music junkie

i'm a music junkie and thought it had been too long since i've posted a list of bands i'm listening to at the moment. Since the moment is constantly changing this list will not be indicative of my future tastes.

But for now you might want to check out:

Amadou and Mariam.....Welcome to Mali
Muse....The Resistance
Monsters of Folk....Monsters of Folk
David Grey.....Draw the Line
The xx.....xx
MGMT......Oracular Spactacular
Mason Jennings.....Blood of Man
Three Days Grace....Life Starts Now
The Rural Alberta Advantage....Hometowns

I don't like all the songs on all the albums...but find a way through, there is lots of good there. Lala.com is a fun place to listen to music.

i'm also a book junkie and although i haven't been reading much lately these were good.

Breakfast with Buddha...Roland Merullo
My Stroke of Insight....Jill Bolte Taylor
The Sparrow....Mary Doria Russell
I Am A Strange Loop....Douglas Hofstadter

The Century Plant is going through a metamorphosis. Most of the little plantlets that grew on the cut down stalk have spread out and fallen off. The shoot that came out a while ago had a partner that joined it. They both grew straight up with slight curves and then bent over to the west together. They have flowered together and i'm still watching them to see what is next. They are beautiful. The stalk is dying off and it will be interesting to see what is left in its place. All the little followers i imagine

Hope the bird is most amazing. Her flight of 3,500 continuous miles is a record for Whimbrels. She is still here, 46 days and counting. She has stayed longer than the researchers in Virginia thought she would. There was another Whimbrel that landed in the Dominican Republic but she only stayed two weeks and flew on to South America. She was released in Virginia in September and came straight to the Caribbean so hasn't been traveling as long as Hope.

My friend and i are the only ones to have seen Hope on St. Croix. We have seen her 3 times now and every time its as if it never happened. She is very skittish, has a lovely loud cry and i imagine because of that transmitter she is carrying she won't let us get too close. We also had a flagged Ruddy Turnstone that we are trying to find out where it came from. This time of year is a wonderful time for birding. i'm constantly amazed at how far these small creatures travel just to survive.

As most of you know i'm a believer in defensive war only, i don't believe in Just Wars there is no such thing. i think Guantanamo should be closed, we should be out of Iraq and Afghanistan, and those responsible for creating an environment where torture was tolerated and even condoned should be held accountable. i believe in universal health care and think we as a nation can do much better for those living within our borders.

Andrew Sullivan in the October issue of Atlantic Monthly has a four page letter that he wrote to President Bush. It is one of the most eloquent pieces i have read in a long, long time. He comes from a conservative background and expounds on those things he agreed with during the Bush administration. Many things i don't agree with but that is beside the point. He speaks to Bush in a respectful manner which many have lost the capacity to do in this day and age, and he speaks truth.

A very dear friend put me on to this piece and i'm putting the link here because everyone should read it. Please set aside some time from your hectic lives as this is very important.
http://www.theatlantic.com/doc/200910/bush-torture


And finally aren't clouds the most pretty, handsome, good looking, alluring, prepossessing, delightful, bewitching, elegant, drop-dead gorgeous, easy on the eyes creations to look upon. All the color changes they go through as the sun rises and sets just makes my heart glow. My mother lives in Southern California and once said she was sick and tired of blue skies. "Blue, blue, blue" she said, "I've had enough." She longed for a billowy white cloud to look at. Well we have loads of them here taking all shapes and sizes. Hiding all sorts of messages. Look up and enjoy them. If you double click on the cloud pic you will find two rainbows.

e.e.cummings once said:
"We do not believe in ourselves until someone reveals that deep inside us is valuable, worth listening to, worthy of our trust, sacred to our touch. Once we believe in ourselves we can risk curiosity, wonder, spontaneous delight or any experience that reveals the human spirit."

mass observations

i've been reading a bit about a woman called Nella who participated in a civilian writing project in Great Britain during and after WWII. The idea behind the writing project was to enlist ordinary citizens to keep a diary. A written record so to speak of how they were experiencing every day events in their part of Great Britain.

Nella was a housewife and began writing in 1939 as part of a larger group of diarists. Her diaries covered everything we all encounter during the course of our lives and one reviewer of a book that was later published by her said, "it's about tiny domestic difficulties and lumpy custard." But it wasn't just about tiny difficulties, it was about everything happening in a neighborhood during War.

The project she was involved with was called the Mass Observation project. A term, that at least to me, smacks of surveillance. Too bad it wasn't called something else more palatable because the idea is actually a very good method to include personal ordinary histories in the greater scheme of the major aspects of historical accounts. The original aim was "to create an "anthropology of ourselves".

There is a web site dedicated to making available testimonies that were collected during that time and two of Nella Lasts books are available at Amazon. Many of the diarists wrote about "the coronation of George VI to peoples drinking habits in Bolton pubs, to sex and boredom, the themes covered are quite diverse." The project continued into the 1950's but was then disbanded, it started up again in the 1980's. If you want more information you can find it here:
http://www.massobs.org.uk/index.htm

Having majored in Anthropology this whole exercise in writing by large groups of people spread out over a nation is fascinating. Just the idea of pulling so many stories together into an archive that can be accessed far into the future is wonderful. Imagine the cultural historians, anthropologists, and scientists looking for information on numerous topics from that time period. No longer do they have to guess or unearth deposits...they have it available on the net.

i've been wondering if something like this could be started in the Virgin Islands?

-------------------------------------------------------------------------

i'm still on the health reform conversation and probably won't be able to let it go. There are a number of objections that seem to always rear their ugly heads during this debate. Taxes which i addressed in my other piece still grabs everyone so here is a bit more on that subject.

i want to ask you politely, is it our priority to place the funding of our military industrial complex over the values of the American people? Are we really a Christian nation?

"The U.S. military is unmatched. Since 2001, total U.S. defense spending has increased by nearly 80 Percent. Furthermore, we are spending more on defense than all of the other countries of the world combined. Combined. 56 percent of the entire discretionary budget for fiscal year 2010 will be used to fund the defense department."

"The global reach of the US military today is unprecedented and unparalleled. Officially, more than 190,000 troops and 115,000 civilian employees are massed in approximately 900 military facilities in 46 countries and territories (the unofficial figure is far greater). The US military owns or rents 795,000 acres of land, with 26,000 buildings and structures, valued at $146bn. The bases bristle with an inventory of weapons whose worth is measured in the trillions and whose killing power could wipe out all life on earth several times over. These figures do not include Iraq and Afghanistan." Thom Hartman

Really check out this web site to see where your taxes go....to me it looks like there is lots of room for a public option without breaking the bank if we re-evaluate who we are as a nation.
http://www.warresisters.org/pages/piechart.htm

And finally, i don't understand why we would rather spend $4 on insurance premiums to save $1 on taxes? Because you know the premiums will go up if nothing is done.

Another big issue is Malpractice and Tort Reform. An article up yesterday titled "Medical Mal Practice Breeds More Waste" stated that:

The direct costs of malpractice lawsuits — jury awards, settlements and the like — are such a minuscule part of health spending that they barely merit discussion, economists say. But that doesn't mean the malpractice system is working.

There is a lot of good stuff in this article about tort reform and malpractice
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/23/business/economy/23leonhardt.html?em if this debate does interest you get educated.

And finally that issue of government can't run anything but all those failing industries can.

Consider this:
The health insurance industry has a 30% administrative overhead compared to 3% government's(Medicare/Medicaid)? Simplistically we could assume that the health industry is 27 % less efficient than the Government. The Government is actually the solution because they are better managed than the private insurance cartels.

And what about the personal health bankruptcy's? Sick people made a choice to run up all those bills in order to retain their health or life, right? Getting sick, that's a choice, right?

And so i end with a quote by Maurice Maeterlinck:
"At every crossroads on the path that leads to the future, tradition has placed 10,000 men to guard the past."

bird banding

For the past three mornings i have been helping to band birds. We use mist nets that we set up in areas known to have a variety of indigenous and migrating birds. This time we set the nets up at the Sandy Point Refuge.

Birds fly into the nets which are strung up between aluminum poles. (Double click on the image to the left for a better view) Once a bird gets stuck in the net they become frantic trying to get out, so every 15 minutes we do a pass by and collect whomever has had the misfortune to get caught. We put them in bags to calm them down and take them back to the data tent. Here we put a band on their leg, measure their beak, wing and tail, check the brood patch and whether they are molting or not. Then we release them back into the wild.

Doing this type of work with people who challenge, encourage and teach one another to reach a higher level of expertise is wonderful. All along the way we have to cooperate and include each other to protect the birds and get the job done as quickly and painlessly as possible.

If there had been any one of us that didn't try to be inclusive, speak kindly, or acknowledge the others it could have been a miserable three days.

Lucky for us we worked well together.

Although this is my second time banding i was thinking about how the teaching was done without criticism. Teaching without criticism reinforced the lessons learned and kept the environment calm and productive. Everyone reached out to help any one else that was having a problem removing a bird from the net, trying to get a band on a squirmy leg, or just doing the simple measurements and jotting down data. All of us changed roles and participated in every aspect of the banding job.

If any one of us had been self absorbed, or thinking they didn't need help it would have been a nightmare. Which brings me to my point today.

Those that believe the individual is solely responsible for eventual outcomes are deluding themselves. Team work gets the job done quicker and more efficiently. Even if a leader sets out achievable goals they may not meet those goals if the group can't work together.

Which brings me to children. Raising children to think only of themselves and that they are self sufficient and only responsible for themselves makes for difficult adults later in life. People avoid them and it impacts the final product. Incivility does have tangible costs in the workplace and can be a major deterrent to getting anything done.

Peggy Tabor Millin wrote a short piece on interacting that I found in a book about civility. The image of the raindrops remains with me and may with you after you read this.

"I was on a train on a rainy day. The train was slowing down to pull into a station. For some reason I became intent on watching the raindrops on the window. Two separate drops, pushed by the wind, merged into one for a moment and then divided again--each carrying with it a part of the other. Simply by that momentary touching, neither was what it had been before. And as each one went to touch other raindrops, it shared not only itself, but what it had gleaned from the other. I saw this metaphor many years ago and it is one of my most vivid memories. I realized then that we never touch people so lightly that we do not leave a trace. Our state of being matters to those around us, so we need to become conscious of what we unintentionally share so we can learn to share with intention."

How can any one of us ignore the amount of interacting we do on a daily basis? If we are civil to each other the possibility of misunderstanding is reduced when we have a clear sense of our impact. Do not go mindlessly about your business, stay present and try to understand how you affect others.





PS Hope is still here on St. Croix. She is still at Great Pond, moving around, eating and sleeping. It has been a month now and maybe she will stay with us until she returns to the mainland. We have seen her since the first time with another Whimbrel and are glad to see she has company.
i will let you know if anything changes.

bounded rationality

According to Herbert Simon most people are only partly rational and are in fact emotional/irrational in the remaining parts of their lives. Most of us can't process or compute the results of every alternative action and find ourselves coping with the limited information available to make decisions.

When the decisions seem too large to solve we shut down. We stop thinking about it and go on about our lives. This is happening all across America as citizens shut down their minds when contemplating government involvement in health insurance.

So since this topic concerns all members of American society and i'm pro government involvement. Here is part of a case for endorsement of a public option.

Taxes....Insurance companies have the power to tax and they tax the public mightily. When 20% - 30% of payments do not go to health care, but to denying care and profiting from it, that constitutes a tax on the 96% of voters that have health care. But the tax does not go to benefit those who are taxed; it benefits managers and investors. And the people taxed have no representation. Insurance company health care is a huge example of taxation without representation. And you can't vote out the people who have taxed you. The American Plan offers an alternative to private taxation.

Doctors care; insurance companies don't. An American plan aims to put care back into the hands of doctors.

Economics....we are losing our competitive advantage. Our corporations and small business are saddled with astronomical health insurance costs and as a consequence make our products and services more expensive and less competitive. The capacity to innovate, having a sophisticated business culture, effective public services, excellent infrastructure and well-functioning goods markets are key indicators of a thriving economy. Why is it Europe and Asia are increasing their employment roles while we are falling behind, they all have universal health care? Could the ridiculously high cost of health care in American have anything to do with why American firms are not hiring?

Government has two moral missions: protection (of consumers, workers, the environment, the old, the sick, the powerless; and empowerment( through public works; communication, energy, and water systems; education; banks that work; a court system: and so on.) Without them, no one makes it in America. Taxes are what you pay for protection and empowerment by the government, and the more you make the greater your responsibility to maintain the system.

When you fight against a public option you are not fighting for freedom of medical choice you are fighting for insurance company profits. The CEO's of the major insurance companies said in the congressional hearings recently that they would continue to deny care. They will deny you care that you believe you have paid for, why would anyone support this?

Countries with universal care admit there are problems...we admit there are huge problems here in the US.......nothing is ever perfect...but they would never dismantle their universal care.......they would improve it. Unlike us who want the same dysfunctional system to continue just so government doesn't have a hand in it. Crazy logic when there are other countries all over the world experiencing better care, better economies, higher standards of living etc. than we get.

Constitution
Art. I, Section 8 states:

"The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes, duties, imposts and excises, to pay the debts and provide for the common defense and general welfare of the United States."

That means that Congress can tax and spend for whatever it chooses, including health care, highways, and bridges, unless another part of the constitution forbids it (for example, the 1st amendment bars Congress from spending money for religious activities). So the question really should be, where does the constitution forbid Congress from passing health care reform?
We are already adversely impacted by our "insurance company free enterprise". Here are a few adverse impacts.
1) We spend more on healthcare than any other industrialized nation. If we don't reverse this trend, 20% of our GDP will go to healthcare within the next 10 years.

(2) The US healthcare system ranks 37th in overall performance, and 72nd based on health outcomes.

(3) The Center for American Progress forecasts the cost of the average family insurance policy will skyrocket from $13,000 today to over $22,000 by 2019.

(4) Our businesses - yes, American businesses - cannot compete globally because they are burdened by the high cost of providing healthcare to employees.

(5) Medical debt is the principal cause of bankruptcy in the United States.

(6) People are literally dying, either because they can't afford healthcare, or, because their insurers are denying coverage.

(7) The current healthcare system is economically unsustainable and will lead to the financial ruin of us all.

Status quo: If you oppose health care reform don't think you don't support a health care plan. You do. It's called the status quo. To help you understand what you support let's look at the status quo as if it were an actual bill.
Under the ‘status quo' plan a few for profit conglomerates will squeeze out all competition and run the most expensive and least efficient health care system in the world. As a nation we will spend $2.5 trillion dollars a year to receive health care worth $912 billion dollars. The cost per family for insurance will average $22,000 a year as compared to less than $2000 a year in Canada. This plan will rank 37th in outcomes and 24th in life expectancy. It will gobble up 20% of the GDP but in the coming years will rise at 3 times the rate of inflation sending the nation into bankruptcy. It will leave 45 to 50 million people uninsured and drop 15,000 people a day from its roles. 18,000 people will die from this insurance program each year (or 50 a day) because they can't afford health insurance and can't get the treatment they need. Under this program 2/3 of all personal bankruptcies will be health cost related. If you have paid your premiums on time all your life, you are as likely to be dropped by your private insurance company when you need life-saving care as you are to get treated.

The most important asset for a country is a healthy population. i don't understand why we don't want to invest in that?

And finally.......... Christianity demands more from those fortunate enough to be wealthy, and it demands social justice(affordable health care). Social justice does not mean tax cuts for the wealthy, who can then CHOOSE to give to the poor. It means that we take care of our poorest first. If we give money to the poor, they spend it, all of it, and it trickles up to the wealthy.

We want SMART government that will be there for those who need it. – NOT for those who take advantage of it, regardless of whether the one taking advantage is rich or poor.

clean that dirty water

Human Beings get pretty raunchy if we go days or even a week without cleaning our body. Today, if you didn't wash, friends and enemies would smell you coming and get out of the way so as not to assault their olfactory glands. In fact, if you aren't clean the chances of being shunned by those around you rises exponentially.

We all have active odor receptive genes that kick into high gear when something is not hosed down or emits a rank odor. Smells that are offensive explain our dedication to trying to keep a modicum of cleanliness. We enjoy clean bodies, hair and surroundings.

We spend large sums of money annually cleaning up our lives after making messes.

We don't all do ritual cleaning but it is a mainstay in many religions and typically involves the use of water in some manner. Sweat lodges, standing under waterfalls, bathing in rivers, washing the feet, hands and face, pouring water over the heads of babies and full ritual immersion before interacting with a god of any sort are part and parcel of religious traditions world wide.

Cleaning goes on in nature as well. Mother Nature uses snow, hurricanes, tornados, fire, floods, wind and rain to clean out debris and let new life begin. Animals, reptiles, birds and insects all perform some type of cleaning ritual, be it on their bodies or in their homes. Everything on this earth gets cleansed in some manner during its lifetime.

We here in the Virgin Islands are in for some annual cleaning out. It is hurricane season. Historically September and October bring on the rains and the hurricanes and it cleans things out to say the least.

This is going to be short...but i want you all to think about cleaning out your minds. Clean out all the pre-conceived notions you have been packed with since child birth. Clear the slate and look at your fellow human beings, as equals first............... Equals................Greet everyone as an equal.

Practice looking at everyone you encounter through out the day with no added baggage concerning their dress, their manner of speech, their intellectual level, their wealth or lack of wealth, their weight, their skin, their hair, their eyes, their color, their affectations and on and on.

Practice seeing them first as equals, clean out your mind, and relate to them as a human being first.

Thank you ahead of time to all of you that try this.