Paranoia Redux

Change is brewing, can you feel it?
The old, tired planetary systems that have ruled by force for millenia are self-destructing, even as they attempt murder-suicide.
Paranoid patriarchy, that old standby, is giving way to the universal feminine.
Sometimes, it doesn't look so good. Sometimes, it feels like things keep getting worse.
Look behind the curtain, Toto.
Intransigence is giving way to surrender.
New children are entering and spiritual "sleeper cells" among us, they, too, are awakening.
It's not going to be easy. But then, again, no one said it would be.
The key is to remain centered and to move in love, not fear.
Only by joining together in love will we move forward into the new world.

Independence Day my ass

God Almighty Independence Day
A national holyDay
A liberation Day
License to blow bite-sized
mortars Day
Fill the fiery sky with smoke Day
Strike fear in the hearts of every living non-human Day.
Sons and daughters, mothers and fathers
Of Lexington and Bunker Hill,
I call out to history...

Battle cries, the wounded child dies
Red sky at night
A soft sigh, a caress, an end

Transportation solutions

Can we move forward on transportation? I hope so. Our transportation thinking has been shallow. We've been locked into the bus/light rail/bicycle paradigm. What we need is a move toward systems thinking. In that mode, we look at every urban planning and transportation challenge with new eyes. It's time to think mobility, not simply transportation. Students at MIT did an interesting project. They noticed airports have these neatly stacked carts in them. They extended the airport shopping cart concept further---to automobiles. In this integrated system, stacked rows of two-seat mini-cars, perhaps powered by a diffused engine system, sit at the entrance to subways. Passengers collect their public mini-cars there, which are good for short trips. The cars are then deposited in another stacked row at another terminus, such as a subway entry. Such an integrated, networked system can function almost the way a beehive does. Each part within the system compliments the whole system. An integrated system of vehicles of varying shapes and sizes, each dedicated to a particular function, would fit into a systems approach to mobility. What we have today works, to an extent. But it is a limited vision.

Inconvenient truths

Al Gore's star seems to be rising again. It started with an appearance on Saturday Night Live last month. Now comes a film about his slideshow on global warming, An Inconvenient Truth, which my wife and I watched today. The films a little hard to sit through but I came away from it really angry and concerned about our future. At times, the whole issue can seem overwhelming. It's similar to the feeling I get when I have a huge project due. If I chop it into manageable pieces, it's far easier to handle. Same with environmental issues. Rather than take on Big Oil, I'm working at the local level. I've researched pesticides. They're everywhere and people, I think, can relate to wanting safe yards. So that's where I started, just reading everything I can get a hold of about pesticides and herbicides. The next step was to do a Powerpoint presentation for my Condo association. They weren't moved to action, so I have to improve the oratory. Next up: more neighbors. This is my antidote for my day job, where I'm expected to write objectively. I don't think the environment is an objective issue, if such an issue exists. We're all in this bowl called earth, breathing the same air, drinking the same water. God does not recognize Human boundaries, neither does nature.

Under the radar and beyond belief

Bernardo's Hideaway


How many of you know there was a massive UFO sighting in Milan Feb. 6? Thousands reported seeing a panel of lights suspended in the sky for 6 hours. The lights changed color and position, were photographed by TV and newspapers, yet were not picked up on radar, meaning they could not have been weather balloons. This is according to Paola Harris, a journalist based in Rome.
Similar sightings have been reported in Mexico City, Madrid, even Washington, D.C. and yet the voluntary censorship within U.S. media is absolutely stunning.
No other first-world country has this level of censorship about UFOs. The Italians don't even refer to them as UFOs --simply as lights in the sky.
Those who think for themselves and have followed the UFO issue for years (33 years in my case) know there is a very overt and also a very covert effort to supress information about extraterrestrial intelligence interfacing with us.
Books have been written on the subject. But I wonder how many people, who consider themselves otherwise open-minded, even have a clue about what's been happening here and abroad for decades.

In an instant, love took wing

He arrived into our lives much the way he left us. That is to say, we didn't seek him out, nor he us. And when he left us, it was sudden, unplanned and stunningly swift.
He was our cockatiel, my wife Bianca's and my pet bird. He was a pearl-grey, the most common type of tiel, the bird that is native to Austraiia.
My wife has 20 years experience with tiels. When the bird we came to know as Pico arrived a few days after Labor Day, 2001, I was resistant. I had no interest in keeping a bird. They seemed so simple, just feathers and beaks and talons, and excrement that I'd have to clean up.
He'd been picked up off the street in Maple Valley, Washington by a guy driving a pickup. The story goes that the little fellow was right at home on the driver's shoulder, giving him little ear nibbles. This was a bird who, though only a few months old at the time, had obviously been much loved.
He spent several months with a family that had too many pets to keep him long. So they gave him up free and we were lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time.
Hmm...some luck, I remember thinking at the time.
Right from the start, he took to us virtually without hesitation. This bird loved to be nuzzled, massaged, stroked. He craved it. We'd never seen anything like this before.
After a brief period of skiddishness, he settled down to become a fabulous house companion and I soon got used to cleaning up his droppings, even allowing him to land on top of the fridge (though we eventually banned that). We'd get his wings and talons clipped every now and again but, for the most part, he was free to roam our condo.
I learned a lot from him. He taught me several calls and variations within calls. We set up a perch in the master bathroom, where he could see himself in the mirror, clean his tail feathers and just sit, sometimes for hours. He'd climb on our wedding photo and sit there, content as could be. We hung beads to separate the master closet from the master bathroom and he'd climb the beads like a circus aerialist, hanging upside down as we'd laugh.
He taught me to see love in a new way, as something that pulsates like a vibrating ball of light, that shines like an incandescent bulb. He sometimes seemed so insistent on being stroked, that I often wondered whether we spent too much time with him. He'd often walk to the edge of our dining room table and start this intense clucking in which his entire body vibrated. Bianca said she thought it was an orgasm. I always thought it was really him just expressing joy in the moment.
I used to wonder what would happen if he ever flew away. Once, early on, I walked outside to our non-attached garage, got into my car and was shocked to notice he'd been on my left shoulder (his favorite spot) the entire time.
A month ago, we brought home an 8-week old male Chihauaha, whom we named Paco. Pico and Paco seemed to have a good ring, though it's almost too cute to be real. The dog and the bird slowly began to touch each other, never with malice but only genuine curiosity. I imagined that Pico felt secure in the knowledge that he could escape the dog's clutches in a flash.
I was right. The fact that he had full use of his wings, I believe, made him feel more secure around the dog.
I'll admit it, we coddled Pico, the bird I called "God's favorite cockatiel." We even ripped most of our carpeting out and replaced it with Pergo, in part to make it easier to clean up after him.
On New Year's Day, we'd had a potluck at the community recreation center when the power went out. I'd just awakened from a nap and noticed all the lights had gone out while I slept. I was worried about the pets, since it was pitch dark. I tracked down our emergency flashlight and helped the dog find his food dish. Then I went to the bathroom, where Pico'd been resting. He jumped onto my hand and then to my left shoulder, secure. After several minutes dealing with Paco, I went to the sliding glass door, swung it open and stepped outside into the pouring rain, headed for the recreation center. It was about 4:30 p.m. After about 1-2 minutes, I suddenly became aware of Pico on my shoulder and I panicked. That startled him and he took wing, circling above me clockwise, calling out to me and I to him.
And just like that, he was gone.

Losing our civil society

How many times have you come across someone yelling into their cell phone in public or using language with their friends that should never leave the bedroom? Welcome to the age of incivility. It seems as decades have passed, the concept of separating what we do or say in private from what we do or say in public has vanished. Call me sentimental but have we always been so informal? I mean, OK, this is America, land of the reinvented man (or woman) and all that jazz...where we address people we don't know by their first names but, I mean, c'mon! Am I a fuddy duddy?

Lost in the shuffle

I've been following the controversy over Intelligent Design and its proponents with great interest. The latest court case out of Dover, Pa. has been widely publicized and I think the judge in this case made a very valid argument as to why ID has no place in a science class. A broader question, and one I've heard no discussion about, is which lines of inquiry or, more specifically, which critical analyses of evolution theory actually HAVE been made over the last, say, 25 years, that have been based on real evidence, i.e. the archeological/anthropological/geologic record? What analysis of specific elements within evolution theory, for example, change in gene frequency, have been debated and what was the nature of that debate or that analysis? I ask this because it seems to me that regardless of the fact that the media have pitched the ID v. evolution story as a conflict between belief and reason, the--pardon the pun--evolution of Darwin's theory has been picked apart over the years by scientists themselves and has held up quite well. However, it's my guess, and I'm not a scientist so this is a hunch based on a variety of reading, that there are parts of Darwin's theory that don't fit the evidence. Am I on the right track or is evolutionary theory just so rock solid that there are absolutely no holes to poke into it?