Sunday, March 24, 2013

Poem for the day

Not Heard/My God Speech

How can I be heard
When they don t
Hear themselves

Be loved
When the don t love
Themselves

Be known
When they don t
Know themselves

Donato Mar. 24  2013

Wednesday, March 13, 2013

Humans are Superior Beings?

Humans are Superior Beings?

The trajectory of human life on this planet over the past 100 000 years or so has been to indulge its addictions to consumption, as any other animal would. But their big brain sciences gave them the means to make exponential increases in their numbers, and now suicidal destruction of habitat, unconstrained by any natural predators. Science proceeds without the morality underlying the “natural justice” that pervades all other activities of planet earth.

Scientists always claim their right to discover and invent whatever they please, without any responsibility for its use and the outcomes. They would invent matches (they have, atomic power) and give them to babies to burn the house down.

Wolves have a family and social life the equal of the best of humans. They have lived this way for 20 million years. Humans long ago ceased learning from other animals, and consequently, will flame out in the next 100 years or so, and take most other life with them.

Wednesday, March 6, 2013

The Way the Money System Works

The Way the Money System Works

The banks need, as they have done throughout history, to earn money to pay their bills and have some left over for dividends in order to attract capital for a bit of reasonable expansion. We need the banks to keep our money safe, grow it a little for our old age and facilitate some borrowing so we can conduct business, pay for goods and the means to make them, in advance of making sales and collecting income. So the banks make loans to people and businesses at competitive interest rates, to earn the money they need to stay in business.

That’s how they used to operate. But now, since the mathematicians and the economists got into the act, the banks have discovered that making small loans to facilitate trade is for chumps. They make huge loans to each other and their friends in finance, to help them move billions of dollars around in pure gambling operations, betting on small changes in interest at the chip window of the central banks who print the money, but don’t ever give it to any but the rich in the financial game. Small business goes nowhere, employment that they would generate never happens, the economy, the real economy stagnates, and the rich stay in their gated communities worrying the mob may soon come howling for blood. A mob they have created through their greed and inability to control their consumption of products, housing, cars, travel, of no use once they pass the age of 60+. And their bodies rot out just as fast, if not faster, than those of the other 99% not so befriended by the government and banking system. So the 99% get to pay the medical costs of the rich and to educate the children of them too, but have increasingly less access either to education, or effective medical care.

Note that universal education started in the 1700’s in response to the need of the industrial revolution merchants for workers with minimum skills in reading and writing. Now that that work can be done by electronic gadgetry, educating the masses is no longer a priority, so governments and all those with large pension plan incomes, treat it as a cost to be minimized. Whereas, medical care of the elderly rich, is a priority, especially massively expensive research into means of palliating their illnesses caused by their careless and profligate lifestyle addictions...

Long ago. there wasn’t much money in circulation, and there were a lot of poor, only able to find hard laboring work as virtual slaves, not able to get enough money to start small businesses and begin to employ more people more regularly. The rich didn’t take much part in the cash expense economy either, their cash was all tied up in land, from which they got rents. Or in buying government bonds, having lent money to the government, collecting rent on that as interest. To make money, for survival and a pension, people worked for wages, or collected rents on land or money, or gambled by buying low and selling high, in goods, or slaves, or whatever. So merchants are basically gamblers....Banksters and the financially rich, the landowners, the owners of stocks and bonds, are renters, and the 99% are wage slaves, at the mercy of those who can use the army to control the ownership of resources.

In the distant past, the relation between armies, thousands willing to die to support a few rich, and the poverty of the masses (who supplied their bodies for a pittance as cannon fodder), was not so apparent as today, when even governments do the bidding of our vast armies and armaments factories, the military -industrial complex, which supplies welfare in the form of wages and directly maintains the control of the rich over all resources, land, mineral, now water, and coming, to a place near you, the air (Drones anyone?)

Donato Mar. 6  2013

Saturday, March 2, 2013

Pondering The Hero's Journey

In  my Men's Group meeting recently we talked about how the group got started 20 years ago. with a workshop on how to be a man, acting out some ideas from the Hero's Journey, by Joseph Campbell. The conversation around Hero's Journey has been really exciting for me. Here is an excerpt from an article I found plus some of my thoughts for your entertainment..

This is from a blog by a man who seems to have gone through a trans-gender crisis to become what he could call a man. And yet reading it, I am further convinced that there are so many ways to be a man that we ought just stop using the term, say a "person"  and be done with the struggle and the angst to find something that doesn't exist…

"What makes a man? It’s not just my question then, but one for all of us, and the answer depends on how much one can extricate oneself from the war cry of a society intent on destroying femininity, enforcing a reductionist binary, and flattening complexity. Every man I’ve known well enough to get a little drunk with has eventually addressed the dilemma: how to be yourself in a world that expects a monster or a hero, but never a new dad struggling with how to raise his own child under the weight of a bad relationship to his own father, or an effeminate straight man struggling to accept himself for who he is when his own family can’t believe he’s not gay."

Read more: http://www.utne.com/mind-body/what-makes-a-man-zm0z13mazros.aspx?page=3#ixzz2MIm3ilCk

Thomas Page McBee writes about gender and culture for TheAtlantic.com, Salon, the San Francisco Weekly, and the Phoenix, where he is an editor. Reprinted from The Rumpus (October 12, 2012), a literary website with a focus on publishing good writing.


I want the Hero's Journey to end with the Prince being found and turned into a frog and hopping away leaving behind no trace except his wet footprint. That frog has a lot to say to me,  is just as interesting as the Prince, and a lot less dangerous….

Poem

The Archetypal Quaternion

As for me now
Pondering
Lover Magician Warrior King
Being an empty boat
I choose my Act
To carry the day
All I need
Are a pair of oars
Lover and Magician
Will do
Their own
And all the work
Of the other two

Donato  Mar. 2  2013

Poem

Hero’s Journey

Let us be done with
Heroes
Internal or ex
If Theseus had come back
From that Minotaur he killed
Become a frog hopping away
Instead of a Prince in honour
We would now live
Closer to Paradise
Not the hellish effect
Greek ideals have brought
To the life of our Planet home

Donato  Mar. 3  2013