The roots run deep

 Tyrants always try to destroy the best parts of society. Although they can cut the tree, they can never destroy the roots. #PeacefulResistance

Deep roots always remain!

No money for U.S. citizens in need?

 It is sad that the U.S. government always, always has money for certain things, like wars and tax breaks for billionaires, but never enough to protect citizens. Why is that?

Never enough for US

Knowledge is power

Throughout human civilization, holders of knowledge also held power. Cultures that flourished always shared knowledge freely and promoted learning as a key habit and skill.

Did you know that African civilizations shared knowledge freely, even before the printing press was invented?

Did you know that the opposite was true with European nations?

Africa had libraries before Europe had printing presses

Can Republicans govern?

I wonder if Republicans can actually govern.

Witnessing the proceedings in the House of Representatives over the last two days makes it apparent that Republican politicians are simply foreign to concepts such as cooperation and negotiation unless, of course, they are assured a victory. Compromise is simply an impossible tactic.

Democrats may be happy seeing this much chaos amongst their opposition. But they should not be. A divided Congress is an inefficient government and a waste of our tax money.

Come on, people! Get to work already!

Imagine

Many years ago I gave a speech entitled "Imagine." The premise was basic: can we imagine a world without professional sports? Without useless competition?

The speech was inspired by watching a soccer game televised in England. The TV crew was showing how close two soccer stadiums were to each other. A fan could just walk from one stadium to the other. The two enormous concrete structures surrounded by humungous asphalt parking lots. All that money just to see 22 men compete. Imagine if all that space was used for other things: parks, museums, art, science. More cooperation and less competition.

Imagine if the world would spend more time learning instead of watching TV or going to arenas to witness the cruelty of players bashing each other?

Just this week, during the Monday Night Football game, the world watched a young man collapse during a "routine" tackle. Buffalo Bills Damar Hamlin, just 24, suffered cardiac arrest and was resuscitated on the field. He remains in critical condition.

Is it time to imagine a different reality? Can we eliminate competitive sports and instead turn our energy into more worthwhile endeavors? Can we imagine a world in which we teach our children how to collaborate and cooperate rather than constantly compete against others? Can we teach them to compete against themselves rather than others? What would the human race be like?

Imagine all that money going to worthy causes such as eliminating hunger and restoring our planet, really curing diseases such as cancer and diabetes, and improving every aspect of life, rather than burying issues in a sea of meaningless distractions.

Imagine that. Just imagine that.

Divide? Combine? Conquer!

As a follow up to my January 1 post, I have rediscovered the power of combining. In this case, I had decided to use my inversion table more often to help my back stay healthy. So I decided to combine my morning meditation time with my inversion table time and achieve two daily goals at once. So far it has worked perfectly.

There are many times when a problem is so large that it may seem impossible and we may freeze, deciding to postpone handling it until we can figure it out or are forced to deal with it. I often recommend to people that large problems are easier to handle if we divide them into smaller pieces. 

"How do you eat an elephant?"

"One bite at a time!"

Whether we combine things or divide things, what matters is that we take action.

I hope you are having a wonderful 2023.

Image Source

Virovores eat viruses

 From the realm of the amazing: scientists have discovered an organism that eats viruses. 

"... one particular microbe seemed to be snacking on the viruses – a ciliate known as Halteria. In water samples with no other food source for the ciliates, Halteria populations grew by about 15 times within two days, while chlorovirus levels dropped 100-fold. In control samples without the virus, Halteria didn’t grow at all.

In follow-up tests, the team tagged chlorovirus DNA with fluorescent dye, and found that Halteria cells soon began to glow. This helped confirm that Halteria was indeed consuming the virus."

Source

My 2022 review

 It is customary to reflect on the year that just passed to see what we accomplished, what was left undone, what we want to carry into the new year and what we want to let go.

My 2022 was a good year, all things considered. Here are some highlights:

• Professionally, 2022 was likely my best year yet. I accomplished much and helped others accomplish a lot. I think it was a resounding success.
• Personally, 2022 was another year of loneliness. There were two sides to this. On the one hand, I spent my 10th year by myself. wishing to have a life partner, or even an adventure partner. But it was not meant to be. On the other hand, I have become more comfortable with loneliness and solitude, perhaps as a way to prepare myself for the next adventure after I retire.
• It was a year of unexpected losses: first Tara, our 12 year old dog, and then Bhakti, our six year old kitty that had been with us less than a year.
• It was a year of new companions: we gained Duke around Thanksgiving. Everyday is an adventure with this guy.
• It was a year of good-byes: after over a decade, I stepped down from the ContraCola Board, unwilling to succumb to the chaos that has become part of that operation.
• It was a year of hellos: I became an officer in the Harvest Moon Folk Society, having been elected its President for the 2002-2003 year (and also taking over as Booker and continuing to do work as webmaster), and I also joined the Charlotte Contra Dancers Board as their Secretary and sound tech.
• This was a year of new realizations. One of them was that my relationship to Contra dancing changed drastically over the last few years. I still love the dance form and the communities around Contra, and I am also not as driven to actually dance. When I go to a dance, I am content with just watching others dance, rejoicing in their smiles, loving that I made a small contribution to their joy. My lower stamina gets in the way of enjoying the actual dancing. That also comes across at my lack of interest in driving several hours to attend a dance or my lack of interest in going to weekend dances. All this is neither good nor bad; it is just interesting to observe.
• It has also been interesting to observe how much some Contra communities have changed since the pandemic. Many members of the Contra world have stepped away from it, either partially or completely. Without them many of these communities are struggling, being forced to re-start their groups almost from scratch. Not only are we missing the dance energy from these members, we are also deprived of their knowledge and wisdom. As with many similar situations, there are also positive aspects: we are being forced to re-invent these groups, forced to re-think what we do and how we do it, and this may be what Contra needs in order to survive and grow again.

What are your reflections about 2022? Was it a good year? What lessons did you learn?

[GIF image source: https://www.asiamediajournal.com via Google Images]

And so 2023 starts

 

Today is January 1, 2023. Another year gone. Another new year started.

Somehow, however, it does not feel like just any new year. 2022 was the bridge between what we knew and loved, pre-pandemic, and what is here and now.

So much has changed since the end of 2019!

The start of a new year is often an opportunity to change our lives, start new habits, dream new dreams, set new goals. We know that, sometime around Valentine's Days, most of our new year resolutions would have been forgotten, abandoned by the side of life's road, ran over like roadkill. And that usually happens because we try to change too many things all at once. We forget that making small changes over a long time is far more effective.

I stopped making new year resolutions many years ago. Instead, I try to fine-tune my rituals, the sequential steps we take everyday throughout each day. It starts by writing down what we do during a regular day. We get up, go to the bathroom, take a shower, etc. Each step is a trigger for the next step.

How do we fine-tune our rituals? We simply decide what we want to accomplish and how we can do that. Then we find something in our rituals that we can replace or shuffle to accommodate what we need to do. For example, if we want to be healthier by exercising more, we may find a spot in our rituals that we can use as a trigger for exercising. Let's say that we usually watch TV after dinner. Finishing dinner would be the trigger. If we substitute watching TV with going for a walk, then we will likely achieve what we want.

And it is not an all or nothing proposition. We do not have to give up TV altogether. We can exercise three days and watch TV three days.

Finally, it needs not be perfect. There may be times when the weather just is not OK for a walk. So we can watch TV that day and do a walk the next day.

Let's have fun with life this 2023. We have gone through a lot since the end of 2019.

May you be well, healthy and happy!

Is it back?

Is it really back?

No, not COVID. That has not gone away.

Polio. Is it really back?

Watch this brief video to learn some facts.

Clouds

 One of my joys is to capture beautiful cloud settings. Here is one of my latest.

Discovery

 I am hooked on this. There is a YouTube channel called "SUV RVing" and it rocks!

Tristan, the guy that runs this channel, is the ultimate adventure seeker. The places he travels to in his SUVs are amazing.

What I like most about his channel is the simplicity. The photography is fabulous, the narration is simple and lively.

One of the things that impresses me the most is Tristan's comfort with loneliness in what could be dangerous situations. I often wonder what would happen to him if the unthinkable happened?

I hope you enjoy his adventures.

Science-based

There is so much information available to us. And there is so much misinformation fighting its way to capture our attention. Which one wins? The one we pay attention to, of course.

An area that concerns me the most is the misinformation concerning health issues.

In the last few months I discovered the work of Dr. Michael Greger at Nutrition Facts. Everything posted there is science-based. Profits from the few products he promotes (mostly his books) all go to charity. He also does a podcast, which I listen to regularly. It is called "Nutrition Facts with Dr. Michael Greger." Two of the main advantages of using these resources is that they are based on science and that Dr. Greger promotes healing the body through better nutrition (which is an integral part of a healthy lifestyle).

The other resource that I like and recommend is the NPR show "The People's Pharmacy" (which also has a weekly podcast.

Are either of these resources perfect? Probably not. They do go a long way in being more objective than most others in that they are not benefiting directly from Big Pharma and the corrupt medical industry (no longer a profession, now a full-blown, money-driven industry).

Freedom

What is freedom?

I mean, true freedom.

How do you define freedom?

I was exposed to a different, yet not new, definition of freedom.

The Wages of Freedom

I hope you enjoy this short video.

I hope your definition of freedom is changed, expanded, re-focused.

May the power of humanity, the humanity in all of us, helps us all become free.

Priorities

I was deeply moved by the needless pain and the suffering. I was disgusted by the unjustified greed. 

In today's NY Times "The Daily" podcast there is a story of people suffering from the Monkeypox virus and how, through greed and cruelty, they were denied treatment for weeks and months.

When a society values money and profits above the well-being of its members, such society must be examined carefully and thoroughly, and its priorities must be changed. Nothing justifies inflicting horrendous suffering when the treatment is available.

Perhaps we should all adopt a philosophy of "Do no harm."

The NY Times "The Daily" Podcast

I hope you listen to the show.

I hope, sooner rather than later, we can demonstrate that we care more about people than about money.

It has been a while

 It has been a while since my last post here. Life has been happening to all of us.

A quick update:

• I am still alive and doing well. 😁
• The company I worked for merged/was bought by a larger enterprise.
• I retired from that company.
• I went to work for another company.
• I still Contra dance.
• I still hike.
• The kids are well and rising seniors in university.
• Oh, yes, a pandemic happened and the world changed.
• And let us not forget, ever, that January 6, 2021, also happened.
• Much has changed, not always for the better, and much has, unfortunately, remained the same.

I love writing and I intend to do much more of that in the future.

For now, I wish you well.

Bringing someone to justice

Much has changed in the last two years. Much of what we knew as normal or expected behavior has been discarded like last weekend's stale pizza. What once was unacceptable has been normalized. Such are the times we live in.

In today's announcement on the death of ISIS' leader, Donald Trump used a phrase that took my breath away and sent shivers down my spine. In describing the killing of an enemy, Trump used the phrase "He was brought to justice." All day long that replayed in my mind, crashing loudly against the concept I have had that "bringing someone to justice" meant charging them with a crime, bringing them to court, and using due process to determine their guilt or innocence.

Granted, several sources online do use "punishing someone for a crime" as "bringing them to justice." In the case of al-Bahgdadi and many other accused foreign terrorists, death may be considered punishment for their crimes, assuming we believe everything we are told about them, a point I will not argue here. So that is how we treat foreign enemies, assigning death as justice.

A question kept jumping at me: what happens when this or any other administration turns that definition on domestic "enemies"? Will political opponents become "enemies" and, thus, subject to being brought to justice by means of death? We already have way too many examples of citizens dying shortly after committing insignificant "crimes". What happens when speaking your mind becomes a crime?

I don't know if Mr. Trump meant the phrase one way or another. I don't know if the administration would turn on its own citizens like this. I do know that words matter, behavior matters. And, based on the last two years, nothing, absolutely nothing, is outside the realm of possibilities. We have already seen that what was once considered absolute bottom is nothing but a rung in a very long ladder heading down.

A little FB experiment

For the last few weeks I have been paying careful attention to my Facebook news feed and doing an experiment to track how closely the bots are adjusting what they present to me. You will not be surprised if I tell you that the algorithms are very much in use on every one of us.

Personally, I do not want to be manipulated or brain-washed, especially when it comes to politics and elections. Therefore, I have decided to be a (mostly) non-reactive user of Facebook in as much as politics is concerned. I will not "Like," "Love" or share any post that concerns politics or the upcoming elections. It is nothing personal. I am just going to play a different game, and hopefully not their game.

The Experiment

My experiment consisted of two phases. First, I focused solely on posts of animals and landscapes, liking and loving as many of these posts as I could. Facebook served me more of those posts, tons and tons of them. In phase two I switches to focusing on political posts, liking and responding and loving as many of them. Quickly, Facebook abandoned most of the previous posts (the birds and landscapes quickly disappeared) giving room for more and more political posts. It took less than 24 hours for their programs to adjust to my new interactions. Phase three, now in progress, is to stop reacting and begin acting. I will try to use FB for nothing but building personal relationships, things such as saying happy birthday and keeping up with everybody's adventures.

Let's Be Careful

Please be careful when using FB. The poisoning of our minds is actively underway. There are active efforts to widen the gaps between us. We can either let FB and other actors weaken us as a nation, or we can find ways to cooperate and find common ground to make our nation truly greater than it has ever been.

This book is finished

This book is finished. The last page completed. The last paragraph inked, all "ts" crossed and all "is" dotted. Done.

I cannot, in all good sense, call it a chapter. Something that has taken 20 years to write deserves to be much more than a chapter, it deserves to be a book. Besides, who would read a chapter that long? Not me; I hate long chapters. Give me a stopping point every few pages, I say.

Today, I penned the last line of my career at Dominion Energy, the place I still, too often, refer as SCANA. Here are the words I shared in my almost-mandatory, sent from the heart, email message; I share this to reach all those that retired ahead of me and those I know I did not include in that electronic blast of memory-laden electrons.

Dear colleagues and friends:

Today is my last day at Dominion Energy. It is hard to believe that 20 years have gone so quickly.

My contact information is [Ed:email address removed] and cell phone remains [Ed.: phone number removed]. I am on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and Instagram.

I began working at SCANA as a contractor in August 1998; I was employed by Vanstar, which then merged with Inacom in 1999, and went bankrupt in 2000. I was hired by SCANA in July 2000.

During the last 20+ years while at SCANA/Dominion Energy, I got married; went through the incredible Y2K (yawn!); had two incredible kids; went through bankruptcy (thanks Inacom!); learned that my wife had cancer; fought the darn disease with her for three dark, incredibly painful years; experienced the death of my wife and then my mom; and lived life with my kids for 13 years as they became adults. I am now watching them leave home to attend university.

Along these two decades we have shared many experiences. Some of you saw me go through, and some helped me with, the darkest three years of my life as I tried to help Tracey with all that comes with a cancer diagnosis, and helped my kids deal first with all the surgeries and procedures she endured, and then her loss and our new reality without her. I am eternally grateful to those that stood by us, offering everything from a kind word to hours of companionship in hospital waiting rooms.

Over the years I moved from Workstation Support to Staging (now ABARS), to software development, to Cyber Security. Along the way I had the honor of interacting with many of you and with many that have already retired. It has been a great experience.

I wish each of you well. As with anything worth doing, there will be challenges and successes. In keeping with the family spirit that we experienced here throughout the years, please continue to be kind and supportive to each other, knowing that your kindness makes a huge difference to those that receive it.

May there always be light where you are. May the brightest light come from your heart.

Memorial Day Thoughts

While many Americans "celebrate" Memorial Day with BBQs, picnics, cookouts, and parties, I find the day very sad.

It seems many Americans misunderstand the reason for Memorial Day. Some think it is to honor those that serve in the armed forces; actually, that is "Armed Forces Day." Some think that it is to celebrate the valiant efforts of our veterans; in reality, that is done on "Veterans Day."

Memorial Day is supposed to be a day to remember those that died in combat or while serving in the military. It is a day to be grateful for their sacrifices and those their families made. It is a day to stop and think why those sacrifices were made. It is an opportunity to stop and question why those sacrifices were made.

As I grow older and gain ability to discern, I find myself very sad on Memorial Day. The last few wars, from Korea on, are very different from their predecessors. The reasons for going to war have shifted from morality to economics. I cannot help but to question how many lives lost in wars motivated by greed could have been spared and would have benefited our country and our world in so many better ways. My admiration for, and gratitude to, the men and women that lost their lives is not diminished; my sorrow for their loss is heightened by the awareness of senselessness.

We now face the prospect of another prolonged war, this time against Iran. The lies being told are obvious to anyone that wants to use a questioning attitude. Who will benefit from another war? Will it benefit the average citizen in the United States? Not likely, as we will all be made to pay for this war and the restoration thereafter. Will it benefit the citizens of Iran? Not likely; their dead will be but one more reason to hate us. Or will it benefit, mostly, a few wealthy industrialists that peddle their deadly, immoral wares unconcerned with whether the victims are in a far away place or in an elementary school down the street.

I think we must grow impatient with the status quo; we need to question the excuses for more unnecessary death, for more unnecessary destruction. Let us be true patriots and pledge allegiance to the nation, not to the government, certainly not to a government that has sold out to the war lords.

Our fallen deserve our respect, our gratitude, and our truest patriotism.