randomWalks

"It will perfume a whole room," Ms. Goldman said. "And it's incredibly beautiful. It tastes horrible, but that doesn't matter."

Heirloom Gardening

Heirloom seeds pre-date hybridization (which does not breed true), disease and insect resistance straining, and genetic engineering. Heirloom seeds have been handed down from one generation to the next, preserving the diversity and the beauty of our gardens, the taste of our food, our ability to adapt to changing environments, and now to preserve plant reproduction itself.

Of their own free will, knowing who they're with and who they're supporting and who they're encouraging and who they're assisting...

"When they built the road there in the first place, people were cringing, as we knew what was underneath," said James Spollen, a Fire Department spokesman.

For months firefighters had suspected that many of their colleagues might be buried in this southern section of the site.

The south tower was the first to fall, so there was little sense of the extreme danger among the firefighters in the lobby, on the sidewalk, on the adjacent street, as well as those trying to help rescue victims in the lower floors.

“Booklend is an Internet lending library by post. Sign up, choose a book, and we’ll mail it to you. When you’re done, mail it back. …Booklend is like your local library. Except smaller. And less convenient.”

The Bruderhof company “community playthings” makes beautiful wood toys and furniture for babies and toddlers.

we have brains is a collaborative writing project for feminists.

As with all arguments over affirmative action, a little knowledge of history is helpful here. Today's equal-opportunity policy in the Army largely evolved after President Jimmy Carter made Clifford Alexander the first black secretary of the Army.

As Mr. Alexander later described it to me, he was dissatisfied with the absence of women and nonwhites on the first list of colonels he received who were candidates for promotion to general. He sent the list back and asked for it to be expanded, with an eye on including a more racially and gender-diverse pool of applicants.

One of the colonels on the new list was Colin Powell, later the nation's first black chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and currently its first black secretary of state.

"The radio business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There's also a negative side."
—Hunter S. Thompson

As Rabbis Face Facts, Bible Tales Are Wilting

When I grew up in Brooklyn, congregants were not sophisticated about anything. Today, they are very sophisticated and well read about psychology, literature and history, but they are locked in a childish version of the Bible.

O’Reilly, long considered the definitive technology publisher (I can see 19 O’Reilly books from where I’m sitting; 17 if I don’t turn my head), is increasingly becoming a destination for subversive and insightful technology analysis. Andy Oram’s Stop the Copying, Start a Media Revolution is a good example:

It’s thrilling to enter the cathedral in Rouen, France, and ponder how I am walking the same nave trod by the medieval residents of that town. But of course, my modern upbringing grants me a very different experience of the cathedral from theirs. In fact, if I go back the next day I am not having the same experience as I had the day before. My subjective experience of the cathedral at Rouen changes as rapidly as the light captured by Monet in his series of paintings of the cathedral’s facade.

The new art may be built on an understanding that an experience cannot be repeated. The artist may change it at whim, or build in an automatic form of evolution like the video I used to like at the MOMA. Like the river in Buddhist theology, art will be both eternal and evanescent.

U.S. Behind Secret Transfer of Terror Suspects (washingtonpost.com)

Since Sept. 11, the U.S. government has secretly transported dozens of people suspected of links to terrorists to countries other than the United States, bypassing extradition procedures and legal formalities, according to Western diplomats and intelligence sources. The suspects have been taken to countries, including Egypt and Jordan, whose intelligence services have close ties to the CIA and where they can be subjected to interrogation tactics – including torture and threats to families – that are illegal in the United States, the sources said. In some cases, U.S. intelligence agents remain closely involved in the interrogation, the sources said.

www.darpa.mil/iao/ - “The Information Awareness Office (IAO) develops and demonstrates information technologies and systems to counter asymmetric threats by achieving total information awareness useful for preemption, national security warning and national security decision-making."

I submit that “total information awareness” means exactly what it sounds like. Got privacy?

suggested reading:
No more Mr Scrupulous Guy, John Sutherland in the Guardian

One good thing about music, when it hits you
Feel no pain (repeat)
So hit me with music, hit me with music
Hit me with music, hit me with music now
I got to say trench town rock
I say don't watch that
Trench town rock, big fish or sprat
Trench town rock, you reap what you sow
Trench town rock, and everyone know now
Trench town rock, don't turn your back
Trench town rock, give the slum a try
Trench town rock, never let the children cry
Trench town rock, 'cause you got to tell JAH, JAH
You grooving Kingston 12, grooving, Kingston 12
Grooving woe, woe, it's Kingston 12
Grooving it's Kingston 12
No want you fe galang so
No want you fe galang so
You want come cold I up
But you can't come cold I up
'Cause I'm grooving, yes I'm grooving
I say one good thing, one good thing
When it hits you feel no pain
One good thing about music
When it hits you feel no pain
So hit me with music
Hit me with music now
Hit me with music, hit me with music
Look at that
Trench town rock, I say don't watch that
Trench town rock, if you big fish or sprat
Trench town rock, you reap what you sow
Trench town rock, and everyone know now
Trench town rock, don't turn your back
Trench town rock, give the slum a try
Trench town rock, never let the children cry
Trench town rock, 'cause you got to tell JAH, JAH why
Grooving, grooving, grooving, grooving

Six Months After, A Memorial Built On Beams of Light (washingtonpost.com)

The two light beams, made up of 88 intense searchlights arrayed in two side-by-side 50-foot squares, will cost about a half-million dollars, which covers the installation, security and a lighting technician.

The beams will be lighted from nightfall until 11 p.m., but are subject to temporary shutdown based on Federal Aviation Administration concerns about how the light plays in certain weather conditions and conservationists' concerns about the impact on bird migratory patterns. They worry the lights could draw migrating birds to their deaths.

Utne Reader presents America’s 60 Best Public Places

An eclectic assortment of favorite hangouts from Key West to Seattle. In drafting the list, we drew upon the work of the Project for Public Spaces, a national advocacy group, and Gianni Longo’s book A Guide to Great American Public Places, as well as suggestions from friends around the country and happy memories of our own travels. We define the idea of public place broadly here, ranging from rib joints to the Grand Canyon, art museums to Coney Island. Our only firm criterion was that these places must be open to everyone at no more than a modest cost.

The Privatization of Our Culture by Bret Dawson

Here is a convenient thesis statement for you: The discoveries, eureka-moments, fables, characters, songs and jokes that form the only common ground we share as citizens -- the set of ideas collectively known as ‘The West’ -- are now the property of a few multinational corporations. Our entire culture has fallen into private hands, taking with it our right to tell our stories, our right to keep our personal lives personal, even our right to heal our sick. Most of the thoughts passing through your head at any given moment are private property, subject to the whims and desires and litigious controls of the companies that own them. (...)

They can be stopped by large and small acts of civil disobedience, by the willful and deliberate and unauthorized use of those precious trademarks in media large and small -- on your school notebook, on your website, on your TV show. Eventually, they’ll lose their power, becoming as generic and empty and valueless as ‘Kleenex’ and ‘Aspirin’ and ‘Thermos’ have become.

Visible Darkness is down on Kerouac for all the wrong reasons. Kerouac’s contribution to literature was an unimaginable honesty. The trouble is most people simply aren’t interesting enough to create a masterpiece out of an honest accounting of their lives. His contribution to humanity, however, was much greater than his contribution to literature – the revelation of his tragic spiritual journey, and through it, his compassionate soul.

Some nice thoughts on children’s books at Open Brackets, via wood s lot.

I don't know a single Arab or Muslim American who does not now feel that he or she belongs to the enemy camp, and that being in the United States at this moment provides us with an especially unpleasant experience of alienation and widespread, quite specifically targeted hostility. Hundreds of young Arab and Muslim men have been picked up for questioning and, in far too many cases, detained by the police or the FBI. Anyone with an Arab or Muslim name is usually made to stand aside for special attention during airport security checks. There have been many reported instances of discriminatory behaviour against Arabs, so that speaking Arabic or even reading an Arabic document in public is likely to draw unwelcome attention. And of course, the media have run far too many "experts" and "commentators" on terrorism, Islam, and the Arabs whose endlessly repetitious and reductive line is so hostile and so misrepresents our history, society and culture that the media itself has become little more than an arm of the war on terrorism in Afghanistan. All with what seems like great public approval in the United States. (...)

I have come to deeply resent the notion that I must accept the picture of America as being involved in a "just war" against something unilaterally labeled as terrorism by Bush and his advisers, a war that has assigned us the role of either silent witnesses or defensive immigrants who should be grateful to be allowed residence in the US. The historical realities are different: America is an immigrant republic and has always been one. It is a nation of laws passed not by God but by its citizens. Except for the mostly exterminated native Americans, the original Indians, everyone who now lives here as an American citizen originally came to these shores as an immigrant from somewhere else, even Bush and Rumsfeld. The Constitution does not provide for different levels of Americanness, nor for approved or disapproved forms of "American behaviour," including things that have come to be called "un-" or "anti- American" statements or attitudes. That is the invention of American Taliban who want to regulate speech and behaviour in ways that remind one eerily of the unregretted former rulers of Afghanistan. And even if Mr Bush insists on the importance of religion in America, he is not authorised to enforce such views on the citizenry or to speak for everyone when he makes proclamations in China and elsewhere about God and America and himself. (...)

The US position has been escalating towards a more and more metaphysical sphere, in which Bush and his people identify themselves (as in the very name of the military campaign, Operation Enduring Freedom) with righteousness, purity, the good, and manifest destiny, its external enemies with an equally absolute evil. Anyone reading the world press in the past few weeks can ascertain that people outside the US are both mystified by and aghast at the vagueness of US policy, which claims for itself the right to imagine and create enemies on a world scale, then prosecute wars on them without much regard for accuracy of definition, specificity of aim, concreteness of goal, or, worst of all, the legality of such actions.

The trappings of a state of siege trap us in a state of fear, ill-equipped to deal with the Patriot Games, the Mind Games, the War Games of an unelected President and his unelected Vice President.

Let us pray that our country will stop this war. "To provide for the common defense" is one of the formational principles of America.

Our Congress gave the President the ability to respond to the tragedy of September 11. We licensed a response to those who helped bring the terror of September 11th. But we the people and our elected representatives must reserve the right to measure the response, to proportion the response, to challenge the response, and to correct the response.

Because we did not authorize the invasion of Iraq.

We did not authorize the bombing of civilians in Afghanistan.

We did not authorize permanent detainees in Guantanamo Bay.

We did not authorize military tribunals suspending due process and habeas corpus.

We did not authorize the resurrection of COINTELPRO.

We did not authorize national identity cards.

We did not authorize the eye of Big Brother to peer from cameras throughout our cities.

Nor did we ask that the blood of innocent people, who perished on September 11, be avenged with the blood of innocent villagers in Afghanistan.

We did not authorize war without end. Yet we are upon the threshold of a permanent war economy.

Yet the defense budget grows with more money for weapons systems to fight a cold war which ended, weapon systems in search of new enemies to create new wars. This has nothing to do with fighting terror.

This has everything to do with fueling a military industrial machine with the treasure of our nation, risking the future of our nation, risking democracy itself with the militarization of thought which follows the militarization of the budget.

As we grow to human maturity and care for the lives of others, we become creatively and beautifully silent. We evoke words from the other and generate life by our listening... The silent person is not the one who never speaks but the one who knows how to listen well.

“Look inside” Ram Dass' Be Here Now.

The French Senate approved a bill proposing that Saartjie Baartman's, the so-called Hottentot Venus, remains be repatriated, nearly 200 years after she was exhibited in Europe as a sexual freak and scientific curiosity.

originally posted by zakia

The Eye Begins to See “will be spending the week discussing Kerouac’s On the Road. We’re starting today with a background on Kerouac and the Beat Movement.” Woohoo!

BBC photo gallery: Winter Olympics closing ceremony
BBC photo gallery: Winter Olympics opening ceremony