A nation is a group of people united by a mistaken view about the past and a hatred of their neighbours ~Ernest Renan

To write well

Write, write whatever is on your mind. Your pen's ink is worth the ideas that are flowing through your mind. I mean this perhaps like it's of the most critical things to our civilization and its survival. In Utopic/democratic circumstances this may not be necessary because there are no dangerous power monopolies to overcome. But in order to fight the growing totality of capitalism, citizens must understand the institutional organization (or their institutionalization) that they are part-off. Their understanding is critical if they were to become skeptics of capitalistm and its direct relation to injustice and oppression.This is multiplied by the inattention and often the denunciation by Islamists of  labour and social movements. Islamists are permanently fixated on self-cleansing: hiding emotions and controlling personal and social behavior. The Sunni tradition doesn't have any idealogical support for socialism. They denounce their fellow protesting citizens who also have not read a single word for Marx, but have just had enough of being exploited. Islamists fear the spontaneous organization of citizens with the secular spirit! So yes, it's important to know about these things. The word is the catalyst. Literacy is essential if were to overcome our own evil.

Talking about politics

If you take yourself and your surrounding affairs seriously, you would not have room to use the word politics. Because some people don't like talking about politics, and I just want to smack them in the face. Everything is politics.I hardly use that word, I don't need to. All our affairs are continuous -- they don't begin when you open the domain of 'politics' -- they are related and interrelated.

Garden Living 103 - How much?

I am trying to get a sense of land size, time and productivity. How long does it take to cultivate? How many family members can it feed? This will help me estimate the costs of purchasing the land, and start looking into the logistics.

1.http://forums.gardenweb.com/forums/load/permacult/msg0117455615948.html

2.From http://www.answerbag.com/q_view/20859:
"If you are just starting don't try to grow everything your family needs. 7 people are going to need a big garden. Most important in determining garden size are the gardener's physical ability, available space, time and equipment, and genuine interest in gardening. The work can be hard no matter how many "Gardening made EZ" hints you follow. It is better to start small and build on success than to become discouraged and abandon the garden because it was too large or too much work. As for what to plant, first plant things your family likes ( well duh), from that list your garden should be things that definitely taste better fresh from the garden than the freshest from the store. Tomatoes are the number one thing for that, no store tomato comes close to a fresh one, and they are easy to grow and don't take much space if you use cages to keep the vertical rather than sprawling. Some people can't do without fresh corn and again the taste of store corn just don't compare, but they have a longer growing season taking up space, and you really can only count on one ear per plant in a garden, less than that in a smaller garden. Space and time are the important, Melons, pumpkins, squash, potatoes and sweetpotatoes are in the garden for a long time, and take up a lot of space, and are a one time harvest crop. Okra, tomatoes, peppers, eggplant, and pole beans are also in the garden a long time but produce a continuous supply of food.
Vegetables for a small garden, because of the space and the amount produced, are bush snap and lima beans; leafy greens such as lettuce, spinach, mustard, and turnips; green onions; tomatoes; sweet peppers; and eggplant. If space permits, add broccoli, cabbage, hot peppers, okra, summer squash, Southern peas, and pole beans. Cucumbers, which normally take a lot of ground space, can be trellised. Radishes are easy in looser soils and great for a kids first garden because they can be planted early and sprout and mature quickly, preventing boredom. Two or three crops might be planted before it gets too hot, then something else can be planted in their space.

From that list choose a half dozen or so ( make sure you choose them maters, yum yum, and I ALWAYS grow hot peppers for garden fresh salsa)

3.How long does it take to grow vegtables?
4.How Big Should The Vegetable Garden Be?
"We have six 2 metre by 5 metre Plots and another two 1 metre by 4 or 5 metre plots that are for Strawberries and a few soft fruit and flower beds.

I think that sixty square metres in total would be very close to being able to support a family of four in all of the basic Vegetables all year around. This is not to say you will be growing many unusual or non staple vegetables, but it should be more than adequate for the basics.

Some of our Veg Beds are used for Melons etc and we also grow an awful lot of Onions and Garlic. About two hundred of each. Some basics such as these take up space but are a staple for most dishes so we grow them every year.

You need to decide what you want to grow to make the most of the Vegetable Plot and plan accordingly. Crop Rotation is very important so it needs some planning in a limited space. Decide how basic or adventurous you want to be in your Vegetable Growing and take it from there.

Sixty square metres will give you all the basics for a lot of the year. You may have to sacrifice some things, like a year round supply of potatoes, and have to be careful about growing things such as melons and cucumbers that take up a lot of room but I think you will be well on your way to becoming self-sufficient for your vegetable needs.
-- End of quote

Now this is great news. If you look to the image below you'll see why. This entire tennis court has an area of about 250 squared metres. For a family of four, you need 60 (say 100) squared metres: that's not even half the tennis court.

Tennis court has an area ~260 squared metres -- more than double the 

cultivation area required for a family of four

Garden Living 102 -- The basics

The necessities of garden living:
House
Organic food
Fresh air
Pure water
Clean environment

Fundamental ingredients for healthy-living"
Olive oil
Za'tar
Tea
Honey
Nuts
Marijuana

When you get in the habit of healthy-eating(and that means preparing your own food), you will realize that you depend on a few basic, natural, ingredients -- some which I may have noted above. Perhaps your first task could be to end fastfood, and any kind of quickly packaged, stored, transported or frozen food items. All these things cost your money, and cost the environment.

Your basket should not have more than what's out of the ground, from vegetables, fruits, rice or bread or whatever your carb is, nuts.

Neolithic conservatism and the ethical unconscious

The reappraisal of the primitive -- especially for its ecological wisdom -- has come a long many routes, in many cases heavily frightened with political as well as environmental priorities. This can be seen vividly in the Utopian anarchism that Paul Goodman brought to prominence in the sixties. Goodman liked to refer to himself, somewhat impishly, as a conservative, one who cared most of all

for green grass and clean rivers, children with bright eyes and good color whatever the color, people safe from being pushed around so they can be themselves. Conservatives at present seem to want to go back to conditions that obtained in the administration of McKinley. But when people are subject to universal social engineering and the biosphere itself is in danger, we need a more neolithic conservatism.

In the contrast to the "phony conservative" who continue to care more for the welfare of high rollers in the marketplace and the baronial cooperation, Goodman took as his historical baseline the tribal simplicities of the prehistoric past. The result was a conservatism that reached so far beyond the empire of cities that it became the basis of a new radicalism. Goodman was through and through a New Yorker of intensely sophisticated tasted; yet like many romantic anarchists before him, he nursed a sincere if somewhat sentimentalized allegiance to bucolic folkways. His goal was to recapture these ancestral values within the context of the modern metropolis.  Like E. F. Schumacher, he sought to achieve the "small" that is "beautiful" within the context of the big by way of decentralization and international diversification. He felt this would be the cure not only for many of our political ills but for the crippling sense of powerlessness that is the peculiar psychopathology of industrial society. For Goodman, the ideal village for modern times would be something like Greenwich Village in its heyday, a colorful, lively community of artists and intellectuals blessed with cultural distinction and a decent amount of neighborhood autonomy within the otherwise suffocating bulk of greater New York.

In his effort to recapture the spirit of the neolithic within a high industrial order, Goodman was following the trail blazed by Prince Peter Kropotkin. Kropotkin's place as one of the founders of modern ecology is widely acknowledged; he is among those who created the concept of the ecosystem. What is less recognized is the psychological theory that Kropotkin deduced from his studies and that qualifies him as among the fist ecopsychologists.

Kroptokin was always careful to insist that the mutual aid he discerned among all living things was not primarily an altruistic virtue. It went much deeper. It was instinctual, utterly spontaneous impulse welded into the foundations of animal consciousness and evolving throughout the history of life on Earth. The contrast with Freud could not be more dramatic. Based on his close, lifelong study of animals in the wild and the tribal societies of Siberia and Manchuria (a larger body of evidence that Freud ever accumulated in his consulting rooms), Kropotkin concluded that human nature was fundamentally ethical; kinship and moral concern come to it as naturally as the song comes to the bird. At the foundations of the unconscious one finds conscience, the moral energy of the personality as firmly rooted in the psyche as particidal jealousy or the death instinct -- or possibly more so.

"It is not love and not even sympathy upon which society is based in mankind. It is the conscience - be it only at the stage of an instinct - of human solidarity. It is the unconscious recognition of the force that is borrowed by each man from the practice of mutual aid; of the close dependency of every one's happiness upon the happiness of all; and of the sense of justice, or equity which brings the individual to consider the rights of every other individual as equal to his own. Upon this broad and necessary foundation the still higher moral feelings are developed."

For Kropotkin, the factor of innate conscience makes human community a great deal more than an agglomeration of people held together by social contract. It is a biologically deep and intricate system. In contrast to the totalitarian regimentation that treats the populace as so many subordinate cellular units of the body politic, each linked to each by ethical caring. Nothing more is needed, no police force, no bureaucratic apparatus. But of course we have policy and bureaucracy; we have had them for a very long time. Why? What is the need if there is an ethical unconscious that provided reliable social bond? Anarchists have never produced a good answer to the question; they are no better at explaining the origin of evil than anybody else. But it is nonetheless clear that if an ethical unconscious did not exist, no amount of police force or bureaucracy could hold any society together. We form our selves spontaneously into family, clan, band, tribe, guild, village, town. This is social ecology in action. The anarchist asks: how far can this be instinctual sociability be used to solve the social evils that besets us?

Freud, dealing with the psychic casualties of bourgeois industrial Europe, could find nothing in nature with which to connect the psyche but vindictive selfishness -- and beyond that the alien void of a dead universe. Kropotkin, dealing with healthy animals in the wild and ruggedly independent peasant folk, assert an ethical unconscious derived from biological symbiosis. Goodman, in his turn drawing on the same fine faith in human nature to create his neolithic conservatism, broadened his analysis. He was amongst the first to connect decentralism and healthy ecology with the Taoist tradition. In the Tao, at last as he understood it, he found the principle of organic self-regulation whether of the body, the community, or the environment. The homely mysticism of Lao Tzu, the Chinese peasant sage, become the basis of Goodman's Gestalt psychology, a significant departure from Freudian orthodoxy that involved trust the body, the sense, and the natural environment to solve their problems in their own spontaneous way.

Gestalt began in the 1920s as a divergent approach to the psychology of perception. In contrast to the Behaviorists, who saw perception as essentially passive and receptive, the Gestalitists Wolfgang Kohler and Kurt Koffka fixed upon the remarkable capacity of the sensory organs to create meaningful patterns even when confronted with seeming chaos. The mind makes meaning, even when it has little to work with. This finding raised intriguing questions. How far can this formative tendency be extended beyond the eye, ear, touch? Can it be found throughout the organism in all parts of mind and body? Can it be found in our relation to other people and external nature as a whole? In the late forties, Goodman and the Freudian maverick Fritz Perls, starting with these questions, elaborated Gestalt into a new school of psychiatry, the first therapy to use the word "ecology" to describe the spontaneous adjustive power of the organism within its environment. Gestalt assumed innate healthy functioning. Where there was neurosis, then, the therapeutically pertinent question became: what is getting in the way?

The distinguishing feature of these early effort to combine psychology and ecology is optimism. Both Kropotkin and Goodman credit human nature with native innocence. Neither force nor the threats of a father god are necessary to make people behave as convivial beings. The politics of domination begins when some people teach other people that the body, the psyche, the community, and nature at large are unreliable, incompetent, hostile, therefor in need of top-down supervision. Authoritarian politics roots itself in the guilty conscience. It begins by convincing people they cannot trust one another, that they cannot trust themselves. The Zen poetry Gary Snyder summarized the critique nicely. This poetry is meant to invoke "the Great Subculture" that "runs without break from Paleo-SIberian Shamanism and Magdalenian cave-painting; through megaliths and Mysteries, astronomers, ritualists, alchemists...right down to Golden Gate Park," the scene of many a gather of the San Francisco tribes during the 1960s.

All this [he tells us] is subversive to civilization: for civilization is built on hierarchy and specialisation. A ruling class, to survive, must propose a Law: a law to work must have a hook into the social psyche -- and the most effective way to achieve this is to make people doubt their natural worth and instincts, especially sexual. To make "human nature" suspect is also to make Nature -- the wilderness -- the adversary. Hence the ecological crisis of today

...
The reappraisal of primary people as a basis for contemporary politics and personal sanity is no small achievement. It is a rare act of cultural renunciation After all, the cultural life of the modern world, whatever its national, ethnic, or ideological variations, belongs to citified intellectuals, an international class that shares a common commitment to ubran ways. They monopolize the critical dialogue. Whatever questions of justice may divide the classes, races and sexes of the ubran-industrial world, those questions are raised within the culture of cities and between members of that culture. For this reason, those who speak in behalf of nunurban or preurban people -- those those who protest for the endangered species -- reveal a unque sense of the universal.
--

From Theodore Roszack's The Voice of the Earth

Garden Living 101

Alright so here we go. I am a chemical engineering graduate, and I have decided I no longer want to be a wrench for my heavy industry. I'd rather build my own land, and live of it. So I will be writing a bunch of notes about living from your garden; basic information that should convince anyone of the insanity in urban slaving, eating, drinking, excercising.

We are in an unstable economy, serving unstable jobs. Comes the first benefit of garden living. You don't need the unstable economy to survive.  (I dilberatley chose the phrase garden living, instead of farm living or farming)  You can now step outside into your garden and pick your salad. Most of our needs are below the ground, all we have to do is work it.

The ultimate task here is to simplify life's need by reducing your survival needs, whilst at the same time enjoy nature. Work has been so tailored, that it is sometimes difficult to see how your outcome has affected anyone or anything. Garden living is taking control of your life. You are the reason for your survival.

Do you have a girlfriend? Getting married soon? Live with her too, and you will understand her and enjoy her like you never did. Get to know them during, and after work-hours. When you work with him/her, and see them sweating, and need your help, that's love! Both your lives will now depend on each other.

Grow apples, mango, peppers, mint, banana, tomatoes, carrots, green onions, sweet onions, (marijuana), berries...whatever you like. And have many pets; there's plenty of room for them too.

Your home is your investment. Where you create yourself. You are autonomous. Enjoy mother-nature, recelebrate your birth, every moment and with every sweat.

I can write whatever...

I can write whatever I want. I don't need to read over my last sentence; I'm a train of thought that is unstoppable. I am making sense right now. I'm materializing a voice that might be pronounced one day. And to the listener, just like the current reader, I will be making perfect sense.

This ain't about terrorism. It's about KABOB!

In this movie, "Terrorism and KABOB," a middle class civil engineer loses his patience chasing employees to finish his children's paperwork in dt Cairo. He flips out and decides to occupy an entire government building (Tahrir centre in Tahrir square), and take the workers and civilians inside as hostages. Eventually everybody got hungry. So his first demand from the authorities was that they send up some food for them. He asked the people what would they like to eat, and they decided they want KABOB. And instead of worrying about the "terrorist", the hostages rallied behind him for their KABOB!

Song starts @3.00 ...It goes "KABOB KABOB, or we'll let your lives hell. KABOB KABOB, or we'll let your lives hell. KABOB KABOB, or we'll let your lives hell. KABOB KABOB, or we'll let your lives hell. "




!أرجوك أتمسك بموقفك
!الكباب يعني الكباب
!لو طوعت الحكومة حترسي على فول ولطتعميه
!!!تبقى مصيبه

Culture of domination and authority

Neither force nor the threats of a father god are necessary to make people behave as convivial beings. The politics of domination begins when some people teach other people that the body, the psyche, the community, and nature at large are unreliable, incompetent, hostile, therefore in need of top-down supervision.-Roszak

FML

"...I can't tell people how to live their lives. I don't give advice to my own children. If I did, they'd be smart enough not to listen. -Chomsky

poems give us a theme for reason

Two most important subjects

Subjects don't exist. They are ways to divide experts and students into groups of similar interest. There are no conceptual limits to what's possible in physics, chemistry or biology...These dividers are just ways to make language and people more organized and efficient. If we would have asked classical philosophers like Kant or Descartes, what is the difference between science and philosophy, they wouldn't have been able to answer. There was no difference because there was insufficient technical knowledge. With increased knowledge we needed to figure out ways to organize our ideas and our so-called experts. We need to call them common names, and their books need to have a common heading, and so on...

If I was a university dean, I would make philosophy and (modern) psychology mandatory subjects. They trespass on a lot of our the territory of science and so they help to break this mental barrier that make us favourite subjects and narrow our scope of the possibility of truth.

The economics of getting high

In Canada, a gram is sold individually at around 10 bucks. Lets see how much money this is really worth, and whether growing marijuana for individual use is really worth it.

If you smoke a gram a day, and you buy each gram individually, you would be spending about 3500 bucks per year on marijuana. (Taking a few days for a job interview, seeing your parents...that sort of stuff)

Assuming that an ounce of marijuana costs 100 dollars, a pound of marijuana would cost about 1500 dollars. A pound of marijuana is about half a kilo, which is about 500 grams of marijuana. So on a pound basis, marijuana costs 3 bucks per gram. So if you are purchasing less than pound amounts of marijuana, the street price will be at least 3 or more dollars per gram.

A small setup is considered to consist of about 20 plants. One marijuana plant takes about 4 months to ripe and produces anywhere between 2-4 ounces or 60-110g (dry).

http://mmjspots.com/forum/how-many-grams-or-ounces-per-marijuana-plant

Basic installation for a small grow-op shouldn't cost more than 200 bucks.

So I don't know, the economics tell me one thing, and one thing only....

The Voice of the Earth, Theodore Roszak

. . . green voices are singing

the dark ecstatic metabolism of hidden Earth.

We may read the shaman's gestures, 

we bear the heat of eggs in our bodies,

the clustering amorous atoms, molecules,

miracles of future flesh, magnificence of bone, 

arteries, sinews, spangled galaxies

craving form.

. . . helped me [the author] hear the voice

"At its deepest level, psychology is the search for sanity...Modern psychology on the other hand has been most distinctively an attempt to disconnect from the supposed subjectivity of philosophy and religion. It has followed the example of other fields -- economics, political science, sociology -- in choosing a scientific model of inquiry, hoping to escape the hazards of judgement.

From Mind in the Cosmos
Looking back across the centuries, we can now see that the entire materialist program reads like a secular catechism based upon articles of faith. It was asserted into existence by passionate men on the grounds of their own fiery certitude. It was not a finding; it was the program of an ethical and political cause. In that capacity it served well as a way of clearing the intellectual decks for action; radical, even ruthless simplification was a way of starting  afresh, eliminating the inherited clutter, trying out new ideas. But as commendably eager as materialism was to rebuild society on the foundations of pure reason, it eventually ran up against formidable obstacle: reality. Truth is never simple, no more so in the state of nature than in human affairs.


Today there is a wide measure of agreement, which on the physical side of science approaches to unanimity, that the stream of knowledge is heading toward a non-mechanical reality; the universe begins to look more like a great thought than like a great machine. Mind no longer appears as an accidental intruder into the real of matter; we are beginning to suspect that we ought rather to hail it as the creator and governor of the realm of matter. -James Jeans, The Mysterious Universe

From City Pox and the Patriarchal Ego
When Men start participating as deeply as women in the initiation of infants into the human estate, when both male and female parents come to carry for all of us the special meanings of early childhood, the trouble we have reconciling these meanings with person-ness will finally be faced. The consequences, of course, willl be a fuller and more realistic, a kinder and at the same time more demanding definition of person-ness. -Dinnerstein

It is not love and not even sympathy upon which society is based in making. It is the conscience -- be it only at the stage of an instinct -- of human solidarity. It is the unconscious recognition of the force that is borrowed by each man from the practice of mutual aid; of the close dependency of every one's happiness upon the happiness of all; and of the sense of justice, or equity , which brings the individual to consider the rights of every other individual as equal to his own. Upon this broad and necessary foundation the still higher moral feelings are developed. - Prince Peter Kropotkin

The initial issue raised by feminists was the conventional democratic demand for political and social equality that dates back to the suffragettes of the Victorian period. Votes, jobs, education for women.

The self identity of the boy child is founded upon negation and objectification of an other.

From Modern Psychology in Search of Soul
At the turn of the century, this vision of inescapable doom permeated philosophy and the art as well as the sciences. It accounts for the aura of invincible pessimism that surrounds the poetry of Housman and Dowson, the historical studies of Henry Adams and Oswald Spengler, the plays of Eugene O'Neill, and the novels of Thomas Hardy. The poet Swinburne lamented

Then stars nor sun shall waken,

Nor any chance of light:

Nor sound of waters shaken, 

Nor any sound or sight:

Nor wintry leaves nor vernal, 

Nor days nor things diurnal

Only the sleep eternal

In an eternal night.

A high society

It is vital to the wallets of pot-heads, and to the wellbeing of  patients of more than two hundred illnesses that we come to terms with our so called illegal and immoral drug activities, to put an end to public hypocrisy and closet use of something that is probably one of the most useful natural prescriptions for good health and freethought. I want recognition of the aweful sin and crime that is behind marijuana prohibition, to show like many things in our authoritarian societies, is harmful and propagates corruption.

We, the potheads, from the amount of money we spend and the time we spend due to its effect; our purchasing power that's transferred to dealers, and their dealers, the real criminals; the police complex that benefits from the prohibition for their own high and bonuses; the insult of rule of law, to make a mockery of justice .... Marijuana is a safe natural product, right next to honey and cinnamon, and any prohibition against this plant is either from shear ignorance or an outright crime.

http://arabicforread.blogspot.com/search/label/marijuana