• Rant relief, man with love for earth, for life, watching dysfunctional corporate leadership f____k with every personal right our forefather came for when the abandoned plutocratic European cultures with their Royal Corporate Domination of the world.
• --------------------------------HEALING________________________________
• 
  
• Stick your hands in the ground, 
• wet ground,
•  cold ground, 
• rich ground...
• ground you made to soil,
• with your own composted cow manure
• hauled by wheelbarrow.
• 
  
• Rub the mud on your nose, 
• and inhale your surrounding,
• Poke a hole in the soil, 
• push a spinach seed into the still,
• night frosted ground.
• Dream of bing cherries from the blossoms,
• Dream of heirloom tomatoes in the fall.
• 
  
• Push your filthy thumbs in your ears.
• Drown out that illusionary civilization 
• Brainwashed with advertisement and lobbying.
• 
  
• Shut out the noise of sirens!
•  the outer squabbles,
• The filth of political dialog in elections.
• Be  prepared to shout your anger,
• 
  
• As freedom,
• loses out to paranoia,
• and becomes virtually Illegal.
• 
  
• I'm thankful for a life
• Before surveillance cameras,
• Physically invasive airports, 
• Assumed guilt drug testing,
• Internet identity theft,
• Cell phones compulsively interrupting our lives, to drive us to compulsive response disorder 
• and the ability to focus for any length of time.
• A life before computers and drones,
• 
  
• Thanks, too, for our native ancestors
• Prior to us Caucasoids (White People) 
• To remind us what it would have taken,
• To have lived here sustainably.
• 
  
• As we've turned their garden of Eden only a few hundred years ago,
• Into quadratic subdivisions of green laws monoculturized by Roundup.
• 
  
• Enjoy the sun, 
• the rainbow, 
• the snowflakes, 
• the bowing trees,
• the moods of clouds,
• the scent of flowers, 
• the croaking of frogs, 
• the chirping of birds,
• for they could be gone tomorrow.

Contemposcribe 4-27-12

The Thinker 

Rodin

I am, therefore I think.Especially when I sit,What I see is then still.Details emerge.New associations sparkle.New perspectives light up.
Man am I and I am ManTwenty digits,Two arms,Two legs,Hands and feet.Self-mobilizing,
Now stationary,Now fist to chin,And hands to knee.Being,Not doing,An ancestral icon for me to ponder.

Peter Prehn

Apostrophes

'

     The apostrophe, like all punctuation, has a purpose in writing, but disrupts computer programming. and as such can't be used in an e-mail address.  But someone who didn't know that O'Ryan wasn't a geekspeak name, put an apostrophe in the name of one of my student's e-mail adresses, blocked the web pages I needed, to know the names and data about my students who were registered already 2 days into the quarter for my GED class. It was fixed a day later, but spun in motion another catastrophistic prophesy.

     Now an apostrophe may seem like a small matter, until you ask if a misplaced apostrophe could bring down the global network?  Creating network dysfunction is the mission of a whole new younger generation  of rebels with anarchistic tendencies, as in any era of dysfunctional societies.

     That network relies on Vigintillion (and yes that means:

10,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,

000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,

000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000  yes/no bytes, or ten to the 120th power, as defined in Europe, anyway.  These infinite numbers of yes/no bytes now rule the globe these days, to run our banks, our tax system, our finance system, our military, our electric grid, our communications grid, etc. etc.  Did I mention Nuclear bombs.

     Cataclysmic things can happen when someone can't or won't program.  And the solar system could also have a sun with nuclear energy having a flare or two at two or three times higher than usual, which for most knowledgeable people is not an if but when  event of a gigantic solar flare with intense magnetic fields crashed against our electrical/communication infrastructure the apostrophe wouldn't matter anymore, but in the meanwhile, any small error in programming has potentially huge consequences...especially when a hacker works hard to make it happen.

All of which is to say, from my perspective, that we've become more vulnerable to global collapse than at any time in our history, short of nuclear war.

It is really incredible to think of this global network  which is operating with a collective knowledge globally but which depends on nearly microscopic chips to contain more data than that unimaginable number of "yes-no" decisions...it's hard to believe this way of life can ultimately continue...yet we do nothing to plan for an alternative...is that sanity?