Ron Paul for President in '08

I think the key issue for 2008 is reducing the power of the executive. As some have pointed out, as the US increasingly centralizes power in one branch of government, our checks and balances are overturned in a way reminiscent of fascist coups. It doesn't matter who is president in 2008 or 2012, what matters is the fundamental process of democracy.

"With the gutting of traditional checks and balances, we are no less endangered by a President Hillary than by a President Giuliani - because any executive will be tempted to enforce his or her will through edict rather than the arduous, uncertain process of democratic negotiation and compromise."

Ron Paul is a republican who seems to actually believe in Less Government. As such, I support his presidential bid. I am a one-issue voter, because that's the way the system is. And my one issue is less government.

EF Schumacher on "Progress"

"He called his talk 'The Insufficiency of Liberalism' and it was an exposition of what he termed the “three stages of development”. The first great leap, he said, was made when man moved from stage one of primitive religion to stage two of scientific realism. This was the stage modern man tended to be at. A few move to the third stage in which one can find in the lapses and deficiencies in science and realism, and that there is something beyond fact and science. He called this stage three. The problem, he explained, was that stage one and stage three appear to be exactly the same to people stuck in stage two. Consequently, those in stage three are seen as having had some sort of a relapse into childish nonsense. Only those in stage three, can understand the differences between stage one and stage three."

find a Permaculture-Social-Environmental-Justice grassroots movement near you

The Orion Society is the nexus.

Diagram of Cloud Mechanisms

Letter of the Week: 1872 Mining Law

Dear Senator,

The 1872 Mining Law needs to be changed. It consistently favors the interests of large, often foreign companies over the interests of local Arizona landowners. It subsidizes the give-away of over $1 billion in publicly-owned minerals every year.

My family and I are directly affected by dust blowing off the numerous open-pit mines in Pima county, and what really irks me is the thought that my tax dollars are funding this irresponsible exploitation of our God-given natural heritage.

This land is held in trust by our government so that everyone can use it, but when these companies come in with their mines they just use it up. Although we often hear that these mines are creating jobs in our local communities, the reality is that these corporations will leave us high and dry when the minerals run out.

We need an updated mining law that considers the valid interests of local landowners as well as the interests of economic development. I plan to watch your action on this issue as a kind of litmus test for who you really support; is it the local landowners trying to make a living in Arizona or is it the big corporate interests at their government-sponsored pig trough?

Homeopathy

"The underpinning of the editorial content of the Lancet as it relates to homeopathy relies on a quaint old idea from the nineteenth century that the ONLY way that the property of water can be affected or changed is by incorporating foreign molecules. This is the Avogadro-limit high-school level chemistry argument. To a materials scientist this notion is absurd, since the fundamental paradigm of materials-science is that the structure-property relationship is the basic determinant of everything. It is a fact that the structure of water and therefore the informational content of water can be altered in infinite ways".

Dr. Rustum Roy

An Island to Oneself

"The coral waxes, the palm grows, but man departs."
Suvarov, Cook Islands, South Pacific

"Transition"

Transition
Let us now turn to psychological facts. At night all leaping fountains speak with a louder tone; my soul, too is a leaping fountain says Zarathustra. Into the night life seems to be exiled --these are the famous words from Freud's Interpretation of Dreams--into the night life seems to be exiled what once ruled during the day. This sentence contains the entire modern psychology. Its great idea is the stratification of the psyche, the geological principle. The soul has its origin and is built in strata, and what we learned before in the organic field apropos of the construction of the big brain from the anatomic-evolutionary standpoint of banished aeons, is revealed by psychosis as a still-existing reality. We carry the ancient peoples in our souls and when the later acquired reason is relaxed, as in the dream or in drunkenness, they emerge with their rites, their prelogical mentality, and grant us an hour of mystic participation.

When the logical superstructure is loosened, when the scalp, tired of the onslaught of the prelunar states, opens the frontiers of consciousness about which there is always a struggle, then there appears the old, the unconscious, in the magical transmutation and identification of the "I" in the early experience of the everywhere and the eternal. The hereditary partimony of the middle brain lies still deeper and is eager for expression: if the covering is destroyed in the psychosis there emerges, driven upward by the primal instincts, from out the primitive-schizoid substructure, the gigantic archaic instinctive "I" unfolding itself limitlessly through the tattered psychological subject.


Quoted in "Plexus" the 2nd volume of the Rosy Crucifixion by Henry Miller

Henry Miller's Gourmet

At a Jewish delicatessen. Plenty of sour cream, radishes, onions, strudels, pastrami, smoked fish, all kinds of dark bread, creamy sweet butter, Russian tea, caviar, egg noodles--and Seltzer water.

In addition to fried onions and mashed potatoes we had succotash, beets and Brussels sprouts, with celery, stuffed olives and radishes on the side. We washed this down with red and white wine, the best obtainable. There were three kinds of cheese, followed by strawberries and rich cream. For a change we had some excellent coffee, which I prepared myself. Good, strong coffee with a bit of chicory in it. All that lacked was a good liqueur and Havana cigars.

Delicious breakfast, ...always fresh fruit and berries smothered in cream, muffins fresh from the oven, thick strips of bacon, marmalade, steaming coffee with whipped cream. I felt like a pasha.

A "snack" consisted of cold cuts, salami, headcheese, olives, pickles, sardines, radishes, potato salad, caviar, Swiss cheese, coffee, a German cheesecake or apple strudel, with kummel, port or Malaga to top it off.

What better than a caviar sandwich on black bread smeared with sweet butter--at 2:00 A.M.? With a glass of Chablis or Riesling to wash it down, certes. And to round it off, perhaps a dish of strawberries floating in sour cream, or if not strawberries then blackberries or huckleberries or blueberries or raspberries. I see halvah and baklava too. Goody goody!

Farm Bill Letter

Senator,

I am very concerned about the upcoming vote on the Farm Bill. I consider the existing farm bill a prime example of government "pork". The basic issue is whether we, the American consumers, should be allowed to choose which food and which farmers to support.

This is a very important issue, one that we are confronted with every week at the supermarket. Government subsidies have made it cheaper to buy Coca-cola than local apple juice. Why the government would want to promote corn syrup while we are in the midst of a diabetes crisis boggles my mind.

Please stay out of my dinner. Let the market decide which foods are produced (that's what capitalism is good at). By all means provide funding to retrain farmers who were dependent on subsidies, and put tariffs on imports from countries that lack our environmental and labor standards. But let us, the American people, choose how to spend our own money.

Thank you.

Conor Flynn