Honey Bee on the Brink of Death
In my dream world, there are flowers everywhere. And I cannot think of who I'd thank for that more than the bees. They pollinate the planet. I'm a bee hugger. I boycott all bug sprays. When a bee comes flying near me, I know the bee is usually harmless and perhaps exploring a scent. Meanwhile bees have been in the news in recent years. They've been dying in droves. Perhaps all the needless insecticides and human paranoia are chasing them to extinction along with acid rain and mercury from coal-driven electrical plants. Or perhaps we have been stealing too much of their honey. That is also the topic of an animated film called Bee Movie involving Jerry Seinfeld.
Just yesterday morning, I was out on the back porch looking yonder into the woods, eating my breakfast when I damn near swallowed a bee. It was in my tomato juice. I tasted it when I took a swig. Luckily I stopped myself from swallowing just in time. Upon realizing it was a bee, I launched an operation to save the bee. This began when I spit the soggy bee back into the cup of tomato juice. I then went to the sink and drained the cup slowly to get the lifeless looking bee onto a paper towel since no emergency bee stretchers could be found. I then showered a few drops of lukewarm water over the bee to remove the tomato juice, fearing the acidic content may have harmed the bee. Nonetheless, the bee appeared possibly drowned. I took it back outside on the damp fold of paper towel.
Once outside, I placed the paper towel bearing the bee onto the wooden rail of the porch. But it appeared to be perhaps dead. I put myself into the bee's frame of mind, asking myself what I would want done to me if I had just been dragged lifeless from a vat of liquid. There was no way to give the tiny bee mouth to mouth rescuscitation. So I just pressed on the bee very gently with my finger several times, hoping this might somehow revive it and help it to expel any liquid. At first, it remained lifeless. Then it moved, but not enough to indicate survival. It was just a bit cool outside. So I breathed on the bee to warm it. All I could see was the appearance of a dying bee. Then I got another idea. I promptly grabbed a toothpick, a tiny bit of a date and my jar of acacia honey and made a diluted sweet solution, carefully placing a small dab of it at the mouth of the bee. At first the bee remained lifeless. I continued to coax the bee into the diluted honey and used the toothpick to assure that it did not get smothered. By now I realized that I had done all that I could do unless something else might come to mind. I resumed eating my breakfast, having nothing left for the bee except a prayer. Suddenly the bee came to life, buzzing its wings. And within a moment, it became animated and flew off into the sunny blue sky. I felt a sigh of joy. I have no idea what the bee thought of this experience. Perhaps it will communicate my scent to the hive and tell how it was saved from the brink of death.
We practically owe our lives to the bees. If not for them, I don't think we'd have much to eat. Countless fruits, vegetables and seed plants depend on bees for reproduction. All I did was to give back some of the honey that I had taken from the bee's world. Seeing the bee survive made me feel really good inside. But I still kept most of the honey.
- 2007 October 31 Wednesday
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Killing the Messenger - Why not bomb the world with cameras?
As I write this, it has been a few days since the hanging of President Sadaam Hussein by the new Iraqi government. Tonight, ABC Nightline did a segment on the divisive sectarian unprofessionalism of the execution where Shiite revenge was palpable. We all know that Sadaam was a Sunni Muslin and persecuted everyone, especially Shiites. Video footage showed Sadaam being cursed and returning curses before he prayed away his last few seconds at the gallows. As a direct result of cell phones smuggled into the event by at least two high Iraqi government officials, the world benefitted by seeing the hanging without censorship. This grainy video footage became a huge embarrassment to the Iraqi government. That government is, by all appearances, deeply complicit in a barely concealed campaign of ethnic cleansing and unspeakable tortures against minority Sunnis at this very hour. Toward the end of the report, an ABC news reporter in Bhagdad assured us that the Iraqi government has identified the persons who smuggled in the cell phones and there may be punishment. I was quite sickened to witness the hypocracy of ABC resting the story end on this note, as if the cell phone videographers had committed a crime. During the segment, ABC was broadcasting this rare and precious footage. Let me enlighten ABC about amateur journalism: This was not a story about unlicensed videographers, it was a story about an unprofessional hanging. The men with the cell phones may have risked their lives, their freedom and their government jobs to bring us this footage. They should be thanked and protected without regard to taking any side in this war. Journalism is journalism. ABC Nightline has descended to Geraldo ever since the venerable Ted Koppel was replaced by the unobjective and unprofessional anchor Martin Bashir who could well have kept the story on track if he only had a brain. In a previous episode, Bashir likewise showed his Garaldo mentality in a segment wherein he visibly denigrated a man for having bikini-clad babes and fine cars while thumbing his nose at US tax laws that may or may not be applicable. The interviewee had become fabulously wealthy running an offshire online gambling operation. I can only gather that ABC Nightline resents anyone beyond the reach of Ceasar and his reporters. Likewise, if you want to see the real war, the drilled and tortured corpses, the piles and piles of bodies, the bloody rooms where Iraqi genocide is happening every day, turn off the TV and rev up your search engines. The real horrors of war will not be televised except when brave men smuggle flimsy cellphones into the belly of the beast. Iraq should be "bombed" with millions of free digital cameras for all of its citizens. Then perhaps ABC Nightline would be worth watching again. It used to be my favorite program.
- 2007 January 03 Wednesday
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Holocaust Deniers.... Should We Censor Them?
In late 2006, holocaust deniers have hit the news again. Iranian government leaders have been denying that the World War Two Nazi death camps existed. Likewise, Austria recently expelled British historian David Irving and placed him on probation after serving 13 months of a three year jail sentence just for denying the holocaust. In America we enjoy some level of free speech, at least in theory. If such a denial were ever outlawed here, then we would have the American Civil Liberties Union in an uproar, as well it should be, for such laws are unconstitutional. Their arguement and mine would be something like this: "What the defendant has said may be preposterous, ignorant of the facts or perhaps even a deliberate lie, but we must defend his right to say it with all of our might." Many if not most Jews have relatives who have died in the holocaust. Jewish lawyers in the ACLU have defended neo-Nazi free speech issues in the past where the right to demonstrate is concerned. I am well aware that these lawyers may feel repusled by the message of these hate-mongering souls. But what these lawyers do is good for the cause of free speech in America at the civil and judicial level and globally at the philosophical level. And furthermore, we do not need stupid laws in Europe making it a crime to deny the holocaust. Stuffing a sock in someone's mouth is a good way to make them into an undeserving martyr. Any time we have a government denying the right to say something, it only lends the powerful suggestion that there must be some truth to the very words they are suppressing. But who in their right mind would doubt something that has been witnessesd and documented in millions of ways. In WWII, my own mother lived in the Moselle Valley of France where most of that nation's Jews and other oppressed souls were rolled out in boxcars into death camps in Germany and Poland. But if I happened to beleive otherwise, I would have every human right to shout it, print it, and speak it until I was gagged. Using free speech to show one's own ignorance is stupid but it should never be a crime against the state. After all, it is the exclusive moral duty of citizens to judge the misreason of their fellow man. For the government to do so is a pious fakery. Oh, you hate neo-Nazis? Then you are politically correct. Stalin was Hitler's enemy? Then he must have been a wonderful old chap. Laws that suppress unpopular speech are some of the most enduring manifestations of neo-Nazi extremism ever legislated. The suppression of vitriol is far more fascist and dangerous than vitriol itself. It is better to run through the streets of Europe saying that Hitler was a saint than to become him through censorship of any voice, no matter how incorrect that voice may be. And as for those of you who continue to deny the holocaust, you have every right to be wrong.
- 2006 December 22 Friday
- ref. NY Times, 2006De21Th, page A3, Austria Frees Holocaust Denier From Jail, by Mark Landler
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Slicing up Jesus
Saw Mel Gibson's film Passion of the Christ. It was so powerful that I could have broken into tears and wailed rivers of agony in the end. But I didn't because I'm such a manly macho man. I'm glad I saw it at home alone on my DVD player. I'm sure that many people had to be dragged from theaters gushing seas of despair while armies of janitors stood by with mop buckets. It was certainly the most brutal violent ass kicking I have ever witnessed or hope to hear of in my life ever again. It was an orgy of vioIence. Maybe someday another film will do an equally savage history of Christian led tortures from the Roman times, through the Crusades, the Iron Maiden , the religious slaughter of native Americans on two continents and the Nazi death camps. That would be the best Christian blood orgy Hollywood could ever produce. Perhaps the real miracle of the Jesus legend is the gospel having survived Christians and their own blood stained claim to owning this great philosopher. Don't get me wrong, this Academy Award winning film is epic beyond comprehension. But the final resurrection scene was for me a great disappointment, right out of the dressing room at KMart. He merely stands up inside his tomb with all of his hundreds of slash wounds gone and that's the end of the film.
Is it possible that anyone could behold Jesus without the vehement Christian claim of literal magic miracles? Or would that call for a true depth of philosophical understanding? Any false hearted sinner who wants to keep supporting needless war, starving the poor and scarfing down loads of animal flesh can love their own perception of a human God who functions as a rock star to groupies. The real Jesus was certainly close to God - or close to Mary/Goddess if you are sick of penis-based religion.... or whatever your concept of a Higher Power. But regardless of obedience to the Christian party line, few can love the wretched human standing right next to them. Christ and Christianity as an organized religion have been two wholly separate entities from the first day after this became a miniscule underground movement. Mel Gibson has given us Jesus as a piece of meat with red wine, the same lustfully delicious lamb you eat after ignoring and sanctioning the lamb's final betrayal and crucifixion in the slaughterhouse.
- 2006 March 27 Monday
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Mister God Wrench - In the old days, when your car backfired through the air intake and you were good with a toolbox, then you knew your distributor cap needed a bit of adjustment or you had a valve stuck open. Or in rare cases a slipped timing chain. Today, it's either any of those or you need an ignition control module or a crank position sensor or a camshaft position sensor or the big expensive master electronic control module. Some experts even say it could be the manifold absolute pressure sensor, the mass air flow sensor, the throttle position sensor or a ground short caused by frayed or melted wires. Or your injectors could be clogged. All of these things are theoretically designed to protect the environment and assure good gas mileage when they actually work. And so suddenly you realize that a fragile delicate electronic octopus has turned your car into something you are no longer authorized to fix if you can even see in there under the hood. You hook up your cheap error code detector module and get no information, exactly as the car manufacturer intended. So then you get on the Internet and Google "backfires" and similar phrases. You discover ten thousand poor bloggers just like you. And a zillion so-called "experts" who gave differing answers to the same problem. But most of all, you find guys who replaced multiple sensors after being confounded as to which one failed. So you tow it to the garage with the big computer and they replace everything at four times the cost of parts or half the cost of a good used car. Mountains of removed parts and unfixable cars end up in landfills. Congatulations! Your energy efficient gas powered car is now working again. And you're doing your part for the environment. Your car is now a money machine for dealer garages and auto parts retailers. Your new pimp's name is Mister God Wrench.
- 2006 March 17 Friday
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Bird's Eye - I was riding the eastbound Colfax bus on Capitol Hill in Denver one afternoon in the early 1990s. An oriental woman sat next to me. Across the aisle a woman was spouting aloud her anger that the Japanese were taking over America. We both pretended not to hear as the woman kept mumbling. None of the passengers in the crowded bus responded. I felt that it would be too unkind to inform the angry woman about the huge glob of pigeon dung that was resting on her shoulder.
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The Buddhist Meeting - One evening in the mid-1970s I walked out of the Carnival Cafe in Boulder onto the Broadway sidewalk after eating a nice vegetarian meal. A young man my age was handing out pamphlets and asked me if I would like to come to a Buddhist meeting. I looked him in the eye smiling sincerely and told him very calmly....... "I am at one."
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Fighting for Peace - Fred despised violent people. He just wanted to beat them and kill them and stab them and shoot them and bash their heads with sledgehammers and strangle them and torture them until they were dead. Then peace would rule the world and nobody would be feared........... except Fred. - 2005 December 19 Monday
