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BUSH IS SERVING THEM TURKEY, ALRIGHT

[As a veteran who put in all his time without one minute AWOL, I am truly disgusted at what this turkey is doing to veterans (shedding tears in the turkey scene!), including the men he's serving turkey big time (see below) and sending into the jaws of death. (All emphasis mine)]

"President Bush, having surprised the nation with his Thanksgiving trip to Baghdad, asked Americans on Saturday to volunteer to help military personnel and their families. [Are military personnel and their families that hard up?]

'I'm pleased to report back from the front lines that our troops are strong, morale is high and our military is confident we will prevail,' the president said in his weekly radio address."
Full article here.

[Talk about staged!! Air Force One touched down at Baghdad International Airport at 5:20 AM Baghdad time. Bush was on the ground for two and a half hours serving turkey and stuffing for BREAKFAST to soldiers no doubt surprised to be awakened at that hour for thanksgiving "dinner," as the carefully selected press in attendance played it up, never letting on to the American people that it was all as staged as the Oscars. Bush zipped unannounced into a totally secure-on-base 6 am turkey breakfast for two hours before zipping out again in the dark in a blacked out airplane (same way he zipped in). He had to get there before Hillary Clinton began walking around actual Baghdad in the open on her pre-announced trip the next day.]

ACTUAL FACTS OF BUSH'S GRATITUDE TO VETERANS, WITH LOTS OF STUFFING AND NO GRAVY

"Bush administration slashes veterans' benefits"

"Even more than his father, and Ronald Reagan before him, Bush is cutting budgets for myriad programs intended to protect or improve the lives of veterans and active-duty soldiers. Bush's handlers have worked hard, through the use of snappy salutes and fly-boy stunts, to present the service-ducking former National Guardsman as the soldiers' friend. But though Republicans enjoy widespread military support, Bill Clinton was the only president of the last four to cut weapons programs instead of veteran benefits.

Consider the following:

With 130,000 soldiers still in the heat of battle in Iraq and more fighting and dying in Afghanistan, the Bush administration sought this year to cut $75 a month from the "imminent danger" pay added to soldiers' paychecks when in battle zones. The administration sought to cut by $150 a month the family separation allowance offered to those same soldiers and others who serve overseas away from their families. Although they were termed "wasteful and unnecessary" by the White House, Congress blocked those cuts this year, largely because of Democratic votes."

Incredible. For more disgusting details of the total turkey Bush is handing to veterans, see In These Times...

SPARROWS' INN

Following a long spell of rainy cloudy weather we get a bit of no surprise whatsoever in three more days of rain and warm weather, caught up as we are in a battle of the titans as an implacable (late November!) typhoon pushes in from the Pacific, going head-to-head against a muscular cold front trying to push down from Siberia into what is traditionally called Snow Country, bringing us strong winds and warm rain that should be quiet snow up to here.

But there's nothing I like better on a rainy day than a little serendip, and Echo finds the greatest stuff on her vast grapevine. Off we went into the mist up Route 367 along the narrow valley of the Katsura River on the other side of the mountain (chronicled earlier here), in search of Suzume-no-oyado (Sparrows' Inn) a natural-food restaurant out on the now brightly forested riverbank. We drove and drove through tiny villages, through vibrant autumn colors in the rolling mist and slanting rain, I had to get out and take some misted pictures, till at last we arrived at the restaurant, in an old thatched-roof farmhouse that was moved here piece by piece from Aomori Prefecture.


What nice people! What great food! What a picturesque place in the Autumn rain! (And can be rented for large events.) Big old black-beamed farmhouse with irori (traditional firepit); lots of etegami (picture-letters) on the walls, and natural products for sale. The meal consisted of as much brown rice as we wanted, black and white sesame, broccoli, daikon radish, mushrooms, pumpkin, carrot, wild pickles, honey-salted plum, hijiki and misoshiru , but these are just the names; think perfect shojin ryori served all at once. Perfectly filling, too, and for only 850 yen. You can get there by local bus from Kyoto.

IMAGINATION RAMBLE

The apparatchiks who are assigned to think of such things tend generally to think of imagination the same way they thought of ketchup as a vegetable: just another box to be ticked on the form, another quotidian quota to be filled, one more lesson to be learned on Wednesdays in fourth grade, another certificate on the way to graduation, when you can get on with your REAL life.

In other words, to the disimagined, imagination is not essential to living or to life, may even be detrimental if practiced in excess. We have Hollywood to do it for us. That's like saying if you pay us to breathe, you don't have to. Never before in history has imagination been so threatened in the young.

We lament the loss of the rainforests and the whales, bemoan the disappearance of the wild, but say nothing about the loss of imagination, which may be the greater loss, for it has made all the other losses possible; who could kill a thousand whales or cut down a rainforest but a person without imagination? The disimagined children of today will own the world tomorrow. To be without imagination is to be without intrinsic power, and powerlessness worships powerful things. The future begins right now.

Imagination is not greatly encouraged by human systems of organization because it is by nature free; it is beyond established control, inimical to chains, can't be enslaved, organized or taxed, depends upon no institution. It is the source of change, pure and simple, of new ideas. Imagining is anarchic; it is not at home in classrooms or file cabinets. And though wild, it is inherently benevolent. Imagination is the habitat of the spirit. Those who have been deprived of imagination will hunger for that freedom all their lives. What food it is and limitless, when you are the source!

Every consciously and responsibly caring parent and grandparent has seen the light that lights up in the eyes of still new children at the slightest spark of their own mind's imagining. One recent rainy day while Kaya (nearly 3 years old) was visiting us and looking imagination hungry, I took a tiny ceramic owl I have, the size of a pinky tip, put it in a tablespoon and called it the owl's magic airplane, and began to fly the magic airplane way up high in the big blue sky that was now above the kitchen table, and then all at once the magic airplane became the magic boat, floating the tiny owl perilously upon the vast and turbulent ocean a kitchen table can so swiftly become, and Kaya's eyes lit up like christmas trees at the spark that took fire in her mind.

The whole idea of imagining was perfectly at home in her, as native in her as the seeds of myth have always been in ourselves: she saw how it all worked, how to tell her own stories and it was ok, it was a part of her, that big doorway in her mind that she could open anytime to anywhere, and so she did and passed on through and back again, all that rainy day.

I will do everything I can to ensure that she never loses that spark, or the key to that door. And so we should with all our children. This fire of the spirit that is the imagination, that can so warm and quicken our lives and lead us to new places, should be praised and nurtured, made the key to every entire life so as to enrich us all, not taken away, homogenized and sold back to us as cookie-cutter commodities that stifle all imagining and leave us hungry and incomplete; else tomorrow will have no dream of its own.

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SUMMITS

I love mountains. I have a special love for the Sierras, the Rockies, the Sangre de Christos...
Here is the finest mountain-lover's book I have seen in many years.

Amidst these evocative prints by woodblock master Tom Killion, an artist rooted in the great early woodblock masters of Japan, are timeless word-vistas by John Muir, that early great lover of these mountains, and poems and journal exerpts by Gary Snyder, who later followed the same trails to new places. All shared here in exquisite vintage from Heyday Books. Enjoy. Climb. Summits await.

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BUSH REQUIRES DIGITAL ENHANCEMENT

Which makes me wonder: is he maybe just a low quality GOP graphic?

THE OCEAN RUNS RED

Understandably, there is very little coverage of this in Japan. Every year during Japan's traditional dolphin-hunting season from September to March, the ocean runs red before the villages where fishermen still practice the so-called "Drive Fishery." One of those villages, earlier also notorious for its annual dolphin slaughters, has learned another, wiser approach.
Here are some details on the continuing dolphin hunts and what you can do.

A LEAF

After Kaya left a few evenings ago, as I was emptying my pockets before going to bed I found a leaf that she had picked up on our afternoon walk that day, from among all the other leaves lying on the ground. I suppose she had picked it out because of its unusualness in being half crimson and half bright yellow, the colors divided right down the middle of the leaf, had picked it up and given it to me, I had looked at it, and remarked upon it, and thought and I suppose said, in the brief instant of attention young children allow for such things, how special it was that she had seen the very beauty in that particular leaf among all the others. Then I had put the leaf in my pocket and forgotten about it as we continued on our walk. When I found it in my pocket that night, I put it on the table beside my bed. Now for the days since, each time I go to bed at night and each time I rise in the morning the beauty of that leaf, at first so bright and attention-grabbing, has begun to fade a little bit as the red weakens toward brown and the yellow does too. Soon it will be the one color all the other leaves have become, so is grabbing my attention in a different way. It is a little record, there, of the life of all things, once in their greenness, thence to their fullest beauty, that falls in time to the beginning children give to us.

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BAFFLED AT GULLIBILITY OF INDIAN DOCTORS BAFFLED BY MAN WHO CLAIMS NOT TO HAVE EATEN FOR 68 YEARS

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VERRRRY INTERESTING...

This bizarre story sank without a major media trace, which is unbelievable, given America's tabloid appetite; can't imagine such a thing happening during the Clinton administration. No wonder though, why it was buried so completely...

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TIME AND WISHES

Nothing makes you start thinking about time like the shockingly peaceful aftermath of a dervish young granddaughter, when you find gingko leaves on the desk, acorns in the corners, beanbags behind the stove, weeds in the vase, persimmons on the chair, interesting seeds and twigs everywhere.

Took that thinking with me on the train to the city this morning and realized looking out the window into the mist of the rainy day swirling by how much time has passed in my own life, born before WWII and the bomb, when Japan became the enemy; milk and bread were delivered by horse cart when I was a boy (many tales there), and all us young kids had jobs of our own: delivering papers before dawn in howling winters of upstate NY (many tales there too) or sweeping leaves off sidewalks or shoveling snow or delivering groceries or stacking mom & pop store shelves---we had no tv till I was 12 or so, we listened to radio and what a thrill it was---

Remembered that in high school I studied Latin and Spanish, then Mandarin Chinese in the military, later Russian and Japanese and smatterings of other languages as I made my ways around the world (Americans today are pretty much monolingual and mononational), yet in college I remember being amazed at seeing a Xerox machine on tv, and now computers and cell phones, practically constant progress---we have advanced so far in so many ways, yet fallen behind in so many others---

Remembered my own great grandmother, a tiny white-haired lady sitting in the sun on the porch with me at her feet when I was about 7 and she was 100, talking about before there were automobiles. She had been born before the Civil War, was sixteen when Lincoln was assassinated, lived through the two big 20th-century wars, heard of the A-bomb, and reaches all the way to me here today. How I wish I could talk to her now!

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REPORT HITS AMERICAN IGNORANCE OF WORLD

"We desperately need to understand other countries and other cultures--friend and
foe alike. We are unnecessarily putting ourselves at risk because of our stubborn
monolingualism and ignorance of the world."

---The Strategic Task Force on Education Abroad

SECURING AMERICA'S FUTURE: GLOBAL EDUCATION FOR A GLOBAL AGE

Excerpt:

"On September 11, 2001, an international threat of which Americans were largely ignorant did more serious damage to the homeland than any foreign power had managed to inflict since the attack on Pearl Harbor. No one who lived through that terrible day will soon forget the anguished, confused questions that we all had to process: Where did this come from? How could anyone want to do this to us? We all recall the tickers rolling across the bottom of our television screens asking speakers of Arabic, Farsi, and Pashto to come forward. It was a very painful and public admission of how little we knew about the Arab and Muslim worlds.
It is not just the Middle East of which we are ignorant. As a nation we suffer from a pervasive lack of knowledge about the world. There have been periods, indeed entire eras, in our history where Americans have relished their isolation from the world. Some have made speaking only English a point of national pride instead of a disgrace. Never mind that the schools of most countries, rich or poor, teach at least two languages to their children. In the most prosperous nation on the planet, with the most extensive system of higher education, we are notoriously inept at imparting languages to our youth."

Full Report [PDF file]

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FIST IN THE AIR FOR THE BEEHIVE DESIGN COLLECTIVE.

The beehive itself is here. Spread the word.

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I haven't raked this much

since I was-z-z-z-z...

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JAPANESE SCIENTIST WANTS TO KILL MORE WHALES BEFORE THERE AREN'T ANY LEFT

Tadasu Yamada, curator at Tokyo's National Science Museum and no doubt recipient of large research grants from it would be interesting to know where, says "The results from research whaling supported our research." "Knowing how many different whale species exist would aid in their conservation," he adds, like the US general in Vietnam who destroyed that village to save it.

Commercial whaling was banned by the International Whaling Commission in 1986, but a special provision lets Japan catch whales for "scientific projects," such as finding whales to count, by killing up to 400 a year. Yamada wants a bigger number; thousands and thousands would be good.

Environmentalists and anti-whaling nations have criticized the absolutely not hunts as commercial whaling in disguise. But that is patently untrue, since most of the whale meat completely coincidentally resulting from Japan's absolutely crucial research is eventually sold to restaurants to help cover the program's costs until they run out of whales. When that happens at least we'll know the names of all the cetaceans that no longer exist, so our descendants can put them in alphabetical order or something.

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DEMOCRACY STILL LIVES IN AMERICA

Senate sees Bush Energy Bill for the kickback it is, rejects multibillion dollar subsidies for big oil and gas interests. How about a tenth of that to the growing penniless elderly and homeless populations of America?


[In her comment hereto, M Sinclair Stevens of WordsIntoBytes correctly points out (at interesting length) that the bill wasn't rejected, but stalled; still, democracy isn't flatlining yet.]

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THE LITTLE EXPLORER

Kaya (whose bed is covered with acorns), just back from her walk with Echo, came to me at the computer, held out her closed hand and proudly placed into mine four crumpled bright-yellow gingko leaves. Naturally, I was effusely thankful one, two, three and four times. Not long after I heard myself saying to her "No Kaya , don't bite the keyboard..."

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AMERICAN DIVIDE

Superb essay on splendor and loss in the state of America by one of America's greatest novelists in any genre, James Lee Burke. If you haven't read him, start with The Lost Get-Back Boogie, then move on to The Neon Rain, where the wondrous Dave Robicheaux makes his first appearance, and continue from there. You'll be glad you did. Check out the rest of James Lee's site, too.

ABOUT THE STARS

Kaya is back with us again for a couple of days. Before her bath, took her out onto the deck to see the big bright starworks in the clear night sky, turning round and round up there. Unexpectedly, she laughed and laughed at how wonderful it was, and I had to agree with her.

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SAVE THE EARTH -- DUMP BUSH

Bobby Kennedy Jr. at Salon, trying to save for tomorrow's children what Bush is selling out to his pals.

Also see this interview with Kennedy for more on the environmental travesty now under way, whose price will be paid by our children.

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KAYA'S DREAM

This morning at breakfast I asked Kaya why she'd awakened in the middle of the night, did she have a bad dream, she said yes, so I asked what the dream had been about (I'm supercurious about the dreams of very young children). She answered: "The sun was crying."