Kate's Takes

"What are you thankful for?"

2011-05-08T17:59:00.000-07:00

In November 2010, I received an email from Bill Miller of the Friends of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, asking that question. On November 25, I posted the reply below. Unsurprisingly, they did not publish it. To see the posts they did see fit to include, visit Friends of the Chamber and type THANKSGIVING into the search box.

I'm thankful that I can still feel outrage at how our politicians have betrayed our trust, our principles and our future. Our incessant preemptive wars are a disease, and non-stop destruction of lives and resources is fatal to the economic health of our country and the world. We need commerce--free trade--among nations, not coercion, control and connivance. We need individual freedom to work and to choose how we spend our earnings, not to be forced to subsidize causes we don't approve of.

I'm thankful that I can see these truths and continue to protest against government incursions into our freedoms, and against government expropriation of our property. The bureaucracy has become a vampire on the lives and energies of the people. And the collusion between government and certain businesses is a recipe for continuing disaster, a continuing draining of the people and a distortion of their values. Where does the Chamber of Commerce stand on this issue?

I am grateful for my clear and free thinking, and for my ability to pity all those religious folk whose minds and emotions are held captive by myths, superstitions and fanaticisms of all stripes. Their religious infighting leads to horrible deaths, ceaseless enmity, and abandonment of the principle of love they claim as their prime directive. Their abandonment of Reason makes them create all the harm in the world.

I am thankful for the intelligence of the human race that has developed science, technology, tools, and a growing understanding of the laws of physics that help us find true answers to the problems of survival and attaining a healthy, peaceful, productive society.

The $5 panhandler

2011-05-04T10:27:00.000-07:00

I just received a "personal" email from President Obama. Here's what it said:

Kate --

If it were easy to do the big, meaningful things we believe will make our country better -- if it were quick -- someone would have done those things long before any of us showed up.

We've chosen to do something hard.

You know that our victories so far have been hard won: taking the difficult steps necessary to put our economy back on track, reforming Wall Street excess despite an army of lobbyists against us, and making health care more affordable and accessible despite well-organized opposition by those who profit from the status quo.

You also know we have not yet done everything we set out to do -- not nearly.

But that's a reason to work harder, not to let up. That's why we're building this campaign now. And you have to take ownership of it.

So I will be direct: Can you step up and make a donation of $5 to get us started?

...

As I've spoken with supporters who are helping get this campaign started, I've met folks who are frustrated by the pace of change.

I understand that. But we knew this wouldn't be easy. The kind of change we're working for never comes easily.

Now is the time to begin again, and build the campaign that will shape our country's future.

Thank you,

Barack

............................................

Such a masterful piece of motivational tripe I could not swallow. This was my response:

............................................

Barack (and "campaign helpers"),

To make the country better, a handbook of easy ways to do it was given to us by the Founders--the Constitution--well before "we" showed up to ruin it.

You and your predecessors have, like a slippery slope, drifted from that wisdom and brought our nation to disgrace and disaster. It will get harder and harder to restore it. And you have chosen to do, not something hard, but something evil.

You have been led astray from the decent values you professed to believe in during your first campaign. You have gone farther to the dark side even than George W. Bush, whose crimes against humanity will one day be punished.

You lack the courage to admit how wrong we have become, and to take the first brave step towards making restitution to the world. America cannot be the bully to the world, to sow hatred, anger and resistance in one nation after another, and expect to survive. Our moral principles have become terminally diseased if we pursue a course of force and fraud under phony sanctimonious slogans of "humanitarian" goals.

You cannot help other countries by destroying them. If you want America to rule the world, that is a formula for global genocide. The only way to eliminate opposition is for you to kill off all those who resist. And since others want to live, too, they will continue to resist. And they have every right to do so.

Labeling people who oppose your tyrannical predations as "terrorists" only seeks to cover the fact that America has become the biggest terrorist of them all. And I won't take ownership of that.

Even if you change and repent right now, it will take generations for America to gain forgiveness and to win back the esteem and admiration we once had as the land of freedom, honor, decency, and respect for individual human rights.

You want $5 to help your new campaign? Your administration has wasted trillions of dollars of Americans' substance and future. There is no $5 available to throw into your pot to allow you to continue on this devastating course. No matter how clever the emotional manipulation and marketing of your slogans, we're not buying it anymore.

If, with one nod of your head, you can send off a killer team to execute bin Laden, you could change course with one command. It is not a big and difficult task to say, "Enough, this is not the way to go, this is not what America is about." No more violence, no more preemptive wars, no more taking sides in foreign civil wars, no matter what lobbyists scream and wave money, no matter what special interests get cut off from the trough. You cannot recover a nation's economy with only the arms manufacturers thriving. You cannot recover a nation's morale and self-respect by pumping them up emotionally with kill statistics. Enough!

Make a real change. You can do it with one nod of your head, one short declaration. Let me see actual results: apologize for our war crimes, get our troops out of every foreign country, close Guantanamo, pull back the growing police state on U.S. soil, restoring our civil liberties, and then I'll consider sending you some money.

-- Kate Jones

The "right" to clean water - Blog Action Day 2010

2010-10-21T13:02:00.001-07:00

As part of Change.org's Blog Action Day, which for 2010 addresses the subject of clean water, here are my thoughts:

____________________

WATER

It's an unconditional human need, but it's not an unconditional human right. Not since the days of small populations and nomadic tribes were humans free to wander up to any water source and partake of its clean, clear flow. The earth provided, and all were able to use it.

As populations grew and settlements expanded, more and more demands were made on the streams, rivulets, creeks, and rivers. People always built near water for easy access to this life-sustaining substance. They learned to use it for irrigation, navigation, cleaning, and harnessing its power.

More people produced more waste, and the water, believed to be a universal cleanser, began to fill with ever more pollutants and contaminants, long before early populations even understood the meaning of those concepts. They soon did understand that activities upstream could send troubled waters downstream to their own water supply. Battles ensued over water rights and access to the best sources. Not poisoning or dirtying wells was an early lesson learned. The folk belief that running water unconditionally cleans itself led to accelerating pollution and abuses.

There is the fairytale of the wolf, drinking from a creek upstream from a lamb, accusing the lamb of sullying his water, as a pretext to attack the lamb. The writer clearly understood the wiliness of predators, animal and human.

India's Ganges, its waters held sacred, gradually grew to a total sewer, while the inhabitants continue to drink it, bathe in it, defecate in it, and consign their dead bodies to it. Old ideas die hard.

To claim that all have a "right" to clean water is to demand that some people take action and invest time, money and energy to provide this water to all claimants. That is a formula for slavery. Those with the knowledge to manage water have a right to be paid for this service. Since no one can "own" all the water of the earth, and water flows downhill from a pure source, it behooves all of us to change our habits and infrastructure and prevent water contamination. That will require finding alternate means to process waste, to dispose of it and recycle it. We can learn from nature how to develop symbiotic systems. And we need to learn that not everything nature does is good for us.

For example, we live on a water planet, and we need drinking water. Why does nature wash more and more salt into the oceans? What is salt good for? Yes, we need some in our bodies and our food, but not in our water. Human intelligence needs to find a means to build efficient technology to turn ocean waters back into fresh, clean water. The desalination industry is our future. Now to find a good use for all that salt by-product.

In brief: everyone has the right to work to obtain what he or she needs to live, including water. No one has the right to demand that someone else provide it for them.

Doing productive work and exchanging it with others for what they have produced is the only just and lasting social relationship of intelligent beings. Let us solve our problems without resorting to force and servitude. Let's clean up our planet, our home, and be good custodians of its life-nurturing processes. Let's put our resources there, not throw them away on wars and sabotage.

Water Protection and Reinvestment Fund

2010-02-25T10:25:00.000-08:00

Barack Obama's minions in cyberspace work through Change.Org and offer weekly updates and causes to respond to. On February 11, 2010, the topic was the Water Protection and Reinvestment Trust Fund. This was my reply:

No! It is not up to government actions to step in here. The principle to establish is to let private companies in each community be responsible and to stop befouling our nest and our life support. The growth of bottled water, and the cost of that as a routine part of life, is moving us farther from what we would like to take for granted, namely that tap water is plentiful and safe and economical, like the clean springs and streams we have in our racial memories. Bottled water is only a stop gap that could become an excuse for letting our bodies of water continue to be polluted. But at least it is a means to secure safe drinking water through private effort.

Many households are still on well water and septic systems, and that needs to be watched carefully lest the sewage seep deep enough to pollute the groundwater the well pumps from. We need to find a way to recycle sewage so that nature itself reuses and purifies it, and so that it serves as a nutrient for plant life, rather than flushing it into the rivers and oceans. Our technology can find a way to establish a natural balance threatened by increasing population.

It is a false assumption that private companies do not have the public interest as a priority. Without the public they would have no business and no income. It is by pleasing the public and supplying what people need that the companies become successful. How else can they make money? Making money is not evil. It is the reward for good work done. It is the company's paycheck for value produced. If there were not productive private enterprises, there would be nothing for government to tax to pay themselves and their allegedly important social programs.

Further, we should encourage private investment in better husbanding of fresh-water supplies, such as major snow and ice run-offs. Rather than letting clean water run into the salty oceans, build aqueducts and pipelines to move the annual melts to regions that need it, as has been done for centuries in the desert regions of Persia.

Explore trading water for oil. We have disgraced ourselves in the eyes of the world by destroying the water processing infrastructure of Iraq, causing hundreds of thousands of deaths from polluted water supplies. Did Americans even know this was being done in their name?? As an American, I object profoundly to such crimes against humanity carried out by our government without our knowledge and consent.

Count me as a No vote against government control of our water management, and count me as a No against our wars in foreign lands. I am dismayed that Obama has broken his promises to end the wars. I feel thoroughly betrayed. So much for Change!

Protect Constitutionally guaranteed individual rights

2010-02-24T07:35:00.000-08:00

Change.org in January 2010 launched the 2010 "Ideas for Change in America" competition, and I just submitted an idea you might like to support. No money, just your vote. The title of the idea is "Protect Constitutionally guaranteed individual rights."

To vote for my idea, all you have to do is click on the link below and you can vote in less than 20 seconds.

The top 10 voted ideas will be presented at an event in Washington, DC, to relevant members of the Obama Administration, and then promoted to Change.org's full community of more than 1 million people. So we could have a real impact with this radical idea about unalienable rights.

Here's the text of my proposal. If you agree, please click on the link and vote. Thanks for your help!

All the changes and programs being promoted and passed into law aim only to help certain groups and to spend ever more government money, which is either taxed or borrowed. Both come out of the people's substance, Socialism in action. I propose that every bill before Congress be first measured against our Constitutionally guaranteed individual rights, to make sure that it does not abrogate individuals' life, liberty and pursuit of happiness (i.e., property). You may have to set up a special Congressional committee or get advice from the Supreme Court. But the first question to ask is, "Will this harm any individual?" And if the answer is Yes, cease and desist from pursuing such legislation.

Please VOTE by Feb. 25, 2010

"Putting Life Ahead of Profits"

2010-02-18T07:51:00.000-08:00

An apparently enlightened organization, Global MindShift, in response to Change.org's 2010 invitation to enter their Ideas for Change in America competition, submitted an idea titled: "A campaign to put Life ahead of profits." And although I like their philosophy of "All is One" and "Love is the Action," I just had to object:

Sorry to have to demur. Life and profits are interdependent, not mutually exclusive. Profits is what we earn by investing our time and effort, whether by renting them to an employer or creating our own enterprises.

Other than by force or fraud, the ONLY way to earn profits is by producing or providing what other people want and need--by delivering a value they are willing to pay for. In brief, by mutual exchange of values. "Find a need and fill it" is the recipe for creating goods, creating jobs, creating profits. It started tens of thousands of years ago when mankind discovered the division of labor, or diversification of functions.

Profits are a company's wages. Surely you don't mean to say that workers should not be paid for their labor because that would constitute a profit for the workers? If a company is begrudged its earnings, where do you think the money will come from to pay the employees? Where will the money come from to invest in new enterprises that create new jobs and keep the economy healthy?

Groups that pride themselves on being "non-profit" still need money to operate. Where does that come from? Voluntary contributions. Where do people get the money to donate to their favorite causes? They first have to earn it by creating something of real value. And if government gives grants and subsidies, where does it get the money? From taxing the working people.

"There ain't no such thing as a free lunch." (TANSTAAFL)

Please do not confuse profits with exploitation. The only agency that has the power to exploit people without their consent is the government. And when government teams up with corporate entities to make rules that limit the freedom of some to play favorites with others, the freedom of all is imperiled. When government steps between employers and employees, dictating terms such as minimum wage and mandatory benefits (entitlements), government fosters grotesquely distorted economic relations and eventual meltdown, as we are seeing now.

As there is a Constitutional separation of church and state, and there should be a separation of school and state, so should there be a separation of business and state. Any other course deprives people of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, among other freedoms.

Forcing people (through taxation) to give up their substance, their earnings, so government can use the money to advance social engineering projects, is not putting people first. Perhaps being good, kind, benevolent and helpful to others is a noble idea, but socialism is not the road to that ideal. It is through individual enterprise, initiative, creativeness, and the freedom to act on it that members of a society can offer value to other members, including opportunities for new jobs that improve everyone's lives. Their profits are well earned. Profits make Life possible.

If you'd like to support Life, take government out of business and out of our pockets.

Blog Action Day 09: Climate Change

2009-10-15T10:41:00.000-07:00

October 15, 2009 — Today over 7000 bloggers are participating in Blog Action Day by posting comments on a subject of global significance to humanity: Climate Change. The unfortunate acronym of BAD notwithstanding, it's a good idea for reflection and consciousness raising.

For millions of years human life has clung precariously to our tiny marble in the sky, from barest subsistence living off the land like all the other animals, to learning in minuscule increments to adapt to existing and varying temperatures and availability of water and food and shelter.

From caves to make-shift hovels to skyscrapers; from rivers to aqueducts and aquifers and reservoirs; from foraging to agriculture; and from hunting/fishing to animal husbandry, mankind learned to put a widening safety margin between survival and flourishing.

Through the creation of language to communicate and preserve the fragile knowledge, our understanding of the natural laws at work on our planet broadened. We learned to harness energies from many sources—earth, wind, fire, and water and raw muscle power—and change the face of the land forever.

With levers and pulleys we built monumental structures. With fire from wood, coal, oil, we extended our territorial reach from icefields to scorching deserts as our nomadic ancestors explored the globe from pole to pole, not dissuaded by the vast distances of sea and land.

Through brutal conquest and pillage they took what they needed, whether natural resources or the achievements of other populations. Constant battles between population groupings both obtained and destroyed resources, material and human, in escalating numbers. Treating foreign peoples as no more than dehumanized resources to rob, kill and expropriate, the conquering hordes took land and lives with equal impunity, even unto the present day. The mutual destruction and enslavement of conquered populations, whether for free labor or extracted tribute, became entrenched into our very genes as protocols to benefit our own kind, and continues yet, allowing limited and differentiated development of societies and civilizations.

It was the discovery of electricity that gave mankind its greatest boon in advancing beyond the marauder stage, in only the last 200 years, a mere blink of an eye on the historic scale. It allowed the building of infrastructure, the unfolding of ever ascending scientific and technological marvels, from refrigeration to a national power grid and the Internet, from rural to urban habitats, from local to interplanetary transport, and, sadly, ever more sophisticated armaments with which to continue the ingrained habits of war and conquest.

To a great extent such cultural climates were molded by the planet's own conditions of climatic changes, the natural cycles of freezing and melting as its great source of received energy, the Sun, went through its own cycles of increased and decreased output.

Relatively long spells of weather within tolerable margins allowed humanity to settle into patterns of tribal, racial and national groupings and the expectation of stable conditions within the changing seasons.

There is a tendency to expect the accustomed to remain unchanged as the given, the taken-for-granted, a right. With seemingly free energy, assured food supplies, comfortable lodgings, mankind's complacency settled in for the long run. Our ability to temper, and to tamper with, natural environments lulled our communal memories of a harsher time into oblivion. Our dependence grew on an ever narrower margin of variable conditions of temperature and humidity, within which lay our ideal comfort zone for food supplies and ever-rising living standards.

As our populations expanded exponentially, the impact on our global life support system began to make itself felt. The historic process of "befouling our nest" showed its consequences in the water, earth and air. Like heedless children, mankind had proceeded on its course of expansion and exploitation until it crossed the threshold where the planet's natural processes of self-cleansing and maintaining a human-friendly equilibrium became overwhelmed.

Now we are engaged in seeking to heal our planet by reducing our habits of polluting and altering our energy use to cleaner methods. But like careless children who don't understand the chains of causality with which they play, we will meddle with nature's processes at our peril. Like petulant children throwing tantrums when deprived of what they had come to consider their rights and privileges, we urge each other to rush headlong into putative cures whose hoped-for remedial effects will have consequences we cannot predict.

Whether only we have caused global warming or cooling with our puny activities is far from certain. Solar activities that flood us with heat waves, or their absence, have far more effect on the state of our planet and our sister planets than our vehicle emissions.

Earth's life forms evolved through far more dramatic changes in soil and atmosphere all those millions of years ago. For every substance there is a customer, and we and the plants have come to a symbiotic relationship of exchanging oxygen and carbon dioxide. If we befoul the air and decimate plant life beyond the plants' ability to restore, we endanger ourselves.

Our big brains need a certain minimum level of oxygen for full functioning. Air quality has degraded, especially around massive population concentrations. How has that affected our cognitive and physiological performance?

Early man as well as modern man destroyed huge swathes of forest for fire and timber, yet good wood grows far more slowly than the rate of harvesting. Forest management is a rather recent development, and not practiced everywhere. Shortsighted gain sacrifices long-term survival. Moments of truth appear only on the edge of disaster.

It is eye-opening to realize and remember that human survival everywhere depends on the quality of a few inches of topsoil. The soil in which the rainforests flourished has already given its all. It is not naturally rich for other crops. It requires massive infusions of chemical fertilizers, a self-defeating notion, and removal of trees makes the soil subject to erosion, like the horrible dustbowls of the Great Depression. Ignorance and shortsightedness will bring accelerating disasters.

More plants could easily handle our carbon emissions. It is, after all, one of the planet's most prevalent and most necessary components. The more important point is that we are polluting our life support system. We've understood the harm of forced inhalation of cigarette smoke and banned it from public areas. We have the geological evidence of the devastation caused by volcanic eruptions. We are well on our way to developing vehicles that run on cleaner energy. Necessity is the mother of innovation, and urgency begets solutions.

The quick, easy, dirty energy we have been obtaining from fossil fuels—coal, oil—has not only run its course in pushing us forward to far-spread suburban settlements and exploded commuting distances, but has brought us to the threshold of exhausted supplies. Scarcity has triggered the age-old response of appropriation by force.

To get control of dwindling oil supplies, America is at war with an escalating number of countries beneath whose soil lies the coveted resource. By a demented logic, America justifies wasting irreplaceable amounts of its wealth and lives to attack Middle Eastern countries, gashing unhealable wounds into its relationships with those other cultures and reversing centuries of diplomatic evolution. America is resorting to the same aggressive, imperialist practices she freed herself from in the name of enlightened principles of freedom from tyranny two and a half centuries ago. Not only has America betrayed its founding ideals, but has with every bomb and bullet dimmed its own reputation in the world.

The true pollution and environmental damage we've done is not to the physical environment but to the cultural/conceptual one. The fragile veneer of civilization and human values has cracked, much as the crust of the earth cracks from subterranean eruptions. The climate change we need to repair is not whether the globe's comfort zone of temperature oscillates a few more degrees than before, but the cultural climate of humans at war rather than in non-predatory cooperation.

The true enemy is neither our fellow man in other countries nor the planet's climate. The true enemy is in ourselves and our diseased ideas of rationalized mayhem and mass murder. And if we ever, in our most idealistic moments, hope to convert less humanistic governments to our model of democracy, we would fare far better by example, inspiring emulation, rather than by forcible regime change that is not an organic or spontaneous outgrowth from the indigenous cultures.

The climate change we need is not in the "carbon footprint" or tampering with the laws of nature, but in the mental/emotional climate of military boot imprints on the soil and throats of other nations. Our entire orientation of the metaphoric "wars" on terror (isolated incidents by individuals, not attacks by nation states), drugs, poverty, hunger, ignorance, or any cause du jour, is a travesty of truth-distortion and a ploy for social engineering that ineluctably leads to abrogation of individual rights by a ruling class. We become the tyrants we profess to deplore.

Climate change in the planet's physical rhythms is actually a good thing, stimulating inventiveness and letting humanity emerge into a sustainable modus vivendi and elevated consciousness. We need to be reminded that change is what brought us step by step to the evolved creatures we are now, coping by adapting to new conditions. The planet may well serve us better when dry areas become wet again, and cold regions become more hospitable.

We need to remember especially that America is primarily a land of immigrants, people who were willing to be uprooted and go where life was more promising, and where a great mixing bowl of diverse peoples learned to live together and thrive together in a new land. We need to be reminded that constructive, not destructive, practices and mutually respectful, not mutually destructive, relations are the solution to both the outer and the inner climate.

We must outgrow the predatory habits that served us as animals. They are the source of monstrous evils committed in the name of power, resources, religion, economics, security, national interest, or any other current buzzword we hold up as pretexts. These malevolent justifications pollute our spiritual climate and pervert our value system. Worse, they poison the whole world's meme pool, its storehouse of ideas and wisdom.

Let's change the climate of warmongering and remove the provocations for enmity. Obama should not be continuing an illegal war in Iraq and spreading its conflagration into adjoining lands. Congress needs to take back its duties to authorize wars and exercise its right to withdraw funds from illegal operations.

The American people need to reconcile their religious values (especially "Thou shalt not kill"; "thou shalt not steal"; "thou shalt not covet"; and "thou shalt not bear false witness [lie]") with their actions in the world. They need to learn to evaluate more critically and resist more intelligently the temptations by their "leaders" for vengeful wars against imaginary enemies.

The American people need to hold their representatives' feet to the fire of truth and not get swept up by the hysteria of false patriotism. Invest our resources in enterprises that build a less befouling infrastructure and we will accomplish both: a cleaner climate and a peaceful world.

WHAT'S COOKING?

2008-11-04T10:37:00.000-08:00

Halloween message, October 31, 2008 (4 days before election day),

verses to accompany Jacquie Lawson's "Witch's Brew" animated e-card,

http://www.jacquielawson.com/preview.asp?cont=1&hdn=0&mpv=3111911

Witch candidate slyly will boil us,
In deepening warfare embroil us?
Before it's too late,
Don't drink the Koolaid--
And VOTE, let no tyrant despoil us.

Our rulers have frogwarmed us yearly,
The slippery slope cost us dearly.
For all of our toil
They've hooked us on oil--
Thus hoodwinked we no longer see clearly.

They rule us with terror and fright--
Incessant harangues day and night.
Though they want to deceive,
We don't have to believe--
In our hearts we should know wrong from right.

There's no such a thing as free lunch;
At some point it comes to the crunch.
As the going gets steeper,
We just dig ourselves deeper--
What's left of us, maggots will munch.

So vote with your conscience and reason.
And don't give your trust to their treason.
Our freedoms they scatter
As though life didn't matter--
Bring justice and truth back in season.

Our country's most noble provisions
Leave not to their venal decisions.
Keep their feet to the fire,
Let not vigilance tire,
Or their witch's brew'll end all our visions.

Our honor world-wide to be earned
Our course from abyss must be turned.
False pride makes us weak.
We the people must speak--
Plowshares, not swords - haven't we learned?

If our masters have wronged any nation,
In our name practiced abomination,
We must seize the hour,
Take back our power,
Or share guilt by association.

We the people have natural rights
Transcending the government's might.
We the people's consent
For what they represent
Was the Founders' most brilliant insight.

So we are the rulers, not chattle.
Redistribution is battle
Of each against each,
Laborer or leech--
As the do-gooders milk us like cattle.

Yet our liberties aren't for sale,
Nor to be bartered as bail
When events lose control.
And we lose our soul
If we don't protest honor's betrayal.

War crudely accelerates war,
Heating passions to crave blood and gore.
Real peace can be bought
Only through thought--
Reasoned and true to the core.

-------

So please think, then go out and vote,
and thereafter speak up every chance you get,
or we'll all be in the soup.
-- Kate

My Daemon

2007-07-07T00:00:00.001-07:00

The Golden Compass has grand ambitions to follow The Lord of the Rings as a mega-hit fantasy epic series. Its website has all the ambience to involve fans-—past, present, and future. Earlier (July 2007) you could even take a 20-question test to determine your very own unique animal spirit avatar, or daemon. Mine was a tiger that regally walked into view. Regrettably this charming feature is no longer available (December 2008) on their website. I miss him. Having seen this superlative movie several times, and eagerly awaiting the sequel, I have a new favorite: Yorik Berneson. I have this thing for polar bears. So much for reason and sanity... Still, they are the guiding force of Philip Pullman's masterpiece.

Opening moves

2006-02-27T10:48:00.000-08:00

Through an unpredictable series of connections, I find myself in possession of this blog. It was the price of admission to posting on another blog. For the moment this blog will be vastly under-utilized. From time to time I will take refuge in it when a piece of my mind needs to make itself known on this gameboard we call life. On this small spot, at least, let reason and sanity prevail.