ghosts of winters past

In these Dickensian times when our economy seems so out of whack with job stats still under average, how do we cope with the climate trends?

 http://www.livescience.com/18868-mild-winter-climate-change.html

http://thinkprogress.org/romm/2012/03/10/441639/fourth-warmest-winter-on-record-for-the-us/

http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2012/01/12/why-this-winter-is-so-crazily-warm/

http://www.c2es.org/blog/huberd/2012-4th-warmest-winter-us

Ghosts of Winters Past

Ever the outlier of stat analysis

one more winter regresses into spring.

No one will notice this one either, the planet mourns,

over the constellation of some perhaps sunspot enmity

against this single digit nonsense that used to be.

That used to be. That used to free up some worthy small spaces

where organisms trended into dying off somewhat now & again.

Who will notice when micro life is expanded while the mammals die?

How many insistent migrations will matter in terms of the whole?

Won't it just go to show you that the few seconds that

humans have lived here

are ever trending into their own loss

of selves ?

Of shelves where products reign?

And who mourns them who live with death

born in some spaces of not enough

where not enough is always in place.

More humans than ever weight the planet

ever more off balance.

3-16-'12

pmb

google where did you hide my contact list for gmail <"_?

The only info i could find on the loss of gmail contact is that as always they will fill them into the address bar for you when you start to type in the names . . . . 
K. i tried it. N found it guilty of perjury.

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Subject: what on earth happened to my contacts on my gmail page, google ????????

From: Pat Berg <pat.rivercritter@gmail.com>
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--
Our ability to reach unity in diversity will be the beauty and test of our
civilization.
Mohandas Gandhi

--
Our ability to reach unity in diversity will be the beauty and test of our civilization.  
Mohandas Gandhi

nightmare on another level of awareness

So here in the middle of the muddle of a maplewoodian noosphere I am waking up with an amoebic dysentery of the brainblog over all this mixed up nutcasting of everything on earth. There those crazy flagellating organisms are floundering around in my cerebral interior and leaking out of my every skull based orifice without any actualization in the realm of logic or any auditory consent form. How the fiction of a complicated diction did any of this stupifyingly weirdo constellation of an earthborne disorder of the mythological mystery of Life & Times turn out to rhyme with a riot act of distinctly moralizing nonsense such as all the worst talk show crazy loony tunes on the face book of the continent play with in their own nightmares <”_?

Well, it must just be money squawking.

http://www.startribune.com/business/135700128.html

Jobs are god, no matter what devil they happen to actually serve.

http://www.canadianbusiness.com/article/62588--u-s-senate-puts-more-pressure-on-obama-over-keystone-pipeline

http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2011/12/01/athabasca-chipewyan-first-nation-suing-shell-canada-65520

Thanks so much, Senators, for forcing the cards out on the table over the Keystonian cop out over our outrageous gobbledygook of an appetite for horrendous oil disturbances all over the surface world.

http://indiancountrytodaymedianetwork.com/2011/12/17/senate-democrats-supporting-gop-keystone-xl-pipeline-strategy-will-obama-reject-68152

It is really the most simon & garfunkle hormone of an excellent comedy central guffaw of a laugh track the whole earth club has ever clobbered out over us all.

http://www.grist.org/energy-policy/2011-12-16-america-must-not-back-down-on-sustainable-energy

Meanwhile some really serious downtown news of an urgent sort has floundered its way out into the science blogosphere here:

http://www.grist.org/list/2011-12-16-fundamental-breakthrough-could-double-electricity-produced-from-

As for job creation, well, gee willigers, could someone please get Van Jones on the phone <"_?

OMG, i love that man!

http://contract.rebuildthedream.com/?rc=rtd_feature

Flooding can hopen us up into a new future if we let it.

Past, present and future-- sometimes they all intersect. This has been one of those times for me. Many memories can flood up in me sometimes related to old injuries; but more recently I have gained more fondness for the pleasant times in my life, counting up adventures and friendships like blessings in my personal history. 

At the same time, I know things from experience and that gives me a different perspective from younger people who are just starting up with their adult lives and fortunes. I used to say as a young woman beginning to find myself that what I value the most are experience and friendship. That had something to do with my writing in some way; how can you enjoy writing without some substance? 

Over time I learned how to sit with the moment through meditating, healing practices, and poetry. Those disciplines have not all been readily maintained in my daily life because I tend to be a scatterbrained slob. But they help me to understand what is valuable. Generally it isn't the big wins but the singular moments.

 Here we are now, living in middle America, with another flood upon us and thinking back to 1993, when we were stunned with a hundred year flood. Huh. Somewhere either I or my daughter has a book that the Post-Dispatch  published afterwards, filled with the photographs of the drama that emerged out of the clouds. Now we're back there again in Missouri and places further south, while my brain is hung up on current needs, past scenarios in a grattitudinal analysis of where i have been since kidhood. Seems that I had some premonition about this flood of memories over all sorts of history-- when I heard the weather forecast before the disasters hit us with tornadoes, floods and horror.
  
Yesterday, May 2, 2011,  the Army Corps of Engineers began their intervention on the flood wall front to protect the little town of Cairo, Illinois, leaving some people in southern Missouri bewildered over it all. Think back to the flood of 1927 for a moment. I lived in Paducah, Kentucky for a couple of years, a solitary confinement of a memory for me in some ways. It was not the happiest time of my life, finishing up with my high school education under duress. But I remember those stories from people about how one might find underneath the wall paper on many an old house interior the flood line still visible. Pianos floated in that water, among other dearly loved possessions. Can you imagine that? There were elders in the community who remembered those incidentals and chuckled about it by then, mid 60s.

Later I traversed an assortment of highways on an occasional visit back to the Paducah area, and some of those towns are familiar sights in my mind yet-- Metropolis, Cairo, Cape Girardeau. They have changed, no doubt; but I crossed over into Kentucky over more than one bridge. People who aren't familiar with the confluence of the Ohio and the Mississippi don't really recognize that the Ohio is a much larger river, and it is a stunning place on the planet where the two rivers meet.  That's why I started to follow the story so closely. I can visualize some of those areas as they usually have been, and the photos of the flooding, along with the flood levels at Metropolis have stirred me with concern and with reverence for what we are looking forward to on this planet in terms of climate change.
http://waterdata.usgs.gov/il/nwis/uv/?site_no=03611500&PARAmeter_cd=00065,00060

We need each other on this Earth to use our collective inquiry into ourselves and the powers that be in order to change the future. Imagine that. Determining our future instead of denying it a chance as a hopening, a quiet interior place where hope happens by our opening up to the stirring of our collective spirit.
http://stlouis.cbslocal.com/2011/05/03/historic-flooding-possible/

http://stlouis.cbslocal.com/2011/05/03/historic-flooding-possible/

http://www.wpsdlocal6.com/news/local/Area-river-level-information-from-National-Weather-Service-120579274.html 

Twelve Points in favor of Impeachment

1. My support is fully behind pursuing impeachment of current members of the administration, George W.Bush and Richard (Dick) Cheney. I deign not to designate them by their presumed titles, President and Vice President.
2. Holding the current administration accountable is required to safeguard the United States Constitution.
3. The press has publicly recognized the fears of some members of Congress related to their inside knowledge of administrative policies that skirted legality. Not only was a sovereign nation illegally invaded and war illegally waged, but also illegal torture was used against persons who had not been given Rights which are sacrosanct to Americans as well as to civil society in the World. Lies were used to produce more lies and violence was initiated without warrant or due process
4. Congress now must act, since the truth has emerged, in order to effect a remedy. This will require courage. Courage is a quality admired by the populace.
5. Failure to pursue all legal means necessary to reign in the powers of the Presidency will result in damage beyond knowing to our nation. The failing economy is only the beginning of the decline that could ensue.
6. The outcome of pursuing every legal remedy, including impeachment proceedings against both persons known as the President and the Vice President, preferably simultaneously, will be to relieve our nation of its now damaged reputation in the eyes of the world and to restore confidence of its citizens in the government.
7. Assuming a political stance of looking forward rather than back as a way of protecting individual Congress members is not a choice. It smacks of cowardice. It is an inside-the-Beltway idea that has no relevance to the people who cast votes in a nation no longer recognizing the sovereignty of The People.
8. Our nation has ventured into the beginning of a reign of fascism, a too close alliance between government and corporate powers. The so-called "Bail-out" is symptomatic of this.
9. The Republican and Democratic Parties have become way too intertwined and mutually corrupt. Their members are deluded by material gain and illusory power rather than serving as our true representatives. Other Parties must be allowed equal access to office.
10. Currently reigning political corruption is most damaging to us in foreign policy. We often label other nations as intolerant and in violation of civil rights. In fact we are a nation of great resources and wealth with an obligation to share with those who are not so blessed. Yet we fail to provide some of our own citizens with "the pursuit of happiness" as could be provided by health care.
11. Money forfeited to the now defunct regime of evil, to be replaced by President-elect Barrack Obama and Vice President Joseph Biden, has been wasted on violence, personal accrual of assets, false and nefarious propaganda and directives such as the imperial rule of the Department of Justice, blasphemous violations of the Constitution by political operatives for political gain, abuse of the role of Commander in Chief, and establishment of illegal empire in foreign states. These are indeed high crimes and misdemeanors.
12. As a citizen of the United States of America, I demand that the Congress of these United States proceed with impeachment against George W. Bush and Richard (Dick) Cheney.

Check your Voter Registration Now

So, suppose you go to the polls and find out when you get there that your name is not on the list of registered voters? What do you do? Who do you call? Why ask this beforehand?

Election day is now only days away. Take this one action now--check to see if you are truly registered. We are at a turning point in American history in more ways than one, and having our vote received and counted is essential to our future. Among the many tricks in the book of election shenanigans is the old standard of purging the voter rolls at the last minute-- illegal, but a known maneuver. This apparently actually happened in St. Louis City in 2000, disenfranchising hundreds or even thousands of voters. You may remember the uproar. Since then a great deal of work has been done to prevent such an occurrence from happening here again. In fact this evening Jonah Goldman of Election Protection appeared on Channel 5 NBC News.

Still we have had reportedly ten percent of the voters in Missouri removed from the lists. Could you be among them?

Since 2002 a lot of changes have occurred in our voting systems, and one of them is the installation of Missouri Centralized Voter Registration (MCVR), with the Secretary of State-- or chief election officer-- keeping one computerized version of the rolls from all over the state. The object of this is supposed to be to keep any voter from voting in more than one place. Never mind that the statistical instances of this happening are virtually nil. It was written into the Help America Vote Act, the biggest recreant legislation Congress ever pulled over on the American people.

Naturally the new computerized data systems have been found to be faulty in some states, with suspicions surrounding them, as though the new voting machines were not already enough of a problem. The new software is really a middleman added to the more tried and true older methods of local control.

St. Louis City and County have used these new MCVR systems several times already to work the bugs out, and bugs they have had too. Fortunately we still have access here to the plain old voter sign-in books, and chances are that we will have smooth and cool poll workers in enough numbers to compensate, if we can all be patient with the process. If you happen to be voting late in the day, please stay to ask whether the number of votes counted is equal to the number of voters who signed the book. Say your "please" and "thank yous" to the poll workers, whom we often under appreciate.

But, before Tuesday arrives, if you are like me you might want to look up your name on the Secretary of State's website, if, like me, you had heard you could do that. Attempting to use it turned out to be futile, so that duty of confirming registrations has been punted back to the counties, after the website problems were reported to the SoS office.

When I called the County Board of Election Commissioners (BoEC), they had received so many new registrants (about 50,000) that they had already postponed using the Missouri Centralized Registration until after this major election.

This entire situation of numerous new voters and highest turnouts ever expected should alert us to the need to check your registration ahead of time, especially for new or changed registrations. Don't wait until Tuesday to call. The phone lines will be busy enough that day.

The County continues to use the system they have always used and found my name with my current address readily. The employee who spoke to me on the phone was terrific, and encouraged me to send others to the phone to check their own registrations if they feel the need. So in St. Louis County, if you have any question about whether you are properly registered. call them at (314) 615-1800. They are receiving massive numbers of calls, of course, so be patient, hang on the line until someone answers. And don't wait until election day to check-- call ahead of time.

The St. Louis City Board of Election reports that they have also received numerous calls from individual who could not find themselves listed on the MCVR. Therefore you are advised to call them at (314) 644-4336.


When you do finally go to vote the lines may be long, so request a paper ballot, which takes less time than the touch screens and is also hand recountable. Remember to bring along an ID that shows your current address, or a recently postmarked utility bill or government letter. If your registration is not on the list you can check to see if there are two election judges who recognize you from a previous election-- they can co-sign you into the book.

Or they may be able to look back in the book for your name. If not you can vote on a provisional ballot, although this should only be done as a last resort. You should never take a provisional ballot if you are at the wrong polling place. Instead, if you are unsure, vote early enough to have the time to go to the right place. A poll worker can look up your address for you to see if it is served by this specific polling place and send you to the right one. Some polling places have been consolidated, so confusion may occur. Your polling place is always listed on the card you receive from the BoEC a few days before the election, and that card is also a piece of government mail that can be used as your ID. Put it in your wallet the minute you receive it.

If you are certain you are registered and in the right place, but not being allowed to vote for some reason, your next move is to request a provisional ballot. The envelope it is in has a detachable ticket that gives you an 800 number to call later to be certain your vote was counted. In some cases you may be required to provide further documentation that you do live at the address you have claimed.

Never leave without voting! Read the signs about your voting rights and insist, politely, that you are here to vote. If you are time pressed and know you are in the right place but being told you are not on the list, request to vote on a provisional ballot. If all else fails and you cannot get help from the poll workers where you are, call Election Protection Hotline at 1-866-OUR VOTE. Your call will be rerouted to the local advocates of Voter Protection Coalition in St. Louis where volunteer lawyers can answer your questions, speak to the election judges for you, and if necessary come to your polling place to intervene.

If you have been convicted of a felony but have served all of your time including parole or probation you are qualified to vote in Missouri although you must have been registered before the deadline, which is now passed.

This year the BoEC will mail you a card that has your complete ballot issues and candidates listed on it. You can also download this information ahead of time at http://www.stlouisco.com/scripts/elections/index.cfm
or (for city) http://www.stlelections.com/images/pdfs/samp%20ballot%20nov.pdf

By the way, in some other states now, as in Ohio in 2004, the vote count online reporting is being funnelled through a software middleman. Bev Harris is asking people to use VideoTheVote.org to record the vote counting. Perhaps if you have a press card the election directors will allow you to do this.
Or possibly candidates will be allowed to do so.

This is a turning point in our nation's history, and we are all responsible for increasing our vigilance over the voting rights that we have won over the centuries. Prepare ahead of time and make your voice heard through a PAPER ballot.
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This information is provided as a public service and can be copied and distributed freely.
--pmb

Colin Powell endorse the New Era and the New Generation

Nothing to lose but walls

Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen-ground-swell underneath
And spills the upper boulders in the sun.
--Robert Frost

We used to see and hear the stories on TV, black and white back in the early sixties, of people trying to climb the Berlin Wall and being shot down, of others tunneling under, and we cheered them on. To us in our middle class neighborhoods these scenes were cruel aspects of some life far away from us, while we lived in freedom in America.

The Diary of Anne Frank, televised version, ended with that creepy up and down siren that lived on in the imagination afterward, even though that detail was actually a fiction. All of us little white children could never have imagined the horrors even in our own country of segregationist policies that kept some people out of the halls of power. Until they too showed up on that little screen in the living room, most of us were excruciatingly naïve. We had not yet comprehended our own shame, far less that of others, far less that of governments.

Oh, it was all in the Bible, those verses that we memorized and sought to practice against reprimands from our parents. But we had very little other context than our own back yards, the swing sets, the doll houses, the teeny little green rubber soldiers that engaged in make believe battles on the sidewalk or on the living room rug. A lot of us had fathers who were soldiers in World War II.

Across the street from where I was a new little house went up next to the giant oak tree and a family moved in with a couple of girls around my age and their little brother. Their father was a “Mason,” or so my mother told me with a touch of disdain in her voice. I never was sure what that meant or why it angered her. Maybe she was jealous.

But clearly it was some kind of distaste which was not even something described in the Ten Commandments, to my knowledge. I wanted her to be friends with the mother because one of those girls and I hit it off over making mud pies together. Before we moved away from there when I was twelve that family was already in another new house, bigger and better, around the block from us, and my first real friendship with someone outside the family had vanished into thin air. I never really knew what had happened. My first best friend had to be substituted for by some girls at school who were, presumably, of the right sort of Christian like us.

Where do those kinds of wall come from, the ones that prevent people from speaking their minds and honestly working out their problems, leaving some things unsaid with the blessing of humane acceptance? Those subtle walls known as prejudices slowly build over time into physical structures, separating us from the benefit of alternatives to our own rigid thinking. In the U.S. we now have the highest rate of incarceration in the world, and are building actual physical walls on our southern border.

Now, nearly half a century later than making my first solid friendship, everything on the computer screen is in color and you will not be able to watch TV next year if you have not yet made some adjustments for high definition. Oh yeah, it is all still about money. Some of us have access to information, political power, education and jobs and others do not.

And now we have businesses such as Boeing, a corporation which is a member of Dwight D. Eisenhauer's predicted military-industrial complex, benefiting from the current rage in building walls to keep people from crossing borders to our south, just like Israel has around Palestine. Here we have the effects of so-called “free trade” at work, along with climate change. Well, you know, it is all for our safety against terrorism (one of those “isms” in the same class as racism). And building walls provides Americans with jobs, not to mention gives some specific contractors access to government handouts. Who gives a deflated dollar if it hurts them there foreigners or does virtually no real good for us? For the most part it is kept totally out of our eyesight anyway, since the corporately owned media will not let us know what we are doing as a nation. And that keeps us innocent of any crime as individuals, at least in our imaginations.. It is all the property of the Homeland Security office or some foreign state that we underwrite. None of us need get our own hands dirty if we don't want to. It is just the way things are. We gotta have walls.

During my last couple of years in high school I lived in a southern state, not the Deep South, but close enough. We were some of the first students to go to the now desegregated school. The town was still divided, as it probably remains to this day, into black and white neighborhoods. Moving back to St. Louis again not long after graduation-- and even up until today-- our neighborhoods are still generally ethnically divided. People say that they want to live by people who are like them, but that is not the whole story and we know it, everyone who has half a brain. Yeah, we still have these walls, which we work together to maintain, despite those noble words of Robert Frost. If only they could tumble down so readily among us creatures so easily divided by hierarchical heritage with our fearful brains and hairless bodies hiding under clothes. Each of us insists we are some special breed because of the small piece of land upon which we were bred by circumstance outside of our command. Sometimes I feel lucky to be able to answer the eternally famous St. Louis question, “Where did you go to school?” with two words, ”Not here.”

Because I don't fit in anywhere. Because I started out working in the trenches with the least among us and did so for years and years, and I always wanted to learn something new. So I found out at a young age what dying was like, what a corpse actually looks like, how people are terrified by death and work like hell to bring someone back, rarely entertaining the idea that for some it might actually be an improvement over what they are experiencing on this plane.

And I went from hospitals to homes and usually made friends with the “lower class” workers and patients because they were more like me in many ways, despite some advantages that I have benefited from. In my own early life there had been violence, a lesson that imprints itself indelibly on the organism's physical body forever after, leaving trust of others always in question. Besides that I was “shy,” a quiet person who didn't talk excessively like most “leaders” do, so I became an astonishingly good observer, since that was my job, and also my lifestyle.

Politics are everywhere and nearly always involve dirt. When they sink to violence we might consider them animal, but the truth is that no other species is as self destructive as we are to ourselves. When Mr. Gorbachev “tore down those walls'” in 1989 as leader of the Soviet Union he was just a few years past the Chernobyl incident in the Ukraine. Reagan may have taken credit for it but internal pressure was probably more likely the cause of democratic moves in Eastern Europe.

Perhaps I have spent most of my life looking for something that will always remain totally inexplicable and elusive. We apparently cannot escape the despicable ways that humans beings behave so that we find lasting peace.

But this week I was given renewed hope by a small band of international human rights workers who sailed on a couple of fishing vessels into Gaza, opening the Palestinian citizens there to outsiders for the first time in forty-one years. The Free Gaza Movement had arrived.

On Saturday, August 23, two boats landed on the beach where they were welcomed by enthusiastic Palestinians, who have been blockaded into their small borders by the Israelis since 1967. Perhaps facing the devastation of ensuing global climate disruption will bring us forward into a new era of peace, working together for our common interests.

We really don't have much to lose in hoping.