advocacy

Your Piehole…

Your Piehole…: These days, these foods and the lifestyles they are fostering, are making less & less sense in their impact to [and on] land, water, urban-sprawl, the uglification of what our eyes have to look at while out and about, the air, the atmosphere, and our health [of course physically, but mentally too]… so much so, the only real purpose they are serving is Profit, Laziness and the seemingly unending need for Immediate Gratification.
[While Scott’s last coupla posts have seemed a bit bitter to me, that’s prolly in my head, rather than in the words, so I’ll not say more about it. There are many good things about people on bicycles but those of us who ride for recreation and commutation (multi-modal for me) should not be climbing on any high horses. Start at the basics. Where’d that bike come from? Where’s did the steel, scandium, aluminum, carbon fiber, resin, grease, lube, plastic, rubber, cork, paint etc. come from? Who dug it out of the ground, produced a “finished” product and shipped it to be built into that bike? Who again packaged and shipped that bike? How much energy was consumed in the process? How much environmentally harmful stuff was used and discarded? Are the large bike companies any cleaner environmentally than other manufacturing processes? I don’t know how many miles have to be ridden before you offset the debt of the build, but it has got to be more than just a few. I know that the same thing is true for a car or truck with their even higher starting points. And that therefore your impact is lower to start… but it’s still a long way from zero. And therein lies my point. While riding the heck out of that bike now that it’s built, and caring for it so that it lasts a long time, you make the most of the energy spent. However it remains all too easy to climb on a high horse of falsely virtuous eco-righteness. Don’t. You’ve just chosen less, not none. Feel good about that. Help others to do the same. Conservation is a powerful tool. At the same time be understanding of the needs and culture of others. Realize that a bike may be completely foreign to that person, an alien that they have no understanding of or connection to, and remember that we are not outside looking in, but inside, sharing the ride.]
Source: Large Fella on a Bike

Sometimes the Inside is, Outside…

Sometimes the Inside is, Outside…: What am I capable of… how far can, or will, I go to do Right?  Others times, I feel [right or wrong] like I’m doing this to atone for some stupid, crappy thing I’ve done to someone long forgotten about.  Like an old teacher would tell me when I was teen, “Sometimes you gotta bleed for others… “.

So I go across the street to Skol, buy a bottle of water and a pint of gin, and go back over to the guy in the wheelchair.  In the bag, with the gin & water, I put in some kleenex from my saddle bag, a smallish bag of sunflower seeds and a five dollar bill.  I tuck the whole deal into the guys jacket, after lifting his drooping head off his chest.  His skin feels like dried out leather.  He keeps snoring.

I roll on.

After some more miles, I head back home… and decide to go by that corner again.

He’s still there, still sleeping…

…and the bag has fallen out from underneath his jacket.

The pint of gin is broken on the sidewalk, while the bottle of water must have rolled out and onto the street and has been run over by a car or bus. 

I hope the tissues, seeds and money are still in the bag… [Remarkable. Murphy can be really mean.]
Source: Large Fella on a Bike

The Gospel of Consumption

The Gospel of Consumption | Orion magazine: This was the stuff of a human ecology in which thousands of small, almost invisible, interactions between family members, friends, and neighbors create an intricate structure that supports social life in much the same way as topsoil supports our biological existence. When we allow either one to become impoverished, whether out of greed or intemperance, we put our long-term survival at risk.

[…continues]

Rather than realizing the enriched social life that Kellogg’s vision offered us, we have impoverished our human communities with a form of materialism that leaves us in relative isolation from family, friends, and neighbors. We simply don’t have time for them. Unlike our great-grandparents who passed the time, we spend it. An outside observer might conclude that we are in the grip of some strange curse, like a modern-day King Midas whose touch turns everything into a product built around a microchip.

Of course not everybody has been able to take part in the buying spree on equal terms. Millions of Americans work long hours at poverty wages while many others can find no work at all. However, as advertisers well know, poverty does not render one immune to the gospel of consumption.
[A not to be missed article.]

Trouble in Capital City

Trouble in Capital City: I suppose the lack of public discourse is because saying you’re opposed to a major public-works housing project being located directly adjacent to the retail hub of the village makes one sound like a bigot—it sounds like you’re saying you’re not in favor of the people who live there.

Personally, I’m not in favor of the criminals that live there, just as I’m not in favor of criminals that live anywhere else. But really I’m not in favor of is a social-political development that fosters the continued dependance on the broken unemployment and social assistance programs in our country. I’m not in favor of any development that makes people of any income class live in small, squalid housing with little to no job training and no connection to the community.

I’m not in favor of treating people like lesser citizens because they make less money on average than most. I’m not in favor of ugly subsidized public housing that ends up fostering crime.

Maybe instead of talking about parking meters and who is going to run the marina and to what end, we should talk about how to develop sustainable housing in Nyack for ALL income classes, without making any look or feel like they are second class citizens, and without creating further blight in Nyack. [Right on David, right effin on.]
Source: Attention Deficit David

Let my People Have Root

Let my People Have Root: App Engine is certainly convenient for Google because it maps exactly to what they have already built for internal use. But does it mean that Google has solved the hard problem of how to manage a cloud computing offering while simultaneously giving developers the freedom of full root control? And is root access important? [Granted they have a self interest, but they still make a good point…]
Source: Joyeur

Mr. Silver Does It Again (Congestion Pricing Killed)

Mr. Silver Does It Again – New York Times: New Yorkers should remember Monday as the day Sheldon Silver, the Assembly speaker, used the power of his office to deprive them of $354 million in federal funds to help mass transporation, ease traffic congestion and improve the air that all New Yorkers breathe.

Backed by his Democratic conference, the speaker killed congestion pricing in the most cowardly way: without even holding a vote. Mr. Silver said so many members of his own conference were against the plan that it would never pass. How many? Who knows? The speaker hid behind closed doors to keep the public from watching his cronies do the deed. [Shameful!]

Something to live for

We live when we have something to live for.

Time and again, when you hear from a survivor, what you hear is “I thought of my son, daughter, wife, husband, parents…” We would think that survival would be a very selfish process, but it’s not. It’s much more about how embedded in a family or a community we are. Seemingly, we cannot save ourselves. Survival, even salvation, lies in our love for our family and community. Survivors literally use the power of love to survive. People who care about others have a better chance of surviving. At the moment of truth, if we are thinking only about ourselves, we are at a disadvantage.

How do we get ourselves into trouble? Simply wanting to do something can often overwhelm all other considerations. We know we shouldn’t, but we want to. So we tell ourselves a story. Our story is built on truth. We turn experience into stories. They feel real and truthful to us. When the story reflects the world as it really is, we do well. When they don’t, we find ourselves in trouble. Want something badly enough and the story will only have the thinnest veneer of truth. It’s a false story. And it leads to the commonly used phrase “What were they thinking?”

To use a recent example what was disgraced former Govenor Eliot Spitzer thinking? What story did he tell himself that made these actions OK?

And how many times did I hear someone say “What was he thinking?” in regard to Spitzer’s actions? Too many to count.

People swim in shark infested waters and get hurt…”What were they thinking?”
People climb mountains when storms are approaching… “What were they thinking?”
People get drunk, attempt to drive home and kill themselves and others… “What were they thinking?”

You’d never let anyone hurt you as badly as you hurt yourself.

Logic and reason can inform us but emotion makes us decide and act. And wanting is an emotional thing. Without the aid of the stories we create and the emotions they generate, we are all but paralyzed. Stories hurt us when they reflect only our desires. Stories help us by making other’s experiences real and prevent us from having to experience every situation for ourselves. They warn us of things so we don’t have to survive them ourselves. But for the latter to occur you need to be embedded in a family or a community, to trust other’s experience. And as we know, people who do trust, who feel that connection, who don’t only think of themselves survive even the the most dangerous, stress filled, gasping for breath, I-almost-lost-my-life moments. Such is the power of love.

It’s love people, love.

Today a lot of people are aware of race issues because it’s the 40th anniversary of the assasination of Martin Luther King, Jr. But one of the things that I don’t think is being remembered as much(I was 4 at the time so have no memory of the event) is that one of the things he preached was love.

I’ve often used the golden rule as a means of gauging my own behavior. Sure, treat others as you wish to be treated goes a long, long way. And there’s no doubt, it’s a personal work in progress. Still, if more people practiced the ethics of reciprocity routinely the world would be a nicer place. But on this day, when people are already discussing the measure of the King Dream, I’m asking that you love others as you wish to be loved.

It’s harder, it requires more thought and greater commitment. You have to reach deeper and do more, you have to not just say, “hmmm how would I want to be treated” but what would I truly wish for myself and how can I extend that to everyone else.

And if we extend that to more of what we do, our interactions with others, a ever deepening desire to seek that level of love for all people, the world will in fact be better place, and where without further effort, people will be judged by the content of their character.

My Gnomedex Talk: 1100 Stacies

My Gnomedex Talk: 1100 Stacies: The best way to help people is to build an infrastructure that enables a kind of pyramid scheme of good. If, like me, you’re not smart or lucky enough to be able to do that, then all things considered, just earn more money, or spend less, and donate the difference.

Now’s the time when I unveil my project. My kick-ass killer app. The awesome user-generated content, ad-supported, Facebook-enabled, mobile-aware, Ajax-powered thingy. The thing that’ll cure AIDS or give sight back to the blind or whatever, all stored remotely on Amazon S3.

And here it is! [Simply amazing.]