Dream Job or What?

How would you like this dream job?  Frequent breaks, work two or three weeks and have a week off, sometimes two weeks, as at Easter.  A month in August.  A month at Christmas.  Really, only work about half of the weeks in a year.  And at an annual salary of $174,000, almost half of which is paid vacation.

That is, according to the recent schedule published by U. S. Congress, which you can access here:  http://www.thecapitol.net/FAQ/cong_schedule.html  Really, is that what they mean by smaller government?   Okay, okay, in all fairness to them, they claim that that time off is so that they can go home and work for their constituents.  You know, reach out and touch them, ask them about their problems so they, the legislators, can go back to the capitol and pass legislation to help their constituents. 

Well, then, let’s hold them to it.  Check out the local offices of your legislators, senators and representatives.  Keep track of this schedule, and when your legislator is home, go visit  at h/h office or call  and if s/he is not available, request that s/he call you back, or you could make an appointment to go visit with h/h.   Do be polite, and do have an honest question or concern ready.  In all fairness now, these legislators may have more than one office so you may have to call around to reach them.  But it should be doable, because that’s why they are not in session.  So you can reach them.  Get in touch with other members of your political party, club, or executive committee.  Or any civic association.  Arrange to keep your legislator busy by taking turns with your visits and phone calls.  Perhaps you can even arrange for h/h to visit with your group. 

Of course, if you really, really want to talk with h/h, you may have to take up golf!

For tree huggers only

tree!! my tree! what have they done to you?
does it hurt? tree? say something!

Haunted by Genetic Engineering

The title above was suggested by my friend, Mike, who has posted this on his blog, so I thought it was time to post it on mine.  This post was prompted by recent news about the USDA approval of GE Alfalfa.  Here is a link to one such article: http://www.alternet.org/story/149716/why_you_can_now_kiss_organic_beef%2C_dairy_and_many_vegetables_goodbye?page=entire 

For me to begin any discussion, to express my views, of the GM/GE crop development controversy, I have to go back to the 1980s.  At that time, I was county extension agent in Mineral County MT.   It was probably in 1988 that I attended a conference of extension agents at Montana State University (land-grant university), in Bozeman Mt, where a major presentation was by a representative of United States Department of Agriculture, in Beltsville MD.  He wanted to introduce us to this amazing new process of genetically modifying crops to change their nature, their properties, their reactions to environment, according to the will of the scientists.  Specifically, they were working on modifying corn so that it would be resistant to pesticides.    I found it very interesting that this USDA representative also had an investment in the biotech firm, also located in Beltsville, which was actively working on this objective.

For the previous two decades, while living on small farms or homesteads in Virginia, Montana, and North Dakota, with my young children, I had endeavored to garden and raise livestock for our own use organically and naturally—free range chickens and grass fed beef and contented dairy cows or goats and happy hogs, along with vegetables, herbs, and small fruits.   No chemicals, no pesticides, no antibiotic or hormone- laced feeds for the animals.  I had subscribed to Organic Gardening and Mother Earth News and Countryside and bought books on organic gardening.   I was familiar with the history of USDA’s opposition to organic gardening, (it could mark the end of a USDA employee's career to even breathe the word “organic”,) but now in the ‘80s it seemed they were a little more encouraging of organic methods and alternative crops.  We extension agents had been attending workshops on how to use organic methods in gardening, how to reduce use of pesticides, etc.    I was pleased that we seemed to be entering a new era.

Now it seemed that was about to change.  This USDA person was explaining that corn could be modified so that it would be resistant to pesticides such as Roundup, so that the farmer could use more Roundup without damaging the corn.  What?  More pesticide?  I thought we were supposed to be trying to use less pesticide.  Of course, Roundup was, and still is, promoted as being less dangerous than other pesticides because it is less persistent in the soil. 

After this main session in the auditorium, we moved in small groups to small rooms for discussion and Q&A with extension staff.  Again, we were told of the great value of this modification of corn, how it would increase production and reduce labor, etc.  We were advised, moreover, that this could be a bonanza for our university.  Land grant universities were eligible to apply for grants and funds to research this process; that mean money, of course.  We were also exhorted to go home to our counties and inform our farmers and ranchers of this wonderful process and encourage them to support the research and to look forward to planting this corn themselves.  And other such products to follow.  It seemed to me that our discussion leader was trembling with fervor.  I know I asked some questions, but I was careful not to state my skepticism.  I do know that I felt a chill running down my spine.  It seemed to me this new science was not auspicious for our future.  And although, to be fair to USDA and the extension service, I did go home to my county and discuss this with the local farmers and ranchers, I could not in all honesty endorse it.  I was never sure why my position was terminated after another year.

I have seen nothing nor read anything in the years since then to make me change my mind about GM and GE crops, including the recent USDA approval of GE alfalfa.   I was devastated when President Obama appointed Vilsack as head of the USDA.  So what about the organic garden on the White House Lawn?  Was that just to be a distraction?  

The Pale Blue Dot Grows Smaller

Sagan Carl on Pale Blue Dot

A quote from Sagan:  We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and by the depth of our answers.

Carl Sagan had requested that the Voyager I turn about and take photo of our tiny, tiny planet from beyond Jupiter, then he wrote this about the photo.

"Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there--on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.
-- Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot, 1994

Sunday Morning with Cats

If you like a spiritual fix on Sunday, from whencever it might come, read this entry from the blog of my friend, Michael Hasty.  He has a little fun trying to explain his Yoga master's spiritual views to his cats, but they have opinions of their own.  Mike promises to provide a "gospel hour" every Sunday morning.  FYI (for your inspiration), of course.

http://hampshireindependent.blogspot.com/2011/01/spiritual-politics.html 

Gramma Windy

Gasland Review

Gasland Review according to Windy

“I had tried to keep anger and sorrow at bay.”  So said Josh Fox as he broke down while kneeling beside the now polluted Divide Creek in Colorado, the creek which reminded him so much of his own creek at his home in Pennsylvania.  Josh had spent weeks touring natural gas drilling sites in many states, beginning in Dimock, PA, near his own home, where he had been offered $100,000 for a lease on his property of 19 acres.   Josh traveled through much of the West—Colorado, Utah, Wyoming—to follow up on reports of adverse consequences to environment and people.  He interviewed whistle blowers and town mayors, and tried to interview, by phone and in person, industry officials.  He listened to people relate their experiences, from large scale ranchers to back-to-landers in remote areas.  He collected water samples for testing, watched tap water and creek water being set afire.  Josh attended legislative hearings where members dismissed any evidence save that from industry officials; environmental agency meetings where no representative of the agency was in attendance; press conferences where no press showed up.  The product of his experience is the documentary, “Gasland.”

This film both opened and closed with scenes from an energy committee hearing in the U. S. House of Representatives.  With industry leaders seeking to prove that reports of environmental damage and personal injury were not true, that hydraulic fracturing was safe; while opposing witnesses presented reports on damage and illness.  Rep Boren (D-OK) claims that one witness is “…searching for a problem that does not exist.  Because looking at all these other incidents, in other states, there has not been a problem with hydraulic fracturing.  And I’m proud that I’m supported by the oil and gas industry because they employ a lot of people in my state, and I’m gonna stick up for the, I’m tired of people trying to shut down an industry when they’re not educated on the facts.  If you’re not able to do this hydraulic fracturing, how much more will we be dependent upon foreign oil---and---and terrorism.”  Hearing closed soon after.

This film was shown at a public meeting, sponsored by Hampshire County Independent Network, at the Romney Public Library on Monday, January 17^th, or, that is, part of the film was shown, as it runs for nearly two hours and it was not possible to show it in its entirety and still allow time for Q & A.   I want to urge you to watch the film in its entirety—library has a copy, you can buy it, or rent it, or borrow it.   Or you can download it and watch it free at http://documentaryheaven.com/gasland/

Timely Reflections on Scrooge

During Christmas week I watched, as I had many Christmases before, “Scrooge,” or “A Christmas Carol,” the 1951 one with Alistair Sim, based on Dickens’s  “A Christmas Carol.”  I awoke the next morning remembering an old incident, back in 1951, with the thought, probably not for the first time, that the old man I encountered in that incident was the epitome of Scrooge. 

Back in September of that year, my husband  and I, with his teen-age-brother and our two-year-old child,  were returning to our home in Prince George’s County, Maryland,  from a trip to Iowa.  It was already nightfall when we arrived in Frederick, MD, and realized we had not enough gas to get home, and not another penny among us.  Just a dollar’s worth would get us home, gas being then about 20 cents a gallon.   Surely some kindly gas station attendant would  loan us a dollar for gas.  But the elderly gent at the corner gas station declined to help us.    What?  A nice, clean-cut family like ourselves couldn’t be trusted?  And the dollar was so much money that the old man couldn’t take a chance on losing it?  What was he thinking?  That we would not return the dollar and it would be his undoing?  He would go bankrupt?  No doubt he would have gone to his grave grieving for that lost dollar.

Eventually we met a young police officer who himself took a dollar out of his pocket and gave it to us.  We took our dollar back to the little corner station and gave it to the old man, and got our gas.   Next day we put two dollar bills in an envelope and addressed it to Officer Denver J Shook with a little heartfelt note of thanks for his help.  Back came a letter from his captain, expressing his appreciation for our prompt return of the money while at the same time assuring us that we would not have had to do so, they were glad to help. 

But the Scrooges, or their spiritual descendants, still walk among us.  We witnessed them in the Halls of Congress during the last few weeks.  Saying no to extension of unemployment benefits, no to extension of tax cuts just for the middle class, no to the rights of gays and lesbians to be a part of the military, no to the rights of children of immigrants to gain citizenship by attending college or joining the military, no to medical care for 9/11 workers, no to food safety, no to expanding child nutrition, no to allowing anyone to pick up the crumbs from the table.  As Scrooge said, “What?  Are there no prisons?  Are there no workhouses?”  And today he might add, “Are there no homeless shelters?  Are there no soup kitchens?  Are there no grates on the sidewalk?”  But then when these statesmen were able to get what they really wanted, tax cuts extended for the very rich, they allowed other legislation to proceed, although most still voted their nay’s.  When the ghost of Jacob Marley was warning Scrooge of what was to come if he did not mend his ways, Scrooge protested:  “But you were always a good man of business, Jacob,” and Marley shrieked: “Business!  Mankind was my business.  The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business.  The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business….Why did I walk through the crowds of fellow-beings with my eyes turned down….”

May you have a Happy and Progressive New Year,

Gramma Windy