Nature
Last week I discussed Earth Day and made some suggestions for how people can get involved locally. Here is a chance to get involved on a national level. Last month National Geographic did an article on this and I am ashamed to say in the furry of Bush administration, it’s folly, it’s frauds and it’s fuck-ups, I forgot to mention it until now.
This is a tragedy not merely for wildlife, but for the people living all around the mountains of West Virginia, Virginia and Kentucky. This isn’t just about the survival of some rare species of nuthatch folks, this is about human beings who’s homes and lives are being destroyed by obscenely bad mining practices. As both Robin Williams and George Carlin have observed, given enough time Nature can recover from whatever we dish out, we have to stop these things to save ourselves.
In West Virginia, citizens battle against the mining companies carving off their mountaintops
If you can, I also recommend going to the library and reading the March 2006 National Geographic. They talk to more of the local residents, not just the activists.
Like Strip mining times ten, Mountaintopping is exactly that, removing coal from a mountain by blasting the entire mountain top to pieces and removing coal directly from the exposed seems. The coal is separated from the rock using a hydrological process. Extra material, the rubble left of the mountain top, fills in valleys and makes developable land for things like golf courses and shopping malls. The wastewater, filled with crushed rock and coal dust called slurry, is stored in abandoned mine shafts and manmade ponds made of dirt embankments called impoundments.
Proponents say that it is safer, cheaper, quicker and the leveled areas provide much land for development.
Well, I think the slurry spills of Buffalo Creek, Miller Cove, Buchannan and Quecreek kind proves that to be a lie. Add to that the affected ground water from slurry seeping into the water table, the disruption in the air quality, and noise pollution and areas around these mines are becoming dead zones fit only for shopping malls.
Given the safety issues of old fashioned deep mining, I’d say that alternative energy research is desperately needed. Even if one doesn’t believe in the effect of pollution on Global Warming, isn’t the immediate environmental impact on people, plus freeing ourselves from the apron strings of the Middle East, reason enough to find something other than fossil fuels to power this nation?
Write your representatives, demand a bill be passed to fund alternative energy research!
And in the meantime, tell them to either shut these mines down or demand much stricter guidelines and monitoring.
Some More Reading To Get You Outraged
Crimes Against Nature : How George W. Bush and His Corporate Pals Are Plundering the Country and Hijacking Our Democracy by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
The book speaks for itself. I don’t care if the author is a Kennedy, it’s very well researched and documented. A must read.
Gee Whiz Golly...
This sound familiar to anyone?
On to More Pleasant Topics.
Go Elliott! Sadler takes the pole at Talladega once again! He went in saying that that they wanted to improve their qualifying efforts and they did. Good Job!
Tomorrow’s race promises to be interesting. Because of the number or wrecks at the Superspeedways (Daytona and Talladega) last year due to bump drafting, NASCAR has mandated that the CC put a lighter bumper on the car to discourage the practice.
My first reaction was, well my typical first reaction:
“What! Why do they have to punish everyone just because JJ get’s twitchy in traffic at Tallageda! That’s Bullshit! Just put the #48 on a rail and let everyone navigate around him.”
However, having seen how they are going about it….I’m good.
See, at the front and rear ends, superspeedway cars had basically become tanks. The reinforcing that went into the bumpers was starting to verge on the ridiculous, but that was the only way to survive such an aerodynamically dependant race with your aerodynamics intact. Not only would cars suck up under one another draft in order to gain momentum just through lengthening the profile, they would bump into the car in front of them to move the line along faster. At 190+ mph this works fine if the car in front of you is directly in front of you, however if they are going into a turn, well it’s a big mess. And because there are two to three freight trains of cars all going into said turn at 170+ mph side by side, it’s a HUUUUGE mess. That why whenever there are races at Talladega or Daytona, you keep hearing the phrase "The Big One". That's because wrecks at these tracks usually involve three to twelve more cars than they would elsewhere. I think the record was set a couple years ago at 23 cars involved in a single accident.
NASCAR has mandated that the front bumper be lighter to discourage people from bump drafting period. Some drivers (DJ) are happy about this, but some drivers (Dale Jr., Matt Kennseth) said they were going to spend practice finding out just how hard they could hit people without damaging their front ends so as I said, interesting times ahead tomorrow.
Speaking of Elliott, Happy Birthday! Mr. Sadler turns 31 today. Best of luck to him and the Chocolate Thunder. Whip Dega once and for all guys!!!
Dale Sr. was inducted to the International Racing Hall of Fame this last Thursday and all the cars of DEI are running Dale Sr.’s old black with silver accents paint scheme for the race. Congratulations to the Earnhardt family and Best of luck to Dale Jr. and the Bud Crew.
And Mark Martin, good luck on his drive for the Championship! Have a great race!
Be safe all and Godspeed!
A Long Time Ago I Promised…
To explain why Elliott would be very popular at Pagan parties. That’s because his Birthday falls on one our major Holidays, one that is particularly looked forward to by adults.
Now, I’m going to talk a bit about my faith here, so if this kind of thing makes you uncomfortable you can stop reading. It’s the last section of this blog entry anyway. :)
April 30th is Beltane with the following day being Mayday. (Some people say the names are interchangeable for the entire celebration, but I was taught this way.)
First of all to explain: Paganism, or Neo-Paganism as it is practiced now, is very much a one-to-one analogy. Nature is the way the divine expresses itself. As almost everything in the plant and animal kingdoms (this was before microscopes folks) maintains the continuity of it’s species through the joining of two sexes, so the divine created and maintains the continuity of the universe through the joining of Male and Female aspects of itself: The God and the Goddess. Or Lord and Lady as many call them.
Pagans view the cycle of the seasons as an expression of, or representing (and/or they represent it, all depends on your view) the lifecycle of the God and Goddess. The Goddess is constant, she is the Earth after all, though she does go through phases of Maiden (spring), Mother (summer and fall) and Crone (winter) as the year progresses.
The God goes through life and death. He is both the hunter and the hunted, the priest and the sacrifice. He is born at Yule, the Winter Solstice, grows older as spring and summer come on. He gains the height of his power coupled with growing wisdom in August at Lughnasadh when, as an analogy, we would consider him to be in his 40’s. Then he wanes as the harvests go on and dies an old, albeit wise, man at Samhain, or Halloween.
Now for the Beltane celebration.
To begin, The ancient Celts did not consider the day to begin as we do, at midnight, or at dawn. (For really freaky division of time, the Royal Navy used to believe the day began at noon, which is when the reckoning for latitude was taken. Meaning until 12:00pm tomorrow, to them it’s would still be Saturday. The odd things we just don’t think about.) The Celts believed that the day began at sundown (for example at 8:00pm on Tuesday, it becomes Wednesday). So at Sundown on April 30th the first part of celebrations begin.
Like the Vernal Equinox, this is a spring fertility holiday. But the…flavor is…different. Whereas the Vernal Equinox is the God and Goddess just discovering virility and fertility, the teenage phase if you will, Beltane and Mayday have much more…powerful and primal connotations. It is the marriage of the Goddess and God and when many sects consider the Goddess becomes pregnant with the God who will be reborn on the Winter Solstice. It’s the Union of the Goddess and the God….
Please people, my Dad reads this blog. Don’t make me spell it out for you.
Fire is a major part of the Beltane night rituals. The cleansing act of leaping over a campfire and making a wish is a tradtional part of the Beltane celebration. Cattle would be driven between two fires for luck, though one could also say the smuging from the smoke killed insects that might have carried diseases which could wipe out a families herd.
As we study old lore, we often find there is something scientifically sound in the practice.
And as Mr. Nicols accounts in is his series of essays on the Pagan Holidays, young men and women would go out into the woods and stay out there all Beltane night in order to “greet the Dawn” and collect wild flowers and boughs for the Mayday celebration.
It takes how long to collect branches?
Yeah.
As Kipling put it in A Tree Song:
Oh, do not tell the Priest our plight,
Or he would call it a sin;
But we have been out in the woods all night,
A-conjuring Summer in!
Now before anyone jumps to any wild media-driven conclusions, I have been a Pagan for jeez…6 years now, in Los Angeles no less, and I have even never heard of the actual Great Rite (ie. Sex for ritual purposes) being performed in public by anyone, let alone an orgy. A. Sorry to disappoint people like Pat Robertson, we’re not that weird and B. Sorry to disappoint the salaciously inclined, but this isn’t about swinging or free love or any of that. This isn’t about Krishna seducing dozens of milk maids or Zues having his way all around the Agean, though there is that aspect to the God as well. This is about THE Union, not random screwing. This is more of a “go home, grab your S.O. and get it ON” kind of thing.
Anyway, the next day are the Mayday rituals, which tend to represent the formal marriage of Goddess and God and are more Springy and flowery (though there is the Maypole *chuckle*) in feel. Needless to say, a lot of Pagans chose this Holiday to be married or handfasted on as well.
Then there's usually a BBQ.
A football or volleyball may get tossed around.
Kids run around making a lot of noise while older folks sit in the shade and chat...
The usual. :)
Thank you letting me pontificate. This, with Lughnasadh and Candlemass, is one of my favorite holidays and I just wanted to share. :) Happy Beltane/Mayday to any other Pagans out there.
To bring full circle: National Geographic did a spread on the modern Celtic population a couple months ago and they put up a scrolling photo gallery up on their website here. The second section, A Bit of the Wild, contains pictures from the yearly Beltane Fire festival/ritual in Edinburgh. I’ve never been to anything that large or elaborate, but it does give you a sense of the Holiday. The entire Flash presentation is worth sitting through BTW, great presentation.
Anyway, I have one more final on Thursday. Things have been going quite well so far, but I don’t want to jinx anything by publicly celebrating too soon. Wish me luck and have a great week all!
This is a tragedy not merely for wildlife, but for the people living all around the mountains of West Virginia, Virginia and Kentucky. This isn’t just about the survival of some rare species of nuthatch folks, this is about human beings who’s homes and lives are being destroyed by obscenely bad mining practices. As both Robin Williams and George Carlin have observed, given enough time Nature can recover from whatever we dish out, we have to stop these things to save ourselves.
In West Virginia, citizens battle against the mining companies carving off their mountaintops
If you can, I also recommend going to the library and reading the March 2006 National Geographic. They talk to more of the local residents, not just the activists.
Like Strip mining times ten, Mountaintopping is exactly that, removing coal from a mountain by blasting the entire mountain top to pieces and removing coal directly from the exposed seems. The coal is separated from the rock using a hydrological process. Extra material, the rubble left of the mountain top, fills in valleys and makes developable land for things like golf courses and shopping malls. The wastewater, filled with crushed rock and coal dust called slurry, is stored in abandoned mine shafts and manmade ponds made of dirt embankments called impoundments.
Proponents say that it is safer, cheaper, quicker and the leveled areas provide much land for development.
Well, I think the slurry spills of Buffalo Creek, Miller Cove, Buchannan and Quecreek kind proves that to be a lie. Add to that the affected ground water from slurry seeping into the water table, the disruption in the air quality, and noise pollution and areas around these mines are becoming dead zones fit only for shopping malls.
Given the safety issues of old fashioned deep mining, I’d say that alternative energy research is desperately needed. Even if one doesn’t believe in the effect of pollution on Global Warming, isn’t the immediate environmental impact on people, plus freeing ourselves from the apron strings of the Middle East, reason enough to find something other than fossil fuels to power this nation?
Write your representatives, demand a bill be passed to fund alternative energy research!
And in the meantime, tell them to either shut these mines down or demand much stricter guidelines and monitoring.
Some More Reading To Get You Outraged
Crimes Against Nature : How George W. Bush and His Corporate Pals Are Plundering the Country and Hijacking Our Democracy by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
The book speaks for itself. I don’t care if the author is a Kennedy, it’s very well researched and documented. A must read.
Gee Whiz Golly...
This sound familiar to anyone?
On to More Pleasant Topics.
Go Elliott! Sadler takes the pole at Talladega once again! He went in saying that that they wanted to improve their qualifying efforts and they did. Good Job!
Tomorrow’s race promises to be interesting. Because of the number or wrecks at the Superspeedways (Daytona and Talladega) last year due to bump drafting, NASCAR has mandated that the CC put a lighter bumper on the car to discourage the practice.
My first reaction was, well my typical first reaction:
“What! Why do they have to punish everyone just because JJ get’s twitchy in traffic at Tallageda! That’s Bullshit! Just put the #48 on a rail and let everyone navigate around him.”
However, having seen how they are going about it….I’m good.
See, at the front and rear ends, superspeedway cars had basically become tanks. The reinforcing that went into the bumpers was starting to verge on the ridiculous, but that was the only way to survive such an aerodynamically dependant race with your aerodynamics intact. Not only would cars suck up under one another draft in order to gain momentum just through lengthening the profile, they would bump into the car in front of them to move the line along faster. At 190+ mph this works fine if the car in front of you is directly in front of you, however if they are going into a turn, well it’s a big mess. And because there are two to three freight trains of cars all going into said turn at 170+ mph side by side, it’s a HUUUUGE mess. That why whenever there are races at Talladega or Daytona, you keep hearing the phrase "The Big One". That's because wrecks at these tracks usually involve three to twelve more cars than they would elsewhere. I think the record was set a couple years ago at 23 cars involved in a single accident.
NASCAR has mandated that the front bumper be lighter to discourage people from bump drafting period. Some drivers (DJ) are happy about this, but some drivers (Dale Jr., Matt Kennseth) said they were going to spend practice finding out just how hard they could hit people without damaging their front ends so as I said, interesting times ahead tomorrow.
Speaking of Elliott, Happy Birthday! Mr. Sadler turns 31 today. Best of luck to him and the Chocolate Thunder. Whip Dega once and for all guys!!!
Dale Sr. was inducted to the International Racing Hall of Fame this last Thursday and all the cars of DEI are running Dale Sr.’s old black with silver accents paint scheme for the race. Congratulations to the Earnhardt family and Best of luck to Dale Jr. and the Bud Crew.
And Mark Martin, good luck on his drive for the Championship! Have a great race!
Be safe all and Godspeed!
A Long Time Ago I Promised…
To explain why Elliott would be very popular at Pagan parties. That’s because his Birthday falls on one our major Holidays, one that is particularly looked forward to by adults.
Now, I’m going to talk a bit about my faith here, so if this kind of thing makes you uncomfortable you can stop reading. It’s the last section of this blog entry anyway. :)
April 30th is Beltane with the following day being Mayday. (Some people say the names are interchangeable for the entire celebration, but I was taught this way.)
First of all to explain: Paganism, or Neo-Paganism as it is practiced now, is very much a one-to-one analogy. Nature is the way the divine expresses itself. As almost everything in the plant and animal kingdoms (this was before microscopes folks) maintains the continuity of it’s species through the joining of two sexes, so the divine created and maintains the continuity of the universe through the joining of Male and Female aspects of itself: The God and the Goddess. Or Lord and Lady as many call them.
Pagans view the cycle of the seasons as an expression of, or representing (and/or they represent it, all depends on your view) the lifecycle of the God and Goddess. The Goddess is constant, she is the Earth after all, though she does go through phases of Maiden (spring), Mother (summer and fall) and Crone (winter) as the year progresses.
The God goes through life and death. He is both the hunter and the hunted, the priest and the sacrifice. He is born at Yule, the Winter Solstice, grows older as spring and summer come on. He gains the height of his power coupled with growing wisdom in August at Lughnasadh when, as an analogy, we would consider him to be in his 40’s. Then he wanes as the harvests go on and dies an old, albeit wise, man at Samhain, or Halloween.
Now for the Beltane celebration.
To begin, The ancient Celts did not consider the day to begin as we do, at midnight, or at dawn. (For really freaky division of time, the Royal Navy used to believe the day began at noon, which is when the reckoning for latitude was taken. Meaning until 12:00pm tomorrow, to them it’s would still be Saturday. The odd things we just don’t think about.) The Celts believed that the day began at sundown (for example at 8:00pm on Tuesday, it becomes Wednesday). So at Sundown on April 30th the first part of celebrations begin.
Like the Vernal Equinox, this is a spring fertility holiday. But the…flavor is…different. Whereas the Vernal Equinox is the God and Goddess just discovering virility and fertility, the teenage phase if you will, Beltane and Mayday have much more…powerful and primal connotations. It is the marriage of the Goddess and God and when many sects consider the Goddess becomes pregnant with the God who will be reborn on the Winter Solstice. It’s the Union of the Goddess and the God….
Please people, my Dad reads this blog. Don’t make me spell it out for you.
Fire is a major part of the Beltane night rituals. The cleansing act of leaping over a campfire and making a wish is a tradtional part of the Beltane celebration. Cattle would be driven between two fires for luck, though one could also say the smuging from the smoke killed insects that might have carried diseases which could wipe out a families herd.
As we study old lore, we often find there is something scientifically sound in the practice.
And as Mr. Nicols accounts in is his series of essays on the Pagan Holidays, young men and women would go out into the woods and stay out there all Beltane night in order to “greet the Dawn” and collect wild flowers and boughs for the Mayday celebration.
It takes how long to collect branches?
Yeah.
As Kipling put it in A Tree Song:
Oh, do not tell the Priest our plight,
Or he would call it a sin;
But we have been out in the woods all night,
A-conjuring Summer in!
Now before anyone jumps to any wild media-driven conclusions, I have been a Pagan for jeez…6 years now, in Los Angeles no less, and I have even never heard of the actual Great Rite (ie. Sex for ritual purposes) being performed in public by anyone, let alone an orgy. A. Sorry to disappoint people like Pat Robertson, we’re not that weird and B. Sorry to disappoint the salaciously inclined, but this isn’t about swinging or free love or any of that. This isn’t about Krishna seducing dozens of milk maids or Zues having his way all around the Agean, though there is that aspect to the God as well. This is about THE Union, not random screwing. This is more of a “go home, grab your S.O. and get it ON” kind of thing.
Anyway, the next day are the Mayday rituals, which tend to represent the formal marriage of Goddess and God and are more Springy and flowery (though there is the Maypole *chuckle*) in feel. Needless to say, a lot of Pagans chose this Holiday to be married or handfasted on as well.
Then there's usually a BBQ.
A football or volleyball may get tossed around.
Kids run around making a lot of noise while older folks sit in the shade and chat...
The usual. :)
Thank you letting me pontificate. This, with Lughnasadh and Candlemass, is one of my favorite holidays and I just wanted to share. :) Happy Beltane/Mayday to any other Pagans out there.
To bring full circle: National Geographic did a spread on the modern Celtic population a couple months ago and they put up a scrolling photo gallery up on their website here. The second section, A Bit of the Wild, contains pictures from the yearly Beltane Fire festival/ritual in Edinburgh. I’ve never been to anything that large or elaborate, but it does give you a sense of the Holiday. The entire Flash presentation is worth sitting through BTW, great presentation.
Anyway, I have one more final on Thursday. Things have been going quite well so far, but I don’t want to jinx anything by publicly celebrating too soon. Wish me luck and have a great week all!
posted by KiplingKat | 1:10 AM
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