"Credible Threat"

Last night there was another truncation of our democratic process here in Wisconsin. A single lawmaker decided that there was a "credible threat" to the safety of those in the state capitol from protesters that had assembled both outside and inside the building. Thousands wanted to speak to the issue before the committee, regarding the proposed "Rigth-To-Work" law that has been proposed. Each person was allowed one minute to say their piece, but the three lawmakers did not want to listen to unanimous opposition to the policy their financiers had concocted. Notice the language that these lies are couched in. The word credible usually means that there is a strong reason to believe something, or that the threat has been vetted. There was one protester who refused to leave the building, otherwise, not a single arrest. A lone, raving, toothless old man, who was probably homeless and didn't want to spend another night in below zero temperatures outside. That is the one arrest made all day and perhaps he was the credible threat. The only threat that I think he posed, was that the Capitol Police and the hundreds of officers brought in to "control" the "situation" were getting overtime pay (because they have a strong union)and the threat was that our tax dollars were paying their overtime. Several thousand (The number keeps growing, as more reasonable approximations of the crowd come out.) Wisconsinites had gathered to tell our legislators that their proposal is bad for our state, but they could not be bothered to listen.

Facts, like the fifty percent increase in workplace deaths in "Right-To-Work" states, the higher levels of child poverty and premature death in states that have this sort of legislation on the books, the fact that the war on unions dates back to the seventies, when union membership was about one third of the workforce and how as union membership has fallen to under 9%, the real value of take home pay has dropped for the average worker precipitously. The near elimination of the "middle class". all of these issues need to be addressed, but the words, even though they will be entered into the public record fell on deaf ears. The whole hearing was perfunctory. The minds of the corporate controlled legislature has already been made up.

We are told that corporations do not want to locate here because one of the "first questions" they ask when considering opening a new facility in our state is "Do they allow unions?" This just sounds like fiction. We had a criminal enterprise lease a substantial part of the Northwoods for exploring the mineral content of the bedrock, even though our state allows unions. Many of our enterprises have been purchased by large multi-national corporations, even though we allow unions. I was alive at the time when unions were at their peak and I can tell you that there was a far better standard of living than we enjoy today. The right wing of our political system has decided that "A rising tide lifts all boats.", but for those who are looking closely at our current situation, we realize that the rising tide is mostly being funneled into the pockets of the oligarchs. The only credible threat posed at this time is from the proposed legislation.

The Wisconsin Idea-Part Two

I have to be careful how I write about our governor being a college drop-out. There are those who would brand me as a hypocrite for pointing this out because I too dropped out of college. However, the reasons that I dropped out were many and in my world view quite sound, whereas Governor Scott Walker, who now wants to be President of the United States of America was kicked out for cheating. In short, our reasons for not getting a degree could not be much more different. My moral stand against registration for the draft is what motivated me. Ronald Reagan, with a nod from Congress, made qualification for student financial aid dependent on registration for the draft. When I did my own due diligence, I found out that when the draft existed in the past, there was a special process for those that would be registered C.O. (or Conscientious Objector)The way the law was written in 1984, there was no such process and if I had registered for the draft, it would have meant that there would be no due process for changing my status to C.O. that could be completed before my being "called up" and once owned by6 the govie, there would be no time to pursue the people who would be needed to validate my status before my deployment. Morally, this was unacceptable to me. The only recourse that I could conceive was to opt out of the whole process.

I was too poor to continue, and instead of dropping out, I continued to attend. I went to classes for an entire year after my financial aid was cut off, supporting myself by working at several jobs and paying my own way through life, without paying tuition. I would make appointments to speak to each professor in person, explaining the changes that led to me not being officially enrolled. I also explained that learning, to me, is like air. that I need it to live and that I would like to attend their classes even if it meant that I would receive no credit for my efforts. All but one professor encouraged me to stick with it and finish my course of study, but they warned that without a piece of paper to validate the completion of my course of study, the costs of my decisions would affect me the rest of my life. I was an adult and felt that I knew what I was doing. Even after all of these years, I don't regret my decisions one bit. The education that I received just talking to a dozen professors about this issue were worth the price I paid for college. In my first three years, I ended up owing $1050 (one thousand five hundred dollars)Ironically, that is exactly the exact same amount of money that I was given by my family to start my new life as an educated adult.

The Wisconsin Idea was strong in my upbringing. In some ways you could call me a "freeloader", as only one of the dozen or so professors that I interviewed, did. he was adverse to my ideas from the start and threatened that if I showed to one of his classes, he would "call the police." What I saw, en masse, were souls, who may they be tortures firmly believed in the transfer of knowledge and our right to become informed. We are currently being led by the cadre who thought it was all about the paper, and when they were denied, for cheating in collegiate politics, the whole process of thinking about education turned into a vendetta.

Being an aware and intellectually adept youth, facile with language, whose mom was one of the bohemians "allowed" to go to college, first in her family to get a degree; I often would get what she called "mental health days", where she would take me to her classes instead of allowing public school to have me another day. I was always sure that I would be a teacher, because that is what everyone in my family had done, whether they had known it or not. My lessons would be of global scope, but informed by and stem from infinitesimally small, infinitely local awareness. Even at seven years of age, I was aware of the infinite Om, the lost chord so to speak.

Is There Anybody Out There?

I have tried to resolve several issues with blogger.com and have even used the "report a problem" tab to try to resolve issues. My latest posts are getting plenty of views, but there seems to be a lack of action or even recognition that, as an end user of the system, my efforts are being undermined.

For instance with this post, I fully expect that it may lack paragraphs. That seems to be par for the course with my other blog at this site. I suppose it is better than having my guests be shifted to some other site, but it makes communication difficult, especially because I want to say more than just a few words.

No tech support of any kind, not even recognition that I sent in a report of a problem. My other blog was down for over a week and although it seems to be mostly "fixed", it took several dozen hours to try to get back to where I had been before. In fact, it is only since trying to fix the problem that errant code seems to be embedded in my new post page and the formatting seems to have gotten screwed up as well.

I hope that I can resolve these issues quickly, but this is not my full time occupation.

Three Ingredients And A Nice, Thick, Mulch

I have written several posts about bio-char and the benefits that it can provide for soil health, water quality and agriculture. The three ingredients that constitute biochar are the char itself, which is virtually pure carbon, water and some sort of biological inoculate, like compost. There has been a systematic poisoning of the soils worldwide. Multinational corporate welfare whores are continuing to produce TNT, which produces anhydrous ammonia as a by-product. If anyone needs any more reason to be a pacifist, the ecological destruction that is part and parcel of the military industrial complex should be reason enough. Our leaders have proven that human life is meaningless to them, but perhaps ecological destruction of the soils upon which all life is built may be the fulcrum to move public opinion and government regulation with a bit less effort. We have a long lever arm at our disposal and that is our desire to continue the species. In war there has always been the expectation that there would be a victor and a vanquished people. Facts deny that this is true but we continue to be lied to by history and those that profit from the carnage. The same is true for our agricultural practices. If the oligarchs cannot keep the money rolling into their hands, there is very little chance that people will hear about it. That is why I want to simplify the process by which we can feed twice as many people using the same amount of land that is under cultivation as we have today. Production increases will not be enough in isolation, but distributing the abundance of nature has always proven to be a difficult task for humans and that has not yet changed.

Char is best made by roasting clean and pure sawdust, wood chips or pieces small enough that they can be crushed to powder after they have been charred. Ideal-sized pieces are the size of a grain of rice or smaller. There can be no synthetic glues, laminate, plastic, or chemical biocides or "treatments" on, or in, the wood. Smashing, grinding or otherwise powdering pieces of roasted wood makes lots of dust and although I have made my char powder using several different low tech methods, the easiest one that I have found is to feed the chunks of charcoal into a meat or coffee grinder. The only reason that I have begun to use sawdust is that I have a never-ending source of the material a short bike ride from my home. This material, when created, can last for tens of thousands of years in the environment because in nature, the organisms who inhabit the micro-pores in the char are only interested in the protection that it provides. They do not eat the material. The char acts as housing, a matrix upon which life can cling but also protection from predators. If you have ever let water stand in a basin, over time you will feel a slick coating on the surface of the container. This is a thin film of bacteria clinging to the container. Imagine this same film coating fourteen acres of surface area in each handful.

As far as the water goes, the most success will be had by using distilled or rain water. Especially rain water seems to overcome the surface tension issues that make the char hydrophobic. In my early days I used a drop or two of bio-degradable soap, but since discovering the power of rain water, I probably will not go back to using any other type of water. All life seems to need clean fresh water, the soil organisms that we add to our chat to make it bio-char need at least enough moisture to remain hydrated and to begin their reproduction process. When making char, it is important to keep it aerobic (with air) and to keep it warm enough that the microbes that we add continue to multiply. Below about fifty degrees, biological activity slows and getting the culture of organisms to take hold in the char will take longer.

The nutrients in compost as well as the organisms that thrive in it are exactly the ones we seek to introduce into our char. The soil is a living community made up of millions of different bacteria, plankton, algae, fungi and viruses. The most beneficial ones are dependent on both air and water, so burying the char deeply is not as beneficial as they would be in the top six inches or so of the soil column. Over twenty years ago, my mentor turned me on to the soil building method that just "breaks" the surface. I most often do this with a potato fork. just drive it into the soil and pry a bit. This creates regions that have oxygen and the cracks and fissures that open up also allow moisture to percolate into the soil instead of just running off or sitting on the surface if the soil had been compacted. I have written about the quality of the ground upon which I garden at length and for those who know I am sorry for repeating myself.

When I took ownership of my property, two city lots in Green Bay, Wisconsin, the land had been a brickyard and dump. The heavy clay soils had been compacted and sterilized by chemical abuse, heavy equipment and callous humans unaware of the world of life that was supposed to reside beneath their feet. When I tried to dig my first garden beds, the sharpened spade just bounced off the surface. The only tool that could penetrate the surface, and in most places only a half inch or so, was the potato fork. I tried to work the surface, spread a bit of compost, and covered the whole affair with straw. (mulch is perhaps the most important single ingredient in my gardening process)sunlight kills many bacteria, so protecting the soil from the desiccating effects of direct sunlight and keeping UV rays from killing off the critters that I encourage are, and always have been crucial to my efforts at soil recovery. After the first rain, I was able to force the tines of my potato fork an inch or two down, so I pried the soil open to that depth, repeating the process and finally covering the earth with another few inches of mulch. It took several years, but the soil began to yield and recover from the horrible treatment that had lasted for decades before we got here. now, we have recovered soils to the point of being able to plant most seeds and sets with fingers as our only tools. Places where water used to pool are now able to absorb even the heaviest rains with not problem and the garden that used to need water as much as several times a day to get seeds started can be left for weeks without irrigation and the plants still do well. That is because there is a thriving community of organisms extending from just below the surface to at least several inches down. In places, the soil has developed to over a foot, but it did not happen overnight. I have been loving my property "back to life" and caring for the soil for a decade and it continues to improve.

By expanding the base of the food chain, it has effects all the way up to the top. Since staring our gardens, we have seen a steady growth in wildlife, both numbers of individual creatures and the variety of different species. When we first bought our property, the wildest things we saw were neighbor cats and oppossum. Now we have a variety of rodents, turkey, fox, deer and dozens of species of birds, all attracted to the oasis that we have created. Even the neighbors started to notice the amazing recovery that we were able to achieve and now several of them are starting gardens or expanding their interest in growing a few things for use in their kitchens. where there was nothing but baked clay a decade ago, there are fruit trees, grapes, rhubarb, raspberries, blackberries, asparagus, Jerusalem artichokes, onions, leeks, chives, and in Summer, there will be cukes, melons, squash, tomatoes peppers and kale. Swiss chard, carrots, potatoes and radishes, to name just a few. Sure, some go to critters and each year we lose a few to disease or falling tree branches, but the volume of food that we produce in the yard grows each year. Bio-char is a large part of that ever-increasing cornucopia and if you are interested in learning more about it, I am producing a video that reduces the three to five hour process into a twenty minute presentation. If you learn better in-person, I have a small enough char generator that I can take it on the road and I am willing to give presentations and explain the easiest ways to make char to anyone who is interested. I do, however, require transportation and lodging costs to get me, and me device, to your location, so consider what it is worth to you to double your agricultural production.

Inquiries welcome! My physical address is ECO-Tours of Wisconsin Inc. 1445 Porlier street Green Bay, Wisconsin 54301 USA. If you want to contact m electronically, you can leave a comment here or use Facebook to contact us through ECO-Tours of Wisconsin Inc. "there". blessed be and may the art and science of restoring the Earth bring you multi-fold blessings. I know it has for me!

I Am Just Dog Tired.

I love writing, especially if I feel that I can both learn and teach in the same post. The demons that I am wrestling with go back into a deep place, deep in all of our psyches. The forces are mammoth because they have stretched across generations. Much of the work that needs to be done to access these places is tiresome or difficult because they are shrouded in the mists of time. A friend of mine recently read the originally noted works of the brothers Grimm, of fairy tale fame. She commented on several interesting and so it seemed to her, twisted themes that she had noted. First off, when a man turned evil, his hair almost immediately fell out. I guess this is part of many of the stories. Also, she said, young girls in the stories frequently ran off with strange men from far off lands. She also said that there seemed to be a lot of sexual abuse instances and rapes. I wonder if the men who were charged with collecting and transcribing the stories were bald? I also wonder if the old women whose stories they were collecting felt a bit violated. Back in those days if you made it past fifty you were very old, so perhaps men of balding age were a little on the devil may care side of standard decorum. I'm pretty sure that if a gent came along who wanted to know the stories that you told your children they might be considered a bit suspect from the start. ( I would hope that even in today's day and age, it would raise a few eyebrows) I imagine that in the late middle ages, at the time these stories were continuously told down through the ages, you pretty much knew what your destiny was from the start. There was no such thing as social mobility. Whatever was in the village is all you would ever have. Gambling for a future, whether it might be better or worse might only be possible by taking flight with a random stranger. Keep in mind, there were virtually no books. There had never been any and to keep one's culture alive, you had to have storytellers who could pass along important knowledge in an entertaining way.

please forgive my jarring perspective. I have been Disnified all week. I have seen enough princesses to last some cultures millennea. I had to have something to hold onto so I wouldn't drown in schmaltz. The source material for most of what Walt Disney peddled has always been, for me, at least as compelling as his movies. The interplay between the old way thinking, where traditions were carried on orally around the hearth with mammas talking to their children dates back to cave people days. Codifying it into symbol language and standardizing the genre was the antithesis of storytelling. The memes of the day have always been living stories, much like the ones referenced in the end passages of Fahrenheit 451. Each person having their "book" to translate important ideas that continued culture across the ages. Now that such a vast part of our folk lore has been standardized, I worry that our mothers are not relaying the important messages of our time to their children. When the stories themselves were committed to memory and their functionality as parable kept certain knowledge alive, it seemed that evolution would be easy. Once a story is committed to a movie, only our perspective with relationship to it can change. In days of old, generation to generation the stories got tweaked, mis-remembered or different parts were embellished or downplayed. Sometimes telling to telling they would change.

The current process for passing on our culture through stories has become having to have people like me, instead of the mothers and grandmothers telling living stories. In addition to load-in and load out of a nine truck show, we also ran the show eight times between Wednesday and Sunday. If all goes well, this is the exact same story they will hear from Sao Paulo to Helsinki and from Japan to Mexico. Children all around the world love mickey mouse. This is an annual occurrence for me and I never quite get over the fact that even with all the joy that the Disney versions of these ancient stories give to children of all ages, the parent material for the inspiration came from two guys traveling around asking old ladies what do you tell your children at night after dinner as you sit around the hearth?

Blessed Imbolc

I bring you resonant frequencies from the Great Lakes Region. To create this wave, I will go to the opposite end of the great bowl that is the Great Lakes Watershed, to a bay nearest the East Coast, pluck at a string of history and with luck reverberate meaning through all the time in-between. I will reach back through an age of Wiley and capricious destruction to a humble birthplace of one George Copway,born 1881, whose native Ojibwa name means "He Who Stands Forever". When you need to span a great distance, you need to tie one end of your bridge to a sturdy and solid support. The Oneida people, who I live closer to than any other tribe, are the "People of the Standing Stone". This reference point I am using is a stone of monolithic proportion. A man, who became the first ever, first nations writer, to be published, makes his words "special", if only that they were his, in a time when the voices of nearly all of his people had been all but been wiped out. I respectfully use his words to anchor my message today. Because he was born into a place that I have been, on the opposite end of my world, my bioregion. This giant bowl draining into the Great Lakes has always inspired me, always informed my understanding of "birthplace". I honor the space, the ecology, the niches that surround her great shoreline and the habitat that it provides to many millions of humans. since childhood I have continued to study these freshwater seas in an effort to share my understanding with those who have not yet understood that we, and everything we do has direct and indirect effects on the water, the quality of life that is possible in this basin and on the future for many hundreds of thousands of years. Kahgegagahbowh knew all of these things in the very fibers of his being. His words have been put down for all time and I will use them as my anchoring point.

I was born in Nature's wide domain! The trees were all that sheltered my infant limbs, the blue heavens all that covered me. I am one of Nature's children. I have always admired her. She shall be my glory: her features, her robes and the wreath around her brow, the seasons, her stately oaks and the evergreen -her hair,ringlets over the earth- all contribute to my enduring love for her.
And whenever I see her, emotions of pleasure roll in my breast, and swell and burst like waves on the shores of the ocean, in prayer and praise to Him who has placed me in her hand. It is thought to be great to be born in palaces, surrounded with wealth -but to be born in Nature's wide domain is greater still!
I would much more glory in this birthplace, with broad canopy of heaven above me,and the giant arms of the forest trees for my shelter, than to be born in palaces of marble, studded with pillars of gold! nature will be nature still, while palaces shall decay and fall to ruins.
Yes, Niagara will be Niagara a thousand years hence! The rainbow, a wreath over her brow, shall continue as long as the sun, and the flowing of the river- while the work of art, however carefully protected and preserved, shall fade and crumble into dust!

This level of eternity is what we reflect upon during the holy days at the start of what is now called February. This Imbolc, much of the region has gotten a great storm and in my neck of the woods, the north wind is blowing to beat the ban! Winter is putting up her best protestations, but the advancing sun will eventually win this "war". Pulling the string, anchored upon the words of Kahgegagahbowh, taught across the ages, we have found that his words are true, his estimations, if anything could be prophetic rather than "innocent". his words had the strength of stone and cleave the flow of history as surely as the islands break Niagara into to separate falls.

Science now allows us to test for infinitesimally small percentages of highly toxic chemicals, including prescription drugs that are now in the Great Lakes. We have known for generations that our actions have sped up the silting in of the lakes, (known as eutrophication -a natural process that all lakes face) by over one hundred times. We have tried to clean up the water, but the majority of many contaminants are falling out of the atmosphere directly because the air is full of toxic compounds. all of these contaminants have the staying power of "He Who Stands Forever". Many types and kinds of poisons will be contaminating the food chain forever. They are the wastes, created by the systems that build the palaces, gild the pillars and exact the toll upon our Mother, Earth. Long after the glimmer fades, the wastes will remain. How we choose to react tot his truth is our own decision. We can choose to be a legacy to one world view or another.

My pagan beliefs are that the gods and goddesses that are alive around each one of us, the gods of the wood, the gods of the water, and the gods of both earth and sky are delighted when we give thanks for their gifts. If I were to continually try to rip and tear at the fabric of life surrounding me, others would be hurt by that process. Every step I have taken toward sustainability has also yield a distancing, of my self, from the destruction of life by waste and or energy creation/ waste. Even after more than five decades, I am still finding ways to ratchet back my waste, get more from less, or reduce wasteful throughput. When we honor the return of Father Sun and the impregnation of Mother Earth, the four corners of the Earth are a huge part of this. The triple goddess is alive all around and father sun is entering, literally, from the South. Earth and sky are one in our transcendent awareness. The enlivened whole is much, much more than the sum of parts. The note plucked across the ages, on the taught sting I have strung is that the same abundant nature exists today, it welcomes all who allow themselves to be born into it and even after the palaces crumble, we will have only earth and sky to sustain us.

Blessed Be!