Magic Beans U.S.P.S. (Untited States Postal Service)

I have said for years that the best way for the Postal Service to turn around budget woes is to go to MWF (Monday, Wednesday, Friday) delivery. Transportation of mail, through the expansive vehicle fleet is the single largest cost of their service. Continue to pay staff at current wages and try to utilize available hours for neighborhood involvement or community building. Imagine hundreds of thousands of USPS emissaries across the nation, making a difference in their families, home life and neighborhoods. This would reduce carbon emissions by nearly half and provide the biggest bang for the buck for those that want to slow climate change. The waiting of a single extra day should not cause any trouble on mail of any type save those that already incur extra charges. I have looked at the numbers, over half the postal service costs are transportation. Reducing red ink is as easy as stopping the funds hemorrhaged into the oil (fossil fuel) economy. A day of reckoning is upon us, either we will treat the planet with a bit of humanity and honor, or we will perish through ineptitude.

A second way to increase revenue is to make advertisers pay their way. If any for profit company wants to utilize the US mail, they should pay full freight for that piece. This unnecessary subsidy of corporations is hurting real people who have to lug that waste paper around! The incentives for cutting this beast's head off are many, but the benefits would accrue to everyone save the .0001%. Corporate welfare is class warfare.

We have the right to demand what serves the most of us the best, whether it be in things as deeply personal as our relationship to Creator, or with the Earth and the rest of creation; as communal as our food system or our education, or as public as either the rarefied echelons of governors who run our collective affairs and as mundane as how we each get our mail. We need to think what one of us would even be willing to run down a couple blocks for less than fifty cents, much less ship it all the way across this great nation? It is time to put on our big boy pants and get down to the matter of fixing the matter once and for all.

People over profits! This bean was once rare. When I first planted it, I was lucky to get a few pods with a few beans in each. After selectively harvesting and replanting the best each year, I now have only a few with only three seeds. Ideas are much the same. If we tend them and make good choices, weeding out the crap and re-investing only the best, they come out just fine. Anyone who tells you that they have all the answers is just kidding, but when they agree that we could all experience a lot more by trying than wringing our hands, studying the matter further or ascribing blame. If we invest in our best, give back to the community and become exemplary corporate citizens, abundance flows.

How To Live On Nothing

A favorite book of my youth by this title had these first words to say, right up front in the introduction, "First steal this book." In essence that is what most folks on the internet do, they steal information, often information that was produced by at least one other person. So it is in life as well and before we go too deeply into practicing this skill, let me say that at best it is somewhat rhetorical. Nothing but air, food water...and you are off to the races down many long and slippery slopes. We must always consume some things and exchange gasses, that is part of what animates us. I think we learned in Science Class in seventh grade, that all organisms eat, excrete, exchange gasses and reproduce. So, apart from these things, which can each be entered into in ways that may or may not have either positive or negative consequences. In fact, some methods for doing each of these defining acts, can have both positive and negative consequences. However, entire books could be written about each of these matrices and those tomes are for the most part written.

As many are fond of saying, "Don't sweat the small stuff, it is all small stuff." In relation to interplanetary and galactic scale, that may be true, but within the ionosphere, on this planet, there are important forces and trends that we need to take into account for quality of life to remain constant or improve. A very dear friend from college days dropped in and taught me that "If you can play with the kids, bake bread and do dishes, you will never go homeless." this, I have found to be true. What I would like to know is why so few people know about it or are unwilling to learn these basic skills. The small stuff really matters more than we can know because an endless series of relationships passes from our simple actions through chains of causation to create the environment that we must face daily. When I buy an item made with sweatshop labor, or that has been produced with a tremendous toxic legacy or requires vast stores of energy to produce, all of the ramifications of creating that product are an accepted "cost" of making that choice. The very device I am using now may have been produced with little more than high tech slave labor, sadly I don't even know if it was. Each of us must make certain choices and we will each be responsible for our own part in making the world of tomorrow.

I cannot possibly tell anyone what to do, but certain things that I have studied led me to make certain choices that worked and I can share them with you for better or for worse, you may not want to try them, but they may spark your own creativity into finding ways to live better on less in your life that will enrich your quality of life while greatly increasing your standard of living. When I was young, a trip to the dump or a junk picking run seemed a great way to both keep things from being land filled, or when I was really young incinerated. I even graduated to dumpster jumping for food when I became an adult. Certain rules apply, especially if you do not want to get sick, but I would estimate that hundreds of thousands of meals are thrown away each day in our country alone. Many pigs in our country eat better than people in some parts of the world. Being people of privilege, you would think that we would have more of a sense of obligation toward more equitable distribution of our great wealth.

A few packets of seed can, when carefully tended, produce many bags full of food I have found packets of viable seed for as little as $.05. What is the return on that investment? sorry to do the math thing again, but it helps to illustrate that although you may not really live on nothing, that living in abundance with plenty to give away can be done for a pittance if you allocate your time appropriately. Say each bag of food weighs in at 10 pounds. With some crops it might be less, but many other crops would be more than ten pounds per grocery bag. Conservatively, there would be a bag for each seed packet, again many would be more than that but some would be fewer. So fifteen cents investment could yield three bags or thirty pounds of produce. now, overt he past year or two, groceries have gone up tremendously. what used to average less than a dollar per pound has risen, in some cases to over three! Again let us take a conservative number like two dollars per pound. $0.15 yields then, $60.00, a four-hundred fold increase in value! Having tended gardens, three packets of seed could not take more than about an hour to plant, an hour to thin, perhaps another few hours through the growing season to weed and top dress with some compost. Even if you spent a few hours watering , which would be a lot, you could assume that you were paying yourself very conservatively at a rate of 7-10 dollars per hour. Not at all shabby if all your needs are met through playing with the children, baking bread and washing up the dishes.

Living on nothing then is more about cultivating a way of life that is of service to others and rewarding to yourself. Often, when I go to work, it is more for the fun and camaraderie than for the paycheck. If I just wanted the cash, there are more regular things that I could do but I probably wouldn't enjoy them nearly as much. For a time, I kept a small notebook and when conversing, I would note things that other people liked or enjoyed, needed or were on the prowl for. Perhaps, in the days of big old TVs with their wooden stands, someone would see my fish tank displayed in the cabinet and want one. I would take on part of their desire and perhaps find one for them, noting the size aquarium they wanted to put in it. I would hear that someone wanted to start hanging their clothes out to dry and within a week I would find clothespins at a rummage sale, things like that. even providing the service of shopping for a shut in in your neighborhood can bring unfathomable joys that cannot be bought with currency. A favorite saying that I heard when I was very young, but that always stays with me is, Desire is a trap, and liberation from desire is moksha (enlightenment). Living the truth of that statement is a challenge, but one that pays great rewards.

I could go on about hundreds of other ways to conserve and collect massive rewards for minimal effort. However, I was warned against throwing out too many ideas, so as not to disorient the potential newbies. instead, if you want more ideas send a SASE and five dollars (or something of equivalent value) to me at: one, double four, five Porlier Street Green Bay, Wisconsin five, four, three-0-one. We can also make the transaction on Paypal, just use my email once you get there for the account. (tnsaladino42@hotmail.com I will return a list of 100 things that one can do to save at least five dollars each over the next year. That alone, if you practiced every one would be a payback of 100 fold, again conservatively. Where the real value accrues is in getting your life back and truly, what is the real value of that? Priceless.

Okay, one more, just so you know I'm not fooling around. during the eighties, we began to get upset by the cost of canned beans, we ate a fair amount of them, primarily because they were reasonably priced, but the cost kept escalating. We began to buy fifty pound sacks of dry beans and cook them quickly in a large pressure cooker, to save fuel. Then we would can them in quart jars. Our accounting was that the quarts cost us about $0.25. At the time I believe that twelve ounce cans were $1.60. this was a bit more than 1/3 as much for over six times the cost. It took a few hours, but would feed us for many weeks on what we would spend for a few days of food from the store. The keys to all of these techniques are many, to think outside the box, invest in your own time, learn something and find ways to get better quality for less cost. This, in turn, usually creates opportunities to share deep connections with others by having more to share, examples of the ways your life is enriched and provide examples for others to follow on their way to their own process of living more lightly on the planet.

Ingenious Series of Code

When I began writing it seemed to me to be an ingenious series of code, meant to convey information. As I developed “sophistication” with the language, I discovered that to be adept with the written word, sometimes what was left unsaid had more power than the words themselves. In my usual stubborn manner, I still tend to say much more about what I mean and leave little to the imagination or more subtle factors in my message. This method of blurting out the truth rather than leading people to it has a power of it’s own, but frequently I fear, there is too much of a jump for the casual reader to absorb new images, ideas and icons that I have understood for most of my life. As a child, I wondered at the inhumanity of man (mostly the men I might add) toward other men (but mostly to the “fairer sex”. I hesitate to even use this language because it is seated in centuries of male domination and subjugation of women. So many of the words we use are carrying the baggage of this sexual slavery and exploitation that it is hard to write for long without bumping in to one or two.

It is high time that our civilization renounces the old way of thinking about the females who make up a slight majority of most natural populations. In cultures that select for men, inevitably society will have unmarried men who live shorter and sicker lives without the care of mates. Rather than getting bogged down in the aberrant sex selection practices that have been favored by some forms of state controlled childbirth policy, I want to qualify this statement partially. Although it is true, mated pairs may not be exclusively bi-sexual, the vast majority are. The very cultures that select for sex usually have taboos about same sex marriages as well, creating undue stress for the loving couples who stray outside social morays.  When America stole the concept of the Iroquois confederacy, they failed to utilize the most important factor in selection of representatives; the grandmothers were the only people who could vote. Imagine our culture if the cultural memories of the grandmothers were unleashed in policy making.

At once, those who were given flags instead of their children back from the war, those whose children have been damaged by drugs or environmental contamination would finally have a cohesive voice. Those who had lost children to violence, or poverty or the ravages of bad food and overwork, would have a say in how we treat the corporations (mostly men, and women who act like them) who currently receive the lion’s share of welfare in our country. The direct subsidy of allowing public air, water and soils to be contaminated for profit of a tiny few would end overnight. I say, if you are ever considering action of any kind, consult the grandmothers. The messages that I have chosen to send throughout my life have been in defense of the tribal cultures that we can all trace our roots back to. Their cultural intelligence has been lost, along with the power of the grandmothers. To regain any semblance of hope for the future we need to establish sustainable systems that have been proven over time through a long, handed-down chain of events that needs cultivation, not stigma.

We are, after all, tribal by nature. If we had a lick of sense, we would honor those who have seen the most, respect those who have given us life, endeavor to hold sacred the rejuvenating forces of Mother Earth and revel in our power to guide the coming generations. Until we get the intestinal fortitude, good sense or gumption to make the decisions that need to be made, we must resign ourselves to ever decreasing quality of life, more insidious poisoning of our environment, and ever dwindling rights at the hands of the most behemoth of corporate entities. Take time this Thanksgiving to appreciate the cornucopia of giving that belies the Earth’s Spirit and reflect abundance in all of your actions. If you feel run down, empty or depressed, realize that you have the right and the responsibility to change the world for the better.

Climate Change 202

The logical step, once Heat Islands are seen and understood, is to get a picture of large scale impacts of the hundreds of thousands of towns, transportation corridors, energy transmission corridors, etc. each belching up an energized bolus, carrying toxic compounds and particulate matter aloft. Again, perhaps a volcano would be more intense, and concentrated, but we are creating heat islands virtually everywhere. Like a child learning shades of red, we need to understand what we do to our atmosphere. Using the volcano as "out-of-the-box red" from the kindergarten set of Crayons. Perhaps what we are seeing on the global climate change scale is brick red, or terracotta. Still, undeniably "red" once we have matured and understand the range of color that makes up red. The amalgamation of these updrafts, which create nearly invisible columns of upwelling air, here in Northeast Wisconsin, have created a dense and stationary mass of heated air, so large, as to shunt winter weather as far south as Texas!
We see ever more heat, more drought, and wildly fluctuating diurnal (daily) temperature change, combined with heavier, and more prolonged wind, high rain events, etc. Two new types of rain events have now been seen in Wisconsin. One stalls normally, fast moving thunderstorms, (Which get their energy from superheated air blasting into the Stratosphere.) When vast amounts of energy are being released on still summer nights, the phenomenon can dump several times the monthly average, of rain, overnight. The second phenomenon is "training", where a series of nodes of heavy rain, travel perpendicularly along a storm's front, inundating a small area as it's parent air mass runs into these "bubbles", or "columns" of heated air which act as major atmospheric mountain ranges along urban/suburban corridors. I have seen as much as can be seen from the earth, and have integrated information gathered by flying as well. Most of the problem with these phenomena is that they are too small to be considered "weather" in and of themselves, they change weather. Yet, they are usually far too large scale for individuals to detect, perceive, or grasp without an understanding of the heat island concept.
In essence, we each have an atmospheric change map of our entire existence. It has mostly been lost to the scale of time, but we can imagine it quite easily once given tools to "see" this kind of process. At rest, we "contaminate" the air with carbon dioxide, this however is useful to plants, mosquitoes and a plethora of microbes. Because our body heat creates a tiny updraft, the CO2 tries to fall and the effect is of creating two counter spiraling vortecies. This can be imagined as a sort of doughnut shape. Along the inner surface of the bottom of the doughnut, air would be moving aloft, spinning the doughnut, and the CO2 would be curling out and down the outside of the doughnut. To help visualize this phenomenon, hold your right hand out and spin it clockwise, hold your left hand out and spin it counterclockwise. Now, move your hands from front to the sides. This gives you some sense of your "energetic addition" to the world when you are at rest. As you travel through life, you also bring with you a series of these doughnuts, spinning off like a nautilus through time-space. (please don't write this off as Metaphysics) If we exercise, our bodies, we actually make more CO2, and stir up the air more. Although we still make the generalized "doughnut effect", it is overwhelmed by fluid dynamics and eddy currents behind our moving mass.
Similarly, but without the counteracting CO2 is the car or truck at rest after use. It has the spiraling upward energy, but all it has to give back are the gasses and fumes borne up by the heat of the engine. When the car is running far more heat and fumes are created, borne upward by the energy of the heat. It sounds tiny, but we have hundreds of millions of cars operating every day!
Many of us remember the childhood banking lesson. Two sisters got a choice of having their annual allowance allocated in one of two ways. One chose to get ten dollars every month. She liked money and was very happy. Her sister chose a penny plus another penny every day, compounded for the entire year. The sister who picked the first payment plan thought ten dollars was a lot of money compared to a penny, and it is. However, a small change compounded over a long time has substantially more impact. "Penny Girl" has nearly seven hundred dollars by the end of three hundred and sixty five days, whereas the girl getting ten dollars per month only nets one-hundred and twenty.
Similarly, we need to look at long-term incremental changes that yield the biggest bang over the long term. Not everyone can go from a car using fuel at a rate of 25 MPG to one using it at a rate of 50MPG as I was able to do. This cut my transportation emissions by half. I could cut them by half again by always having one passenger, and by half again driving the car with three friends along. Carpooling could drastically the energy use we all have to use for transport. With four people riding in my car, we effectively get 200 MPG!
By using a solar furnace, frequently called a "scorched air" solar heater, I reduced my space heating bill by 1/3. This is only a few hundred dollars per year, but I am expecting the system to pay itself off in year three. From then on, that money saved stays in my bank, rather than flowing to a utility company. Perhaps, all one can afford to do is slow down a few miles per hour to save fuel, or check the air in their tires more frequently. Even keeping them two pounds psi harder can improve mileage without affecting handling. These small changes add up over time and complement one another in unique ways.
Find out if it is possible to ride share to work or the grocery, you may be surprised at how rich your life becomes while simultaneously saving resources! Imaging also, what life would be like if you just spent more time sitting and thinking, letting your CO2 cycle through the natural world the way God/ess intended.