#it seems soul society has something new for restriction to test

[edgar-panda-poe]

[neptune-midheaven]

ASTRO NOTES 🪐 🧿✨🌌

*THERE !!!!!! IS !!!!!! NO !!!!!! BAD !!!!!!!PLACEMENT !!!!!!! IN !!!!!!! ASTROLOGY !!!!!!!PLEASE STOP FEAR-MONGERING THESE POOR NEWCOMERS PLEASEEE !!!!!!!! CHALLENGING never equals BAD !!!!!! If you’re a true student of astrology this would be a well know FACT to you.

*Saturn and Capricorn placements are the areas you will slowlyyy become wise in, having developed compete mastery over that area with TIME.

*You usually get compared with other people who share your rising sign.

*Most scorpios/scorpio risings have dark complexions, they even could have almost a permanent shadow cast over their faces, they may struggle to find perfect lighting.

*Virgo in 6th house are hypochondriacs and are paranoid/worry a lot about their health. They’re very nit-picky about their “symptoms”, they’re the types of people to know what they’re coming down with when they’re already at a doctor appt., they may as well even EDUCATE THE DAMN DOCTOR LIKE GO AHEAD MRS PHDD.

*Chiron conjunct midheaven is the ultimate healer placement, other chiron placements, chiron in first/aspecting the ascendant, following behind, these people are true healers whether they realize it or not, they’re born to assist and heal the general public. The midheaven, the highest point of the sky representing our reputation and career, what we’re known for. These people generate a reputation for their “healing abilities”, they’re quite literally known as the wounded healer (depending on if Chiron is positively aspected in the chart, this will affect the flavor of their reputation), they will experience pain related to work or matters related to the reputation, their status and authority could be wounded, they can later use their pain to help and heal others. Challenges will be met at work if Chiron is afflicted. This placement also means one will have their pain and wounds projected to the public, the whole world knows your pain.

*Mars in twelfth need to express their energy, their anger and will through the activities of whatever sign mars is located in the chart i.e. mars in aries in the twelfth need to express suppressed anger/anger through physical activity, sports, working out, sex, pisces mars by unleashing their massive creativity, compassion, dreams (this sign, and house combo especially, has many dreams, it’s a sleepy placement for the ideal fiery and straightforward mars to be located in). Mars in twelfth is generally a good placement that could manifest in someone being a dancer or athlete, mainly finding escape through any type of physical activity for fire signs, work for earth, socializing for air and creativity for water. This placement has very gentle, enchanting watery movements if they get into any sports or physical activity.

*Mars in eleventh can be aggressive toward their friends esp if mars is in a fire sign it becomes no joke. Don’t get me wrong, they’re the best humanitarians and what not but they have a reputation of being the “angry” or “aggressive” friend out of most of their friend groups, they’re very competitive and energetic people. However the way they stick up causes, they way they are always seen supporting any humanitarian cause with their whole hearts is AMAZINGG. They’re the types of activists to stay late to a protest, they’re the types to seemingly never leave what they’re standing up for, what they’re supporting because they are SOOO AMBITIOUS AND YEAHH !!

*This isn’t talked about a lot but uranus in eleventh have to be the most comforting and “welcoming” presence out of every eleventh house placement in astrology, with uranus in its home, the house of aquarius, it erases any filter put on what friend is attracted by their social presence as EVERYONE is attracted to them, from any possible and imaginable background or culture and homeland, anyone can trust and confide in their wide openness as their care and concern for society is completely genuine. They are truly the biggest and truest humanitarians, the universal humanitarian that will lead us to the monumental revolution of history and bring humanity to a collective whole.

*Pisces moon, people lovee you. People want to come up and talk with you just because of how interesting and intriguing you are. You OOZE this aura of compelling mystery similarly to scorpio moon. Your innocent playfulness is undeniably charming and you are definitely the life of the party, people want to pay attention to you!!

*Saturn in 11th, you are not an outcast, you are not too strange. You’re fine for just who you are, your individuality is a struggle for you, saturn is restricting you from liberating yourself and merging with society, you can selective or strict with friendships. You teach others to have boundaries and to never trust others too easily, you select social causes with caution. There is never anything wrong with this !! You choose what you support for YOU and NO ONE ELSE. You choose who you wanna become friends with it’s because they have passed the true rigorous test of friendship. When you become friends with someone, you already know you can trust them deeply, your caution is quite admirable !!

*Mercury in 12th is an extremely beautiful placement. The native grows shy of their flawless minds, little do they know they are connecting with the watery depths of the astral and psychic realms of the twelfth, the vagueness of their cloudy thoughts winds them up in wispy sheets of intellectual confusion. Your mind is communicating the brilliant and unbelievable parts of what seems like a dream. You are not too confusing or vague for others to understand your ideas, people await what emerges from this shiny and imaginable abyss of a sleepy mind.

*Mercury in 8th have an intellectual superiority complex of sorts, they analyze a piece of information or thing by tearing through the surface until they find the deepest depths of the truth, they believe this will never compare to other placements as they have dug far deeper into something. Be careful to not assume that someone doesn’t know something you don’t, while it still can’t be true. You always want to know someone, don’t be too controlling about it because you could cause conflicts which you didn’t mean to in the first place. If you know your boundaries and limits and of others’, then you should be fine. This placement is brilliant for investigators, someone who could examine, analyze and evaluate to find the answer others can’t see. They harbor a psychic mind, a plutonic one who knows the weight words can have on people. Fantastically persuasive speakers !!

*Gemini in 3rd, gem mercury have unstable minds, they’re very much prone to babbling, but can easily start up a conversation because they never run out things to say so they’re pretty social and friendly.

*Capricorn moon is an amazing moon sign placement, here the moon is in detriment as the saturn ruled cappy doesn’t get along with the soft, nurturing moon, it’s always gotta work work work, limit, restrict !! There’s never anything wrong with the moon here, just because the moon and saturn can’t get along, just because they contradict each other’s completely different functions never means it’s a terrible moon sign. It just manifests in a completely unique way outside of the traditional service and role of the moon, similarly to let’s say sag mercury as it’s also in detriment, they both manifest creatively to make something new out of the planet’s sign. Back to cappy moon, this moon has the capacity to work as they find fulfillment in getting things done, serving others, but negatively restriction and criticizing. With saturn ruling capricorn here your emotions and wellbeing become restricted and limited, you have felt as if no one understands you, you believe something is wrong with you. Like no one in the world supports you emotionally. But this is NEVERRR true, people love you for how caring, attentive and even funny you are !! You care soo much about others you forget to care for yourself, SOME of you even begin to think it’s normal to ignore what your own needs, nooo you need to STOP THISSS . You deserve to feel great about what you do, your accomplishments, how you care for others, EVERYTHING, and most importantly believe, trulyy believe that nothing’s ever wrong with you !! You’re unbelievably charismatic and overall just.... WONDERFULLL. Ily guys smm you’re amazingly stronggg souls !!!

*Moon in 12th house is an EXTREMELY sensitive placement, these people are little babies on the inside (ilyy guyss you all have my heartt <33). They often felt neglected, not nurtured as a kid which creates their extreme sensitivity to their current surroundings and environment. Their shy moon is always hiding behind the mystical and otherworldly curtains of the 12th because of their sensitive upbringing or personality, it’s takes some time for the little guy to come out. The moon here needs SPACCEEEE. A person who’s a walking sponge with fragile emotions, they’re our emotional and energetic vacuum cleaners of the world, they are helping the world without ever realizing it !!

*Pisces risings are known for being hard to characterize for their ability to naturally adapt to their environment. You can tell if someone has this if they absorb their environment like a sponge, then, react to this energy, you can easily see this energy morphing. It becomes noticeable if there’s a lot going on. Another clue is having trouble defining them based on their first impression, like they could be anything you project onto them, very mysterious and dreamy individuals when you meet them.

*Your midheaven/10th house is what you look up to be or what traits you wish to embody, ex: aries MC, confidence, passion, courageousness, being a leader, etc. Moon in 10th, being a therapist, helping the less fortunate, medical professions.

*Libra risings usually have amazing skin, just like virgo risings, to contrast, I’ve seen most of them marked with freckles. They have very symmetrical features, perfectly balanced just like a scale. But it appears as if they’re “superficial” once their faces begin to wear into your mind.

[blushing-starker]

Cold mates and black coffees

For @starkerfestivals prompt of mates

There is, he supposes, something beautiful about a world such as this, primitive yet advanced and sophisticated. Children no taller than his knee carry around super computers that fit in the palm of one's hands, talk to friends thousands of miles away whenever they want. It used to take him months to receive his preferred concoction for the early night wake up call, now stores inhabit every corner of every city. They patiently wait to receive their dependents, all sorts of people relying on some version of the simple black coffee to jolt their system. Convenient, sure, no doubt about that. A quick stop at a Starbucks and violá, five hours of productivity guaranteed. But nothing builds character like swimming laps through a freezing lake infested with piranhas to keep away the urge to rest for just another five minutes. Unfortunately, sleepless days were the norm for him and Rhodey whenever they endeavored to race each other underwater.

There are clothes, too. Clothes for each season available year round. Fox fur adorns a lanky mannequin next to a twin showcasing how breezy summer fabrics can be. Riding boots that he would have spent a small fortune on decades ago shine below man made light for the cost of a nice meal over at Pepper's. Jewels fine enough for the family vault enchant any who take so much as two steps in either direction. Everything is for sale; it just means swiping a plastic card, presenting a number off a super computer or giving the cashier the remains of ancient trees. He could buy an ice cream cone (with sprinkles, of course, he's not an idiot) and immediately wander over to a restaurant selling sizzling curry. It's what his father dreamed about, a thousand years ago. How odd then, that his only heir couldn't be more nonchalant to all this.

It's his what, first month back from sleeping for half a century? He got accustomed to this whirlwind of a consumerist world by the first week. The soft purr of self-driving engines, flashing neon street signs, a melting pot of twenty, thirty languages, glittering clothes clashing with garish makeup, an overwhelming scent of smoke, perfume and money is as familiar as the palm of Rhodey's left hand or Pepper's right. Is it fantastic, being alive for the wild ride that is the twenty-first century? Yes, of course it is. But it's his father's dream; not his. His dream is the same as what drove Maria Stark into the world: finding his mate. Which, logically speaking, won’t happen until time has colored his hair with quite a bit more starlight and streaked thin lines around not too shabby cheekbones. (Rhodey’s teasing words.)

Going along with logic, there is a chance his mate will never show up. It was mere luck his father met the only woman besides Peggy that could stand his whole. Well, that could just stand him, period. A mate is found by scent, identified by touch and only bound with words. If his father had gone for one more drink, he’d probably be as real as the tooth fairy. In the back of his head, there lives a voice. And this voice he named Miss Lucky. She told him how lucky he would need to be in order to find a mate not too close to cradle or grave, a person that saw eye to eye in the majority of the basics and was open to his predilection. Someone that wouldn’t fear or expose him, wouldn’t want to strike the killing blow themselves. And Christ, with or without Miss Lucky, it’s a fool’s idea, thinking that in the middle of New York amidst one of the coldest winters to ever grace the city, his mate, his soul’s match, his other heart will chance upon him and actually accept the fact that he barely exudes a scent. Let alone something useful enough to help others recognize his class.

That’s the one downfall to living in this time; so much tension regarding one’s class. It is infinitely better than before when there were only three possibilities and the social restrictions could very rarely be shattered. But now it’s about pulling rank, percentages listed on a piece of paper could be used against you or signify one’s survival. A double-edged sword. To be a nurse, any applicants must be less than thirty percent alpha. Soldiers were forbidden from entering foreign countries if they had more beta characteristics than not. Lovers, in some parts of the world, could marry exclusively when their percentages were compatible. In the old times, if you smelled like an omega, you were treated as such. That could entail being thrown into a whorehouse or perceived as royalty destined to bring life into the world. Once puberty came, a simple prick and a vial of blood determined one’s next decision regarding the future.

He took the test. Just out of curiosity and it’d be rude not to provide a mate with information so readily accessible merely because of an unjustified fear over his identity. He is an alpha. And if the test had said otherwise, it would have been no problem. Of course not, he would have been proud to identify as a beta or omega. His mother was a beta and his nanny, basically his second mother, was an omega. No shame would’ve clouded his mind at receiving such news. The matter was this, though, he had believed to be an alpha the entirety of his life. If the paperwork said that was his lowest percentage, different rules and procedures, updated to today’s society, would need to be learned.

And he’s so tired of it all when only a handful can smell the fact he’s an alpha. What was he supposed to do, carry the results in his pocket in case a bigot searched for a fight? No, that would be, as Pepper had made very clear before, extremely silly.

He carries the test in case his mate considers such matters important. Or their family. Yes, it’s not because he worries that society will somehow doubt his identity. In the end, being an alpha is an integral part of who he is. It shouldn’t be that way and he barely knows what that means, but it’s true. Miss Lucky comes back around swiftly now, what if his mate isn’t interested in him because of his percentage? What then? Learn what the other classes represent to that person and behave in ways they believe suit said classes? Could his match be with a pureblood, intent on “staying true” to their highest percentage? Would he be able to, cinnamon. Wait, cinnamon and honey? Is that rain and sunlight? Since when does Starbucks incorporate those smells? And how the hell does he know what sunlight smells like? He’s insane. There’s no other explanation, oh that must have hurt.

A young man has just barreled into him. Slammed into his arm like a linebacker. A linebacker that weighs a feather and a half. How is he this light, a breeze had more force. What should he, what’s the proper ritual here, oh my god

“Your nose is bleeding- “

“I’m so sorry, I wasn’t looking. I’m just late for class and- “

“Calm down and let me buy you some coffee; you’re half dead- “

“Shit, your coat. I will pay you back, I swear.”

He hums, looks down and apparently he was too involved in his quest to find a mate that he completely bypassed the thought that this man had accidently crashed into him while holding a coffee…

A mate. He doesn’t know what sunlight smells like. How could he? Unless that’s what his mate smelled like. The young man inhales sharply, lets out a little “oh, I think, I know it’s you.” and, on further reflection, he notices this kid has the voice of an angel. Soft and kind while not being so lilting he’d think it weak and demure. Ah, he looks like an ethereal entity too. Of course he does.

It’s the eyes that do it for him, enchant him enough he wants to kneel and propose right there in the hopes of waking up each night to those amber pools as familiar and mysterious as the universe itself. The rosy lips, pink cheeks and sweeping lashes are also quite nice. He has the body of a being from the old tales, a nymph or a muse destined to bring light and joy to the world. And black coffee to coats older than his father and grandfather combined.

“Could I touch you properly? I think spilling sugar over that coat didn’t really give me the chance to feel my mate, Mister?” Rhodey’s gonna annihilate him. This is a child, twenty-one at most. They could exchange numbers; communicate when his best friend wouldn’t be tempted to take one look and accuse him of going for jailbait. He could make a plan, organize a way to gently explain how he’s an undead creature of the night whose low circulation means that somehow his hormone production slowed and therefore he barely smells like wood let alone an actual human being. They could make it work. If he’s lucky, Angel here won’t fall for another. If he’s lucky, lots of things won’t happen. Or they will anyway.

“Stark. Tony Stark. It’s a pleasure to meet you, all things considered. When I learned one’s mate smells like something unknown, I didn’t quite expect literal sunshine to be what I noticed. And don’t worry about the coat; it’s nothing.”

Marie Antoinette gave him this coat as a gift on his sixteenth birthday a few years before her death. It’s fine.

“Oh. I, I wouldn’t have thought I smelled like that. It’s really nice, actually. You smell, and please don’t take this the wrong way, like alpha. And home. I know it’s weird, but I can’t explain it any other way. I’m sorry if it’s too- “

At least he already knows he dislikes that worried furrow on such a happy face. He surges forward, clasps a soft hand and lets slip a shocked gasp, sees the mirrored reaction because Jesus, it’s as if he licked his finger and then stuck it inside a power outlet. Every hair on his body stands on end and when was the last time his heart beat that fast? Surely it was the night his old flame left or when they, no. No memories of a past lover when his mate is right here, clutching his hand like a lifeline.

“I don’t believe I know your name. Seems a little unfair, don’t you think? Wanna even the odds?” It’s meant to make the young man smile and he does.

It’s only when he grins that Tony notices the sharpened incisors and the slight cold coming from the small figure. The same fog that follows him around even on the hottest of days. The exact shape of teeth Tony cleans in front of his bathroom mirror each night.

“Peter. My name’s Peter. Nice to meet you, Tony.”

[dino-nugget7]

A Manifesto Against The School System

As of writing this I am a second year Public High School Teacher. I won’t be able to live with myself if I spend another year at it. Literally, I feel like a bit of a monster for deciding to finish out this school year rather than quitting right now. But we do what we must to survive, my students won’t be less oppressed because I left, and if nothing else, it gives me an opportunity to strategize about what I can do to aid in revolutionizing school because authentic alternatives to public school exist but none I have found have been intersectional enough to replace public education without excluding the kids who would most benefit from escaping the main school system here in America.

Some of the reasons I did not understand how oppressive school actually is, are that my interests and hobbies happened to align very neatly with the “core” classes, and that even though I grew up very poor and moved around a lot as a kid, we eventually settled and I went to a well funded high school that had just about any elective and/or after school club that I might be interested in trying and then some. During that time, I came to see school as a place where I could explore my passions and escape my home situation. So I figured I would love to pay it forward and go be a teacher.

I recognized at least, the privileged position I came from and decided I wanted to go learn how to teach in settings as different from my high school as possible. Which is why I went and got special permission for most of my classroom placements throughout the teaching program to be at alternative schools. In Colorado at least, alternative schools are small public schools which primarily serve students identified as “at risk”, which is shorthand for “Statistically more likely to drop out than the general population for one reason or another.”

I did not know when I asked to be placed in one, but learned within days of being there that most people that even know alternative schools exist, think of them as the places where “the bad kids” go. I realized very quickly that they are actually places filled with kids who have experienced a lot of trauma in and out of school and don’t respond to that trauma the way adults want them to respond. I came to adore kids at alternative schools because they remind me of my younger siblings.

Like my oldest brother, many of them find school mind numbingly easy and boring and have much more pressing matters to devote their mental energy to.

Like my middle brother, many of them have spent so much time around teachers who do not understand neurodivergence that have been convinced of the lie that they are weird, dumb and/or lazy and because of that, trying to participate in school is like hitting their head on a brick wall.

Like all of my brothers and my sisters, they have a ton of skills that they are brilliant at, but that are not prioritized by the school system, so they never pursue them, such as construction, music, makeup and programming.

Many, if not most of them come from living situations full of abuse and neglect and/or poverty so they don’t have the mental or emotional space to worry about much beyond survival, and not only haven’t learned how to make and achieve long term goals, but have never had the luxury of a stable enough environment for that kind of planning to be worthwhile.

All that being said, something that you only realize if you actually work in a few public alternative schools, as I have done through college and my current job, is that the name is actually an oxymoron.

What started me down the path of considering and researching all the ways school is an oppressive system, was a conversation I had with a student in my first year teaching. He was learning about chemical reactions and safety and asked me the infamous question, “Why do I have to learn about this?” to which I said “Because everything is chemicals and understanding how they can interact with one another and ways they can harm you can keep you safe when you do things like clean or cook.” To which he replied, “Well no offense but I have no idea how this shit relates to cooking and please don’t tell me because its not like I’m actually going to remember it when I am cooking, and I already know how to clean safely because of work. But you’re still going to make me learn this boring shit anyways so seriously, why do we have to learn about this?”

I paused to consider what he was asking. I had interpreted, as the system trained me to, that the question he was asking was, “what value does this knowledge hold?” But what he actually meant was “Why are you making me waste my time learning about this thing that I never asked to learn about?” So I replied, as a sort of test of my new understanding, “It’s part of the physical science curriculum the Education Department thinks is important for high schoolers to learn.” He was taken aback, “Wait, you don’t decide what stuff we learn about? What’s even the point of teachers then? Why don’t they just give us a list of all their stupid stuff they think we should know so we can get on with our lives?” He had a point and I have spent a lot of time reflecting on and growing from that conversation.

Sure, there are some key differences that make alternative schools slightly more tolerable than your standard 800-4,000 kid high school. Class sizes are smaller so students get more individualized help. We get funding to help students access things such as food, clothes, hygiene products, and healthcare and know students well enough that we actually know which kids are lacking these resources. We have slightly more leeway than traditional schools to create innovative lessons. We don’t give out homework.

But public alternative schools are still oppressive in most of the ways that the big schools are. I’m sure none of this will be a surprise to most readers, but I want you to really consider how restricted kids in public school are, how restricted you probably were in school as you read through this.

School starts early in the morning and students have to constantly shift mental gears throughout the day due to a tight schedule of constantly rotating classes and a very short lunch break. Throughout the day, bells tell students when they can’t or must move around or eat. Students have to ask when they need to go to the bathroom or get water and teachers cannot go at all outside of their plan period because students are not trusted to be in the classroom without an adult even for a few minutes. They have no control over who they share space with and very little control over their ability to leave that space if it conflicts with their needs. There is a strict dress code which disproportionately targets marginalized students. Students are expected to be sociable but not given nearly enough opportunities to actually socialize. The school keeps records of everything the student has ever gotten in trouble for, every class the student has taken, every grade they have received, their “class rank,” and every intervention program the student is part of. And like every public school, alternative schools must follow state curriculum standards and by extension, grading, data collection, and required testing. On the surface it might not seem like it, but that last point is actually the most insidious one and its the one that has followed students into remote learning during the pandemic.

According to the people who decide how schools work, there are four factors of student choice: These factors are Time, Place, Pace, and Path. For example, if I am running a unit on plate tectonics, rather than giving students a worksheet and telling them to work on it as we go through a slideshow and turn it in at the end of class, I could put them in groups, give them an online choice board of three different but roughly equivalent projects relating to plate tectonics to choose from, each with different rubrics for completion and tell them they can turn it in at any time in the next two weeks. And then instead of devoting class time to direct instruction, I would give them a variety of resources to peruse and teach them how to research more and let them choose what aspects of plate tectonics to focus on and how to present their information. Now, this is certainly a few steps in the right direction away from making kids sit in rows and listen to the teacher drone on about plate tectonics while they take notes. But it misses the most important factors of choice in my eyes, the things that I would be fired for if I actually gave them the choice about: How students spend their time and what they are allowed to prioritze.

None of this is to say that expecting kids to learn is inherently fucked up or that teaching inherently makes one an oppressive person. On the contrary, authentic teaching and learning are vital to our ability to solve our problems and grow as people. If all students were given the opportunities to spend their childhoods learning things that they were actually interested in, to explore the full breadth of knowledge that humans have compiled at their leisure without timelines or milestones except the ones they set for themselves, to socialize with people of all ages, to authentically participate in society both as learners and as educators, as leaders and as team members, the world wouldn’t be perfect, but it would be a lot less soul crushing.

Now, I mentioned at the beginning of this piece that authentic alternatives do exist.  To get you started on researching what’s out there, I recommend starting with Sudbury schools and the unschooling movement.

But unless these models somehow miraculously become a large and accepted enough presence to get government funding, or money ceases its hold on us all, the public school system will be the only one that most students, especially impoverished students, transient students, english language learners, and disabled students (especially those with profound disabilities) will have access to. Which is a damn shame and a problem I am committed to trying to figure out how to contribute to solving because those are the students whose lives would be most radically transformed for the better if they got the opportunities that these models provide.

[star-anise]

i was hoping my last ask would get me a free rant without having to make a dreaded choice uhhhhhhh do maybe washcloths or fake smile?

Hahaha no you have to specify what white person thing you want a rant about, or else I’m paralyzed by too many choices. And nb. by “white” I generally mean white Anglo-Saxon Protestant; WASPs have traditionally been held up as the cultural standard everyone else n North America or other British colonies should follow, and the “whiteness” of different European ethnicities in those colonies is generally judged by how assimilated they are to the WASP ideal. So my observations will not apply very well to, for example, other European ethnicities, or people from areas colonized by those other European groups.

WASHCLOTHS. Related to another trap, Guest Towels Guests Must Never Use. Which are usually distinguished by their elaborateness and a thin layer of dust. As a certified White Person (Anglo Canadian) I can say: This is a real actual literal thing my family does. If I stay at an aunt’s house, I don’t use her guest towels; I walk past the guest towels on the towel rack and ask my hostess, “What towel do you want me to use?” and she fetches me a new, less nice, towel out of the linen closet. 

The actual washcloth meant to be used is hung somewhere separate. When I was about 13, I rebelled against sharing a washcloth with my brothers, bought my own washcloth from a department store, embroidered my name on it, and zealously defended it against all comers. These days, my older brother has four children. When we go to his house to eat dinner, his children all wash their hands before they eat… and then wipe them dry on a single towel hung in the downstairs bathroom, which his guests also use. So we all wash our hands and then share germs. I… think? There might be a bar on the opposite wall with guest towels hanging on it?  But my eyes have been trained to skate right over guest towels. They’re decor, not things we actually use.

Why White People Do This:

1. Washing and cleanliness… have not traditionally held a central place in European life the way, say, wudu does in Islam. Although priests ritually wash their hands before performing the consecration of Mass, nobody else in the congregation has to. This is partly because in Christian Scripture, Jesus says that if something is ritually pure but spiritually suspect, it should be treated as impure, which Christians kind of took to mean “ritual purity and cleanliness rituals are things non-Christians do.” 

So in the 19th century, a German doctor discovered that you could reduce the rate of infection dramatically when doctors washed their hands and instruments between dissecting dead bodies and attending in childbirth. Doctors were OFFENDED and APPALLED by this–partly because the guy pointing it out was an asshole, yes, but partly because there was a feeling that “a gentleman’s hands are always clean”, so it was offensive to say their hands were dirty because it impugned their class and education.

Cleanliness is hugely related to class and status–I could go on a LOT more here about how in the 19th century, British and American attempts to “educate” and “civilize” poor white people and people of colour included imposing standards of hygiene on them that felt cruel and punitive–scrubbing skin raw, using caustic soap, delousing with kerosene–partly because white people didn’t have a very advanced idea of what chemicals made good cosmetics, and there wasn’t much awareness of the need for oils or moisturizers. (For a long time very few sources of natural oil, like canola, olives, or sunflowers, or even petroleum products, were available in Britain, so until somewhat recently they only really had pine tar and animal fat, which they used for everything from making soap to lighting lamps to greasing cart axels.) And the 19th century cleanliness movement did not have a good opinion of traditional bathing methods like the sauna, banya, or steam room, where sweat was scraped off the skin. So people who HAD hygiene rituals that worked for them, when they emigrated to western Europe or North America, got shamed and discouraged from using them. It was just expected that part of “civilizing” a child who hadn’t been “well brought up” was forcefully ducking them in a bath and scrubbing them while they screamed and fought you.

So for white people from everything but the highest classes, if you go a few generations back, there’s this feeling that cleanliness is something unnatural and unpleasant, something imposed by a punitive authoritarian force, and not something intrinsically desirable. Old men used to talk about “taking a bath once a year, whether I need it or not,” and fear of losing their “protective coating of dirt.” Which makes sense when you realize how awful old cosmetics used to feel.

I mean, as I type this, I’m applying Vaseline to the hangnails on my fingers, because when I use soap in the bath or do the dishes or wash my hands after going to the bathroom, the soap strips oil from my skin and dries it out, leading it to crack and bleed. This is a really common problem but the current solution seems to be “women carry tiny bottles of moisturizer everywhere in their purses, and men… suffer if they want to seem manly, and then post memes to facebook about how rough and terrible their hands look to emphasize their heterosexual masculinity.”

This also relates to why white people say racist things about people of colour being “dirty” when they use natural methods of keeping their hair or skin clean. The white conception of cleanliness is honestly really fucked up.

2. Cloth holds an especially weird place in white society. I mean, lots of cultures everywhere like their cloth to look nice! But in Europe and American colonies in the 1600s there was an extra special movement to restrict women economically and bar them from business and public life–so while a rich woman could run a business outside the home and buy and sell in 1400, that freedom was disappearing in 1600. Only women of the ~lower classes~ did real actual work. And the religious sentiment at the time really emphasized Purity, Hard Work, Productiveness, and No Fun. So women were supposed to stay inside all the time and not participate in industry! But they were always supposed to be busy. The saying was literally “Idle hands are the devil’s tools”. 

That turned embroidery from an aesthetic, decorative art into a moral act. You didn’t embroider to make something pretty; you embroidered for the good of your soul. Fancy embroidered pieces displayed in a home were meant to demonstrate a) that the house was rich enough to have idle women, and b) the moral purity and obedience to gender norms of the women of the house. (This also extends to things like quilts, lace doilies, hooked rugs, etc.)

So towels used to be made of linen, a plain flat cloth, and then embroidered and otherwise embellished. My mom, in the 1960s, learned how to do embroidery where you painstakingly pull a few threads out of a piece of linen, and then embellish the place where the threads have been taken out.

Linen, incidentally, is a strange and amazing fabric. When new, freshly starched and ironed, it is flat and crisp. But pressure and moisture can change it really easily. When I sew with linen, I just have to lick my fingers and fold it over, and it stays like that–something most fabrics don’t do. So if you actually use a linen towel to dry your hands, you will crumple it in a way that is very hard to reverse.

Therefore: Fancy linens were displayed prominently in the home as a status symbol, but a guest who wanted to stay on his hostess’s good side did not use them. There are a lot of ettiquettes around using linens when you absolutely have to, like just gently wiping your fingers on a towel, that diminished the damage the fabric would take.

So, I mean, actually rich people used their good towels, because if they ruin them, they can just get new ones. Fancy linens were intended for high-class guests who knew how to keep from damaging them. So using someone’s guest towels sent the message, “I am so high-status that I’m WORTH potentially ruining something that took a ton of work to make and maintain.” Or, if you obviously weren’t that high status, “I don’t know about the work that goes into making nice things, or don’t value the work you did and don’t care how much effort you’ll have to go to because I wanted to wipe my face.”

But that was in the days of linen. Guest towels are going out of fashion, partly because modern terrycloth towels are almost impossible to crease or ruin, so it doesn’t really matter if guests use them. But even with terrycloth towels, homeowners sometimes like to create really elaborate towel displays. I don’t know how those people feel when guests use them, but as a white girl I feel really uncomfortable taking a towel display in somebody else’s house apart, and try to wipe my hands while causing the least disturbance possible.

Oh, I guess I should mention that invisible tests no one will ever mention if you fail are absolutely a white person thing. Like, if you watch costumed period drama movies, there’s often a scene where someone is really unbearable and rude, and everyone is super polite and awkward and just sits there and says nothing. That’s not consciously an exclusive practice; from the perspective of white people it’s just an ingrained reflex, “Freeze and smile when something awkward happens and then later cut them out of your life.” 

That reflex comes because the Industrial Revolution and colonization (1600s-1800s) led to a lot of class mobility. Ordinary men could get involved in business and become wealthier than the hereditary landowners! Which the hereditary landowners felt super threatened by, so they went out of their way to cultivate manners and standards that were very unlike those used by the common people. Upperclass accents became more marked and exaggerated; dictionaries decided to make English spelling and grammar especially hard to learn; manners got super weird and unintuitive. They wanted to make it as hard as possible for common people to fit into high society.

Therefore, to enable that system, the rule became: Never tell someone when they’re fucking up. If they know what they’re doing wrong, they’ll FIX it, and then they’ll fit in better! And that would lead to the absolute downfall of Western civilization! Which would of course be a bad thing! And that got codified as The Right And Desirable Way To Do Things. A low-class person might say “Hey, you just insulted me, I’m upset,” but someone with aspirations of rising higher in life learned to freeze and say nothing. That was how you defined “polite”.

So like I said, if I, as a white person, point out to other liberal white people that the freeze-and-smile-awkwardly response is really exclusionary to people from different backgrounds, they go, “Oh my gosh, you’re right!” and we can talk about changing it. It’s why white people invented assertiveness training. It’s a thing white people have to unpack and decolonize. But it’s not commonly a conscious attempt to exclude someone by not letting them know they’re breaking the rules.

ANYWAY. Towels.

So IF someone has guest towels taking up their towel rack in their bathroom, there’s very little room left for the actual towels. (Unless they’re like my aunt, whose bathroom literally has a second towel rack to accommodate her guest towel arrangement) Therefore: The entire fucking family sharing a single washcloth because that’s all they have room for, and it doesn’t feel that important not to share.

WHITE CULTURE IS WEIRD AS HELL.

And if you come to my house? You’re allowed to use my guest towels. It’s what they’re there for.

[eretzyisrael]

Moral Dilemmas Then and Now

Dario Gabbai died last month, aged 97. Gabbai was a Sonderkommando, a Greek-Jewish prisoner at Auschwitz-Birkenau who was forced to help herd new arrivals to the German death chambers and remove their bodies to the crematoria a few minutes later. Very few of them survived the war, and Gabbai may have been the last of them.

Gabbai, who was often interviewed and appeared in several documentaries about the Holocaust, described shutting down his brain in order to survive in that hellish place. There were things that he had seen, he said, that he could neither talk about nor get out of his mind.

His situation raised moral dilemmas in the purest possible way. He had a choice: he could help the Germans or they would kill him immediately. Should he sacrifice himself in order to avoid becoming an accessory to murder? It would be pointless: there was no shortage of prisoners who would take his job in order to stay alive a bit longer. The Germans killed all the Sonderkommandos every few months, anyway (Gabbai arrived near the end). Maybe they simply stopped being able to do the soul-destroying work, or maybe the Germans were afraid of a revolt; there were at least three bloody but unsuccessful revolts of Sonderkommandos in Treblinka, Sobibor, and Birkenau. These were men – boys, actually – who had nothing to lose, and who knew in the most graphic and painful way they had nothing to lose.

One day, the transport included two of Gabbai’s friends from Salonika. “I told them they were going to die,” he recalls. “My cousins and I gave them whatever food we had, and we told them where to stand so the gas would kill them in two minutes instead of five.”

The cousins scooped the men’s ashes from the oven and buried them outside the crematoria. “We said ‘Kaddish’ for them,” Gabbai says. “But we were already so ice-cold [emotionally]. Nothing was penetrating. That is the only way we could survive.” – Naomi Pfefferman, “Job of Infinite Horror”

Gabbai was apparently not religious, but he indicated that it gave him some comfort to be told that his actions were permitted as pikuach nefesh, a doctrine that permits violating almost any of the commandments when it is necessary to save a human life.

I rarely write about the Holocaust; I’m not happy with the uses to which it is sometimes put. But I’m thinking about it today because the worldwide coronavirus pandemic has again posed hard, though different, moral questions. There are simple (but not easy) ones, such as that faced by the doctor with an inadequate number of ventilators at his disposal. And there are the more complicated ones, like finding a balance between shutting off economic activity in order to reduce the rate of transmission of the virus, and preventing an ensuing economic catastrophe.

This is a very difficult question from a scientific standpoint, since getting a good answer depends on predicting the effects of social distancing, quarantines, and lockdowns on the spread of the virus, something which as yet is only partially understood. We are better able to predict the economic consequences of these measures, although even then there is uncertainty about possible feedback effects that could make a downturn more severe.

There are moral questions too. As an extreme example, suppose it were decided to impose no restrictions at all on workplaces and schools, and let the virus run its course. Because of the nature of the illness, the greatest number of those seriously affected would be the elderly. It might be possible to mitigate the imbalance by isolating only older people – many of them are retired, after all – but there would still be a much greater opportunity for them to be exposed if movement and commerce weren’t restricted. And if the healthcare system became overloaded, as happened in northern Italy, then they would be much more likely to die, even if care were not apportioned according to age.

If, on the other hand, a society succeeded in “flattening the curve” by reducing normal activity, then everyone who was sick would be more likely to receive the best possible care, which would disproportionately reduce the death toll among the older patients.

A straightforward utilitarian argument can be made for letting the virus run its course. Older people are on balance consumers and not producers. They have a negative effect on the economic life of a society. Economically speaking, they wouldn’t be missed. The virus would just be a small blip, with a small number of productive individuals becoming seriously ill and very few dying.

Sweden seems to be doing something like this. They are taking some social distancing measures and trying to isolate older citizens, but they have not shut down workplaces and schools. At some point there will be herd immunity, and at some point a vaccine.

This strategy could not possibly be adopted in Israel, where even secular people are imbued with Jewish ethical principles, according to which every human life is equally valuable. The tradeoff that is being made in Israel between economic activity and suppressing viral transmission leans in the direction of protecting people from the virus, a policy of pikuach nefesh. And I think this is a humane policy, a morally better one, even if it is less rational by some standard than strictly minimizing economic damage.

Somewhat less admirably, people in assisted living facilities here have been more or less abandoned. Staff have passed the disease to residents, and then essentially fled. No one has picked up the ball.

There are other factors in dealing with the epidemic. I haven’t mentioned the attempt to track and isolate carriers of the disease before they can transmit it. In this respect, Israel could do much better if she would (could?) increase the number of tests done daily. This is a win-win activity, because it only isolates those who need to be. In addition, research is proceeding on various treatments that may be efficacious. The slower the virus spreads, the more patients will be able to receive these treatments in time.

There are (naturally) political problems. There is a struggle between the Health Ministry and the Defense Ministry over who should be in charge of coordinating the overall response to the epidemic, although we do not see the kind of political controversies about the efficacy of this treatment or another which seem to exist in the US. On the other hand, the lack of a permanent government and the specter of a possible fourth election may have serious effects on the ability of Israel to deal with the economic fallout from the epidemic.

The corona pandemic is not like the Holocaust in many ways. There is no Auschwitz-Birkenau and there are no Sonderkommandos. But the campaign against it is much like a military campaign, involving logistics, foot-soldiers, and orders that must be followed. And I suspect that some medical personnel, like Dario Gabbai, will be left with memories that will be very hard to erase, much as they would wish to.

Abu Yehuda

[joannaofportugal]

JOANNA DE BRAGANZA / / CHALLENGE 004 

eleven tests completed & eleven explainations wrote out. 

SOUL TYPE TEST | the sage

A Sage soul is one whose role in life is collective expression, communicating big ideas with as many as possible. Natural extraverts, playful expression is fundamental to the Sage’s nature, though they are more adept at entertaining an audience than in coming up with original ideas. They are born attention-seekers, very much at home in front of an audience, taking centre stage. The bigger the audience the better, but any audience will do. The natural goal of any Sage is to express the highs and lows of life for all to see, sharing lifes lessons in an appealing way to create shared understanding. All soul types can manifest positively or negatively in any given moment, as the individual chooses. When manifesting negatively, Sages lapse into ORATION, i.e. hogging the spotlight, loving the sound of their own voice. The positive manifestation is COMMUNICATION, being on the same wavelength as the audience. Famous Sages include Mae West, Oscar Wilde, Bill Clinton, Jim Carrey

NOTE: reading through the soul type was very on-par with joanna’s very person, i would class her as a YOUNG SAGE who chases fame as nowdays celebraties do. she hogs the spotlight, the loves the sound of her own voice - what else could she be? 

MBTI TEST : entp-a ( the debater )

The Debater personality type is the ultimate devil’s advocate, thriving on the process of shredding arguments and beliefs and letting the ribbons drift in the wind for all to see. Debaters don’t do this because they are trying to achieve some deeper purpose or strategic goal, but for the simple reason that it’s fun. No one loves the process of mental sparring more than Debaters, as it gives them a chance to exercise their effortlessly quick wit, broad accumulated knowledge base, and capacity for connecting disparate ideas to prove their points.

NOTE: i was surprised, i thought her mbti would come out as something a little more dramatic rather than chasing knowledge or logic in it’s most intense form. i’m not too agreeing with the result, but maybe i can use this information to strengthen her person - and i like the ‘devil’s advocate’ side to it. 

CREEPIEST THING ABOUT YOU TEST: your possessiveness is really uncomfortable

It’s obvious to everyone around you that you feel the need to keep everything just the way you like it, and that insistence often borders on obsession. Your persistence, materialism, and sentimentality can prevent you from ever letting things go, and the more you care about them, the more stubbornly you defend your right to own them forever. Sorry to say, but there are some things, like memories and loved ones, you simply can’t own, and trying to stake your claim over them just makes you seem unbalanced and creepy. It probably wouldn’t hurt to quit being such a hoarder, too - none of your guests enjoy trying to find a seat in a room piled high with reminders of everything you refuse to let die.

NOTE: this is quite onbrand but wouldn’t be the creepiest thing to me when it comes to joanna - though she is posessive i don’t agree that it’s overwhelmingly disgusting.. i’d say it’s her rudest, or need to be right all the time.

TEMPERAMENTS TEST: sanguine 23/24 choleric 18/24 melancholic 05/24 phlegmatic 05/24

Your temperament is sanguine. The sanguine temperament is fundamentally spontaneous and pleasure-seeking; sanguine people are sociable and charismatic. They tend to enjoy social gatherings, making new friends and tend to be boisterous. They are usually quite creative and often daydream. However, some alone time is crucial for those of this temperament. Sanguine can also mean sensitive, compassionate and thoughtful. Sanguine personalities generally struggle with following tasks all the way through, are chronically late, and tend to be forgetful and sometimes a little sarcastic. Often, when they pursue a new hobby, they lose interest as soon as it ceases to be engaging or fun. They are very much people persons. They are talkative and not shy. Sanguines generally have an almost shameless nature, certain that what they are doing is right. They have no lack of confidence.

NOTE: this is a much easier answer for me to digest, though joanna isn’t evil she certaily has a rudness that can come across as evil to some people - or perhaps she truly is just a bully. and the last quote, ‘they havae no last of confidence�� is right on the target! though of course, as a young girl there may be bouts of insecurity.. which may evolve into humility or down-right foolery. 

LAWFUL ALIGNMENT TEST: chaotic neutral

A chaotic neutral character follows his whims. He is an individualist first and last. He values his own liberty but doesn't strive to protect others' freedom. He avoids authority, resents restrictions, and challenges traditions. A chaotic neutral character does not intentionally disrupt organizations as part of a campaign of anarchy. To do so, he would have to be motivated either by good (and a desire to liberate others) or evil (and a desire to make those different from himself suffer). A chaotic neutral character may be unpredictable, but his behavior is not totally random. He is not as likely to jump off a bridge as to cross it.

NOTE: in terms of alignment i think this is the safest option to describe joanna, she is no hero but she is no villain either.. she looks out for herself more than anthing else, though most choices come at random and at various paces.

GREEK DIETY TEST: poseidon

He was god of the Sea and other waters; of earthquakes; and of horses. In pre-Olympian Bronze Age Greece, he was venerated as a chief deity at Pylos and Thebes. Poseidon was protector of seafarers, and of many Hellenic cities and colonies. He is noble and powerful, and is recognized as a figure of leadership.

NOTE: like what happened when i took the same quiz for marius, i lost my first results. my first was aphrodite, which i didn’t necessarily agree with - then came poseidon. i’m happier with this result because poseidon was such a crass and awful man who made hell a lot worse than hades ever could’ve - he killed many whilst at sea, and in my opinion, was one of the most powerful gods of greek mythology. 

ENNEAGRAM TEST: type 7 / 7w8 ( the enthusiast )

People of this personality type are essentially concerned that their lives be an exciting adventure. Sevens are future oriented, restless people who are generally convinced that something better is just around the corner. They are quick thinkers who have a great deal of energy and who make lots of plans. They tend to be extroverted, multi-talented, creative and open minded. They are enthusiasts who enjoy the pleasures of the senses and who don't believe in any form of self-denial.

NOTE: she is certainly a pleasure seeker and planner for distraction and i think this is the closest i’d get to describing joanna though i wouldn’t call her creative due to the fact that she has little skill to anything!

SEXUALITY TEST: 40% heterosexual 30% bisexual 20% asexual 10% homosexual

this needs no description though i will write that of course she hasn’t had sex with anyone yet due to her position? it would be wrong for her to do that as a princess and thus has not experimented with anyone either than taking a few kisses from princes and noblemen. also, she has yet to be awoken to the sense that being attracted to girls is normal, so this quiz is entirely random to the point that it’s made for modern day human beings, not ones from 1455. 

POKEMON TEST: flying type

The Flying type is all about the self. You possess traits that are often sought-after: Confidence, self-respect, and bravery radiate from your being. You are a very self-aware individual, and that knowledge can be employed to great use both alone and socially. Remember, however, to not get too big of a head, Flying-type: Your confidence is good, but empathy is better. Often, you may find yourself at the whimsy of society. You are honorable, but also constantly worried about your self-image remaining pristine. If you allow yourself to become too wrapped up in what others think of you, you may become too flighty and scattered for your own good. Remember to relax, and let your spirit soar!

NOTE: though i find it hard to relate joanna to a pokemon the description is pretty good and i can fit joanna into it - though i’d rather see her as a spoilt and messy jigglypuff. 

TEA TYPE: hibiscus tea

You’re a *lot*. But that’s not a bad thing! You’re unafraid to take up space and make your voice heard. You love being the center of attention and are willing to cause a scene to swivel the spotlight toward you. You’ve got a sharp tongue (you’ve probably been called sassy at least once in your life) and you can use that for good or evil. Your tartness might not be for everyone, but those who get you love your larger-than-life presence.

NOTE: once again it’s pretty lose to joanna’s character and i particaly like the line ‘your tartness might not be for everyone’ 

BIG FIVE PERSONALITY: 

of course i wasn’t going to pay for this quiz so i only have a little information to share: OPENNESS 52% CONSIENTIOUSNESS 10% EXTRAVERSION 100% AGREEABLENESS 21% NEUROTICISM 33%

NOTE: extraversion is a funny one, and i really like the look of this type of quiz but alas i’m poor and i’m not gonna spend money on a made up character! 

and as i did with marius i ended up making a birth chat for her, who was born 29th may, 1438 at 17:39am. 

[wisdomrays]

REAL FREEDOM: Part 2

Is freedom in an absolute sense possible?

Some understand freedom as absolute liberty without any restrictions or conditions whatsoever. However, such liberty has never existed anywhere in the world to date. Neither in capitalist systems nor in liberal or communist ones, have people lived as they wished with unrestrained liberty. All systems sanctioned some rules to restrain freedom. For example, although communist systems broadened the limits of what is permissible and came up with an understanding alluring to passing fancies and desires, when it came to fidelity to the system, they acted strictly and tyrannically. They deprived people of their property rights, they killed the freedom for personal enterprise, and banned many actions that contradicted human nature and reason.

Likewise, although some states in our time have given much freedom to their citizens, they never allow any ideas that contradict the official ideology. They bring certain limitations regarding what they term as freedom of thought and conscience: they impose heavy sanctions when certain ideas that disagree with their worldview are voiced. No matter how much they refer to freedom, they cannot forbear the slightest degree of opposition to their own system.

A society’s general welfare and harmonious continuity necessitate adopting certain disciplines. If freedom is perceived and practiced as unlimited satisfaction of all desires and fancies, then this will cause corruption of lineages, breaking up of families, and degeneration of society. Likewise, although “freedom” might seem to allow it, we cannot approve of acts like profanity against the sacred, verbal abuse against religion, and making fun of the nation’s values, for allowing these will cause all moral values to be ruined. It is similarly not possible to accept as lawful, acting against the country or nation under the name of freedom, for in such a case the concepts of nation and country will lose importance, and it will become difficult for society members to co-exist.

On account of all these reasons, almost all legal systems have passed laws to provide shelter for the essential rights of religion, life, lineage, property, and reason; they imposed heavy sanctions against any crimes posing a threat to these. Namely, all states felt the need to draw a frame for freedom through certain laws and regulations. In fact, even while describing freedom, it is pointed out that your freedom ends where the limits of others’ freedom begins. In other words, although all citizens own certain rights and freedoms, they extend to the limits where others’ rights and freedoms begin. If we take the issue from a believer’s perspective, we can express this fact that God and faith too have some rights upon the individual, and they set certain limits for them.

In this respect, the notion of unrestrained freedom does not exist even among animals. They have certain limitations and boundaries, and there are consequences when they are violated.

Animals lead their life with astonishing solidarity and mutual assistance. Take penguins in the Antarctic: we feel dizzy before their system. Had people been able to establish such a system among themselves, all of us would live in peace.

God instilled certain rules in the brains of animals to let them live in an orderly fashion. However, humans possess reason and free will. We can even say that these are the most essential and indispensable human qualities. A human is neither a pile of wood, nor a sunflower stem. In this respect, for the sake of being able to live with others in an orderly and harmonious fashion, a person is supposed to comply with certain rules by means of reason and willpower. This is very important in terms of giving free will its due.

By giving willpower its due, humans will not only live harmoniously together but will even surpass angels. The noble Prophet Muhammad, peace be upon him, who used his free will to the best of his capacity, left the archangel Gabriel behind during his journey on the night of Ascension. Therefore, things like bidding for Paradise and being blessed with the honor of seeing God all depend on using one’s free will properly. On this path it might be necessary to sacrifice some aspects of freedom and to accept certain disciplines by means of free will.

Freedom is a great blessing God bestowed on people. If some people have lost such a divine blessing on account of their neglect and laziness, namely if they failed to retain their freedom, they will be held responsible before God. Furthermore, if they are not aware of being dominated by other ideologies, and not even endeavoring to be saved from this by refusing to regain certain opportunities they have lost, then they are not only betraying their freedom, but also their faith.

In this respect, appreciating the value of the freedom God granted us, upholding it and using it in the right way, are very important. In this respect, every nation needs to know well their era, have plans and projects for the future, and take promising steps as much as their cognition and circumstances allow.

Free thinking and science

Scientific thought has been shaped in the last few centuries by ideas based on positivism, materialism, and naturalism.

Scientific terminology has developed so extensively with these ideas that we are not able to think differently. And with these ideas we cannot reach the truth about our lives. For this reason, it is necessary for believing scientists to re-adopt free thinking as a principle and revise all their scientific conclusions. While doing this, they must be freed from attachment to the status quo and question everything, for it is not possible to establish something new without questioning. To this end, we need to consider that there is a possibility of being mistaken—be it a slight one—about the data we find before us. For example, a doctor specializing in medicine should be able to re-evaluate everything he or she has learned and re-test whether these are correct or not.

This surely is not an easy endeavor; it demands a very serious love for knowledge, research, and truth. Furthermore, it requires being able to dedicate a lifetime to this cause, to undertake very serious troubles and make serious sacrifices. If an industrial revolution happened in the West and serious distances were covered in science and technology, it happened thanks to the people who dedicated their lives to this issue. Some dedicated their lives to studying animal life, some to discovering the secret of historical relics, and some to decoding the tongue of natural phenomena. However, these studies of theirs ended up with materialism and naturalism. It is necessary to overcome this present situation and relate every truth about sciences to the One beyond existence and things. Like unweaving a sweater and re-weaving it with a new pattern, everything must be de-constructed and then re-constructed. While doing this we might sometimes be correct and sometimes err; we might take certain issues further than their present state and walk along with others at certain issues, and we even refer to their help.

However, these are not things to be realized by ordinary people. They require very serious resoluteness. But without such a struggle, it is not possible to be freed from dualism and to eliminate the contradiction between science and religion. Actually, while the origin of the Qur’an is Divine Speech, the Universe is similarly another divine book to be studied, as originated by His power and will. Given that these two books come from the same origin, it is not possible for there to be any contradiction between them.

Pursuing science under domination is no less painful than living under the rule of others’ domination. Merely quoting others but not being able to coming up with any new and original ideas should only be the growls of lowly souls surrendered to domination. Actually every believer must possess this honor. They must look at their glorious past, turn to their spiritual roots, and then consider the present wretched condition and ask themselves whether or not it is shameful. Afterwards, they must absolutely set about being saved from these shames by building up their own world.

As souls under domination will not be able to realize such a revival, there is the absolute need for free thoughts. Actually, freedom begins in thinking. It is not possible to talk about freedom concerning people whose thoughts are dominated others.

[alexryzlingold]

From Out Beyond Your Star (pt. 7)

[philaprint]

Revolution Music

FEBRUARY 28, 2017

By Karas Lamb

“Is Prince dead?”  The question flooded in on the morning of April 21st, 2016.  A rush to communal panic that fed my gut the truth faster than any search engine could ever deliver a credible source.  Prince was, in fact, deceased.  Found slumped in an elevator at his famed Paisley Park complex in Chanhassen, Minnesota.  A hop and a skip from First Avenue.  Floating somewhere in the ether just beyond our grasp, where he had always truly been most comfortable.  

This was the second time in life that I had spent an entire week in my pajamas, digesting headlines with my jaw planted squarely on the floor; the first was 9/11.   This scene, however, was colored by a dread that left me wondering aloud whether the bootleg hoarding Prince disciples in my social circles were managing to breathe.  Worried that black music might not survive the sudden departure of a man who was arguably its most fearless leader.  

Amiri Baraka famously eulogized James Baldwin as “God’s black revolutionary mouth.”  Much less loquacious, but no less brash, Prince may have been God’s beautiful black revenge.  A fiercely private, arguably maniacal prodigy whose distant nature, physical ambiguity and staggering musical genius afforded him super powers that had evaded the grasp of his forebears.  This diminutive and strikingly beautiful sensation was the kind of middle finger to the establishment that only black music could produce.  In his assessment of Baldwin’s life and work, Baraka made a point that would later apply to Prince.

‘When we saw and heard him, he made us feel good. He made us feel, for one thing, that we could defend ourselves or define ourselves, that we were in the world not merely as animate slaves, but as terrifyingly sensitive measurers of what is good or evil, beautiful or ugly. This is the power of his spirit. This is the bond which created our love for him. This is the fire that terrifies our pitiful enemies. That not only are we alive but shatteringly precise in our songs and our scorn.’ (Baraka, NYT - 1987)

The most obvious heir to James Brown’s throne, bedazzled and doused in indifference, Prince was an exacting bandleader and prolific creator with little time for outside opinions or anything short of absolute risk.  If the recording industry had captured lightning in a bottle with the commodification of our blues, the birth of Prince Rogers Nelson was the rare seismic event just cold enough to shatter the glass.  Prince arrived and obliterated the idea that any one ad man, disc jockey, blue-eyed soul sensation or well-heeled industry exec could ever possibly have black music - let alone black people - all figured out.

A one-man synthesis of righteousness, raunch, macho and sass, Prince embodied every melodic translation of black struggle and chewed its most poignant statements into a frenzied other-worldly funk that oozed from his pores and dripped down the fretboard of his guitar into the mouths of a generation thirsty for some sign that it was okay to disrupt for reasons other than color-coded provincial turf battles or the historically holy grails of the black working class -- education, economic opportunity and access to the ballot box.  

In Prince, black youth found its collective creative possibility and a pass to experiment.  An intersectionality underpinned by the shouts of the church, the stomp of the jook joint, the angular poses of the ballroom and the inescapable stank of a sexually charged funk gestated in a post-”free love” era just loud and proud enough to push America’s lingering Puritanical notions from a speeding drop-top to preserve the life of the party.  He spoke our language but was not ashamed of the black body or governed by the strict directives on social etiquette fed to black children through clenched teeth by justifiably fearful parents.  Living and creating outside the monolith, Prince was tangible evidence that burning the rule book might not get us all killed.  A unique station described by Questlove in a 2016 editorial for Rolling Stone.

Prince was singular in his music. He was his own genre. That same singularity extended to everything. He went the other way in life, too. As he got older, the way he managed his career showed off that contrary streak. It came to the forefront in the way he mastered his records, in the way he handled reissues, in the way he used (or didn't use) the Internet and online streaming services. In the summer of 2014, his old band, the Revolution, reunited at First Avenue in Minneapolis. They were all set up for him to join in and play. He drove right past. Prince was a great drummer, and he was always marching to his own beat.

With that particular strain of individuality foremost in their minds, a burgeoning mass of new black leftists followed suit, marching past the rhythmic constraints of the standard and the first tastes of pop culture visibility on the Soul Train line to test the limits of society and sound.  This legion of fans would produce more devotees invigorated by constant threat of damnation for playing the devil’s music and the seductive allure of a transcendent “post-black” identity where the overstatement of a perpetually apparent racial identifier was much less important than the perfection of craft, the erasure of binaries and the proliferation of an explicitly black art.

Described as “the liberating value in tossing off the immense burden of race-wide representation, the idea that everything they do must speak to or for or about the entire race,” post-blackness seems a necessary component of the rebuilding process as black America collects itself in the wake of Prince’s final curtain call.  A loss mourned with memes and dance parties and exacerbated by the anxiety of a fraught election year peppered with instances of state-sanctioned violence.  A loss punctuated by the imminent departure of the first sitting black president, who would ultimately pass the keys to a fascist demagogue.  

Not to be confused with the deceptive buzzword “post-racial,” the term coined by artists Thelma Golden and Glenn Ligon is a call to abandon the one size fits all blackness dictated by policy and propaganda, to do away with abusive intraracial identity politics, and be black however one sees fit.  An embrace of that kind of individuality ultimately creates room for life and art to transcend the boxes we are otherwise corralled into for everything from federal identification and police profiling to public congratulation for creative works; projects often judged and awarded by those still invested in the perpetuation of oppression with little to no proximity to the black experience as it exists outside of pop culture.  

My devastation at the death of a musical icon could technically be filed under first world problems until you consider that black music is the most unadulterated, uninterrupted telling of the black experience in America.  A prolonged circumstance of collective suffering and systemic injustice proximate to the wealth of almost every world power.  One that is often glossed over as little more than an innocuous dalliance with inhumanity that should have no bearing on the modern American psyche nor be of any tangible benefit to the people that continually survive and serve lemonade.

Combined with the lack of a decisive heir to Prince’s musical legacy and a minority of musicians fluent in his particular tongue, the vacancy created by his passing forces creatives of color to step to the plate in numbers.  To bury the dead, bathe in the waters of Lake Minnetonka and summon the chops necessary to spit the next chapter of the story -- one that began in languages broken bylaws and distance and chains, which only remain fresh in our minds because they are sequenced into our blood and our drums.   One that has been slow to surface as artists at the top of the pile drag their feet or face being silenced altogether when it comes to the work of change.

The Black American musical tradition is necessarily derived from black discomfort.  The future of it, however, cannot be informed solely by savage inequalities or scorned love.  The relative lack of mainstream innovation in recent years should also drive the evolution of the sound;  a hybridized chromatic vamp from a strata above the abiding hum that girds our churches and the fragrant Adhan that billows from mosques, blanketing our ghettos.  

Past the loud affirmation of “black lives matter” and the rattle of trunks teeming with balls out posturing and bass, the music must empower a new generation of singular talents to rise to the occasion in a time of revolution as rights are restricted, rules of engagement are erased, people are targeted, and citizenship is decided by an economy of fear.  It must be a sound as reflective of micro-aggressions, political resistance, queerness and personal trauma as it is aspirational, opulent, and indicative of the future.  It must continue the conversation.

Something stronger than the myopic lens of major radio programming and the capitalist appropriation habits of off-white pop stars that portray songs penned in the latest African dialects as the property of everyone but blacks.  A product bigger than the tall tales that convince rising artists to trade the noble tradition of running the baddest band in the land for fast publicity.  Something better than the derivative movements that reward culture vulture cool kids for disrespecting foundational artists with half-baked versions of their hard fought work.  This blues need be wholly representative of each individual committed to burning the existing paradigm to make clear that blackness is much too vast, varied and involved to be mass produced.  

After all, it was not grace but guts that fueled Prince - the man who notoriously gilded his own ass and gave it to the world to kiss.  Who stalled the label gaming him and had the last laugh.  He spent his career insisting that we are not obligated to perform our grief for pennies.  We are indebted to the colossal talents we cannot thank enough, to create outside of the matrix of fear induced by constant policing and the respectability politics of the American caste.  To boycott the gatekeepers that refuse to get us or give us an inch unless they stand to get a check.

To live outside the lines on blocks where the wrong uniform can get you rejected by the tribe.  To speak our pidjin and flip our birds and fly our spacecraft.  To put our titties on the glass.  To love openly in a time of narcissism.  To canonize our respective wounds and create ourselves beyond the palette of police sketches and alien rubrics for excellence.  To be exactly who we say we are, because a people can never be fully realized through the repetition of hymns made in a vacuum of homogeneity and threats aimed at every enemy except the one that has sterilized our bodies, stuffed our mouths with treasury notes and promoted the myth that nothing else matters.  We matter.  Now is not the time to fake the funk.

‘I just had another phone meeting


Felt like I was all alone speaking


To the clones keeping, black music soul weeping


I'm a new angel, and they only want the old demons


Glorifying music, that's abusive and a threat to us


And if you got a message in your records


You collecting dust upon the shelf


They selling us components meant to self-destruct


To shelter us in skelter in disguise of something helping us


So I'ma build a bunker now, in the underground


Surviving with that other sound


Clipping magazines, repeating this ain't had to be


Self-published, but we're still running for covers now


Imagine me in pageantries, we branded as awards


What's the difference 'tween them auction blocks and cooning for applause


Even selling out, or buying something that you can't afford


It ain't a plan to keep us poor, it's just a plan to be ignored’

- Oddisee, “Want Something”

http://bit.ly/PPWBlackFutureSeries

[lesliecafferty]

Correct.

The People (P): What is happening?

Answer (A): A virus has come.

P: Is it dangerous?

A: Very dangerous. But not dangerous to most. It strikes the elderly most viciously. But it can kill the middle-aged, the young, the thin, the healthy.

P: What should we do?

A: Stay away from others. Stay inside.

P: And then we won’t get the virus?

A: Absolutely you will get it. Everyone will get it.

P: Wait. No one told us this. They’re telling us to stay inside and we won’t get it.

A: Well, I’m telling you now. Almost everyone will get it. Seventy percent of you, give or take. Think about it. It’s everywhere, and there’s no vaccine. But we want everyone to get it at different times. Like on a schedule of getting it. At least five million people already have it in the United States.

P: Wait. Five million? Everyone says one million.

A: That’s the known, confirmed cases. We just started testing in earnest like, an hour ago. For every case we know, there’s five, 10, 50 that we don’t know. Maybe they got it and were asymptomatic. Maybe they got sick but not sick enough to go the hospital or get tested. Five million is an extremely low estimate of how many cases there are. It’s probably more like 20 million.

P: Twenty?

A: That’s good news! In a way. That means it’s less deadly to most people than we thought. And it proves the inevitability of you getting it yourself. So stay inside till it’s your turn to get it.

P: How long should we stay inside?

A: I’m thinking two months. No, three. Six? No, 12. Yes, 12!

P: Then it will be gone?

A: The virus? Lord no. It could be 18 months till we get a vaccine. But by then you’ll have already gotten it, so the date doesn’t really matter. Especially given that the virus will come back double-strong in the fall.

P: So it’s less potent in the summer?

A: Absolutely not. Who told you that?

P: You just said it’ll come back stronger in the fall. Which implies its power is dissipated in the summer.

A: Are you a doctor? No? Good. Then pay attention. The virus is everywhere, in every city and state, but we’re flattening the curve. Then it’ll very likely come back with a vengeance in the fall. Winter, too. Also, in the meantime, it’ll be with us all summer with probably no change in its potency. Capiche?

P: No one’s giving us this information.

A: Well, you know how we’re stretching out the cases over a longer period of time? Flattening the curve? We’re also flattening the truth. So just stay inside, and you’ll be fine. Order stuff online. Support your local restaurant.

P: Whew. OK. We can do that.

A: But do so knowing that you are putting the lives of everyone at risk — the cooks, the clerks, the delivery people. I’m actually a bit shocked by your selfishness and the cavalier way you’re sacrificing the lives of people who have no choice but to expose themselves to grave danger during a pandemic.

P: It sounds like you’re saying we shouldn’t order stuff to be delivered.

A: You shouldn’t. Unless you want local businesses to die.

P: So we should support local businesses …

A: Absolutely. While risking their workers’ lives. Yes. Order food, eat it, watch the news about the pandemic that can’t be stopped. Get plenty of sleep, and start smoking. Turns out smokers are less likely to get sick. Which only makes sense! So remember to exercise. Go for a run!

P: Where should we go for a run?

A: Ideally some place where you can spread out, where you aren’t in close proximity to other people.

P: Like the beach? A park?

A: Sure. Beaches and parks are wide-open spaces. They’re about as safe as you can be.

P: We just went to the beach and the park. There were hundreds of other people there.

A: You went to the beach? The park? What were you thinking? There are hundreds of people there! Go home. Be with your kids. Do you have kids?

P: Yes.

A: Well, make sure they keep up with school. Keep up with their worksheets and Zoom, and check their work, and keep them off screens, and go outside, and don’t worry about school. It’s a pandemic, after all.

P: Um. Many of the things you just said sound contradictory.

A: Not at all. I’ll rephrase: Your kids are living through a crisis. It’s all right if they feel anxious, or if you can’t maintain routines or keep up with regular school schedules. Just make sure they don’t fall behind, and remember that kids thrive on routine. So stick to a schedule, but give them space, and stay inside, and go outside, and use technology to connect with teachers and friends, and limit screen time.

P: Wait. So …

A: But enjoy some downtime together! Relax and watch a movie. Cook some food! Just don’t go to the stores, because that’s dangerous to everyone. Order in! But don’t. Stay home. Move to the country. And stay in the city. If you get sick, go to the hospital. But don’t get too sick, because you wouldn’t want to be going to one of those hospitals now! They’re full of sick people!

P: When did you say this would all end again?

A: Eighteen months. That said, the soonest we’ve ever come up with a vaccine was four years.

P: But everyone’s talking about reopening stores and everything now. How does that square with 18 months?

A: That’s easy. People will die.

P: Wait. What?

A: Oh sure. So many more. Oceans of people. Even just 1,500 a day for eighteen months means 800,000 in the U.S. alone will die from this virus. That’s what the Minnesota scientist says. Osterholm. He’s one of the foremost experts in the world. He’s been right every step of the way so far.

P: What? 800,000?

A: That’s if things stay more or less steady. It could be higher, much higher. With the easing of restrictions and all.

P: But isn’t the rate of death declining?

A: Friday was one of the deadliest days yet! And that’s after everyone’s been inside for a month. Once everyone goes back to work, it’ll probably go up significantly. Total blood bath.

P: So why are we easing restrictions?

A: Something something the economy?

P: Excuse me?

A: Mumble mumble the economy maybe?

P: We don’t understand.

A: Listen. People are fatigued. They want to go back to work. They want to shop. More than anything, they want to roll balls toward white pins and make loud bang-bang sound. And then possibly end up with a tube inserted in their trachea, helping them breathe while their lungs cease to function, until they almost invariably die and die alone.

P: Why don’t we just freeze the economy? Just close most businesses and have the government give everyone a living wage while we wait until there’s a vaccine?

A: Hmm. First of all, ridiculous. Second, that would take significant coordination between local, state and federal governments.

P: Can we do that?

A: Well. I don’t know … I mean … OK. For starters, we’d need superadvanced ways to coordinate everyone. We’d certainly need phones. Maybe email. We might even need spreadsheets and/or computers.

P: Do we have all those things?

A: I think we … might? But there are still so many questions. Like, how would we know who to give money to? We’d have to have a national database with all the salaries of all the nation’s workers.

P: Don’t we have that? Seems like we could get that.

A: Here’s another plan: We promise money to pretty much every person and every business. We give this money to maybe half the people, and to a very small percentage of businesses. We let big banks control most of this money meant for small businesses, and the big banks can funnel it to their biggest clients.

P: That sounds terrible.

A: Those big banks sure know how to handle cash!

P: It seems it would just be easier to give people the exact salaries they had before they lost their jobs to one of the deadliest viruses in 100 years. Just freeze everything. Just mutually agree to pause, together, so we don’t have to lose 730,000 more souls.

A: First of all: boring. Where’s the intrigue? The drama? With our system, you have wave after wave of unemployment, with no end in sight. Every week brings something new: business closures, bankruptcies and ruptures of the supply chain — a never-ending, cascading, domino-orgy of lost savings, empty storefronts and shattered dreams. That’s much more exciting than some boring old guaranteed income that would allow everyone to simply ride out the pandemic knowing their jobs and businesses would be there when the virus was defeated.

P: So there’s no plan.

A: Having no plan is the plan! Haven’t you been listening? Plans are for commies and the Danish. Here we do it fast and loose and dumb and wrong, and occasionally we have a man who manufactures pillows come to the White House to show the president encouraging texts. It all works! Eighteen months, 800,000 deaths, no plan, states bidding against states for medicine and equipment, you’re on your own, plans are lame.

P: I’m going to lie down. I don’t feel good.

A: Should we sing a patriotic song? I feel like our forebears would be so proud of us now. It’s just like how we all pulled together in World War II, every element of society, from the White House to Rosie the Riveter, with common purpose and shared sacrifice. This is just like that, except instead of coordination, we have competition, and instead of common cause, we have acrimony and chaos. Instead of fireside chats, F.D.R. and Churchill, we have tweets, Lysol and Ron DeSantis. Other than that, it’s exactly the same. —Eggers

[csrgood]

Will Fear of COVID-19 and Loathing of Capitalism Drive Systemic Change?

This article was originally published on Medium

Texas Lieutenant Governor, Dan Patrick recently said, and I paraphrase, it’s not only OK, it’s good for America to throw granny under the bus to save the economy. Just let that sink in for a moment. What kind of culture would tolerate that kind of thinking. And when I say tolerate I don’t mean tolerate from a legal perspective - I’m referring to the perspective of social norms. The norms that would shame a public figure for uttering such a callous and thoughtless statement.

If that isn’t disturbing enough, I recently saw a picture that was so outrageous that I had to check to see if it was actually true - sadly it was. 

Homeless in Las Vegas

Recently in Las Vegas, in an effort to contain Covid19, the homeless were relocated from a shelter after a resident tested positive for Covid19. They occupants were placed into a parking lot with paint outlining little 6 foot cubicles to keep these poor souls from infecting each other. They did try to lay down some carpet but when they found that it couldn’t be sterilized they gave up on that idea and provided nothing but concrete.

Wow...in a city with thousands of empty hotel rooms, a convention centre and a sports arena, rather than help the homeless stay healthy in a way that let’s them keep their dignity and have a modicum of comfort, they were corralled and sequestered into a parking lot, away from the rest of “us” using the least amount of money and effort. 

There was no outcry and barely a mention in the news, a couple of tweets and it was over. In much the same way as Texas Lieutenant Governor Dan Patrick felt no need to retract his brutal comments, this story too, revealed yet another window into the soul of a heartless predatory capitalist system.

Is it fair to say that this system doesn’t care about people? Maybe, but perhaps it would be more accurate to say that the system cares more about consumption and corporate profits than it does about people. Or better yet, perhaps an even more accurate way to phrase it would be, that while the system does place an oversized value on the strength of the economy, people are still valued, but only inasmuch as they are able to consume. 

Back to “Normal”

There’s a lot of talk about how quickly we can get back to business as usual (BAU) but is that really what we want - to return to a system that makes its decisions from an “economy first” mindset - ahead of public health and well-being. A system that rewards corporations for exploiting people and destroying the environment. A system that glorifies extreme wealth and rising corporate profits while punishing poverty. A system that uses the corporate media to tarnish long standing metrics of societal well-being in favour of the narrow metric of a rising stock market.

You can put all the lipstick you want on this system, you can focus on the few good stories of individual perseverance, there are many to choose from, but when you zoom out and look at the system as a whole the evidence is clear. Free Market Capitalism, as it is practiced in America, is a brutal system that systematically places the 99% into a predatory arena, while the 0.1%, enjoy corporate socialism where their financial mistakes are repeatedly forgiven with corporate bailouts and their stock portfolios are buoyed with Government backed, never ending streams of capital and friendly legislation. 

Real Time 

Normally government policy is a slow process - it can take years to develop and decades to assess. But Covid-19 changes that - suddenly timelines are compressed and policy decisions come rapidly. We have a unique opportunity to see how governments work, (and think) as their choices play out in near real time. In particular, their bias towards policies that choose to protect the economy over people. 

“Economy First” 

Back in January and early February, the whole world could see the explosive growth of this virus, and our political “leaders” had a chance to contain it, BUT as is often the case, guided by the corporate elite and the neoliberal script, they said no.  

For the next 4-5 crucial weeks in opposition to the advice from health care professionals who said that it was vital to contain the illness and restrict air travel, the airports remained open and the virus exploded around the world. Western leaders in both Europe and North America failed us in three distinct ways. First, they squandered the opportunity to act on the early data that China provided in terms of the ease and speed with which the virus spread. Second, they failed to prepare logistically and provide their hospitals with the necessary supplies. And finally they failed to inform and educate the public of what was likely to come. 

The Common Good

The “economy first'' ideology that drives Capitalism has led to a collective failure in global “leadership”. Decisions that were clearly best for public health, societal well-being and long term economic stability, were forsaken for decisions that bolstered the short term interests of corporations and the stock market. We seem to have forgotten that a strong government with a commitment to wellbeing is the foundation of a flourishing and resilient society. And that when society is organized in this way, we are best prepared to overcome big social, economic and environmental challenges - not via an economy devoid of corporate regulations - hoping that profit driven companies will magically work for the common good. 

Our Biology

Covid-19 has captured global attention and is forcing action in a way that the fight for a stable climate never could. Not because the climate strategy was wrong - it wasn’t - not because scientists are poor communicators - they’re not - and certainly not because we couldn’t find the elusive business case - it doesn’t exist. No...the climate fight is failing because it's trying to change behaviour without the benefit of our evolutionary instincts, whereas Covid-19 doesn’t need to win a long complicated argument to bring about behaviour change - it’s benefiting from instincts that have been hardwired into our ape brains since before we came down from the trees, 4 million years ago. Whether we recognize it or not, our biology is dictating the response to both of these crises. 

Timing and Fear

As humans, we’re most responsive to real time threats where cause and effect are undeniable, and as it so happens, the Covid-19 crisis has both of these features. First, let’s look at the time frame between policy choices and outcomes. The condensed time frame rapidly connects a failed policy of “economy first” capitalism to death, from an invisible and highly transmissible contagion. Covid-19 has exposed the soul of capitalism and in doing so, it has coalesced our attention towards the true systemic villain in a way that the climate fight never could. 

The second factor that is missing in the climate fight and that is central to Covid-19 is a healthy dose of fear. This emotion removes the need to convince anyone to do things differently — fear takes care of that. Everyone on the planet is triggered and thinking about their personal safety, and how they interact with other people. This is something that the climate movement was never able to achieve — at an individual level, everyone feeling the urgency to change their ways.

Covid-19 Changed How We See The World

As a fast moving crisis, laced with fear, where policy decisions clearly show cause and effect, Covid-19 has provided great insight into how we as humans respond to threats:

Speed

The speed of the crisis gave us a look behind the curtain and revealed exactly what “economy first” policies can do to a society, and in doing so, it exposed the soul of capitalism. But that speed of transmission had other effects too. 

Fear

It triggered our human fear response and within weeks people across the world were making radical behaviour changes to protect personal safety in ways that we never could have imagined just a few months ago. Considering that we can’t even get people to carry a reusable mug for their morning coffee, the level of behavioural change that has recently been triggered by Covid-19 is staggering.

Unity

It’s rapid connection of policy to outcomes coalesced our attention towards the true systemic villain in a way that the climate fight never could. 

Government Action

Government finally proved once and for all that with enough pressure to save lives, they’re capable of massive disruption to the system and reallocation of capital.

Capitalism and Climate

Covid-19 has shown us beyond any doubt that Capitalism’s “economy first” mentality is a cancer to society, and if left unchecked it will systematically destroy millions of lives and ultimately our planet’s ability to sustain us. Unfortunately the climate movement wasn’t able to expose this - it simply moved too slowly to capture people's attention and it lacked the necessary dose of fear. 

Human Biology and Climate

Covid-19 taught us that while we’re the smartest animal on the planet we still can’t get away from our evolutionary instincts. In the case of the climate crisis, those instincts simply aren’t activated, and that’s leading us down a dangerous path towards extinction, just like every other hominid cousin of ours from the past.

This is Our Chance 

Every leader knew what was coming with Covid-19 but they held firm to their "economy first" dogma. Only when it became obvious that they would lose public support when the body bags started piling up, did they change gears. 

Our system is broken. It lies on a toxic foundation that exploits people and the environment. Trying to find the elusive business case to create a more sustainable business model is like trying to grow a healthier crop, with a few tweaks, on polluted soil. You can add all the sustainability and impact investing you want...the result will still be social harm and ecosystem destruction.

We’ve identified the problem. Now is the time for hope. The pieces of the puzzle are in place. We have the solutions. We have the chance to do something special and re-create our system of commerce. As they say, a crisis is a terrible thing to waste. Let’s get it done!

    Brad Zarnett is a Canadian sustainability strategist, writer and blogger. He is the Founder of the Toronto Sustainability Speaker Series (TSSS). Brad writes about why Corporate Sustainability and our attempts to address Climate Change are a massive systemic failure and what to do about it. You can follow Brad on twitter: @bradzarnett, LinkedIn, Medium or via email.

source: https://www.csrwire.com/press_releases/44816-Will-Fear-of-COVID-19-and-Loathing-of-Capitalism-Drive-Systemic-Change-?tracking_source=rss

[circe-poetica]

New Moon 25th March 2020~

New Moon 25th March 2020~~ The incoming energies are extremely intense during this New Moon, causing profound energetic recalibration and extreme internal and external shifts.

Many of us feel as though we have quantum leaped into a fragile alternative dimension and we are now becoming aware that the world as we once knew it has been left behind. A distinctly different paradigm has emerged and a new world is preparing to open.

Collectively we are in the midst of an existential crisis on a level most of us could not have predicted or preconceived. We might be struggling to recognise our surroundings, where nothing is as it once seemed and where the world no longer feels familiar and safe.

Overwhelming and debilitating emotions may be waking us through the night, and when we open our eyes it can be extremely difficult to separate reality from the dreamworld.

This is the twilight zone that we are all sharing and it is full of unanswerable “what if”, “why”, “who” and “when”. A stage of our lives where everything irrevocably and rapidly changes with every moment and our guard is constantly raised, as life-transforming news floods in.

No one knows what the future, or even the day, will bring. We have to just keep moving forward, banded together, knowing that accumulatively we have everything we need to make it through.

This New Moon is in Aries, the Sun is in Aries and Chiron, the Wounded Healer, is also in Aries. While this will bring to the surface some of our deepest wounds, it will also bring us waves of optimism and warrior strength to help us overcome our innermost fears, heal and ultimately to accelerate our evolution.

Carl Jung coined the term “wounded healer” to describe someone who has healed a significant karmic wound and has gathered knowledge from past painful encounters to use what they learned to assist with the healing of others.

This means we will be seeing an emergence of healers and lightworkers turning their healed wounds into much-needed wisdom that helps guide, protect and carry other wounded souls through these turbulent times.

Chiron’s energy encourages us to recognise where we have inflicted wounds in others. It asks us to be kinder, tender, understanding, forgiving, caring and to express empathy, love and compassion, so that all emotional pain is heard and healed. It pushes us to reach out, whether we are the ones hurting, whether we have hurt others or whether we are the ones helping others to heal. It compels us to let people know we are thinking of them, that we care and that we appreciate those who also show care.

On January 12th I wrote about the rare, potent, foundation-shaking Saturn-Pluto alignment, explaining how it would trigger a magnificent collective shift and that it would bring on the greatest transformation we will witness in our lifetime. I described the life-altering effects it would have and how collectively our entire planet was about to experience major and sudden change, which would close the previous 38-year cycle and kickstart a new 34-year cycle and new age.

An excerpt from my post describes the affect that the Saturn and Pluto combined cosmic energies can have on us all, and this is energy is expected to last for the duration of the year.

“We will all start to notice that both internal and external transformations are occurring on a huge level, as outdated beliefs, past conditioning, old patterns and oppressive and limiting structures disintegrate and fall apart.

The transition is not going to be easy, it is here to awaken us and remove us from our comfort zone so that we alter harmful ways and find more appreciation for our existence. We may try to fight aspects of it, throw tantrums, release tears and raise white flags with reluctance. However, as the days pass we will heal, restructure, regroup and realise how imperative the skin-shedding was for the evolution of our soul’s journey and expansion.

We are about to go through a major personal transformation and as the months pass we will be releasing our hold on anything harmful and creating space for much more healthy, fulfilling, balanced and harmonious encounters….. Overall, this is going to be one of the most transformational and life-altering phases we will go through.”

The Saturn and Pluto combination brought about a dramatic shift that has set the tone for the rest of the year, and it has already stripped away delusions and opened us up to the reality of the world we live in.

It compels us to recognise imbalances within our society and where there is lack or abundance - before we witness a dramatic levelling up.

These energies test our resilience and patience and they ask us to have courage and faith as we navigate painful and turbulent times, particularly related to the loss of our sense of permanence.

Saturn can feel heavy, persistent and it can be relentlessly disciplined, with restrictions and limitations being put in place. As paradigms and structures collapse around us Pluto forces us to rise like a phoenix from the ashes.

It is no coincidence that we are experiencing the most dramatic personal and societal transformations during this time, particularly concerning the deconstruction and reconstruction of power, regulation, finances and the authority of ruling parties. Overall, this brings challenges related to our priorities and values and forces us to rebalance - in particular with our relationship to money.

Saturn will be retrograde from May until the end of September, and during this time we will see significant shifts that bring radical change and progression.

Saturn-Pluto conjunct is known for transformational events, with the 1982 alignment delivering mass-scale recession along with the first case of the AIDS virus. For the past few years astrologers have been predicting that 2020 will be a year for pandemics and global recession, and from an astrological perspective we can expect disruption for a year, possibly two, but we will regroup, recover, heal together and start over.

These energies are known for bringing apocalypse type fears, extremities, distortion, deconstruction, redistribution of power and a general sense of doom. However, we can alter our mindset through having faith that when we collectively pull together we have the ability to pass through this period like mankind has done through similar historic pandemics - albeit a little slowly and with major challenges and suffering involved.

This is why it is vital that entire societies come together and look out for one another - this is not a time for judgements, criticisms, divisions or disconnections, regardless how infuriating aspects of this period may be.

There is still a lot of optimism coming this year as Jupiter and Pluto Conjunct three times - April 4/5th, June 30th and November 12th. Each one bringing with it new opportunities and possibilities, growth, renewed strength, problem solving, expansion and a major turn of events - so expect good news, improvements, collective progress and a positive twist in direction on each of these dates. These conjunctions signify that vital lessons have been learned and will be catalysts for transcending what previously seemed impossible, so be prepared for rapid and positive forward motion.

Jupiter and Pluto alignments are transformational times when old outdated structures crumble and when new and more balanced timelines begin. They are purging and detoxing periods where harmful institutes and systems deconstruct.

The most positive astrological event of the year is the once-in-a-generation Jupiter-Saturn Great Conjunction on the solstice, December 21, 2020 in Aquarius - the element Air. This marks the end of a difficult year, bringing with it stability and signifying a major breakthrough, the beginning of a brand new era and a breath of healthy fresh air.

This will be the closest Jupiter-Saturn conjunction since 1623 and without doubt it will propel a new momentous cycle that will see immense growth and security after a period of stillness and instability. This energy will be warmly welcomed after such a tumultuous and challenging year.

It is imperative that we unite and form tight energetic bonds worldwide to help us all through this tumultuous phase. We must open our hearts wider than ever before and have compassion both for ourselves and those around us, as we all struggle to attune to this new and exceedingly unfamiliar world.

There will be loss, there will be grief, there will be denial and there will be disbelief.

But there will also be mass resurrection.

There will be a sense of feeling wildly out of control.

But the truth is - there never really was control.

Despite how awakened and enlightened we may have believed ourselves to be, we have always been grasping to illusions, never wholly perceiving that there is something bigger and far greater out there that we will never fully comprehend.

Humans are always battling to figure everything out - when sometimes it is entirely impossible - our planet has it’s own unique life force and everything that exists on it has it’s own complex blueprint.

We will never be able to work out all of the reasoning and meaning behind every single thing that occurs, so our energy is far better spent focusing on creating a new healthier, balanced and far more harmonious existence.

Sometimes the most productive and peaceful option we can choose is to flow with these ever changing energies, while remaining alert and prepared to alter direction with little notice.

Life is not meant to be dissected, hurried or forced. Lean into this frequency and trust in the entire process.

I have heard people say they feel Mother Nature is tired, that she is burnt out and angry. Despite the current trauma, I am not feeling that.

I feel that she is fired up and charged and requires us to change - but she is holding space for us all as we enter into silence, surrender and solitude, so she can reboot, rebalance and recalibrate her energy in order to keep humanity and all creatures as healthy as possible.

There is no doubt our planet is resetting. There is an indefinable energy in the air - something different in the clouds and in the water. The whole environment feels different, almost overnight. Birds are louder than ever before, we are noticing wildlife returning and our senses are responding to the subtle vibrational changes.

Our journey was never guaranteed to be easy. It will always churn out plot twists, obstacles and painful turbulence. However, that is the divine reason we exist on this planet—to show the universe that we are united and in this together. Despite hardships or life knocking us down, we refuse to allow derailments to throw us off course or for turmoil to permanently lower our frequency.

Whatever changes are required, we can do this. We have everything we need within us to rise and overcome any situation. We can and we will cope - both alone and together.

When panic and anxieties start to creep in, we can remind ourselves how human we all are, how interconnected we all are, how resilient we all are, how strong we all are and how dependent on one another we are - despite what we might have once thought.

Rest, rethink and reprioritise. Certain material things or systems that we once thought we couldn’t live without may be painfully and suddenly eliminated and there will be chaotic days, but they will be replaced with new and healthier realities.

We absolutely must work together to balance out any destruction with an abundance of new creation. Set highly optimistic and positive intentions. Life will feel secure and beautiful again, someday very soon - I feel and believe this with every fibre of my being.

This is a defining time in our history where a before virus and after virus line is currently being drawn out. And there is no doubt that we will emerge from this forever altered. But we will rebuild, we will reconstruct and we will feel more connected to one another, to nature, to all life, and to our planet than ever before.

Unfortunately no one can predict exactly when this challenging and painful phase will be over, but intuitively and astrologically I feel that from September we will be over the most challenging aspects and from December onward we will see the new world shining through.

When time has passed we will look back on all that we survived, how we supported one another and how dramatically we evolved as a society - we will feel a mixture of gratitude and grief and we will feel so proud that together we made it through.

A virus is energy. Everything in our universe is energy. We will soon find ways to overcome it and harmoniously co-exist with it.

In the meantime:

Try to eliminate irrational fear, as it lowers the immune system.

Remind yourself that you are safe and protected and that this threat will soon pass.

Be prepared to step into a new reality and try not to fear the unknown.

Keep moving forward.

Find joy in simplicity.

Look for the blessings - there is magic within darkness.

Send out love and healing vibrations to our entire planet.

Reach out if you need help, there are many waiting and willing to respond, and tell your loved ones how much they mean to you.

Pray for those suffering, for our future world and for your future self.

We are in the midst of a tremendous revolution.

This is confirmation that things are going to be okay - you are going to be okay.

Everything is in the process of working its way out.

The majority of us are experiencing internal and external battles.

Stay kind. Especially to yourself.

I wish you emotional, mental & spiritual peace, health & wellness.

~Alex Myles

[imagining-1]

Restricting Your Thoughts

Excerpt from Body, Mind and Spirit (1931), by Elwood Worcester and Samuel McComb, pp. 201–205.

The effort of those who realize the incalculable powers of self-suggestion for good or evil, of whom William James was one of the first, has been directed toward teaching how comparatively easy it is permanently to inhibit debilitating self-suggestions by resisting them for a short time, and how soon good and strengthening self-suggestions, which must be made consciously and with conviction at first, strike their roots into the rich soil of human life and operate spontaneously and automatically to our unending good.

Last spring I was present at a small gathering of men and women interested in medical psychology, to listen to an address by a famous man of science. After he had finished his formal talk, he said, in effect: “Ladies and gentlemen, before I sit down I wish to make a more personal statement which I think you will find of greater value and interest than my lecture. Up to my fiftieth year (he is now about sixty-five) I was an unhappy, ineffective man. None of the works on which my reputation rests was published. I was making my home in an unimportant town in California and was utterly unknown in the scientific world. I lived in a constant sense of gloom and failure. Perhaps my most painful symptom was a blinding headache which recurred usually two days of the week, during which I could do nothing.

“As my fiftieth birthday approached, I began to take stock of my soul and I realized that something was very wrong with me. I had read some of the literature of New Thought, which at the time appeared to be buncombe, and some statements of William James on the directing of attention to what is good and useful and ignoring the rest. One saying of his stuck in my mind, ‘We might have to give up our philosophy of evil, but what is that in comparison with gaining a life of goodness?’ (or words to that effect). Hitherto these doctrines had seemed to me only mystical theories, but realizing that my soul was sick and growing worse and that my life was intolerable, I determined to put them to the proof. In accordance with my teaching and mental habits, I resolved to make a careful, honest experiment which should be as carefully and honestly recorded. I decided to limit the period of conscious effort to one month, as I thought this time long enough to prove its value or its worthlessness to me. During this month I resolved to impose certain restrictions on my thoughts. If I thought of the past, I would try to let my mind dwell only on its happy, pleasing incidents, the bright days of my childhood, the inspiration of my teachers and the slow revelation of my life-work. In thinking of the present, I would deliberately turn my attention to its desirable elements, my home, the opportunities my solitude gave me to work, and so on, and I resolved to make the utmost use of these opportunities and to ignore the fact that they seemed to lead to nothing. In thinking of the future I determined to regard every worthy and possible ambition as within my grasp. Ridiculous as this seemed at the time, in view of what has come to me since, I see that the only defect of my plan was that it aimed too low and did not include enough.

“By this time I felt that I was about to make an important discovery and I began to be conscious of a certain tingling of expectation which I usually experience in my scientific work at such moments. When the day I had assigned arrived, I threw myself into the new task (incomparably the greatest I had ever attempted to perform) with ardour. I did not have to wait a month. At the end of eight days, I knew that the experiment was succeeding. I had not thought of including my headaches in my scheme of effort, as I deemed these beyond the possibility of help from this source. But therein I miscalculated, as they abruptly ceased. In fifteen years I have had but one headache and that was one I deliberately brought on for experimental purposes.

“Apart from this welcome relief, the first change of which I was aware was that whereas for many years I had been profoundly unhappy, I now felt happy and contented. I knew what James meant when he spoke of ‘being consciously right and superior.’ What surprised me more was that I was able to make others happy and that my personality seemed to attract, whereas before it had repelled. Up to this point of my recital I anticipate that you will find nothing strange in these changes and discoveries, except that I made them so late in life. What follows may tax your credulity. Personally I should not have accepted one of these statements sixteen years ago. Yet most of the changes in my outer life are matters of fact which can be verified in Who’s Who. As I stated at the beginning, the burdens I found hardest to bear were my obscurity and isolation, consciousness that the passing years were bringing me no nearer the goal of my ambition, that although my capacity was considerable, my name was unknown and my works unpublished because no publisher would accept them.

“The outward changes of my life resulting from my change of thought have surprised me more than the inward changes, yet they sprang from the latter. There were certain eminent men, for example, whose recognition I deeply craved. The foremost of these wrote me, out of a clear sky, and invited me to become his assistant. My works have all been published, and a foundation has been created to publish all that I may write in the future. The men with whom I have worked have been helpful and co-operative toward me chiefly on account of my changed disposition. Formerly they would not have endured me. One ambition of mine, my election to the presidency of a great foreign scientific society, though in accordance with my highest hope, seemed so utterly beyond my reach that I should have deemed it preposterous to aim at it, yet it came to me. As I look back over all these changes, it seems to me that in some blind way I stumbled on a path of life and set forces to working for me which before were working against me.

“There is one more incident I must record. After several years of peace and improvement it occurred to me that I had not given these theories a sufficient test. Apparently my experiment had succeeded, and I knew too much about the law of probability to ascribe all these changes to chance. Still, as a scientific man, I felt that I ought to test the principles with which I had been working negatively. I therefore began deliberately to revive the emotions of fear and apprehension. Within two hours I felt myself weak, depressed, doubtful, and I was conscious, for the last time, of a splitting headache. I therefore felt that I had done my duty and that I might rest comfortably in the great saying of Paul, ‘All things work together for good to them that love God.’ ”

If it were right for me to mention a great name, that of one of the least credulous or superstitious of mankind, this recital of his would evoke no mockery.

[republicstandard]

A Deceptive Coup – Ireland and the Globalist Abortion Agenda

On Friday 25 May the Irish electorate will decide on whether or not to repeal the Eighth Amendment which would allow for abortion on demand. The Eighth Amendment clarifies:

"The State acknowledges the right to life of the unborn and, with due regard to the equal right to life of the mother, guarantees in its laws to respect, and, as far as practicable, by its laws to defend and vindicate that right."

This is the phrasing exactly as it appears in the Irish constitution and to alter it would require a referendum in the Republic of Ireland. Since 1983 the Amendment has acknowledged the right to life of the unborn, equating it with the mother’s right to life. A pro-abortion coalition was launched to repeal this amendment in September 2017. However, regardless of where one stands in relation to abortion, a very disturbing sequence of events has recently unfolded which casts the sinister shadow of globalist infiltration over the debate.

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It now seems that once again a Cultural Marxist, liberal agenda to alter Irish society has become apparent. Unbeknownst to many who are advocating for abortion, a leaked document revealed that George Soros' Open Society Foundation was heavily funding the main pro-abortion campaign groups: Amnesty International Ireland, the Abortion Rights Campaign and the Irish Family Planning Association. The strategy was to use Ireland as a litmus test for the purpose of implementing abortion in the future, in other mainly Catholic European nations. The Open Society Foundation actually stated that it would fund these three Irish organizations;

to work collectively on a campaign to repeal Ireland’s constitutional amendment granting equal rights to an implanted embryo as the pregnant woman. With one of the most restrictive abortion laws in the world, a win there could impact other strongly Catholic countries in Europe, such as Poland and provide much needed proof that change is possible, even in highly conservative places.

This makes the intentions of this organization patently clear. A further revelation from the leaked document was even more insidious.

The recent legislation of same-sex marriage (in Ireland) offers valuable and timely opportunities to advance the campaign.

According to Cora Sherlock, Deputy Chairperson of the Pro-Life Campaign;

"These revelations are extremely disturbing… the fact that an outside body is talking about funding and coordinating groups in Ireland to dismantle protection for the unborn child represents a gross interference and is an attack on democracy.’ She then continued, "I think most people want to see a fair debate regardless of where they stand on the issue. The public will be deprived of such a debate if this kind of meddling continues from well-funded outside bodies."

To make it even more blatantly obvious that the Irish Abortion Referendum is influenced by a globalist liberal Marxist agenda, the three organizations in question defended their receipt of the funding.

There is now a manifested level of emotional self-righteous indignation with anything to do with traditional values in Ireland, coming predominantly from the college-attending millennial generation that borders on the unhinged. The same level of feminist bile on display at the Women’s March is evident at Irish pro-abortion rallies. Chanting slogans and rhetoric in uniformity is now the norm with, as per usual, opportunities for civilized debate being null and void. Those who oppose the rhetoric are labelled fascist, et cetera. Unfortunately it is these heavily indoctrinated college campus revolutionaries who will vote en-masse to repeal the Eight Amendment and lead Ireland even closer to the Cultural Marxist utopia, which is the globalist dream.

I have no doubt that many of those who support the abortion agenda in Ireland are unaware of its Marxist influence or even of its historic relationship with the eugenics movement of the early 20th Century. After the atrocities of WW2, eugenics was given the less controversial moniker of ‘population control’ or ‘birth control’. In America, the eugenics promoter, Margaret Sanger’s American Birth Control League changed its name to Planned Parenthood and the ‘Eugenics Quarterly’ journal was rebranded ‘Social Biology.’ In fact, Sanger was quoted as saying prior to WW2;

"the most merciful thing a large family can do to one of its infant members is to kill it."

Her radical socialist views would create the eventual blueprint for the new feminism mainstreamed in the 1960’s and ‘70’s.

Yet how did it ever come to this? To understand the level of Cultural Marxist indoctrination and its ‘slow march through the institutions’ we have to remember that this has been an ongoing battle to destroy all Western values since the renegade Marxist, Max Horkheimer became director of the infamous Frankfurt School in 1930. He believed that the real enemy of Communism was not Capitalism but Western Culture and its inherent values. Victory would be attained only after ‘Christian beliefs had died in the soul of Western Man.’ In order to achieve this, the institutions of culture and education would have to be captured. This new road to cultural hegemony would be achieved through psychological conditioning, with the social and moral beliefs represented by the nuclear family as prime targets. By destroying the traditionally strong bonds of the family and the nurturing values it represents, Western values would soon crumble, fostering the greater potential to replace Western traditional society with something wholly different – a Marxist, atomised society more dependent on the tenets of the state which would then become the surrogate family.

With the Irish mainstream media, political establishment and educational institutions all advocating for the right to abortion on demand, it would seem that the Cultural Marxist agenda has finally achieved its aims. After all, is that not the premise we are expected to abide by now in Ireland without being vilified? However, it does not have to be like this.

So, notwithstanding the abortion legislation already introduced in 2013 allowing for limited abortion where the life of the mother was in danger, the Eighth Amendment provides the last remaining protection for the unborn child in Ireland and should be robustly defended.

According to the Pro-Life Campaign, each human being regardless of age, gender, disability, race, status in society, possesses a profound, inherent, equal and irreplaceable value and dignity. Abortion advocates want the unborn child to be an exception to this rule. To do this they resort to the ploy of denying the humanity of the unborn. However, the indicator of a truly civilised society, however, is one that welcomes everyone in life and protects everyone in its laws.

Cora Sherlock of the Pro-Life Campaign said:

"The 8th Amendment (Article 40.3.3) is the last remaining constitutional protection for the unborn in Ireland. Since its insertion into the Constitution in 1983, it has ensured that pregnant women in Ireland receive all necessary medical treatment and at the same time has provided full protection for the unborn child’s right to life. It is no exaggeration to say that tens of thousands of people are alive in Ireland today thanks to the 8th Amendment. We know of many mothers who are grateful for the Amendment, because without it their children may never have been born."

She further clarified that;

"Since the Government introduced abortion legislation in 2013, abortion is legal throughout the full nine months of pregnancy on a threat of suicide, without any medical evidence to back it up. This law is unjust and must be repealed but at least while the 8th Amendment is still in place, the right to life of the unborn child must still be considered by doctors in Ireland. What Deputy Coppinger (of the Irish Socialist Party) and her supporters ignore is that the repeal of this Amendment would remove the rights of an entire group of human beings in Irish society – the unborn."

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I can only hope now that the Irish electorate and the millennial generation in particular will not only realise this but also the sinister agenda of globalism delving furtively behind the scene as well.

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[raggedyrenaann]

“Let your weird light shine bright so the other weirdos know where to find you.”

Hey!  You found me!  I knew you would!

I’m your friendly local woodworker & maker, prepper, Star Wars aficionado, tea granny, and nacho connoisseur…and that’s just getting started!  Want to know more?  Who is this mysterious woman behind all the wood shavings and paint splotches who has mastered the use of the sarcastic #hashtag?  Carry on, oh curious minds!

This is a little Q&A post that I like to call:

It’s time for you to…

Meet Your Maker.

(and her dog).

Whew, that was terrifyingly epic and super up in your grill  (see: ‘personal motto’, below).

Just sit back and relax…let’s get to know each other.  Sort of like a first date.  What’s that?  I didn’t bring you flowers?  Damn…ok, think of this as more of a job interview then.  No, no!  I said relax!  you look so nervous!  Why are you nervous?  I’m the one being interviewed!  Wait….now I’M nervous.  Should I be nervous if I’m technically interviewing myself?  Wow…that got awkward fast.

*ahem*…so…let’s shed some light on this mystery woman behind RRA Restorations!

Partying the night away, or chill at home?

I am a raging introvert, so definitely chill at home.  Ok, maybe introverts don’t rage…so more like quietly and unobtrusively smoldering in the corner, but you get the idea.  I love to enjoy the comforts of home, and when I do occasionally go out I have a code word for my husband so that he knows when I am ‘peopled out’ and need to return to the sanctuary of my home.  Since I love being home so much I really try to turn my house into a comfortable little nest.  I am SUPER tactile, so I have plush blankets, cushy slippers for my tired toes, and soft yoga pants for every occasion.  Basically, if I touched it and liked touching it, I kept it.  Although it is getting a little bit difficult to explain to my husband why I need THIS many scarves (they make me feel pretty, Ok?!).

What is one thing you can’t live without?

I know I’m supposed to be all mushy here and say my husband and my dog…but seriously, I just bought a milk frother and my London Fogs have been on point lately!  We’re talking about a huge quality of life upgrade here!

You know it’s hard out here for a mutt.

My husband and my dog are obviously very important as well, I mean, look how adorable they are!  (But did you know that you can order vanilla syrup from amazon and it will deliver right to your door?  I will never have to leave my house for Sbux quality drinks again!).

Don’t judge, I’m only kidding.  Mostly.

What is your personal motto?

“If you can’t overdo it, it’s not worth doing.”  I figure, if you’re going to paint something in a really snazzy bright colour you may as well add glitter!  I have trouble knowing when to stop adding…minimalism is a challenge.  #thestruggleisreal

Another thing I try to do every day is to wake up and say “something amazing will happen today”…and the crazy part?  Something amazing usually does happen!  Of course, not everyday is easy and on rough days I always tell myself that “things always look better in the morning”.  As they say, you may as well look on the brighter side of life…none of us get out alive anyhow!

So how did the ‘biz’ get started?

I took a personality test once that totally pegged me.  It said that I would likely have many careers over the span of my life due to carrying wildly differing interests, and that I am happiest stepping out of the box and creating an independent life outside of restrictive corporate culture.  In my young life I’ve already been a golf course turf care queen, barista, gold explorer, ‘black gold’ hunter, geologist, and lab analyst.  That said, let’s flash back to several unhappy years ago when I was working for a company that I felt didn’t care about me, and I was getting totally burned out.  I had been with this company for three years when the economy sputtered in Alberta, and in 2015 both my husband and myself were laid off within a week of each other (from two different companies).  I knew then that I needed to do something different because I couldn’t spend another miserable moment working for someone else.  We began to lay the groundwork for businesses that we could build and grow with.

I’ve always been creative and, much to my husband’s chagrin, I always have a project (or two) on the go.  My interests have always been varied and far reaching.  I like to think that I have a curious and wandering soul…I am more than just a personality test, after all!  I crochet, write, paint, and am learning photograpy.  I’ve taken clay working classes, water colour classes, acrylic painting classes, and I am a self-taught Popsicle structure artist (I attempted to build a miniature scale Titanic out of Popsicle sticks when I was 14…I say ‘attempted’ because it turned out it required more Popsicle sticks to finish it than I could afford with my allowance…#embarrassing).  I even play a few instruments, and do a bit of scrap-booking & card-making.  Eventually my projects began to overrun the house…I loved making things but was running out of room to put everything so I started to think about selling the things I make.  I loved making, and didn’t want to have to stop just because my house was starting to look like a hoarder lived in it!

RRA Restorations was born as much out of a need for me to feel like a productive and working member of society as it was a deep need in my soul for me to feel that I was doing fulfilling work that allowed me to make my own decisions while being a little wild and free (which these days means working at midnight because apparently that is when my brain gets totally jazzed on creativity).

What is your favourite thing to make?

I love Alberta and everything that makes this province the unique and beautiful place that it is.  I love to make wooden art signs with the shape of our gorgeous province of Alberta painted on them, and as an adorable added touch I paint little hearts on the location of people’s hometowns.  I love custom wooden sign orders, there are some wonderfully crazy people out there and I never know what they are going to ask me to design!  Right now I’m working on a sign in the shape of a pooping dog…don’t ask!

I also love up-cycling and reclaiming things that had a past life into something new and fun!  The tagline for my company is that this is “where history and handmade meet”.  I love that so many of my items had a story before we got our hands on them, and that with a little bit of love from us their story didn’t have to end.  Living in the country (a.k.a the boonies) I am lucky enough to have access to a lot of weathered farm wood so I can make gorgeous barn board signs, or something like these cute little coasters cut from wooden fence posts salvaged from local farms.

I’m also currently restoring an antique treadle sewing table that I’m super excited about!  It is so intricately handcrafted, and shows such pride of craftsmanship.  The damn thing still works over 100 years later!  They sure don’t make ’em like this anymore.

You know I can do a mean chicken dance.

So…this prepping thing…?

The zombies are coming and I’m not going to be the first to get eaten.

I kid!  I live in an area that is prone to natural disasters and I have an obsession with making sure that I am prepared for anything.  I’m currently saving up for a generator to deal with power outages (which frequently occurs living rural), and am working on prepping a garden plan in which the plants will complement each other and provide benefits to each other so that everything grows in a happy little symbiotic harmony.  I’ve always been interested in being self sufficient and independent.  Sort of like the Alaska Bush People, but with running water and television…I’m not a caveman.

I’m totally into personal safety and preparation for any emergency, and I love to help everyone around me get interested in it too!  If you think that this is something that you might be interested in be sure to check out my blog post on how to create your own Family Emergency Plan and build your first Bug-out Bag.  You will feel so much safer and prepared, and your family with thank you!

You seem totes wacky and I want to know more!

Aw shucks!  Well, thanks!  You can always keep up with my newest antics by signing up here for my blog updates, or you can check me out on my website here, or check out my latest projects on my Instagram here!

One last VERY important question…

Best video gaming platform?

Hands down Nintendo 64, and I will fight anyone who says otherwise…you know I would win because Legend of Zelda taught me mad chicken-slaying sword skills.

  There you have it!  A sneak peak into my world.  Until next time…

Check us out on Etsy here!

It's time for you to...Meet Your Maker! I'm a weird and wacky maker in Southern Alberta and wanted to say hi! "Let your weird light shine bright so the other weirdos know where to find you." Hey!  You found me!