One great way to prepare for the year to come is to slow down and walk a labyrinth. (It’s also an opportunity to donate to vital local services if you live in the Peterborough NH area.)
Everything slows down to “one foot in front of the other” for a half-hour or an hour. It has to be experienced; it can’t be described.
Here’s a video you might like:
We put out sunflower seeds for birds, but, as of December 24, none had shown up. A red squirrel, who belongs to a species that I think of as the gentlest species of squirrel found in this area, took up the offer, providing entertainment for our bird-viewing-deprived cat.
The music is a folk song whose words appear in the Digital Tradition without a tune, so I just made one up.
Update: On Saturday, the birds flew in, at least three species. Kitty was overjoyed!
(cross-posted from my LiveJournal blog) A small flock of wild tom turkeys stole the show at Monandnock Quaker Meeting on December 20. We all just had to take a break from business meeting to watch them. One of the turkeys perched in a crabapple tree for a while, but unforunately his picture didn’t come out well. At various points, the turkeys seemed to be acting the parts of the various birds in “The Twelve Days of Christmas” for us. Music is midi banjo playing the obvious tune.
At the Copenhagen Climate Summit the idea of a “Tobin Tax”, a tiny tax on every international currency-exchange transaction, as a way to raise the proposed $100 billion dollars per year that is now the bare minimum that must be pledged by the developed countries to support the transition of poor (developing) countries to sustainable energy production and out of absolute poverty. Actually 300-400 billion dollars per year is the amount that is recommended.
This blog from last year (http://makewealthhistory.org/2009/01/07/the-tobin-tax/) says that a tax of 1 quarter of a cent on each such transaction would raise $300 billion.
This sounds like an excellent idea to me, if properly implemented.
One of my Myspace friends cites an alarmist opinion piece
(http://www.prisonplanet.com/final-copenhagen-text-includes-global-transaction-tax.html) that laments the possibility of such a tax, saying that it would be collected unaccountably by the International Monetary Fund (IMF), and that it is already included in the secret draft of the Copenhagen agreement. This source says that it would cost each US family “at least $3000 a year”.
Assuming that the average American family spends $60,000 a year, and that every dollar they spend is subject to this tax, that would come to $150 per year per family. Since most family expenditures do not involve currency exchanges, the actual amount would probably be less. Two Starbucks coffees a week would cost more than that. I share a concern over the IMF’s governance and policies and would want the money to be handled transparently by a different agency, but a wealth transfer from the rich countries to the poor countries is self-evidently necessary to enable the majority of the world’s population to survive the disastrous effects of climate change and make a livable future possible. If the price of gasoline went up three cents, you’d pay it without batting an eyelid; this proposed (not enacted yet) new tax is no worse, no more than a minor annoyance.
Of course if you believe, as the “prison planet” blogger does, that global warming is a hoax designed to take away our freedoms and bring back a kind of worldwide Babylonian empire, then you want to hold on to every cent you’ve got, and the rest of the world be damned, and nothing I say will persuade you otherwise. Even so, I hope you will at least question his math.
The prison planet blogger says the Tobin tax would be at a 2 percent rate (which, I guess,
http://www.irasandperl.org/wordpress/
The words below put me in mind of the old hymn “Only remembered for what we have done”. While I sing the old Wobbly song that says “The ends the means are justifying”, I really believe the opposite, and I think most radical union members actually spend more time “building the new world within the shell of the old” than attacking fellow humans. The “good people” Sandperl refers to include people like Barack Obama, I’m afraid, calling for more war to end war.
I finally got the coyote to slink behind (or is it inside?) the machine.
Coyote is an archetypal trickster, and he is always getting inside things that are normal and makes them non-normal. The images on which this is based are in freely licensed through the Wikimedia Commons. I hope you’ll bear with me while I do some fumbling
They came from their caves all together,
a great army of heroes
roused from their legendary slumber:
Frederick Barbarossa, outraged that
ravens no longer flew around his mountain;
Finn and the Fian warriors,
their wooden whistle blown by the wind,
Scotland