Comfortable in your arms

There is something about the standing bass, double bass, bass viol or whatever else you might call it. Irreplicable.

Tom Freund opened for Ben Harper in Toronto many years ago where I wrapped my ears around this catchy little tune.

Have a listen:

Food System

For those of you who have not seen the documentary on the industrial food system FOOD INC, see it.  It does not try to shock the audience into an emotional response against meat. In fact, it is not anti-meat at all.  It does however shed some light on an industry that does not want light shed upon it.

This clip from the film is a wonderful overview of some of the issues and the ideas.  The farmer being interviewed, from Polyface Farms, is Joel Salatin.  I think he challenges the red neck stereotypes to which we might be prone, and certainly proves himself a very intelligent, well spoken expert in his craft.

Notable highlight from the Video:
-” A culture that just views a pig as a pile of protoplasmic, inanimate structure to be manipulated by whatever creative design the human can foist on that critter will probably view individuals within its community, and other cultures within the community of nations, with the same type of disdain, and disrespect, and controlling type mentality”  (Joel Salatin)

Pay particular note to the events at 3:15 of the video. (Point to follow)

Q: How did you react to the slaughtering of the chickens?

Having shown this to many, and witnessed hundreds of reactions, it seems that we tend to be horrified by the act of slitting the chicken’s throat.  Yes, it is a brutal act.  How many of us are more than willing to order wings at a restaurant, but don’t want to be shown the consequences of such a decision?  How disconnected have we become from the effects of our food eating habits?

Honest advertising

Lots of ads these days use all kind of methods to deliver a kind of propaganda.  What if there was an ad that was entirely truthful about the effects of that product?  Would we be in a position to accept it?

Perhaps the alien aspect of the commercial is a bit of a stretch, but is this scene not being played out in coffee shops around the world?

Einstein come true

Albert Einstein.  Undisputed visionary.

“I fear the day when the technology overlaps with our humanity. The world will only have a generation of idiots.”

“I’m spiritual, not religious”

“I’m spiritual, not religious”.
Eric Hyde has a nice article on the delineation between spiritual and religious.

It strikes me that many who might utter such a phrase are reacting to the dogma of organized religion.  Erkhart Tolle’s book A New Earth really crystallized for me that religions hold many of the same values that those who consider themselves “spiritual” aspire to.  The corruption of this higher ideal, however, may occur when people shift their focus from enlightenment and understanding to ‘putting asses in the seats’.  The shift of priorities from teaching to merely filling a building, and thus a collection plate, may mean that the patrons of such institutions may not be as virtuous or spiritual as one might assume, as though there is some mathematical equation between holiness and time spent going through the motions.

It strikes me that the closer people get to being in touch with a greater force (The Force in a Jedi sense?)  in this world, the closer people get to recognizing that such a force might be called by many names.  Perhaps each religion is pointing to the same elemental force that is tangible and real to those who are aware of such a presence.

Consider the major three religions (as I understand them): Islam, Christianity, and Judaism.  Christianity and Judaism are quite similar–the old testament is the Torah; the difference is that Judaism doesn’t subscribe to the New Testament, and thus Christ as the son of God (though they do consider him a prophet).  Muslims beliefs are quite closely aligned with Judaism as well–they even share similar dietary restrictions.  Each of the religions tout similar values of kindness to one another and personal virtue.

Has it become a semantic debate about the name we assign to God?

What is in a name?

What if…

What if, instead of trucking home all of the packaging for items like televisions and computers that we inevitably throw out at home, we left it at the store.

If the cost of disposing this waste became a burden for the distributor, would they begin to put pressure on the supplier to ship their product in a more manageable way?

Top 5 Reasons why 9/11 couldn’t be a “Terrorist Attack”

I have done quite a bit of reading and video watching about 9/11.  There are far more thorough accounts of the attacks and lots of reasons that people cite to support the idea that the attacks weren’t perpetrated by men armed with box cutters.  Yet despite all of this, there are still people who do not seem able to wrap their head around this idea.

Certainly the implications of believing that the 9/11 attacks were perpetuated by members of the US government is a frightening proposition–it challenges the very foundations of our belief in government.

I decided to write this post, not for the initiated, but for the lay person–the skeptics.  I intend to set forth 5 simple reasons for why the official account of the collapse of the towers cannot accurate.  5 ideas, that if thought about logically and rationally without any particular scientific knowledge, with cast an indisputable shadow of doubt on the official story.

TOP 5 REASONS (in no particular order):

1.  SPEED OF COLLAPSE:  Imagine standing atop of one of the twin towers and dropping a billiard ball over the side.  The approximate time that it would take for the ball to hit the ground is 8-10 seconds. The towers, standing 110 stories tall, collapsed in 8-10 seconds.  Therefore they collapsed at free-fall speed, something that would be impossible if one is to believe that the weight of the top floors collapsed onto the floors below and crushed them.  Any resistance offered by the floors below would have slowed the collapse.  This repeated 75 or 80 times over would have meant that the time of collapse for the towers might be closer to 40 seconds, not 10.

2.  POP CAN STOMP THOUGHT EXPERIMENT:  Most of us have likely used the heel of our foot to stomp a pop can flat to make them all fit into our recycling bin (or just to feel like a big man from time to time).  If you have done this, or seen it done, you might have also witnessed a time when the pop can wasn’t stomped on squarely enough and so shot out from beneath the foot, half crushed.  Perhaps you have been inundated with cans and thought to speed up the process by doubling the cans one atop the other and crushing two stacked cans in a single stomp. If you have attempted this you probably have realised, as I have, that to do so is extraordinarily difficult.  One can inevitably slides off to the side, squirts out, or otherwise deviates from the linear path of force, resulting in failure.

Think now about the theory that a top section of 30 floors acted as a weight crushing the floors beneath it.  Compare it with the idea of stepping on a stack of cans that was 75 cans high.  What are the chances that you would be able to crush that entire stack straight down onto its own footprint, not once but twice in two attempts?

Notice in this picture that the aforementioned top section of floors that was said to have crushed those beneath it already has a noticeable tilt to it.  It has not yet begun to crush the floors below, yet it appears to be quite off centre.  Shouldn’t it have then eventually slide off the stack of floors beneath it and tumbled onto the streets below?

3.  GROUND ZERO:  Let’s assume that the official story about the top portion of the building crushing the floors beneath is correct.  With no prior knowledge of the event, what would you predict you would see at the bottom of the building?  Take a moment and visualise it.  Would it be a fair assumption to think that there would be a stack of concrete floors?  Shouldn’t there be something remaining of those top floors that acted as the “hammer” to collapse the floors below?

What was left? Was there a stack of floors that had been pancaked down into the ground?  Certainly two buildings worth of concrete and steel (220 combined floors) would make a HUGE pile of rubble, wouldn’t it?  How high a pile of rubble does 110 floors worth of building create?

I can’t say for certain when these photos were taken.  Not the day of the collapse (as there are cranes in the shot) but not long after either (the remains are still smoldering….but that’s a whole different question)

4.  DUST:  The amount of dust that was created on 9/11 was reportedly seen by NASA.  Where did all of this dust come from?  How could the pancaking of floors upon on another create so much dust?

Just look at the photos.  Ask yourself if this is what you would predict?  What explains the amount of dust in the air, not to mention the showering action of the buildings?

5. TIME LINE:  The time line of the collapse raises some interesting questions about the nature of the collapse.  Here are the key points as it pertains to this argument according to Wikipedia:
– 8:46am: Plane hits Tower 1 (North)
– 9:03am: Plane hits Tower 2 (South)
– 9:58am: Tower 2 (South) collapses–total time of fire prior to weakening steel causing collapse: 55 minutes
– 10:28am: Tower 1 (North) collapses–total time of fire prior to weakening steel causing collapse: 94 minutes or 1h34m

Why is it that if jet fuel was said to have caused the collapse of the towers did the first tower to be hit collapse after the second tower?

FURTHER ‘READINGS’:
There are a plethora of sources to give you a better sense of the events and the arguments.  Among the best full length films to check out are LOOSE CHANGE and ZEITGEIST.  The first is probably the best single film that touches the greatest number of arguments in the most coherent way.  The latter is a more wide-sweeping look at the world around us and suggests an alternate theory to explain how the collapse of the towers might play into a bigger picture.
If you’re at all interested in seeing real footage from the day of the event through the eyes of the firefighters who knew the buildings well, check out a documentary about a rookie fire fighter who found himself responding to this tragedy.  It is called 9/11, and wasn’t intended to be about this at all.

Capitalism, Charity, and the (Soft) Apocalypse

This is a great animated lecture on the false ethics of the economy. Just as the Kony 2012 video was criticised for removing the face of an issue but leaving the infection to fester, this video suggests the same thing about our Capitalistic ways.

What if…..

What if instead of throwing “disposable” things out we reused them…just once.

Take for example a Ziploc bag.  If everyone was able to reuse each bag once (or even reuse 80% of bags once), just think of the savings.  Consumption of the bag would be cut in half.

Green Idea #3

The ubiquitous coffee tray. Cardboard life savers in a crowded work place sea of people streaming through corridors and hallways, elevators and stairways, hands filled with bags, phones, papers, tablets and other assorted necessities–these hearty helpers make the impossible possible.

How many of these trays does your work place use on a daily basis?

What if instead of simply tossing these trays into the recycling we actually took them back to be Reused?  Tim Horton’s will gladly accept these trays to be reused (at least this has been my experience as I shovel a 60 tray stack through the drive-through window, all but smothering the unsuspecting coffee lady).

While these trays are generally already made of recycled material, think of the energy and resources saved by reusing instead of recycling.

Who are we kidding anyway, we’re headed right back to grab another coffee anyway….let’s cut out the middle man and get those trays to where they need to be: helping the low man on the totem pole sent to pick up coffees for the team.