“What is a LEADER?” asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. “Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?”

“A LEADER isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. It’s realizing that every experience develops some latent force within you.¹ You begin to understand that vision is the art of seeing the invisible² so that when you want to build a wagon, you don’t gather the other toys to collect wood or assign them tasks, but rather you teach them to long for ways to traverse the endless immensity of the backyard.³ Then you become a LEADER.”

Edger let me know that RiaD has died. She left us on December 18.

RiaDarlin’. Fairy dust and magic. but she had a bite. and she could write. she was fierce and brave. she didn’t have a sweet nature, but a kind and forgiving one. and Ria knew things, she just did.

whenever i see emeralds in the river or stand in the rain and melt into the ground, i will remember her. as the clouds march across the skies like floats in thanksgiving day parades, i will smile and think: Ria helped me see such things.

when the snow falls and the streets go silent and the darkness is lit by moonlight, i will let go her name and see her form in the moist frost, knowing that it’s magic. whatever they think it is and whatever they call it, physics or science or religion or nothingness. it is magic. we are magic. the universe is the sorcerer and we are hatchlings spread out and swirling around planets in great gaseous lights or walking, swimming, flying on a tiny blue dot in system with a sun.

she knew it and that life was everywhere, flowing as urgently in the still and static stone as the heart beating within her. i miss her. i will never forget her. and how to connect in a free fall.

i love you RiaDarlin’… peef.

This post on Tuesday, How Shell is trying to send a chill through activist groups across the country, brings up one very interesting question…

HOW DID SHELL LEARN ABOUT A POTENTIAL AND hypothetical GREENPEACE PROTEST?

The case, Shell Offshore Inc. vs. Greenpeace, was filed by Shell Oil Company. Last summer, Shell assumed –based on conjecture – that Greenpeace USA would protest the company’s drilling in the Alaskan Arctic.  Shell asked the 9th Circuit court for a preemptive injunction and restraining order against Greenpeace USA

The real question, it seems to me, is this: Is this the type of info the NSA is gathering and distributing to mega corps?

I’ve seen some very disturbing polls, allegedly asserting that at least half of Americans (and that includes modern Dems … not my kind of Dem but oh well) support NSA programs, although there are indications Americans want um oversight of those programs. Yeah. Right. Oversight by whom?

Anyway. I do wonder how Americans would feel if that NSA spying on Americans program™ was primarily focused on disrupting the next OCCUPY protest? What if the NSA program is aimed at stopping Americans from protesting in the same manner as Brazil or Turkey? I wonder if Americans would approve. Maybe they would. Maybe America has changed so radically that people like me are the outliers… the bothersome and drab bearers of bad news trampling over the promise of more Brand Dems in the White House…

But one wonders why, with all the intel about the Boston Marathon suspects, that tragedy wasn’t averted…

Maybe some of us still think this is about political parties and getting Dems in National Office, abortion, immigration, and marriage equality. It’s not. They are cultural issues thrown into the waters like chum to attract a feeding frenzy by all those polarized and rapt in their “side-taking.” What is at play here is far more urgent… in the-short-term urgent life-on-planet-earth urgent… and it involves the NSA program, the trade agreement being negotiated that will upend our sovereignty, bailouts, water, and our food sources. And that little thing called climate change.

So… where are the priorities? Hillary in 2016 (don’t make me gag) or finding a way to change this game… and address the issues that will really change people’s lives. Clue: voting Brand Democrat in 2016 ain’t it.

Brutal, fatal cleaver assault in London called a terrorist attack

They first hit the man, thought to be a British soldier, with a car in broad daylight. Then the two attackers hacked him to death..

According to CNN, one of the attackers said the killing was an “eye for an eye” … a retaliation for Muslims who are “dying daily.”

^{cross posted at daily kos}

I am so tired of all the posturing on either side of the political divide. I am so tired of those taking sides, vomiting up, along with their bile, the inevitable “lesser of two evils” mantra. Obama, Boehner… whoever… I’m sick of them all.

Whether Republican or Democrat, really, haven’t we had enough of epically bad governance? No? No, apparently not… epically bad governance isn’t compelling enough. We still have to try to lessen the stupidity of one side by magnifying the screwball antics of the other.

keyrist. i am so tired of it.

^{crossposted at dKos}

Literally within hours of the Sandy Hook massacre on 14 December 2012, some of my pro-gun Facebook connections started moaning about how libruls would use the tragedy to swoop in and take away their guns.

Really???? Really??? I told them: please, have some decency… can we wait at least a week before hearing you all crying about your guns. Twenty little kids… they were just little kids, and six adults have been murdered.

I didn’t see it at the time, but perceived later that most of us seemed to make the story about people killed by guns, gun deaths, statistics, and the guns don’t kill people, people do litany. But just maybe there was something deeper to understand… twenty little kids gunned down in an elementary school… what really happened to bring us to that sad and mournful December day?

Now another child, a baby boy, has been shot and murdered in his stroller in Brunswick GA. I still can’t grasp it: why the kids alleged to have committed this horrific act shot the baby in the stroller after shooting the woman in the leg… why didn’t they take her purse… and without witnesses, it seems to me to have more questions than answers.

And yet, with all of the strangeness of the story, those damned guns steal the spotlight. See, I think there are far more important elements in either story than the use of guns…  

US Elections Live: Hour after networks call, Romney yet to concede

Typically the defeated concedes before the winner speaks. One theory is that he (Romney) isn’t willing to concede, the other is that he doesn’t have a concession speech.

Just when you think the world can’t possibly get worse, it does.

270 miners charged in co-workers’ deaths

South African authorities have charged 270 miners with murder in the killings of 34 fellow workers, even though police are believed to have fired the fatal shots.

Whaaaaaat? Well, in fact, the South African authorities are using a sort of they made us do it defense. In an ugly throw-back to the Apartheid-era, the miners are being charged under the common purpose law:

“It’s the police who were shooting but they were under attack by the protesters, who were armed, so today the 270 accused are charged with the murders,” Frank Lesenyego, a spokesperson for the National Prosecuting Authority, told the Associated Press.

^{Daily News / 30 Aug 2012}

Because of course, it’s always a good idea to blame the victim. This is unbelievably frightening… to now put this massacre at the feet of the miners is breathtaking. Really jaw-dropping insanity.

I mean WTF???????????

Watch out, because this is our world now and those in power (all of them) make it harder and harder for us to act on the truth as we are being buried in bullshit… being forced to accept lie after lie, no matter what we see, no matter what the facts may indicate. One can only wonder how long before police in Oakland or New York City adopt a similar strategy…

This video is amazing… look at it and bear witness; one never knows if it will disappear.

sing it, share it, revel in it… this is a voice that can change the game.

brisk and bold, the bracing east wind blows across the lowlands, drying the air and clearing the sky of its oft worn grey.

today it is bright. today there is cold sunlight. today is one for a long walk in the park.

^{cross posted at writing in the rAw and at daily kos}