Here It Comes

There's an article in today's WaPo that does a good job of explaining, in English, what's happening in financial markets. Here's the take-away:

"When people get scared, they tighten up all over," said A. Gary Shilling, president of the investment firm that bears his name. He said he expects housing prices to fall significantly further. "This kills consumer spending," he said of the credit crunch. "We think we'll be in a recession as a result by the end of the year. And that will spread globally because U.S. consumers still are the buyers of first and last resort for the excess goods and services produced around the world."

It's still not too late to take some steps to protect yourself.

*Quit buying stuff on credit. I mean it. Quit using your credit cards. You don't need 90 percent of that shit, anyway.

*Pay off any debt that you have. Here is how to do this. Make a list of every debt that you owe: student loans, credit cards, car loans, mortgage, etc. Next to each debt, write the interest rate that you are paying. Circle the number if the terms of the loan allow the lender to raise your interest rates. You can find this information out by reading your monthly statement very carefully or by calling the customer service number on the statement and asking them. Pay the minimum due each month on every debt except for the one with the highest interest rate. Pay as much as you can possibly afford to pay on that debt until it is paid off. Then, start in on the debt with the next-highest interest rate. You'll have to watch the debts that you circled to see if the interest rates on those go up.

*Get at least six months' net salary in a safe, liquid place such as a savings account, an interest-paying checking account, or a series of CDs. Take a second job for a while in order to do this if that's what you need to do. Skip your vacation trip this year if that's what you need to do. Sell off stuff if that's what you need to do. You've got to have a cushion as we head into bumpy waters. Having this cushion is what allows you to stay out of credit card debt. This is money that you'll live on if you lose your job, that you'll use to buy a new washing macine if the washing machine breaks, that you'll use to pay bills if you have health expenses not covered by insurance.

*If you can, get a fixed mortgage. If you've paid off all other debt, or all other debt except for low-interest-rate student loans, pay extra on your mortgage. If you have a 30-year mortgage, for example, you can pay it off in 15 years. There are calculators on the web that will show you how much you have to pay every month to do this. You'll save thousands of dollars in interest this way. First, however, you need to make sure that there are no penalties for early payment. Call your mortgage lender and ask.

The Cat And The Moon By W. B. Yeats

THE cat went here and there
And the moon spun round like a top,
And the nearest kin of the moon,
The creeping cat, looked up.
Black Minnaloushe stared at the moon,
For, wander and wail as he would,
The pure cold light in the sky
Troubled his animal blood.
Minnaloushe runs in the grass
Lifting his delicate feet.
Do you dance, Minnaloushe, do you dance?
When two close kindred meet,
What better than call a dance?
Maybe the moon may learn,
Tired of that courtly fashion,
A new dance turn.
Minnaloushe creeps through the grass
From moonlit place to place,
The sacred moon overhead
Has taken a new phase.
Does Minnaloushe know that his pupils
Will pass from change to change,
And that from round to crescent,
From crescent to round they range?
Minnaloushe creeps through the grass
Alone, important and wise,
And lifts to the changing moon
His changing eyes.

"From The Wild Swans at Coole. W.B. Yeats. New York: Macmillan, 1919.

Unsafe In Any Century

Being labeled a witch can still be dangerous for women in the 21st Century.

A women was stripped and brutally beaten with hot iron rods after she was branded a witch and held responsible for the death of a woman in a Jharkhand village, police said Monday.

The incident came to light only after a week when the woman from Dadighagar in Hazaribagh district, about 130 km from here, approached some local reporters Sunday.

Basdeo Manjhi said 45-year-old Chandmuni Devi had used black magic against his wife who died of snakebite on July 14. He complained to the panchayat that ordered that Chandmuni be stripped and beaten with hot rods and sickles.

Chandmuni and her husband braved threats and filed a police complaint against six people five days later. But the police did not take any action either and the couple approached the media for help.

Witch-hunt cases are rampant in Jharkhand. More than 600 people, mostly women, have been killed in last 10 years after they were charged of practicing black magic.

It's all there. The need to strip the witch. The fact that it's almost always women. The need to blame someone for the fact that a snakebite can kill. The refusal of the police to do anything. The elements of this story never change.

Air

Land Of The Lotus Lovers

Went today with my artistic friend R., aka the best cook in the world, to the Kenilworth Aquatic Gardens in Northeast D.C. Wow.

You have to drive through a not-too-lovely part of town to get there, and my sweet little GPS device took me through quite a bit of construction, but once you arrive at the Gardens, it's as if you're a million miles from evertyhing else. The lotus blossoms -- correction -- the acres and acres of lotus blossoms were in full bloom. Huge, dinner-plate-sized blossoms of the palest pink surrounding lemon yellow structures that will become seed pods. Gigantic pointed buds, standing straight up, as if they're about to be launched into the sky. Structurally-elegant seed pods, yellow, green, and brown. Huge, serving-tray-sized green leaves, often with a tablespoon or so of dew sitting in the middle of the leaf, just above the stem. Really, you can't wander here and not have a mystical experience.

Amazingly, we saw bees everywhere, as well as literally dozens of butterflies and a young blue heron, with a neck like a prima balllerina, who let us get up quite close, the better to admire how graceful and exotic she was. We saw a dam that must have been built by beavers.

We wandered into the back of the Gardens to the boardwalk over the Kenilworth Marsh, filed with water lillies, cat tails, white rose of sharon bushes, and a lovely purple-flowered weed that I couldn't identify. The Marsh serves an incredibly important function, helping to clean much of the water that flows through DC before reaching the Atlantic Ocean. Sadly, our drought is taking its toll on the marshes; many spots were clearly exposed as a result of the lack of water. Lots of water lillies may not make it.

If you're ever in DC this time of year, you should go, even though you'll have to go a bit out of your way to get there. R. and I were discussing a topic that came up for discussion the other day in Comments over at Eschaton: how unusual it's becoming for Americans to spend time outside with each other, especially when they're not at some organized "event." It ties in with quite a few of the points that Barbara Ehrenreich makes in Dancing in the Streets about how unfamiliar most Americans are with the notion of festival, of celebrating with lots of other people. TV keeps so many of us indoors and isolated. But as we used to say when I was young, "We've got to get ourselves back to the garden."

PS Sadly, the receding marsh water shows that some people have thrown soda bottles into the marsh. What kind of a motherfucking dickhead do you have to be to do something that goddamn ignorant? You're in a spot of magnificent beauty and you can't carry your goddamn empty soda bottle back to the parking lot and put it in the trash can? You think that marsh is there for you to throw your plastic Mountain Dew bottle into? It's a good thing for you that I don't know who you are. Because if I did, I would hurt you.

Water

My New Name For A Blog

What Freeway Blogger said.

Note To Fundie Whackjobs: Potter Not A Witch

I've tried to explain recently to several friends that Harry Potter's not a witch. No cosmology of Gods and Goddesses. No special reverence for the Earth. No understanding that working spells requires raising power. Etc.

Here's an article that makes a pretty good argument for Harry Potter, or at least J.K. Rowling, being an alchemist.


Alchemy, a sacred science and the precursor to modern chemistry, has a long, if not entirely proud, tradition in literature. Most people know some alchemists tried to transmute base metals into gold; less known is that this physical transformation was intended as a mirror of higher spiritual transformation. Practiced by the ancient Egyptians, it benefited from the scientific explosion in the Arabic-speaking world near the end of the first millennium, and it was adopted by Christians during the Middle Ages. Its precepts of purification and transformation fit nicely with Christian thought.

As the Enlightenment dawned, alchemy lost sway, brushed aside by chemistry and the scientific method. But its philosophical precepts lingered in the arts, where the “alchemical structure” became a key metaphor in Western Europe for the structure of a plot.

. . . In alchemical terms, Harry is the lead being turned to gold.

Two of the primary substances, called essentials, used in alchemy were sulfur and mercury. Harry’s best mate, Ron Weasley, is an emotional, fiery redhead (sulfur). Harry’s other best friend, Hermione Granger, is a levelheaded intellectual. The name Hermione is the female form of Hermes, name of the Greek god whose Roman name was Mercury. Also, Hg is the elemental symbol for mercury. Granger supposes that it is Ron and Hermione who act on Harry in countervailing ways throughout the series, helping him transform.

. . .

Of course, alchemy can be like numerology: Once you’re looking for it, you start seeing it everywhere, even where it doesn’t exist.

But there are other clues that the Harry Potter series might well be hung around an alchemical skeleton. In England, the first book was titled “Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone” - that stone being the Holy Grail of alchemists. We learn that Dumbledore himself is an alchemist and is great friends with one Nicolas Flamel. This Flamel was in reality a celebrated French alchemist of the 14th and 15th centuries. And then there’s this stray quote from Rowling herself, who said in 1998: “I’ve never wanted to be a witch, but an alchemist, now that’s a different matter. To invent this wizard world, I’ve learned a ridiculous amount about alchemy.”

. . .

ABOUT THE WRITER
Jonathan V. Last is a columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Sleeping In The Forest by Mary Oliver

I thought the earth remembered me,
she took me back so tenderly,
arranging her dark skirts, her pockets
full of lichens and seeds.
I slept as never before, a stone on the river bed,
nothing between me and the white fire of the stars
but my thoughts, and they floated light as moths
among the branches of the perfect trees.
All night I heard the small kingdoms
breathing around me, the insects,
and the birds who do their work in the darkness.
All night I rose and fell, as if in water,
grappling with a luminous doom. By morning
I had vanished at least a dozen times
into something better.


from Sleeping In The Forest by Mary Oliver

The Party Of Personal Responsibility, My Ass

I've never heard of an abuser saying, "I hit you because I wanted to terrorize you into submission." Instead, he might say, "I wouldn't have hit you if you wouldn't have kept yelling and yelling and yelling at me about coming in so late." The framing conditions caused his violence. If we move this to a larger scale, how often have we heard politicians speak of the necessity of preemptive attacks on other countries (which just happen to sit atop coveted resources)? They rarely say, "I choose to invade this country." Instead, they say they've been forced into this regrettable action by those they are about to subjugate, er, liberate. The Nazis played this same card -- everybody plays this same card -- they only invaded Poland because they had no choice, they only invaded the Soviet Union because they had no choice, they only killed untermenschen because they had no choice. Sigh. It's a terribly dirty job, but somebody's got to do it.

CEOs follow this same logic. If it were up to them, they would keep factories open (not that it's a good thing from the persepctive of the planet, but within the confines of this culture, most people consider it good), pay workers livable wages, maintain solid retirement programs, and so on. But you know how things are. They have no choice buy to lay off workers and move the factories to Bangladesh, where they have no choice but to pay Bangladeshis eight cents per hour (as they themselves pull down a cool million per year, which converts to about five hundred dollars per hour, or more in one minute than they pay a Bangladeshi for a hundred hours). And, if the Bangladeshis complain, the CEOs will have no choice buy to move the factory on to Vietnam. Market pressures, you know. And these same market pressures force them to pollute, to clearcut, to overfish.

I'm sorrry, each and every one of us can say, we have no choice but to destroy the planet. It's really not our fault.

Bullshit.

~Derrick Jensen, Endgame, Volume II: Resistance

World Full Of Volition

You cannot destroy a world and live on it. It is only this culture's monumental arrogance, abusiveness, narcissism, and stupidity that causes so many people to believe that they can ignore the needs of the world, that they can manipulate it, that they can poison it, that they can blithely exploit and consume it, that they can take from it without giving back, and that the world will, like a good victim, continue to support those who are killing it, and that it will never fight back.

It doesn't really matter in this case whether you are a mechanistic sort who does not believe that the word can and does and will fight back, or whether you are more of an animistic sort, who, as I do, experiences the world as full of volition. If you're the former, you can talk about ecosystems collapsing and losing their ability to support human (and if you're in an especially expansive mood, nonhuman) life. If you're the latter, you can talk about the planet withdrawing its support for this wretched culture, and fighting back, undermining and ultimately destroying that which is attempting to kill it.

. . .

You know, it's always the same with those who are destroying life. First you ignore the damage entirely. We can kill all the bison we want, you say, and it doesn't matter. We can kill all the passenger pigeons we want, and it dosn't matter. When it doesn't work to ignore the damage, then you deny [that] it's happening. The herds are just as big as they were last year, you say. It's harder to hunt them, but the herds must be just as big. When it doesn't work to deny that the damage is happening, then you attack those who try to tell you about it. You attack their reputations: Oh, they're just Indians, they aren't scientific, they don't know anything about population dynamics. They're just environmentalists, they're too emotional, and you know they'll lie to protect some piece of ground. When it doesn't work to attack the mesenger, you pretend [that] the damage isn't really damage. Who needs bison anyway? And what does it matter if there are a few chemicals in every stream? You already have chemicals in your body, and they haven't killed you yet, have they? Global warming is good, isn't it? When it doesn't work to pretend the damage isn't damage, they you try to blame someone else. The Indians, not the whites, were the ones who overhunted the bison and killed them off. [It's all those Chinese who want to drive cars that are really creating global climate change.] When it doesn't work to blame someone else, and you finally have to acknowledge that you are the one who did this damage, then you say that someone made you do it. You wouldn't have killed the bison excep the Indians wouldn't give you their land, so you had to starve them off. . . . And when it doesn't work to blame your destructiveness on someone else, then the last resort is for you to say that everyone does it, so you cannot be held accountable. . . . It's all crazy. No matter what we say, you've got an answer forit, and no matter what we say, you keep on destroying our home.

~Derrick Jensen, Endgame, Volume II, Resistance

Spoiler Alert!

Off to soak in a tub of olive oil and Black Phoenix scent, while reading Harry Potter.

Here's my prediction and you can laugh at me if I'm wrong. It occurred to me this morning that Hermonie must be the one who dies. She's the Hillary Clinton of Hogworts, "quite the most brilliant witch of her generation." Chicks like that can never be allowed to live.

Wish me luck and discipline; I really don't want to stay up all night. Really.

PS: You know that you want to soak in this. You know that you do:

Witch-herbs, crushed golden flowers, and a man-made-dragon's surly musk lightened by the scent of the blossoms and unearthly incense that clings to the Faerie Queen's hair. Dragon's blood musk, ambergris, sunflower, chrysanthemum, muguet, and rue, with gingered lily, moonflower, bluebell, peony, nightwort, and white rose.

Black Phoenix should make a Hermonie.

Sunday Akhmatova Blogging

My Way (1940)

One goes in straightforward ways,
One in a circle roams:
One waits for a girl of his long gone days,
Or for returning home.
But I do go -- and woe is there --
By a way nor straight, nor broad,
But into never and nowhere,
Like trains -- off the railroad.

India Can Do It. So Can We.

Maybe in 18 months, we can catch up with India:

"Symbolically, this election matters a lot. It will impact the common woman's mindset when she sees the three chiefs of army, navy and air force greeting a woman as their leader," said Ranjana Kumari, director of the Center for Social Research in New Delhi. "It will instill confidence. However, we are still a long way off from the true representation of women in all forms."

Earth

Ours Is The God Of The Poor Who Emerges Out Of Farmers' Ribs Hungry

From America, America
translated from the Arabic by Khaled Mattawa

I too love jeans and jazz and Treasure Island
and John Silver's parrot and the balconies of New Orleans.
I love Mark Twain and the Mississippi steamboats and Abraham Lincoln's dogs.
I love the fields of wheat and corn and the smell of Virginia tobacco.
But I am not American.

Is that enough for the Phantom pilot to turn me back to the stone age?
. . .
America:
let's exchange gifts. Take your smuggled cigarettes
and give us potatoes.
Take James Bond's golden pistol
and give us Marilyn Monroe's giggle.
Take the heroin syringe under the tree
and give us vaccines.
Take your blueprints for model penitentiaries
and give us village homes.
Take the books of your missionaries
and give us paper for poems to defame you.
Take what you do not have
and give us what we have.
Take the stripes of your flag
and give us the stars.
Take the Afghani Mujahideen beard
and give us Walt Whitman's beard filled with
butterflies.
Take Saddam Hussein
and give us Abraham Lincoln
or give us no one.

. . .
We are not hostages, America
and your soldiers are not God's soldiers ...
We are the poor ones, ours is the earth of the drowned gods,

the gods of bulls
the gods of fires
the gods of sorrows that intertwine clay and
blood in a song...
We are the poor, ours is the god of the poor
who emerges out of farmers' ribs
hungry
and bright,
and raises heads up high...

America, we are the dead.
Let your soldiers come.
Whoever kills a man, let him resurrect him.
We are the drowned ones, dear lady.
We are the drowned.
Let the water come.

~Saadi Youssef

My New Name For A Blog

What Jamison Foser said.

Saturday Goddess Blogging

Eris and Discordia

These are the Goddesses who've been ruling my life this week, so I thought that I ought to blog about them.

The Discordians were the ones who first taught me to honor these Goddesses.

Hail Eris! Hail Discordia!

In all seriousness, I do honor these Goddesses. In the middle of chaos and discord is where new things happen. Ceridwen's cauldron, where she stirs all things and creates everything anew, is fulll of chaos and discord. Shit goes in, gets broken down, bubbles up to the top, gets stirred next to something else, is transformed by heat. Pop! Three drops splatter out onto a bard's tongue! Poetry ensues. Chaos and discord are liminal states; Hecate is a Goddess of liminal spaces, including, especially crossroads. Thus, I honor Eris and Discordia.

You've got to have them. You've got to have those spaces in which all the possibilities are present, chaos mixes everything up, so that new ingredients can come in contact, within Cerridwen's cauldron, with old ingredients, re-combine and make something new: proteins that make life, music, fusion cooking, new religions, new political movements, new ways to view your own life that suddenly let you move foreward.

And, when you've had all the Eris and Discordia that you can absorb, you can always wish their blessings and attention upon, um, your co-counsel. Who's obviously one of their most intent devotees, anyway, if actions are any sign. Not that I'm bitter.

Those Of Us Who Are Not Attempting To Destroy Things

The Fault, Dear Brutus, Is Not In Our Stars

But in ourselves, that we are underlings."

--From Julius Caesar (I, ii, 140-141)

I'm less of an Olberman fan than many in the liberal blogosphere. But he's damn good tonight and worthy of your time. You can like her or not like her. But, may the Goddess guard Hillary Clinton for stepping into this breach. The women who come after her will find footholds upon the steps that she's carving on the cliffs of patriarchy.