The Heck With High Gas Prices….
“Ditch The Car, Ride A Broom!”
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Category: Articles
My Body is a Temple.
Author: Aiko Ren
I write this to express my gratitude. I have always felt ‘less than’… something was missing. At a very young age, I turned to drugs to fill my void. I was a dirty junkie who could care less about myself. The statement ‘the body is a temple’ made no sense to me. I don’t want to get explicated but, in order for someone to understand my bottom, I have to share it. I had horrible hardships in my life. Some were a direct consequence of my drug use; others were because I was a victim. I would bruise my body injecting drugs and I would sleep around to obtain the next hit. I was raped several times, which caused me to lose faith in everyone and everything. I didn’t understand how there could be any good in the world if such horrible things could happen. I was always looking at things negatively. I was sick and tired of being sick and tired. I was at the end of the road. It was either get clean and change, or die.
My clean date is May 11th 2010. When I surrendered my addiction, I started to look for a higher power. This was hard for me at first because my views were so different then everyone else’s’. I felt like no one understood my beliefs. I started to read about the Craft, first out of curiosity. The more I learned about Wiccan ways, the more I learned about myself. I started to understand the saying my body is ‘a temple’. I started to see all the good in the universe. I started to meditate and became driven to better myself. Today, I do the next right thing because that is the right thing to do. Wicca has brought hope into my life.
Even though I am new to living this path, I feel like I found my home. The feeling I received when I got clean is very similar to finding my higher power. I love myself today. I am a loyal girlfriend. I am a respectable daughter. I am a good friend. I am a witch. When I started to dedicate my life to the Craft instead of just reading about it, I was nervous about what others would think. This is a character defect of mine. I am a people pleaser. Once again I was thinking about what others wanted instead of what I wanted.
In the beginning, I was hiding it from everyone I knew; similar to how I hid my addiction. I was telling people I was at my friend’s house when I was really at my local metaphysical shop. I took out library books on Wicca and hid them from my family. I hid my ritual supplies under my bed. I felt guilty about this. I felt like I was ashamed of something. I have read about how society views Wicca and how some choose to hide their beliefs… but I didn’t want to be one of them. (I wasn’t going to tell random strangers, ‘hey I am a witch’ but I at least wanted to tell my family and my close friends.)
I finally came to the decision that a Wiccan was what I wanted to be and I started to take steps to become one. I began to read books in front of my family. As I continued to learn, I also educated them about Wicca. When they finally got over the whole, “why are you reading that devil worshipping stuff, ” and realized what Wicca really meant, they were accepting. This allowed me to practice the craft without feeling like I was lying to the world. When I finally shared it with my family and my close friends, it opened new opportunities. I started to search passionately for guidance. I shared with a close friend my newfound life and found out that she too follows the same path. I started e-mailing other people on this website to start building a support network.
I want to share a little bit more about how my family’s perspective on Wicca. At first, they were completely clueless about anything. They were afraid, thinking that I was dabbing in evil things. Then they believed that I was going to put spells on the family and try to make them turn to toads or something. The more they saw how happy and dedicated I was though, the more accepting they became.
I do not know much ‘about’ Wicca, but I ‘feel’ Wicca. (If that makes sense) I understand there are fundamentals, however I also believe it’s up to one ’s self to figure it out. I believe in practicing on your own, even though the joy of sharing it with someone seems so powerful.
I am writing this article not only to show my gratitude towards my newfound path but also to give a “newcomer’s” view. I am sharing my experience, strength, and hope to maybe touch someone else who is struggling. Maybe I will find someone who can help me. All I know is I had an overwhelming desire to write this article, and usually that means something.
Since I decided to follow the Craft I have a new perspective on life. I find gratitude in the small things. I have a renewed sense of the universe. Nature looks greener to me. Things that were once puzzling now make sense. The desire to find myself has always been a struggle for me, even before I picked up drugs. By following this path, by collecting knowledge, and by practicing, I am finding myself. I could continue on and on about how my life has changed since I made the decision to become a witch, but I know as you are reading this you are probably looking back on your life and feeling the same way. Our stories might be very different, but the feelings are the same.
I believe there are many paths to the same destination. Everyone can follow a different path and have a different story, but the universe brings us together for a reason. And that is powerful stuff.
Blessed be. Let the Goddess and God be with you.
Blindfolding the Inner Eye: The Ethics of the Second Sight
Author: LoneWolfTarot
There are lots of books and resources on psychic abilities. There are many different guides to expand your skills and increase your inner sight. However, many of them neglect a most basic aspect: when NOT to use it! That’s right… not how to see more clearly but how to not see at all.
There are times when being able to see is a great gift, but where do you draw the line? How do you keep yourself from becoming the spiritual equivalent of a peeping tom? As a tarot reader, dream walker, and clairvoyant, this is a line I have had to learn to walk very carefully but it worries me that so few places cover this fundamental subject. So I have compiled a list of some basic guidelines for those who want to learn to use their psychic gifts to the fullest.
1) Be specific! When you are trying to see for someone, be very specific in what you ask for. Don’t just aim to see their lives in general, but; instead make sure you are narrowing your focus on the particular issue and only on that issue. If you ask for guidance before you use your gifts, then ask Spirit to show you only what you need to answer the question.
2) Never do a third party reading. In other words, never read for someone regarding someone else. Generally the motives for asking you to pry into the other person’s life are far from pure. If you do not have the consent of the other person, then using your gifts to see into their lives is an invasion of privacy. I do however have two exceptions to this rule: First, if it is parents asking about their own minor child. As the guardian for the child, they have the right to ask. Secondly, relationship readings… and even then I am very careful to ask to see only things that directly impact the client.
3) Find a test subject! I get a lot of people asking me how they are supposed to practice if they can’t “look in” on anyone without their permission. Easy. Find friends who don’t mind you practicing on them… or join an online/local group and ask for volunteers. You will be surprised how many people will be happy to let your practice on them.
4) If the subject makes you uncomfortable, don’t look into it. If you would feel wrong discussing the situation in person, then it definitely is not proper to use your gifts to see into the situation from afar.
5) Never use your gifts to see purely for curiosity’s sake. These gifts come with responsibilities; too many people treat them as if they are some sort of game. You have the very real potential to cause a lot of harm to a person by seeing into things that are none of your business.
6) Never use your gifts to see into the lives of others with the intention of using that information against them in any way – even if it is just to “help”. The road to hell is paved with good intentions.
7) Be wary of those who would use you. There are people out there lacking a clear-cut sense of ethics who would love to get their hands on someone with the ability to see.
This is just a basic set of guidelines. You will have to discover your own more personal rules as you go along. There is another set of considerations that also must be taken into account. What happens when you do see more that you need to? What happens when something comes up in a reading that you are not sure should be brought into the light of day?
As an example, I once did a reading for someone on a relationship problem. Everything went along just swimmingly until I looked into where their issues were coming from. Then I got more information than I needed, and a lot more information than I wanted. It was a tarot reading and the cards screamed of an abusive childhood and more traumas than I knew how to deal with.
I didn’t know what to do. Do I mention what I was seeing? Do I risk bringing up something so painful and potentially damaging? The trauma is at the heart of their relationship problem, and they are asking specifically about the cause of the problem… do I have the right to NOT tell them part of their answer? Do I have the right to bring that up at all?
In the end, I very carefully spoke of what I was seeing in the most general terms I could think of. I felt that I needed to tell them something, to at least point in the general direction of their childhood but I didn’t want to go too far into it for fear of opening wounds. So I sort of glossed over it and hoped they would pick up the hint. Not perhaps the best solution but the best I had at a moment’s notice. As it happens they did pick up the hint – and gave me permission to gently tell them in more detail what I saw.
I hadn’t really thought of it before that event – but during a reading we are often put into the position of counselor. This person has come to you for guidance, often with very personal problems and you need to treat it as such. The problem is that we ARE NOT THERAPISTS.
Few people who go into doing readings of whatever type for people are also licensed counselors, and when something truly painful appears in what we see, often referring them to someone who is, is the best that we can do. Yet we deal with much the same issues, and often we end up put into that position whether we like it or not. So walk carefully, and err on the side of caution. Just by the act of looking into that person’s life, we are altering it. Treat your gifts with the respect and caution that they deserve.
The WOTC’s Sunday Cartoon – “Ooops, they did it again!”
Is Wicca Dead?
Author: Helio
It seems like an odd thing to me, and I’m sure to many others, that some would claim that Wicca is dead or dying. But I have heard this from at least a few members of the Craft. Strange to think of Wicca, the fastest growing of the rapidly growing Neopagan religions, as being doomed to die in the near future. I have received different opinions for ‘why Wicca is dying’ and ‘what the fate of Wicca will be’.
More than a few Wiccan elders who have expressed this sentiment to me are just simply disheartened by what they view as a lack of progress made in and for Wicca over the past few decades. These elders, I think, believed that there would be a great unity in the Craft and that Wicca and Neopaganism would make great social progress. Many of these Wiccan elders have also seen the rise and fall of covens and friendships between witches. And so if asked the fate of Wicca, they would respond that there would be no future for Wicca. Neopaganism in general will fail as a religious movement.
I have heard from other Wiccans that Wicca is dying do to a lack of central authority. And this I have heard from Witches who are not members of any tradition! I’ve found that some of those I’ve heard this from have backgrounds in Catholicism, so perhaps they are used to the idea of the papacy as a central authority. But the whole reason why many come to the Craft is I>because of the lack of central authority. The Craft teaches self-reliance. I think some of my fellow Crafters have forgotten this.
I have also heard that Wicca has become too public. ‘No one wants to stay in the broom closet anymore like a good witch should’. Oh My! I think those who hold this sentiment may still be holding on to past life feelings of persecution. But if this is an age of religious tolerance, and Judeo-Christian beliefs are no longer supposed to operate in the secular domain, then we have no reason to hide or fear being burned at the stake. Wicca needs to be open if we are to show the world that we are not dangerous.
There are also those who see the rapid rise of solitary witchcraft and the collapse of covens as evidence of Wicca’s impending doom. I have never felt that it ‘takes a Witch to make a Witch’ but certainly there are some who could use a bit more experience before they declare themselves a Witch. I know there are plenty of solitaries who don’t really know the Craft as much as they should and that they may sometimes suffer from hubris, but it is the right of every Wiccan to explore the Craft personally and without a coven. I think covens are great, but for some people a coven just doesn’t work, and I feel there are some who use the coven structure to make themselves feel more important and powerful. We all know there is no place for tyrants in a coven structure.
Now unlike the belief that Wicca will die and cease to exist, I have found those who believe Wicca is dying but that it will develop into a new religion, or religions. I somewhat share this sentiment, but I don’t think Wiccan witchcraft will just cease to be. And if Wicca is to become something else then it is not dying, it is evolving. All religious movements evolve. There are many who would point out that modern Wicca is ‘not the Wicca of sixty years ago’, and this is because of a natural evolution in the religion.
I feel that part of the reason for this whole ‘Wicca is dead’ thing seems to be that Wicca and Neopaganism have failed in the last sixty years to supersede western society’s Judeo-Christian dominance. I know that there are many screaming at me after reading that last line. ‘The point of Wicca isn’t to supersede Christianity! All faiths lead to the same source!’ But I have not yet met the Crafter who didn’t hold some level of anti-Christian sentiment. I’ve found that much of the ‘Wicca has failed’ belief comes from those Wiccans who experienced the great social and spiritual revolutions of the late sixties and seventies. At the time it must have seemed like Neopaganism would become a powerful social force by the turn of the millennium. Its failure to become so has soured the movement for some.
It may not seem like it for many, but Wicca’s ability to suddenly go from a few dozen followers to thousands (or millions) of followers in only half a century is an amazing achievement. It is a direct parallel of early Christianity’s rise from a few dozen believers in 30 C.E. to hundreds or thousands by 150 C.E. Wicca has perhaps grown twice as fast in half the time thanks to television, the Internet, and especially, modern printing and publishing. Most new religious movements do not rise out of the underground in their first hundred years.
Is Wicca dead? Has Wicca failed in some way?
No one ever said being a Witch is easy. Some of my elders may find me youthfully naïve, but in the six years that I have been in the Craft, I have found a vast, vibrant, though mostly underground, community that is ever growing and evolving to meet the needs of its followers.
I can definitely say Wicca is very far from taking its last breaths.
The Threefold Law in Folktales
Author: Nukiuk
Three is a magickal number. It is the number of forms of the Goddess – Maiden, Mother, and Crone. Likewise, it is the form of the God as Father, Sage, and Son. It symbolises the Druidic elements of Land, Sea, and Sky. It is the number of times you chant a charm, the number of times you walk around a circle… and it is the basis for the three-fold law.
We all know the Wiccan Rede, or some variation of it. My favorite version is one I read long ago, although I cannot remember the author who so cleverly put it into rhyme:
“Three times three, what you put forth comes back to thee.”
Simply put, the threefold law speaks of karma. The energy you put out is the energy you get back, three times over. It is the basis for yet another popular Pagan tenet: “An ye harm none, do they will.” Putting forward negative energy will bring you nothing but negativity in return.
Old folktales are full of this concept, although they may never state it directly. Whether the tale is from Western or Eastern Europe, whether it is written about magical creatures or just about lucky noblemen, the importance of both karma and the number three are readily apparent. In most fairy tales, people get what they deserve for their efforts. My favorite example of this is from The Girl in the Well. In this story, a girl drops her spindle down a well. Her stepmother forbids her to return home without the spindle, so the girl dives into the well.
At the bottom of the well, the girl finds an alternate world. There she meets three groups of people, who each ask her a favor: a group of shepherds who need help cleaning their sheep, a group of cattle herders who need a similar favor, and a rich couple who ask her to work for them for one year. She aids each group, and is rewarded.
When she returns home, her stepmother grows jealous and sends her own daughter into the well. However, the stepdaughter refuses to aid the shepherd and the cattle herders and when she gets to the elderly couple, she is so lazy that after three days they send her home. She bears no rewards, but arrives home covered in bugs and filth. The moral of this story is obvious: put forth good effort, and you will be rewarded; act lazy and mean, and you will be punished. The energy you put out is what you get back.
In this tale, the number three is easily visible. The girl meets three groups of people seeking her aid, and is rewarded when she passes their tests. The stepsister fails all three – in fact, she is sent back home after three days.
Another tale, The Three Feathers tells us of three princes who are in dispute over who should rule the kingdom. His siblings consider the youngest brother a simpleton. The king decides that he shall give them a quest to determine who shall inherit; he sends them out to see who can bring him the most beautiful rug in the land. To settle any dispute, he throws three feathers into the wind, so that each brother can follow one in the direction it went.
One of the feathers goes straight up and down again, so the simpleton remains behind while his two brothers set off, one to the east and one to the west. However, he happens to notice a trap door beneath his feather, and follows it to find a court of toads. He asks the queen of these toads for the finest carpet she has, and it is delivered. Meanwhile, his brothers figure that he won’t be able to find a rug from anywhere, so they decide not to waste their money and each bring back a handkerchief.
When they return, the king declares the simpleton to be the inheritor. The brothers protest, and manage to talk the king into two more challenges – for a beautiful ring, and for a beautiful woman. The feathers do the same thing, and both times the youngest brother wins the challenge in the same manner, and so is crowned king, with his beautiful bride (who was once a young toad maiden) . The two elder brothers put forth no effort in their quests, and thus received nothing. Meanwhile, the supposed “simpleton”, instead of trying to outwit his father, simply does as he is told, and through this wins the crown. This tale has three brothers, sent to find objects three times, who are guided by three feathers. Once again, the number three shapes the way the story turns out.
Finally, the third example of this is in a strange little story call The Three Spinners. A girl refuses to spin flax, so her mother beats her. The queen is passing by and hears the girl’s cries. When she comes into the hut to investigate, the mother is so embarrassed by her daughter’s lack of spinning ability that she instead brags and claims the inverse – that she is beating the girl because she will not stop spinning, even though there woman can afford no more flax. The queen is impressed by this lie, and has the daughter brought to her castle to spin. She says if the girl can spin three roomfuls of flax, she will be able to marry the prince.
Of course, the girl cannot spin. So she cries for three days. After this period, three old women appear who offer to spin the flax for her, if only they can attend the wedding and be treated as the girl’s aunts. They each have a different deformity: a large, flat foot. a massive hanging lip, and an oversized thumb.
The girl agrees, and the rooms of flax are spun quickly. When the wedding comes around, the prince asks the old women how they got their deformities; they respond that they are through treading the pedal, licking the thread, and pinning it down with their thumb, respectively. The prince is alarmed and says that his beautiful bride shall never be allowed to spin again. And so the girl gets everything she wanted from life. The girl in this tale is by no means a paragon of goodness; she is rather lazy and disobedient. However, she made a promise to the three old women, kept it, and was rewarded almost three times as much as was worth such a favor.
This story has three women – specifically crones, the third incarnation of the Goddess. There are three rooms of flax to be spun, and the girl cries for three days. Three three’s – a powerful number, which potentially aided the magic that helped her out of her predicament.
The rule of three is written in many old fairy tales, if you just know where to look. In these stories, the rewards for basic kindnesses are often overdone; but then again, energy does tend to return threefold as much. These three stories are but a small example of the multitude of such tales that fill the body of European folklore. All throughout these tales, the number three is woven into stories of karma that have been told for generations.
White-Washed Witches
Author: BellaDonna Saberhagen
Witches are good. They were the great priests and priestesses of the “Old Religion” that everyone turned to in times of need. They were healers and seers, guides and advocates. It was only when the big bad Christians came and burned the Witches (nine million women, to be exact) that they were seen as bad, malevolent, evil things seeking to destroy all that was good and holy. Christianity maligned the good people of the earth, demonized the gods, and spread the hatred and fear of Witches that survives until this very day.
The above sounds familiar, doesn’t it? It’s what many Pagan authors believe and would like their readers to believe. The only problem is, it’s not true. It’s rewritten history. Every bit of it. If we’re to grow beyond the haphazard anthropology of Margaret Murray, we have to accept that. Many Pagans do accept that (most Pagans by now, I would hope) ; but there is one part of it that seems to be ignored: that Witches are good, and in fact MUST be good.
Historically, often the opposite is true. I’m not speaking of Celtic or even Norse tales; one can argue that since they were not written down until after Christians took over their respective regions that they may well have been changed to suit Christian morality. However, the Greeks had tales of witches that far pre-date the Christian take-over, and even these do not paint witches too kindly.
Medea was a princess well skilled in magic. In the tale of Jason and the Golden Fleece, she plays a key role. Hera takes an interest in the success of the mission and asks Aphrodite to have her son Cupid strike Medea with love for Jason so that she would be willing to help him with her “dark knowledge.” Medea’s father was King Aetes, the keeper of the Golden Fleece. After being struck with love for the enemy of her father, Medea considers killing herself with one of her deadly potions rather than betray her father or her love. However, she decides to betray Aetes and help Jason, which sets the tone for future actions. She gives him a balm that makes him invincible for a day and tells him how to win the trial her father has set before him to win the Golden Fleece. After the trial is won, she learns that her father has no intention of honoring his bargain and handing over the Fleece. She tells Jason of this and he and the Argonauts steal the Fleece and take her with them as they flee. During the pursuit, Medea is responsible for allowing the Argonauts to escape by causing her brother’s death; either by asking him to rescue her and sending him into a trap or by cutting him into pieces herself and forcing her father to stop pursuit to gather the remains of his dismembered son.
Upon arriving home, Jason finds that his father, the rightful king, was forced to suicide by the evil Pelias (the entire expedition for the Fleece was a bargain made between he and Jason, if Jason could bring the Fleece, Pelias would relinquish the kingdom back to its rightful ruler) . Jason needs to bring Pelias down and again turns to Medea. Pelias is an old man, so Medea approaches his daughters with a magical way to make the old young again. She cuts up an old ram in front of them, puts the pieces in a pot of boiling water, says a charm and out springs a lamb. That night, the daughters happily cut their own father to ribbons in their effort to make him young again. Jason becomes king. Medea bears Jason two children, but he does not marry her. Instead, he marries the princess of Corinth in order to gain that kingdom as well and forces her and her sons to leave his realms because she threatens harm to his new wife and he has seen what she can do. In exile, Medea sends a poisoned garment that kills Jason’s wife. Once Jason finds out, he threatens to sell his sons into slavery, so Medea kills them herself so that they would not be so tortured and shamed; then she escapes as Jason curses her.
While some of her magic may have been for what she saw as good, she certainly did not live by the codes modernly associated with Witches. She was a Witch, but not a good Witch. Her early magic may not seem so bad, helping Jason to win the Fleece through the trial; but she had to betray her own family to even go that far and that was certainly seen as evil in those days. Circe was a “most beautiful and dangerous witch.” She turned every man she came upon into a beast, but with a human mind so that they remained conscious of their predicament. When Odysseus sent a scouting party out to check the island, she turned them into swine, save one who got away and ran back to tell his captain. Odysseus went alone to face Circe, having been given an herb by Hermes to prevent her magic from affecting him. That he was able to resist her magic sparked Circe’s romantic interest and she freed his men and told him what he must do next on his long journey home.
In another tale, Glaucus sought a love potion from her to make the woman he desired love him. His story made Circe love him, but he was not interested. She decided it was the fault of the woman for which he longed. Circe turned this woman into a monster that destroyed all that tried to get close. Her name was Scylla; she became a monster that different sea-farers worried about in several tales. She was another Witch doing evil things, possibly in the name of love, possibly for her own selfish aims.
The concept of Witches as evil is older than Christendom. These tales prove this. In fact, the idea of Witches as good is more modern than many would prefer to believe. The book, The Wizard of Oz was banned in some places for daring to have good Witches in it. Even Leland’s Aradia has Witches doing bad things (the age of this text is up for conjecture, I date it to Leland, since his claimed source was never heard from again; others consider it to be based on a much older text) . Aradia is told by her mother: “And thou shalt teach the art of poisoning, Of poisoning those who are great lords to all; Yea, thou shalt make them die in their palaces; and thou shalt bind oppressor’s souls; and when ye find a peasant who is rich, then ye shall teach the witch, your pupil how To ruin all his crops with tempests dire (…) And when a priest shall do you injury By his benediction, ye shall do to him double harm and do it in the name of me, Diana, queen of witches all!”
I find that Leland’s Aradia states that Witches should out-right harm those who oppose them (and even those simply better off than they are) very interesting since some of his writings were clearly taken and applied to some forms of modern Wicca. The Charge of the Goddess as written by Doreen Valiente states, “Whenever ye have need of any thing, once in the month, and better it be when the moon is full, then shall ye assemble in some secret place and adore the spirit of She, who is Queen of all witches. There shall ye assemble, ye who are fain to learn all sorcery, yet have not won its deepest secrets; to these will She teach things that are yet unknown. And ye shall be free from slavery; and as a sign that ye be really free, ye shall be naked in your rites.”
From Aradia: ”Whenever ye have need of anything, Once in the month, and when the moon is full, ye shall assemble in some desert place, or in a forest all together join to adore the potent spirit of your Queen, my mother, Great Diana. She who fain would learn all sorcery has not won its deepest secrets, then my mother will teach her, in truth all things as yet unknown. And ye shall be freed from slavery, and so ye shall be free in everything; and as the sign that ye are truly free, ye shall be naked in your rites.”
I only hope Valiente gave Leland credit and did not just outright plagiarize him. This piece is clearly taken from Aradia, but the morality taught in that book (what I took as proof of Witches doing bad things was from the very same chapter as the “Charge” was “borrowed” from) was discarded and the Wiccan Rede placed in its stead. Since, by what most modern Witches would prefer to believe, all Witches follow the Rede, there are no bad Witches; and if you believe Wicca is the “Old Religion” of Europe, there never were bad Witches.
This belief creates individuals who become indignant every time pop-culture and media portray Witches as anything but good. They cry everything from “Christian persecution” to “the patriarchy gets nervous about powerful women, so they have to make them evil, cruel and sometimes insane.” While these beliefs may not be baseless, it must also be understood that Witches are not always good, just as Christians are not always good, just as your five year-old is not always good. Witches are humans and as humans, we can make mistakes, get angry, be selfish, exact revenge and wish to protect our families and property at all costs. If modern Witchcraft really wants to strive to be one with nature, then we cannot go against nature. Nature is both destructive and creative, we need to be the same or we are unbalanced. It may well be true that “The Witch that cannot hex, cannot heal.”
I see the modern good interpretations of Witches to be like old B-rate horror day-for-night shots (outdoor scenes filmed in broad day-light with a filter over the lens trying to create the illusion of darkness and usually failing) ; they give the darkness lip-service but stay within the circle of their white-light lamp. Sometimes you have to step outside your comfort zone to get in touch with reality; you might not always like the reality you see, but at least it is real and not a fantasy. The Witch as always good is just as much a fantasy as the Witch that is always bad.
Footnotes:
Mythology by Edith Hamilton
Aradia or Gospel of the Witches by Charles LeLand
The Charge of the Goddess by Doreen Valiente
Research Shows Herb Protects DNA from Disease
by Michelle Schoffro Cook
Sage has a proven history at boosting memory and balancing menopausal and PMS symptoms, but perhaps the most exciting benefit of sage essential oil is that it may actually protect genetic material from damage.
According to a study published in the Journal of Agricultural and Food Chemistry scientists found that compounds in sage may protect cellular DNA from damage and may even stimulate DNA repair in already damaged cells. While the research is new and has not been tested on humans, this exciting advancement could help in the prevention and treatment of genetic diseases as well as diseases with a genetic component like cancer, heart disease and others.
Spice Proven to Speed Metabolism, Fight Cancer
by Michelle Schoffro Cook
Turmeric is not just for curries anymore. New research by the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) found the key ingredient in the spice turmeric, curcumin, enhances the activity of the cells’ energy centers to speed metabolism. Given overweight and obesity rates, which are at an all-time high, this new information offers assistance to the millions of people trying to lose weight.
This information follows a lengthy list of other studies showing curcumin’s ability to prevent or delay cancer, prevent and even improve Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, heal heart disease, arthritis, and depression.
Of course you can still enjoy turmeric (fresh or powdered) in curries, but don’t hold back with this spice. Add it to soups, stews, and salad dressings too. The USDA study found that supplementing with 300 to 500 mg of curcuminoids (the collective name for the active ingredients in turmeric) worked best for boosting metabolism.
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The Ancient Art of Splatiomancy
Ancient Art of Splatiomancy
by Andy
humor
In times of Yore, when our ancestors needed to know something, they turned to divination. There has been much written in this paper about the systems they used, such as astrology or fire scrying, and how we can apply those systems to our lives as modern witches. One very popular technique, however, has never been written about: Entrail Reading. It is true. Oftimes, when our ancestors needed to know the future, they would kill animals, look at their insides to divine the future, and serve them up for dinner. For instance, recent scholarship has unearthed the tale of Morgana de Ravenna (Note – even in ancient times, pagans used made up names like Morgana and Raven), a mid-evil pagan witch (the mid-evil period comes in between the early-evil and the late-evil periods).
At dawn of the summer solstice, 942 years ago, Morgana was asked by the village elders to foretell what the coming year would bring. As per her requirements, they brought her a pig to slaughter. They brought it to a clearing, she killed it, let the entrails spill out, and began the Sacred Ritual of the Afore-telling. For hours she danced around pig under the hot sun. After the Afore play was finished, she went over to the pig, got down on her knees, sorted through the entrails and smelled the meat. Then she raised herself up and uttered the prediction: “A Plague of Salmon will soon strike the village” (translated from the original Arabic phrasing: “Salmon El-La”).
The villager elders liked the sound of this, for the fish are good to eat. They took the sacred pig back to the village, cooked it up, and served it for dinner. Sure enough, that very evening, everyone became sick, and many people died. The aforetelling was true, and the people learned never to wake Morgana before noon.
The question is how can we adapt this ancient and powerful art of entrail reading to modern times. Splatiomancy is the answer. Splatiomancy is defined as “the Art of Telling the Future by Interpreting Insect Entrails on the Windshield” (from 1,001 Useless Forms of Divination for the Modern Pagan).
This family tradition is handed down from Mother-in-Law to Mother-in-Law, smiting hapless husbands along the way. It originated in the Detroit area, the ancestral home of the Way of the Horseless Carriage. As my own mother-in-law is from Detroit, and a high priestess of the Ford tradition (high priestesses have owned at least three different models of Ford vehicles), she has initiated me in its ways. To this day, she occasionally tests me with the ritual phrasing: “Aren’t You Ever Going To Get This Thing Washed?” when she wants me to do a reading.
Before you can begin divining, you must prepare your tools. Splatiomancy has just one tool, your “horseless carriage,” or car as we now call it. You must cleanse your car, front and back. Do not forget the roof and undercarriage because “as above, so below.” While a “drive though” car wash is acceptable, a personal cleansing is preferable.
A patient seeker will find that some of the fueling shrines of the carriage are equipped with wondrous wands that aid greatly in the invocation of water. These will multiply the effectiveness of your cleansing at least until the buzzer announces that your time is almost up.
Pay special attention to the windshield, for it is here that you will read the secrets of the entrails. If this area is not spotless, your reading will be muddled with the omens of drives long past.
At its heart, Splatiomancy is a local art. The insects you drive through are local, and thus must your reading be based on local signs. Make a map of your local area. Divide the map into regions, and figure out the energies of each of those regions. Above is the map I created for the Seattle area.
Take your map and copy the regions from it to your windshield. I find lipstick works well for this. If you live in a vertically oriented area, as we do, you may find it easier to use east for the top of the map. All maps used to have the orient (which was east) on top, hence the word “orientation.”
I have divided the Seattle area into 12 regions called “garages”. They are, with their energies:
Contented Cows: A peaceful, quiet garage where chewing your cud all day seems like a good idea. Not thinking about things.
Microsoft: The high tech garage. All things electronica reside here.
Boeing: The garage of war and strife. If your energies are destructive, this garage is for you.
Bellevue: The garage of greed and calculation. Trapped between the garages of Microsoft and Boeing, who are constantly warring for capitalist supremacy, Bellevue is about exploiting your situation for your personal ends. If you are successful, you move to…
Billionia: The garage of the super-rich. A region of idols and the idle.
Amazonia: Not the garage of Amazons, but of Amazon.com. A place where knowledge comes at a price, but shipping and handling is free with an upgrade code.
Capital Hill: This is the garage of has-been. Like the Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco, this garage may once have been a cool counter-culture area. Now it is the domain of over-priced yuppie stores pretending that time has not passed them by.
U of W: The garage of the real counter-culture, in all its smelly dread-locked glory. It may be dirty, but at least it is honest. The university also adds an air of learning, without the fees of Amazonia.
Suburbia: The garage of people, houses, and everyday life. Strong in the energy of doing things behind closed doors that you hope your neighbors will never find out about (unless, of course, you can talk them into joining you…)
The Zoo: This is where the wild things are. If you like animals or nature, this is your garage.
Stadium Heaven: The garage of sports and recreation for the masses. Or the garage of a fool and his money, depending on your perspective on professional sports and stadiums.
Sea-Tac: This is the garage of the air and of getting away from it all.
Now that the car is prepared, begin your ritual. Take up your keys and go out to your car. Circle your car three times widdershins, for widdershins is the direction the wheels roll. Use the following invocations to the Lord and Lady:
Asphaltia, Goddess of the Highways and By-Ways, come to us. Great lady of the Crossroads and all other Intersections, guide us so that we do not go astray. Asphaltia, guard and protect us from the highway patrol.
Spacius, Great God of Parking, come to us. Lord of the Open Road and the Open Spot, bring us to your sacred space, that we may always have room to park. Protect us from the vultures of the lots and from the scourge of the meter maid.
Next you must call the little folk, the flying ones to be part of your rite:
Flying ones, buzzing ones, come to us. Sprites of the air, you who sting or drink blood, join us. Your lives will bring us the sacred knowledge. You who are about to die, we salute you.
Now enter the sacred carriage and drive. Play some pagan music, and focus your mind on the future. The rite is best performed by the last light of the setting sun, and with your headlights shining as a beckon. The winged spirits abound at this time. After a few miles, you will find your entrails are ready to be interpreted.
There are three factors to consider in your entrails: Color, Placement, and Legs.
Color is the Signifier in Splatiomancy. It defines to whom the scrying applies. Look at your splat. What color is it? The color yellow is the color of the sun, of the center. It represents you. Red is the color of love, and thus represents a significant other. Green is the color of trees, standing together, and represents your friends. And blue is the color of the Big Blue Marble, representing the world as a whole.
Next look at where the splat is on your windshield. Check what garage it is in and think about the energies of that garage. If you are local to Seattle, you can use the associations listed above.
And finally, how many legs and/or wings can you see in the sacred splat. These do not need to be distinct, in fact they rarely are. Just look at it and count in your mind. The number of legs and wings is the Sign of your scrying and tells how the splat is to be interpreted. Zero is the Sign of Abstinence. Never had it, never will. One is the Sign of Masturbation. It represents enough to get you through the night, but nothing more. Two is the Sign of the Couple. It is balanced, and enough to go around, but it can get stale. A good sign for stability. Three is the Sign of the Three-Way. It is wild, unstable, and more than people need. This sign can represent hidden desires. And four (or more) is the Sign of the Orgy. This is a crazy level of abundance and can represent too much of a good thing.
Now do your scrying. Look at the Sacred Splat. In April, I did a scrying and got a yellow splat in the Garage of Billionia. There were no surviving legs or wings so the Sign was zero. Personal abstinence in the garage of the super rich. So I sold my Microsoft stock. Now look at it, off by 35% from where I sold. Thank you Splatiomancy. Note that the splat was not in the house of Mircosoft. That would have meant my computer was going to die.
Let’s do another example. Say you get a blue splat with two legs and two wing pieces in the Garage of Boeing. Blue is the global color. Boeing is the Garage of War. Two legs and two wing pieces (remember, just count them all) is the Sign of the Orgy. Pack your bags and head for the survivalist bunker, we are talking World War III. If you also get a yellow, zero-legged, Billionia that means you should liquidate your assets before going to the bunker. I’m sure this paper can get you a good deal for any assets you care to liquidate. After all, you will need seeds much more than a car after the Blue Bug hits.
A final example, more complicated this time. Last fall, I got a green splat (friends) with three legs (three-way = wild) in the Garage of the U of W (smelly, counterculture). I also got a two-legged (couple = stability) blue splat (global) in the Garage of the Contented Cow (unthinking). It also had a five-legged (orgy), green (local) splat in the Garage of Boeing (War). Unbalanced counterculture, global unthinking, and local war. That was the WTO protests.
Splatiomancy is an ancient, venerated art. Before there were cars, splatiomancers would draw diagrams on their servants, and look at where the bugs bit them and were splattered. Go out and divine with pride knowing you are following the Way of the Horseless Carriage. If you wish to begin an initiation in the Way, the author is available for personal lessons. Rates are reasonable; you pay for the sacred gas, of course. Lessons are in my garage in Bellevue…
Basil: The Green Leaves of Summer
by Catherine Harper
I celebrate the beginnings of several different, overlapping, summers. When April blooms into May, and the days become long, that is the beginning of summer, the voluptuous green and flowering summer that turns into warm gold autumn in August. In mid-July, when the rains dry up, and we have our stretch of dry, hot days, that is the beginning of another summer that continues through September, usually, or perhaps later. But the summer of the palate, for me, begins when the local basil begins to appear in the farmer’s markets, beginning the cycle that will bring in turn corn, tomatoes, peppers and eggplants to the table.
Basil is the most delicate of herbs. While many tough, resinous herbs of the Mediterranean thrive in poor, rocky soil, developing their best flavor where water is not overplentiful, basil is a tender, soft-leaved plant. It requires as much care as all the other herbs in my garden put together, and indeed is happiest if given the rich loamy soil and regular waterings I think of as more the provenance of vegetables. I start the plants indoors, on a warm surface, and then hold off on planting them out until June. From that point on, they must be watered and tended, given plenty of sun and protected from slugs (planting basil in large pots — large so that they do not dry out too quickly — and fixing a three inch strip of copper to the rim to deter slugs is perhaps the simplest solution). And deer. And even your neighbors. Basil needs to be gathered in fall before the night temperatures fall much below 50 degrees.
I have an aesthetic preference for working closely with my local climate, and growing mostly the things that thrive here with little intervention. These plants seem, to me, to belong here. With all the culinary splendors of the world open before us, it is a comforting discipline to me to work sometimes with a more limited palate of local food. Basil, is at the best, borderline. There is a reason we have no native basil. Basil self-seeds only reluctantly here and is outcompeted by any number of plants better suited to this clime. But every year, I plant or buy my starts, and fuss over them throughout the summer months. Basil I cannot resist.
Basil is the name given to any of about 150 plants in the Ocimum family (Ocimum basilicum is perhaps the best known culinary basil, varieties of which are usually sold fresh, though Ocimum minimum, or bush basil, is also common, and often sold dried). These are native to Africa, the Mediterranean and southern Asia. Even inside the O. basilicum species, flavor can vary incredibly, tasting now like cinnamon, now like cloves, and here again like lemon.
Ocimum sanctum, holy basil, is a plant sacred in India to Krishna and Vishnu, and found to this day planted around their temples. To my mind, basil is an herb well-suited to temples beyond just these. Many European cultures, especially those of Latin origin, consider this herb to be associated with love. In Italy, a pot of basil displayed in a window of a family’s compound indicated that a daughter had reached marriageable age. In Mexico, there is a custom of carrying basil in one’s pocket to attract love.
But basil lore has a darker side. Culpepper, the noted English herbalist, mentions that while many Arabic physicians defend the curative properties of basil, he has found it useful only for such things as poultices for drawing out poisons, for, he remarks rather snarkily, like calls to like. The English used it to ward against insects and evil spirits. Early English sources also refer often to its unpleasant odor, a reference which quite bemused me until I recalled that garlic, too, had been referred to as foul-smelling by many. (Asafoetida, on the other hand, is a well-loved spice in many Near Eastern cuisines but is disliked intensely by most people of European descent, who see it only as a banishing herb. Tastes vary.)
Though the common name “basil” derives from the Greek word “basileum,” meaning king, the Greeks saw basil as a plant of ill-omen. The Romans, perhaps similarly, thought that basil would only grow well if abused when planted or on ground that had been cursed — a custom that seems to survive to this day. But not with me.
To me basil, with its strong clear flavor, its affinity with light foods and its splendor when served fresh, epitomizes summer cooking. Though I used fresh basil first in cooked tomato sauces, and then more heavily in Thai dishes where basil was treated almost as a green vegetable rather than as a mere flavoring, I find myself most pleased with the basil leaves uncooked. Vietnamese cooking seems to have a particularly fine grasp on the use of fresh herbs. One of my favorite of such dishes is the cool noodle salad bun, where rice vermicelli is served on a bed of shredded greens including copious amounts of basil and mint (not to mention Vietnamese coriander and perilla) topped with grilled meat and drizzled with a fish-sauce based dressing.
But one does not need to be so complicated.
Pesto
Pesto is a paste, such as might be made by grinding moist ingredients with a pestle. The proportion and ingredients vary greatly — what I include here is the recipe in its simplest and most common form. But increasingly pestos are based on other herbs than basil, or sunflower seeds and walnuts are incorporated to spare the expensive pine nuts, or spinach is added to supplement the basil. These too, can be fine (if you like sunflower seeds, or walnuts, and remember to use twice the quantity of pesto, which spinach dilutes in flavor — this is a fine way to eat spinach, but it does not save on basil). All measurements are approximate; adjust to taste.
- 5 parts basil leaves, coarsely chopped
- 1 part grated Parmesan
- 1 part pine nuts
- 1 part olive oil
- Fresh garlic and salt to taste
Combine ingredients in a mortar and pestle. Or a blender, or a food processor (though the texture of pesto worked by hand is superior). Blend ingredients until they reach the desired consistency (which can be completely smooth, or rather lumpy and grainy, as desired, but should be more or less pastelike). If you are using a blender, you might need to add more olive oil so as to have a liquid enough consistency for adequate blending. Serve tossed with pasta. Or on bread, or pizza, or crackers. Pesto can also be frozen in ice cube trays or muffin tins (and later transferred into freezer bags) yielding a number of single serving portions for less bounteous times of the year.
Fresh Tomato Sauce
By fresh, here I mean “uncooked.” This is a dish that should wait for the arrival of decent tomatoes. If the tomatoes have no scent, pass them by.
Combine the following:
- 2 large tomatoes, chopped
- 1 generous fistful of basil, sliced widthwise into ribbons (slicing basil widthwise, across the veins, best releases its flavor)
Drizzle with olive oil and balsamic vinegar (or a good red wine vinegar), then add salt and pepper to taste. One can also add a bit of pressed garlic, or a finely minced shallot, but in a dish so fully flavored there is no need to allow the alliums to dominate. Allow the sauce to sit for at least 10 minutes to better mingle the flavors before eating.
Serve, again, over pasta. Or as a topping for bread. For that matter, tossed with greens this sauce makes a nice salad.
Astronomy Picture of the Day for June 1
Astronomy Picture of the Day
Discover the cosmos!Each day a different image or photograph of our fascinating universe is featured, along with a brief explanation written by a professional astronomer.
2012 June 1
A Sagittarius Triplet
Image Credit & Copyright: Martin Pugh
Explanation: These three bright nebulae are often featured in telescopic tours of the constellation Sagittarius and the crowded starfields of the central Milky Way. In fact, 18th century cosmic tourist Charles Messier cataloged two of them; M8, the large nebula left of center, and colorful M20 on the right. The third, NGC 6559, is above M8, separated from the larger nebula by a dark dust lane. All three are stellar nurseries about five thousand light-years or so distant. The expansive M8, over a hundred light-years across, is also known as the Lagoon Nebula. M20’s popular moniker is the Trifid. Glowing hydrogen gas creates the dominant red color of the emission nebulae, with contrasting blue hues, most striking in the Trifid, due to dust reflected starlight. This broad skyscape also includes one of Messier’s open star clusters, M21, just above and right of the Trifid.
News From NASA: Live Webcast of Venus Transit
Watch the Venus Transit! Live Video Feeds
Several live NASA video feeds will be available on June 5 to observe the Venus transit. In the late afternoon on June 5, a live video feed of the transit as it looks over Huntsville, Ala., will be embedded on this page. We’ll also offer links to other cameras around NASA, including full coverage from Hawaii courtesy of NASA EDGE.
You can read more about this at:
Protecting Grandparents From Mercury
by Dominique Browning
By Laura Michelle Burns, Moms Clean Air Force
If you’re anything like me, you fall into the category of women who are caring for their children and their parents or grandparents. My aunt and my grandmother are both in their 70s. I’m grateful that they are in good health and are active. But I will confess that I worry about them the most when they are up visiting Lake Erie with their friends. It may sound silly, but I worry because they always tell me about the wonderful local, fresh caught fish they had each trip.
Growing up, I spent a lot of my summers visiting Port Clinton and Marblehead on the Lake Erie coast. Even as I type this, I can see myself sitting in a corner booth of a small Ohio diner watching the fishing boats pull up to the dock to sell their morning’s catch. I ate a lot of fresh caught fish sandwiches with my aunt and grandmother. I know they taste amazing! But what I know now is that those fish are tainted with mercury. Lake Erie is surrounded by coal-fired plants that spew mercury into our air. Mercury in the air doesn’t stay in one place, it is absorbed into the water droplets in the air and circulated through the clouds, and eventually rains down into our lake.
We know what mercury does our our children. Today though, I’d like to highlight what mercury does to our children’s grandparents. Since mercury is a neurotoxin, it functions in the degradation of the brain. A child’s brain is impacted by mercury in a way that can hinder the child from reaching their full potential. An adult’s brain has already developed and is now used to maintain the information necessary for everyday life and beyond.
6 Facts About Mercury:
- Mercury can have an effect on the Central Nervous System, specifically the brain, by concentrating in the cerebral spinal fluid.
- It can also inhibit the microtubules in the brain which then reduce the nerves’ function and their communication.
- Our brains rely on the communication between the nerves to do things like remembering what it felt like to hold our baby for the first time, or how to sing “The Itsy Bitsy Spider.”
- As we age and these memories aren’t so recent, we rely more and more on our brains to retain them.
- Alzheimer’s disease was reported to affect an estimated 5.4 million Americans in 2011.
- Research has shown that mercury can be a causal factor in Alzheimer’s disease…even more so than the concerns of thimerosal being a leading factor in autism!
Of course, I want my family to be able to enjoy their summer visiting Lake Erie. I want them to eat and be as carefree as the day allows. But I also don’t want to worry that their memories could be affected by their unwitting consumption of mercury. This summer, as excited as I am to share my days with family, I’ll be encouraging them to skip the fish and order a burger instead. I know that memories can fade in time, but I’d hate to hurry it along with a side of mercury to accompany their catch of the day!
Eating Invasives: Delicious or Dangerous?
by The Nature Conservancy
By Matt Miller, The Nature Conservancy
Warm spring days evoke a strong memory of my grandmother. She’s hunched over the yard, seemingly picking randomly at the grass. Her short stature and rapid movements give the appearance of a dervish. She grips at a plant, plucks and plops it into the bucket, then moves a short distance away to resume her harvest.
My grandmother collected dandelions, a spring bounty she served with a bacon dressing. The bitter greens were not unlike spinach or kale, bitter yet tasty. My grandfather used the flowers to make a potent wine.
This time of year, I so often encounter dandelions shriveled from hefty doses of herbicide. Recalling my grandmother, it seems a waste: here are delicious, nutritious greens that could be providing some free meals. Instead, they’ve become toxic reminders of the so-called “war on weeds“—the scorched earth approach to invasive control favored by both surburban lawn owners and conservationists.
Why aren’t we instead looking at some non-native, invasive species as a sustainable source for fresh, local food?
The idea is popular. Books like Jackson Landers‘ upcoming Eating Aliens encourage local foodies to eat such invasives as iguanas and nutrias. Marine conservationists have launched campaigns to encourage restaurants to carry lionfish, a species devastating coral reefs. Even governments have urged their citizens to eat non-native gray squirrels (in Britain) and camels (in Australia).
As history shows, people can certainly eat their way through populations of species. As such, eating invasives doesn’t only provide good food, it’s good conservation.
Or is it?
An upcoming paper by ecologist Martin Nunez and others to be published in Conservation Letters, the journal of the Society of Conservation Biology, encourages skepticism to this approach. In the paper, they argue that encouraging people to eat invasives may have unintended consequences. There’s a real risk, the authors argue, that people will start actually liking said invasives.
Entrepreneurs could develop markets for them; hunters could enjoy pursuing them. Invasives could become a part of the local culture. As a review in Conservation Magazine points out, native Hawaiians often oppose eradication measures for non-native pigs because pig hunting and eating is so clearly linked to their culture.
I can relate: On a recent weekend, my friends and organic gardeners Clay and Josie Erskine asked me to their farm to hunt the non-native (in Idaho) wild turkeys that had begun raiding their gardens. As we looked across their farm, ring-necked pheasants ran from the kale patch. Valley quail called from literally every corner of the property.
“Every one of them is a non-native species,” Josie sighed. “And they’re all absolutely devastating to vegetable farmers like us.”
Non-native quail, pheasants and turkeys have a constituency, though. Membership organizations advocate for their conservation. Landowners can receive government funding for practices that largely benefit these birds.
I reluctantly admit, as a non-native gamebird hunter, I would oppose any effort to eliminate these species.
Could campaigns to eat kudzu or camels or carp actually have the reverse effect? Could such campaigns lead to people protecting or spreading them?
It bears serious thought.
The risks need to be recognized. So, too, do the benefits.
Intensive invasive species control poses risks of its own. With its war metaphors and scorched earth campaigns, invasives eradication often requires hefty doses of toxic chemicals. And just as often, weeds or invasive animals still flourish. Aside from cases on small islands such as Santa Cruz, complete eradication is usually impossible.
Recognizing dandelions as a food source will not eradicate the plant. But spraying dandelions doesn’t, either.
In many ways, eating invasives is not a control measure so much as it is a new way of interacting with non-native species. Through eating them, they become part of our environment rather than “enemies.” And because they’re prolific and abundant, they make ideal sustainable, low-carbon, local food sources.
Despite our best efforts, invasive species already thrive in our midst. Is serving them for dinner really going to make them even more prevalent?
Doubtful. These species are here to stay. It’s time to recognize them as a truly sustainable and abundant food source. I’ll take the fried iguana served over a bed of dandelion greens, please.
Matt Miller is a senior science writer for The Nature Conservancy. He writes features and blogs about the conservation research being conducted by the Conservancy’s 550 scientists. Matt previously worked for nearly 11 years as director of communications for the Conservancy’s Idaho program. He serves on the national board of directors of the Outdoor Writers Association of America. An avid naturalist and outdoorsman, Matt has traveled the world in search of wildlife and stories.
First Lady Grows a Book
by Eric Steinman
Eleanor Roosevelt achieved the last vegetable garden planted at the White House back in the early 1940s. For approximately 65 years the White House lawn (which technically is considered a national park) was reserved for press conferences, Easter egg hunts, and photo ops. Nary a vegetable was grown for generations. First lady Michelle Obama sought to change all of that, while simultaneously addressing the nation’s need to rethink health and nutrition. So, she did the obvious thing and planted an organic garden (or more accurately, had it planted) on the White House lawn a few years back.
The yield was impressive, with tons of organic veggies, honey, etc, and the reception was largely positive (excepting a few naysayers who feel the First Lady is trying to impose a “nanny state” where nutrition is dictated from up high). Now, after two harvests comes the definitive, White House-approved book to go with the garden. The fittingly titled American Grown is a look at rebuilding the tradition of the White House garden, while taking a concerted look back at the history of the American garden (it wasn’t so long ago that nearly everyone that could, had their own backyard garden).
The First Lady has made some noise in the past, and ruffled some feathers, with her dedication to reframing how Americans, particularly American families, consider health and nutrition. For her, the journey seems like it was informed by personal experience, as she told NPR earlier this week:
“Obama says her path to becoming a health advocate was a personal journey. ‘Before coming to the White House, I was a busy working mother. My husband was a U.S. senator and was often not home. We found ourselves eating out more than we should, packing on the sugary drinks … the habits that you fall into just trying to get through the day. And our pediatrician kind of pulled me aside and said, ‘You might want to look at your children’s diet.’ ‘”
Are you inspired by the First Lady’s moves towards a new era in gardening, or do you see it as just a cynical undermining of personal choice? Do you have a garden and if so, has it changed the way you and your family eat? Whether or not you want to buy the book, is there any reason not to be in support of the mission of bringing backyard gardening back into the mainstream?
Don’t Miss The Celestial Event of a Life – June 5 & 6
The 2012 Transit of Venus
It won’t happen again until December 2117. On June 5th, 2012, Venus will transit the face of the sun in an event of both historical and observational importance. The best places to watch are in the south Pacific, but travel is not required. The event will also be visible around sunset from the USA. Credit: Science@NASA
On June 5th, 2012, Venus will pass across the face of the sun, producing a silhouette that no one alive today will likely see again.
Transits of Venus are very rare, coming in pairs separated by more than a hundred years. This June’s transit, the bookend of a 2004-2012 pair, won’t be repeated until the year 2117. Fortunately, the event is widely visible. Observers on seven continents, even a sliver of Antarctica, will be in position to see it.
The nearly 7-hour transit begins at 3:09 pm Pacific Daylight Time (22:09 UT) on June 5th. The timing favors observers in the mid-Pacific where the sun is high overhead during the crossing. In the USA, the transit will be at its best around sunset. That’s good, too. Creative photographers will have a field day imaging the swollen red sun “punctured” by the circular disk of Venus.
Observing tip: Do not stare at the sun. Venus covers too little of the solar disk to block the blinding glare. Instead, use some type of projection technique or a solar filter. A #14 welder’s glass is a good choice. Many astronomy clubs will have solar telescopes set up to observe the event; contact your local club for details.
Transits of Venus first gained worldwide attention in the 18th century. In those days, the size of the solar system was one of the biggest mysteries of science. The relative spacing of planets was known, but not their absolute distances. How many miles would you have to travel to reach another world? The answer was as mysterious then as the nature of dark energy is now.
Venus was the key, according to astronomer Edmund Halley. He realized that by observing transits from widely-spaced locations on Earth it should be possible to triangulate the distance to Venus using the principles of parallax.
The idea galvanized scientists who set off on expeditions around the world to view a pair of transits in the 1760s. The great explorer James Cook himself was dispatched to observe one from Tahiti, a place as alien to 18th-century Europeans as the Moon or Mars might seem to us now. Some historians have called the international effort the “the Apollo program of the 18th century.”
A double transit: the International Space Station and Venus on June 8, 2004. Photo courtesy of Tomas Maruska. In retrospect, the experiment falls into the category of things that sound better than they actually are. Bad weather, primitive optics, and the natural “fuzziness” of Venus’s atmosphere and other factors prevented those early observers from gathering the data they needed. Proper timing of a transit would have to wait for the invention of photography in the century after Cook’s voyage. In the late 1800s, astronomers armed with cameras finally measured the size of the Solar System as Edmund Halley had suggested.
This year’s transit is the second of an 8-year pair. Anticipation was high in June 2004 as Venus approached the sun. No one alive at the time had seen a Transit of Venus with their own eyes, and the hand-drawn sketches and grainy photos of previous centuries scarcely prepared them for what was about to happen. Modern solar telescopes captured unprecedented view of Venus’s atmosphere backlit by solar fire. They saw Venus transiting the sun’s ghostly corona, and gliding past magnetic filaments big enough to swallow the planet whole.
2012 should be even better as cameras and solar telescopes have improved. Moreover, NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory is going to be watching too. SDO will produce Hubble-quality images of this rare event.
Read More At NASA.gov.
Related articles
- Last Transit of Venus for 105 Years (theepochtimes.com)
Microsoft Tops List of Google Takedown Requests
by Kristina Chew
In its annual transparency report, Google reveals that it is receiving more than a million requests a month to remove sites from its search. The majority of these are not from governments concerned about the revelation of sensitive or unflattering information but from copyright owners including Microsoft, NBC Universal, Universal Music Ltd. and Sony Music. All told, Google now receives more than 250,000 requests a week, more than it did in total for 2009.
Just in the past month, Google received over 1.2 million requests for URLs to be removed from its search from over 23,000 websites on behalf of 1,322 copyright owners. Indeed, in 2011, Google received 3.3 million requests for removals; it expects that number to quadruple this year. The most targeted website was Filestube.com, which enables users to find downloadable files (audio, video and documents); file sharing site torrentz.eu was the next most-targeted. Google complies with 97% of removal requests and said that it usually takes about eleven hours to remove links.
As Dominic Ruche (from the Guardian via Raw Story) notes, the notable increase in removal requests follows the defeat of the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), which was supported by the largest media companies in the world and the likes of the Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA). SOPA was virulently opposed by the technology community whose all-out online protest against it led to the measure being tabled.
Microsoft’s dominance is also its Achilles’ heel: 90 percent of all PCs run Windows and 95 percent of users use its Office software, so these products are “a major target for illegal file-sharers” and indeed, “the most pirated bits of software on the Web,” says Zack Whittaker in ZDNet. Microsoft can only do so much in fighting the “global piracy battle”; requesting that Google remove links to pirated copies of its software is often all that it can do.
Emphasizing that “transparency is a crucial element to making this system work well,” Fred von Lohmann, Google’s senior copyright counsel, notes that copyright holders are overstepping and even abusing their powers in some cases. As he writes on the Google blog:
At the same time, we try to catch erroneous or abusive removal requests. For example, we recently rejected two requests from an organization representing a major entertainment company, asking us to remove a search result that linked to a major newspaper’s review of a TV show. The requests mistakenly claimed copyright violations of the show, even though there was no infringing content. We’ve also seen baseless copyright removal requests being used for anticompetitive purposes, or to remove content unfavorable to a particular person or company from our search results.
Media companies continue to express frustration, and exasperation, towards Google. Says BPI boss Geoff Taylor in the BBC,
“It’s wrong for Google to be wilfully blind to the clear data it has that particular sites are massive copyright infringers.”
“When Google has been told 100,000 times that sites like The Pirate Bay and beemp3 distribute music illegally, why do they come top – above Amazon and iTunes – when I search for ‘download music’? It’s irresponsible, it misleads consumers and if Google won’t sort it out voluntarily, Government should get on with doing something about it.”
Is Google being “willfully blind” — should governments step in and regulate Google’s search? Or should it be left to us users to avoid sites (and downloads) that infringe copyrights?
Wikileaks’ Julian Assange Loses Extradition Appeal
by Kristina Chew
Wikileaks founder Julian Assange has lost his extradition appeal to the UK Supreme Court and could now face deportation to Sweden on allegations of sexual abuse brought by two Swedish women. His lawyers have been granted two additional weeks to submit fresh arguments as to whether they want to take issue with a central point of the judgement or to challenge the correct interpretation of international treaties — of, specifically, Article 31.3 of the Vienna Convention on the Law of Treaties.
Assange, who has been on conditional bail and subjected to electronic monitoring, curfew and regular reports to local police, was not himself present for the decision due to being “stuck in traffic” according to his lawyer. Assange tweeted “We got the news not hoped for” after learning of the decision, says the BBC.
The 40-year-old Australian is charged with raping one woman and “sexually molesting and coercing” another in Stockholm and a nearby town in August 2010, when Wikileaks was in the midst of releasing a vast trove of classified United States military and diplomatic documents. The women, who were both Wikileaks volunteers, both made complaints that what had been consensual encounters became non-consensual. Assange was present for an initial interview with Swedish police than fled to London,prior to further questioning could be completed. Swedish authorities issued an arrest warrant for him, leading to him being briefly imprisoned in December 2010.
Assange has insisted on his innocence and his lawyers have spoken of a “honey trap” set for him, to prevent him from releasing more documents on Wikileaks. Assange has railed against Sweden as a “Saudi Arabia of feminism.” His legal battle has been going on for 18 months.
Britain’s highest court ruled by a vote of 5 to 2 to reject Assange’s appeal for extradition. The judgement hinged on whether the Swedish authority who issued the extradition order had the “judicial authority” to do so under the 2003 Extradition Act or whether that power was granted only to a judge or a court, says the BBC. Judge Nicholas Phillips, the president of the court, said that the decision “has not been easy to resolve” but was “lawfully made.” Assange’s lawyers are honing in on a “fine point of European law” in appealing the court’s ruling, namely that the judgement was “based on a point which was neither heard nor argued in the case,” says the BBC’s Dominic Casciani.
As the New York Times observes, this new delay in Assange’s extradition case pushes back “indefinitely” any attempts by the US to extradite Assange on charges for his role in Wikileaks’ release of classified US diplomatic and military documents.
The NYT says that there have been “frequent but unconfirmed reports … that a secret grand jury hearing in Alexandria, Va.” is preparing a US Justice Department bid to charge Assange with espionage. A 4-page Wikileaks statement, issued some 12 hours before the British Supreme Court’s ruling, has “depicted the decision in London as a prelude to a much grimmer challenge awaiting” Assange than the sex abuse charges in Sweden. If convicted of the latter, Swedish lawyers say that he faces a stiff fine or, at most, a brief prison term. If convicted of espionage in the US, he could face a life sentence in a maximum-security prison.
Bradley Manning, the US army private charged with leaking massive amount of classified government information to Wikileaks, is seeking dismissal of 10 of the 22 counts he faces. Manning, who is currently being held in Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, contends that eight of the counts are unconstitutionally vague and that two others fail to state a prosecutable offense. He faces life in prison if convicted of aiding the enemy, the most serious charge. On June 6, a military judge will hear pre-trial arguments in Fort Meade, Md.; Manning faces a full court-martial in September. A Guardian interview with his aunt, who has been visiting him frequently, says that Manning is “keeping himself in a relatively positive state of mind, buoyed by trust in his lawyers and the support of close family and backers from around the world.”
Quirky Law Could Kill Thousands Of Animals For New Cigarette
by Sharon Seltzer
More than 8 million of the 47 million U.S. adult cigarette smokers have a serious illness caused by smoking, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Tobacco also costs the economy $96 billion a year for medical care. To counter the bad press, the tobacco industry has created new “light” tobacco products they claim are less harmful. In order to make that claim, a quirk in the law requires the products to be tested on thousands of animals.
Two years ago, Congress passed a law that requires tobacco companies to prove that any of its products labeled “light” or “mild” significantly reduce the risk of tobacco-related disease to smokers and benefit the health of the population. The Food and Drug Administration was placed in charge of regulating the law. They drafted guidelines that required animal testing to be part of the process.
The National Cancer Institute, Institute for Medicine, Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine and PETA have all called for an end to the animal testing clause.
The National Cancer Institute doesn’t believe the light cigarettes are less harmful to a person’s health. In a recent report they stated, “There is no convincing evidence that changes in cigarette design… have resulted in an important decrease in the disease burden caused by cigarette use.”
Bingxuan Wang, a toxicology researcher with the nonprofit Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine is very concerned about the number of animals that will needlessly die during these tests.
“The bottom line is, tobacco – light or not – poses serious risks to the user’s health and to the health of others. Wasting countless more animal lives to prove the safety of an inherently harmful product, especially when such tests in the past have been misleading, would be grossly counterproductive for human health,” said Wang.
The Institute of Medicine said, “It is not possible to make laboratory animals use tobacco products the way humans do, and there are inherent interspecies differences that prevent meaningful extrapolation of human effects.” Experiments conducted on animals 50 years ago found that tobacco did not cause lung cancer, but that information was obviously incorrect in humans.
PETA said, “In some of the horrendous tobacco tests that could be conducted, rats would be forced to breathe tobacco smoke for as long as six hours a day for months at a time by jamming the animals into tiny canisters and pumping concentrated cigarette smoke directly into their noses. The animals would then be killed and their bodies dissected.”
Belgium, Germany and the U.K. have banned animal testing for tobacco products and Canada uses non-animal methods.
Take Action: Stop Testing Nicotine On Animals
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