but so are the people in the midwest - particularly Iowa.  Just read Monica's incredible diary over at Daily Kos.

Best to all especially Phil.

So long as we privately fund campaigns, then those who can contribute the most (or bundle the most) will get the best access and be listened to the most.  The only real campaign finance reform is public financing of campaigns.

Good luck to Daniel Biss.

I agree with both Rich and Monica. However, until we get some laws in place, Daniel is doing the next best thing.

Off to the "Y"

bbl

My son, Chris called yesterday and we talked for quite a while. He has really got interested in the Presidential race and is an Obama fan.

We had a wonderful talk on everything from Iraq to the 11th district race in Va.

Well about half way through the talk, he said he had something special to tell me.

He said he is so proud of me. He said he has told his friends. my mom is going to Denver in August as an Obama delegate from the 3rd District of Va.

I almost lost my breath. While Chris and I are close, he has never told me how he felt about what I do. He said he always wondered why I did PTA, worked in the community and cared so much about others while taking care of our family and working full time.

I said I had always cared about others, and not myself.

I can tell you now folks, I feel everything I have tried to do was well worth it. I got validated by my family and that is all it takes.

Have a great day you all.

When you have time please let us know how everything is.

Morning Folks,

I'm reading a book by Daniel Pinchbeck about 2012, the end of the Mayan calendar.  As some of you may know, I'm suspicious of statements like "unconditional love" "levitation" etc.  I'm pretty grounded, trust my senses and my ability to reason. 

But in this book, published in 2006, Pinchbeck predicts a fuel crisis, food crisis, and earthquakes for 2008.  He examines the esoteric fields of shamanism, predictions such as the Hopi, Buddhists, Hindu, and many other documents and traditions.  While I think I may understand about a tenth of what he says, he points out that we have been in the masculine mode for a long time.

For instance, the number 13, which is still considered bad luck (he grew up in New York where most of the apartment buildings didn't have a 13th floor) is a female number, having to do with menses.  When the Julian calendar was adopted, the sun became the measure of time, not the moon as it was in every agricultural society before that.  He goes on, but what I think is pertinent is that we do still live in a cultural mileu that is masculine: mechanistic, industrial, reason, logic, linearity. 

Now, as to Hillary (I like her so much better when I have some distance), she has made a huge difference for women, and I appreciate that.  But, her mistake was to run as a male in the sense of Rovian tactics, bravado, assertiveness, polarizing, etc.  I don't fault her for that, but as Pinchbeck says, we are coming to the end of that system.  We've pushed it beyond what the earth can tolerate.  We can't afford in the crises that we face that mindset.

Obama ran, interestingly enough, on a more feminized mindset: inclusiveness, commonality, a variety of ways of solving problems, refusal to engage in hostilities, a sense of the big picture.

That's why he won in my estimation.  Hillary gave it her best, but that mindset, that tradition is something this earth and its peoples cannot afford anymore.  We must go on to something new, a new paradigm for solving problems, one that is inclusive, that is gentle towards the earth and its denizens.  We've already mechanized and restructured the earth into an industrial homogenous patterning, and we are seeing unprecidented die-off of species, of crowding, of decreasing fertility of the land, of pollution, etc.

Humans don't like change. "We prefer the devil we know to the the devil we don't know," but we are at the end of what we can do with homogeneity, mechanization, pollution, and ndustrialization.  And, we need the balance of the feminine and the masculine.

Just some La La Land thoughts.  Here's the title of the book if anyone is interested:2012: The Return of Quetzalcoatl by Daniel Pinchbeck.

Just got a call from the Va State Party asking me if I knew what a commitment it was to be a DNC member and if I still wanted to run.

I set YES.

I mean they called me so they must have me in mind.

Have to work on my speech but I will probably use the same one I used at the 3rd district convention.

Wowzers.

means retirement homes for horses will take food out of the mouths of poor people somewhere.

My ditto head brother in law beats me over the head with the "fuzzy thinking liberal" line and Obama's sponsorship of that bill costs him all over rural america where animals are treated like people but not at the expense of people.

I want someone who is "practical" or a "realist" to explain how euthanizing a horse when they are dying of old age is different than deciding when they die earlier.

or is there a "femine" symbolism to sparing the life of a horse(they are magnificent beasts) while causing the death of some starving human?

since Pat entertained the thought process of La La Land, and had that discussion thought I would throw it out, and seashell brought it up on the overnight

Hi Phil,

Frankly, and we've written it into our will, I don't want to be kept alive as a body.  I don't think it makes sense for animals either, though it's a tough decision.

With respect to your Lala Land reference, I don't see women as sentimental sops either.  They make hard diecisions and always have. 

I've never really felt much difference between the masculine modes and female, but as a public school teacher, there's great equality.  What I have noticed though, is generally, the way we speak in public is often very different.  I'm not sure I can articulate it, but it is different.  For me, it seems that there's capacity to listen, to be very aware of the interactions that are going on, to be careful of people's feelings, to speak in a way that is inclusive and explaining as to asserting and challenging. 

I've noticed sometimes that women's voices are not heard, and I've observed a woman make a statement that seems to be ignored and then five minutes later a male will make essentially the same statemnt and there will be responses.  Now whether that's because it takes a while to comprehend a thought or that it's a male/female thing, I don't know.  I do know that we have to balance our society between the male and female much better than we do now.

Interesting and telling article on Baracks and McCains fathers.

It was in the slums of Kenya that Barack the son realised he was an American, tied inexorably to his country's freedoms and failings. There was no contradiction. He thought of his grandmothers – one watching her home burned down by colonisers, another hurrying at 6.30am to catch the bus to work in a bank in Hawaii – and understood: "They all asked the same thing of me, these grandmothers of mine."

McCain's father was mostly absent, away at sea. As a navy child, McCain writes, "you are taught to consider their absence not as a deprivation, but as an honour." But he hungrily sought out stories of his grandfather and father. They were both angry, hard-drinking men, often disciplined for starting fights: his grandfather even drank the alcohol used to fuel torpedoes on his submarine. Warring was all they knew. When the Second World War ended, his grandfather lamented: "I feel lost. I don't know what to do."

From his father, Obama learned to eschew "the confidence reserved for those born into imperial cultures" that they should rule the world their way, with "a steady unthinking application of force". He can imagine the mentality of the boy in Basra whose father has vanished into an occupiers' prison, because it happened to his father and grandfather too. McCain learned the opposite from his father: that the natives only ever learn "to behave themselves" at the end of a big stick. So now we have to ask: which ghostly father will America choose?

http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/johann-hari/johann-hari-if-you-really-want-to-understand-what-this-race-is-about-look-at-the-two-candidates-fathers-841344.html

Thanks, Sandy m, very interesing.

Glad your mom is ok.

Good luck on her therapy.

Thanks - just heard she may now need a pacemaker.  She has an irregular heartbeat, so rehab is postponed for now.  Sigh.....

Smart kiddle you have to notice what he's mum is up to. . . .And boy, oh boy, what she's up to, lol! Luv ya!

Hi Puddle,

I know what you are saying, yes. I watched my uncles who were doctors as they conversed. In my childlike perceptions, I was in elementary school, there was a sense of authority and superiority that was evident. It puzzled me, since even then I knew that women were every bit as competent, thoughtful, and authoritative as men.

Many years ago in a writers' group I belonged to, the child of one woman was raped. I participated and observed how the women responded. There was a verbal and nonverbal embracing, a total openness to the pain of the woman, a coming together as I've never seen before of people in a nurturing, protecting, loving and healing behavior. I will never forget it.

Even on this blog where we are confined to words, I'm sensing that sympathy, empathy, and outpouring. This is one of the qualities that women have and our society needs desperately.