Cheezburgerocracy…With a couple’a caveats.
Tuesday, November 4th, 2008 by Maryam Webster
This cute kitty comes from the "I Can Has Cheezburger" website. All kitties want is Cheezburgerocracy. 
Barack Obama is the 44th President of the United States. My friend Krishna De says that we should all remember where we were this day, when we heard the news as it is historic, one to tell the grandchildren.
Yes, Virginia, you CAN have another stab at democracy.
Let’s take a look what that will be like in the energy field…
Remember 9/11? Remember how the cameraderie and community feeling nationwide? Remember how good it felt? And remember how that lasted about six to eight months? No more than a year across the land. Then we started getting proprietary,
grabby, “not in my back yard” and looking suspiciously at our neighbors again. So much for national siblinghood and unity.
Now we have another incident that justifiably perhaps, is engendering great joy and goodwill throughout most of America and much of the rest of the world.
But will it last?
History tells us it won’t, not for long. But we can re-write history, you know.
Really.
It’s not even all that hard.
We’re going to learn much more in Magic School shortly, but here’s a pointer or two: Read the rest of this entry »
Franklin Delano Roosevelt seen at right and commonly referred to as FDR, was the 32nd President of the United States. That’s for the folks who seem to have missed being taught about New Deals I and II, and the Great Depression. I’m finding suprisingly many who seemed to have skipped this bit of history in school. And while I was not personally alive during the Depression, my parents were. Their generation’s experience formed how I viewed money for most of my life, as it did for many who are alive right now. 
We are not in a Depression, though many have labelled it that. In the 1920’s, there was a real economic downturn, marked by its term "The Great Depression". Great sections of the prairieland midwest turned into dusty deserts as agricultural conditions too deteriorated, and crops could not be grown – the economic vying with the geological and climatic to provide an experience of total disaster. People starved to death. Entire families in this society perished, or were forced to debase themselves for food at any price. 
Read Steinbeck’s Of Mice And Men for a candy-coated version. "Candy-coated" was what my mother said (snorted) when I brought the book home from high school English to find Mom making Snickerdoodles. "Steinbeck my foot!" Mom fumed "That wasn’t the half of it honey, not the half of it. That’s the candy-coated version." She continued to pat cookies into measured rounds, but this time with a vengeance that flatted them to cinnamon-sugar shingles. And refused to say more of what she had witnessed.
‘TIPPING POINTS’ COULD COME THIS CENTURY
When I first put up my website in 1996, I got a nastygram from the Merriam Webster dictionary people as I too am a prolific writer and produced tons of material that contained words in their book. Imagine the cheek, they said. They desisted after a spell of chatting with me. An almost magical sense of charm and persuasion goes a long way back among the women in my family. 
Speaking of the Dalai Lama, I have received two initiations from His Holiness Tenzing Gyatso, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama. The White Tara longevity empowerment and the Medicine Buddha initiation and blessing for my work in healing. It’s not as cool as you think though – I was one of about five thousand that day to receive these blessings. And he was going along so fast in Tibetan you had a hard time keeping up with the visualizations of a white Buddha above a towering stack of golden Buddhas all holding lotus flowers and so on and so on.
If you like cats and you’re a computer nerd, you might "has" seen the picture at left. (No, it’s not my kitties, 
I am an accomplished frontierswoman. Though you wouldn’t think it to look at me, I can make my own paper and ink, spin, weave, dye woven goods with native plants, make soap in a cast iron cauldron, split logs, make brooms and other tools of wood and local plants, harvest and manage forest foods such as hickory nuts, boil the hickory branches to get three kinds of food: salt, sugar and milk (yep, you can), muddle and sweeten ground roasted acorns for frontier flour, construct a log cabin (well, in theory, I only did it once and that was with a lot of help – those logs are heavy!), grow, harvest and make herbal medicines (plus know how to use them), midwife human and animal babies into the world, make shoes from leather, plants or refuse such as old tires (great for treads), set, manage and harvest a trotline for fish, snares for rabbit and quail, plus skin and dress the meat if called upon to do so (not my favorite thing) and tan the skins. I can build a fire with a bow drill and pine duff or other local tinder, though it takes a long time. I can construct a shelter out of almost any material available, and find food in a forest even in winter. What’s more, I have a hardy spirit and am a survivor, born of a long line of women who persisted, shared their knowledge and endured to win in life.
I’ve not been called on to do any of these frontier tasks in a long time, but the memory still persists. My mother was a great one for recapturing the pioneer spirit and my great grandmother on my father’s side up in the Smoky Mountains of Carolina (they really do look like they’re smoking – see?) thought a girl child should know how to weave and dye and make soap, ink, paper and so on. 
I was recently asked by a client how to remain professional in a contentious situation. Here is something I wrote a long time ago that still applies:
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