Saturday, November 14, 2015

Paris, Friday 13 November 2015

Art by Jean Julien, found on FB

Paris was attacked yesterday by male religious extremists. 127 people were murdered - people simply out on a Friday evening, enjoying the unusually warm weather, dining, going to a concert, shopping, watching a soccer game. Close to 200 people were injured, with reports that 80 of them sustained critical injuries. 

And for what?  The endless wars that men start and continue - that they have started and continued for millennia, all in the name of religion, of ethnicity, of culture, for Earth's resources, of greed, of violence, of destruction, of dominance, of superiority of all other life forms on Earth.  Their actions, their inflammatory words are like an auto immune disease for all of the rest of us living here on our beautiful Earth. They are malignant narcissists, psychopaths, sociopaths who won't stop - their addiction to violence will never be satiated because they don't want it to end - a calm and peaceful life is too boring for them - they crave excitement, titillation at any cost and that cost is the lives of all living beings that share this Earth with them.

I'm beginning to believe that the Y chromosome must be terribly degraded, causing some sort of insanity to overtake men. What else can account for this?
"Civilization is in a constant state of warfare.

Over the last 6500 years, more than 14,500 major wars have resulted in the death of almost 4 billion people. Since WWII, there have been about 30 armed conflicts per year on average, in which 90% of the casualties have been civilians."


--via Deep Green Resistance
Not to mention the non human life forms and ecosystems that have been killed, damaged and/or destroyed.

Men's words of peace, love, beauty, harmony are meaningless in the face of their actions.
“If you insist upon fighting to protect me, or ‘our’ country, let it be understood, soberly and rationally between us, that you are fighting to gratify a sex Instinct which I cannot share; to procure benefits which I have not shared and probably will not share; but not to gratify my instincts, or protect either myself or my country. For, the outside will say, in fact, as a woman, I have no country. As a woman I want no country. As a woman, my country is the whole world...”
Virginia Woolf (1882 - 1941) England
“Women are not at the peace table. We are not there where our commitment to peace, our capacities to find solutions through dialogue, debate, our sensitivities to human needs, human rights are sorely needed. Therefore, we still must press - from the outside...Feminists can make clear that one does not have to agree with the political or economic systems of a country in order to like and understand its people...The feminist movement has a vision. We understand, first of all, that we have but one earth, shared by one humanity. ...We will make it a woman’s world, not in the sense of control, or power, or dominance, but those values that we call women-centered values, will be diffused throughout society.”
Margarita Chant Papandreou. Greece/U.S.A.
“When we carry our eyes back through the long records of our history, we see wars of plunder, wars of conquest, wars of religion, wars of pride, wars of succession, wars of idle speculation, wars of unjust interference, and hardly among them one war of necessary self-defence in any of our essential or very important interests.”
Anna Barbauld, English poet, essayist, critic, 1793


Monday, November 2, 2015

Elephants being elephants


One more Elephant trekking camp has joined our Saddle Off program . Here are some of the 20 beautiful ladies who live in this camp which is joining our freedom program called " Elephant Keeper " .

The visitor will enjoy taking the herd to walk in the jungle, to feed them, watch them eating and foraging, swimming and playing in the mud. If you want to help more elephant out of the riding work, to take the saddle off of their backs, please help to support this program at Mae Pin elephant camp, Mae Wang district. More details on the program soon.

You can read more about Elephant Nature Park at their FB page and their website.

There is also a wonderful Nature program on PBS worth watch entitled Soul of the Elephant.

They are such remarkable beings - sensitive, intelligent, soulful - and it pains me greatly to read about them being poached and poisoned for their tusks.  Humans have so much to be ashamed of...


Pileated Woodpecker

A simply stunning shot of a male Pileated Woodpecker in flight—notice how he has twisted his neck around so that his head is upside-down relative to his body. Thanks to David Mintz in Florida for the photo.

I was fortunate to see a Pileated Woodpeck back in 2007 - walking in the woods with my dog, Kylie, I head the drumming and looked up to see one in a dead tree by the river.  I gasped and gave thanks to Nature for allowing me that opportunity as they are rare what with all of the development in the area.