Leland Tea Company update
A new indie flick, City on a Hill, recently filmed a couple of scenes there. Sounds interesting.
"Copia" is Latin for "abundance," and this blog explores my belief that abundance is all around us. We live in a world of infinite possibilities,
and we have the ability to choose our own paths.
I write about a wide range of topics, and common themes are politics, civil liberties, health, the environment, and science.
Who am I? I'm Torq Anvil...
Labels: climate change
Labels: being human, m
And Mark Green discusses the factors that are endanger our democracy on The Huffington Post.“There are no hereditary kings in America and no powers not created by the Constitution,” she wrote, rejecting what she called the administration’s assertion that the president “has been granted the inherent power to violate not only the laws of the Congress but the First and Fourth Amendments of the Constitution itself.”
Labels: civil liberties
Labels: climate change
WHILE THE BUSH TEAM PLAYS POLITICS with the disruption of the terrorist plot to bring down airliners with liquid explosives, the TSA ignores advice from internal experts, one of whom predicted just such an approach a year ago:There is an interesting resonance here between the "just-in-time" delivery of manufacturing inputs and retail stock and the modern tendency to keep essentially no food in one's home. It's a joke on TV shows and movies about bachelors and young moderns, but a great many people really do have nothing in their fridges but a six-pack of beer and a jar of mustard and nothing in their cupboard but half a bag of cookies and a couple of Cup-O-Noodles. They depend on take-out food, restaurants, their more provident friends' larders, and heaven help them, vending machines.
If the restaurants are not open because no food has been delivered, if the pizza take-out isn't delivering because there is no gasoline (and no pizza), and the vending machines have all been stripped bare by other hungry people, then these "grasshoppers" only resource is their friends. Desperation is just around the corner.
Read more here. Also, listen to Thomas Kean, chairman of the 9/11 Commission, speak on Fresh Air about his new book, Without Precedent: the Inside Story of the 9/11 Commission."Next time the terrorists might put explosives in toothpaste tubes, and you can count on TSA screeners squishing out all the toothpaste from passengers' bags."
Well, we can expect that sports drinks and hair gel will now be permanently banned. This was what the British terrorists planned to use to disguise the explosives.
'Tis surprising to see how rapidly a panic will sometimes run through a country. All nations and ages have been subject to them.... Yet panics, in some case, have their uses; they produce as much good as hurt. Their duration is always short; the mind soon grows through them, and acquires a firmer habit than before. But their peculiar advantage is, that they are the touchstones of sincerity and hypocrisy, and bring things and men to light, which might otherwise have lain forever undiscovered.... They sift out the hidden thoughts of man, and hold them up in public to the world.
-- COMMON SENSE, The American Crisis, No. I, Thomas Paine, 1776
To understand where this complexity can lead in a simple example, consider a steak--to be precise, a porterhouse, select cut, with a half-centimeter layer of fat, the nutritional constituents of which can be found in the Nutrient Database for Standard Reference at the USDA Web site. After broiling, this porterhouse reduces to a serving of almost equal parts fat and protein. Fifty-one percent of the fat is monounsaturated, of which virtually all (90%) is oleic acid, the same healthy fat that's in olive oil. Saturated fat constitutes 45% of the total fat, but a third of that is stearic acid, which is, at the very least, harmless. The remaining 4% of the fat is polyunsaturated, which also improves cholesterol levels. In sum, well over half--and perhaps as much as 70%--of the fat content of a porterhouse will improve cholesterol levels compared to what they would be if bread, potatoes, or pasta were consumed instead. The remaining 30% will raise LDL but will also raise HDL. All of this suggests that eating a porterhouse steak rather than carbohydrates might actually improve heart disease risk, although no nutritional authority who hasn't written a high-fat diet book will say this publicly.The bottom line for improving your health is to pair some common sense (e.g. eat a variety of fresh foods that have been minimally processed) with some knowledge about how specific foods impact the human body (e.g. most plant oils are high in healthy fats; human-engineered fats like partially hydrogenated oils are bad in any amount).
We found one company that would produce one of our half-minute TV spots for as little as $10,000. At Iraq's national station, Al Iraqiya, located with Baghdad's old Jewish ghetto, an English-speaking commercial director said he could air the spot during the station's nightly news, the most expensive time, for only $2,000. Production and distribution, then, would cost us around $12,000. The amount Lincoln Group was charging the military for developing, producing, and airing each commercial had already been determined: just over $1 million.
Labels: LGBT
Labels: being human
... extremism has been strengthened. Lebanon is abject, on its knees, stricken with a plague inflicted on it by Bush and Olmert. The abject, the humiliated, the impoverished do not, as Bush and Olmert fondly imagine to themselves, lie down and let the mighty walk over them. They blow up skyscrapers.
The idea that the whole Eastern Mediterranean had to be polluted, that the Christian Lebanese economy had to be destroyed for the next decade or two, that 900,000 persons had to be rendered homeless, that a whole country had to be pounded into rubble because some Lebanese Shiites voted for Hizbullah in the last election, putting 12 in parliament, is obscene. Bush's glib ignorance is destroying our world. Our children will suffer for it, and perhaps our grandchildren after them.
Perhaps this country is actually ready for what he's selling: the twin notions that the world is an enormous, embattled, struggling place and that the law has a responsibility to try to fix it. Not just in service of the Constitution, but in the service of freedom.The speech reminded me of a movement within the legal profession that I heard about in 2003. Kim Wright, a lawyer in Portland and founder of the Renaissance Lawyer website, had shared about "law as a healing profession" at a seminar we were in; the thrust of the movement is to move beyond the adversarial aspects of the practice of law and identify ways that lawyers can instead bring people together. For more information, check out the Renaissance Lawyer page on transformational law.
Labels: U.S. Supreme Court
Labels: energy, environment, peak oil
Dear Mom and Dad,
I went along kicking and screaming at times, but through the lives you led I learned that it was okay to take another path, and that has made all the difference in my life. I learned from you how to feel comfortable around all types of people. I never heard you make a racist joke or comment. You always allowed me to be me.
For all of that, and for sticking with me through everything that has happened since, thank you.
Love, Michael
Labels: music
Our greatest fear is not that we are inadequate,
but that we are powerful beyond measure.
It is our light, not our darkness, that frightens us.
We ask ourselves, Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous,
handsome, talented and fabulous?
Actually, who are you not to be?
You are a child of God.
Your playing small does not serve the world.
There is nothing enlightened about shrinking
so that other people won't feel insecure around you.
We were born to make manifest the glory of God within us.
It is not just in some; it is in everyone.
And, as we let our own light shine,
we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same.
As we are liberated from our fear,
our presence automatically liberates others.
Labels: quotes
Note: I went to the CarbonNeutral Shop and offset the CO2 emissions from my flight to and from Costa Rica. It cost me $18.
Labels: m
Labels: movies