Yule and the Quarter Century Moon
Friday gratefuls: Mini-splits. Elements and Elementals. The abyss. Sisyphus’ rock. Nietzsche. Whitehead. Plato. Socrates. Democritus. Diogenes. Thales. Xeno. Even Descartes. Kant. Maimonides. The Talmud. The Mishnah. The Torah. Coleridge. Wordsworth. Keats. Lao Tze. Chuang-tzu. Moses. Israel. Joseph. Miriam.
Sparks of Joy and Awe: Our core story
Kavannah for 2025: Creativity
Kavannah for this January 3rd life: Joy
One brief shining: Went to Stinker’s Sinclair yesterday to buy some milk, but there were no quart containers available, so I took four of the 16 ounce plastic bottles to the checkout where the clerk offered to make sure there were not any quarts in the back; while he did that, I looked across the counter to the other clerk, a thin guy with slightly long dark hair, maybe early twenties, and noticed that he carried an empty holster on his hip, tied to his right leg with a carefully knotted strand of leather.
I’ve had a quiet week. Spoken to a few friends. Breakfast with Tara and with Alan this morning. Otherwise getting well back into a new workout routine, this time ensuring I do two full body resistance sessions a week and still aiming for the 150 minutes of moderate cardio. Not all the way there yet, but I can feel it coming.
Reading. Finished the Tao of Pooh and ready to start the Te of Piglet, Hanukkah gifts from Ruth and Gabe. Von Bek, stalled in the story of the second Von Bek, The City in the Autumn Stars. Parsha in Bereshit (Genesis). Commentaries. The NYT. The Washington Post.
Watching The Outpost, Seal Team, and Archer. Hawai’i 5-0 when I workout.
Listening to Mozart quartets.
Exchanging e-mails here and there.
Listening to the voices of my past as they continue to bubble up. Wondering why I tend to focus on the noble failures more than the successes. At least I see them as noble.
An example. We (odd, but I don’t who recall who “we” were.) heard one of the last remaining local seed companies, Northrup King, had entered into negotiations with Sandoz, the Swiss pharmaceutical giant. This purchase followed a trend of Big Pharma and Big Ag Chemical companies buying the smaller companies who sold seeds to farmers for each year’s new crop.
Why? The smaller companies owned patents on the seeds. When there were many local seed companies, the hybridization processes were sensitive to regional and even local variations in soil, weather, pests, and other variables important to good crop production.
The companies buying up the patents wanted two things (at least): control over the seed patents for crucial crops like corn, wheat, soy beans, and rice. Corn, wheat, and rice provide about 50% of the world’s calories according to chabotgpt. That control was step one. After they gathered (harvested?) these patents, these companies could centralize hybridization and begin the process of working on their genomes. This was in the mid-1980’s, when genetic manipulation was still in its infancy.
We organized. Tried to form a local co-op to purchase Northrup-King and keep them out of Sandoz’s hands. We protested at the Northrup-King building which is now a wonderful space for artists. I met a person from the General Accounting Office of the Federal Government and tried to get her interested. We looked for a local buyer.
This was prior to the internet so I subscribed to a company, a clipping service, that would provide relevant information published in magazines and newspapers throughout the U.S. We developed crude information packets for local media.
All this over the course of 9 months to a year, as I recall. We were way out of our league. Barely had an effect on a process more critically handled in the world of finance than of local radical politics.
In my mind a noble failure. We did, for a while, raise consciousness of the issue. We discovered novel ways to fight big corporations and their capitalist driven desire to dominate markets by any means necessary. Still, in the end, Northrup-King disappeared into the world of chemists and genetic engineers, their seed patents with them.