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…and We Still Ended Up Feeding the Fox!

Most of rural Portuguese households rely on buckets.  Buckets for wood, water, pine cones, clothes pegs/pins – you name it there will be a bucket for it.  We all use similar types of black buckets — ownership is usually interchangeable along with the contents. Occasionally, we  halfheartedly say we will color code them with tape on the handles according to ownership — it lasts about a month before our buckets are everywhere again.

However, we have a special bucket — bright orange with a lid.  This is for our kitchen waste.  We do not compost our food waste here for several reasons.  First, the smell, and the flies amplified by the heat and, second, composting encourages rats, mice and other vermin such as foxes.  We feel most of our food waste to the chickens and they give us eggs in return.

Continue reading → …and We Still Ended Up Feeding the Fox!

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Garry Davis and the World Citizen Movement: Life of Pleasure, or Pursuit of the Purity of Nothingness?

Garry Davis is 89-years-old and he’s a Man of the Universe and a Word Citizen.  Garry was born the privileged child of world-famous big band orchestra leader Meyer Davis, he trained as a student of drama at Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon University) and that intrinsic familial wealth and fame — along with the cherished opportunity for excellent education  — allowed Garry to live a life of the mind.  Garry’s biggest claim to fame — or insanity — is the notion that we are all citizens of the world, and not tethered to nations, and to prove that point, he created the Word Passport in order to test his belief.

Continue reading → Garry Davis and the World Citizen Movement: Life of Pleasure, or Pursuit of the Purity of Nothingness?

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Is Intelligence Inherited or Earned?

A friend recently said to me, “All intelligent people should be required to have children in order to preserve the human race.”

My friend went on to argue if you are intelligent you see how dangerous and rotten the world has become and you would never wish that sort of increasingly Armageddon-like future on your offspring; the intelligent are able to see the future and realize our current evolutionary course is in for a major correctionIntelligent! by deadly force resulting in the removal of the current trough of all bodies from the face of the earth.

My friend believes intelligent children can solve this conundrum of a world at war and that’s why intelligent parents must give birth to them.

My friend understands you want your children to prosper, not perish, and the hatred and destruction of the world isn’t something you want to gift your intelligent children with in life and so — my friend’s theory goes — intelligent people have been consciously making the “smarter” choice, the more human choice, to not birth children into a world filled with emotional and intellectual suffering and a guaranteed, bloody, death by radicals.

The unspoken, provocative, angle of my friend’s argument is that intelligence is inherited and not earned and that only “selfish, stupid people” are procreating and that’s why we’re in such a terrible world situation.