kubiac
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Posts posted by kubiac
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Propaganda may not be the best word to use.
Vegan With a Vengeance is my fave veg book, but I am no longer vegetarian.
I am trying to reclaim propaganda as a useful word meaning "marketing of ideas" although I realize the Soviets and the Nazis and the Fascists have given it quite a negative connotation!
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If you're on Facebook and want any recommendations for support groups where you can ask questions and learn more from people who are living this way, just let me know. :)
I am TOTALLY on Facebook. Any social-media recommendations are more than welcomed!
Thanks guys. Just checked out the ebook of Eat to Live from my library and will get through all of these!
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Blackberries grow quite fast, relatively speaking. 6-8 weeks from flower to fruit, which I don't think is enough time for the berry to absorb huge amounts of dangerous contaminants.
I think the main issue between the two locations is that the whole plants (rather than specifically edible parts) will be somewhat grungier near a busy road. You'll get dirtier picking them, although the berries themselves might not be terribly different in their level of car exhaust.
Pick as many berries as you can carry home and then eat until you're full and then turn the rest into jam.
My personal bias is that seeing where your food comes from and being a part of the harvest is almost always better than food that comes from some undisclosed location where you have no idea about pollution levels or anything else.
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Are there any vegetarians/vegans/pescatarians/nutritarians/"vegetable-arians" in the Hive who can recommend books about this way of eating?
I'm interested in learning more about the benefits of nutrient-dense foods as well as some ways to prepare them.
Thank you in advance!
Edit: Swapped out propaganda for resources in the title of the thread. My bad!
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Teaming with Microbes: The Organic Gardener's Guide to the Soil Food Web is my absolute favorite composting book. You'll be so so inspired by what goes on in there.
On a related note, our compost varmint is a small lizard who uses it as a source of insect snacks.
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Awesome, awesome thread. I have nothing to contribute except food gardening advice:
EASY-GROW PERENNIAL OR SEMI-PERENNIAL FOOD PLANTS:
* Lemon trees
* Fig trees
* Any other fruit trees your climate and yard can support. Just go for it. Ask your city water and power department about tree giveaways.
* Tree collards
* Artichokes
* Asparagus
* Sunchokes
* Vining squash/gourds
* Bramble berries
* Herbs, especially any that ramble and invade, like mint and oregano
Start a compost pile if you can possibly stand it. Recommended resource: http://forums2.gardenweb.com/forums/soil/
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Just saw this. Unthinkable. We're all with you.
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DETROIT IS DEPRESSING. It feels like a place that is suffering from a systemic disease. Parts of it are literally rotting. People are stressed and pessimistic. It's cold.
It's like that classic poll question: Do you feel like the country is going right way/wrong way? Detroit is going "wrong way" and has been for many years.
I don't mean to be so harsh, and I love Michigan as a whole and think of it as a "home state" I never lived in, but I cannot romanticize Detroit. I've seen what happened to the communities and neighborhoods my relatives lived in or left behind, and...It's just too far gone.
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With respect to soy, yogurt and their fans in assorted combinations, soy yogurt tastes like puke.
Yours truly,
Lady who is allergic to pretty much every delicious food
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What kinds of things do your kids complain about?
(I'm just wondering if the arguments I hear people make for less children play out in the reality of your lived family with several children, i.e. that the kids think don't get enough attention/resources or that their lives are suboptimal because they have too many siblings or something.)
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My son's best friend's little sister is almost two and not talking yet. She speaks all the time, but as her mom says, she "sounds like a Minion" (from the Despicable Me movies). She is very verbal, but it is not intelligible. It has the cadence and fluidity of language, it just doesn't have any words or sounds that make sense in context.
Other points:
* Her uncle was diagnosed with autism as a child and lives in a group home.* She comes from a bilingual family. I'd say she hears English 70 percent of the time, Spanish 30 percent.
* Her brother spoke fluently and well in English from an early age. He understands Spanish but won't speak it most of the time.
* She seems to have fluent receptive language, as far as we can tell.
* The other night I was hanging out with the girl in question and basically asked her if what she says makes sense and sounds right in her head and she indicated that it did. I tend to believe her.
It seems like there is just some disconnect between the language formulation in her brain and what comes out her mouth, like a shift cipher or something.
Any thoughts on what this might be and what if anything we could or should do to help her?
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Travel and read.
Go out into the world and see how other people with other belief systems live and observe if their personhood seems radically different/better/worse than yours and what that can be traced to. Is it their faith? Is it family? Is it environment? Is it finances? Is it education?
Observe, make conclusions and then change your beliefs or your practices. Reassess as needed.
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Teannika, I think all your questions, comments have been totally appropriate and I'm OK with the thread sort of being "dialogue with some atheists" as much as "ask an atheist."
If I found out I was going to die in an hour, I would FREAK the hell out. But not because I've been procrastinating or because I should have gone to church, just because life is already too short. My plan is to live to be 100 on the dot and dying later today would be quite disruptive.
But seriously, part of my journey in life has been learning to appreciate the present, live in the moment while still appreciating the past and the future. I don't need something better to come later. I try to love the flowers as they bloom, and the moments as they come, and be radically content in this here and now. The hereafter, as some imagine it, is (as you say) to much for our little minds to contemplate. Why would I waste my time on earth, which is so short and limited, pondering a mystery that cannot be unlocked by sheer force of will or any duration of spiritual quest?
[i had a three-paragraph rant here about what I would say to god if I had to meet him in an hour, but discretion is the better part of valor, so I'm leaving it out.]
When my son asks about death and we discuss how we don't want to die, my husband always says, "It's just like how it was before you were born. That didn't feel bad, so why should death?" We tell him it's OK be scared, but the important thing is to live rightly and happily and well in the now.
I don't know why I am posting this picture, but thinking about the morality of animals and then about death brought it to mind.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/10/29/the-story-behind-national_n_338120.html
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Starting a geography unit. Map on the wall with pushpins for locations of books we read, get out the Geopuzzles, watch some videos. Love someone's suggestion from somewhere in the hive that starting a history cycle is easier if you have a geography background first.
Plus more reading (Phonics Pathways and BOB and some books in the wild) and math and some handwriting practice.
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Oh, a lot of theistic people believe their moral values come directly from God. Where do atheists think their moral values came from?
I think human morals, where they exist, come from altruism, which has widely recognized evolutionary benefits on the individual, clan and species levels.
I think human "sin," where it occurs, comes from unrestrained selfishness and favoring impulse and ego and vulgar instinct over reason and relationships.
As a species, I think humans are about as moral-immoral, on balance, as our cousins the chimpanzees. They love, they share, they protect, they work, they murder, they rape, they spite, they fight, and then it all goes around again. Ditto for people.
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Someone who volunteers at a used bookstore near our house makes "chandeliers" out of the interesting stuff people leave behind in books:
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Jenny and the Cat Club by Esther Averill.
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I did the Oxford Ancestors test years ago and got haplogroup T.
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How do you, as an atheist or during your journey to it, handle questions that your children have about gods and religion?
This is SOOOO hard for me. I don't even know where to begin explaining religion and gods to my kid(s). I feel like I want to give all belief systems "equal time" (like how political views are supposed to get equal time on American television) but I don't even know how to "correctly" characterize religion much less explain the beliefs of every major world religion.
I feel like my skepticism must be transparent when I haltingly explain, "Well, some people believe in something called god, who is, well...they think..."
WHAT DO THEY THINK!? I don't even know where to start. Is it a he or a she or just a vague cloud thing? Does it have powers? What are those powers? How does it manifest? What is its purpose?
Maybe there's a wikipedia article I can read...
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in re Jesus
* Don't know that Atheists have a consensus. We are very poorly organized, you know. :)
* I personally think Jesus was a historical guy. My personal interest in him is my belief that he was prototypically charismatic; I think he had that special extroversional "it" factor that draws people in and causes followers to want to follow. In fact, he was so charismatic that his followers founded a religion in his honor.
I think he was a non-magical guy with relatively excellent personal principles who wanted to change the world and in many ways succeeded. I don't think he was resurrected by his father the god. I think it's perfectly possible that crucifixion is an inefficient killing method and that you could put leave a crucified body in a cave for three days and the person could linger and have a few last words for you before they finally died from a massive blood infection.
(Note: I have always felt like Joseph must have been the dupe of all time until I realized that the story of the Virgin Birth was ginned up after the fact and tacked on to the life of Jesus Christ. In science-fiction fandom, there's a term "retcon" --> retroactive continuity, i.e. when writers go back and add some scenes that connect/explain to previously disconnected story points.)
Note: I feel bad answering this question with my true opinion because I realize how personally meaningful Jesus Christ is to many. Know that I respect the faith and the love of Christians, even if I do not share the beliefs they hold.
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I don't label as anything besides atheist/non-religious. I am intermittently attracted to ecumenical performances or the Quakers or Unitarian Universalism, but never so interested as to actually go anywhere or do anything.
If I need an additional tag, I will take "religiously inert." I guess you could say lazy, but it just has a fraction of a fraction of a percent of significance in my daily life. I try to expose the kids to a lot of cultures and some cultural aspects of the Jewish side of their religious background.
All the religious culture stuff is interesting to me, but gods and faith and spirituality? That's all just a nullset.
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From the Wikipedia page on stranger danger:
Constantly warning children of possible danger in the form of strangers has also been criticised as exaggerating the potential threat and unnecessarily spreading mistrust, especially when considering that (for example) in the US, about 800,000 children are reported at least temporarily missing every year, yet only 115 "become victims of what is viewed as classic stranger abductions".[10] In situations where the child is in danger for other reasons, avoiding strangers (who might help) could in fact be dangerous itself, such as in the case of an 11-year-old Boy Scout who avoided rescue searchers because he feared they might want to 'steal him'.[10]
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mathmarm, don't know if you are still reading these forums, but I found something for you!
A book called What's Whole About Whole Language? by Ken Goodman is referenced in another book I'm reading about reading instruction. It says that Goodman is one of the founders of the movement. The original was published in 1984, the current version is from 2004.
From what I can tell, no book advocates whole language as a specific reading-instruction method, but rather as a holistic philosophy or something. It sounds to me like there's no there there, but maybe I'm missing something esoteric.
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Can you recommend some pro-vegetarian resources?
in The Chat Board
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Please known I had no intention to offend anyone, I was being foolishly glib. I'm not sure I fully realized that this was a politically fraught topic, although obviously it is!