These links somehow failed to post when they were fresh. Better late than never...here they are.
Green
Jeff Gibbs blows the whistle on what happens when big corporations try to do "Green" their way. It's not even Poison Green so much as it's Stupid Green. "Biomass" is supposed to mean burning garbage and sewage. Trees give us lots of dead wood that nature intended to burn, without ever felling a living tree. Surplus plant and tree material composts slowly, and even one acre of land yields more than enough to get things you don't want to spread on the vegetable garden burning. Toilet contents, chicken bones, fish tails. Dry heat converts all carbon-based waste back to carbon, so it burns like coal. Like coal, it burns hot and produces lots of sooty black smoke. If you want to use a biomass/trash fire to do more than detoxify waste, you have to be careful about safety, but seriously, Gentle Readers, dung, bones, and animal fat can heat your house or fuel your car.
I don't have a good, insulated, filtered biomass burner. They are expensive but nice ways to convert the foul-smelling biochemicals from dung and carrion into clean Green energy. Purely because the smell of smoke clings to the pot, I usually cook food over a candle or a handful of hard wood, and don't get much use from things I burn just to convert them to a less disgusting form. But you can. That's what "biomass" is properly used to mean. You can refine the process to the point of having a burner that will heat the house or charge a battery just on the methane from human and animal bodywaste alone, if you invest in the equipment.
Because the equipment to make really sophisticated and efficient use of things too nasty to compost does cost money and take up space, it makes sense to build big biomass burners for neighborhoods rather than small ones for private homes...but big-spending corporate types, unclear on the concept, are apparently building huge biomass burners, which produce large amounts of foul-smelling smoke, and using them to burn more wood than nasty stuff. And they're cutting down forests.
When True Greens talk about burning biomass, we mean as an alternative to burning wood on a large enough scale that anyone ever needs to cut a living tree. At most you prune a weak limb that's likely to cause a fruit tree to split, or cut out a diseased branch from a tree. Any reasonable True Green family can heat a house with wood and never cut down a living tree. Wood-burning stoves may require more cleaning and filtering than some people want to bother to do, but they do not endanger forests. But Gibbs claims the corporate types are clear-cutting acres and then using expensive technology to spray chemical fertilizer on the ground in the hope of getting something to grow in acres of fresh wood chips left behind. They say that's Green because they have no idea what Green means.
Music
You may have heard it said that two wheelchair users don't make one dancer. Ha! Watch this Portuguese version of "Smile." Study the Andaluces-inspired dance. Fun for couples who want to hug to music; fun for physical therapists and patients, grandparents and grandchildren, dance video soloists. Wheelchair users can do it. For some styles of dancing, footwork is optional!
Psychology
US Rep Rashida Tlaib has ticked a lot of people off, saying things that don't sound much like "Minnesota Nice," but what else could she do? The current Situation In The Middle East is harrowing enough to think about if you only have Saudi or Israeli relatives. Tlaib should be granted six months of compassionate leave to go home, pray, and cry. Cynthia R. Wallace offers suggestions for those whose reactions to recent news, though overwhelming, can't possibly be as horrible as Rashida Tlaib's.
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