Native American Profecy

I think the subtitles are either German or Swedish.

Lakota Nation Secedes from United States

This is huge! Link

Descendants of Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse break away from US

December 20, 2007

WASHINGTON (AFP) — The Lakota Indians, who gave the world legendary warriors Sitting Bull and Crazy Horse, have withdrawn from treaties with the United States, leaders said Wednesday.

"We are no longer citizens of the United States of America and all those who live in the five-state area that encompasses our country are free to join us," long-time Indian rights activist Russell Means told a handful of reporters and a delegation from the Bolivian embassy, gathered in a church in a run-down neighborhood of Washington for a news conference.

A delegation of Lakota leaders delivered a message to the State Department on Monday, announcing they were unilaterally withdrawing from treaties they signed with the federal government of the United States, some of them more than 150 years old.

They also visited the Bolivian, Chilean, South African and Venezuelan embassies, and will continue on their diplomatic mission and take it overseas in the coming weeks and months, they told the news conference.

Lakota country includes parts of the states of Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Montana and Wyoming.

The new country would issue its own passports and driving licences, and living there would be tax-free -- provided residents renounce their US citizenship, Means said.

The treaties signed with the United States are merely "worthless words on worthless paper," the Lakota freedom activists say on their website.

The treaties have been "repeatedly violated in order to steal our culture, our land and our ability to maintain our way of life," the reborn freedom movement says.

Withdrawing from the treaties was entirely legal, Means said.

"This is according to the laws of the United States, specifically article six of the constitution," which states that treaties are the supreme law of the land, he said.

"It is also within the laws on treaties passed at the Vienna Convention and put into effect by the US and the rest of the international community in 1980. We are legally within our rights to be free and independent," said Means.

The Lakota relaunched their journey to freedom in 1974, when they drafted a declaration of continuing independence -- an overt play on the title of the United States' Declaration of Independence from England.

Thirty-three years have elapsed since then because "it takes critical mass to combat colonialism and we wanted to make sure that all our ducks were in a row," Means said.

One duck moved into place in September, when the United Nations adopted a non-binding declaration on the rights of indigenous peoples -- despite opposition from the United States, which said it clashed with its own laws.

"We have 33 treaties with the United States that they have not lived by. They continue to take our land, our water, our children," Phyllis Young, who helped organize the first international conference on indigenous rights in Geneva in 1977, told the news conference.

The US "annexation" of native American land has resulted in once proud tribes such as the Lakota becoming mere "facsimiles of white people," said Means.

Oppression at the hands of the US government has taken its toll on the Lakota, whose men have one of the shortest life expectancies -- less than 44 years -- in the world.

Lakota teen suicides are 150 percent above the norm for the United States; infant mortality is five times higher than the US average; and unemployment is rife, according to the Lakota freedom movement's website.

"Our people want to live, not just survive or crawl and be mascots," said Young.

"We are not trying to embarrass the United States. We are here to continue the struggle for our children and grandchildren," she said, predicting that the battle would not be won in her lifetime.

On Peace

In this season when so many are wishing for peace, or at least wishing each other peace, I thought it might be nice to post some quotes about peace:

The first peace, which is the most important, is that which comes from within the souls of men when they realize their relationship, their oneness, with the universe and all its powers, and when they realize that at the center of the universe dwells Wakan-Tanka, and that this center is really everywhere, it is within each of us. This is the real peace, and the others are but reflections of this. The second peace is that which is made between two individuals, and the third is that which is made between two nations. But above all you should understand that there can never be peace between nations until there is first known that true peace which is within the souls of men.
-Black Elk, Oglala Lakota Spiritual Leader (1863 - 1950)

True peace is not merely the absence of tension: it is the presence of justice.
- Martin Luther King Jr.

Short-circuiting the long-established principles of patient negotiation leads to war, not peace.
- Jimmy Carter

Each one has to find his peace from within. And peace to be real must be unaffected by outside circumstances.

-- and

If we are to teach real peace in this world, and if we are to carry on a real war against war, we shall have to begin with the children.
- Mohandas Gandhi

Peace is not something you wish for; It's something you make, Something you do, Something you are, And something you give away.
- Robert Fulghum

When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace.
- Jimi Hendrix

Books about ob/gyn care in the US

In case you were wondering, yes, these books point out that we have a pretty high maternal death rate, and infant death rate, for a developed country. Most wealthy countries do far better with less money.

By Hook or By Crook film clip

This came out a few years ago (before C was born). My good friend Carina has a major part in it so I couldn't help wanting to put it up:

Snow!

It snowed last night, melted, then snowed again today! It's quite beautiful, but I'm glad I'm not trying to drive around in it. It's pretty chilly, too. This is the earliest it's snowed up here since we moved here a bit over three years ago. It had been feeling like it was going to snow for several days, but it was still a bit of a surprise to wake up to a snow-covered world. It was too cold to make a snow-person, and anyway in an apartment, where would it go?

Video about global warming

This guy is kind of funny the way he argues with himself about global warming:

Danged grocery store turkeys! And Preschool is going well!

OK, so for Thanksgiving, I cooked everything we ate from scratch. I made my own stuffing using mushrooms, chopped pecans, onions, and a bit of homemade chicken broth. I made mashed "faux-tatoes" using cauliflower. I made mashed sweet potatoes with coconut milk in place of the sour cream I used to use (because sour cream gives me migraines now). I made pumpkin pie using coconut milk in place of the evaporated milk and agave nectar, maple syrup, and smidgen of Sucanat in place of the sugar with no crush at all -- just used an oven-proof glass pie plate. (no, I don't think it was Pyrex brand, I think it was Anchor Hocking, and they do call it glass, Stacy, just ovenware). It used to be borosilicate glass, but apparently they have changed it and use lime now. I made roasted Brussels sprouts with olive oil on them. I also made dh some nasty boxed stuffing loaded with MSG (but didn't eat even a tiny amount of it -- I don't even like stuffing made from bread anymore anyway, it tastes like soggy bread to me -- which in fact it is, LOL). It took me quite a while. Oh, and I made homemade cranberry sauce using the same combination of sweeteners.

So I should not have ended up with a migraine. And the first day, I was fine. It was the second day it started to kick in, and I can only conclude it was the grocery store turkey breast I bought because I was in too much of a rush to go to the health food store to buy one that wasn't injected with an MSG-laced "solution." Big mistake. I should know by now that if I eat any meat that has been processed in anyway by a mainstream manufacturer (ham, lunch meat, ground or whole turkey, etc.) that I will end up with a migraine headache. They should have to put a big warning label, "Contains MSG" on these things, but they get to hide it as "broth" or "flavor" instead. Ugh! Anyway, after a ton of magnesium and some Petadolex and green tea, I got better, but never again.

I had gone to the supermarket for something totally unrelated, now I know I have to be super careful and plan these things out better. It's partially because I agreed to take someone else's day for preschool on Wednesday, and partially because I took a first aid class Tuesday evening. I just have so much less free time with ds in preschool -- who knew?

Preschool news!
Speaking of preschool, C is definitely doing well in school and enjoying it. He really craves time with other kids, and we just don't get that all that much on our own. Not with the same kids consistently enough, anyway. His friend A and he used to get together fairly regularly, but it was becoming less and less with her in school. Now he gets to see her at least those three days a week, plus often another day or on the weekend. He also sometimes visits the kids downstairs, but they often eat dinner at 7:30 or 8, right when he's ready to go down there. They are from India, and have kept the tradition of a later dinner (which they call supper, I think). His other neighbor friend, E, is in Kindergarten, and is in both before- and after-school programs because his mom works full time and his dad, who also works full time but has earlier hours, rides his bike to work (about two blocks away) and couldn't pick him up from school. And now that he's in school and going so early with his mom, he has to go to bed at 8 PM. So we generally only see him on weekends.

Being an only child, C has a constant desire to be around other kids (or maybe it's just being my kid), so school is really the only way he can get that. We've tried homeschool groups, but they meet irregularly and are never the same kids twice. It's just not worked for us. Plus, to be honest, when it's just the two of us, we don't do much. I get drawn into the computer, and C gets sucked into his DVDs, and the whole day will go by without our interacting. Now at least we interact a bit more when we are getting ready and when we are on our way to school and on our way home. C has been learning more -- he sometimes recognizes words, can count at least to 30, and we read more when we're at home so we're both learning more about insects, among other things (we have several books about them). I didn't realize that dragonflies went through incomplete metamorphosis, for example. Or even that there was an incomplete metamorphosis, for that matter. Pretty cool.

Also, I'm now able to go shopping without ds -- while he's at preschool. Before that, if I tried to leave him with dh or a friend, he would freak out and cling to me. He doesn't do that at school. He does sometimes cry a bit, but he gets over it and is fine. He still won't stay home with dh, even after being able to stay at school, so I know it's not a permanent change. He accepts the rules at school, but at home, with us he sort of is in charge, which I know isn't good but it's the way it's gotten to be.

Anyway, I again say that I will not buy another grocery store turkey as long as I live!

This is so nice

Sesame Street needs to go back to its roots:

What is an offensive breast?

I enjoyed reading this post about how showing a breast being used to feed a baby is considered obscene, but using it to sell a product is not. I wanted to add that usually the non-offensive breasts are on waif-thin, Photoshop-retouched models. And that usually you don't see the nipple (although of course you don't usually see the nipple while a woman is breastfeeding, unless her baby pops off to take a peek around). The magazines aren't usually the same type, however. Parents or Baby Talk or whatever are targeted at mothers -- so you'd think showing a breast doing what it was made to do, feed a baby, wouldn't be that big a deal.
If you are in San Francisco, you can show your breasts in public as long as your nipples are not exposed (you can put bandaids on them, or electrical tape, and be legal because you are concealing that they are in fact breasts not just round blobs). I know from experience, you might say. Anyway, all this is to say that humans are trying to deny that we are mammals, and that women's breasts are made to feed babies, and that babies are meant to drink from them. We aren't birds, for goodness sake! Actually, even pigeons and many other birds feed their babies with food they first consume, at least. Not taking milk from another species and processing it until it's an imitation of the real thing.
Maybe humans are trying to create a new offshoot of the mammal order (or whatever the grouping is called)? Maybe there will be a new species that no longer bears live young, breastfeeds, or has hair? It will be used exclusively for pornography, modeling, and other aesthetic uses. They can all live in cities and live in condos.
Brilliant!

Ack! Today is Blog Action Day!

I am so busy today, I don't think I'll have time to do a real post that would do justice to what I feel is important. I have always felt that our environment is in need of our attention. That we have to take care of it so that it will take care of us. That around the world, people, especially women, already are doing what we can to heal our planet and protect our land for future generations. Here are some cool links in lieu of a more eloquent post: Transformational Prayer
Fifth World
Healing Mother Earth
Chipko Movement

And of course there is my friend Chasmyn's wonderful post.

Blog Action Day Monday

If you have time, please drop by the Blog Action Day website and see what you can do for the environment, particularly if you have a blog.

Walking Daddy Blues

This is funny:

Boy remembers living on Mars

OK, so this is pretty far out, but I thought it was interesting.

http://english.pravda.ru/science/19/94/377/12257_Martian.html

Socialization

Just wanted to post this link right quick on an article about socialization. Very interesting.

Breastfeeding in public (warning offensive content)

I loved this post about breastfeeding in public and how it's viewed.

Purslane Recipes

Purslane, which is considered a weed by most people, is very nutritious. It's high in omega 3 fatty acids, including ALA, and is also high in beta carotene. It kind of tastes like oxalis, another weed. Here are some links to recipes for it:
Purslane
Purslane Recipes

Hidden Names for MSG you might not know about

I have a real problem with MSG -- it often causes me to have a nasty headache/migraine. I read labels, but it's often hard to tell if something has MSG in it, so I often just make my own stuff. From this website, here is a list of some of the ingredients that have MSG in them:

MSG Gelatin Calcium Caseinate
Monosodium glutamate Hydrolyzed Vegetable Protein (HVP)
Textured Protein Monopotassium glutamate
Hydrolyzed Plant Protein (HPP) Yeast Extract
Glutamate Autolyzed Plant Protein Yeast food or nutrient
Glutamic Acid Sodium Caseinate Autolyzed Yeast

Imagine that? I knew most of these already, but there are others, farther down on the page, that I hadn't known about -- rice syrup for one. Pectin and gums, which I was avoiding for awhile, seem to also often contain MSG. What I wonder is, what about nutritional yeast they sell in the bulk bins? I would bet that has it in it, too. Too bad, because it's a good natural source of B vitamins.

Yurt

I wish I had a yard, I'd build one of these!

Unschooling -- Free At Last?

Say what you will about Abraham-Hicks, they are pretty well spoken about the difference between learning and schooling. Here is a clip from their article:

Abraham: The kinds of things they said to you were, "We thought it was going to be a whole lot more fun. We thought we were going to get to do more of what we wanted to do, and we thought we were going to get to choose." And that's the way you felt when you were born, you thought you were going to get to choose, that was the bargain.

And then somebody else says, "Well, here you are, and you don't get to choose. You don't get to choose where you sit, or when you come, or how long you sit there, and you don't get to choose what we think about. You don't get to choose when you talk, and you don't get to choose what we talk about. In other words, you are not free, you are our captives. And we are here to assert good stuff into you."

And they say, "Ah, give me a break! That's not what the bargain was. I came understanding that I am a creator. I came knowing that I get to choose." It takes years to beat that out of them. It takes years and years before they are willing to sit there and be quiet and do only what is supposed to be done when it is supposed to be done. It takes a long time to conform you into your unhappiness.