The Life Slant - Page 14

The Alcoholic Next Door

Alcoholism

*That glorious moment when you get to put your head down and shut your eyes and let it all go away for a few hours. The TV still emitting a faint glow, this side of the pillow still cool, lids barely touching and BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG BANG! Damn! 12:30 at night. This can’t be good.

One of my neighbors. A very nice young lady crying and babbling and reaching for a hug – needing to be not wrong for a moment. Details trickle out as they are withheld, revolving around a drunk husband, a dog beaten to death, a rope being held by its end. Sadly, it is just another story to add to my life’s collection; each heartbreaking, each unique yet identical to all the others.

Prohibition did not work. People like to drink. They have since the first accidentally-fermented grapes were bravely ingested. No matter how many marriages it wrecks, families it demolishes or lives it obliterates, alcohol is not going to go away. Keep Reading

Climate Crisis – Heatwaves, Firestorms, Failing Crops

Heatwave - Climate Change

*The planet is exhibiting telltale symptoms of our addiction to burning climate-wrecking fossil fuels: hellacious wildfires, unrelenting heat, sweltering Arctic temperatures and withering crops in northern Europe. We are in a climate crisis!

14 million people in the megalopolis of London braced themselves for record-breaking heat, dubbed “Furnace Friday.” Combustion-induced smog levels soared exacerbated by extreme heat. Intense demand for power had emergency services on red alert. Hospitals contended with many heatwave casualties. 90,000 lightning strikes, flash flooding and wildfires ravaged sun-baked Britain in an unforgettable week of Mother’s Nature’s unbridled overheated wrath.

Burnt Cars from Greece's July 2018 Firestorm - Climate Change
Apocalyptic fiery images of burnt cars from Greece’s firestorm of July 23, 2018. Photo credit: The Guardian

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A Father’s Journey – Part 5. Relax Daddy, Just Follow My Lead

Steven Pecevich (father) reading to baby Sydni

* Relax, Daddy. Just follow my lead. It’ll be okay. Let me show you the way.

*Stephen Pecevich, a single dad of three in the Boston area, had his life take a complete detour when his youngest child was diagnosed with cancer before she she was even 60 days old.  Follow the story of how this devoted father found faith and strength on what Stephen calls “a life detour”, as we publish regular excerpts from Stephen’s own memoir, which will be available in its entirety in the near future.

January 25th

Dear Sydni,

*The moment I arrived at the hospital this morning, without delay, I noticed a teardrop sliding down the contour of your rosy right cheek. Instinctively, I wiped the droplet from your face, brushed it against my lips followed by crossways over my heart.

Right then and there, I prayed to God that He allow me to absorb your struggle and pain. When I opened my eyes, to my immediate wonder, in the place of your anguish and grief, I instead was beholden to calmness and repose. I perceived pure beauty. It was as if you were saying:

“Relax, Daddy. Just follow my lead. It’ll be okay. Let me show you the way.”

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Iceland’s Repugnant Whaling Bloodbath

Blue Whale slaughtered - Iceland Whaling

*The direct action conservation movement Sea Shepherd revealed that on July 7, 2018, Iceland’s only fin whaling company, Hvalur hf, tortured and murdered an endangered blue whale.

For almost 50 years blues have been protected. During the 20th century, 360,000 of these glorious beauties were obliterated, including 29,000 in one year alone. Their populations have not rebounded.

Blue Whale - Iceland Whaling
At 100 feet long and 200 tons, blues are Nature’s priceless treasures.

Today, those that remain are filled with man-made poisons. The song of the largest animal to have ever lived on Earth is mostly drowned-out from humongous propellers of 100,000 ocean vessels daily, and incessant deafening air gun surveys for more climate-wrecking subsidized fossil fuels. A deaf whale is a dead whale. Keep Reading

Too Much Forged in Fire

You might be watching too much Forged in Fire if:

  • Your kids are making a fortune selling snow cones, as there is a constant supply of chopped ice.
  • You can’t watch TV because the satellite dish is in the back yard filled with coal.
  • You walk into the kitchen to see why Sunday dinner is late, to find a $35 roast beef hanging from the ceiling, your wife wielding a knife in each hand, watching a youtube clip of Doug Marcaida.
  • The beater car in your neighbor’s backyard seems to be walking away piece by piece – first the leaf springs, then the axle …

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Trees: Nature’s Masterpiece Burned For Heat

Burning Masterpieces for Heat - Trees

*Would you dispassionately stand by and watch if every priceless Renaissance work of art in Florence’s Uffizi Gallery, or Paris’s The Louvre, or 20th century masterpieces held in New York’s The Museum of Modern Art were burned for heat, one by one?

Ladies and gentlemen, our remaining ancient forests are indeed the equivalent to what the great master’s painted. They are Nature’s finest invaluable living, breathing masterpieces on our planet!

Trees - General Sherman Redwood
Each year, the largest tree on the globe, a sequoia named General Sherman, adds the comparable wood of one tree 1.5 feet (ft) wide by 65 ft high. Photo credit: Reese Halter

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Hot As Hell, Everywhere

Hot as Hell - Boy in Water

*12 footballs fields a minute are incinerating in California’s latest wildfires,  adding to the 104 football fields furiously felled every minute, 24/7/365, on our ailing overheated planet.

When heat and drought collide firestorms erupt across the western United States and elsewhere on the globe. The higher the mercury soars, the quicker the fine fuels in the forest become tinder-dry kindling, especially amidst a drought.

Hot as Hell - Map
Photo Credit: Weather Channel

113 million Americans are blanketed by a massive heat dome. It stretches from the Mississippi Valley up to Philadelphia, Chicago and arches over to New York City, Boston, Baltimore and the nation’s capital, Washington, D.C. Temperatures are soaring into triple digits, 10 to 20 degrees Fahrenheit (F) above normal.
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Republicans Ransacking Nature

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Dead Fish - Photo credit: Warren Carlton

*Last week, along the southern border of America, refugees were separated and children were caged. Shock and outrage ricocheted around the world. Under the cover of chaos the Republicans pushed through two atrocious assaults on our mother, Nature.

President Donald Trump signed an executive order, which washed away President Barack Obama’s emphasis on ocean conservation and a plan to mitigate the climate in crisis.

Director of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration under Obama, Dr Jane Lubchenco said, “The policy reflects a shift from ‘use it without using it up’ to a very short-sighted and cavalier ‘use it aggressively and irresponsibly’.”

Trump’s policy increases slaughtering the ocean and it greenlights more subsidized fossil fuel seismic surveys. It’s in keeping with his election promise to unlock $50 trillion of U.S. oil and gas.

In so doing, Trump is impoverishing all sea life by increasing ocean acidity and decreasing ocean oxygen.

Dissolved Shells - Article: Ransacking Nature
53 percent of free-swimming snails sampled off the west coast of the U.S. had severely dissolved shells. Photo credit: NOAA

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Religion & the Tacet Underground

Separation of Church and State

*What if He didn’t exist? At all. What if long ago, visiting ETs decided that the easiest way to keep these creatures (us) complacent was to chisel out some stony rules and promise a heaven and a hell, much like a kindergarten teacher promises stickers for good behavior and time out for bad behavior? Sure – it’s crazy. But just for a minute, what if?

What if the bible is not the ‘word of God’ as it is so flippantly called while held up and venerated? What if you discover that it is a collection of stories jotted down by the fallible and earthly predecessors of Aesop and the Brothers Grimm, later bastardized and edited and tilted to meet the selfish needs of a corrupt church hierarchy?

What if you woke up tomorrow and none of it made sense anymore? Keep Reading

Another Dead Wolf of the Sea

Orcas at sunrise

*Over the weekend, Friday Harbor-based, Center for Whale Research, reported a missing Southern Resident orca, L92, presumed to be dead. That brings the critically endangered Southern Resident Salish Sea population down to 75, the lowest since 1984. It’s yet another man-made fiasco.

Allow me to remind you that we are amidst the human-driven Sixth Mass Extinction. It’s accelerating 1,000 to 10,000 times faster than the five other mass extinctions. This looting of Nature has collided with the horrendous man-made persistent organic pollutants and 300 zettajoules of fossil fuel ocean heat driving the climate crisis.

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An Imperfect Preference for Perfect Postulants

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Job Candidates - Applicants

*I recently read on a website a hiring manager who discarded the application of any applicant who had less than a 3.0 grade point average (GPA). This manager was quite proud of this fact. So let’s take a look at some of the critical qualifications of hiring and compare some of the good points and bad points. Included are some other characteristics that might on the surface demonstrate great qualities, but there might be some other considerations.

This reminds me of a person that I spoke with once who had a particular motorcycle that had a great reputation as a race bike. The person who had owned this motorcycle said that it was a great bike, but if you weren’t a very experienced rider, it was a nightmare, because it only performed well at very high speeds, and if you weren’t capable of holding the throttle wide open and slamming it around, it would torture you. The bike was essentially a production model of the bike that had won the world championship the year before. If you were world champion class rider, it was good for you; if you weren’t a world champion rider, it would punish you.

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Silk Road to Hell

Silk Road to Hell

*Despite our planetary climate emergency, the first and third largest economies on the globe are moving at the speed of light to extract and burn all available fossil fuels. The consequences are hideous.

China’s One Belt One Road, a 21st century Silk Road, is linking 71 countries with rapid rail-lines and new supertanker ports. China is spending $1 trillion on its infrastructure to add an additional $2.5 trillion to its 11 trillion GDP thereby narrowing the gap on the European Union, the second largest economy.

This plan requires mega zettajoules of fossil fuel energy. It’s an expansion of the world’s coal-fired power capacity by 43 percent, with 1,600 new coal power stations in 62 countries. Keep Reading

Veganism Saves the World

Go Vegan

*Go Vegan and Save the World

This week was particularly challenging. A number of separate reports are stark wake-up calls on the acceleration of the climate crisis and its collision with the hideous Sixth Mass Extinction. 

My colleagues proposed that we add a Category 6, or, sustained winds above 190 miles per hour, to the Saffir-Simpson Hurricane Wind Scale. Increased combustion of subsidized fossil fuels is adding mega zettajoules of heat into the oceans. This heat is driving Nature’s fiercest storms, hurricanes and cyclones, to greater intensities. It is also slowing them down by 10 percent, causing more destruction.

On October 23, 2015, Hurricane Patricia had maximum wind gusts of 215 mph, making it a Category 6 in the proposed updated system. Credit: NASA

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R.E.S.P.E.C.T. Professors & Teachers

Professor.  Just the word elicits respect, and respect is something we don’t have or show a lot of in 2018 America.  We call physicians ‘doc’, coaches, bosses, aunts and uncles by their first names, and almost everyone else ‘dude’ …  except for politicians and lawyers.  But even the most confident of us wants to impress when dining or conversing with a professor.

Teacher doesn’t have the same shine, does it?

Teachers seem more human, more approachable, and generally speaking are not shown the type of respect college professors enjoy.

Why?
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Tokyo Slaughters Pregnant And Baby Whales

Poached Minkes on Japanese ship inside Southeron Ocean Whale Sanctuary

*Japan is still torturously harpooning whales inside the Southern Ocean Whale Sanctuary; it’s a demonstration of bloody ruthless power.

Eight years ago, proceedings were instituted at the International Court of Justice (ICJ) at The Hague, where Australia accused Japan of pursuing a large scale Antarctic whaling program.

Four years later, the ICJ ruled that Japan must immediately stop its whaling program. The World Court found the loophole in the 1946 International Convention for the Regulation of Whaling that permits lethal scientific research did not apply to Japan.

Whaling Vessel represented as research vessel
Japan has not produced any meaningful scientific research after 25 years of killing more than 20,000 whales.
Photo credit: Australian Broadcasting Corporation

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Just Login to our System

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Login to our system

*“Just login to our system.”  A very common demand these days.  You can’t get a mortgage or buy a toy or receive medical care without creating an account and logging in.  It sounds reasonable, but is it?

Entering your life’s data into any system is risky, as we are repeatedly reminded by the steady stream of news reports about hackings that assurances about the safety and security of your data are mere rhetoric, no matter the company or organization.  Demanding that you to login to a system assumes that you are willing to take a huge leap of faith, and trust that:

  • the system is well-built and supported,
  • the people administering the system are highly skilled, and that
  • state-of-the-art security measures (ineffective as they may be) are in place and the people administering them are highly skilled.

This is like asking you to jump off a cliff based on a stranger’s assurances that “it’ll be OK”.
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Bees – Nature’s Smart Superheroes

*Bees are admirable little creatures, but they’re in terrible trouble.  Nearly 7.6 billion procreating humans need them in order to survive. That means you.

Twenty thousand species of bees pollinate about 85 percent of flowering plants, or 336,000 species, including most of the 80,000 kinds of trees on Earth. In fact, bees help us breathe because without plants, we couldn’t exist!

Bees: Forager Honeybee Nappnig
A forager honeybee napping on a lemon blossom petal in Hollywood, California.
Photo Credit: Dr. Reese Halter

Bees pollinate 75 percent of the world’s food crops and 100 percent of cotton, which clothes us. Bees account for as much as $577 billion in commerce per annum.
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A Father’s Journey – Part 4. Open Hearts

A Father's Journey

* Friends and strangers, far and wide have opened their hearts beyond my wildest imagination.

*Stephen Pecevich, a single dad of three in the Boston area, had his life take a complete detour when his youngest child was diagnosed with cancer before she she was even 60 days old.  Follow the story of how this devoted father found faith and strength on what Stephen calls “a life detour”, as we publish regular excerpts from Stephen’s own memoir, which will be available in its entirety in the near future.

January 25th

Dear Sydni,

*I awoke in such an upbeat mood this morning. You smiled upon me in my dreams last night. Your beam assured so that it strengthened my resolve as I greeted the present day.
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Hard of Listening

Active Listening

*People pay thousands of dollars for education, yet listening is free. Nobody likes to be criticized. And to some extent, everyone displays some measure of defensiveness – the impulse to reject all criticisms by denying their validity and undermining the messenger.

Unfortunately, defensiveness does not serve us. It encourages us to ignore potentially useful feedback, which inhibits our ability to improve. It behooves us to rely on those with relevant qualification and expertise. We cannot learn that which we think we already know.

Listening isn’t something we’re all innately born with, and we’re all guilty of not listening at times.  Listening is a skill just like reading, writing, and talking.  That’s good news because it means we can all learn to listen and connect with the speaker. Like any skill, the more we practice it, the better we become. We have had practice reading, writing, and talking, but how much actual practice have we had learning how to become better listeners?

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