PostSecret

Beautiful :)

http://postsecret.blogspot.com/

Our Kinder, Gentler Ancestors

Our Kinder, Gentler Ancestors
Ardi casts doubt on the notion that we have an innate killer instinct

By Frans de Waal

Are humans hard-wired to be ruthlessly competitive or supportive of one another?
The behavior of our ape relatives, known as peaceful vegetarians, once bolstered the view that our actions could not be traced to an impulse to dominate. But in the late 1970s, when chimpanzees were discovered to hunt monkeys and kill each other, they became the poster boys for our violent origins and aggressive instinct.

I use the term "boys" on purpose because the theory was all about males without much attention to the females of the species, who just tagged along evolutionarily. It was hard to escape the notion that we are essentially "killer apes" destined to wage war forever.
Doubts about this macho origin myth have been on the rise, however, culminating in the announcement this past week of the discovery of a fossil of a 4.4 million year old ancestor that may have been gentler than previously thought. Considered close to the last common ancestor of apes and humans, this ancestral type, named Ardipithecus ramidus (or "Ardi"), had a less protruding mouth equipped with considerably smaller, blunter canine teeth than the chimpanzee's impressive fangs. This ape's canines serve as deadly knives, capable of slashing open an enemy's face and skin, causing either a quick death through blood loss or a slow one through festering infections. Wild chimps have been observed to use this weaponry to lethal effect in territorial combat. But the aggressiveness of chimpanzees obviously loses some of its significance if our ancestors were built quite differently. What if chimps are outliers in an otherwise relatively peaceful lineage?

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Making is Connecting

http://www.makingisconnecting.org/

Owners of the Water

A Manifesto for Slow Communication

Manifesto for Slow Communication

John Freeman

"The boundlessness of the Internet always runs into the hard fact of our animal nature, our physical limits, the dimensions of our cognitive present, the overheated capac­ity of our minds. "My friend has just had his PC wired for broadband," writes the poet Don Paterson. "I meet him in the café; he looks terrible—his face puffy and pale, his eyes bloodshot. . . . He tells me he is now detained, night and day, in downloading every album he ever owned, lost, desired, or was casually intrigued by; he has now stopped even listen­ing to them, and spends his time sleeplessly monitoring a progress bar. . . . He says it's like all my birthdays have come at once, by which I can see he means, precisely, that he feels he is going to die."

"We will die, that much is certain; and everyone we have ever loved and cared about will die, too, sometimes—heartbreakingly—before us. Being someone else, traveling the world, making new friends gives us a temporary reprieve from this knowledge, which is spared most of the animal kingdom. Busyness—or the simulated busyness of email addiction—numbs the pain of this awareness, but it can never totally submerge it. Given that our days are limited, our hours precious, we have to decide what we want to do, what we want to say, what and who we care about, and how we want to allocate our time to these things within the limits that do not and cannot change. In short, we need to slow down. "

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Raging Grannies International

http://raginggrannies.org/

"Let us be clear about the Grannies. We are totally non-violent, believe in only peaceful protest (with lots of laughter), work for the ‘many not the few’ (motto of the old Mechanics’ Institute) and see our work as the spreading green branches of a great tree, rising up to provide shelter and nourishment for those who will come after us.
Grannies are best equipped to make public, corrupt things that have been hidden (often for profit). Local toxic waste sites that no-one seems prepared to tackle, asbestos sites employing young people desperate for work, nuclear waste products being dumped outside an uninformed small town, laws that affect an entire community, passed quickly with no opportunity for study. The list goes on.
Grannies always check their facts before acting, discarding rumours, conspiracy theories and the agendas of others. They wait patiently till the whole picture is clear before hitting the street with their pointed, original and devastating songs, written by any old gran who feels inspired.
The delights of grannying include: dressing like innocent little old ladies so we can get close to our ‘target’, writing songs from old favourites that skewer modern wrongs, satirizing evil-doing in public and getting everyone singing about it, watching a wrong back down and turn tail and run, sharing a history with other women who know who they are and what they’re about. Grannying is the least understood yet most powerful weapon we have. Sometimes, looking back, we can see grannying was the only thing that could have met the need.
From the most ancient times, the strong, wise, older women were the ones who advised, mediated and fought for what was right. Belief in the Disir or Divine Grandmothers, the Mothers of Time, is ancient and runs through all societies. The Celts listened to their older spokeswomen since they believe that Kali-The-Crone had the power to create their mountain ranges. The Malay thought there were three grandmothers, the Kari-Under-The-Earth who would cause floods if not listened to respectfully. There were the Druids who believed that the souls of old wise women lived on in the trees that surrounded them. The Norse Nanna or Anna doubled as Earth Mother. And on this Turtle Island where we live (North America), the Iroquois teach that the Woman who fell down from the sky was the Mother of All. So their older women are the clan mothers who guide all decisions.
What an inheritance. And what a history of trouble-raising when not listened to. Even in our times, we grannies have raised a few mountains, caused a few floods.
What do you need to be a granny? A sense of humour and an ability both to be objective and to compromise when working with others. Willingness to make noise. An open heart to learn something new. No singing ability. Passion. Joy. Delight. No colour sense, obviously. A friendly disposition. Kindness. Scientific curiosity can’t hurt. Maybe a sense of history and our place in it. There is so much more to be written on being a granny by those yet to come."

Rose DeShaw
Kingston Raging Grannies

Oren Lavie - Her Morning Elegance