Ghetto Plainsman | Jarid Manos

OK… we’ve all had a stressful day — it’s a stressful life (but we’re still blessed).   So, anybody wan hear an Orangutan laugh?  Click here:
http://msnbcmedia.msn.com/i/msnbc/Components/audio/2009/2009-june/090604-orangutan-laughter.wma

Here’s a picture of a bebe orangutan being tickled when they did a study to chart animal laughter :).   hey– after Tiananmen Square, we need some humor

For mo’ on this story, see MSNBC’s great “Cosmic Log” latest entry: http://cosmiclog.msnbc.msn.com/archive/2009/06/04/1953175.aspx

p.s. dont let palm oil plantations destroy what’s left of their Indonesian rainforest home! www.ran.org (Sorry– couldn’t  resist getting in a lil activation   I don’t know why I love orangutans so much. Poor lil ugly dudes just want to live peacefully in wild Indonesia– a beautiful tropical forest nation of islands I will never get anywhere near.

Well it’s already June 4th in China, and I just watched a CNN report that the Chinese government has completely shut down Twitter, YouTube and other Internet sites, and is blocking CNN reporters from filming the square where thousands of unarmed students were slaughtered on June 4th, 1989 as the military rolled in to crush the democracy demonstrators. It’s just a few minutes into June 4th here in Texas, just past midnight. Dont know if I’ll be able to sleep. Back in ‘89 I was on the streets of NYC, one step from homelessness, just barely hanging on. In the six weeks of protests before the slaughter, I remember reading the newspapers left on the park benches, and the Newsday flasher in Times Square where the news screamed around the building.  At first there was a sense of possibility with all the students converging there in central Beijing, tens of thousands growing into hundreds of thousands, then a million, and then… there was a sense of something terrible about to happen — this coming 2 months after the catastrophic Exxon Valdez oil spill .. It felt like such a dark time.

Here’s a recap of the timeline:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/jun/03/tiananmen-square-protests

What’s really unnerving is how completely the Chinese populace has been kept in the dark over this, especially young people. Few know what really happened. But even more disturbing is how placated people have become with material things, so much so that they don’t even want to know. (This desire to not know sounds disturbingly familiar.) They know something terrible happened, but as long as they’ve got enough sneakers and trendy clothes and iPods, they’re cool, even if they lost their opportunity to participate in the course of their future. And those who’ve tried to speak up about it are jailed, some for years.

By the way, I love my iPod, and I am thankful for the imperfect democracy we have here in the United States, but I also know — and am saddened — that legions of people right here in this country are, by their own determined ignorance, willing accomplices to their own victimization — regarding their own personal health, or that of Planet Earth which sustains all life.

Photos from The Huffington Post

Just saw the new Terminator movie with my friend and photographer Jarriel Jones. Watching that unrelenting army of monstrous machines out to destroy all human life with such overwhelming firepower and cold, crushing calculation, I couldn’t help thinking that is exactly what we’ve done to the animals — in fact all other life — of this planet.  Sigh– just wanted go see something mindless and escapist, and found a gut-clenching allegory instead. Over this lifetime I’ve really come to love people and believe in the human race, and we can’t let ourselves be defined like the monsters we’ve been to the rest of creation.

“What I feel being a human being is it’s just having the freedom to be yourself Not caring what other people think Just having that freedom to be you”

– Brandy

Video for “Right Here (Departed)” (in case you ain’t seen it yet — is deep). And beautiful– like herself. (Yeah = this mug’s a long time fan of Brandy.)

CLICK HERE TO SEE BRANDY’S VIDEO

Glad to see Van Jones, of Green for All, as one of the primary panelists on this past weekend’s State of the Black Union 2009, Afternoon Session, held at the Los Angeles Convention Center.  Watch it on C-SPAN here. http://tinyurl.com/bhot2f

Van, from Oakland-based Green for All, who is author of the NY Times Bestseller THE GREEN COLLAR ECONOMY, has been at the top in calling for green jobs to lift people, especially people of color, out of poverty while addressing environmental issues.  Unfortunately,all this excellent clamor for rebuilding the nation’s infrastructure is still ignoring the need to rebuild the nation’s devastated natural infrastructure.

How about Green for All Life….  If we can now just breathe into place the major missing component of the emerging Green Collar Economy, the creation of green jobs in wildlands restoration, the Green Economy will be complete. This is Ecological Heath– healing ourselves through healing the Earth.

Great Plains Restoration Council seems to be the only one calling this, and we are already demonstrating it in our project areas.  www.gprc.org We need to become a nation of workers again, only this time building up life, not tearing it down.

First Week of February, 2009

Ridin Miami citybus thru steaming Afropuffd toenail-painted bigbootytightjeans female-n-tanktopped men slinging streets like an Angie Stone vid

Well that was the first night I got there. Man I love Miami– one of the few places I can disappear into to get some intensive writing done. Course it got cold and blustery after the first night,  but I love it any way, and it could be my secret second city if I had the dollars and hadn’t just told you.  The gritty, comfortable streets and the aqua Caribe sea and South Beach tropical life all blended into one. I went to view the Everglades restoration with my friends from Operation Green Leaves, http://www.oglhaiti.com/, which is based in Miami and helps Haiti replant its devastated hillsides but also, along with a couple other orgs, helps local inner city Miami youth experience the South Florida Everglades wilderness. I also helped participate in a planning session at National Park HQs for the upcoming March for Parks which, considering the recent terrible AK-47 slaughter of innocent young people (2 teenagers killed, 7 wounded) on the corner in Liberty City (a neighborhood of Miami) while they were playing a game of street dice http://www.miamiherald.com/460/story/871201.html is def going to be welcome for all who get to come. http://www.npca.org/take_action/upcoming_events/march-for-parks.html

To experience such sweeping expanses of wilderness sawgrass prairie makes our hearts hurt out here in the Great Plains, where we’re left holding on for dear life to tiny patches of our native prairies and plains. South Florida is putting Texas to shame as far as ecological protection. Everglades National Park alone is 1.5 million acres, and that doesn’t even include Big Cypress. And now the State of Florida is working at purchasing 187,000 acres of U.S. Sugar-owned land for restoration north of the Park and south of Lake Okeechobee.

Also, right after the Cuban Missile Crisis, a secret missile base was installed deep inside the Everglades, and the Park Service gave us a private tour. All around the base is 6,000 acres of former farmland that has been restored to native habitat very successfully.

View more pics in the the stand-alone slide show we’ve created in the panel to the right.

While in Miami, I also (finally) read Toni Morrison’s BELOVED, and I read it deeply and thoroughly, word by word. I think it is one of the best books in American literature. Raw, pungent, nature soaked humanity — the story of people on the land is the American Story, and Toni Morrison perfected it. I’m gon do a lil youtube vid about this.