QotD: MLK on Service

Everybody can be great... because anybody can serve. You don't have to have a college degree to serve. You don't have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace and a soul generated by love.

Q2otD: EA on Liberals/Conservatives

Counterpart to the knee-jerk liberal is the new knee-pad conservative, always groveling before the rich and the powerful.
--Edward Abbey

World Food Standards

http://www.codexalimentarius.net/web/index_en.jsp
Very interesting project here.

Chattooga Old School

This video is of people from a Georgia paddling club running a whitewater river in the classic craft of the 1970's and 80's. That is when I began running rivers, in the same region. The equipment has changed substantially. The river is still the same. The video is mostly filmed on the Chattooga, where I spent years paddle raft guiding and safety boating (kayak).

The Chattooga river still shows up in my dreams. Section IV of the Chattooga is where I became conscious, woke up, began to see past the tip of my own nose and into the people and world around me. There's some nostalgia and a certain electricity for me in seeing these old boats on familiar waters with such southern-sounding rock playing in the background. This video is inside my head already.

Contrast this with the trailer for a more current whitewater video here and you'll know why I backed down from the cutting edge. No need to go anywhere near THAT edge. I'm too old and too female for that.

Writer's Block: Free your mind

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NO. Because we are animals. Our instinct is to be wary of creatures that are much different. Unfamiliar races are too strange to our animal selves for us to ever completely override that instinct with intellect. It would take either a LOT of evolution as a global community, or substantial racial blending and homogenization, or both, to reduce this response. It appears to me that before either of these mechanisms is complete way we will have a substantial reduction in human populations and return to a more tribal way of living which will separate us and reduce the blending of races, thus slowing or reversing the process.