How to deal with gym rat rage -- Seattle Times Northwest Fitness Section

How do you handle conflict at your gym, Y, or any place lots of people get together for a work out -- and your neighbor smells funny, plays loud noises, gets under your skin?

Richard Seven-- Seattle Times Fitness columnist has some food for thought on Fitness Section a subject lots of people run into: conflict in the adult work out scene-- swimming, gym, any place where we have to get along -- even with testosterone Tommy's pumping aggression.

I think about these ideas a bit -- in the context of practicing being a better person. As you know, life is difficult-- and it takes a significant effort to be compassionate toward someone you initially call a jerk.


Seven's fine story gets at some ideas for solutions.

best fishes,

Timothy

Jim Hansen: The Threat to the Planet

From the NY Review of Books

Boycott Japan: Editorial from the radical Christian Science Monitor

Commentary > The Monitor's View
from the June 02, 2006 edition

Save the whales - by not buying Japanese
The Monitor's View
Japan's export titans often get their way with their government. Right now they want senior politicians to end their controversial visits to a Tokyo war memorial that also honors war criminals - the visits are bad for business in China. But they should add this request: Don't overturn a ban on commercial whaling.

Japan has spent heavily to influence poor countries that are members of the International Whaling Commission (IWC). It just announced a fresh $410 million aid package to South Pacific nations. Its aim is to reverse a 1986 IWC ban that has allowed many whale species to begin a long, slow recovery. In mid-June, the 66 nations of the regulatory body will gather, and Japan is expected to succeed in winning the votes of many cash-poor IWC members. Overturning the ban requires a 75 percent vote, but Japan may first secure a 51 percent vote to conduct balloting in secret.

The prospect of the IWC allowing the slaughter of whale species not fully recovered has yet to raise much fuss in many antiwhaling nations. But it should, given the importance of whales in the health of oceans.

If the UN General Assembly or the US does not act soon, then a consumer boycott of Japanese products is needed. That will catch the attention of Japanese corporate leaders, who can then pressure politicians leading the pro-whaling campaign.

These politicians regard the ban as Western "culinary imperialism" aimed at Japan's tradition of eating whale meat. But the issue is conservation, not culture, and the Japanese data and arguments that many whale species are fully revived should remain suspect, and certainly not acted on in a secret IWC ballot.

It's not even clear if the Japanese people want to consume whale meat in large quantities. Less than 1 percent now eat the meat that is sold from the more than 1,000 whales Japan catches annually "for scientific research" (allowed under IWC rules). Some of the meat has ended up simply as doggie treats.

Emotions either against or in favor of whaling are usually strong. Many Japanese see hypocrisy in those who argue against the killing of such intelligent animals, but who also eat lamb or pig. Environmentalists see Japan as little concerned about nature's well-being beyond its shores. And the resurgence of nationalism in Japan - something its business chiefs sometimes oppose - may be behind this pro-whaling initiative.

Persuasion through facts and logic about the health of whale stocks are unlikely to prevail at the IWC, given Japan's long determination to overturn the ban for cultural reasons and its monied clout over weak members.

Some antiwhaling groups want the US to withhold support for a permanent Japanese seat on the UN Security Council. But that tactic is meaningless, given China's stance against Japan obtaining a seat.

Barring quick US or UN action, a temporary consumer boycott of Japanese products would carry the most certainty of saving the ban.

Forcing Japan to back down isn't a pleasant prospect. But neither is the risk of some whale species going extinct.

One side has to give, and for Japan, it's the easier give.

Forest Service Bails on Roadless Rules in Oregon's Biscuit/ OR Governor Goes To Court to Stop Logging

The Darth Vader side of the Forest Service is going full tilt, with Bushco's policy of "Big Bucks for Big Timber" going after big trees in roadless, salmon rich, Oregon. Let's not forget the taxpayer in this equation. You and I are subsidizing this roadless ravage policy in the millions of dollars.

Perhaps they see the 2006 elections as a potential throttle on the timber industry ravage policy-- and need to get the cut out -- biodiversity be damned?

Update here

Peace

From a customer , Maria --

PEACE- it does not mean to be in a place where there is no noise, trouble, or hard work.

It means to be in the midst of those things and still be calm in your heart.-- Unknown

Positive Proof of Global Climate Change

A Poem: Man in Stream by Rosanna Warren

Man In Stream

You stand in the brook, mud smearing
your forearms, a bloodied mosquito on your brow,
your yellow T-shirt dampened to your chest
as the current flees between your legs,
amber, verdigris, unravelling
today's story, last night's travail...

You stare at the father beaver, eye to eye,
but he outstares you-- you who trespassin his world,
who have, however unwilling, yanked out his fort,
stick by tooth gnarled, mud-clabbered stick,
though your whistle vespers to the wood thrush
and trace flame-flicker in the grain of yellow birch.

Death outpaces us. Upended roots
of fallen trees still cling to moss-furred granite.
Lichen smolders on wood rot, fungus trails in wisps.
I wanted a day with cracks, to let the godlight in.
The forest is always nocturne, but it gleams,
the birch tree tosses its change from palm to palm,

and we who unmake are ourselves unmade
if we know, if only we know
how to give ourselves in this untended light.

from THE NEW YORKER which I only get for the cartoons,this meditation can be found on page 36 of the June 5th 2006 edition

Rosanna Warren writes to her Dad

His Long Home

For Robert Penn Warren, 1905-1989

I
Of Course

From lips notched in the pinebranch bled
no confession, but a clot of resin.
Such currency
in winter. No need to notch

the stream, ice-choked but still
greenly slurring
past boulders and scragwood to some ever-lapsing
period not even January

can grant. If you and I
stand, in silence, to observe
that pregnant snowcloud stalled
on Stratton's frozen stoop

it is the knowledge
that what courses between us, runs
under the rind of winter
so deep, no blade can coax it.

II
Storm, Summer

At first a numbness
gaining on the surface of the pond,
a twitching in birch and poplar leaves,
tremor in the flat, symmetrical branchtips of
balsam fir.
Then thunder surges, thudding from ridge to ridge,
a seizure of rain
sunders spiderwebs, pummels leafmold,
drowns out the true confessions of the brook.
While we cower on the porch
it passes
like a spasm,
heaves itself into the valley
over the notch.
Sky shimmers in the pond again,
breeze fondles the leaves.
We're still here. Waiting.

III
Your skin

as fragile, pale, and infinitesimally moist
as erasable bond;
your look, a startled bound
of apprehension, subsiding
into its lair.
You coil away from us:
we hunt you down.
Groping, you half-rise:
we escape, leave you there.
What intersection can we appoint
between your knowledge and ours?

IV
Two days before

you died, we saw your death
funneling in at the eye, your pupil fixed,
tiny, waking neither
to light nor to shade

so that your wisdom drained
inward where only
reverberations of our
voices fathomed:

yet you held us still
kindly, having foreknown
the sere flame tasseling
the roof beam, the palace wall

sinking but invisible
to the chorus; and in the teeth
of our denial
had already greeted

the strange man you alone
saw loitering by the porch,
had wrenched up your
emaciated smile: "Come in! Come in!"

Rosanna Warren allowed Letters to reprint this
poem in memory of her father. This is from her volume,
Stained Glass, with the permission of W.W. Norton
and Company, Inc.