"When Did You Start Calling Yourself A Witch?"

Oddly enough, it was my wife who asked me that question.

I've been a pagan - a Wiccan, specifically - for more than a decade now. And while I've accepted the idea that I am a witch, I've never really embraced it as a title for what I am. Not until recently, anyway.

So what happened? What made me start using the "witch" word more frequently?

There's a lot of answers I could give to that. I could explain how Wicca is one variety of what we now know as British Traditional Witchcraft. I could discuss how "Wicca" and "witch" come from the same Old English word, and how that word is a proud one that should be used.

But really, neither of those are the reason. No, the reason I started using it more is because I got pissed off. Let me explain.

I am, oddly enough, a member of a church - Heritage Universalist Unitarian Church, to be specific. Not because I'm a Unitarian or a Universalist, but because I really like the people and the programs there, and because that's where I do all of my public rituals. For the most part I don't attend the Sunday service, and there are a number of people there who have joined the church after I did that don't realize I'm a member, but I am.

Early on this year, the children's Religious Education was doing a series of classes on various world religions: Islam, Christianity, Judaism, Buddhism, and so forth, and they were looking for people knowledgeable about those religions to teach that particular class to the children. One of the religions they wanted to touch on was "Paganism/Earth-Centered Spirituality"[1].

Well, being both a pagan and a member of HUUC's Pagan Steering Committee, I felt I should sign up. Besides, I like teaching and I like working with children.

Before my big day, I had an orientation meeting. This was to go over the UU expectations for people who work with children, discuss the format of the class, things of that nature. Standard stuff. But something nonstandard, and something I completely had not expected, happened as well.

During the orientation meeting, I was asked not to call myself a "witch". The rationale? It might frighten the children. It caught me off guard, and I agreed.

Later on, though, I got me angry. The UUs claim to be open and accepting, and here they are demanding that I not use one of the names for my religious path because it might "frighten children". How dare they? And how dare I agree? How dare I roll over and hide my religious beliefs because it might make someone uncomfortable to know that I have them?

So now? Now I call myself a witch. And if someone doesn't like that, if someone is uncomfortable or frightened by that?

That's their problem.

[1] Yeah, I know. That's something more than "one" religion. I didn't make the category up.

Vandana Shiva Calls For Death By Starvation For 3 Billion People

This all started on Facebook. Someone I friended "liked" an article by Vandana Shiva, titled "Time to End War Against the Earth".

Go ahead and read it. Go ahead. I'll wait.

Now that you're back, I'll get started.

I'm curious. How does Ms. Shiva reconcile her opposition to industrial agriculture with the work of Dr. Norman Borlaug, whose work with industrial agriculture and the development of stem rust-resistant and drought-resistant wheat was directly responsible for allowing India's agriculture to go from being able to support around 500 million people (in the 1960's) to over a billion people (today)? Today, thanks in large part to his work, hunger is overwhelmingly a political issue - not an ecological issue.

If not for his work, and the drought-resistant and pesticide-resistant crops that derive from his work (not to mention the pesticides and the fertilizers that she decries), every other human being in the Indian subcontinent would either be dead or would not have been born.

Ms. Shiva calls for "earth democracy" and "fundamental human rights". As Dr. Borlaug observed, "Almost certainly, however, the first essential component of social justice is adequate food for all mankind," and "Food is the moral right of all who are born into this world."

Perhaps Ms. Shiva would like to start suggesting which among us should die, as we abandon our current practices and return to a "sustainable" (but far less productive) mode of agriculture? After all, based on India, it should only be around 3 billion or so human beings.

Her hypocrisy is both overwhelming and nauseating.

Oh, for further reading: http://www.sirc.org/news/vandana_shiva_reith.html

NASA's Fermi Telescope Finds Giant Structure in our Galaxy

You can read the original article on the NASA web site. In a nutshell, however, a team of astronomers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, MA have found this:



This, of course, is an artist's interpretation of a gamma ray-emitting structure that extends 25,000 light years above and below the galactic core of the Milky Way. A bubble that emits much more energetic gamma rays than have been seen anywhere else in the Milky Way, and that appears to have well-defined edges and seems to have been formed "...as a result of a large and relatively rapid energy release - the source of which remains a mystery."



What is it? Well, that's the better question. There are no answers yet, because this is a fairly new discovery.

One possibility includes a particle jet from the supermassive black hole at the galactic center. In many other galaxies, astronomers see fast particle jets powered by matter falling toward a central black hole. While there is no evidence the Milky Way's black hole has such a jet today, it may have in the past. The bubbles also may have formed as a result of gas outflows from a burst of star formation, perhaps the one that produced many massive star clusters in the Milky Way's center several million years ago.

"In other galaxies, we see that starbursts can drive enormous gas outflows," said David Spergel, a scientist at Princeton University in New Jersey. "Whatever the energy source behind these huge bubbles may be, it is connected to many deep questions in astrophysics."

As J. B. S. Haldane put it, "I have no doubt that in reality the future will be vastly more surprising than anything I can imagine. Now my own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose."

Feeling the Future

Trawling through my morning reading, I came across this link: "Have Scientists Finally Discovered Evidence for Psychic Phenomena?!" Eye-catching? Yes. But, I always feel a little... skeptical about any headline for any scientific study that includes both an exclamation point and a question mark.

The actual meat of the article is a brief and breathless abstract of "Feeling the Future: Experimental Evidence for Anomalous Retroactive Influences on Cognition and Affect", a paper published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology by Dr. Daryl Bem, a Professor Emeritus of Psychology at Cornell University.

According to the Psychology Today article, Dr. Bem

took effects that are considered valid and reliable in psychology - studying improves memory, priming facilitates response times - and simply reversed their chronological order.

An interesting idea, I think you'll agree. There are obviously more details in the actual "Feeling the Future" paper. Here's the abstract:

The term psi denotes anomalous processes of information or energy transfer that are currently unexplained in terms of known physical or biological mechanisms. Two variants of psi are precognition (conscious cognitive awareness) and premonition (affective apprehension) of a future event that could not otherwise be anticipated through any known inferential process. Precognition and premonition are themselves special cases of a more general phenomenon: the anomalous retroactive influence of some future event on an individual’s current responses, whether those responses are conscious or nonconscious, cognitive or affective. This article reports 9 experiments, involving more than 1,000 participants, that test for retroactive influence by “timereversing” well-established psychological effects so that the individual’s responses are obtained before the putatively causal stimulus events occur. Data are presented for 4 time-reversed effects: precognitive approach to erotic stimuli and precognitive avoidance of negative stimuli; retroactive priming; retroactive habituation; and retroactive facilitation of recall. All but one of the experiments yielded statistically significant results; and, across all 9 experiments, Stouffer’s z = 6.66, p = 1.34 × 10-11 with a mean effect size (d) of 0.22. The individual-difference variable of stimulus seeking, a component of extraversion, was significantly correlated with psi performance in 5 of the experiments, with participants who scored above the midpoint on a scale of stimulus seeking achieving a mean effect size of 0.43. Skepticism about psi, issues of replication, and theories of psi are also discussed.

I will admit that I have not read the 68-page paper in it's entirety. It's pretty technical, and I'll be the first to admit that I'm not a psychologist. What I do find interesting is, starting on page 48, his discussion of the issues of replication, including some of the potential difficulties in replicating a psychology experiment (as opposed to, say, a physics experiment) and what he did in his study to try and minimize those difficulties for other researchers. It's a breath of fresh air in this kind of work.

So, is this proof positive that psi abilities really exist? No. Of course not. It's a single study (well, it's a summary of 9 studies). It looks well conducted to my layman's eye, but all this study really establishes at this point is that there was some sort of behavior observed in the lab that, on the face, resembles psi abilities. Further study is required, along with serious attempts to falsify the hypothesis, before this can be said to constitute proof.

Nevertheless, I will say I'm excited about what I'm seeing here, and I can't wait to see what developments come out of this. Even if it turns out not to be psi, it certainly shows something interesting about the brain.

Robin's Hood Is Asking For Your Help

An announcement and a request for help from one of our local Pagan charities.

Robin's Hood CommUnity Center
will be hosting
the 10th Annual Magic Mini Mall!

Held at Welcome House
11th & Greenup
Covington, KY

For info, call 859-743-6454

The Magic Mini Mall is a holiday shopping event for kids to pick out the gifts they will give their families under the tree, assisted by volunteer "elves", while we get the scoop from the parents on Santa's list. Each child gets a picture with Santa, and there is no cost to the family for anything.

We are desperately short on toys for the Magic Mini Mall. If you can donate a simple $5 game or a $1 toy, a stuffed animal, a toy car, anything...we need your help! Last year we had a record 754 kids at the Magic Mini Mall and we expect at least that many, if not more, this year.

To date, we have never had to tell a family "we're full" and turn them away. If you can help, we won't have to do that this year, either.

To make a donation you can either call Reverend Bonnie Campaniello at at 513-979-4242 or at 859-743-6454 to arrange for us to pick them up, or you can drop them off. We can accept the donations at either

The Computer Shop,
506 Madison Ave
Covington, KY 41011
859-491-0040

or at the home of Reverend Bonnie Campaniello,
2002 Queen City Ave
Cincinnati, OH 45214

Please help, if you can. No donation is too small.

Thank you for all of your support over the last 10 years.
Rev. Bonnie Campaniello
Founder/Director
Robin's Hood

Apparently, The Most Important Things In Life Are Things

Anthony D'Angelo once said "The most important things in life aren't things." A new study, titled "Brand Attachment and Brand Attitude Strength: Conceptual and Empirical Differentiation of Two Critical Brand Equity Drivers" and reported on in ScienceDaily begs to differ.

The ScienceDaily article starts by asking

Can you forge an emotional bond with a brand so strong that, if forced to buy a competitor's product, you suffer separation anxiety? According to a new study from the USC Marshall School of Business, the answer is yes. In fact, that bond can be strong enough that consumers are willing to sacrifice time, money, energy and reputation to maintain their attachment to that brand.

Interesting in and of itself, but that's just the first paragraph. Let me direct you to the summary of the study's findings:

Overall, the research suggests, the greater the attachment, the greater sacrifices a consumer will make to connect with or remain connected to the brand.

The study's key findings include:

• The more strongly a consumer's attachment to a brand, the more willing they are to forsake personal resources to maintain an ongoing relationship with the brand. They are willing to engage in difficult behaviors -- "those that require investments of time, money and energy, so as to maintain or deepen a brand relationship."
• Highly attached consumers are more motivated to devote their own resources in the process of self-expansion, including paying more, defending the brand, derogating alternatives, and devoting more time to the brand through brand communities and brand promotion through social media.
• Attachment represented by both brand-self-connection and prominence is a significantly better predictor than brand attitude strength of actual behaviors.
  

Now think about that for a moment. And while you do, I'm going to run the risk of being self-referential and quote something I wrote about a year and a half ago:

These entities [corporations] do not care about us. Individual humans are classified by them as either "headcount" or "customer" - which can be understood as "property" or "food", respectively.

I'll leave the explication of the moral as an exercise for the reader, but I'll give you a hint. Have a look at the Mayo Clinic's Drug addiction: Symptoms page, and think long and hard about whatever brand loyalty you may have.

You Want Respect?

Then you stand up for yourself and your fellows. You don't accept the disrespect, and you don't go whining about how people should respect you.

You do it like this:


Now go out and earn some respect.

An Important Point About Homemade Orange Soda

This is, obviously, a follow-up to Homemade Orange Soda.

Make sure you are using good quality oranges. I recommend waiting until oranges are in season. Why? Well, I used some shipped in from overseas, picked at the peak of being able to be shipped without damage (and with no consideration for flavor) oranges. As a result, all of my hard work was squandered on the fact that the soda is bland and tasteless.

Homemade sodas are only as good as the ingredients you use.