A worthwhile map of the forest cover of our planet.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-24934790

However, there should be a like map for the loss of wild-life. With deforestation comes a dramatic loss of animal habitat.

Moreover, I would like to know what effects the 'thinning' of a forest has on animal life. In my area (norwestern Latvia) many forests are thinned and the brush turned into mulch from which brickettes for heating are made of. This leaves many a 'forest' with a see-through floor that can hardly be counted as a wild life hiding place.

Saw Cross https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEjprf1X0bmSUxEx1EOsoOFLVYcnrG2FEqhuGVCcHTOTINFMg1T2T-PDHi5Qis3nCWIHfIE0mtEoKIN51O7Kn87xQuT4mA4Y-PiTDiR2k3G-gl98XvFASWLhOrCFRQzHvwp3SYB4R1SClAlB/s220-h/DSCF7743.JPG

 

One of the most common responses to my complaints about the desertification of the land is: "But the trees, once grown, need to be culled in any case." The answer is indicative of the nature of the "soul" of our contemporary human being who has gone through several brain washings administered by the sandpaper of our urban environment.

The answer also shows a creature of no concern for wild life and the thousands of life forms that make wood their home. It is also a portrayal of a creature that has become so used to living in an urban desert that he-she no longer knows how to differentiate between an environment that is by its nature alive and an environment that by its nature is dead. The latter mindset is  captured in the following link of paintings in which the forest has been removed.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-edinburgh-east-fife-21005725

This writer has struggled for many years to tell his world-view and perspective as a story. It has been a difficult task, because it involves "overriding" or "striking through" much of what we have been tought about the history of the world. The result is neither a novel, nor a history book, but an essay, a science fiction history of the last thousand years or so of civilization on our planet. The effort, such as it is, has now come to an end. It is available at http://jesusthebogomil.blogspot.com

The story begins with a retelling of the Passion of Christ and discovering in it the Passion of Jesus The Bogomil. The body of the blogs argues that civilization did not arise by way of agriculture, but by way of wood dwellers, whose economy was NOT FOR PROFIT, but A SUBSISTENCE economy.

The series ends with two blogs, which are among a few such, that tilt in the direction of justifying Stalin. Which is not to say that this writer favors either cruelty or torture, but perceives that what drove the so-called Russian Revolution was not Lenin's borgeois concern for the industrial worker or the worker's revolt against capitalism (though it made its contribution), but above all the forest dwelling peoples long repressed yearning to recapture their once upon a time SUBSISTENCE economy, which they enjoyed when they lived in the wood.

Not so incidentally, the above perspective necessarily leads one to perceive that what we call "democracy" or "democratic government" is an urban pipe dream, a longing for the democracy that once did exist in the wood and that still can exist only in a wood.

A story that runs a close parallel to Jesus The Bogomil is that of Oedipus The King, which can be found at http://oedipusrexrewritten.blogspot.com Here the Sphinx is not seen as some monster, but as the "wood" itself. From the point of view of literary criticism, the story implies that Oedipus Rex is a version of the story of Jesus portrayed as Christ. This version surely will be ill received by most orthodox Christians. All the same, a case can be made that the biographies of Queen Iocaste and Mary, both, are sufficiently vague to allow for reading into them similar past experiences. These experiences are common to young destitute women (as Stalin's mother 'Keke') managing to eke out an existence as concubines to inkeepers, soldiers, and priests who have taken celebate wovs. The relationships, when resulting in the issue of a child, may prompt such women to tell their sons that they have no physical fathers. When one such young woman known to this writer was asked who the father of her son was, she responded: "He came by a feather". No doubt, this young woman does not know that a similar 'feather' is what the Aztec Goddess Coyolxauhqui told brought into the world her famed son Huitzilopotchtli, who, perhaps in no lesser despair than Stalin so many centuries later, killed ALL earlier Aztec Gods, and ruled until the Spanish lier and conquistador Cortez arrived and installed the even more cruel capitalist Christ.
 

GOVERNMENT IN THE WOOD

The frog on my doorstep

The idea of a government in the wood is nicely presented in the Bavarian fairytale called “King Goldenlocks” http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/books/2012/04/a-brand-new-fairytale.html

The link to the fairytale presents us with some interesting information:

First is that the king’s castle and, thus, kingdom are to be found in a wood;

Second is that the wood about the castle is ruled by a giant, a King of the Wood;

Third is that King Goldenlocks regards the giant as a creature to capture;

Fourth is that not everyone regards the wood as his-her enemy, the king’s son among them;

Fifth is that the son is to be sacrificed by his father in the wood for releasing the giant or king of the wood;

Sixth is that the son of the King of the Wood  is a swineherd of wild pigs;

Seventh is that, both, the giant and his son save the unfortunate prince who appears to love the wood for its own sake;

Eight is that the king of the wood would like to unseat king Goldenlocks;

Ninth is that the swineherd is a good actor-mimic and replaces the son of king Goldenlocks so perfectly that eventually he becomes the new king;

Tenth is that the switch between prince and the swineherd is done through the sacrifice of the tenth finger, very likely the pinky of the left hand, which is—one may presume—how the wood is saved from the axe.

The following blogspots center on a variety of subjects, which I have initiated. You are invited to look and respond.


http://esoschronicles.blogspot.com/ Not-Violence main subject
http://melnaysjanis.blogspot.com/ Temple of Janis (John) site
http://the-not-voter.blogspot.com/ Arguments for systems change
http://the4thawakening.blogspot.com/ Sacrificial crisis in Latvia
http://oedipusrexrewritten.blogspot.com/ Oedipus Rex Rewritten
http://midsummernewyearofjohns.blogspot.com/ Midsummer New Year 21012


This post is somewhat unusual from most of the preceding ones. It touches on my interest of "John" as a religious figure, and why I have turned my property in Latvia into a Temple dedicated to Black John, a figure that stands as a symbol for both the decimated forests of Latvia and John (or Johns) the Wanderer(s). The post has also been entered at Latvians Online site as part of a discussion of Professor Timothy Snyder's book "The Bloodlands", just reissued by Kindle Books.

There remain mysteries that need solving, because orthodox explanations do not suffice.
1] Why does religious scholarship know so little about the origins of the Cathars, eliminated by the Catholic crusaders?

2] Why does the Wandering Jew so closely resemble the Wandering Heretics of the Middle Ages? Why were they eliminated?

3] Why do the Latvians know nothing about the origins of their Children of Johns? The Johns were also known as wanderers. Who eliminated and continues to eliminate them to this day?

These questions, first asked several entries ago, go to the heart—in my opinion—of why the events described in “The Bloodlands” occurred and were largely limited to Eastern Europe.

While Professor Snyder has already described the importance of geography (Eastern Europe) for his book , the following more lengthy lecture fills out the events in said geographic more thoroughly
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qcXMV-4HfXs .

Of the three (3) questions, the one that applies to the Latvians is of course question 3—Who is causing this holiday, the midsummer, to remain an uninvestigated phenomenon? The absence of investigation does not apply only to our own day, but is applicable also to the Latvia of the 1920 and 30s.

One reason for the seeming disinterest is the presumption that all that needs to be known about the Children of Johns (Jāņu bērni) is already known. Another reason is fear that the answer may touch on “religion”, and that—as I have suggested on numerous occasions—the Children of Johns may turn out to be Christian forebears of Latvians along the lines of the Cathars of Lanquedoc, a geographic locale that is part of France http://www.midi-france.info/1904_troubadours.htm . One reason why I am interested in the Cathars is because I believe them to be the forerunners of later Catholic Christianity, and, therefore, relatives of the Children of Johns.

What this has to do with Timothy Snyder’s “The Bloodlands” is that the repression of early Christianity (I suspect that early Christianity existed before Jesus even by the admission of the writers of the New Testament, who make one John the forerunner of Jesus) is necessarily a repression of history. This is one reason, why the origin of anti-semitism and persecution of pa-gans are likely related phenomena. If this is so, then Eastern Europe may once have been like Occitania http://www.midi-france.info/1905_occitania.htm , a culturally related area.

FROM FORESTS AND DEMOCRACY
TO A PAGANKA*-KLEPTOCRACY

The Man's Hand in the TRee.

“….the forests began to recede in the late Miocene epoch and the beginning of the Pliocene, which itself became progressively drier as it went along. This in turn gave way to the Pleistocene epoch, which culminated in the great Ice Ages, and the appearance of modern man. ….we can say roughly that the Miocene started some twenty-five million years ago and ended about twelve to thirteen million years ago. The Pliocene then bagan and ended in its turn about three million years ago, ushering in the Pleistocene. These, then, are our rough anchorage ages.”


The above is a quote from Robin Fox’s book “The Red Lamp of Incest”, which is a book inquiring into the origins of mind and society.


Professor Fox precedes the above by saying that “Leaving the forests…was not voluntary. Those that did not leave had to make some drastic adaptational changes. In the previous chapters we saw how the chimpanzee ancestors kept the forest, and how other primate ancestors moved to the fringe, the woodland, the savanna, and beyond. Our relationship to the chimp suggests that our ancestor at this point was chimplike although probably more generalized in his anatomy and perhaps, therefore, his behavior.”

While the professor is mostly concerned with what happened after the primates left the forest, what catches my eye is the statement that “leaving the forest was not voluntary.”


Why was the forest preferred to the open country?


One simple answer is because of protection it offered. Though the floor of the forest primeval was stalked by the great cats and, thus, was correspondingly dangerous, the animals of the forest had—through the many millions of years that followed the catastrophe that put an end to the Permian epoch—evolved defense strategies, which protected their species not only from extinction, but provided a life-style comfortable enough not to go extinct.

The Hand the Color of Red Sap.

It was in the process of having to adapt to a drier climate and receding of the ancient rain forests that there evolved the primates as we know them today, among them human beings.


Professor Fox is not to be blamed if I derail the trend of the thought behind his book; nevertheless, the fact that he mentions the importance of forests in the evolution of the human species (mind and society), puts me into a “quantum jump” mode, and encourages a comparison between the relative safety of the forests with the political system known as ‘democraccy’. Some critics would also call my method as the practice of pareidolia, even though I am in no way intent on turning insignificant parallels into significant ones.


What I have in mind is to diminish the notion of so many anthropologists and archeologists who put so much stress on the transition from a hunter and gatherer society to that of agriculture that it becomes the real pareidolic bunkum. The support for my opinion is the bare fact that no sooner does agriculture appear that the forest dwelling human being is deliberately forgot.


Why should such a denial (forgetting) of the forest in the development of human society become an accepted prejudice in nearly all cultures?


The answer may be relatively simple, even simplistic. It is not to be denied and it is obvious that agriculture has much to do with the arrival of a capitalist society. If in the barter economy of the forest my one bear skin is worth twenty pelts of fox to you, in agricultural barter, my two sacks of grain becomes twenty sacks for you, if from twenty subsistence farmers like myself, you steal—or take by ‘taxing’—one of our two.


When the advantages of the taxing of agriculturalist economic system made the rounds of all the meat-and-fish-eating princes, the princes invented the meat pie, built themselves near impregnable castles, created a corporation with the rights of an individual, and become the happy inhabitants of an all-embracing paganka*-nationalist empire.

Flag of Temple to Cut Forests, Black John

A paganka-nationalist empire is, of course, an empire without forests, with grass, shrubs, and fields of grain and/or potatoes covering the rest of the empire’s land surface. While in our times empires are indeed large entities of bricks and concrete, they need not always be empires or even large. For example, in my own country, Latvia, while the oligarchs (today’s equivalent of princes) are few, the state bureaucracy has turned capitalism into a unipolar political system, which for all of its obviously repressive nature, calls itself ‘democracy’.


Interestingly, Latvia is called a democracy not because it in fact is a democracy, but because The State of Latvia Forest Monopoly controls the advertising media, and the information media keeps this a secret from the public at large. This is not to say that there are no other advertisers with their megalomaniacal pretensions appearing in such prefixes to company names as “Max-” or “Glob-” or “Uni-”, however, the latter do not have nearly the influence of a political state that persists in calling itself a ‘democracy’, when it clearly resembles a kleptocracy or ‘a politcial order ruled by thieves’.


An excellent example of the Kleptocratic (Kl) political parties is the consequence of austerity measures imposed on the nation, excepting members of the Latvian Saeima, its ministers, and higher levels of the bureaucracy. The Kleptocratic Latvian Party (KLO) is led, not surprisingly, by the Minister of Finance, the Prime Minister, and the Minister President, none of whom suffer from the austerity measures, but continue to buy glistening suits with which to present themselves at the ministries, and, probably, light weight body armour because on their salaries it is not a luxury and the obvious is becoming very obvious.

The Eye in the Tree at the Gate.

As suggested at the beginning of this blog, Latvian boyars (as the oligarchs prefer to know themselves, because of the luster the association with prehistoric Balts brings them) are by no means alone. It is worse in the U.S., with laws made ready for a time when THE DEMOCRACY has become a paganka*-nationalist democracy that keeps out all the clever populists, but not the stupid ones, and recently was known by the name of fascism.


*I prefer to forget the fascist word, and turn to paganka-kleptocrat as a substitute. With paganka harping back to the name of a ''bad'' mushroom in Russian (the name may also be pronounced as "pa-janka" in Latvian, meaning a degraded forest inhabitant not fit to be a good Christian) murfing (by way of paleidoria) us back to the actual and real state of the world, and not a phantasm of the Latvian soap: “The House of Angels”. The last I looked, the ‘boys’ had to acknowledge their having been deeply involved in cosmopolitan money laundering schemes and their like in their previous lives—presumably on our planet and the dismally naked streets of Latvia’s capital Riga.

Meanwhile, the Interior and Regional Development Minister, A. Sprudzhis, agrees that the female bear named “Made” had to be shot, when she escaped from her cage, and was the first to suggest that the two remaining elderly male bears had to be castrated lest they get an erection and forget their prison is not a forest fit for the democracy prevailing in a forest.


A Mass Grave Latvian Style.

The Miocene epoch has met with the Homo-kleptocratus ad Authoritatem sung to by a chorus of decimated forest plots in private hands, and manipulated for the sake of the ruling class of paganka-kleptocracy led by the Latvian State Forest Monopoly. The latter is still popularizing the notion that Latvians stem from farmers and that today there are more forests (if you count shrubbery) than anytime in the last century.

We are excited to announce that the Temple shall shortly begin to sell our Saw-Cross sign. Presently available only at the "Tine" stores in Riga, Audeju iela 10, Latvia.

© THE SAW-CROSS
distributed by
‘Melnays Jānis’
Black John @ http://melnaysjanis.blogspot.com/

A temple dedicated to reforestation.

The Saw-Cross is lazer cut from a thin plane of veneer. It may be worn around the neck or as an attachment to shirt or jacket. In due course, we will post a picture of the insignia; it looks much like the saw-cross in the photo above and is, roughly, as high and wide as your little finger. On the reverse: "Save the Forests from the Saw-Cross." We hope that you will be one of our customer. Any income derived from the sale will go toward the upkeep of the Temple. For more information, please read and address this site. Thank you.

The past winter in my neighborhood was a disaster for the forests. Unrestrained cutting of trees on privately owned lands went on unceasingly (weather permitting) throughout the winter. The government, of course, keeps saying that Latvia is one of the "greenest'' countries in the world. True, if grey and drab is what you think is green also.

How the urban banks, once bailed out by the ECB, collect the debt from nature
by way of  private land owners.

The following link to NASA's Earth Observatory:
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/ForestCarbon/?src=features-recent