This Day in History                  

February 28th marks Rare Diseases Day in non-leap years, and always represents World Tailors Day, while India commemorates its National Science Day on this date; when the hunters and tribal peoples of Europe were still barely into the Bronze Age, twenty-two hundred nineteen years ago, China’s first Han emperor Gaozu held his coronation and initiated four centuries of dynastic rule; fourteen hundred forty-eight years afterward, in 1246 CE, not quite half a world away, in the Iberian Peninsula, the early stages of Spain’s Christian Reconquista unfolded with a Castilian victory at the Siege of Jaén against the Taifa of that theretofore Islamic outpost; four hundred ninety-two years in advance of this exact passing day, the mass-murdering ‘conqueror’ Hernan Cortes oversaw the execution of Cuauhtemoc, a homicide that he had planned and orchestrated in keeping with Spanish imperial goals and protocols; MORE HERE

                A Thought for the Day                

Although the potential must always seem close at hand, among those who obsess about playing games, for dissolution or at least missed opportunities for ‘more productive’ living, still such activities must contain elements of adaptive action, since otherwise their completely ubiquitous presence among individual actors would have encountered the fell, grim hand of natural selection—eviscerated video-gamers, dead dice shakers, collapsed card players, and so forth: determining what precisely might work to the advantage of those who so persistently wile away hours and days in such pastimes is not difficult, at the least a certain sort of strategic sense a likely concomitant to even the most rudimentary pursuit of randomly achieved ‘winning positions,’ most clearly as in chess, backgammon, poker, and on and on among the endeavors that mix chance and skill in some measure, but also in the easiest and most brainless such efforts, as in the solitary engagement of solitaire or the rapid-fire playing of the tokens in checkers; of possible additional utility is the very aspect of these maneuvers that is at times most simple to criticize, the way that they focus scattered attention to a single point that permits the contestant to feel that sense of immersion and engagement that so clearly has dissipated, if not altogether disappeared, in so many other standard aspects of contemporary reality where, at best, one’s intent awareness is only requisite when one is making money for someone else, hooked up in harness without any sense of personal choice, let alone individual amusement.

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The John Muir Project is a small non-profit which is part of the much larger Earth Island Institute community. We have been successfully defending our nation’s public forests (national forests, BLM lands, National Parks and Wildlife Refuges) and the ecosystems and wildlife these lands support for twenty years. We employ a combination of forest management monitoring, original scientific research, public education and legal action in our efforts to ensure that science and maintaining natural processes and the ecological integrity of our forest ecosystems does not take a back seat to economic interests and greed. Our combined efforts of grassroots organizing and trips to DC to inform legislators about recent scientific research over the last few years have played a crucial role in helping to defeat logging bills. Given the most recent election, now more than ever we need a steady presence in Washington to maintain our relationships, keep legislators informed and push for legislative changes to permanently protect our public forests.