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 1 Sep 2007 @ 12:48, by jazzolog. Entrepreneurs, Money Making
As a man is, so he sees.
---William Blake
There is only one great adventure and that is inwards toward the self.
---Henry Miller
The bluebird carries the sky on his back.
---Henry David Thoreau
President Bush speaks at a meeting of the Associated General Contractors of America on May 2, 2007 in Washington, DC.
Photo: Wong/Getty
In America we believe in the marketplace, and we expect bang for our buck. The educated consumer is more highly valued than an educated voter. The wise shopper researches the available products before making a major purchase. Sometimes we complain we have too MANY product choices---like when you need to buy some cough syrup.
We detest socialism, and the mere mention of it can get you a punch in the nose. We think it's probably wasteful, and we can't stand being told what to do. Freedom means I choose the car I drive...and whether or not I throw trash out the window.
So how is it George Bush gets away with 7 years of no-bid contracts clearly to companies that support the Republican Party with lots of cash? What is a no-bid contract anyway and where did it come from? Does no one ask this? Is presidential war powers the answer to every inquiry?
I've spent the morning with 3 articles that have appeared online during the past week, and I feel the need to share them. The first is in the current issue of Rolling Stone (#1034) with How Bush's Cronies Swindled Billions blazing across the cover. May I repeat that word again, since so many seem to blank out at high numbers? BILLIONS. Its author is Matt Taibbi, to whom I referred you last April in a piece called Oil's Final Trickle [link] . If this journalist, still in his 30s, doesn't get a Pulitzer someday, I'll be surprised.
The next is Paul Krugman's commemorating the 2nd Anniversary last week of Hurricane Katrina's devastation of New Orleans. TruthOut kindly put up the premium column yesterday. And finally there's an essay by Nat Hentoff on CIA torture. Well, this is Labor Day weekend reading to get you stirred up admittedly. It did me, and probably will give me more to talk about at the picnic than sale prices at the big boxes. More >
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 31 Aug 2007 @ 23:31, by letecia. Economics, Financing, Banking
AlterNet featured an interview with Kevin Rozario about his recent book "The Culture of Calamity"
"Capitalism itself is a system of destruction and creation. You have to keep destroying the old in order to clear space for the new. Otherwise, it achieves stasis, and if it achieves stasis, it dies. It depends on constant expansion just to keep going. But again, to be very clear about this, not all Americans think this is a blessing. This is a process that can be extremely lucrative for businesses, but it's a process that can be extremely destructive for laborers. The benefits of disaster are very unevenly portioned and they go to those with power and influence rather than ordinary Americans."
View the full interview online at: [link]
Note: Kevin Rozario teaches courses in American popular culture and cultural theory. After receiving his Ph.D. from Yale in 1997, he taught at Oberlin and Wellesley before coming to Smith. Although trained as a historian, his interdisciplinary interests keep pulling him into such other fields as literary criticism, media studies, philosophy, economics, environmental history, gender studies, and cultural theory. From Smith College
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31 Aug 2007 @ 21:55, by vaxen. Government, Public Sector
"...To murder the state you need strong citizens who understand their rights, have honed their abilities and stocked their mental and physical arsenal, and have adopted the quiet determination and moral confidence that often appears as fearlessness, but is not.
"We might take a lesson from the growing Iraqi insurgency and the response of that nation nearly destroyed by our pretext-laden invasion and the American neo-Jacobin possession of that country..."
"How do the Iraqi insurgents do it? How are they defending themselves from the oppressive U.S. managed state in Baghdad? How are they killing it?
"They know what they don't want, and have made a personal commitment to resist it..."
"...All are qualified to resist. None are excluded.
"French-born composer and musician Nadia Boulanger, a major influence on American music in the 20th century, once said:
"Liberty has never come from the government. Liberty has always come from the subjects of it. The history of liberty is a history of resistance. The history of liberty is a history of limitations of governmental power, not the increase of it.
"Liberty" is also a concept George W. Bush favors. He said "liberty" fifteen times in his 2005 inaugural speech, second only to his 25 mentions of "freedom." Bush didn't specifically advocate the murder, or even the restraint, of the state. On the other hand, perhaps he did.
"The way ahead is clear. We should promote our Great Leader's love of liberty and resist, resist, resist!" --
June 15, 2005
Karen Kwiatkowski
[link]
If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of
civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.
Thomas Jefferson, 1816.
REPUBLIC vs. DEMOCRACY
I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one Nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all."
In the Pledge of Allegiance we all pledge allegiance to our Republic, not to a democracy. "Republic" is the proper description of our government, not "democracy." I invite you to join me in raising public awareness regarding that distinction.
The distinction between our Republic and a democracy is not an idle one. It has great legal significance. More >
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 31 Aug 2007 @ 14:56, by jerryvest. Education
"Surrendering to the teaching is the giving up of self-images, fears, thoughts and desires into the hands of deeper self-knowledge." (Tarthang Tulku, Hidden Mind of Freedom)
We can transform our image egos -
As I look back on my personal and professional development as an adult human being, I can see that my image of myself was the culprit that made life, health and relationships unfulfilling. It appears to me that we develop these images to identify, protect and secure the fixed ideas we create about ourselves. Perhaps this is why we are so fragile, insecure and reactive. We are so fearful about losing, shattering or changing this image that our true sense of being becomes fearful, embarrassed, insecure, indignant, protective and isolated; we are often feeling left alone in the world like a pearl in an oyster.
As a social worker by profession, I learned early on that our most effective approach and method for engaging others is to be present, in the moment, with complete openness, respect and acceptance. Knowing that everyone has an image ego that is delicate and protective is even more reason for us to learn to be non-judgmental and tolerant, allowing us to discover and experience these images for ourselves. Oscar Ichazo, one of my teachers, would describe this experience as making an arc of love with another—or being the equal.
However, because these self-images are so fixed, fearful, rigid and controlling, they don’t usually change without some skillful interventions, personal practice and genuine commitment to change. Alternative and integrative health practices have helped me and many of my students transform this image and become whole, with attributes of compassion, innocence and love that we remember as children. I often think: ‘Oh to be a child again!’ Subsequently, my grandchildren arrive in my landscape to help me relax, enjoy and refresh my essential being so that I can play and enjoy life to its fullest. I appreciate what Dr. Ashley Montagu describes in Growing Young and what it can mean to “grow up” as a child and into the skin of an adult:
To grow young means to grow in our youthful traits, not to grow out of or to abandon them.
Success for the child becomes emulation of his elders. The rare individuals who somehow manage to avoid falling into this trap and retain their childlike qualities are considered either eccentric, odd, nonconformist, or otherwise otiose (futile). We do not appreciate non-conformists in America. Our colleges and universities, not to mention our schools, avoid or reject them.(p. 198)
I have attempted to describe my journey of transformation while introducing various methods that I have employed to free this image ego and return to my true youthful nature. While writing this log, I recall many of the questions that we, my friends and colleagues, raised in our group work and/or challenged our egos with such questions during our process of change and regeneration. See for example: “Being an Effective Professional.”
Integrative Health Practices -
While learning and participating in Gestalt Therapy groups during the early 1970’s, I learned early on that behind every question is the answer. How else would we know if it is true or false? I had the good fortune to participate in some fascinating groups with four of our country’s greatest group workers—Oscar Ichazo, Joseph (Jack) Downing, Tarthang Tulku and Claudio Naranjo. Through these experiences, it became evident to me that our confusion, doubts and fears manifested in our image ego can be transformed into clarity, awareness and confidence.
How do Questions help us?
What is there to know? What would you like to know? For example, in therapy it is important for us to raise questions about ourselves? Who are you? How are you? Where are you? Why are you here? What do you want to do with your life? What makes you happy? What are your plans, goals or aspirations? How do you relate with others? What do you enjoy about your life? How do you feel about your partner, family, friends and colleagues? In other words, how meaningful is your life, health and relationships?
We might also inquire: when was the last time you did a self-assessment? Have you examined your self and your relationships with all that is-physically/sexually, mentally, socially, emotionally, spiritually? How can you improve the quality of your work, your life, your health and your relationships?
Other great questions that I recall we were asked to respond to during group sessions:
1. What is there to fear?
2. What stops or prevents you from being your best possible human being?
3. What are your patterns of conditioning that prevent you from fulfilling your whole being?
4. Do you want to change? Are you fully committed to change? What is there to change?
5. Can others count on you? Are you honest and trustworthy?
6. How do you relate or interact with others?
7. Are you mindful? Do you listen to yourself? Do you hear your voice? How you respond or react? Do you say what you mean? Are you conscious of your internal and external breath?
8. Are you curious, interested and enthusiastic?
9. How do you express your joy?
10.Do you have an open and flexible mind?
11.Are you kind, sensitive and compassionate?
12.Do you sincerely care about others and your natural and social environments?
13.How do you get along with others?
14.How do you compensate or adapt when your instincts and image ego is out of balance and you are stressed, anxious and depressed?
15.How do you act or behave when you don’t get “your way?” "My way or the highway!"
Social Work Practice courses can introduce these questions by organizing experiential work groups in the classroom to help our developing professionals learn to be skillful, aware and effective therapists. I suggest that you introduce a new question each session and encourage the students to share a personal experience related to it. This exercise may assist them in developing an open mind.
There are many ideas about our egos. This is a very good overview that may be helpful to understand how our ego develops and becomes ill-- From Beyond the Frontier of the Mind by Osho . I also have worked for the past 30+ years with the Arica Programs to assist me in this transformation process. Perhaps the best resources that I have found during my search for meaning, purpose and truth are part of Tarthang Tulku's collection.
Do visit my other articles in my log that include various approaches, techniques and methods to advance our professional knowledge, skills and values.
Note: Picture is of my mom when she was a little person. In those days the "playpen" was very popular. However, not much room for play! My grandfather, Bapa, took the picture. More >
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30 Aug 2007 @ 02:44, by swanny. Spirituality
CARE OR DIE
August 29, 2007
Earth
Wednesday
Evening
CARE OR DIE
Care or die!
I don't think it can be put any more simpler. If we don't care and care enough about the things that need caring for and pretty soon or now, then we and a lot of species will simply die and become the remains of a ruined planet. So unless we have a burning death wish I suppose we better start boning up on our caring muscles. How much time ? Well this was a fairly wacky weather year don't ya figure. I mean unless you're in a cave or on the space station, the weather was pretty.... well .... I mean really why beat that dead horse any more. Are we asleep or awake I suppose is the real question. Do we care or don't we and ...
etc. etc.. It starts with caring and then caring leads to actions and habits and behaviours and then things gradually change.
Care or die?
Care though not because the alternative is death but care because it is the logical and right thing to do and remember once you did care until the pain of love and life sucked that care out of you. Caring is the natural thing we do as humans. Not caring that is not natural. Or kill yourself cause living with out caring is about the same as being dead or half dead anyway.
I care or try too most of the time.
Its tough to care but its mostly the right and natural thing to do.
Don't do it for me though, do it because its the human thing to do.
ed More >
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28 Aug 2007 @ 19:56, by vaxen. Violence, War
In a recent television program, Phil Donahue spoke with swindled employees of Enron, World,com, and other criminal corporations. Many of the workers who had been fired, without severance pay, by these companies days after the senior executives had stolen millions, were still dazed. These were well-intentioned, hard-working people who had been completely savaged by corporate fat-cats. "What can we do?" they asked.
Well, certainly the first thing American workers must do is wake up to what the Bush regime is doing: fostering and allowing corporate crime to run rampant, destroying the life savings of hundreds of people.
We must be aware that the Bush regime is actually a military dictatorship which will inevitably lead to the total destruction of our civil liberties unless we make sure that doesn't happen.
It's easy to miss the unmistakable aspects of the "High Cabal's" dictatorship if we assume that tyranny in the United States will necessarily take the same form as in, say, Nazi Germany, the communist Soviet Union, Sadam Hussein's dictatorship in Iraq, or other instances of despotism.
The United States has a long and glorious history of civil rights and some amount of governance by the will of the people. So the "High Cabal's" puppet Bush regime must start from a different historical position in its insane drive toward a police state. Daily, we see the Bush-led junta demolishing Constitutional liberties with impunity. We must recognize that the old forms of military dictatorship--with jackbooted storm troopers--have been replaced with new "war on terrorism" military control of civilians.
9/11 was an unconscionable act of terror and whether the Bush regime planned and carried out that operation is still an open question. I would not be surprised if the "High Cabal" perpetrates a second terrorist act within the next year--to create a pretext for suspending all Constitutional liberties in the hysteria that would inevitably ensue. It's quite possible that the Bush-led junta will create a Weimar Germany style financial crash to usher in a complete Nazi-like police state.
One of Dubya's appointees to the U.S. Civil Rights Commission told a Detroit crowd in July 2002 that America could "forget about civil rights" if there was another terrorist attack on the United States by "the same ethnic group that attacked the World Trade Center."
What the Bush regime is doing is so tyrannical that we must begin immediately to act as a people to stop its deliberate destruction of our nation.
===
The Origins of the American Military Coup of 2012
CHARLES J. DUNLAP, JR.
From Parameters, Winter 1992-93, pp. 2-20.
The letter that follows takes us on a darkly imagined excursion into the future. A military coup has taken place in the United States--the year is 2012--and General Thomas E. T. Brutus, Commander-in-Chief of the Unified Armed Forces of the United States, now occupies the White House as permanent Military Plenipotentiary.
His position has been ratified by a national referendum, though scattered disorders still prevail and arrests for acts of sedition are underway. A senior retired officer of the Unified Armed Forces, known here simply as Prisoner 222305759, is one of those arrested, having been convicted by court-martial for opposing the coup. Prior to his execution, he is able to smuggle out of prison a letter to an old War College classmate discussing the "Origins of the American Military Coup of 2012."
In it, he argues that the coup was the outgrowth of trends visible as far back as 1992. These trends were the massive diversion of military forces to civilian uses, the monolithic unification of the armed forces, and the insularity of the military community. His letter survives and is here presented verbatim.
It goes without saying (I hope) that the coup scenario above is purely a literary device intended to dramatize my concern over certain contemporary developments affecting the armed forces, and is emphatically not a prediction. -- The Author More >
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25 Aug 2007 @ 21:28, by a-d. Spirituality
A MESSAGE OF PEACE,
and a call to help support a new film "The Shift of the Ages!"
~ Aluna Joy Yaxk'in
You can find this article (see below), plus much more on this link:
[link]
On July 8th, Grandfather Alejandro came to speak in Sedona, Arizona along with his wife, Grandmother Elizabeth, as well as a young, rising star film maker, Steve Copeland, acting as writer, director and producer. Their path to produce a film has not been easy. It has required hard work on a limited budget, and doing without creature comforts and luxuries while traveling around the world with Grandfather Alejandro.
I was blessed to see Grandfather Alejandro speak with Grandmother Elizabeth as his translator. It was good to see them both doing so well. Grandfather Alejandro has softened with age. I could feel his open heart and could feel that he knew time was short to get his message out. Because of this, he spoke eloquently and to the point. He confirmed many things and also straightened out many misconceptions.
Grandfather Alejandro had a unify message and shared that we are all brother and sisters, and flowers of the Earth. He said that the Maya prophesies are for all people; not just the Maya. They are for everyone everywhere. Even though the flowers of the earth are different, they all bloom for the Creator. The one SUN shines on all equally, and we all drink the same water, and breathe the same air, and live on the same earth . . . and when we die, we all return to her womb. More >
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25 Aug 2007 @ 04:34, by skookum. Ideas, Creativity
things are not as they seem More >
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 24 Aug 2007 @ 07:29, by jazzolog. Globalization
You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait. Do not even wait, be quite still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice. It will roll in ecstasy at your feet.
---Franz Kafka
To learn the way it is important to be sharp and inconspicuous. When you are sharp, you are not confused by people. When you are inconspicuous, you do not contend with people. Not being confused by people, you are empty and spiritual. Not contending with people, you are serene and subtle.
---Liao-An
The best things in life are nearest. Breath in your nostrils, light in your eyes, flowers at your feet, duties at your hand, the path of right just before you.
---Robert Louis Stevenson
Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. Portrait of Napoléon on the Imperial Throne. 1806.
Oil on canvas. Musée de l'Armée, Paris, France.
In the past few years, many of us on the American Left have found ourselves looking for understanding to the writings of historian Juan Cole. Born in Albuquerque in 1952, John "Juan" Ricardo I. Cole is professor of modern Middle Eastern and South Asian history at the University of Michigan. Not only does he have a new book entitled Napoleon's Egypt: Invading the Middle East, but he also translates works in both Arabic and Persian, and maintains a popular weblog called Informed Comment [link] .
The other day Juan Cole posted an entry in which he offered notions of historical comparison that he couldn't help thinking about the Bush involvements in the Middle East, given what he'd learned about Napoleon. While I strongly believe the species' survival depends on learning at least something from history, I also think historical comparisons are a tricky business. Nevertheless the current Bush asked for it in his big speech the other day when he invoked Viet Nam as his latest scare tactic. If he wants comparisons, then let us hear Professor Cole's.
Yesterday Tom Englehardt posted the essay at his site, and Juan Cole is requesting any citation of it be linked to TomGram, so I'll do that. He'll be discussing his perspective this afternoon at the New America Foundation in Washington, DC. Supposedly C-Span will be televising it live at 12:15 PM, and giving it an hour and a half. More >
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 20 Aug 2007 @ 21:59, by ming. Transportation
Oh, I'd really like my own luxury submarine. It's my birthday soon. But $78 million is a bit expensive of course. This is the Phoenix 1000.The Phoenix 1000 is a 65-meter (213') personal luxury submarine. The initial design was originally executed for a client and now awaits a buyer. As proposed, the submarine would constitute the single largest private undersea vehicle ever built, and arguably, one of the most significant personal transportation devices of the century.
This design, which we have named the Phoenix 1000, has more than ample space. The total interior area of the submarine is in excess of 460 square meters (5000 square feet). The significant volume, coupled with very large acrylic viewports, and the potential for relatively large open spaces, results in a vehicle as luxurious as the finest of motor yachts.
Clearly, the Phoenix provides its owner with substantially more capability than a simple yacht - the opportunity to explore the depths of the world's oceans in perfect comfort and safety. The Phoenix is capable of making trans-Atlantic crossings at 16 knots yet can dive along the route and explore the continental margins of some of the most fascinating waters on earth. And unlike surface yachts, when the water gets rough, the submarine can submerge into a perfectly smooth and quiet environment, continuing on toward its destination, providing a ride unsurpassed in quality-unequaled by the finest motor coach or the most luxurious executive aircraft... I probably shouldn't even be looking in brochures that say 'perfect comfort', 'unsurpassed' and 'ample' in every paragraph. But a luxury submarine is a nice thing to dream about. More >
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