STOP-THE-CLASH Who's afraid of Muslim Rage?

Our perception of reality is heavily influenced by what we choose to pay attention to as well as what the media decides to present to us. In both cases we are severely limited by the narrowness of those two perspectives. Recently we have been all but bombarded by images and media coverage focused on the unrest in the world apparently the result of a trashy islamophobic film entitled The Innocence of Muslims; violence which has led to or been associated with the death of the US Ambassador to Lybia, as well as to many other deaths and countless injuries. One could be forgiven I suppose in believing that every Muslim sanctions and participates in such irrational and violent reaction to something that should be dismissed out of hand as a ridiculous individual rant, of which there are countless examples in a free society.

But this would be unforgivable. Responsible thinking people should question the tendency to swallow hook line and sinker the media depiction of "news". The fact is, gaining an understanding of our world and the events that shape it requires a suspension of immediate perception in favor of a more measured and porbistic reflection. This means work, and unfortunately only an alarming few have the stomach for it. WPS

To gain some perspective on the unrest I propose the following article.

http://en.avaaz.org/783/muslim-rage-protests-newsweek-salafists?utm_source=avaaz_newsletter&utm_medium=blast&utm_campaign=stop-the-clash

Deepak Chopra: The Mideast Protests, Social Networks & the Global Brain

There’s a fascinating connection between the social network and where the human brain is going. For a long time, neuroscience held a wrong belief—several, actually—about the brain. The number of brain cells we have was seen as a fixed number that declined over time. No one realized that stem cells in the brain can renew lost neurons at any time of life. But the most exciting discovery was that everyday experience rewires the brain.

Even though it looks like a thing, your brain is a process. It is always in a state of dynamic flux. New connections and new cells are being born, and as the rewiring occurs, something astonishing happens. Your personal reality changes. The brain processes reality, and when new pathways are formed, the world becomes different.

We are witnessing a global test of this thesis in the Middle East. The future there seems to be a race between the mullahs and the iPad, between sermons in the mosque and tweets on a smartphone. After the Bush administration’s disastrous invasion of Iraq, the number of cellphones in that country exploded, even amid social collapse. Young people desperate to be part of the wider world started expressing their yearning through social networks. Tweets and texts were critical during the Arab Spring, especially in getting large numbers of protesters to gather in Cairo’s Tahrir Square.

When the moderate, progressive elements in Egyptlost to the Muslim Brotherhood, it seemed like a huge setback for social networks and a massive victory for the mullahs. Yet the long view is far more hopeful. Millions of tweets, texts, emails, and phone calls have one thing in common: they are neural signals in the global brain. A cabdriver talking all day on his cellphone in Manhattan is weaving himself into the society back home, and the more he communicates, the stronger the neural pathway he is creating.

Silent opposition brought down the Berlin Wall because consciousness, although invisible, is incredibly powerful. Social networks have the capacity to swiftly alter the global brain. On the surface, most tweets are small passing events. But stand back a bit, and you see that a new identity is being formed, a global “we” that anyone can participate in. This newly shaped global brain can topple the traditional barriers of religion, tribalism, nationalism, and political oppression.

Before the social network, think of what it took to escape the mindset of a repressed culture. You had to physically move away, plant yourself in a foreign country, and probably continue to fear for your relatives stuck back home. Now, in the darkest hours of Syrian resistance, as in Libya, Tunisia, and Egypt, anyone can send and receive messages from the global brain. As this stream of messages continues, it reshapes the individual brain, too.

What I’m saying isn’t mystical or hypothetical. The destiny of the whole planet depends on reaching beyond the narrow interests of rich nations and multinational corporations. A community of humanity needs to be formed. It’s completely possible for that to happen. In fragile, hopeful ways, it already has.

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Deepak Chopra is the author God: A Story of Revelation, in addition to more than other 60 books that have been translated into more than 80 languages and include numerous New York Times bestsellers. Dr. Chopra is a fellow of the American College of Physicians, a member of the American Association of Clinical Endocrinologists, adjunct professor at Kellogg School of Management, and senior scientist with The Gallup Organization. Timemagazine has described Dr. Chopra as one of the top 100 heroes and icons of the century and credits him as “the poet-prophet of alternative medicine.”

For inquiries, please contact The Daily Beast ateditorial@thedailybeast.com.

The Danger Of Isolated Conciousness




“We run heedlessly into the abyss after putting something in front of us to stop us from seeing it.”  Blaise Pasale

How is it possible that everyday people can perform roles that are so detrimental to everyone? What is the dynamic that allows society to engage in practices that are so wrong? Read the article by Chris Hedges to learn. Brilliant analysis and worth the 10 minutes or so to read.







The Careerists
By Chris Hedges
Posted on Jul 23, 2012

The greatest crimes of human history are made possible by the most colorless human beings. They are the careerists. The bureaucrats. The cynics. They do the little chores that make vast, complicated systems of exploitation and death a reality. They collect and read the personal data gathered on tens of millions of us by the security and surveillance state. They keep the accounts of ExxonMobil, BP and Goldman Sachs. They build or pilot aerial drones. They work in corporate advertising and public relations. They issue the forms. They process the papers. They deny food stamps to some and unemployment benefits or medical coverage to others. They enforce the laws and the regulations. And they do not ask questions.

Good. Evil. These words do not mean anything to them. They are beyond morality. They are there to make corporate systems function. If insurance companies abandon tens of millions of sick to suffer and die, so be it. If banks and sheriff departments toss families out of their homes, so be it. If financial firms rob citizens of their savings, so be it. If the government shuts down schools and libraries, so be it. If the military murders children in Pakistan or Afghanistan, so be it. If commodity speculators drive up the cost of rice and corn and wheat so that they are unaffordable for hundreds of millions of poor across the planet, so be it. If Congress and the courts strip citizens of basic civil liberties, so be it. If the fossil fuel industry turns the earth into a broiler of greenhouse gases that doom us, so be it. They serve the system. The god of profit and exploitation. The most dangerous force in the industrialized world does not come from those who wield radical creeds, whether Islamic radicalism or Christian fundamentalism, but from legions of faceless bureaucrats who claw their way up layered corporate and governmental machines. They serve any system that meets their pathetic quota of needs.

These systems managers believe nothing. They have no loyalty. They are rootless. They do not think beyond their tiny, insignificant roles. They are blind and deaf. They are, at least regarding the great ideas and patterns of human civilization and history, utterly illiterate. And we churn them out of universities. Lawyers. Technocrats. Business majors. Financial managers. IT specialists. Consultants. Petroleum engineers. “Positive psychologists.” Communications majors. Cadets. Sales representatives. Computer programmers. Men and women who know no history, know no ideas. They live and think in an intellectual vacuum, a world of stultifying minutia. They are T.S. Eliot’s “the hollow men,” “the stuffed men.” “Shape without form, shade without colour,” the poet wrote. “Paralysed force, gesture without motion.”

It was the careerists who made possible the genocides, from the extermination of Native Americans to the Turkish slaughter of the Armenians to the Nazi Holocaust to Stalin’s liquidations. They were the ones who kept the trains running. They filled out the forms and presided over the property confiscations. They rationed the food while children starved. They manufactured the guns. They ran the prisons. They enforced travel bans, confiscated passports, seized bank accounts and carried out segregation. They enforced the law. They did their jobs.


Political and military careerists, backed by war profiteers, have led us into useless wars, including World War I, Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan. And millions followed them. Duty. Honor. Country. Carnivals of death. They sacrifice us all. In the futile battles of Verdun and the Somme in World War I, 1.8 million on both sides were killed, wounded or never found. In July of 1917 British Field Marshal Douglas Haig, despite the seas of dead, doomed even more in the mud of Passchendaele. By November, when it was clear his promised breakthrough at Passchendaele had failed, he jettisoned the initial goal—as we did in Iraq when it turned out there were no weapons of mass destruction and in Afghanistan when al-Qaida left the country—and opted for a simple war of attrition. Haig “won” if more Germans than allied troops died. Death as score card. Passchendaele took 600,000 more lives on both sides of the line before it ended. It is not a new story. Generals are almost always buffoons. Soldiers followed John the Blind, who had lost his eyesight a decade earlier, to resounding defeat at the Battle of Crécy in 1337 during the Hundred Years War. We discover that leaders are mediocrities only when it is too late.

David Lloyd George, who was the British prime minister during the Passchendaele campaign, wrote in his memoirs: “[Before the battle of Passchendaele] the Tanks Corps Staff prepared maps to show how a bombardment which obliterated the drainage would inevitably lead to a series of pools, and they located the exact spots where the waters would gather. The only reply was a peremptory order that they were to ‘Send no more of these ridiculous maps.’ Maps must conform to plans and not plans to maps. Facts that interfered with plans were impertinencies.”

Here you have the explanation of why our ruling elites do nothing about climate change, refuse to respond rationally to economic meltdown and are incapable of coping with the collapse of globalization and empire. These are circumstances that interfere with the very viability and sustainability of the system. And bureaucrats know only how to serve the system. They know only the managerial skills they ingested at West Point or Harvard Business School. They cannot think on their own. They cannot challenge assumptions or structures. They cannot intellectually or emotionally recognize that the system might implode. And so they do what Napoleon warned was the worst mistake a general could make—paint an imaginary picture of a situation and accept it as real. But we blithely ignore reality along with them. The mania for a happy ending blinds us. We do not want to believe what we see. It is too depressing. So we all retreat into collective self-delusion.

In Claude Lanzmann’s monumental documentary film “Shoah,” on the Holocaust, he interviews Filip Müller, a Czech Jew who survived the liquidations in Auschwitz as a member of the “special detail.” Müller relates this story:

“One day in 1943 when I was already in Crematorium 5, a train from Bialystok arrived. A prisoner on the ‘special detail’ saw a woman in the ‘undressing room’ who was the wife of a friend of his. He came right out and told her: ‘You are going to be exterminated. In three hours you’ll be ashes.’ The woman believed him because she knew him. She ran all over and warned to the other women. ‘We’re going to be killed. We’re going to be gassed.’ Mothers carrying their children on their shoulders didn’t want to hear that. They decided the woman was crazy. They chased her away. So she went to the men. To no avail. Not that they didn’t believe her. They’d heard rumors in the Bialystok ghetto, or in Grodno, and elsewhere. But who wanted to hear that? When she saw that no one would listen, she scratched her whole face. Out of despair. In shock. And she started to scream.”

Blaise Pascal wrote in “Pensées,”

“We run heedlessly into the abyss after putting something
in front of us to stop us from seeing it.”


Hannah Arendt, in writing “Eichmann in Jerusalem,” noted that Adolf Eichmann was primarily motivated by “an extraordinary diligence in looking out for his personal advancement.” He joined the Nazi Party because it was a good career move. “The trouble with Eichmann,” she wrote, “was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal.”

“The longer one listened to him, the more obvious it became that his inability to speak was closely connected with an inability to think, namely, to think from the standpoint of somebody else,” Arendt wrote. “No communication was possible with him, not because he lied but because he was surrounded by the most reliable of all safeguards against words and the presence of others, and hence against reality as such.”


Gitta Sereny makes the same point in her book “Into That Darkness,” about Franz Stangl, the commandant of Treblinka. The assignment to the SS was a promotion for the Austrian policeman. Stangl was not a sadist. He was soft-spoken and polite. He loved his wife and children very much. Unlike most Nazi camp officers, he did not take Jewish women as concubines. He was efficient and highly organized. He took pride in having received an official commendation as the “best camp commander in Poland.” Prisoners were simply objects. Goods. “That was my profession,” he said. “I enjoyed it. It fulfilled me. And yes, I was ambitious about that, I won’t deny it.” When Sereny asked Stangl how as a father he could kill children, he answered that he “rarely saw them as individuals. It was always a huge mass. … [T]hey were naked, packed together, running, being driven with whips. …” He later told Sereny that when he read about lemmings it reminded him of Treblinka.

Christopher Browning’s collection of essays, “The Path to Genocide,” notes that it was the “moderate,” “normal” bureaucrats, not the zealots, who made the Holocaust possible. Germaine Tillion pointed out “the tragic easiness [during the Holocaust] with which ‘decent’ people could become the most callous executioners without seeming to notice what was happening to them.” The Russian novelist Vasily Grossman in his book “Forever Flowing” observed that “the new state did not require holy apostles, fanatic, inspired builders, faithful, devout disciples. The new state did not even require servants—just clerks.”

“The most nauseating type of S.S. were to me personally the cynics who no longer genuinely believed in their cause, but went on collecting blood guilt for its own sake,” wrote Dr. Ella Lingens-Reiner in “Prisoners of Fear,” her searing memoir of Auschwitz. “Those cynics were not always brutal to the prisoners, their behavior changed with their mood. They took nothing seriously—neither themselves nor their cause, neither us nor our situation. One of the worst among them was Dr. Mengele, the Camp Doctor I have mentioned before. When a batch of newly arrived Jews was being classified into those fit for work and those fit for death, he would whistle a melody and rhythmically jerk his thumb over his right or his left shoulder—which meant ‘gas’ or ‘work.’ He thought conditions in the camp rotten, and even did a few things to improve them, but at the same time he committed murder callously, without any qualms.”

These armies of bureaucrats serve a corporate system that will quite literally kill us. They are as cold and disconnected as Mengele. They carry out minute tasks. They are docile. Compliant. They obey. They find their self-worth in the prestige and power of the corporation, in the status of their positions and in their career promotions. They assure themselves of their own goodness through their private acts as husbands, wives, mothers and fathers. They sit on school boards. They go to Rotary. They attend church. It is moral schizophrenia. They erect walls to create an isolated consciousness. They make the lethal goals of ExxonMobil or Goldman Sachs or Raytheon or insurance companies possible. They destroy the ecosystem, the economy and the body politic and turn workingmen and -women into impoverished serfs. They feel nothing. Metaphysical naiveté always ends in murder. It fragments the world. Little acts of kindness and charity mask the monstrous evil they abet. And the system rolls forward. The polar ice caps melt. The droughts rage over cropland. The drones deliver death from the sky. The state moves inexorably forward to place us in chains. The sick die. The poor starve. The prisons fill. And the careerist, plodding forward, does his or her job.

America's Street Priest

America’s Street Priest

June 10/2012

Illustration by Mr. Fish

By Chris Hedges

The Rev. Daniel Berrigan, undaunted at 92 and full of the fire that makes him one of this nation’s most courageous voices for justice, stands in New York City’s Zuccotti Park. He is there, along with other clergy, to ask Trinity Church, which is the third-largest landowner in Manhattan, to drop charges against Occupy activists, including retired Episcopal Bishop George Packard, for occupying its empty lot on 6th Avenue and Canal Street on Dec. 17. The protesters, slated to go to court Monday, June 11, hoped to establish a new Liberty Square on the lot after being evicted by New York City police from Zuccotti in November. But Trinity had the demonstrators arrested. It chose to act like a real estate company, or the corporation it has become, rather than a church. And its steadfast refusal to drop the charges means that many of those arrested, including Packard, could spend as long as three months in jail.

“This is the only way to bring faith to the public and the public to the faith,” Berrigan said softly as we spoke before the demonstration in the park that was once the epicenter of Occupy Wall Street. “If faith does not touch the lives of others it has no point. Faith always starts with oneself. It means an overriding sense of responsibility for the universe, making sure that universe is left in good hands and the belief that things will finally turn out right if we remain faithful. But I underscore the word ‘faithful.’ This faith was embodied in the Occupy movement from the first day. The official churches remained slow. It is up to us to take the initiative and hope the churches catch up.”

There is one place, Berrigan says, where those who care about justice need to be—in the streets. The folly of electoral politics, the colossal waste of energy invested in the charade of the Wisconsin recall, which once again funneled hopes and passion back into a dead political system and a bankrupt Democratic Party, the failure by large numbers of citizens to carry out mass acts of civil disobedience, will only ensure that we remain hostages to corporate power.

Berrigan believes, as did Martin Luther King, that “the evils of capitalism are as real as the evils of militarism and the evils of racism.” And he has dedicated his life to fighting these evils. It is a life worth emulating.

Berrigan, a Jesuit priest, was ordained 70 years ago. He was a professor at Le Moyne College, Cornel University and Fordham University. His book of poems, “Time Without Number,” won the Lamont Poetry Prize. But it is as a religious radical that he gained national prominence, as well as numerous enemies within the Roman Catholic hierarchy. He and his brother Philip Berrigan, a Josephite priest and World War II combat veteran, along with the Trappist monk Thomas Merton, led some of the first protests against the Vietnam War. In 1967 Philip Berrigan was arrested for nonviolent civil disobedience and was sentenced to six years in prison. Philip’s sentence spurred Daniel to greater activism. He traveled to Hanoi with the historian Howard Zinn to bring back three American prisoners of war. And then he and eight other Catholic priests concocted homemade napalm and on May 17, 1968, used it to burn 378 draft files in the parking lot of the Catonsville, Md., draft board.

“Our apologies, good friends, for the fracture of good order, the burning of paper instead of children,” Berrigan wrote at the time of the destruction of draft files. “How many must die before our voices are heard, how many must be tortured, dislocated, starved, maddened? When, at what point, will you say no to this war?”

Berrigan was a fugitive for four months after being sentenced. He was apprehended by the FBI in the home of the writer William Stringfellow, whose decision to live and write out of Harlem in the 1950s and whose books “Dissenter in a Great Society” and “My People Is the Enemy” were instrumental in prompting me as a seminarian to live and work in Boston’s inner city, in the Roxbury neighborhood. Berrigan was sentenced to three years and released from the federal prison in Danbury, Conn., in 1972. But he did not stop. In 1980 he and Philip, along with six other protesters, illegally entered the General Electric nuclear missile facility in King of Prussia, Pa. They damaged nuclear warhead cones and poured blood onto documents. He was again sentenced and then paroled for time already served in prison. Philip, by the time he died in 2002, had spent more than a decade in prison for acts of civil disobedience. Philip Berrigan, Zinn said in eulogizing him, was “one of the great Americans of our time.”

“If voting changed anything, they’d make it illegal,” he said to me, quoting Emma Goldman. He added his brother Phil’s reminder that “if enough Christians follow the Gospel, they can bring any state to its knees.”In a culture that lacks many authentic heroes, that continues to preach that military service is the highest good, Berrigan is a potent reminder of what we must seek to become. His is a life of constant agitation, constant defiance, constant disobedience to systems of power, a life of radical obedience to God. His embrace of what has been called “Christian anarchism,” because of its persistent alienation and hostility to all forms of power, is the most effective form of resistance. And it is the clearest expression of the Christian Gospel. Berrigan has been arrested numerous times—“I don’t waste time counting,” he told me—for also protesting American intervention in Central America and the first Gulf War, as well as the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He has demonstrated against the death penalty, in support of LGBT rights and against abortion. And even in his 90s he is not finished.

“Some people today argue that equanimity achieved through inner spiritual work is a necessary condition for sustaining one’s ethical and political commitments,” Berrigan writes. “But to the prophets of the Bible, this would have been an absolutely foreign language and a foreign view of the human. The notion that one has to achieve peace of mind before stretching out one’s hand to one’s neighbor is a distortion of our human experience, and ultimately a dodge of our responsibility. Life is a rollercoaster, and one had better buckle one’s belt and take the trip. This focus on equanimity is actually a narrow-minded, selfish approach to reality dressed up within the language of spirituality.”

“I know that the prophetic vision is not popular today in some spiritual circles,” he goes on. “But our task is not to be popular or to be seen as having an impact, but to speak the deepest truths that we know. We need to live our lives in accord with the deepest truths we know, even if doing so does not produce immediate results in the world.”

Berrigan says he is sustained by his “invisible witnesses”: those he loves, such as the Catholic Worker founder Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton and his brother Philip, who, although all deceased, give him the power and the strength to continue to resist.

“They are not absent,” he said in our conversation. “Their presence is not erased. Their presence is purer and stronger. And their presence is victory over death. It is love. And in their presence I find strength.”

“But what of the price of peace?” Berrigan writes in his book “No Bars to Manhood.” “I think of the good, decent, peace-loving people I have known by the thousands, and I wonder. How many of them are so afflicted with the wasting disease of normalcy that, even as they declare for peace, their hands reach out with an instinctive spasm in the direction of their loved ones, in the direction of their comforts, their home, their security, their income, their future, their plans—that twenty-year plan of family growth and unity, that fifty-year plan of decent life and honorable natural demise. ‘Of course, let us have the peace,’ we cry, but at the same time let us have normalcy, let us lose nothing, let our lives stand intact, let us know neither prison nor ill repute nor disruption of ties.’ ”

Contrast Daniel Berrigan, who lives in a single room with a half dozen other retired priests in a parish house in lower Manhattan, with the imperious rector of Trinity Church, the Rev. Dr. James Cooper. Cooper earns $1.3 million a year, lives in a $5.5 million SoHo townhouse, receives a church allowance to maintain his Florida condo, dips into church funds to take his family on African safaris and oversees the church’s $1 billion in Manhattan real estate holdings from which the church receives as much as $30 million a year. He spent $5 million on a public relations campaign, nearly double the $2.7 million the church gave out in grants, in one year. Ten of the church’s 22-member vestry—its board of directors—have quit over Cooper’s authoritarianism and extravagance.

Cooper, like Berrigan, attended seminary and studied the Gospel, but he has modeled his life after Herod rather than Jesus. He has turned Trinity Church into a temple to greed. He is an appropriate priest for Wall Street. And on Monday, when activists appear in court because he and the other leaders of Trinity Church are determined to prosecute them, Cooper should consider removing the Christian cross from the sanctuary and replacing it with the true symbol he appears to worship—the dollar sign.

“All we have is one another to sustain us,” Berrigan told me. “Community is not magical. It means people are willing to be human beings together. And it means they are willing to pay the price for being human.”

SAP It Gets Better

Very touching testimonials from the employees of SAP, a global innovation company that values "different".

The Last Word with Lawrence O'Connell

Lawrence O'Connell treats the issue of conflating the bible with the constitution in this country political discussion. He interviews Anthea Butler,  Dean of Graduate Religious Studies at the University of Pennsylvania.

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

Protest in Maiden NC against Charles Worley

On May 27, 2012 I attended a protest rally held in response to a particularly hateful sermon preached by Charles Worley on Mother's day. (for a discussion see next post) In the sermon he advocated placing homosexuals and lesbians in concentration camps and called Obama a baby killing faggot. I was honored to be a part of this group, standing up for human rights and basic dignity. A few photos here. More photos here

About 2000 came to Maiden NC to protest the hate filled
sermon of Charles Worley

Protesters listen patiently as a preacher spouts venom

 .

 The protesters sang hymns and other peace songs and chanted "Love not Hate" in unison.

 Some interesting perspectives on the issue.

The small sign reads "I'm with stupid!"

Prop 8; The film

The proceedings were blocked from public view, but the transcript was turned into a dramatic re-creation of the proceedings. Important viewing to understand the drivers behind the issue.

Cognitive Dissonance (Wiliiam Stanhope)

It amazes me sometimes how people can seemingly reject facts,  ideas and practices (personal and political) that are clearly good for them in favor of emotional biases that are purely personal and have no overall positive effect on society. This is explained by cognitive dissonance or the inability for most people to make a clear and rational decision because of the emotional pain associated with a strongly held belief system. .

Politicians, as well as others in positions of power,  know how to exploit this human weakness; they know how to package ideas to maximize the emotional content and to minimize the factual content. They know that certain hot button issues and highly charged words will illicit a very painful reaction in people and those people will reject the facts.in favor of a course of action that reduces their emotional discomfort.

Here in North Carolina we just passed an amendment that will do great harm to a large number of people because it will only legally sanction marriage between a man and a woman. Every other relationship, including any form of civil union or domestic partnership, will have no legal standing. The facts are that certain people will be adversely affected. Children will likely be affected because any benefits their parents enjoy will possibly be removed placing them in a less stable position. End of life decisions and medical decisions will become more delicate, possibly impossible, for partners that have no legal standing. Estate planning and wealth management will become more complicated, leaving partners (straight or otherwise) in a precarious position without legal protections, especially if contested by blood relatives.

This amendment was passed because the power brokers used the 2 "G" words; God and Gay, even though same sex marriage is already illegal in NC. They connected those two points of reference, ignoring the facts and rarely if ever mentioning the negative effects passage of the amendment would have for a very broad range of the population. Many people acted against the better interests of the group as a whole in favor of a more palatable emotional decision, one less emotionally painful but logically not the correct decision in terms of overall benefit to the collective society. How so?

Stable relationships benefit society as a whole on all levels. Children are less vulnerable. Families are less financially challenged. People are happier. There is less discrimination when people are allowed to participate in society as fully recognized and legally protected members. Equality, meaning equal protection for all, is served and this supports the constitution of the US. (We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness)


I am saddened that once again cognitive dissonance has prevented the majority of people in NC to make the right decision. I am disappointed that powerful people have chosen to undermine collective well-being through appeals to emotionally painful issues and personal preference, especially religious beliefs often used to divide rather than unite groups of people. Billy Graham, who is now 93 years old, took out full page ads in 11 newspapers the weekend before the vote, which appealed to the emotional discomfort of people by invoking the 2 "G" words, thus making it impossible for them to make a rational decision.  How sad that his parting shot in this world (at 93 there can't be much time left) would cause so much pain and harm to so many people in NC.

Still illegal in 76 countries.

Acomprehensive study of global lesbian, bisexual and gay rights, seen by 
The Independent on Sunday, reveals the brutal – and, in many instances, fatal – price people pay around the globe for their sexuality. The research, which was conducted by the charity network the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association (ILGA), shows that 76 countries still prosecute people on the grounds of their sexual orientation – seven of which punish same-sex acts with death.


Read more


http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/politics/more-than-70-countries-make-being-gay-a-crime-2040850.html

The Cult of the Self and it's Implications.

Welcome to the Asylum


A well articulated analysis of society's current state of decline and it's causes. The pressing question is "Can we turn this around?" Is there any possibility to interrupt this cycle and pull out of the suicide dive we find ourselves in?

Welcome To The Asylum by Chris Hedges
When civilizations start to die they go insane. Let the ice sheets in the Arctic melt. Let the temperatures rise. Let the air, soil and water be poisoned. Let the forests die. Let the seas be emptied of life. Let one useless war after another be waged. Let the masses be thrust into extreme poverty and left without jobs while the elites, drunk on hedonism, accumulate vast fortunes through exploitation, speculation, fraud and theft. Reality, at the end, gets unplugged. We live in an age when news consists of Snooki’s pregnancy, Hulk Hogan’s sex tape and Kim Kardashian’s denial that she is the naked woman cooking eggs in a photo circulating on the Internet. Politicians, including presidents, appear on late night comedy shows to do gags and they campaign on issues such as creating a moon colony. “[A]t times when the page is turning,” Louis-Ferdinand Celine wrote in “Castle to Castle,” “when History brings all the nuts together, opens its Epic Dance Halls! hats and heads in the whirlwind! Panties overboard!”
The quest by a bankrupt elite in the final days of empire to accumulate greater and greater wealth, as Karl Marx observed, is modern society’s version of primitive fetishism. This quest, as there is less and less to exploit, leads to mounting repression, increased human suffering, a collapse of infrastructure and, finally, collective death. It is the self-deluded, those on Wall Street or among the political elite, those who entertain and inform us, those who lack the capacity to question the lusts that will ensure our self-annihilation, who are held up as exemplars of intelligence, success and progress. The World Health Organization calculates that one in four people in the United States suffers from chronic anxiety, a mood disorder or depression—which seems to me to be a normal reaction to our march toward collective suicide. Welcome to the asylum.
When the most basic elements that sustain life are reduced to a cash product, life has no intrinsic value. The extinguishing of “primitive” societies, those that were defined by animism and mysticism, those that celebrated ambiguity and mystery, those that respected the centrality of the human imagination, removed the only ideological counterweight to a self-devouring capitalist ideology. Those who held on to pre-modern beliefs, such as Native Americans, who structured themselves around a communal life and self-sacrifice rather than hoarding and wage exploitation, could not be accommodated within the ethic of capitalist exploitation, the cult of the self and the lust for imperial expansion. The prosaic was pitted against the allegorical. And as we race toward the collapse of the planet’s ecosystem we must restore this older vision of life if we are to survive.
The war on the Native Americans, like the wars waged by colonialists around the globe, was waged to eradicate not only a people but a competing ethic. The older form of human community was antithetical and hostile to capitalism, the primacy of the technological state and the demands of empire. This struggle between belief systems was not lost on Marx. “The Ethnological Notebooks of Karl Marx” is a series of observations derived from Marx’s reading of works by historians and anthropologists. He took notes about the traditions, practices, social structure, economic systems and beliefs of numerous indigenous cultures targeted for destruction. Marx noted arcane details about the formation of Native American society, but also that “lands [were] owned by the tribes in common, while tenement-houses [were] owned jointly by their occupants.” He wrote of the Aztecs, “Commune tenure of lands; Life in large households composed of a number of related families.” He went on, “… reasons for believing they practiced communism in living in the household.” Native Americans, especially the Iroquois, provided the governing model for the union of the American colonies, and also proved vital to Marx and Engel’s vision of communism.

To read the entire article (one more page) follow this link:
http://www.truthdig.com/report/item/welcome_to_the_asylum_20120430//

When you Love, The Universe Smiles

Plenitude Economy: Creating a New and Sustainable Reality

The High Price of Materialism

Basic Human Rights

Hillary Clinton's important speech. 8 key points:

Tuesday's landmark speech from Secretary of State Hillary Clinton outlined the United States' stance on an "invisible minority" in many countries, as she put it — LGBT and gender-varyiant people. The full speech is available here, but if you're in a hurry, here are eight key points made during her address on global gay rights to United Nations member countries.


1. On the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

It proclaims a simple, powerful idea: All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. And with the declaration, it was made clear that rights are not conferred by government; they are the birthright of all people. It does not matter what country we live in, who our leaders are, or even who we are. Because we are human, we therefore have rights. And because we have rights, governments are bound to protect them.

2. On the Status of LGBT Rights in the U.S.

I speak about this subject knowing that my own country's record on human rights for gay people is far from perfect. Until 2003, it was still a crime in parts of our country. Many LGBT Americans have endured violence and harassment in their own lives, and for some, including many young people, bullying and exclusion are daily experiences. So we, like all nations, have more work to do to protect human rights at home.

3. Why Do Countries Need to Distinguish Gay Rights?

Some have suggested that gay rights and human rights are separate and distinct; but, in fact, they are one and the same. Now, of course, 60 years ago, the governments that drafted and passed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights were not thinking about how it applied to the LGBT community. They also weren’t thinking about how it applied to indigenous people or children or people with disabilities or other marginalized groups. Yet in the past 60 years, we have come to recognize that members of these groups are entitled to the full measure of dignity and rights, because, like all people, they share a common humanity.

This recognition did not occur all at once. It evolved over time. And as it did, we understood that we were honoring rights that people always had, rather than creating new or special rights for them. Like being a woman, like being a racial, religious, tribal, or ethnic minority, being LGBT does not make you less human. And that is why gay rights are human rights, and human rights are gay rights.

4. What Are Violations of Gay Rights?

- When a person is beaten or killed because of their sexual orientation, or because they do not conform to cultural norms about how men and women should look or behave

- When governments declare it illegal to be gay, or allow those who harm gay people to go unpunished

- When lesbian or transgendered women are subjected to so-called corrective rape, or forcibly subjected to hormone treatments

- When people are murdered after public calls for violence toward gays, or when they are forced to flee their nations and seek asylum in other lands to save their lives.

- When lifesaving care is withheld from people because they are gay, or equal access to justice is denied to people because they are gay, or public spaces are out of bounds to people because they are gay.

5. On Arcane Views on Homosexuality


Some seem to believe it is a Western phenomenon, and therefore people outside the West have grounds to reject it. Well, in reality, gay people are born into and belong to every society in the world. They are all ages, all races, all faiths; they are doctors and teachers, farmers and bankers, soldiers and athletes; and whether we know it, or whether we acknowledge it, they are our family, our friends, and our neighbors. Being gay is not a Western invention; it is a human reality.

6. On Religious Doctrine and Gay Acceptance

It bears noting that rarely are cultural and religious traditions and teachings actually in conflict with the protection of human rights. Indeed, our religion and our culture are sources of compassion and inspiration toward our fellow human beings. It was not only those who’ve justified slavery who leaned on religion, it was also those who sought to abolish it. And let us keep in mind that our commitments to protect the freedom of religion and to defend the dignity of LGBT people emanate from a common source. For many of us, religious belief and practice is a vital source of meaning and identity, and fundamental to who we are as people. And likewise, for most of us, the bonds of love and family that we forge are also vital sources of meaning and identity. And caring for others is an expression of what it means to be fully human.

7. How Laws Push Progress

In many places, including my own country, legal protections have preceded, not followed, broader recognition of rights. Laws have a teaching effect. Laws that discriminate validate other kinds of discrimination. Laws that require equal protections reinforce the moral imperative of equality. And practically speaking, it is often the case that laws must change before fears about change dissipate.

8. Clinton's Message to Gays Around the World

And finally, to LGBT men and women worldwide, let me say this: Wherever you live and whatever the circumstances of your life, whether you are connected to a network of support or feel isolated and vulnerable, please know that you are not alone. People around the globe are working hard to support you and to bring an end to the injustices and dangers you face. That is certainly true for my country. And you have an ally in the United States of America and you have millions of friends among the American people.

Family Values

In the state of NC there is a vote on May 8 to further limit the rights of certain families. Basically, the new language (should the amendment pass) would remove any legal protections from civil unions and domestic partnerships. Long standing committed couples would suddenly see all of their legal rights removed, or what few they have. This is destructive of families. A family is about love and commitment. A family exists for the wellbeing of the children and creates a stable environment for their healthy development. Families also exist for the legal and emotional support of each person in the relationship. Anything that we can do to support that is worthy. This amendment is not worthy and should not pass because it hurts real families. Please vote to reject this amendment on May 8, 2012.

I have posted a few videos for you to watch if you are still unsure of how to vote.

Claremont School of Theology

The view from this place of theological study is refreshingly enlightened. The fundamental question is about how to put the human family together so that everyone feels valued and respected.


Beyond Inclusion: Sexual Diversity and Claremont School of Theology from Claremont on Vimeo.

Occupy Wall Street

A naescent movement that gives voice to the frustrations about the direction of this country. Watch the video here

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n4vQDFYZuGg&feature=colike

On Love and Marriage

Lately there has been much in the news about Gay marriage both supporting it and denigrating it as the beginning of the end for American society. I personally find those latter arguments offensive and hypocritical. This society is doing quite well falling apart even without Gay marriage thank you very much!

Anyway, Keith Olbermann (I know, he can be a bit over the top) has managed to put together a few words on the subject which I find cogent and relevant to the debate.

Here is the link to the YouTube video

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=GsHDmfRk9QM

Living Large in a Small Way

Check out the 64square foot house that Dee Williams lives in! Gives a new definition to downsizing. Whatever form that might take, it is the new reality for a sustainable future; finding ways to use less without necessarily losing on the quality of life one experiences.

Follow the link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eZM2G-PfEbc&feature=player_embedded