Oliver Burkeman and Julian Borger in Washington, Thursday November 20, 2003
nternational lawyers and anti-war campaigners reacted with astonishment yesterday after the influential Pentagon hawk Richard Perle conceded that the invasion of Iraq had been illegal.
In a startling break with the official White House and Downing Street lines, Mr Perle told an audience in London: "I think in this case international law stood in the way of doing the right thing."
President George Bush has consistently argued that the war was legal either because of existing UN security council resolutions on Iraq - also the British government's publicly stated view - or as an act of self-defence permitted by international law.
But Mr Perle, a key member of the defence policy board, which advises the US defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, said that "international law ... would have required us to leave Saddam Hussein alone", and this would have been morally unacceptable.
French intransigence, he added, meant there had been "no practical mechanism consistent with the rules of the UN for dealing with Saddam Hussein".
Mr Perle, who was speaking at an event organised by the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, had argued loudly for the toppling of the Iraqi dictator since the end of the 1991 Gulf war.
"They're just not interested in international law, are they?" said Linda Hugl, a spokeswoman for the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, which launched a high court challenge to the war's legality last year. "It's only when the law suits them that they want to use it."
Mr Perle's remarks bear little resemblance to official justifications for war, according to Rabinder Singh QC, who represented CND and also participated in Tuesday's event.
Certainly the British government, he said, "has never advanced the suggestion that it is entitled to act, or right to act, contrary to international law in relation to Iraq".
The Pentagon adviser's views, he added, underlined "a divergence of view between the British govern ment and some senior voices in American public life [who] have expressed the view that, well, if it's the case that international law doesn't permit unilateral pre-emptive action without the authority of the UN, then the defect is in international law".
Mr Perle's view is not the official one put forward by the White House. Its main argument has been that the invasion was justified under the UN charter, which guarantees the right of each state to self-defence, including pre-emptive self-defence. On the night bombing began, in March, Mr Bush reiterated America's "sovereign authority to use force" to defeat the threat from Baghdad.
The UN secretary general, Kofi Annan, has questioned that justification, arguing that the security council would have to rule on whether the US and its allies were under imminent threat.
Coalition officials countered that the security council had already approved the use of force in resolution 1441, passed a year ago, warning of "serious consequences" if Iraq failed to give a complete ac counting of its weapons programmes.
Other council members disagreed, but American and British lawyers argued that the threat of force had been implicit since the first Gulf war, which was ended only by a ceasefire.
"I think Perle's statement has the virtue of honesty," said Michael Dorf, a law professor at Columbia University who opposed the war, arguing that it was illegal.
"And, interestingly, I suspect a majority of the American public would have supported the invasion almost exactly to the same degree that they in fact did, had the administration said that all along."
The controversy-prone Mr Perle resigned his chairmanship of the defence policy board earlier this year but remained a member of the advisory board.
Meanwhile, there was a hint that the US was trying to find a way to release the Britons held at Guantanamo Bay.
The US secretary of state, Colin Powell, said Mr Bush was "very sensitive" to British sentiment. "We also expect to be resolving this in the near future," he told the BBC.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/Iraq/Story/0,2763,1089158,00.html
Tuesday, December 04, 2007
Friday, November 23, 2007
The Paradox of our Age
We have taller buildings, but shorter tempers;
wider freeways, but narrower viewpoints;
we spend more, but have less;
we buy more, but enjoy it less.
We have bigger houses and smaller families;
more conveniences, but less time;
we have more degrees, but less sense;
more knowledge, but less judgment;
more experts, but more problems;
more medicine, but less wellness.
We drink too much,
smoke too much,
spend too recklessly,
laugh too little,
drive too fast,
get too angry too quickly,
stay up too late,
get up too tired,
read too seldom,
watch TV too much,
and pray too seldom.
We have multiplied our possessions, but reduced our values.
We talk too much, love too seldom and lie too often.
We've learned how to make a living, but not a life;
We've added years to life, not life to years.
We've been all the way to the moon and back,
but have trouble crossing the street to meet the new neighbor.
We've conquered outer space, but not inner space;
we've done larger things, but not better things;
we've cleaned up the air, but polluted the soul;
we've split the atom, but not our prejudice;
we write more, but learn less;
plan more, but accomplish less.
We've learned to rush, but not to wait;
we have higher incomes; but lower morals;
more food but less appeasement;
We build more computers to hold more information,
to produce more copies than ever, but have less communication;
we've become long on quantity, but short on quality.
These are the times of fast foods and slow digestion;
tall men, and short character;
steep profits, and shallow relationships.
These are the times of world peace, but domestic warfare;
more leisure and less fun;
more kinds of food, but less nutrition.
These are days of two incomes, but more divorce;
of fancier houses, but broken homes.
These are days of quick trips,
disposable diapers,
throwaway morality,
one-night stands,
overweight bodies,
and pills that do everything from cheer,
to quiet,
to kill.
It is a time when there is much in the show window
and nothing in the stockroom.
Indeed it's all true.
------------
http://www.ntu.edu.sg/home/hblim/passages/paradox.htm
wider freeways, but narrower viewpoints;
we spend more, but have less;
we buy more, but enjoy it less.
We have bigger houses and smaller families;
more conveniences, but less time;
we have more degrees, but less sense;
more knowledge, but less judgment;
more experts, but more problems;
more medicine, but less wellness.
We drink too much,
smoke too much,
spend too recklessly,
laugh too little,
drive too fast,
get too angry too quickly,
stay up too late,
get up too tired,
read too seldom,
watch TV too much,
and pray too seldom.
We have multiplied our possessions, but reduced our values.
We talk too much, love too seldom and lie too often.
We've learned how to make a living, but not a life;
We've added years to life, not life to years.
We've been all the way to the moon and back,
but have trouble crossing the street to meet the new neighbor.
We've conquered outer space, but not inner space;
we've done larger things, but not better things;
we've cleaned up the air, but polluted the soul;
we've split the atom, but not our prejudice;
we write more, but learn less;
plan more, but accomplish less.
We've learned to rush, but not to wait;
we have higher incomes; but lower morals;
more food but less appeasement;
We build more computers to hold more information,
to produce more copies than ever, but have less communication;
we've become long on quantity, but short on quality.
These are the times of fast foods and slow digestion;
tall men, and short character;
steep profits, and shallow relationships.
These are the times of world peace, but domestic warfare;
more leisure and less fun;
more kinds of food, but less nutrition.
These are days of two incomes, but more divorce;
of fancier houses, but broken homes.
These are days of quick trips,
disposable diapers,
throwaway morality,
one-night stands,
overweight bodies,
and pills that do everything from cheer,
to quiet,
to kill.
It is a time when there is much in the show window
and nothing in the stockroom.
Indeed it's all true.
------------
http://www.ntu.edu.sg/home/hblim/passages/paradox.htm
Monday, November 19, 2007
War’s a drug and I got hooked on the carnage of Chechnya
The author of an acclaimed memoir of his life as a Russian soldier, tells how combat and the brutality inflicted on him by his own side claimed his soul.
He is an unlikely hero, as heroes often are. Arkady Babchenko, born in Moscow, the only son of a middle-class family, wanted to be a lawyer. But in November 1995, in his second year of law studies, he was conscripted into the Russian army and sent to Chechnya.
There, as a soldier, he encountered killings, beatings, starvation and sheer terror, all the brutalities and humiliations of war. Yet a few years later, after graduating, he was irresistibly drawn back to fight a second time in the bitter conflict in the tiny republic in the north Caucasus that was trying to break away from the Russian Federation; this time he went as a volunteer soldier.
“Maybe war is the strongest narcotic in the world,” he says. He cannot otherwise explain why he volunteered. “Maybe because my past was there, a large part of my life. It was as if only my body had returned from that first war, but not my soul.”
In Chechnya something happened to him as he stood on the edge of humanity: the war was dehumanising but it moulded his manhood. It taught him to be a survivor and, he says, it made him a completely different person.
Related Links
* One Soldier's War in Chechnya
* One Soldier's War in Chechnya
“When I returned from the war, my mother did not get back her son,” he says. “The Arkady Babchenko who went to war does not exist any more. I am a new man with different interests, different friends, a different outlook on life. I am not happy that the war happened in my life, but I have no regrets.”
Chechnya cost thousands of lives on both sides. Horror was everywhere. Round the main square of one village were large crosses upon which Russian soldiers had been crucified and castrated.
In retaliation Russian troops herded all the men they could find into the square, threw them down in piles and hacked at them. In half a day the whole village was castrated, then the battalion moved out.
But many of Babchenko's comrades were killed, not by their Chechen enemies but by the brutal conduct of their own Russian officer corps who starved and beat the young conscripts, suppressing everything that was human in them, destroying their personality and individuality, treating them, he says, no better than slaves.
That Babchenko, now 30, is alive at all to tell this grim tale is a constant puzzle to him. Tall and slender, with stubble on his chin, he has melancholy brown eyes that still have the stare of a man who has seen death at close hand. He suffers survivor’s guilt.
He was having coffee in Soho last week after readings at London’s South Bank Centre from his acclaimed book on the conflict, One Soldier’s War in Chechnya, and admits that while he does not miss war, without its extremes of highs and lows it has left everything else flat.
“You would imagine that this trip to Britain would impress me and have an impact on me,” he says. “Yet it is not happening. Of course war was the lowest point as well as the highest in my life. Because I had buried all my sensations there I am totally immune to anything now. I have slowly regained some of the feelings but not all of them, so my senses are not all there.”
He thinks he is suffering from the same emptiness described by some survivors from Stalin’s gulags – “this totally destructive, negative experience which wipes out everything in you”.
More and more these days, Babchenko is recognising that just being alive is a gift. He was a colleague of the late Anna Politkovskaya, the renowned Russian journalist and fierce critic of President Vladimir Putin’s policies in Chechnya, who was murdered just over a year ago. He remains deeply affected by her killing.
Politkovskaya, 48, had been working on an article about torture in Chechnya. Her still unsolved murder – she was found shot dead in the lift of her Moscow apartment block – had all the hallmarks of a contract killing.
Like Babchenko she worked for the newspaper Novaya Gazeta (New Newspaper). Although he says that he has not received death threats Babchenko, also an ardent Putin critic, admits that he now wonders how safe he is in a Russia where more than a dozen journalists have been murdered in recent years.
This and more makes him fear for Putin’s Russia. “I think it is hanging on a brink of an incredible precipice,” he says. “It has not yet fallen to the bottom. But it has not quite got out.
“Russia’s problem is that it is too big. It is also its saving grace. There is so much inertia because of its size that the upheavals and perturbations are absorbed by this enormous body of the country.
“I do think it will slowly emerge. You can see the signs of an emerging civil society but Putin is pushing Russia down, trampling it into the mud even further. That is the logic of his actions.”
But, he says, the West should not be frightened of Russia, for all the aggressive rhetoric from the Kremlin. “Rather we, not the West, should be the ones to be frightened of Russia. No Russian tanks will ever enter London, Paris or Berlin.”
Moreover, he says that the Russian army is no longer a good fighting army. It was at its most professional, well trained and combat experienced in 1989 when it withdrew from Afghanistan. But the best army officers resigned over Chechnya after 1995. They felt betrayed that the high command had sold them and gone into the conflict just to make money. There were no high ideals worth fighting for.
In Chechnya, he writes, thieving was both the foundation of the war and its reason for continuing: “Ours is an army of workers and peasants, reduced to desperation by constant underfunding, half crazed with hunger and a lack of accommodation, flogged and beaten by all, regardless of the consequences, regardless of badges of rank, stripped of all rights. This is not an army but a herd drawn from the dregs of the criminal masses, lawless apart from the dictates of jackals that run it.”
He tells how the soldiers sold cartridges, the drivers sold diesel oil, the cooks sold tinned meat and the battalion commanders sold the soldiers’ food, while the regimental commanders trucked away vehicle-loads of equipment and the generals stole the actual vehicles themselves. Many Russian soldiers, he believes, were killed by bullets and guns that their desperate comrades had sold to the Chechens for food.
One day, he writes, two recruits were caught selling ammunition through the wire to Chechen children for vodka and came in for specially sadistic treatment. After a savage beating they were put in a pit for hours, then taken out, suspended by a rope from a makeshift gallows for a day and a half, then they had their toes wired to a hand-driven electric generator.
“Afterwards the armaments officer unties the ropes and they fall to the ground like sacks of flour. They can’t stand or lift their swollen arms. Their hands have gone black and their fingers are twisted,” Babchencko writes.
These days Babchenko does not maintain links or contacts with the comrades he fought alongside: “I don’t want to see the people whom I saw being beasts and they don’t want to see me because we both experienced this animal state back then in Chechnya. We have gone our different ways and the things that unite us are not the best things in our lives by far.”
But, in another way, he cannot completely let go of his military past. He runs a hugely successful website and a magazine written by Russian war veterans – a copy of which he has brought with him to London – that tries to reflect, analyse and do something about the war that so changed their lives.
The cover of its latest issue is the cemetery at Bogorodskoye, 30 miles from Moscow, where all the unidentified Russian soldiers killed in Chechnya are buried after years stored in a refrigerator. The magazine and website are filled with their stories, diaries and songs.
Paradoxically it is for these things and not his remarkable book, which has been so acclaimed in the West, that Babchenko is best known in Russia. Here his book is being compared with All Quiet on the Western Front and the best writings on war. In Russia, he says, no one cares. Nor perhaps should they.
“In war,” he writes, “there is a breed of people who, like bears that have tasted human flesh for the first time, will keep killing to the end. They look normal enough, but when it comes down to it all they can think about is plunging themselves into another slaughter.”
If another war happens, he says that he will go back: “But I will not be armed. I will go as a journalist. This is my work now.”
------
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article2889310.ece
He is an unlikely hero, as heroes often are. Arkady Babchenko, born in Moscow, the only son of a middle-class family, wanted to be a lawyer. But in November 1995, in his second year of law studies, he was conscripted into the Russian army and sent to Chechnya.
There, as a soldier, he encountered killings, beatings, starvation and sheer terror, all the brutalities and humiliations of war. Yet a few years later, after graduating, he was irresistibly drawn back to fight a second time in the bitter conflict in the tiny republic in the north Caucasus that was trying to break away from the Russian Federation; this time he went as a volunteer soldier.
“Maybe war is the strongest narcotic in the world,” he says. He cannot otherwise explain why he volunteered. “Maybe because my past was there, a large part of my life. It was as if only my body had returned from that first war, but not my soul.”
In Chechnya something happened to him as he stood on the edge of humanity: the war was dehumanising but it moulded his manhood. It taught him to be a survivor and, he says, it made him a completely different person.
Related Links
* One Soldier's War in Chechnya
* One Soldier's War in Chechnya
“When I returned from the war, my mother did not get back her son,” he says. “The Arkady Babchenko who went to war does not exist any more. I am a new man with different interests, different friends, a different outlook on life. I am not happy that the war happened in my life, but I have no regrets.”
Chechnya cost thousands of lives on both sides. Horror was everywhere. Round the main square of one village were large crosses upon which Russian soldiers had been crucified and castrated.
In retaliation Russian troops herded all the men they could find into the square, threw them down in piles and hacked at them. In half a day the whole village was castrated, then the battalion moved out.
But many of Babchenko's comrades were killed, not by their Chechen enemies but by the brutal conduct of their own Russian officer corps who starved and beat the young conscripts, suppressing everything that was human in them, destroying their personality and individuality, treating them, he says, no better than slaves.
That Babchenko, now 30, is alive at all to tell this grim tale is a constant puzzle to him. Tall and slender, with stubble on his chin, he has melancholy brown eyes that still have the stare of a man who has seen death at close hand. He suffers survivor’s guilt.
He was having coffee in Soho last week after readings at London’s South Bank Centre from his acclaimed book on the conflict, One Soldier’s War in Chechnya, and admits that while he does not miss war, without its extremes of highs and lows it has left everything else flat.
“You would imagine that this trip to Britain would impress me and have an impact on me,” he says. “Yet it is not happening. Of course war was the lowest point as well as the highest in my life. Because I had buried all my sensations there I am totally immune to anything now. I have slowly regained some of the feelings but not all of them, so my senses are not all there.”
He thinks he is suffering from the same emptiness described by some survivors from Stalin’s gulags – “this totally destructive, negative experience which wipes out everything in you”.
More and more these days, Babchenko is recognising that just being alive is a gift. He was a colleague of the late Anna Politkovskaya, the renowned Russian journalist and fierce critic of President Vladimir Putin’s policies in Chechnya, who was murdered just over a year ago. He remains deeply affected by her killing.
Politkovskaya, 48, had been working on an article about torture in Chechnya. Her still unsolved murder – she was found shot dead in the lift of her Moscow apartment block – had all the hallmarks of a contract killing.
Like Babchenko she worked for the newspaper Novaya Gazeta (New Newspaper). Although he says that he has not received death threats Babchenko, also an ardent Putin critic, admits that he now wonders how safe he is in a Russia where more than a dozen journalists have been murdered in recent years.
This and more makes him fear for Putin’s Russia. “I think it is hanging on a brink of an incredible precipice,” he says. “It has not yet fallen to the bottom. But it has not quite got out.
“Russia’s problem is that it is too big. It is also its saving grace. There is so much inertia because of its size that the upheavals and perturbations are absorbed by this enormous body of the country.
“I do think it will slowly emerge. You can see the signs of an emerging civil society but Putin is pushing Russia down, trampling it into the mud even further. That is the logic of his actions.”
But, he says, the West should not be frightened of Russia, for all the aggressive rhetoric from the Kremlin. “Rather we, not the West, should be the ones to be frightened of Russia. No Russian tanks will ever enter London, Paris or Berlin.”
Moreover, he says that the Russian army is no longer a good fighting army. It was at its most professional, well trained and combat experienced in 1989 when it withdrew from Afghanistan. But the best army officers resigned over Chechnya after 1995. They felt betrayed that the high command had sold them and gone into the conflict just to make money. There were no high ideals worth fighting for.
In Chechnya, he writes, thieving was both the foundation of the war and its reason for continuing: “Ours is an army of workers and peasants, reduced to desperation by constant underfunding, half crazed with hunger and a lack of accommodation, flogged and beaten by all, regardless of the consequences, regardless of badges of rank, stripped of all rights. This is not an army but a herd drawn from the dregs of the criminal masses, lawless apart from the dictates of jackals that run it.”
He tells how the soldiers sold cartridges, the drivers sold diesel oil, the cooks sold tinned meat and the battalion commanders sold the soldiers’ food, while the regimental commanders trucked away vehicle-loads of equipment and the generals stole the actual vehicles themselves. Many Russian soldiers, he believes, were killed by bullets and guns that their desperate comrades had sold to the Chechens for food.
One day, he writes, two recruits were caught selling ammunition through the wire to Chechen children for vodka and came in for specially sadistic treatment. After a savage beating they were put in a pit for hours, then taken out, suspended by a rope from a makeshift gallows for a day and a half, then they had their toes wired to a hand-driven electric generator.
“Afterwards the armaments officer unties the ropes and they fall to the ground like sacks of flour. They can’t stand or lift their swollen arms. Their hands have gone black and their fingers are twisted,” Babchencko writes.
These days Babchenko does not maintain links or contacts with the comrades he fought alongside: “I don’t want to see the people whom I saw being beasts and they don’t want to see me because we both experienced this animal state back then in Chechnya. We have gone our different ways and the things that unite us are not the best things in our lives by far.”
But, in another way, he cannot completely let go of his military past. He runs a hugely successful website and a magazine written by Russian war veterans – a copy of which he has brought with him to London – that tries to reflect, analyse and do something about the war that so changed their lives.
The cover of its latest issue is the cemetery at Bogorodskoye, 30 miles from Moscow, where all the unidentified Russian soldiers killed in Chechnya are buried after years stored in a refrigerator. The magazine and website are filled with their stories, diaries and songs.
Paradoxically it is for these things and not his remarkable book, which has been so acclaimed in the West, that Babchenko is best known in Russia. Here his book is being compared with All Quiet on the Western Front and the best writings on war. In Russia, he says, no one cares. Nor perhaps should they.
“In war,” he writes, “there is a breed of people who, like bears that have tasted human flesh for the first time, will keep killing to the end. They look normal enough, but when it comes down to it all they can think about is plunging themselves into another slaughter.”
If another war happens, he says that he will go back: “But I will not be armed. I will go as a journalist. This is my work now.”
------
http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/books/article2889310.ece
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
ZEN IS BORING
Let's face it. Zen is boring. You couldn't find a duller, more tedious practice than Zazen. The philosophy is dry and unexciting. It's amazing to me anyone reads this page at all. Don't you people know you could be playing Tetris, right now? That there are a million free porno sites out there? Get a life, why don't you?!
Joshu Sasaki, a Zen teacher from the Rinzai Sect, once said that Buddhist teachers always try to make students long for the Buddha World, but that if the students knew how really dry and tasteless the Buddha World actually was, they'd never want to go. He's right. Look at Zen teachers. Not a one of them has any sense of fashion. They sit around staring at blank walls. Ask them about levitation, they won't tell you. Ask them about life after death, they change the subject. Ask them about miracles and they start spouting nonsense about carrying buckets of water and chopping up fire wood. They go to bed early and wake up early. Zen is a philosophy for nerds.
Boredom is important. Most of your life is dull, tasteless and boring. If you practice Zazen, you learn a lot about boredom. I remember the first time I sat Zazen, I was real excited. I figured I'd be seeing visions of four armed Krishnas descending from the Heavens, or I'd be fading into The Void just like the old Beatles song, or reach Nirvana (whatever that was) or some great wonderful thing. But the clock just ticked away, my legs started aching, and stupid thoughts kept drifting by. Maybe I wasn't doing it right, I thought. But no, year after year it was the same. Boring, boring, boring. After almost 20 years it's still boring as Hell.
People hate their ordinary lives. We want something better. This, our day to day life of drudgery and work, is boring, dull and ordinary, we think. But someday, someday... There's an episode of The Monkees* where Mike Nesmith says that when he was in high school he used to walk out on the school's empty stage with a guitar in his hands thinking "Someday, someday." Then he said that now (now being 1967, at the height of the Monkees fame) he walks out on stage in front of thousands of fans and thinks "Someday, someday." That's the way life is. It's never going to be perfect. Whatever "someday" you imagine, it will ever come. Never. No matter what it is. No matter how well you build your fantasy or how carefully you follow all the steps necessary to achieve it. Even if it comes true exactly the way you planned, you'll end up just like Mike Nesmith. Someday, someday... I guarantee you.
Your life will change. That's for sure. But it won't get any better and it won't get any worse. How can you compare now to the past? What do you know about the past? You don't have a clue! You have no idea at all what yesterday was really like, let alone last week or ten years ago. The future? Forget about it...
People long for big thrills. Peak experiences. Some people come to Zen expecting that Enlightenment will be the Ultimate Peak Experience. The Mother of All Peak Experiences. But real enlightenment is the most ordinary of the ordinary. Once I had an amazing vision. I saw myself transported through time and space. Millions, no, billions, trillions, Godzillions of years passed. Not figuratively, but literally. Whizzed by. I found myself at the very rim of time and space, a vast giant being composed of the living minds and bodies of every thing that ever was. It was an incredibly moving experience. Exhilarating. I was high for weeks. Finally I told Nishijima Sensei about it . He said it was nonsense. Just my imagination. I can't tell you how that made me feel. Imagination? This was as real an experience as any I've ever had. I just about cried. Later on that day I was eating a tangerine. I noticed how incredibly lovely a thing it was. So delicate. So amazingly orange. So very tasty. So I told Nishijima about that. That experience, he said, was enlightenment.
You need a teacher like that. The world needs lots more teachers like that. Countless teachers would have interpreted my experience as a merging of my Atman with God, as a portent of great and wonderful things, would have praised my spiritual growth and given me pointers on how to go even further. And I would have been suckered right in to that, let me tell you! Woulda fallen for it hook line and sinker, boy howdy. If a teacher doesn't shatter your illusions he's doing you no favors at all.
Boredom is what you need. Merging with the Mind of God at the Edge of the Universe, that's excitement. That's what we're all into this Zen thing for, right? Eating tangerines? Come on, dude! What could be more boring than eating a tangerine?
Some years ago some psychologists did a study in which they sat some Buddhists monks and some regular folks in a room and wired them up to EEG machines to record their brain activity. They told everyone to relax, then introduced a repetitive stimulus, a loudly ticking clock, into the room. The normal folks' EEG showed that their brains stopped reacting the stimulus after a few seconds. But the Buddhists just kept on mentally registering the tick every time it happened. Psychologists and journalists never quite know how to interpret that finding, though it's often cited. It's a simple matter. Buddhists pay attention to their lives. Ordinary folks figure they have better things to think about.
If you really take a look at your ordinary boring life, you'll discover something truly wonderful. Our regular old pointless lives are incredibly joyful -- amazingly, astoundingly, relentlessly, mercilessly joyful. You don't need to do a damned thing to experience such joy either. People think they need big experiences, interesting experiences. And it's true that gigantic, traumatic experiences sometimes bring people, for a fleeting moment, into a kind of enlightened state. That's why such experiences are so desired. But it wears off fast and you're right back out there looking for the next thrill. You don't need to take drugs, blow up buildings, win the Indy 500 or walk on the moon. You don't need to go hang-gliding over the Himalayas, you don't need to screw your luscious and oh-so-willing secretary or party all night with the beautiful people. You don't need visions of merging with the totality of the Universe. Just be what you are, where you are. Clean the toilet. Walk the dog. Do your work. That's the most magical thing there is. If you really want to merge with God, that's the way to do it. This moment. You sitting there with your hand in your underwear and potato chip crumbs on your chin, scrolling down your computer screen thinking "This guy's out of his mind." This very moment is Enlightenment. This moment has never come before and once it's gone, it's gone forever. You are this moment. This moment is you. This very moment is you merging with the total Universe, with God Himself.
The life you're living right now has joys even God will never know.
--------------
http://www.katinkahesselink.net/tibet/boring-zen.html
Thursday, September 20, 2007
How My Father Taught Me Non-Violence
Posted by Arun Gandhi on Sep 18, 2007
I was 16 years old and living with my parents at the institute my grandfather had founded 18 miles outside of Durban, South Africa, in the middle of the sugar plantations. We were deep in the country and had no neighbors, so my two sisters and I would always look forward to going to town to visit friends or go to the movies.
One day, my father asked me to drive him to town for an all-day conference, and I jumped at the chance. Since I was going to town, my mother gave me a list of groceries she needed and, since I had all day in town, my father ask me to take care of several pending chores, such as getting the car serviced. When I dropped my father off that morning, he said, 'I will meet you here at 5:00 p.m., and we will go home together.'
After hurriedly completing my chores, I went straight to the nearest movie theatre. I got so engrossed in a John Wayne double-feature that I forgot the time. It was 5:30 before I remembered. By the time I ran to the garage and got the car and hurried to where my father was waiting for me, it was almost 6:00. He anxiously asked me, 'Why were you late?' I was so ashamed of telling him I was watching a John Wayne western movie that I said, 'The car wasn't ready, so I had to wait,' not realizing that he had already called the garage. When he caught me in the lie, he said: 'There's something wrong in the way I brought you up that didn't give you the confidence to tell me the truth. In order to figure out where I went wrong with you, I'm going to walk home 18 miles and think about it.'
So, dressed in his suit and dress shoes, he began to walk home in the dark on mostly unpaved, unlit roads. I couldn't leave him, so for five-and-a-half hours I drove behind him, watching my father go through this agony for a stupid lie that I uttered.
I decided then and there that I was never going to lie again. I often think about that episode and wonder, if he had punished me the way we punish our children, whether I would have learned a lesson at all. I don't think so. I would have suffered the punishment and gone on doing the same thing. But this single non-violent action was so powerful that it is still as if it happened yesterday. That is the power of non-violence.
I was 16 years old and living with my parents at the institute my grandfather had founded 18 miles outside of Durban, South Africa, in the middle of the sugar plantations. We were deep in the country and had no neighbors, so my two sisters and I would always look forward to going to town to visit friends or go to the movies.
One day, my father asked me to drive him to town for an all-day conference, and I jumped at the chance. Since I was going to town, my mother gave me a list of groceries she needed and, since I had all day in town, my father ask me to take care of several pending chores, such as getting the car serviced. When I dropped my father off that morning, he said, 'I will meet you here at 5:00 p.m., and we will go home together.'
After hurriedly completing my chores, I went straight to the nearest movie theatre. I got so engrossed in a John Wayne double-feature that I forgot the time. It was 5:30 before I remembered. By the time I ran to the garage and got the car and hurried to where my father was waiting for me, it was almost 6:00. He anxiously asked me, 'Why were you late?' I was so ashamed of telling him I was watching a John Wayne western movie that I said, 'The car wasn't ready, so I had to wait,' not realizing that he had already called the garage. When he caught me in the lie, he said: 'There's something wrong in the way I brought you up that didn't give you the confidence to tell me the truth. In order to figure out where I went wrong with you, I'm going to walk home 18 miles and think about it.'
So, dressed in his suit and dress shoes, he began to walk home in the dark on mostly unpaved, unlit roads. I couldn't leave him, so for five-and-a-half hours I drove behind him, watching my father go through this agony for a stupid lie that I uttered.
I decided then and there that I was never going to lie again. I often think about that episode and wonder, if he had punished me the way we punish our children, whether I would have learned a lesson at all. I don't think so. I would have suffered the punishment and gone on doing the same thing. But this single non-violent action was so powerful that it is still as if it happened yesterday. That is the power of non-violence.
Saturday, September 15, 2007
Need Iraq suffer more if we pull out? By: Johann Hari
Bush's argument-by-analogy that the US was wrong to leave Vietnam because of the ensuing holocaust perpetrated by Pol Pot next door in Cambodia is so historically illiterate it's hard to know how to answer it.
http://comment.independent.co.uk/columnists_a_l/johann_hari/article2898415.ece
Thursday, September 13, 2007
Ten Rules for Being Human, By Cherie Carter-Scott
1. You will receive a body. You may like it or hate it, but it’s yours to keep for the entire period.
2. You will learn lessons. You are enrolled in a full-time informal school called, “life.”
3. There are no mistakes, only lessons. Growth is a process of trial, error, and experimentation. The “failed” experiments are as much a part of the process as the experiments that ultimately “work.”
4. Lessons are repeated until they are learned. A lesson will be presented to you in various forms until you have learned it. When you have learned it, you can go on to the next lesson.
5. Learning lessons does not end. There’s no part of life that doesn’t contain its lessons. If you’re alive, that means there are still lessons to be learned.
6. ”There” is no better a place than “here.” When your “there” has become a “here”, you will simply obtain another “there” that will again look better than “here.”
7. Other people are merely mirrors of you. You cannot love or hate something about another person unless it reflects to you something you love or hate about yourself.
8. What you make of your life is up to you. You have all the tools and resources you need. What you do with them is up to you. The choice is yours.
9. Your answers lie within you. The answers to life’s questions lie within you. All you need to do is look, listen, and trust.
10. You will forget all this.
2. You will learn lessons. You are enrolled in a full-time informal school called, “life.”
3. There are no mistakes, only lessons. Growth is a process of trial, error, and experimentation. The “failed” experiments are as much a part of the process as the experiments that ultimately “work.”
4. Lessons are repeated until they are learned. A lesson will be presented to you in various forms until you have learned it. When you have learned it, you can go on to the next lesson.
5. Learning lessons does not end. There’s no part of life that doesn’t contain its lessons. If you’re alive, that means there are still lessons to be learned.
6. ”There” is no better a place than “here.” When your “there” has become a “here”, you will simply obtain another “there” that will again look better than “here.”
7. Other people are merely mirrors of you. You cannot love or hate something about another person unless it reflects to you something you love or hate about yourself.
8. What you make of your life is up to you. You have all the tools and resources you need. What you do with them is up to you. The choice is yours.
9. Your answers lie within you. The answers to life’s questions lie within you. All you need to do is look, listen, and trust.
10. You will forget all this.
Saturday, August 25, 2007
Truth
Increasingly I am attracted to illustrations of the truth in text. This from What the Upanishads Teach Us: Discourse of Sathya Sai Baba during the Summer Course in Spirituality and Indian Culture held for College Students at Brindavan, Whitefield, Bangalore District in May 1972 Published by Sri Sathya Sai Books and Publications Trust.
Draupadi, after she had gone through all her troubles and tribulations, was sitting and talking to Krishna on one occasion in a pleasant mood. She addressed Krishna as her dear brother and asked: "What is the matter? I remember having been in great difficulties and having called you with the fullness of my heart and begged you to come and save me. But you came late. You never came in time. Can you explain to me what stood in the way of your coming in proper time?" Krishna then asked Draupadi: "You say you addressed me and called me. May I know in what manner you called me and how you addressed me?" Then she replied, "Yes, I said, Hai Krishna, Hai Dwarakavasa". The Lord replied "You addressed me as Dwarakavasa. Where is Dwaraka and where is Hasthinapura, to which place I had to come? That was a long distance. If only you had addressed me as Hridayavasi or as one who is living in your own heart, I would have appeared immediately. Because of the manner of your addressing I had to travel all the way from Dwaraka to Hasthinapura and how could I have come in time from such a long distance?"
Draupadi, after she had gone through all her troubles and tribulations, was sitting and talking to Krishna on one occasion in a pleasant mood. She addressed Krishna as her dear brother and asked: "What is the matter? I remember having been in great difficulties and having called you with the fullness of my heart and begged you to come and save me. But you came late. You never came in time. Can you explain to me what stood in the way of your coming in proper time?" Krishna then asked Draupadi: "You say you addressed me and called me. May I know in what manner you called me and how you addressed me?" Then she replied, "Yes, I said, Hai Krishna, Hai Dwarakavasa". The Lord replied "You addressed me as Dwarakavasa. Where is Dwaraka and where is Hasthinapura, to which place I had to come? That was a long distance. If only you had addressed me as Hridayavasi or as one who is living in your own heart, I would have appeared immediately. Because of the manner of your addressing I had to travel all the way from Dwaraka to Hasthinapura and how could I have come in time from such a long distance?"
Saturday, August 18, 2007
Thursday, August 09, 2007
Saturday, August 04, 2007
Friday, July 20, 2007
Media Culpa: Blaming the press for Iraq
"The forthcoming war was likely to be messy, Kennan sighed, for the people in need of liberation "are wholly unable to govern themselves" and Western-style democracy could not flourish where "the very prerequisites for a democratic political system do not exist among the people in question." But none of this was being debated and, to his mind, there hadn't been "proper public discussion, not even a Congressional discussion, of this undertaking." To do so now, after boots were on the ground, "would be received as something tending to demoralize the forces now in action...""
Michael C. Moynihan | July 17, 2007
Why could we not have had this insight 3915 (3,628 Americans, two Australians, 157 Britons, 13 Bulgarians, one Czech, seven Danes, two Dutch, two Estonians, one Fijian, one Hungarian, 33 Italians, one Kazakh, one Korean, three Latvian, 21 Poles, two Romanians, five Salvadoran, four Slovaks, 11 Spaniards, two Thai and 18 Ukrainians) + 67 265 (Iraqi) people ago?
Sources:
http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2003/iraq/forces/casualties/
http://www.iraqbodycount.org/
Michael C. Moynihan | July 17, 2007
Why could we not have had this insight 3915 (3,628 Americans, two Australians, 157 Britons, 13 Bulgarians, one Czech, seven Danes, two Dutch, two Estonians, one Fijian, one Hungarian, 33 Italians, one Kazakh, one Korean, three Latvian, 21 Poles, two Romanians, five Salvadoran, four Slovaks, 11 Spaniards, two Thai and 18 Ukrainians) + 67 265 (Iraqi) people ago?
Sources:
http://www.cnn.com/SPECIALS/2003/iraq/forces/casualties/
http://www.iraqbodycount.org/
Saturday, June 02, 2007
Thursday, May 31, 2007
Canadian Omar Khadr
Omar Ahmed Khadr (born September 16, 1987 in Ottawa, Ontario), is a Canadian teenager who was captured by American forces in Afghanistan. He is among the youngest prisoners held in extrajudicial detention in the United States Guantánamo Bay detainment camps, in Cuba. Khadr's Guantanamo detainee ID is 766.
...Khadr was 15 when he was captured in Afghanistan during a firefight in which he allegedly killed a U.S. Army special forces soldier with a grenade.
"He doesn't trust American lawyers, and I don't particularly blame him," said U.S. Marine Lt. Col. Colby Vokey, who was taken off the case Wednesday. "The United States is responsible for his interrogation and his treatment under a process that is patently unfair."
-----------------
Khadr was a child soldier. How can after 5 years of the harshest imprisonment could the US find justice for that or any US Army soldier or their families?
This case seems less about justice and more about revenge.
References:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omar_Khadr
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/world/4850528.html
...Khadr was 15 when he was captured in Afghanistan during a firefight in which he allegedly killed a U.S. Army special forces soldier with a grenade.
"He doesn't trust American lawyers, and I don't particularly blame him," said U.S. Marine Lt. Col. Colby Vokey, who was taken off the case Wednesday. "The United States is responsible for his interrogation and his treatment under a process that is patently unfair."
-----------------
Khadr was a child soldier. How can after 5 years of the harshest imprisonment could the US find justice for that or any US Army soldier or their families?
This case seems less about justice and more about revenge.
References:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Omar_Khadr
http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/ap/world/4850528.html
Thursday, May 24, 2007
Saturday, May 12, 2007
Friday, May 11, 2007
Saturday, May 05, 2007
I Believe
I believe in the supreme worth of the individual and in his right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
I believe that every right implies a responsibility; every opportunity, an obligation; every possession, a duty.
I believe that the law was made for man and not man for the law; that government is the servant of the people and not their master.
I believe in the dignity of labor, whether with head or hand; that the world owes no man a living but that it owes every man an opportunity to make a living.
I believe that thrift is essential to well ordered living and that economy is a prime requisite of a sound financial structure, whether in government, business or personal affairs.
I believe that truth and justice are fundamental to an enduring social order.
I believe in the sacredness of a promise, that a man’s word should be as good as his bond; that character -- not wealth or power or position -- is of supreme worth.
I believe that the rendering of useful service is the common duty of mankind and that only in the purifying fire of sacrifice is the dross of selfishness consumed and the greatness of the human soul set free.
I believe that love is the greatest thing in the world; that it alone can overcome hate; that right can and will triumph over might.
John D. Rockefeller, Jr., quotation as inscribed at Rockefeller Center, New York City
I believe that every right implies a responsibility; every opportunity, an obligation; every possession, a duty.
I believe that the law was made for man and not man for the law; that government is the servant of the people and not their master.
I believe in the dignity of labor, whether with head or hand; that the world owes no man a living but that it owes every man an opportunity to make a living.
I believe that thrift is essential to well ordered living and that economy is a prime requisite of a sound financial structure, whether in government, business or personal affairs.
I believe that truth and justice are fundamental to an enduring social order.
I believe in the sacredness of a promise, that a man’s word should be as good as his bond; that character -- not wealth or power or position -- is of supreme worth.
I believe that the rendering of useful service is the common duty of mankind and that only in the purifying fire of sacrifice is the dross of selfishness consumed and the greatness of the human soul set free.
I believe that love is the greatest thing in the world; that it alone can overcome hate; that right can and will triumph over might.
John D. Rockefeller, Jr., quotation as inscribed at Rockefeller Center, New York City
The Nature of Reality
(A transcript of the conversation between Rabindranath Tagore and Professor Albert Einstein on 14th July, 1930, at the latter's residence in Kaputh)
Einstein : Do you believe in the Divine as isolated from the world?
Tagore : Not isolated. The infinite personality of Man comprehends the Universe. There cannot be anything that cannot be subsumed by the human personality, and this proves that the truth of the Universe is human truth. I have taken a scientific fact to explain this. Matter is composed of protons and electrons, with gaps between them, but matter may seem to be solid without the links in spaces which unify the individual electrons and protons. Similarly humanity is composed of individuals, yet they have their interconnection of human relationship, which gives living unity to man's world. The entire universe is linked up with us, as individuals, in a similar manner - it is a human universe. I have pursued this thought through art, literature and the religious consciousness of man.
Einstein : There are two different conceptions about the nature of the universe -the world as a unity dependent on humanity, and the world as a reality independent of the human factor.
Tagore : When our universe is in harmony with man, the eternal, we know it as truth, we feel it as beauty.
Einstein : This is the purely human conception of the universe.
Tagore : There can be no other conception. This world is a human world - the scientific view of it is also that of the scientific man. Therefore, the world apart from us does not exist; it is a relative world, depending for its reality upon our consciousness. There is some standard of reason and enjoyment which gives it truth, the standard of the Eternal Man whose experiences are through our experiences.
Einstein : This is a realization of the human entity.
Tagore : Yes, one eternal entity. We have to realize it through our emotions and activities. We realized the Supreme Man who has no individual limitations through our limitations. Science is concerned with that which is not confined to individuals, it is the impersonal human world of truths. Religion realizes these truths and links them up with our deeper needs; our individual consciousness of truth gains universal significance. Religion applies values to truth, and we know this truth as good through our own harmony with it.
Einstein : Truth, then, or beauty is not independent of man?
Tagore : No.
Einstein : If there would be no human beings any more, the Apollo of Belvedere would no longer be beautiful.
Tagore : No!
Einstein : I agree with regard to this conception of Beauty, but not with regard to Truth.
Tagore : Why not? Truth is realized through man.
Einstein : I cannot prove that my conception is right, but that is my religion.
Tagore : Beauty is in the ideal of perfect harmony which is in the Universal Being, Truth the perfect comprehension of the Universal mind. We individuals approach it through our own mistakes and blunders, through our accumulated experiences, - through our illumined consciousness - how, otherwise, can we know Truth?
Einstein : I cannot prove that scientific truth must be conceived as a truth that is valid independent of humanity; but I believe it firmly. I believe, for instance, that the Pythagorean theorem in geometry states something that is approximately true, independent of the existence of man. Anyway, if there is a reality independent of man, there is also a truth relative to this reality; and in the same way the negation of the first engenders a negation of the existence of the latter.
Tagore : Truth, which is one with the Universal Being, must essentially be human; otherwise whatever we individuals realize as true can never be called truth, at least the truth which is described as scientific and which only can be reached through the process of logic, in other words, by an organ of thoughts which is human. According to Indian philosophy there is Brahman, the absolute Truth which cannot be conceived by the isolation of the individual mind or described by words but can only be realized by completely merging the individual in its infinity. But such a truth cannot belong to science. The nature of truth which we are discussing is an appearance, that is to say, what appears to be true to the human mind and therefore is human, and may be called Maya or illusion.
Einstein : So according to your conception, which may be the Indian conception, it is not the illusion of the individual but of humanity as a whole.
Tagore : In science we go through the discipline of eliminating the personal limitations of our individual minds and thus reach that comprehension of truth which is in the mind of the Universal Man.
Einstein : The problem begins whether truth is independent of our consciousness.
Tagore : What we call truth lies in the rational harmony between the subjective and objective aspects of reality, both of which belong to the super-personal man.
Einstein : Even in our everyday life, we feel compelled to ascribe a reality independent of man to the objects we use. We do this to connect the experiences of our senses in a reasonable way. For instance, if nobody is in this house, yet that table remains where it is.
Tagore : Yes, it remains outside the individual mind but not the universal mind. The table which I perceive is perceptible by the same kind of consciousness which I possess.
Einstein : Our natural point of view in regard to the existence of truth apart from humanity cannot be explained or proved, but it is a belief which nobody can lack - no primitive beings even. We attribute to truth a superhuman objectivity, it is indispensable for us, this reality which is independent of our existence and our experience and our mind - though we cannot say what it means.
Tagore : Science has proved that the table as a solid object is an appearance and therefore that which the human mind perceives as a table would not exist if that mind were naught. At the same time it must be admitted that the fact that the ultimate physical reality is nothing but a multitude of separate revolving centres of electric force, also belongs to the human mind. In the apprehension of truth there is an eternal conflict between the universal human mind and the same mind confined in the individual. The perpetual process of reconciliation is being carried on in our science, philosophy, in our ethics. In any case, if there be any truth absolutely unrelated to humanity, then for us it is absolutely non-existing. It is not difficult to imagine a mind to which sequence of things happens not in space but only in time like the sequence of notes in music. For such a mind such conception of reality is akin to the musical reality in which Pythagorean geometry can have no meaning. There is the reality of paper, infinitely different from the reality of literature. For the kind of mind possessed by the moth which eats that paper literature is absolutely non-existent, yet for man's mind literature has a greater value of truth than the paper itself. In a similar manner if there be some truth which has no sensuous or rational relation to human mind, it will ever remain as nothing so long as we remain human beings.
Einstein : Then I am more religious than you are!
Tagore : My religion is in the reconciliation of the Super-personal Man, the universal human spirit, in my own individual being. This has been the subject of my Hibbert Lectures, which I have called "The Religion of Man."
Source:
(Published in the January, 1931, issue of Modern Review)
Sunday, April 29, 2007
Tenet: CIA warned of 'anarchy' in Iraq
George Tenet's Book Passage
The agency analysis painted what Tenet calls additional "worst-case" scenarios: "a surge of global terrorism against U.S. interests fueled by deepening Islamic antipathy toward the United States"; "regime-threatening instability in key Arab states"; and "major oil supply disruptions and severe strains in the Atlantic alliance."
Whenever I read stuff lie this I keep hearing this in the background:
REM, Document, Track Six.
The agency analysis painted what Tenet calls additional "worst-case" scenarios: "a surge of global terrorism against U.S. interests fueled by deepening Islamic antipathy toward the United States"; "regime-threatening instability in key Arab states"; and "major oil supply disruptions and severe strains in the Atlantic alliance."
Whenever I read stuff lie this I keep hearing this in the background:
REM, Document, Track Six.
Friday, April 27, 2007
Don't Fire Until You See the Whites of Their Eyes
"War, which used to be cruel and magnificent, has now become cruel and squalid."
Winston Churchill wrote those words in 1930, in the aftermath of the First World War, which, from a purely technological standpoint, rivals any war in history for both cruelty and squalidness.
(The rest of Churchill's famous passage goes: "Instead of a small number of well-trained professionals championing their country's cause with ancient weapons and a beautiful intricacy of archaic maneuver, sustained at every moment by the applause of their nation, we now have entire populations, including even women and children, pitted against one another in brutish mutual extermination, and only a set of bleary-eyed clerks left to add up the butcher's bill.")
The advent of the submarine, the tank, the machine gun and the airplane -- especially the airplane -- made the concept of total war inevitable. Churchill the romantic loathed these weapons, but Churchill the pragmatist eagerly embraced them.
If he was a paradox, it was because he straddled a period of military history changed more profoundly by advancing technology than any other. It's worth remembering that Churchill came of age when the cavalry charge was still a valid tactic for breaching the enemy's defenses and he didn't leave the world stage until Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been vaporized and atomic weaponry was a well-established fact.
You might be tempted to wonder what ennobles the lance or the mace or the broadsword, but I take Churchill's point. The science of killing is a ghastly business, but if you're going to do it there's something to be said for having to face your enemy on the battlefield and watch him die by your hand.
The ability to kill a man without touching him, or even seeing him, reduces the act to an abstract concept. That, in turn, inures us to the actual suffering we cause through waging high-tech warfare, allowing us to use, without irony, phrases like "collateral damage" and "normal wastage" in reference to combatants and noncombatants alike.
No, war is not boxing and the civilities of the Marquess of Queensbury rules don't apply. The object is survival, and, tangentially, victory. But if killing a man with a weapon wielded by hand is immoral, then killing him in a detached fashion, from 40,000 feet up or 200 miles away, is utterly amoral.
And the man who cannot distinguish between right and wrong, or doesn't have to, is the most dangerous animal in the human jungle. This is the jungle we inhabit today. This is where military technology and the inherent weaknesses of human beings have brought us.
It would be naïve, even stupid, to think that we can go back to the idealized Churchillian battlefield. We can't. The toothpaste is out of the tube, we've crossed the Rubicon, there's no crying over spilt milk -- pick your cliché. The fact is there's only one way to go and that's forward.
And in going forward there is only one solution. War itself must be made obsolete and that means eliminating the reasons men wage war: nationalism, religion, greed. But it will never happen, not in my lifetime or in yours, because that means 1.) abandoning the concept of the nation-state 2.) abolishing all religion 3.) replacing stock-market, corporate capitalism with universal socialism. It requires nothing less than a reinvention of the human condition. Imagine.
Hell will freeze first and, given the reality of global warming, that's not likely to happen, either.
So we're doomed. We will continue inventing exquisite new ways of killing each other, and justifying the need to do so, until we succeed in destroying everything.
Which, in the name of somebody's god or somebody's country or somebody's way of life, we will.
You have a nice day, now.
Article writtwn in Wired by The Luddite
Thursday, April 26, 2007
The White House line that Iraq’s extremists are all backed by Iran is a myth
By robert fox
T his weekend, buyers from across the Gulf states and the Middle East will descend on a huge arms fair in Dubai. Sheikhs, emirs, princes and kings will be buying anything from specialised sniper ammunition by the ton, to the highest-tech surveillance gear and even the odd British Aerospace gunboat or Eurofighter.
The Arab world will use the International Defence Exhibition (IDEX), to tool up for a coming confrontation with Iran, and to arm Sunni insurgents to fight Iran's allies in Iraq, the Shia militias.
Even the Bush administration will now admit, under its collective breath of course, that Iraq is in the throes of a full-blown civil war between armed groups of its Sunni and Shia Arab communities, triggered a year ago by the destruction of the al-Laskar mosque in Samara, a revered Shia shrine.
‘The growth of Saudi and Jordanian support for the militants is one of the most worrying developments’What the American authorities are reluctant to admit, however, is that there are signs that the Sunnis of Saudi Arabia and their allies - including Jordan - have been equipping and training Sunni extremists in Iraq for some time now. Critically, not all the weaponry and munitions have been used against the militants' Shia and Kurdish Iraqi enemies. Some of them - including lethal roadside bombs - have been aimed at US forces.
"The growth of the official and unofficial Saudi and Jordanian support for the militants is one of the most worrying developments," a senior British officer has told me privately after a visit to Iraq.
The Bush administration has kept mum about this while it tries to concentrate the minds of America and the world on their new public enemy number one, Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the region's chief sponsor of terrorism and nuclear proliferation.
British strategic advisers to the Pentagon and the National Security Council report that, undeterred by their unfinished business in Iraq and Afghanistan, President Bush and Vice-President Cheney are now intent on opening up a third front against Iran. Their argument runs that Saddam Hussein was bad and al-Qaeda even worse, but the threat to world peace now comes from Ahmadinejad. He must be stopped before he gets a nuclear weapon and uses it against Israel.
In Baghdad this week US forces have displayed 'shaped charge' roadside bomb kits - also known as EFPs (explosively formed penetrators) - which have killed 170 American service personnel in Iraq. This figure is surprisingly precise, in contrast to much of the rest of the American presentation: the officers and intelligence analysts would not give their names, and could not substantiate their claim that the deployment of the EFPs was sanctioned "at the highest level" of the Ahmadinejad regime.
It was also reported this week that a consignment of Steyr Mannlicher HS50 sniper rifles sold by Austria to the Iranian police force had ended up in the hands of Shia militias in Iraq. This was reported by the Daily Telegraph, but no one followed it up. The
Bush and Cheney are ramping up the case for an attack on Iran, just as they did before invading Iraq innuendos – if not the facts – are clear: Bush and Cheney are ramping up the case for an attack on Iran, just as they did before invading Iraq.David Kay, whose Iraq Survey Group torpedoed the claims about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction, says: "If you want to avoid the perception that you've cooked the books you come out and make the charges publicly" - and, he might have added, you name your sources and define the quality of your information. Something the Bush administration has failed to do.
The Americans have also been coy about the threat to their helicopters. At least six are now admitted to have been downed by hostile fire, and the number could be as high as 50, including a Chinook loaded with dozens of troops. Who is doing this and how, the Americans will not say - for obvious security reasons. But the chances are that at least some of the helicopters have been downed by those Sunni extremist pals of Saudi Arabia and Jordan - which hardly helps the case for war against Iran.
http://www.thefirstpost.co.uk?menudID=1&subID=1147
Tuesday, April 17, 2007
Sunday, April 15, 2007
The chicken has come home to roust America
The Coming Holocaust-Like Event Against Immigrants
...The loss that Germany suffered as a result of World War I, both economically and in human lives, along with severe war reparations and the Great Depression gave rise to ultra nationalist and extreme patriotic movements. Adolf Hitler’s infamous book ‘Mein Kampf,‘ which blamed the Jews and Communists for Germany’s loss in World War I, simply played on and reinforced peoples fears and racist tendencies.
...When President George W. Bush promoted his immigration reform plan in Arizona, he linked securing the homeland with ‘eliminating’ ‘illegal’ immigration and expressed concern that they were putting ‘pressure on our schools and hospitals…and straining the resources needed for law enforcement and emergency services.’ He also claimed that released immigrants were often ‘murderers, rapists, child molesters, and violent criminals.’
Blogger: How could this be the America my parents knew? What the hell happened to you guys?!
Wikipedia Entry
Blogger: Were the 9/11 bombers not people known to police/FBI? Were they not senior operatives for some international organization? Did that the actions of 9/11 not guarantee new powers to a government to fight the threat these new "Collumnist”? Shall we be placing the blame for the a possible economic down cycle on groups like African-Americans, Latinos & Muslims rather than the billion dollar a month war for in Iraq?
...Some radio talk show hosts and their audiences espouse hatred and resentment towards ‘illegal’ aliens. They warn of a cataclysmic event if the U.S. is ever ‘overran’ by immigrants. Others claim that ‘illegal’ aliens should be severely punished and tortured which would ‘teach them a lesson’ before they are deported to their country of origin.
...Some websites, filled with supremacist ideology, advocate extreme violence against ‘illegal’ aliens and say they should be shot and to ‘clean your guns and have plenty of ammunition ready.’ ‘Border Patrol,’ a racist video game, portrays 88 Latino men, women, and children running swiftly across a river under the image of a gun’s telescope. The players shoot at them and bonus points are awarded if they hit pregnant women with children. (1)...The loss that Germany suffered as a result of World War I, both economically and in human lives, along with severe war reparations and the Great Depression gave rise to ultra nationalist and extreme patriotic movements. Adolf Hitler’s infamous book ‘Mein Kampf,‘ which blamed the Jews and Communists for Germany’s loss in World War I, simply played on and reinforced peoples fears and racist tendencies.
...When President George W. Bush promoted his immigration reform plan in Arizona, he linked securing the homeland with ‘eliminating’ ‘illegal’ immigration and expressed concern that they were putting ‘pressure on our schools and hospitals…and straining the resources needed for law enforcement and emergency services.’ He also claimed that released immigrants were often ‘murderers, rapists, child molesters, and violent criminals.’
Blogger: How could this be the America my parents knew? What the hell happened to you guys?!
Wikipedia Entry
The Reichstag fire was a pivotal event in the establishment of Nazi Germany. At 21:14 on the night of February 27, 1933 a Berlin fire station received an alarm that the Reichstag building, the assembly location of the German Parliament, was ablaze. The fire seemed to have been started in several places, and by the time the police and firemen arrived a huge explosion had set the main Chamber of Deputies in flames. Looking for clues, the police quickly found Marinus van der Lubbe, shirtless, inside the building. Van der Lubbe was a Dutch insurrectionist council communist and unemployed bricklayer who had recently arrived in Germany.
The party leaders were determined to demonstrate the Reichstag Fire was a deed of the Comintern, and in early March 1933, three men were arrested who were to play pivotal roles during the Leipzig Trial, known also as "Reichstag Fire Trial," namely three Bulgarians: Georgi Dimitrov, Vasil Tanev and Blagoi Popov. The Bulgarians were known to the Prussian police as senior Comintern operatives, but the police had no idea how senior they were: Dimitrov was head of all Comintern operations in Western Europe.
Blogger: Were the 9/11 bombers not people known to police/FBI? Were they not senior operatives for some international organization? Did that the actions of 9/11 not guarantee new powers to a government to fight the threat these new "Collumnist”? Shall we be placing the blame for the a possible economic down cycle on groups like African-Americans, Latinos & Muslims rather than the billion dollar a month war for in Iraq?
Saturday, April 14, 2007
Thursday, April 12, 2007
Oscar Wilde - In The Old Days Men Had The Rack
In the old days men had the rack. Now they have the press. That is an improvement, certainly. But still it is very bad and wrong, and demoralising. The tyranny that it proposes to exercise over peoples' private lives seems to be quite extraordinary. The fact is that the public have an insatiable curiosity to know everything except what is worth knowing. Journalism, conscious of this, and having tradesmanlike habits, supplies their demands...and what aggravates the mischief is that the journalists who are most to blame are not the amusing journalists who write for what are called Society papers. The harm is done by the serious, thoughtful, earnest journalists who solemnly, as they are doing at present, will drag before the eyes of the public some incident in the private life of a great statesman, of a man who is the leader of political thought as he is a creator of political force, and invite the public to discuss the incident, to exercise authority in the matter, to give their views, and not merely to give their views, but to carry them into action, to dictate to the man on all other points, to dictate to his party, to dictate to his country; in fact, to make themselves ridiculous, offensive, and harmful. The private lives of men and women should not be told to the public. The public have nothing to do with them at all.
There Are Hundreds Of Paths Up The Mountain
There are hundreds of paths up the mountain,
all leading in the same direction,
so it doesn't matter which path you take.
The only one wasting time is the one
who runs around and around the mountain,
telling everyone that his or her path is wrong.
all leading in the same direction,
so it doesn't matter which path you take.
The only one wasting time is the one
who runs around and around the mountain,
telling everyone that his or her path is wrong.
Hindu teaching
Thursday, April 05, 2007
Wednesday, April 04, 2007
Quote
Ultimately, we are deluding ourselves if we think that the products that we design are the "things" that we sell, rather than the individual, social and cultural experience that they engender, and the value and impact that they have.
Design that ignores this is not worthy of the name.
Bill Buxton
Design that ignores this is not worthy of the name.
Bill Buxton
Tuesday, April 03, 2007
Empire v. Democracy
Why Nemesis Is at Our Door
By Chalmers Johnson
I had set out to explain how exactly our government came to be so hated around the world. As a CIA term of tradecraft, "blowback" does not just mean retaliation for things our government has done to, and in, foreign countries. It refers specifically to retaliation for illegal operations carried out abroad that were kept totally secret from the American public। These operations have included the clandestine overthrow of governments various administrations did not like, the training of foreign militaries in the techniques of state terrorism, the rigging of elections in foreign countries, interference with the economic viability of countries that seemed to threaten the interests of influential American corporations, as w
ell as the torture or assassination of selected foreigners. The fact that these actions were, at least originally, secret meant that when retaliation does come -- as it did so spectacularly on September 11, 2001 -- the American public is incapable of putting the events in context. Not surprisingly, then, Americans tend to support speedy acts of revenge intended to punish the actual, or alleged, perpetrators. These moments of lashing out, of course, only prepare the ground for yet another cycle of blowback.
Me: This seems to explain too much to be completely unture.
See:
Cheney Doctrine
Baseworld
One Percent Doctrine
By Chalmers Johnson
I had set out to explain how exactly our government came to be so hated around the world. As a CIA term of tradecraft, "blowback" does not just mean retaliation for things our government has done to, and in, foreign countries. It refers specifically to retaliation for illegal operations carried out abroad that were kept totally secret from the American public। These operations have included the clandestine overthrow of governments various administrations did not like, the training of foreign militaries in the techniques of state terrorism, the rigging of elections in foreign countries, interference with the economic viability of countries that seemed to threaten the interests of influential American corporations, as w
ell as the torture or assassination of selected foreigners. The fact that these actions were, at least originally, secret meant that when retaliation does come -- as it did so spectacularly on September 11, 2001 -- the American public is incapable of putting the events in context. Not surprisingly, then, Americans tend to support speedy acts of revenge intended to punish the actual, or alleged, perpetrators. These moments of lashing out, of course, only prepare the ground for yet another cycle of blowback.Me: This seems to explain too much to be completely unture.
See:
Cheney Doctrine
Baseworld
One Percent Doctrine
Monday, April 02, 2007
Re: AYBABTU
In A.D. 2101
War was beginning
Captain: What happen?
Operator: Somebody set up us the bomb.
Operator: We get signal.
Captain: What!
Operator: Main screen turn on.
Captain: It's You!!
Cats: How are you gentlemen!!
Cats: All your base are belong to us.
Cats: You are on the way to destruction.
Captain: What you say!!
Cats: You have no chance to survive make your time.
Cats: Ha Ha Ha Ha ….
Captain: Take off every "zig."
Captain: You know what you doing.
Captain: Move "zig".
Captain: For great justice.
...To understand the duality of Japanese society - the strait-laced conformity, on the one hand, combined with what we might consider almost reckless abandonment - it is necessary to get to grips with two Japanese concepts: honne and tatemae. Honne means your true feelings, which you normally keep to yourself. Tatemae is the face you present to society, the way society expects you to behave. Japanese people always understand, when someone says or does something, that they may be merely expressing tatemae. It may well not be what they really think or feel.
Lesley Downer is the author of 'Geisha: The Secret History of a Vanishing World' (Headline 1999) and 'Madame Sadayakko: The Geisha Who Seduced the West (Headline 2002)
Saturday, March 31, 2007
Is this how aliens see us?
Rubbish is a ticking timebomb in the Bomb
Nasa can easily detect the larger pieces of junk, but the smaller fragments of flaking paint or frozen satellite coolant are too numerous to avoid and can be as lethal as a speeding bullet as they hurtle around the earth, posing a risk to the many satellites and space craft that are still functional।
By Peter Griffin
Tuesday, March 27, 2007
Our Pale Blue Dot
“We succeeded in taking that picture [from deep space], and, if you look at it, you see a dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever lived, lived out their lives. The aggregate of all our joys and sufferings, thousands of confident religions, ideologies and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilizations, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every hopeful child, every mother and father, every inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every superstar, every supreme leader, every saint and sinner in the history of our species, lived there on a mote of dust, suspended in a sunbeam.
The earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena। Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that in glory and in triumph they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of the dot on scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner of the dot. How frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity — in all this vastness — there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves. It is up to us. It’s been said that astronomy is a humbling, and I might add, a character-building experience. To my mind, there is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly and compassionately with one another and to preserve and cherish that pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”
* This is a picture of Earth. Yes. If you look very carefully and closely, you’d see it. Just below the center line, on the right side, bathed in sunbeam. Yes, it’s that speck of dust.
The Case Against George W. Bush: Elizabeth Holtzman
The latest Bush administration scandal—the firing of eight U.S. attorneys under highly questionable circumstances—has Washington abuzz with talk of a new Watergate. The question on everyone’s mind is: Could this be the president’s Saturday night massacre—the obstruction of justice that triggers impeachment?
Unless there is a sea change in Congress, talk of impeachment is largely a hypothetical exercise. That does not mean there’s no legal case against the president. If a California prosecutor were fired to end an investigation of a Republican congressman, that might be a crime. If the others were fired for failing to prosecute Democrats without evidence, that would be a gross abuse of power. If President George W. Bush played any role, impeachment is a legal possibility.
We need not wait for the outcome of investigations of this scandal, however, to conclude that President Bush has so abused the powers of his office that he could be impeached and removed from office. There are already other substantial grounds.
The framers of the U.S. Constitution knew that despite powerful checks, presidents might still abuse their powers and damage the country’s democracy, so they created impeachment as the ultimate safeguard. Constitutional grounds for impeachment are “treason, bribery or other high crimes and misdemeanors.” During Nixon’s impeachment, the House Judiciary Committee determined that abuses did not have to violate the criminal code to meet this test. They simply needed to be, as the framers said in constitutional debates, “great and dangerous offenses that subvert the Constitution.” Several of the president’s actions already qualify.
The strongest legal argument for impeachment—because it is based on the Watergate precedent—arises out of the fact that President Bush refused for years to seek court approval required under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act for a special wiretapping program in the United States. After revelations that President Nixon illegally wiretapped journalists and White House staffers, Congress enacted FISA to prevent future such abuses, making them a federal crime. Illegal wiretapping was one of the grounds for articles of impeachment against Nixon.
But 30 years later, President Bush asserted that FISA hampered intelligence gathering in the war on terror, so as commander in chief he could ignore it. Actually, the FISA court overwhelmingly grants presidential requests (19,000 approvals since 1978 versus 5 rejections) and can grant approvals after wiretaps commence. But if President Bush still thought FISA too burdensome, he should have asked Congress to amend it. Since he didn’t, he must obey it. After the 2006 elections, he reversed himself, announcing he would comply with FISA, but what about all the years he flouted it?
The Constitution plainly states the president shall “take care that the laws be faithfully executed.” The president must obey and uphold the law, not take it into his own hands. Case law on this is clear. When during the Korean War President Truman wanted to seize U.S. steel mills to keep them running despite a strike, the Supreme Court said no, noting in its decision that the president was commander in chief of the Army and Navy, not the country.
But the truth is, impeaching a president is not just about checking off legal boxes. There must be solid evidence of wrongdoing, but impeachment is an inherently political act. The legal case must resonate with the public, not just lawyers.
That’s why the strongest political ground for impeachment isn’t Bush’s illegal wiretapping program, but the fact that the country was driven into war in Iraq—which most Americans now view as a disastrous mistake—under false pretenses. The framers deliberately gave Congress war-making powers because the momentous decision to go to war should be reached only after the fullest consideration. They believed Congress would curb the historical tendency of executives to make war needlessly. If a president lies or deceives Congress about going to war, he negates its critical constitutional role.
President Bush and his team falsely implied that Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda were in cahoots, reiterating this suggestion so often that by the time of the invasion, most Americans thought Saddam was responsible for 9/11 and U.S. soldiers saw their deployment in Baghdad as “payback.” Yet shortly after 9/11 occurred, former White House counterterrorism expert Richard Clarke told the president that Saddam had nothing to do with it. President Bush undoubtedly also knew that U.S. intelligence agencies gave little credence to the possibility that Saddam Hussein would provide weapons of mass destruction to al Qaeda.
Moreover, the president either lied or was aware that something was seriously wrong when he told Congress in his 2003 State of the Union address that the British government discovered that Saddam tried to buy uranium in Africa, supposedly proof that Iraq was reconstituting its nuclear weapons capacity. But U.S. intelligence knew that claim was bogus at the time, and months after the invasion, the president acknowledged this.
If the president had been briefed on U.S. intelligence before his address, then he deliberately deceived Congress and the United States about the war, “a great and dangerous offense that subverts the Constitution.” In the unlikely event he was not briefed, he still took us to war based on British intelligence, without consulting U.S. intelligence, violating his responsibility to “take care that the laws are faithfully executed.” A full investigation would determine to what extent he and Vice President Dick Cheney deliberately deceived Congress and Americans about the war.
Facilitating mistreatment of detainees in violation of the Geneva Conventions and U.S. statutes (including the War Crimes Act of 1996) is another ground for impeachment. President Bush’s directive effectively removed these protections from al Qaeda and Taliban detainees. After abuses at Abu Ghraib became public, President Bush failed to conduct thorough investigations or to ensure those responsible, including higher-ups, were brought to justice, further violating the Geneva Conventions and his constitutional obligation to faithfully execute the law.
Other potential grounds for impeachment exist, but in my judgment the pattern of this president’s failure to uphold the law and his subversion of the Constitution is sufficiently clear. The question now is, what to do about it?
Former Congresswoman Elizabeth Holtzman, a member of the House Judiciary Committee during the Nixon impeachment hearings, is coauthor with Cynthia L. Cooper of The Impeachment of George W. Bush: A Practical Guide for Concerned Citizens. She currently practices law in New York City.
Monday, March 26, 2007
Poem: Her solitary wish tonight
Nine years ago, my friend, alittle taller than me, with nice
thick, curly hair and I,
stood in front of the air cooler.
We were singing. Our some-
what hormone tinged chords,
distorted by the gust of air.
Half the word would shiver.
Our lips wobbly like rubber.
Woolf had been discovered,
shelved. You asked me what
I wanted. Money. Love. Thin-ness.
I replied. Years later, your glasses
come to memory. You liked to
stand with the wind hitting
your face, only with naked eyes.
I wish now, that I had taken cue.
From that author. Asked for
something unsharable. Like
a room। Or emptiness.
Published by Neha Viswanatha
Saturday, March 24, 2007
Sunday, March 11, 2007
A New Theory of the Universe,
In classical science, humans place all things in time and space on a continuum. The universe is 15 to 20 billion years old; the earth five or six. Homo erectus appeared four million years ago, but he took three-and-a-half million years to discover fire, and another 490,000 to invent agriculture. And so forth. Time in a mechanistic universe (as described by Newton and Einstein and Darwin) is an arrow upon which events are notched. But imagine, instead, that reality is like a sound recording. Listening to an old phonograph doesn’t alter the record itself, and depending on where the needle is placed, you hear a certain piece of music. This is what we call the present. The music before and after the song you are hearing is what we call the past and the future. Imagine, in like manner, that every moment and day endures in nature always. The record does not go away. All nows (all the songs on the record) exist simultaneously, although we can only experience the world (or the record) piece by piece. If we could access all life—the whole record—we could experience it non-sequentially. We could know our children as toddlers, as teenagers, as senior citizens—all now. In the end, even Einstein admitted, “Now [Besso—one of his oldest friends] has departed from this strange world a little ahead of me. That means nothing. People like us . . . know that the distinction between past, present, and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion.” That there is an irreversible, on-flowing continuum of events linked to galaxies and suns and the earth is a fantasy.Biocentrism builds on quantum physics by putting life into the equation
By Robert Lanza
Saturday, March 10, 2007
Poor British youth face drink, drugs and alienation
WYTHENSHAWE, England: Wandering the streets after dusk in this endless housing project, the five teenagers said they were not troubled by the turns their lives had taken so far. Not by the absent fathers, the mothers on welfare, the drugs, the arrests, the incarcerations, the wearying inevitability of it all.
The housing projects in Wythenshawe (pronounced WITH-en-shah) represent an extreme pocket of social deprivation and alienation। But the problems here — a breakdown in families, an absence of respect for authority, the prevalence of drugs, drunkenness, truancy, vandalism and petty criminality — are common across Britain.
...As in parts of Egypt, Iraq, Russia & the United States
Friday, March 02, 2007
Eventually, the administration determined that Diem was unwilling to further modify his policies and the decision was made to remove U.S. support from the regime. This choice was made jointly by the State Department, Pentagon, National Security Council, and the CIA. President Kennedy agreed with the consensus.
Wikipedia
Note: Is it at this point actors for the military industrial complex decided that this “consensus” did not meet with their objectives?
So we are here now...
This is a Google map of the causalities to date from Iraq.
Wednesday, February 28, 2007
Question...?
Worldmapper.org: GDP Wealth
This wealth map shows which territories have the greatest wealth when Gross Domestic Product (GDP) is compared using currency exchange rates. This indicates international purchasing power - what someone’s money would be worth if they wanted to spend it in another territory. For some their money will gain value when they move - others’ money will lose value. This facilitates the movement of some people, whilst severely limiting that of others.
Does Islam speak to the primary needs to organize a society “better” than Christianity, Judaism?
Could ability be one of the variables that make the Islamic faith so pervasive in the regions that contains much of the world’s poor?
The power of Islam to make sense of the world reminds me of that conviction that sustained African Africans during the 1800’s.
Perhaps there is a connection?
Thursday, February 22, 2007
Tuesday, February 20, 2007
Heinlein - Specialization is for Insects
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
Tuesday, February 13, 2007
The end of one man's illusions...
Dear World,
I QUIT
I am now officially quitting runescape. I was once Dragon6851, but now, I am Daniel, a man with a life. I ask, however, for the assistance of the internet community, and all the sub communities like the one of runescape, second life, WoW, etc. PLEASE, for the love of god, log on to my account (I will provide the password later) and change the password and the recovery questions. I will not allow for the temptation to continue playing to exist. I simply cannot have it.
Current Info:
USERNAME: Dragon6851
PASSWORD: clemente7
Please, I beg of you, change the above.
Before I go, let me say a few things. The first is the reason I have quit. SO WHAT??????? so I played for hours and hours, 300k, full rune armor, lvl 48 tcl, thousands of runes and a (paid) membership later, it hit me. why? What do I get out of doing this? The answer is, absolutely nothing. I toiled long and hard for nothing. Has no one else realized this???? I was paying $5 a month to do nothing more than fratenize with asain 7th graders. My second reason is, lets face it, the graphics.... leave much to be desired.
So, along with my plea to change my password, I implore you. If you play any game of this sort,
GET A LIFE.
Insight, Karma, & Compassion: Terrorism and Social Justice.
September 9, 2003
President Bush continues to make Iraq the centerpiece of the war on terrorism. As I considered the invasion and occupation, I came up with these possible results, that the war and occupation:
- makes the above statement into a self-fulfilling prophecy;
- creates a new Vietnam for the US, a Vietnam which also helps to spread global terrorism;
- creates a renewable source of national suffering and impoverishment for the US, and serves as a source of selective corporate enrichment.
Paul Dolinsky, Ph.D
Monday, February 12, 2007
Wednesday, February 07, 2007
Race and Science
Most scientists today agree that Homo sapiens -- modern human beings --originated in Africa some 200,000 years ago, and that between 60,000 and 100,000 years ago, small groups began migrating out of Africa and spreading out across the continents.
Over time, these groups of migratory humans became isolated from one another, and eventually mutation and other evolutionary pressures produced slight genetic changes, some of which are responsible for the differences in appearance we've commonly used to divide up human beings into racial groups. But periods of isolation were followed, as trade and transportation were developed, by periods of admixture -- the mixing of populations that had previously been separate.
Map of human migratory patterns over the past 100,000 years. A map of the migrations of early humans, as reconstructed via DNA studies. By tracing slight changes in DNA and by combining that data with a calculation of the rate at which genetic material changes over time, researchers have been able to reconstruct the general pattern of the historical migrations of peoples across the globe, starting in East or South Africa and extending north into Europe and Asia and eastward to the Pacific Islands and through the Americas, to the tip of South America. The research indicates that all humans alive today share a couple of common ancestors, a woman who lived in Africa around 150,000 years ago, and a man who lived in Africa around 60,000 years ago, at around the time human beings began to leave Africa to explore the rest of the world.
Considering that commonality, it's no surprise the amount of variation between even the most disparate groups of human beings is very small. It's estimated that people share some 99.9% of their DNA. Even looking at that .1% that does vary, 85% of the variation that has been observed is unconnected to membership in any particular group of people; only 15% of the variation is between defined groups. In fact, because as a species we spent the most time in Africa, the greatest amount of genetic variations are currently found among people living on the African continent -- on a genetic level, an individual of East African ancestry may have more in common with a European than with a West African.
© 2006 Educational Broadcasting Corporation. All Rights Reserved.
Over time, these groups of migratory humans became isolated from one another, and eventually mutation and other evolutionary pressures produced slight genetic changes, some of which are responsible for the differences in appearance we've commonly used to divide up human beings into racial groups. But periods of isolation were followed, as trade and transportation were developed, by periods of admixture -- the mixing of populations that had previously been separate.
Map of human migratory patterns over the past 100,000 years. A map of the migrations of early humans, as reconstructed via DNA studies. By tracing slight changes in DNA and by combining that data with a calculation of the rate at which genetic material changes over time, researchers have been able to reconstruct the general pattern of the historical migrations of peoples across the globe, starting in East or South Africa and extending north into Europe and Asia and eastward to the Pacific Islands and through the Americas, to the tip of South America. The research indicates that all humans alive today share a couple of common ancestors, a woman who lived in Africa around 150,000 years ago, and a man who lived in Africa around 60,000 years ago, at around the time human beings began to leave Africa to explore the rest of the world.
Considering that commonality, it's no surprise the amount of variation between even the most disparate groups of human beings is very small. It's estimated that people share some 99.9% of their DNA. Even looking at that .1% that does vary, 85% of the variation that has been observed is unconnected to membership in any particular group of people; only 15% of the variation is between defined groups. In fact, because as a species we spent the most time in Africa, the greatest amount of genetic variations are currently found among people living on the African continent -- on a genetic level, an individual of East African ancestry may have more in common with a European than with a West African.
© 2006 Educational Broadcasting Corporation. All Rights Reserved.
Tuesday, February 06, 2007
Pioneer. Percy L. Julian (1899-1975), Research Chemist
On the day that Percy L. Julian graduated at the top of his class at DePauw University, his great-grandmother bared her shoulders and, for the first time, showed him the deep scars that remained from a beating she had received as a slave during the last days of the Civil War. She then clutched his Phi Beta Kappa key in her hand and said, “This is worth all the scars.”
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