Boddisatva as a Parent

We are confused by words.
Emotions have some utility in the
comprehension of ourselves.
The insight that those emotions afford
are at best a guess based on experience.

Love is as much a guess
as it is a practice of faith.
And for me, Thursday.

Making my son
smile as he fell slept
restores some of that faith.

The Baseline

By Scott Horton, Harper's Magazine.

Back in the days when I was a lawyer representing mining companies (you may have noticed the absence of environmental advocacy in this space), we used to arrange, on acquiring a new mining site, for a “baseline study.” The object was to put the company in a position to demonstrate, when some later issue arose over pollution, what part of the problem was there when we started. I think it’s useful at 11 days before the inauguration of Barack Obama to do a baseline study–to look at what he’s inheriting.

The simple description would be to say it’s an unprecedented mess, and indeed to use a few expletives in the process. The closest analogy certainly is the turnover from Herbert Hoover to Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1933. I’m with John Judis: “We may not simply be facing a steep recession like that of the early 1980s, from which we can extricate ourselves in a year or two, but something resembling the Great Depression of the 1930s.” I also share Judis’s fundamental concern that Obama’s conduct does not yet show that he fully appreciates the magnitude of the calamity that hangs over the nation and the world at this moment.

So here are three of the flashing red lights, all from the newspaper headlines of the last few days:

*

7.2. The current unemployment rate is 7.2%, which in the view of many analysts considerably understates the problem. Taking the approach used by other industrialized nations, our rate might actually be more on the order of 10%. In any event, Bush 43 leaves office with a sixteen-year high in unemployment—matching the record that inspired the American electorate to drive his father, Bush 41, from office. By contrast, Bush inherited a country with a 4.2% unemployment rate, the lowest in 16 years, following an administration that created 20 million jobs. Bush destroyed 2.6 million jobs in the course of 2008 alone.
*

2 trillion. The Congressional Budget Office recently put out its best guess as to the budget deficit that Bush was leaving behind for FY 2009: $1.2 trillion. But that number is almost certainly low. For instance, Strategas analyst Dan Clifton reworks the numbers and comes up with $2.2 trillion. In any event, it will be the biggest deficit in America’s history. By comparison, Bush came into office following the longest sustained peace-time economic expansion in U.S. history under Clinton, who left behind a budget surplus of $559 billion. The total cost of the Bush Administration is estimated by Joe Stiglitz and Linda Blimes in our January cover story at over $10 trillion. Bush was the costliest presidency in U.S. history, by a wide margin; the debt burden he’s leaving behind may be close to triple the one he inherited.
*

Afghanimire. The prestigious congressionally created think-tank the U.S. Institute of Peace issued a massive analysis of the Bush Administration’s performance in Afghanistan and the mess it’s leaving behind for Obama. Conclusion: George W. Bush and his administration have had close to eight years to address the process of building a stable and friendly government in Afghanistan, and they leave office with no measurable achievements, notwithstanding billions expended. All the analysts are agreed on the nature of the problem, too. The Bushies constantly pursued short-term, highly cosmetic goals while neglecting—or even aggravating—the fundamental problems that make the country unstable. Some of their stupider policies were apparently driven by a desire to play to their domestic Religious Right political base—leading Bush to prioritize a highly counterproductive drug suppression program pursued using tactics that were guaranteed to fail from the outset.

Is it really possible for a single president in a single term to bring the nation back to the status quo ante the arrival of the Bush-Cheney hurricane? Almost certainly not. And as we measure Obama’s progress over the coming years, we should measure it realistically against the steaming pile of excrement he inherited from his predecessor. Obama truly has inherited mission impossible.



Source:
http://www.harpers.org/archive/2009/01/hbc-90004164

2009.

“ May your coming year be filled with magic and dreams and good madness. I hope you read some fine books and kiss someone who thinks you’re wonderful, and don’t forget to make some art — write or draw or build or sing or live as only you can. And I hope, somewhere in the next year, you surprise yourself.

Neil Gaiman

My US Auto bailout plan

Let's take the number $34bn

Firstly Chapter 11 for GM & Chrysler LLC. States, Feds to jointly work together to decide how the end of these firms will take place.

Secondly Every dollar of this program has to be accountable to a special office of the GAO as part of the deal.

3. Take 10bn and pay the 70% of salaries, 80% of medical expenses for two years;

4. Take 5bn to continue retirement benefits of workers already retired;

5. Take 3bn to retrain the workforce for new manufacturing economy, new careers, re-education for two years of displaced auto workers;

6. Take 5bn to actively develop manufacturing of alternative energy vehicles, mass transit & engine conversion research for existing auto industry inventories;

7. Take the 11bn left over and put it in trust for expansion of this program for successful, viable ventures developed.

US Auto Bailout

'We spent as much money as we could, and got as little for it as people could make up their minds to give us.'

Great Expectations
Charles Dickens
Chapter 34

The Thirty-Seven Practices of Bodhisattvas: An Oral Teaching

Holding illusory appearances to be true makes you weary.
Therefore when you meet with disagreeable circumstanes,
See them as illusory—
This is the practice of Bodhisattvas.

[...from The Thirty-Seven Practices of Bodhisattvas: An Oral Teaching by Geshe Sonam Rinchen, translated and edited by Ruth Sonam, pg. 59]

Faith

With the deepest respect I will remember: Moshe, Gavriel and Rivka Holtzberg.


Peace be with you,
d

Bullet Proof Soul

I was so in love with you
You rarely see a love that's true
Wasn't that enough for you
Wasn't that enough for you
I would climb a mountain
I wouldn't want to see you fall
Rock climb for you
And give you a reason for it all

You kept on thinking
You were the only one
Too busy thinking
Love is a gun

Hit me like a slow bullet
Like a slow bullet
It took me some time to realise it

You keep on thinking
You were the only one
Too busy thinking
Love is a gun

I know the end before
The story's been told
It's not that complicated
But you're gonna need a bullet proof soul

You keep on thinking
You were the only one
Too busy thinking
Love is a gun

I know the end before
The story's been told
It's not that complicated
But you're gonna need a bullet proof soul

You were trigger happy baby
You never warned me let me free
It's not that complicated
But you're going to need a bullet proof soul
Think you got it but you got all the trouble you need
I came in like a lamb
But I intend to leave like a lion

It hit me like a slow bullet
It hit me like a slow bullet


From the album Love Deluxe,
Songwriters, Adu, Mattewman, Hale

Self-Examination

Not others’ opposition
Nor what they did or failed to do,
But in oneself should be sought
Things done, things left undone.

Dhammapada 4(6): 50

Bodhisattva without a dance partner

Doctrine of the Mind, teaches three things:
(1) To know the mind—so near to us, yet so unknown.
* What power does she have that takes my mind? Takes time from my day to do the things that I prioritize as a priority. With her wonderful smile and fabulous hair. She probably smells nice too...

(2) To shape the mind—so unwieldy and obstinate, yet may turn so pliant.
* Making me think of being that person I promised myself to be. Yes that guy... That guy before this guy.

(3) To free the mind—in bondage all over, yet may win freedom here and now.
* To free the mind, my mind from the excuse that she is the reason that these realizations are happening now.

cc 2008, deayrs

Fearlessly? Recklessly? Selflessly...?

What if you where, you where...
impermeable to pain?
Pain would pass through you like
a breeze through an open window.

Changing the window as much as the
breeze. Changing the breeze as much as the
window.

My question is this.
If you where impermeable to pain.
If love was the only remedy. Compassion its only
vehicle.

How would you love?


cc 2008, deayrs

Boddisatva as a Parent

We are confused by words.
Emotions have some utility in the
comprehension of ourselves.
The insight that those emotions afford
are at best a guess based on experience.

Love is as much a guess
as it is a practice of faith.
And for me, Thursday.

Making my son
smile as he fell slept
restores some of that faith.

Estoy a su deuda.

Official History Spotlights Iraq Rebuilding Blunders

BAGHDAD — An unpublished 513-page federal history of the American-led reconstruction of Iraq depicts an effort crippled before the invasion by Pentagon planners who were hostile to the idea of rebuilding a foreign country, and then molded into a $100 billion failure by bureaucratic turf wars, spiraling violence and ignorance of the basic elements of Iraqi society and infrastructure

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/14/world/middleeast/14reconstruct.html?_r=1&hp

By JAMES GLANZ and T. CHRISTIAN MILLER

Scarred by past woes, Japan sees U.S. bailout as a first step

"America is walking the same road as Japan, and that road will be long and hard ahead," said Hirofumi Gomi, a former commissioner of the Financial Services Agency in Japan, the industry watchdog that oversaw the banking cleanup. "There is a lot more pain and turmoil coming."

The similarities with Japan are striking. Like the United States today, Japan in the early 1990s faced a banking and real estate crisis that undermined the entire economy and required large government intervention. Some of Japan's most venerated financial institutions collapsed as snowballing losses from failed business and property loans plunged the nation's financial system into paralysis.


By Martin Fackler
Published: October 10, 2008
http://www.iht.com/articles/2008/10/10/asia/10japan.php

Seven Sins of the World

1. Wealth without work
2. Pleasure without conscience
3. Knowledge without character
4. Commerce without morality
5. Science without humanity
6. Worship without sacrifice
7. Politics without principle



by Mahatma Gandhi

British fear US commander is beating the drum for Iran strikes

By Damien McElroy, Foreign Affairs Correspondent
Last Updated: 1:53am BST 05/04/2008

British officials gave warning yesterday that America's commander in Iraq will declare that Iran is waging war against the US-backed Baghdad government.

A strong statement from General David Petraeus about Iran's intervention in Iraq could set the stage for a US attack on Iranian military facilities, according to a Whitehall assessment. In closely watched testimony in Washington next week, Gen Petraeus will state that the Iranian threat has risen as Tehran has supplied and directed attacks by militia fighters against the Iraqi state and its US allies.

General David Petraeus: British fear US commander is beating the drum for Iran strikes
General Petraeus: recent attacks on the green zone used Iranian-provided, Iranian-made rockets

The outbreak of Iraq's worst violence in 18 months last week with fighting in Basra and the daily bombardment of the Green Zone diplomatic enclave, demonstrated that although the Sunni Muslim insurgency is dramatically diminished, Shia forces remain in a strong position to destabilise the country.

"Petraeus is going to go very hard on Iran as the source of attacks on the American effort in Iraq," a British official said. "Iran is waging a war in Iraq. The idea that America can't fight a war on two fronts is wrong, there can be airstrikes and other moves," he said.

"Petraeus has put emphasis on America having to fight the battle on behalf of Iraq. In his report he can frame it in terms of our soldiers killed and diplomats dead in attacks on the Green Zone."

Tension between Washington and Tehran is already high over Iran's covert nuclear programme. The Bush administration has not ruled out military strikes.

In remarks interpreted as signalling a change in his approach to Iran, Gen Petraeus last week hit out at the Iranian leadership. "The rockets that were launched at the Green Zone were Iranian-provided, Iranian-made rockets," he said. "All of this in complete violation of promises made by President Ahmadinejad and the other most senior Iranian leaders to their Iraqi counterparts."
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The humiliation of the Iraqi prime minister Nouri al-Maliki by the Iranian-backed cleric Moqtada al-Sadr in fighting in Basra last week triggered top-level warnings over Iran's strength in Iraq.

Gen Petraeus and Ryan Crocker, the US ambassador to Baghdad, will answer questions from American political leaders at the US Congress on Tuesday and Wednesday before travelling to London to brief Gordon Brown.

The Wall Street Journal said last week that the US war effort in Iraq must have a double goal.

"The US must recognise that Iran is engaged in a full-up proxy war against it in Iraq," wrote the military analyst Kimberly Kagan.

There are signs that targeting Iran would unite American politicians across the bitter divide on Iraq. "Iran is the bull in the china shop," said Ike Skelton, the Democrat chairman of the Armed Services Committee. "In all of this, they seem to have links to all of the Shi'ite groups, whether they be political or military."



http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2008/04/05/wiran105.xml

Banking on the Sex Trade

A unique financial institution helps Indian women break loose from a debilitating and demeaning profession

Kolkata-based Aditi Biswas, 29, was keen to turn entrepreneur and run her own grocery. There was one problem. Aditi was working as a prostitute and the neighborhood banks she approached for loans turned her down flat.

Enter the Usha Multipurpose Cooperative Society, a bank that caters exclusively to the financial needs of Kolkata’s sex workers. The society offered Aditi seed capital of Rs100,000 ($2500) for her business, with minimal fuss and nominal interest. Away from the sleaze of her previous profession, Aditi is now an entrepreneur who not only sends her children to a good school but also just bought a one-bedroom house. “The bank has turned my life around 180 degrees,” she exults.

http://www.asiasentinel.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=968&Itemid=34

War critics astonished as US hawk admits invasion was illegal

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

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

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