Morning of grace

“No society has been able to abolish human sadness, no political system can deliver us from the pain of living, from our fear of death, our thirst for the absolute. It is the human condition that directs the social condition, not vice versa.”

"I thought that it was strange to assume that it was abnormal for anyone to be forever asking questions about the nature of the universe, about what the human condition really was, my condition, what I was doing here, if there was really something to do. It seemed to me on the contrary that it was abnormal for people not to think about it, for them to allow themselves to live, as it were, unconsciously. Perhaps it's because everyone, all the others, are convinced in some unformulated, irrational way that one day everything will be made clear. Perhaps there will be a morning of grace for humanity. Perhaps there will be a morning of grace for me. "

Eugène Ionesco

Keith Olbermann

Technorati Tags:bush, iraq, olbermann, youtube, war, corruption, manipulation, fear

Private Warriors

Frontline's documentary on military outsourcing to private contractors, corporate security guards who are killing without accountability, the money being made on the war by companies like KBR and Halliburton, why things went fubar in Fallujah. This is an incredible documentary, and you can watch it on PBS via streaming video.


Frontline's Private Warriors - view the entire program online.

How to End the War

What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty or democracy?

Mahatma Gandhi, "Non-Violence in Peace and War"

How to End the War, by Naomi Klein

The Universe Within

from the FSU Molecular Expressions website:

Secret Worlds:  The Universe Within

"Soar through space starting at 10 million light years away from the Milky Way down through to a single proton in Florida in decreasing orders of magnitude (powers of ten). This tutorial explores the use of exponential notation to understand and compare the size of things in our world and the universe, and provides a glimpse of the duality between the macroworld around us and the hidden microworld within."

 

War Profit Litany

Allen Ginsberg

To Ezra Pound

These are the names of the companies that have made
       money from this war
nineteenhundredsixtyeight  Annodomini  fourthousand
       eighty Hebraic
These are the Corporations who have profited by merchan-
       dising skinburning phosphorous or shells fragmented
       to thousands of fleshpiercing needles
and here listed money millions gained by each combine for
       manufacture
and here are gains numbered, index'd swelling a decade, set
       in order,
here named the Fathers in office in these industries, tele-
       phones directing finance,
names of directors, makers of fates, and the names of the
       stockholders of these destined Aggregates,
and here are the names of their ambassadors to the Capital,
       representatives to legislature, those who sit drinking
       in hotel lobbies to persuade,
and separate listed, those who drop Amphetamine with
       military, gossip, argue, and persuade
suggesting policy naming language proposing strategy, this
       done for fee as ambassadors to Pentagon, consul-
       tants to military, paid by their industry:
and these are the names of the generals & captains mili-
       tary, who know thus work for war goods manufactur-
       ers;
and above these, listed, the names of the banks, combines,
       investment trusts that control these industries:
and these are the names of the newspapers owned by these
       banks
and these are the names of the airstations owned by these
       combines;
and these are the numbers of thousands of citizens em-
       ployed by these businesses named;
and the beginning of this accounting is 1958 and the end
       1968, that static be contained in orderly mind,
       coherent and definite,
and the first form of this litany begun first day December
       1967 furthers this poem of these States.

Cop says legalize, not decriminalize.

Norm Stamper was chief of the Seattle Police Department from 1994 - 2000. He is the author of 'Breaking Rank.'

How Legalizing Drugs Will End the Violence. July 28, 2006

Leave the Dopers Alone. October 20, 2005

You are 58% stoner You are a fairly regular stoner. You were probably the kid who was always smoking up at the back corner of the parking lot of your high school. You like experimenting with other stuff – although you are too clever to really get addicted to anything. Take this quiz at QuizUniverse.com

The Dangers of a Personal God

Judaism, Christianity, and -- to a lesser extent -- Islam have all developed the idea of a personal God, so we tend to think that this ideal represents religion at its best. The personal God has helped monotheists to value the sacred and inalienable rights of the individual and to cultivate an appreciation of human personality. The Judeo-Christian tradition has thus helped the West to acquire the liberal humanism it values so highly. These values were originally enshrined in a personal God who does everything that a human being does: he loves, judges, punishes, sees, hears, creates and destroys as we do. Yahweh began as a highly personalized deity with passionate human likes and dislikes. Later he became a symbol of transcendence, whose thoughts were not our thoughts and whose ways soared above our own as the heavens tower above the earth. The personal God reflects an important religious insight: that no supreme value can be less than human. Thus personalism has been an important and - for many - an indispensable stage of religious and moral development. The prophets of Israel attributed their own emotions and passions to God; Buddhists and Hindus had to include a personal devotion to avatars of the supreme reality. Christianity made a human person the center of the religious life in a way that was unique in the history of religion: it took the personalism inherent in Judaism to an extreme. It may be that without some degree of this kind of identification and empathy, religion cannot take root.

Yet a personal God can become a grave liability. He can be a mere idol carved in our own image, a projection of our limited needs, fears and desires. We can assume that he loves what we love and hates what we hate, endorsing our prejudices instead of compelling us to transcend them. When he seems to fail to prevent a catastrophe or seems even to desire a tragedy, he can seem callous and cruel. A facile belief that a disaster is the will of God can make us accept things that are fundamentally unacceptable. The very fact that, as a person, God has a gender is also limiting: it means that the sexuality of half the human race is sacralized at the expense of the female and can lead to neurotic and inadequate imbalance in human sexual mores. A personal God can be dangerous, therefore. Instead of pulling us beyond our limitations, "he" can encourage us to remain complacently within them; "he" can make us as cruel, callous, self-satisfied and partial as "he" seems to be. Instead of inspiring compassion that should characterize all advanced religion, "he" can encourage us to judge, condemn and marginalize. It seems, therefore, that the idea of a personal God can only be a stage in our religious development. The world religions all seem to have recognized this danger and have sought to transcend the personal conception of supreme reality.

A History of God: The 4,000-Year Quest of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, by Karen Armstrong

Chapter 7: The God of the Mystics

No Place to Hide

The Daily Show's Jon Stewart interviews No Place to Hide author Robert O'Harrow, Jr.  You can watch the clip here.

The official site offers a 'Multimedia Investigation by Robert O'Harrow, Jr. and the Center for Investigative Reporting'.

Read the final chapter of No Place to Hide online, or listen to author interviews, read reviews and interviews of major players. 

And to further deepen your paranoia, why not check out the different theological interpretations of the number 666 on the Wiki entry on 'Number of the Beast'.

I'm trying to be lighthearted, doesn't seem to be working.  I love the Daily Show for making me laugh at the things that keep me awake at night.

 

The Terrorist in the Mirror

The Terrorist in the Mirror

Noam Chomsky's speech at the Amnesty International Annual Lecture hosted by TCD, delivered at Shelbourne Hall, the Royal Dublin Society, January 18, 2006.

Fog of War

Clearing the Fog of Endless War

By Eric Frances

Bob the Mind Bomber

I moved to Toronto in October 2001, and my husband used to keep CityTV's BT (Breakfast Television) on in the mornings to listen to the traffic and weather reports before work. I don't watch a lot of tv, but I'd watch friendly suspender-clad Kevin Frankish doing a run down of the day's top stories, we'd both laugh and wink at each other when Mika the sexy transit reporter came on for a few seconds, mute the tube when Liza Fromer, the station bimbo giggler came on and didn't pay much attention to anything else. Then came the day I caught a glimpse of this old hippy in a kimono bathrobe scanning a stack of newspapers with a highlighter on a segment called "Papercuts", so I turned up the volume and gaped.

That was my first introduction to Bob Hunter, and I became a devotee. Bob, with his receding, ponytailed hair, sporting the groovy bathrobes and reading through and commenting on a variety of reports from the morning papers, is responsible for enlightening me on a wide variety of subjects, including the Kyoto Protocol, global warming, oil supply politics, activism, nuclear power issues, eco-journalism, as well as internal Canadian, US-Canada, and global politics. I watched Papercuts for many months before googling Bob's name, and was amazed to discover that he was a co-founder of Greenpeace, and largely responsible for the organization's media savvy. He is noted not only for his eco-activism, but for his journalism. To read some of Bob's articles, check out his contibutor section on Eye.net. He has authored many books:

Erebus; The Enemies Of Anarchy; The Storming Of The Mind; Greenpeace; Greenpeace III: Journey Into The Bomb; To Save The Whale; Warriors Of The Rainbow; The Greenpeace Chronicle; Cry Wolf; On The Sky: Zen And The Art Of International Freeloading and 2030 : Confronting Thermageddon in Our Lifetime

I had noticed that Bob's Papercuts segment had disappeared from BT's daily broadcasts, but I was stunned to hear that he had passed away on May 2nd after a fight with prostate cancer. His funeral is set for May 15th, and I hope the media covers it to the hilt so that the world will know what kind of hero we've lost. He was one of a kind, and meant a lot to me.

Apocalypse Bob