Ticklish Licorice Clitoris

Crossjostle Gospel

2009-10-25T00:05:00.001-07:00

We've moved to "The Book..."

None of the Nuns had... (permits to park)

2009-10-25T00:02:00.000-07:00

"Climate Change is a Hoax" (the song)

2009-10-24T18:54:00.000-07:00

Emerson's Note: I actually have an issue with the scientific models in regards to 'climate change'. That's my main beef.

I agree with Nassim Taleb when he says:

"I am hyper-conservative ecologically (meaning super-Green). My position on the climate is to avoid releasing pollutants in the atmosphere, on the basis of ignorance, regardless of current expert opinion (climate experts, like banking risk managers, have failed us in the past in foreseeing long term damages and I cannot accept certainty in a certain class of nonlinear models). This is an extension of my general idea that one does not need rationalization with the use of complicated models (by fallible experts) to the edict: "do not disturb a complex system" since we do not know the consequences of our actions owing to complicated causal webs. (Incidentally, this ideas also makes me anti-war). I explicitly explained the need to "leave the planet the way we got it."

Emerson's Note: (continued) ...Although, Owsley Stanley, of 60s 'Sunshine acid' fame, clearly doesn't believe in global warming.

Quotes from him include:

"The greenhouse effect is a myth." ...

"Global warming does not exist. There are so many buffers in the atmosphere that it is highly unlikely to ever happen, even if the so called "greenhouse gas" content were to increase hundreds of times over." ...

"Burning fossil fuels is probably one of the most important aids to the life cycle on this oxygen-rich, carbon-poor planet that man can do."

Hard to really know. I'm not a scientist like Owsley.

Queensryche & Lita Ford - Close My Eyes Forever

2009-10-17T14:37:00.000-07:00

JED'S A MILLIONAIRE play "live" tonight at the Ruby Room @ 10:30 p.m. (all-originals set)

2009-10-02T21:21:00.000-07:00

www.jedsamillionaireband.com

www.myspace.com/jedsamillionaire

radiofreedoghouse - "Tucson Blues"

2009-10-02T21:17:00.000-07:00

No Longer Willing to Settle for Less

2009-10-01T08:21:00.000-07:00

"The truth is, we don't live in a reality.

We live at the intersection of many realities,
and any one of them can spring into expression
in a heartbeat,
the moment we are no longer willing
to settle for less,
and resting in that identity,
lay our silent claim."

(Field training)

Arianna Huffington: What Michael Moore Told Me

2009-09-21T11:14:00.000-07:00

... After a preview screening last week (at which I did a Q&A session with Michael), he came over to my home for a late night bite. Over lasagna, he told me about an incident that occurred while he was filming that exemplifies how the economic crisis cannot be looked at through a left vs right prism.

It happened while he and his crew were shooting the climax of the movie, where Michael decides to mark Wall Street as a crime scene, putting up yellow police tape around some of the financial district's towers of power.

While unfurling the tape in front of a "too big to fail" bank, he became aware of a group of New York's finest approaching him. Moore has a long history of dealing with policemen and security guards trying to shut him down, but in this case he knew he was, however temporarily, defacing private property. And his shooting schedule didn't leave room for a detour to the local jail. So, as the lead officer came closer, Moore tried to deflect him, saying: "Just doing a little comedy here, officer. I'll be gone in a minute, and will clean up before I go."

The officer looked at him for a moment, then leaned in: "Take all the time you need." He nodded to the bank and said, "These guys wiped out a lot of our Police Pension Funds." The officer turned and slowly headed back to his squad car. Moore wanted to put the moment in his film, but realized it could cost the cop his job, and decided to leave it out. "When they've lost the police," he told me, "you know they're in trouble." ...

source

AZ Wing Chun Gung Fu w/ Sifu Brian Tufts

2009-09-20T22:14:00.000-07:00

Bagful of Beliefs

2009-09-20T16:54:00.001-07:00

As you get out into the world,
or into new relationships,
there are others who want your agreement.

And so, you find yourselves
(bless your hearts)
upside down and all around
as you are trying to conform
to the primary stream of thought,
relative to subjects:

You want to do what’s
socially acceptable,
for you do not want to be
an outcast.

And, you want to do what’s politically correct,
because you do not want to be an outcast.

And, you want to do what your family expects of you,
because you don’t want to be disinherited.

And, you want to do what your religion says,
because you don’t want to be disavowed or go to hell

—which is far worse than any of the other things. (Fun)

Most of you have been using standards
or measurements
that are outside of you
and that have nothing
to do with you
in order to try to formulate
your thoughts or opinions
or attitudes, or actions.

And in the process,
what has happened is,
you have picked up an incredible hodgepodge of beliefs,
some of which serve you—some of which do not.

Most ... feel powerless in what comes to them
because they’ve been practicing this vibration
and practicing that vibration, and practicing that vibration,
and picking up thoughts and beliefs based upon the evidence
that the society produces around them.

And so now, you find yourselves often with a whole bagful of beliefs that are not serving you.

The thing that is
most hindering
is when you look
at what people
are living
and you gather your evidence or statistics,
and then you claim it
as true.

You say,

-
“It must be true.

They warned me about that, and sure enough, it happened.”

And what we are wanting so much for you to hear is:

What anyone is living...
-
your culture, your environment, your society,
your city, your family, your person
-
what anybody is living...
-
The truth, or the evidence that you are producing
is only the truth that manifests in response
to the habit of vibration that you offer.

So, when you look out into your society and you see something,
wanted or unwanted,
and
you proclaim it as true,
—

which is the reason that you give
that others should think about it,
write about it, talk about it, understand,
and accept it as truth,
—

do you feel how screwy that is?

That’s like saying,
“There’s something out there that I do not want,
but because somebody else created it in their experience
and it became their truth, now I must beat the drum of it,
and make it my truth, too.”

And we say, fortunately there are a variety of truths for you to pick from.

Fortunately, you are the creator of your own truth.

No one can write a book;
no one can start a movement;
no one can organize a religion.

No one can say,

“These are the things that are important for you to do,
and these are the things that
you must not do,”
-

because no one knows the mix of intentions
and the mix of beliefs that you hold.

You get to choose all of it.

-Abraham-Hicks-

Jed's a Millionaire - "Nothing"

2009-09-20T16:06:00.000-07:00

Jed's a Millionaire - "Ghost"

2009-09-20T15:30:00.001-07:00

Woolytooth - "Sleeping Planet" (live)

2009-09-20T13:25:00.000-07:00

American Political Sanitarium Inmates suffer from SDD: Selective Deficit Disorder

2009-09-19T11:57:00.000-07:00

by David Sirota

Watching the health care debate unfold these days is a little like watching scenes from "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" — the ones showing a collage of strung-out, deranged or otherwise incapacitated patients rotting away in a squalid psychiatric ward.

As the insurance industry's Nurse Ratched lurks in the background, congressional Democrats cower in the corner, fearing the phantom menace of their own shadows. Standing next to the window, suicidal Republican leaders rant about "death panels" and threaten to splatter their electoral prospects onto the pavement below. Nearby, White House officials struggle with multiple-personality ailments as they mumble contradictory statements about the public option. Meanwhile, tea party protesters lie on the floor in a fetal position, soiling their hospital diapers as they throw incoherent tantrums about everything from socialism to communism to czarism to Nazism. And, not surprisingly, Washington reporters just stare off into the distance, having been long ago lobotomized in the wake of their Watergate heyday.

Clearly, the inmates in America's political sanitarium are each struggling with different maladies. However, they are all suffering from Selective Deficit Disorder — an illness whose symptoms can be particularly difficult to detect.

When we see tea party activists bemoan deficit spending or watch rank-and-file senators like Blanche Lincoln, D-Ark., say, "I'm not going to vote for a (health care) bill that's not deficit-neutral," it is easy to think these poor souls are perfectly healthy. When President Obama promises to "not sign a (health) plan that adds one dime to our deficit" and then New York Times writers such as David Brooks praise this "dime standard" as the epitome of "pragmatism" and "fiscal sanity," these victims seem absolutely sane.

Yet, Selective Deficit Disorder is a sickness of omission.

Attacking the neural synapses that maintain rudimentary logic, it presents itself not in what its carriers say and do, but in what they refuse to say and do.

Where, for instance, were conservative organizations marching on Washington when President Bush vastly expanded the deficit with his massive tax cuts for the wealthy? Where was Senator Lincoln's concern for "deficit neutrality" when she voted to give $700 billion to the thieves on Wall Street? Where was Obama's "dime standard" when he proposed a budget that spends far more on maintaining bloated Pentagon budgets than on any universal health care proposal being considered in Congress? Where were demands for “fiscal sanity” by Brooks and other right-wing pundits when they cheered on the budget-busting war in Iraq? Where were any calls for raising taxes from these supposed “deficit hawks” when they backed all this profligate spending? And where were the journalists asking such painfully simple questions?

They were nowhere, because those plagued by Selective Deficit Disorder (as the name suggests) are only selectively worried about deficits.

When it comes to spending on priorities like health care reform that would help ordinary Americans, the illness's victims scream about deficits and overspending. But when it comes to handing over trillions of dollars to financial firms, defense contractors and other corporate interests, deficits suddenly don't matter to the disease-addled politicians, protestors and journalists underwritten by those interests.

Luckily, while almost every significant voice in politics is stricken with Selective Deficit Disorder, the majority of the country's citizens are not. That doesn't mean Americans love unbalanced budgets, of course. It just means we know there is something very wrong with those who decry deficit spending on health care for millions of people, but ignore far bigger deficit expenditures on giveaways to a tiny handful of fat cats.

Now, all we have to do is stop flying over the cuckoo's nest and start breaking into the asylum...

source

"You're Not People," Sotomayor Tells Corporations

2009-09-18T15:11:00.000-07:00

Sonia Sotomayor, President Obama’s newly installed Supreme Court Justice, has a few words for corporations seeking protection under law.

You’re not people.

During arguments in a recent campaign-finance case
-
that may upend campaign finance law
to allow more spending by corporations,
-
Sotomayor suggested that the core underpinning of protecting corporations’ rights was flawed.

Judges “created corporations as persons;
gave birth to corporations as persons,” she said,
the Wall Street Journal noted Friday.

“There could be an argument made that
that was the court’s error to start with…
[imbuing] a creature of state law with human characteristics.”

Corporations were first afforded the rights of persons under United States law in the 1800s, allowing them wide protections under federal code.

Development of the law mushroomed as corporations — which were originally chartered by and in single states — began to grow larger and cross state lines.

Eventually, courts ruled that states didn’t have the right to revoke contracts made by the corporations themselves.

They also ruled that states didn’t have the unhindered right to revoke corporate charters.

Corporate personhood emerged
from the 1886 Supreme Court Case,
Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad.

The interpretation of law giving corporations individual rights is salient in the campaign finance debate because corporations with “human rights” under law also have a right to free speech.

Those seeking to gut campaign finance regulations use this argument when positing that the ability for firms to spend lavishly on political campaigns is tantamount to their right to free speech.

Sotomayor’s comment, while limited in scope, could mark a shift in judicial thought on the bench.

Supreme Court Justice Roberts, installed by President George W. Bush, was seen by critics and fans alike as a strong defender of corporate rights.

“Progressives who think that corporations already have an unduly large influence on policy in the United States have to feel reassured that this was one of [her] first questions,” Douglas Kendall, president of the Constitutional Accountability Center, was quoted in the Journal as saying.

On the other side of the fence, the pro-corporate Heritage Foundation said they found Sotomayor’s remark problematic.

“I don’t want to draw too much from one comment,” Todd Gaziano, director of the Center for Legal and Judicial Studies at the conservative Heritage Foundation, said.

But it “doesn’t give me a lot of confidence that she respects the corporate form and the type of rights that it should be afforded.”

source

The Filmmakers vs. the Capitalists

2009-09-17T15:05:00.000-07:00

We’re about to find out if the filmmakers can succeed
where Congressional hearings and mainstream media have failed.

Will the film documentaries examining insatiable corporate greed
and Wall Street malfeasance provide the American people
with the necessary foundation of understanding and activist tools
to seriously tackle the problem head on?

The embryo of a breakthrough idea is emerging amidst the smell of popcorn and Raisinets in theatres around the globe: the mega corporate structure is no longer facilitating product innovation as much as it is spawning audacious crime innovation. So big and bulky it can’t get out of its own way, let alone innovate, the bloated behemoth resorts to crime for profits. Unless we think there is a future for our nation in patenting, securitizing and exporting felonious acts, we need to change course and fast.

Three films are standouts as a combined curriculum for leading Americans out of the darkness. Together, they provide a compelling argument that the seeds of today’s financial calamity were planted in the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in 1886 to effectively grant corporations the same protections as humans.

Each film uses its own unique stories of corporate atrocities but delivers the same underlying message: corporate personhood, heeding only the clarion call of profits at any cost, has developed the endemic traits of a psychopath, corrupting everything it touches from its own managers, courts, or governments. As these corporate tentacles of corruption now reach into every conceivable part of our existence, the corporate personhood structure is effectively snuffing out human personhood, one foreclosed family at a time, one Bhopal disaster at a time, one corrupt judge jailing children for profit at a time. If there is a Dickensian feel to all of this, it’s because deregulation of corporations is accelerating the devolving human nature of our society.

Ideally, the films should be viewed in this order: First, “The Corporation,” a 145 minute film by Mark Achbar, Jennifer Abbott, and Joel Bakan that premiered at Sundance in January 2004 and has racked up 26 international awards. A two-disc DVD now includes an additional eight hours of deleted scenes, Q and A’s, and clips sorted by person’s name or topic.

Next, Michael Moore’s “Capitalism: A Love Story” which will be released to mass audiences in the U.S. on October 2 after September premieres in Venice and Toronto. (I researched Moore’s film from released clips, web archived interviews and an extensive amount of European press.)

And, third, the uproarious corporate prankster movie which will begin its U.S. theater release on October 7, “The Yes Men Fix the World.” This film presents a hilarious and ingenious how-to program on inflicting public shame on corporations within the confines of their own corporate confabs.

“The Corporation” begins by tracing the birth of the corporation and its rise to “personhood” status. Prior to the Civil War, corporations were restrained by having their charters issued by states for specific purposes and terms. If corporations engaged in illegal acts, their charters could be revoked. But following the passage of the 14th Amendment, which provided that no state could “deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law” the corporations aggressively sought to gain personhood status for themselves. The film notes that while 600,000 people died in the Civil War to give rights to people, from 1890 to 1910 the U.S. Supreme Court heard 307 cases under the 14th Amendment: 288 came from corporations; 19 by African Americans. (The pivotal case the corporations use to cite their legal personhood is the 1886 Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific.)

The Yes Men have honed in on this same corporate personhood problem. On November 12, 2008 the Yes Men (known as Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno) participated in a hoax that saw 1.2 million copies of an extremely high quality, but fake, New York Times being distributed in New York City and other major metropolitan areas. The newsprint edition was backed up by an equally high quality web site. Above the fold headlines declared “Iraq War Ends” and “Nation Sets Its Sights on Building Sane Economy.” A spoof article outlines how John McCain is heading up a program to help corporations finish their quest to become fully human persons by achieving that one distinguishing characteristic: a conscience. “You’d have to be very cynical to think that corporations, when they won protection as ‘persons’ under the ‘Freed Slave’ Amendment, were thinking only of their own wealth…It’s clear that corporations just admire humans and what we have. We should be good hosts and help them however we can. Right now, that means making them responsible and responsive.”

All three films, wittingly or unwittingly, focus the audience on the psychopathic tendencies of the modern day corporation. Moore’s film delves into a host of malfeasances including some markedly grotesque examples. One, previously detailed in the February 2, 2008 CounterPunch article “Global Finance and the Insanity Defense,” is the corporation’s purchase of large life insurance policies on their workers without their knowledge. Called dead peasants’ insurance, janitor’s insurance or Corporate Owned Life Insurance (COLI), here’s what we reported in February 2008:

“Some of the largest corporations in America have been boosting their income statements by including cash buildup in the policies as well as receiving the death benefit tax free.

In 2003, the General Accountability Office (GAO) released a study with the startling findings that companies were taking out multiple policies on the same individual and that 3,209 banks and thrifts had current cash values in these policies totaling $56.3 Billion.

But instead of a congressional revolt against this revolting practice, it remained in place for at least 16 years after Congress first learned about it. Then along comes the worker-friendly sounding Pension Protection Act of 2006 submitted by our Congress and signed by the President. Buried deep within this massive document was the grandfathering of the millions of previously issued policies with a little tinkering at the edges of tax and reporting issues on newly issued policies.”

Moore’s movie has not yet hit U.S. theatres and the Wall Street Journal and New York Times have already published pieces that discredit the filmmaker. Matthew Kaminski, a member of the Wall Street Journal’s editorial board, says “Mr. Moore can't be judged as a documentary film maker, except dismissively. He confuses issues on purpose. He repeatedly ignores the other side of the story. He never asks why, for example, a company might take out an insurance policy on a key employee.” Here, Kaminski is guilty of his own charge, ignoring the other side of the story: billions of dollars of life insurance was taken out on non-key employees, without their knowledge. In many cases the insurance remained in force after the employee left the firm, extinguishing any possible claim to an insurable interest as required under the law.

The New York Times, which together with Judith Miller relentlessly waved the pom-poms in the lead-up to the Iraq war, notes the following in a piece on Moore’s film by Michael Cieply, citing a study from the Center for Social Media: “The report found that documentarians, while they generally aspire to act honorably, often operate under ad hoc ethical codes. The craft tends to see itself as being bound less by the need to be accurate and fair than by a desire for social justice, to level the playing field between those who are perceived to be powerful and those who are not.” The Times ran another piece by Bruce Headlam which devoted four words (“privatized juvenile detention centers”) out of a 2100 word article to Moore’s expose in the film on the jailing of children for profit. Following is the background on what locals in Pennsylvania are calling the Kids for Cash scandal, a growing and fluid public corruption case. You decide if four words get the job done.

Our society has apparently begun to mimic the psychopathic corporate personhood role model. Two judges (Mark Ciavarella Jr. and Michael Conahan), a lawyer (Robert Powell), and a builder (Robert K. Mericle) of privatized juvenile jails in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania have been charged by Federal prosecutors in a scheme to essentially sell kids, as if they were commodities, to fill up the for-profit jails.

Here’s how the scam went down according to criminal charges and civil suits: first, one of the judges cut off funding to the county’s own juvenile detention center; next he gave a green light to the builder and co-owner lawyer to build the first jail (a second one was later constructed); a 20 year, $58 million lease was signed by the county; then his pal judge who headed the juvenile court facilitated a form being shoved under parents’ noses just before entering his courtroom waiving the child’s right to counsel. Typically, within a few moments of the child entering the courtroom for “crimes” as small as slapping another child, making fun of school personnel on a website, or stealing change from unlocked cars, children were handcuffed, shackled and sent off to the privatized juvenile jail leaving parents stunned, crying and even fainting in the courtroom. In many cases, children were incarcerated for months.

Very likely, many of these children will never again feel safe in our society; a precious part of their childhood has been viciously removed for profit. The judges received over $2.5 million from Powell and Mericle in reward for their efforts.

You can bet that the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal will see no connection between the above episode and Wall Street’s transgressions. So let me make the connection. Attorney Powell needed the same comforts as Wall Street titans: a mansion, a private plane, and a 56’ yacht named “Reel Justice.” The builder, Robert K. Mericle, has been permitted to essentially reduce his charges by placing $2.1 million in a fund for children. According to the Times-Shamrock newspapers of Northeastern Pennsylvania, “In his plea agreement, Mericle agreed to donate $2.1 million to local programs promoting the health and welfare of children. Mericle has already placed the funds in an escrow account with his attorney, William Winning of the Philadelphia firm Cozen O'Connor, according to the agreement.” This sounds very similar to Wall Street’s perpetual habit of committing massive crimes against the public and then settling for millions with the SEC.

And then there’s the matter of the two judges, who prosecutors say have been showing signs of hiding assets and may be a flight risk. The judges are free on bail and not confined to their homes. That’s more generous than Bernie Madoff’s home detention while he awaited sentencing. What message does that send to these children and their families?

Also similar to the Madoff matter, for years people in Luzerne County tried everything short of shouting from the rooftops to expose the fact that these judges were up to no good but the investigation of these high powered people went nowhere: the list of people speaking out included the former county controller, Steve Flood, who eventually suffered a stroke and lost his ability to speak; the Juvenile Law Center which has now brought a civil suit on behalf of the children; a former Judge, Ann Lokuta, who says she was politically targeted for challenging the corruption; and parents of the children.

When Michael Moore says “I refuse to live in a country like this, and I’m not leaving,” he extols us to look deeply within ourselves. How did we, some of the most hard working and creative people on the planet (as surely evidenced by Andy Bichlbaum and Mike Bonanno) allow our democracy to be transformed into a massive corporate crime scene? (Moore wraps yellow crime scene tape around Wall Street in the film to underscore the point.)

Here’s my creative thought to start taking back our country: instead of giving gifts this holiday season that are made by corporations who have pillaged our democracy, give sets of the above three films.

For extra good measure, include Andrew and Leslie Cockburn's film "American Casino," the most insightful look yet at the foreclosure and housing crisis.

source

Jed's a Millionaire - "Eyes"

2009-09-16T18:12:00.000-07:00

Andrew Cockburn's Daughter: Olivia Wilde

2009-09-16T17:53:00.000-07:00

Andrew Cockburn is the producer of The American Casino

Olivia Wilde may still be best known for making out with Mischa Barton on "The O.C." and playing a bisexual doctor on "House," but she's on the cover of the October GQ and reveals an enviable pedigree full of D.C., Hollywood and media A-listers. Obama has phoned her and she's married to a prince. Read through some of the details below, read the whole GQ article here, see more pics here, and vote in the poll at the bottom.

Excerpts from GQ:

On Hitchens:
Christopher Hitchens used to babysit me when I was young."

"With Olivia you could tell it was going to be the movies or stage or TV or nothing," says Hitchens, the noted writer and political racon-teur who briefly lived with the Cockburns and describes it as the type of place where the worn memoirs of the French military leader Ferdinand Foch were used to prop up a window. "Olivia sort of lived the part--very pretty, and, well, the Victorian term for it is headstrong. She wasn't going to be overlooked or ignored."

Growing up in D.C.:
Her parents, Andrew and Leslie Cockburn, are both longtime investigative journalists based in Washington, D.C. Andrew is the author of unfrivolous books like The Threat: Inside the Soviet Military Regime and Rumsfeld: His Rise, Fall and Catastrophic Legacy. Leslie, meanwhile, has produced or directed segments for 60 Minutes, ABC News, and Frontline. This fall the couple will release a documentary about the housing crisis called American Casino.

When they weren't traveling on assignment to places like Afghanistan, Colombia, and Iraq, Wilde's parents were legendary for dinner parties at their rambling Georgetown town house. Andrew and Leslie Cockburn remain fixtures on the D.C. social circuit; over the years, journalists like Seymour Hersh and the late Peter Jennings have been friends.

"Olivia was exposed to a lot of very clever people when she was little," Leslie Cockburn says. She recalls Olivia eavesdropping one night on a conversation between Richard Holbrooke and Mick Jagger--until the Rolling Stone turned around and shooed Olivia to bed. "How many girls were told to go to bed by Mick Jagger?" she asks.

Olivia is married to an Italian prince:
Wilde's husband is Tao Ruspoli, a wavy-haired 33-year-old filmmaker and flamenco guitarist whom Wilde met not long after moving to L.A. After a whirlwind courtship, the couple eloped, getting married on a funkily painted school bus with only a pair of witnesses. "They're like Barack and Michelle," says -Wilde's friend, actress Megalyn Echikunwoke. "It's like, give me a break--could you be any cuter? They're probably going to have perfectly amazing babies, and they'll be even more annoying."

Nearly every story about Wilde to date makes mention of Ruspoli's aristocratic lineage--he's the son of an Italian prince, the late Roman bon vivant Dado Ruspoli, which technically makes Wilde an Italian princess. "Dado was friends with the Stones, with the Dalai Lama, orgies with Brando, all these people," Wilde says. "We have pictures of him bathing in pitchers of Bordeaux."

Olivia got a call from Barack Obama after helping campaign early in his run:
One afternoon on the set of House, Wilde's cell phone began ringing. The future president was on the line, calling to thank Wilde for her campaign service. The conversation was brief and cordial. Then Wilde hung up and began to jump and scream like a -Jonas Brothers fan: "I was just squealing and squawking, trying to replay the whole thing."

But Wilde hadn't actually hung up her phone. Through a friend, she learned that Obama was still on the line and heard every shrill decibel of Wilde's fangirl outburst, laughing the entire time at the lunatic on the other end. "It was awful--horrifying!" Wilde says. "But apparently he was flattered."

Julie Christie is helping her deal with impending superstardom:
Nothing about her manner suggests a derailment is coming, but Wilde confesses she's turned to a new spiritual adviser: family friend Julie Christie, the British actress who defined a generation of female glamour. As Wilde navigates a similar juncture, Christie has given wise counsel.

The Yes Men Introduce the SurvivaBall

2009-09-16T17:49:00.001-07:00

President Obama Calls Kanye West "a Jackass"

2009-09-16T17:08:00.000-07:00

Emerson's poem:

Having a Kanye moment.
'Devil trying to break me down'.
A Kanye moment I'm having.
God, why you make me such a clown?

"Everybody knows but Kanye.
Everybody grows, not Kanye.

George Bush don't care about Kanye.
The burning bush don't care what Kanye say.
Diamonds & gold diggers don't care 'bout Kanye.
Beyonce even say 'Kanye, Go away.'"

Cuz 'Jesus walks'. Kanye talks shoes.
Like a dick in a box, a TV set on Fox news.

The Vortex: Where Law of Attraction Assembles All Cooperative Relationships

2009-09-12T20:56:00.001-07:00

A Word from Bill Maher to President Obama

2009-09-12T16:04:00.000-07:00

"Mr. President, there are some people who are never going to like you. That's why they voted for the old guy and Carrie's mom. You're not going to win them over. Stand up for the 70% of Americans who aren't crazy.

And speaking of that 70% -- let's call them the sentient majority -- when are we going to actually show up in all this? Tomorrow Glenn Beck's army of zombie retirees are marching on Washington in protest of, well, everything. It's the Million Moron March, although they won't get a million of course, because many will be confused and drive to Washington state -- but they will make news. Because people who take to the streets always do. They're at the town hall screaming at the congressman, we're on the couch screaming at the TV. Especially in this age of electronics and Snuggies, it's a statement to just leave the house. But leave the house we must, because this is our last best shot for a long time to get the sort of serious health care reform that would make the United States the envy of several African nations."

source

Jed's 'Live', Baby

2009-09-12T10:23:00.000-07:00

Yer attendance is appreciated in advance an the cosmic rewards will be huge.

Come on out and catch a show in Phoenix on September 26^th! See details below; hope to see you there!!

Emerson's "unauthorized" videos of Jed's a Millionaire (below)

Deepak Chopra Hears Fox News Softly Crying

2009-09-11T15:57:00.000-07:00

If you hear someone softly crying, "I'm melting, I'm melting," in the distance, it's not the wicked witch from The Wizard of Oz but Fox News. One must listen through the din of hysteria that dominates almost every program. The shrinking credibility of the right wing, like the shrinking of a defeated witch, will be very good for innocent children everywhere. When Fox News tried to strike fear into the public heart by claiming that President Obama's televised speech to schoolchildren was secret indoctrination, the wind whistled down the empty canyons of Mediaville.

They turned up the volume with cries that Obama was the same as Kim Jong Il, that he was brainwashing a future generation of liberals, that his tactics were identical to those used in Stalin's Russia. Common sense contradicted these delusions -- not that anyone at Fox News believed them for a second -- and such socialist presidents as the first George Bush and Ronald Reagan had delivered the same sort of benign address to the nation's schools. One had to smile at the lengths the right has to go to in order to evoke a quiver of nervousness, much less the full-blown seizure of anxiety and fear they used to trigger.

Why, then, not admit victory and smile? The deathers and birthers aren't making an impact, with the former trotting out the specter of bureaucratic death panels to end Grandma's life, the latter wandering about in a daze as they hold Barack Obama's birth certificate up to the light, certain that they will spot a counterfeit. It's an amusing -- and sad -- spectacle but not a dangerous one. Therefore, it's time to stop fearing this shadow play that was once so real.

Step by step, Barack Obama is returning the country to its senses. Rational adults are in charge. Enormous challenges are being met with moderation, honesty, and candor. That's the real victory, which goes far beyond politics to the very character of America. By embodying those same qualities, all of us mount the best defense against the haunting memory of the reactionary decades when every form of unreason turned this nation into a surreal circus of wrong-doing. In other words, it's just as important to change your response to Fox News as it is to undo the social damage of the Reagan-to-Bush era. Without a new attitude, the same futile tug-of-war will continue.

I am not suggesting that the fate of a Van Jones, driven from his advisory role at the White House by an old-fashioned witch hunt, is anything to smile at. At its most venal, the far right will contract until only the Glenn Becks remain. Sincere, rational conservatives know that this is happening. They cringe when Rep. Joe Wilson shames the entire Republican Party by calling the president a liar in public. They shake their heads when Fox News trumpets toxic nonsense about mandatory abortions under the Obama health plan. When a piece of furniture sits on a base that's too small, it topples over. As the Republican base dwindles to Southern white males and various credulous hangers on, the whole party is set to topple just as inevitably.

But this isn't a post about gloating. A vigorous two-party system is necessary to the body politic. The rights of the minority need protecting, which means not just ethnic minorities but the far right minority. The whiners and grumblers at Fox News will find an audience, just as auto wrecks find rubbernecks on the highway. In place of gloating, we need to exhibit the confidence and good humor of people who have stood on the outside for a long time while protecting the truth, who have spoken truth despite the ethos of lying in Bush's Washington, who understood that the essence of America is and always will be progressive, tolerant, and accepting.

Isn't that reason enough to give Fox News a smile once in a while?

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Bank of America Gives Valued Customer 30% Rate

2009-09-10T11:07:00.001-07:00

The Field Center

2009-09-09T22:44:00.000-07:00

An Educational Forum for Joyful Awareness

Our Story

The Field Center, established in 1993 during a typically stormy Central Florida summer, is an educational forum offering a unique curriculum for practicing joyful awareness, conscious creating, and shifting into more aligned states of identity.

During the four years following the Center's birth, our founder and director, Philip Golabuk, “witnessed a lifetime of study, formal training, and investigation gathering like a storm into a remarkable curriculum,” and in the fall of 1997, we offered the Course for the first time to a small group of students.

Our aim was to correct the oversimplifications, confusions, and misconceptions pervasive in the New Age literature about how personal consciousness “creates reality” in the world, particularly with respect to the whole notion of "manifestation," as we recognized that these errors in thinking and practice had cost many people dearly.

Enrollment grew rapidly, and today we are proud to support students, Certified Facilitators, and blog subscribers in some 75 countries.

How We're Different

Field training is arguably the most thorough and precise model available on the subject of how our consciousness becomes the events and conditions of our experience both inwardly and outwardly.

Unlike even sophisticated approaches such as Ernest Holmes’s Science of Mind and the work of Neville Goddard, Field training recognizes the element of paradox inherent in conscious creating, and most importantly, incorporates this element into its practice. This alone would set it apart.

In addition, however, Field training is unique in its assertions that "creation follows identity," that "the aim of practice is alignment, not manifestation," based directly on its handling of paradox, and rooted in a practice that begins where the so-called New Age methods of visualization and affirmation leave off.

Finally, no other approach brings together elements as seemingly diverse as the wisdom of the world’s major spiritual traditions, the new physics, ontology (the study of Being), and phenomenology (the study of phenomena as events in consciousness).

View comparison chart.

Why People Study with Us

Many come to the Field Center after years of following some spiritual path or other, because they have a deep sense that something’s still missing.

It may be showing up in one or more staging areas of life that remain unfulfilled, a general feeling of incompletion, or even homesickness.

Often, they’ve studied Seth, A Course in Miracles, Science of Mind, Abraham, Neville, Chopra—the list goes on—but they still feel a “divine discontent.” They know there’s more.

All of these models miss what Field training understands as the essential gesture of deliberate creatorship—namely, a wholehearted and undistracted immersion in the creative moment for its own sake, an unconditional giving of self to the ideal.

The techniques and methods they offer invariably aim at creating a desired outer fact, e.g., prosperity, romantic partnership, improved health, and so on.

In short, the focus is always on changing the world.

Field training, on the other hand, recognizes that conscious creating is first and last about the self, about identity, and not about worldly conditions at all.

It begins with a longing, not to have more, but to be more.

Further, changing consciousness in order to change the world implicates us in a contradiction that all but ensures failure.

Field practice is a path of wholeheartedness.

It calls for a certain virtuosity of creative authority, so that we remain poised in a stance of inner friendship and agreement, and the war between desire and belief finally can end.

the field center

'Financial Risk' Mathematical Model Under Fire

2009-09-09T19:45:00.000-07:00

This Thursday September the 10th marks a historic development for both Washington and the financial markets.

The US Congress' Committee on Science and Technology will hold a hearing on the responsibility of mathematical model Value at Risk for the credit crisis.

As HuffPost readers know full well, I have long blamed VaR for the mayhem (remember: VaR allowed banks to build the toxic leverage that sunk them and the world).

To my knowledge this is the first time that a financial theory is put on the spot like that, the inevitable consequence of having endured a theory-caused meltdown of biblical proportions.

My friend Nassim Taleb has been invited as expert witness by the Committee. That's a wise choice. Taleb has not only been a real derivatives trader for decades, but crucially has been warning about VaR's potential for destruction for at least 15 years.

As I told HuffPost readers not long ago, he alone predicted what has just happened, including the term "bail out". Frankly, it was only a matter of time before VaR killed us.

While I don't doubt that Taleb will kick ass in the nation's capital, I would like to contribute to the crusade (hey, the Committee also contacted me and apparently began to wonder about VaR's role in the crisis after reading my stuff) by making some suggestions to the author of The Black Swan.

Nassim, if I may, here are some things that I would like you to ask at the hearing:

Why did regulators embrace and enforce a tool that is built on obviously flawed foundations?

Didn't they understand that a broken tool should not be given the power to set capital charges for trading activities?

Didn't they understand that VaR would tend to generate lethal leverage and to hide risk given its tendency to be unrealistically low?

Why did they continue to peddle VaR even after it had failed dramatically during the Asian and LTCM crises of 1997-98?

Don't regulators care that their models fail?

Why did the SEC finally succumb to the VaR siren songs emanating from Wall Street and in 2004 allow broker-dealers to use the model to set their capital requirements?

Why did they find it acceptable that some banks would, courtesy of VaR, run 100-to-1 and even 1000-to-1 leverage on their trading positions, as they did in the run-up to the crisis, especially when a lot of that trading stuff was super nasty?

Why don't regulators just abandon VaR altogether rather than try to hastily fix what is not fixable?

Why not use the crisis as an opportunity to erase demonstrably flawed mathematical models from financeland once and for all?

Finance theory has been responsible for the worst market meltdowns since 1929, isn't it time we protect ourselves from the delterious math and its quantitative promoters?

It's great that the "beware of models" debate has moved to Washington. Let's not waste the chance. We can't allow a repeat of the latest malaise.

I am not sure how close the hearing's venue is to the White House, but if Barack Obama is available and not busy with other things he could do worse than stop by.

Perhaps unbeknownst to him and the rest of the political class, the theme under discussion on that Thursday is as relevant to our economic welfare and social stability as almost any other thing.

I'm sure that should he eventually stop by, the new leader of the free world would be seduced by Taleb's argumentation and, if that's not too much to hope, prompted to take remedial action.

As I also said in a past HuffPost rumination, it is time for President Obama to help us kill the tool that killed us.

source

Rock Dinosaurs Criticize Guitar Hero & Rock Band

2009-09-09T14:38:00.000-07:00

Bill Wyman, the former Rolling Stones bass player, has criticized music video games like Rock Band and Guitar Hero, claiming they will lead to fewer young people taking up real instruments.

"It encourages kids not to learn, that's the trouble. It makes less and less people dedicated to really get down and learn an instrument".

"I think it's a pity," he said, speaking at Abbey Road studios while recording a charity Beatles song for Children in Need.

His concerns were echoed by Pink Floyd's Nick Mason, who described the games as "an interesting new development".

Pink Floyd had not ruled out working on one in the future as a new way of selling music. But, he added: "It irritates me having watched my kids do it. If they spend as much time practising the guitar as learning how to press the buttons, they'd be damn good by now".

The news comes on the eve of the release of The Beatles: Rock Band game, which allows players to play along as The Beatles through their career in environments such as The Cavern Club in Liverpool, and Shea Stadium, the home of the New York Mets.

But Alex Rigopulos, co-founder of Harmonix Music Systems, which created the Rock Band series, refuted the musicians' claims.

"We're constantly hearing from fans who were inspired by Rock Band to start studying a real instrument," he said.

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Medicare Part E: Everybody

2009-09-09T08:00:00.000-07:00

by Thom Hartmann

The President this morning admitted on national television that he lost control of the message with health care. It's time to reboot - and use a very, very, very simple message so all Americans can understand it.

Let's use Medicare, which nearly every American understands. Just create "Medicare Part E" where the "E" represents "everybody." Just let any citizen in the US buy into Medicare.

It would be so easy. No need to reinvent the wheel with this so-called "public option" that's a whole new program from the ground up. Medicare already exists. It works. Some people will like it, others won't - just like the Post Office versus FedEx analogy the President is so comfortable with.

Just pass a simple bill - it could probably be just a few lines, like when Medicare was expanded to include disabled people - that says that any American citizen can buy into the program at a rate to be set by the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) which reflects the actual cost for us to buy into it.

Thus, Medicare Part E would be revenue neutral!

To make it available to people of low income, Congress could raise the rates slightly for all currently non-eligible people (like me - under 65) to cover the cost of below-200%-of-poverty people. Revenue neutral again.

This blows up all the rumors about death panels and grandma and everything else: everybody knows what Medicare is. Those who scorn it can go with United Healthcare and it's $100 million/year CEO. Those who like Medicare can buy into Part E. Simplicity itself.

Of course, we'd like a few fixes, like letting negotiate drug prices, and fill some of the other holes Republicans and AARP and the big insurance lobbyists have drilled into Medicare so people have to buy "supplemental" insurance, but that can wait for the second round. Let's get this done first.

Simple stuff. Medicare for anybody who wants it. Private health insurance for those who don't. Easy message. Even Max Baucus and Chuck Grassley can understand it. Sarah Palin can buy into it, or ignore it. No death panels, no granny plugs, nothing. Just a few sentences.

Replace the "you must be disabled or 65" with "here's what it'll cost if you want to buy in, and here's the sliding scale of subsidies we'll give you if you're poor, paid for by everybody else who's buying in." This creates Part E.

And if this fails - if the Congress can't get out from under their corporate overlords - at the very least pass the Kucinich amendment that will allow individual states to create their own single-payer systems, as was done in Canada a generation ago.

Thom Hartmann (thom at thomhartmann.com) is a Project Censored Award-winning New York Times best-selling author, and host of a nationally syndicated daily progressive talk program The Thom Hartmann Show. http://www.thomhartmann.com/

His most recent books are "The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight," "Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights," "We The People: A Call To Take Back America," "What Would Jefferson Do?," "Screwed: The Undeclared War Against the Middle Class and What We Can Do About It," and "Cracking The Code: The Art and Science of Political Persuasion." His newest book is Threshold: T he Crisis of Western Culture.

A Stumblebum Safety Break

2009-09-04T23:22:00.000-07:00

Snoop Dogg Changes Name to "Niggarachi"

2009-09-04T23:02:00.000-07:00

Clearly, it must be the ganja or Uncle Snoop must still be Ego Trippin as reports have shown that the West Coast rapper will be shedding his name in place of Niggarachi for the upcoming compilation album Bacc To Tha Chuuch Vol, 1.

Serving as the sequel to 2007's Welcome 2 Tha Chuuch, the upcoming release will be produced entirely by the rapper, excluding one track which was intended for his last album Ego Trippin'. Daz, Kurupt, Ray J., Snoop and others are expected to be on the album.

Aside from the old school barrel of rappers, this release will also serve as a launching pad for new artists as Snoop will place new MCs such as Hustle Boyz, Tha Raw Doggz, the TC's and singer Chris Starr into the spotlight. This goes to show that even the old school is still willing to usher in some new talent for those that continue to feel that they are only grumpy old men.

The Dogg will also be serving up his own batch as he is set to release his tenth album in the form of Malice in Wonderland. So far, the likes of Dr. Dre and Pharell are set to leave their presence felt on the next solo joint from the Doggfather.

Snoop has recently been leaving his mark in music as he collaborated with Nipsey Hussle for the track “Gangsta's Life.” With the re-release of Dr. Dre's debut, now titled The Chronic: Re-Lit & From the Vault, fans will be able to hear vintage Snoop on bonus cuts such as “Poor Young Dave” and “Touchdown.”

Man, it must be good to be Snoop because there is no other artist that could pull such a moniker as Niggarachi and actually run with it, but maybe that's what makes the West Coast veteran such a force in the game. Or maybe it's just the ganja.

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Guess Who's Back from the Non-Physical?

2009-08-31T12:53:00.000-07:00

Identity as Author

2009-08-31T09:11:00.000-07:00

...from the Field Center

There was a Field training student who scheduled a Facilitating session to address why things always seemed so difficult for her. She had realized various successes, but always in the proverbial eleventh hour and only after considerable struggle. At one point during the session, as she was describing how she had met all these challenges bravely, she stated with a sense of pride, “I’m a survivor.”

Such identity claims often present the Facilitator with the key to the session. This woman had identified with being a “survivor”—consequently life had no choice but to continue providing her with situations to survive. This idea of the complementarity of identity and reality explains many things, especially when we remember that we may make these identifications unwittingly, and indeed often do.

The transactional analysis (T.A.) psychologist Stephen Karpman devised what became known famously as the “Karpman Triangle” to explain the social and psychological roles that are commonly adopted in various situations, viz. the Persecutor, the Victim, and the Rescuer. The Persecutor is the individual in a given scenario who pressures, blames, or coerces the Victim, who in turn accepts the role of the underdog, someone who’s being abused or otherwise treated unfairly, while the Recuer intervenes in the Victim’s behalf, ostensibly to help the situation or at least come to his or her aid. In the same way that our identity choices may be unwitting, the roles Karpman described are often ulterior. Furthermore, a person playing this “game,” as T.A. calls it, may and often will switch roles—so, as the situation develops, the Victim may turn on the Rescuer, the Persecutor may become the Victim, and so on.

Each of the Karpman roles has a payoff—that is, each role is adopted in an attempt to win justification, but at the expense of others; thus the roles are considered to be “dysfunctional” and ultimately destructive. Now, one can look at the commitment to one or the other roles as a kind of authorship. The Persecutor, for example, attempts to write the scene in a way that conforms to and legitimizes the stance he’s taken, and those in the other roles are doing the same with respect to their stance. Each then, is a protagonist who attempts to direct the story to his or her private ends, and so lives in the reality of that story until it plays out in one of the many ways it can, e.g., with someone “wins” for the time being, someone quits the game, or the exchange escalates and becomes tragic.

In Field training terms, “I am a survivor” is an intention statement. As one gives oneself to this identity claim, one leaves the Field no option but to keep creating situations that prove the claim. It is the same with any intention. “I am a victim” represents an ontological commitment that will demonstrate itself with conspiratorial efficiency. And so on with countless other roles. Life obliges. Therefore, it is well worth our while to be mindful about what we agree to be.

Each of us is an author, writing a story in which the identity we have taken on is the protagonist. Each of us is living in a story of our own invention, a story that flows not from what we want but from the stance we have taken about who we are. A great deal can be gained from noting one’s experiences, especially those troublesome experiences that seem to follow one like a shadow, and asking ourselves, “What role corresponds to these experiences?” Or we could ask, “Who have I agreed to be such that these kinds of experiences would be required?”

The woman in the Facilitating session was startled when I pointed out to her that her survivor identity required situations to survive. Seen in that light, “I am a survivor” seemed to her less a point of pride than an agreement to continue struggling, suffering, and beating the odds at the last minute in an endless replay of exhausting vindications. She saw for the first time the high price of continuing to identify with the that longtime role, just as those who examine the various Karpman roles they have favored can suddenly awaken from what Field training calls “immersion” and see the “dysfunction” (we call it “contradiction” or “counterintention” and regard it as highly functional) for the first time, which opens the way to a new and better choice.

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Sleuth - "End the Fed"

2009-08-31T08:37:00.000-07:00

Barney Frank:

Bill Mandating "Complete Audit" of The Fed Will Pass the House This Fall"

Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass.), chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, told a Massachusetts audience at a recent town hall that the House will pass legislation this fall mandating a "complete audit" of the Federal Reserve.

The bill to audit the Fed, H.R. 1207, was introduced by libertarian Fed critic Rep. Ron Paul (R-Texas) and is backed by well over a majority of the House. Frank's comment suggests it won't just be left to languish in committee.

"I want to restrict the power of The Fed in a number of ways," said Frank in response to a question about the bill.

"They have had since 1932... the right to intervene in the economy almost whenever they" wanted to, Frank said, noting that The Fed relied on its extraordinary lending power to forward billions to financial institutions last fall. He intends to curtail that lending power, he said.

"Finally we will subject them to a complete audit," he said. "I have been working with Ron Paul, the main sponsor of that bill. He agrees that we don't want to have the audit appear as if it is influencing monetary policy, because that would be inflationary and Ron and I agree on that."

Defenders of an independent monetary policy, including much of the political elite of both parties, argue that politicizing monetary policy would destabilize the financial system, devalue the dollar and lead to higher interest rates.

"If monetary policy is seen as not being independent that could shake people's confidence in the dollar. I mean, we are dealing with a world of nervous people," Frank told HuffPost in June.

A politicized monetary policy is assumed to be inflationary because politicians have an incentive to run-up deficits and then have inflation reduce the value of the debt -- a policy that would harm debt-holders such as China.

"One of the things the audit will show is what the Federal Reserve buys and sells, and that will be made public," Frank said. "But not instantly, because... you would have a lot of people trading off of that, and you would have too much impact on the market. Again Ron agrees with that, so we will probably have that data released after a time period of several months, enough time so it wouldn't be market-sensitive. That will be part of the overall Fed regulation that we are inducting."

The questioner followed up: "By the end of the year?"

"The House will pass it probably in October," said Frank.

The bill has steadily picked up co-sponsors since it was introduced, with rank-and-file Democrats and Republicans coming together in an unusual way.

Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-Ohio), who has his own legislation pressing for Fed transparency, became the symbolic 118th cosponsor of Paul's bill.

House passage will put pressure on the Senate to act. The upper chamber has had a similar bipartisan coming-together, with Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, a socialist, and Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.), as far from a socialist as imaginable, cosponsoring a version of Paul's bill.

Wall Street has been pushing back against opening up
The Fed.

A federal judge recently ordered it to disclose who the bank is lending to and what collateral it's getting in return.

The Fed is appealing, arguing that such disclosure would damage it and the banks receiving the loans.

The Clearing House Association, a coalition of financial industry players, joined The Fed in protesting the decision.

"Experience in the banking industry has shown that when customers and market participants hear negative rumors about a bank, negative consequences inevitably flow," said Norman Nelson, vice president and general counsel for the group, according to Bloomberg.

"Our members have accessed the discount window with the understanding that The Fed will not disclose information about their borrowing, especially their identity."

Clearing House members include: Bank of America, Bank of New York Mellon Corp., Citigroup, Deutsche Bank, HSBC, JPMorgan Chase and Wells Farg0.

The Health Care Status Quo: Why Arizona Needs Health Reform

2009-08-30T10:16:00.000-07:00

Congress and the President are working to enact health care reform legislation that protects what works about health care and fixes what is broken. Arizonans know that inaction is not an option. Sky-rocketing health care costs are hurting families, forcing businesses to cut or drop health benefits, and straining state budgets. Millions are paying more for less. Families and businesses in Arizona deserve better.

ARIZONANS CAN’T AFFORD THE STATUS QUO

Roughly 3.5 million people in Arizona get health insurance on the job¹, where family premiums average $13,362, about the annual earning of a full-time minimum wage job.²
Since 2000 alone, average family premiums have increased by 97 percent in Arizona.³
Household budgets are strained by high costs: 19 percent of middle-income Arizona families spend more than 10 percent of their income on health care.⁴
High costs block access to care: 14 percent of people in Arizona report not visiting a doctor due to high costs.⁵
Arizona businesses and families shoulder a hidden health tax of roughly $1,700 per year on premiums as a direct result of subsidizing the costs of the uninsured.⁶

AFFORDABLE HEALTH COVERAGE IS INCREASINGLY OUT OF REACH IN ARIZONA

20 percent of people in Arizona are uninsured, and 73 percent of them are in families with at least one full-time worker.⁷
The percent of Arizonans with employer coverage is declining: from 60 to 55 percent between 2000 and 2007.⁸
Much of the decline is among workers in small businesses. While small businesses make up 73 percent of Arizona businesses,⁹ only 32 percent of them offered health coverage benefits in 2006 -- down 18 percent since 2000.¹⁰
Choice of health insurance is limited in Arizona. Blue Cross Blue Shield AZ alone constitutes 43 percent of the health insurance market share in Arizona, with the top two insurance providers accounting for 65 percent.¹¹
Choice is even more limited for people with pre-existing conditions. In Arizona, premiums can vary based on demographic factors and health status, and coverage can exclude pre-existing conditions or even be denied completely in some cases.

ARIZONANS NEED HIGHER QUALITY, GREATER VALUE, AND MORE PREVENTATIVE CARE

The overall quality of care in Arizona is rated as “Average.”¹²
Preventative measures that could keep Arizonans healthier and out of the hospital are deficient, leading to problems across the age spectrum:
- 18 percent of children in Arizona are obese.¹³
- 19 percent of women over the age of 50 in Arizona have not received a mammogram in the past two years.
- 36 percent of men over the age of 50 in Arizona have never had a colorectal cancer screening.
- 69 percent of adults over the age of 65 in Arizona have received a flu vaccine in the past year.¹⁴

The need for reform in Arizona and across the country is clear. Arizona families simply can’t afford the status quo and deserve better. President Obama is committed to working with Congress to pass health reform this year that reduces costs for families, businesses and government; protects people’s choice of doctors, hospitals and health plans; and assures affordable, quality health care for all Americans.

http://www.healthreform.gov/reports/statehealthreform/arizona.html

Banks 'Too Big To Fail' Have Grown Even Bigger

2009-08-27T22:32:00.000-07:00

Banks Hold Almost 1/3 Of Deposits, Issue Half The Mortgages And 2/3 Of Credit Cards

Food Banking on a Friend Request

2009-08-27T21:38:00.000-07:00

Hi guys,

Excuse the mass email (trust me, you were still hand-picked from thousands of finalists …)

I just took a box of food to one of the drop-offs for the food bank.

The guy there told me that donations are way, way down from normal.

Just a thought – if you have some extra rice, peanut butter, creamed corn, etc., there are tons of convenient places to drop it off.

http://feedingamerica.org/foodbank-results.aspx

Folks gotta eat.

Thanks,

w...

Do You Really Understand Your Tax Bracket?

2009-08-27T16:03:00.000-07:00

Federal Tax Brackets

Your tax bracket is the rate you pay on the "last dollar" you earn; but as a percentage of your income, your tax rate is generally less than that. First, here are the tax rates and the income ranges where they apply:

Example: Tax Year 2008 ... Married, filing jointly
... $100,000 income

If your taxable income is between... $0 and $16,050
... your tax bracket is 10%

If your taxable income is between... $16,050 and $65,100
... your tax bracket is 15%

If your taxable income is between... $65,100 and $131,450
... your tax bracket is 25%

If your taxable income is between... $131,450 and $200,300
... your tax bracket is 28%

If your taxable income is between... $200,300 and $357,700
... your tax bracket is 33%

If your taxable income is between... $357,700 and above
... your tax bracket is 35%

However, in the above example of $100,000 income,
the only part of your income which is taxed at 25%
is the amount between $65,100 and $100,000.
---
So, the last amount of your income ... $34,900 is taxed at 25%.

The middle amount of your income ... $49,050 is taxed at 15%

And, the first $16,050 of your income is taxed at 10%.

Because of the way you are taxed, you are paying $17,688 in taxes
... on an income of $100,000.

You and your wife are in the 25% tax bracket,
but as a percentage of your income,
you are paying less than 18% in taxes.

To try this yourself, Click HERE.

Tax Hikes, Tax Cuts

1993 saw a tax hike on the wealthy (via two new brackets at the top), and then 2001 through 2003 saw a series of tax cuts that lowered the tax brackets as follows:

1992	1993 - 2000	2001	2002	2003 - 2009	2010 ?
15%	15%	15%	10%	10%	10%
15%	15%	15%	15%	15%	15%
28%	28%	27.5%	27%	25%	25%
31%	31%	30.5%	30%	28%	28%
	36%	35.5%	35%	33%	36%
	39.6%	39.1%	38.6%	35%	39.6%

From 2000 to 2002 most brackets dropped by one percent, and there was a new low bracket added for the "lucky duckies" at the very bottom. In 2003 most brackets got an additional cut of two percent with a special gift for the "other" lucky duckies, the ones at the top. But note that the rich still paid more in 2003, and everybody else paid less, than was the case in 1992. Now if we could just balance the budget...

Future Tax Rates

As of early 2009, the plan for the future is to leave the lower tax brackets alone, and raise the top two brackets to where they were during the 1990s. The cutoffs for the top brackets are to be raised, so that singles making above $200,000 annually, or families making above $250,000, will be the ones affected by the higher rates.

Natalie Portman & Her Dirty Rap Lately Scene

2009-08-27T14:57:00.000-07:00

GYLLENHAAL: What song best describes your current state?

PORTMAN: My current state . . . I'm trying to think of a song that feels like sleepwalking. [laughs] I don't know. I've mostly been listening to dirty rap lately. That's sort of my scene.

GYLLENHAAL: Your affection for dirty rap is something that people really don't know about you, which I think is fascinating. You do incredible things for the world, and then you listen to just completely obscene hip-hop music.

PORTMAN: Really, really obscene hip-hop. I love it so much. It makes me laugh and then it makes me want to dance. Those are like my two favorite things, so combined . . . I've been listening a lot lately to "Wait (The Whisper Song)" by the Ying Yang Twins, where the lyrics are like, "Wait 'til you see my dick"--which is just amazing because it's whispered. [whispers] "Wait 'til you see my dick . . . " [laughs] Crazy. So I just listen to it like I'm a five-year-old, like, "Oh my god! I can't believe he just said that!"

source

Rest in Peace

2009-08-26T17:12:00.000-07:00

Doesn’t it seem curious that the condition of “resting in peace” should be reserved for those who have died? Why shouldn’t those of us who are alive in this world also have this benefit?

Perhaps we believe that worldly life is not or should not be restful, that one cannot live in that inner repose that we wish for those who have passed on. But as soon as one examines this, it seems arbitrary and worth a closer look.

Field training teaches that we only start living, in the fullest sense, when we are resting in that inwardly peaceful state that we call “alignment,” which is defined as friendly agreement between desire and belief. Now, we don’t live just inwardly, of course; we also live outwardly, among the conditions and circumstances of our worldly life. So there are, in basic terms, two forms of fulfillment and its expression: the inner, tacit, hidden form that David Bohm called “the implicate order” and the outer, explicit, visible, “explicate order.”

Now, living in peace requires that we rest in alignment, which depends on the release of our will and its practice of trying to make things happen. This is why the Course states that “the aim of practice is alignment, not manifestation.” The moment we’re exerting our will to make this or that happen, we are caught in the snare of contradiction, for we do not set out to make happen that which already is, and since belief is creative, the belief that what we want needs creating is tantamount to belief in its nonexistence.

The same holds true if we believe that what we want exists, but exists at a distance and so must be “attracted.” In that case, its distance from us is presumed, and this belief, too, operates.

The only way out of these mazes of contradiction that inform any strategic approach to conscious creating—that is, any approach that has the aim of altering worldly conditions—is to rest in the peace of alignment.

Trying to create something through an act of will, whether the venue of effort is inner or outer, turns out to be a failure method. As the movie War Games notes of such games, “the only way to win is not to play.” This is why Field training, while understanding and appreciating that outer things matter, sometimes greatly, directs us to set aside all concern about manifestation and take up the practice of alignment, leaving all else to the Field.

This last bit is crucial. Our worldly concerns must be delegated if we are to rest in alignment and in peace. Field practice, therefore, brings us into relation with something greater than our own will, and invites us to recognize that our creative life is a collaboration. Our part requires, among other things, that we release our will and all attempts to manage timing, the ways and means of fulfillment, and the form that outcomes will take.

Experience soon demonstrates to those who take up this practice its supreme value, for our resting in the peace of alignment and release is itself creative, moving through conduits of nonlocal efficiency from our inner to our outer life and shaping conditions in ways we could never contrive or anticipate.

Those who follow the path of effort and “making things happen,” whether by running around the world or through various consciousness techniques, may not at first appreciate the enormous creative reach and authority of our approach. They may be puzzled by its indirectness and deem it passive, even idle. And yet we have seen again and again that the power of our creative nature, paradoxically, lies in release of the will from a stance of alignment, just as the power of an arrow sent to its target lies in the aligned release of the bow string.

Resting in peace, mindful and willing to cooperate with whatever is before us to do, alert and ready, responsive but not initiating, we find ourselves in a great partnership. We bring our alignment to this partnership, and our Partner brings the rest. And we come to see that our willingness to rest in peace is a doorway to greater life.

source

Envisioning

2009-08-26T17:09:00.000-07:00

If something you want
is slow to come to you,
it can be for only one reason:

You are spending more time
focused upon its absence
than you are about its presence.

Abraham-Hicks

Bill Maher on The Tonight Show

2009-08-26T17:04:00.000-07:00

Britney & Russell do the Mind Cross-jostle

2009-08-26T16:57:00.000-07:00

Britney Spears and Russell Brand did their best to ignore the sexual tension elephant in the room in a 2008 Video Music Awards spot, and now they're conveying their desire for one another telepathically in a promotion for this year's VMAs.

"Should I have played it up more when he was flirting with me last year?" Spears, poolside in a white bikini, asks herself. "I have to admit, there is something sexy about his dangerous ways."

Back in his hotel room, Brand can hear her lustful thoughts! "Britney," he thinks, hoping she can read his mind. "This is the voice of your mind. Go to Russell's hotel room and abandon yourself. Give yourself to him, Britney. Sleep with Russell!"

Brand's off-color monologue ruffled some feathers when he hosted the VMAs last year, but he will be back this year for a repeat performance live from NYC on Sunday, September 13.

Geithner: "Fed Audit Would Be Problematic"

2009-08-26T16:35:00.000-07:00

Related bipartisan news:

Reps. Barney Frank (D) and Ron Paul (R) ally to audit Fed

Of Montreal ... do Bowie

2009-08-21T21:43:00.000-07:00

"Moonage Daydream" at soggy Lollapalooza

What other band’s lead singer is carried on stage by a pair of Skeletor-looking monsters for a set of short-attention-span pixie-pop that included masked ninjas battling a gigantic female sumo wrestler, transvestites in one-legged leotards releasing balloons and pajama-wearing goons in gasmasks delivering Christmas presents filled with smokebombs?

source

Crossjostlin' the Headlines

2009-08-21T17:25:00.000-07:00

William Greider: Squandered Opportunity

NYC mayor: Drug CEO pay not high
Multi-billionaire Bloomberg thinks CEO's earning $25 million 'don't make a lot.'

Nikolas Kozloff
Colombian Elites Fear Bolivaran Revolution

Sting's Daughter: My Dad Knows Nothing About Tantric Sex

Jim Hightower:
Taking Us for a Ride on Health Care

Mexico legalizes drug possession

Marshall Auerback
Why a Debtor's Revolt Would Work

Poll: Majority Of Montanans Disapprove Of Baucus' Work On Health Care

Robert C. Hinkley:
Changing the Corporation

Tucson: Valencia Middle School focuses on the positive

Glenn Greenwald:
Has Obama Lost the Trust of Progressives, as Krugman Says?

Aspen zoning allows pot dispensaries

Brad and Angelina Go Shopping for Gerbils

Larry Flynt: Common Sense 2009

Michael Hudson
The Specter of Debt Revolt Is Haunting Europe?

Dear GOP: Watch Your Astroturf, We're On to You

Top 10 Reasons Not To Do Yoga

Robert Kuttner: Rage the Left Should Use

GOP Congresswoman: "No gov't say over my body."

George Lakoff:
The PolicySpeak Disaster for Health Care

WATCH: Billy Ray Cyrus Defends Miley's Stripper Pole Dance (POLL)

Dave Lindorff
The Worst and the Best Thing to Happen to the Democratic Party in Years

Triumph The Insult Comic Dog Checks Out LA's Dog Hotels

Heaven and Hell - "The Mob Rules"

2009-08-21T13:29:00.001-07:00

Weiner Leaves Scarborough Speechless

2009-08-21T12:41:00.000-07:00

Joe Scarborough Is Shocked,
Yet Awed by Single-Payer Logic

by Leslie Savan

Something rather remarkable happened on Tuesday's Morning Joe. Rep. Anthony Weiner of New York pointed out that the health insurance industry has no clothes, and Joe Scarborough, after first trying to spin it some gossamer threads, broke down and said, By God, you're right, this emperor is a naked money-making machine!

Well, he didn't use those exact words, but Joe did seem to finally get that America has granted insurance companies the right to create bottlenecks in the financing of health care in order to extract profits out of the suffering of ordinary people--without providing any actual health care whatsoever.

"Why are we paying profits for insurance companies?" Weiner asked Scarborough. "Why are we paying overhead for insurance companies? Why," he asked, bringing it all home, "are we paying for their TV commercials?"

Weiner, who recently warned that President Obama could lose as many as 100 votes on a health bill if a public option is not included, really wants single payer--Medicare for all Americans is his goal. What a crazy, way-out, reckless notion, Joe went into their encounter believing. But Weiner asked some simple, direct questions that no politician, much less Obama or HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius, has managed to pose:

What is an insurance company? They don't do a single check-up. They don't do a single exam, they don't perform an operation. Medicare has a 4 percent overhead rate. The real question is why do we have a private plan?

"It sounds like you're saying you think there is no need for us to have private insurance in health care," Joe asked at one point.

Weiner replied: "I've asked you three times. What is their value? What are they bringing to the deal?"

Scraping the bottom of a seemingly bottomless pit of spin, Joe is repeatedly left speechless, "stunned" and "astounded," he said, by the questions themselves. Indeed, when confronted with unfettered capitalism's massive failures, the right usually has nothing to say. The "free market" is supposed to eternally grow, not crash under its own greed. They're left ideologically crippled.

But unlike, say, Lou Dobbs, who began dobbering when confronted with similarly direct argument for single-payer, Joe was able to take a deep breath and return from a break with his eyes opened.

He even repeated Weiner's points clearly: The goverment would take over only the "paying mechanism" of health care, not the doctors or their medical decisions themselves. His ears perked up every time Weiner mentioned that the nonprofit Medicare spends 4 percent on overhead, while private insurers spend 30 percent.

And Joe, who has been criticizing mob rule at town halls, seemed to appreciate the way Weiner counters the fearmongering over Medicare: After decades of railing against the program's wasteful, "runaway" spending, Republicans have done a 180 and are now trying to scare seniors that the Democrats' proposed Medicare cuts will come directly from their medical care and not, as is actually proposed, from wasteful, stupid practices in the system--like, as Weiner mentions, putting people into a $700-a-night hospital bed when all they really need, and often prefer, is a visit by a homecare attendant in the two-digit-a-day range.

Maybe the real turning point came when Weiner asked, "How does Wal-mart offer $4 prescriptions?" Joe and co-host Mika Brzezinski looked as if they'd been thwacked by a hardback copy of Atlas Shrugged, and sat back to let the congressman explain it all to them:

They go to the pharmaceutical companies and say, "Listen, we have a giant buying pool here. You're going to give us a great deal."
Who's bigger than Wal-Mart? We are, the taxpayers. Do we do that? No. Because we have outsourced this to insurance companies who don't have necessarily as much incentive to keep those costs down because, frankly, they are getting a piece of the action.

Progressives tend to understand this stuff, but many conservatives won't trust such logic, especially in the abstract, which is how most Dems have been communicating. But Weiner, aware that if you can't visualize something it ain't going to stick, argued with a specific, familiar visual--that of a successful, supercapitalist, and, as Mika might say, "real American" company. And suddenly, as the mote dropped from the MJ crew's eyes, Weiner went from "scaring American citizens," in Joe's words, to instant celeb.

"That was SO great!" said Mika, as she and Joe asked Anthony to please, please come back soon, this week if possible!

"You have succeeded in doing something that no one else has done on this show in two years," said Joe, his fists rapidly knocking the table in excitement. "You made me speechless. And you made me speechless because you so clearly came here and stated your position."

While maintaining that he and Weiner have "different worldviews," Joe nevertheless raved, "This is fascinating, and one of the problems with the president's message is that it's muddled." And, damn, that's true.

Could this episode herald a Single-Payer Awakening? Or is this just the thrill of logic running up Joe's leg, soon to be forgotten as corporate media try to undermine real reform of a system that feeds the nets millions in ad revenue? When the big mainstream players shouted in unison to prematurely declare the public option dead, I couldn't help but think: In the corporate media's total takeover of ideas, they, too, have a death panel--made up of three or four conglomerate owners and chaired by Rupert Murdoch--that will determine whether an idea lives or gets its plug pulled.

On Thursday, Morning Joe replayed Weiner's best hits, but Joe was occasionally dobbering himself, complaining that our health care problems come down to costs, costs, costs but "now all the President is talking about is a moral imperative." (Of course, Obama put morality on the table only yesterday; until then, he focused on costs, costs, costs.)

We'll see how far this relative openness to single-payer goes. In the meantime, though, the education of Joe Scarborough is, as always, a sight to behold:

Capitalism: A Love Story (movie trailer)

2009-08-21T12:24:00.000-07:00

Abraham-Hicks ... on Politics and the Environment

2009-08-18T16:26:00.001-07:00

Pipeline-Istan: Everything You Need to Know About Oil, Gas, Russia, China, Iran, Afghanistan and Obama

2009-08-18T16:12:00.000-07:00

By Pepe Escobar, Tomdispatch.com -- Originally posted May 13, 2009.

Nothing of significance takes place in Eurasia
without an energy angle.

As Barack Obama heads into his second hundred days in office, let's head for the big picture ourselves, the ultimate global plot line, the tumultuous rush towards a new, polycentric world order. In its first hundred days, the Obama presidency introduced us to a brand new acronym, OCO for Overseas Contingency Operations, formerly known as GWOT (as in Global War on Terror). Use either name, or anything else you want, and what you're really talking about is what's happening on the immense energy battlefield that extends from Iran to the Pacific Ocean. It's there that the Liquid War for the control of Eurasia takes place.

Yep, it all comes down to black gold and "blue gold" (natural gas), hydrocarbon wealth beyond compare, and so it's time to trek back to that ever-flowing wonderland -- Pipelineistan. It's time to dust off the acronyms, especially the SCO or Shanghai Cooperative Organization, the Asian response to NATO, and learn a few new ones like IPI and TAPI. Above all, it's time to check out the most recent moves on the giant chessboard of Eurasia, where Washington wants to be a crucial, if not dominant, player.

We've already seen Pipelineistan wars in Kosovo and Georgia, and we've followed Washington's favorite pipeline, the BTC, which was supposed to tilt the flow of energy westward, sending oil coursing past both Iran and Russia. Things didn't quite turn out that way, but we've got to move on, the New Great Game never stops. Now, it's time to grasp just what the Asian Energy Security Grid is all about, visit a surreal natural gas republic, and understand why that Grid is so deeply implicated in the Af-Pak war.

Every time I've visited Iran, energy analysts stress the total "interdependence of Asia and Persian Gulf geo-ecopolitics." What they mean is the ultimate importance to various great and regional powers of Asian integration via a sprawling mass of energy pipelines that will someday, somehow, link the Persian Gulf, Central Asia, South Asia, Russia, and China. The major Iranian card in the Asian integration game is the gigantic South Pars natural gas field (which Iran shares with Qatar). It is estimated to hold at least 9% of the world's proven natural gas reserves.

As much as Washington may live in perpetual denial, Russia and Iran together control roughly 20% of the world's oil reserves and nearly 50% of its gas reserves. Think about that for a moment. It's little wonder that, for the leadership of both countries as well as China's, the idea of Asian integration, of the Grid, is sacrosanct.

If it ever gets built, a major node on that Grid will surely be the prospective $7.6 billion Iran-Pakistan-India (IPI) pipeline, also known as the "peace pipeline." After years of wrangling, a nearly miraculous agreement for its construction was initialed in 2008. At least in this rare case, both Pakistan and India stood shoulder to shoulder in rejecting relentless pressure from the Bush administration to scotch the deal.

It couldn't be otherwise. Pakistan, after all, is an energy-poor, desperate customer of the Grid. One year ago, in a speech at Beijing's Tsinghua University, then-President Pervez Musharraf did everything but drop to his knees and beg China to dump money into pipelines linking the Persian Gulf and Pakistan with China's Far West. If this were to happen, it might help transform Pakistan from a near-failed state into a mighty "energy corridor" to the Middle East. If you think of a pipeline as an umbilical cord, it goes without saying that IPI, far more than any form of U.S. aid (or outright interference), would go the extra mile in stabilizing the Pak half of Obama's Af-Pak theater of operations, and even possibly relieve it of its India obsession.

If Pakistan's fate is in question, Iran's is another matter. Though currently only holding "observer" status in the Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO), sooner or later it will inevitably become a full member and so enjoy NATO-style, an-attack-on-one-of-us-is-an-attack-on-all-of-us protection. Imagine, then, the cataclysmic consequences of an Israeli preemptive strike (backed by Washington or not) on Iran's nuclear facilities. The SCO will tackle this knotty issue at its next summit in June, in Yekaterinburg, Russia.

Iran's relations with both Russia and China are swell -- and will remain so no matter who is elected the new Iranian president next month. China desperately needs Iranian oil and gas, has already clinched a $100 billion gas "deal of the century" with the Iranians, and has loads of weapons and cheap consumer goods to sell. No less close to Iran, Russia wants to sell them even more weapons, as well as nuclear energy technology.

And then, moving ever eastward on the great Grid, there's Turkmenistan, lodged deep in Central Asia, which, unlike Iran, you may never have heard a thing about. Let's correct that now.

Gurbanguly Is the Man

Alas, the sun-king of Turkmenistan, the wily, wacky Saparmurat "Turkmenbashi" Nyazov, "the father of all Turkmen" (descendants of a formidable race of nomadic horseback warriors who used to attack Silk Road caravans) is now dead. But far from forgotten.

The Chinese were huge fans of the Turkmenbashi. And the joy was mutual. One key reason the Central Asians love to do business with China is that the Middle Kingdom, unlike both Russia and the United States, carries little modern imperial baggage. And of course, China will never carp about human rights or foment a color-coded revolution of any sort.

The Chinese are already moving to successfully lobby the new Turkmen president, the spectacularly named Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov, to speed up the construction of the Mother of All Pipelines. This Turkmen-Kazakh-China Pipelineistan corridor from eastern Turkmenistan to China's Guangdong province will be the longest and most expensive pipeline in the world, 7,000 kilometers of steel pipe at a staggering cost of $26 billion. When China signed the agreement to build it in 2007, they made sure to add a clever little geopolitical kicker. The agreement explicitly states that "Chinese interests" will not be "threatened from [Turkmenistan's] territory by third parties." In translation: no Pentagon bases allowed in that country.

China's deft energy diplomacy game plan in the former Soviet republics of Central Asia is a pure winner. In the case of Turkmenistan, lucrative deals are offered and partnerships with Russia are encouraged to boost Turkmen gas production. There are to be no Russian-Chinese antagonisms, as befits the main partners in the SCO, because the Asian Energy Security Grid story is really and truly about them.

By the way, elsewhere on the Grid, those two countries recently agreed to extend the East Siberian-Pacific Ocean oil pipeline to China by the end of 2010. After all, energy-ravenous China badly needs not just Turkmen gas, but Russia's liquefied natural gas (LNG).

With energy prices low and the global economy melting down, times are sure to be tough for the Kremlin through at least 2010, but this won't derail its push to forge a Central Asian energy club within the SCO. Think of all this as essentially an energy entente cordiale with China. Russian Deputy Industry and Energy Minister Ivan Materov has been among those insistently swearing that this will not someday lead to a "gas OPEC" within the SCO. It remains to be seen how the Obama national security team decides to counteract the successful Russian strategy of undermining by all possible means a U.S.-promoted East-West Caspian Sea energy corridor, while solidifying a Russian-controlled Pipelineistan stretching from Kazakhstan to Greece that will monopolize the flow of energy to Western Europe.

The Real Afghan War

In the ever-shifting New Great Game in Eurasia, a key question -- why Afghanistan matters -- is simply not part of the discussion in the United States. (Hint: It has nothing to do with the liberation of Afghan women.) In part, this is because the idea that energy and Afghanistan might have anything in common is verboten.

And yet, rest assured, nothing of significance takes place in Eurasia without an energy angle. In the case of Afghanistan, keep in mind that Central and South Asia have been considered by American strategists crucial places to plant the flag; and once the Soviet Union collapsed, control of the energy-rich former Soviet republics in the region was quickly seen as essential to future U.S. global power. It would be there, as they imagined it, that the U.S. Empire of Bases would intersect crucially with Pipelineistan in a way that would leave both Russia and China on the defensive.

Think of Afghanistan, then, as an overlooked subplot in the ongoing Liquid War. After all, an overarching goal of U.S. foreign policy since President Richard Nixon's era in the early 1970s has been to split Russia and China. The leadership of the SCO has been focused on this since the U.S. Congress passed the Silk Road Strategy Act five days before beginning the bombing of Serbia in March 1999. That act clearly identified American geo-strategic interests from the Black Sea to western China with building a mosaic of American protectorates in Central Asia and militarizing the Eurasian energy corridor.

Afghanistan, as it happens, sits conveniently at the crossroads of any new Silk Road linking the Caucasus to western China, and four nuclear powers (China, Russia, Pakistan, and India) lurk in the vicinity. "Losing" Afghanistan and its key network of U.S. military bases would, from the Pentagon's point of view, be a disaster, and though it may be a secondary matter in the New Great Game of the moment, it's worth remembering that the country itself is a lot more than the towering mountains of the Hindu Kush and immense deserts: it's believed to be rich in unexplored deposits of natural gas, petroleum, coal, copper, chrome, talc, barites, sulfur, lead, zinc, and iron ore, as well as precious and semiprecious stones.

And there's something highly toxic to be added to this already lethal mix: don't forget the narco-dollar angle -- the fact that the global heroin cartels that feast on Afghanistan only work with U.S. dollars, not euros. For the SCO, the top security threat in Afghanistan isn't the Taliban, but the drug business. Russia's anti-drug czar Viktor Ivanov routinely blasts the disaster that passes for a U.S./NATO anti-drug war there, stressing that Afghan heroin now kills 30,000 Russians annually, twice as many as were killed during the decade-long U.S.-supported anti-Soviet Afghan jihad of the 1980s.

And then, of course, there are those competing pipelines that, if ever built, either would or wouldn't exclude Iran and Russia from the action to their south. In April 2008, Turkmenistan, Afghanistan, Pakistan, and India actually signed an agreement to build a long-dreamt-about $7.6 billion (and counting) pipeline, whose acronym TAPI combines the first letters of their names and would also someday deliver natural gas from Turkmenistan to Pakistan and India without the involvement of either Iran or Russia. It would cut right through the heart of Western Afghanistan, in Herat, and head south across lightly populated Nimruz and Helmand provinces, where the Taliban, various Pashtun guerrillas and assorted highway robbers now merrily run rings around U.S. and NATO forces and where -- surprise! -- the U.S. is now building in Dasht-e-Margo ("the Desert of Death") a new mega-base to host President Obama's surge troops.

TAPI's rival is the already mentioned IPI, also theoretically underway and widely derided by Heritage Foundation types in the U.S., who regularly launch blasts of angry prose at the nefarious idea of India and Pakistan importing gas from "evil" Iran. Theoretically, TAPI's construction will start in 2010 and the gas would begin flowing by 2015. (Don't hold your breath.) Embattled Afghan President Hamid Karzai, who can hardly secure a few square blocks of central Kabul, even with the help of international forces, nonetheless offered assurances last year that he would not only rid his country of millions of land mines along TAPI's route, but somehow get rid of the Taliban in the bargain.

Should there be investors (nursed by Afghan opium dreams) delirious enough to sink their money into such a pipeline -- and that's a monumental if -- Afghanistan would collect only $160 million a year in transit fees, a mere bagatelle even if it does represent a big chunk of the embattled Karzai's current annual revenue. Count on one thing though, if it ever happened, the Taliban and assorted warlords/highway robbers would be sure to get a cut of the action.

A Clinton-Bush-Obama Great Game

TAPI's roller-coaster history actually begins in the mid-1990s, the Clinton era, when the Taliban were dined (but not wined) by the California-based energy company Unocal and the Clinton machine. In 1995, Unocal first came up with the pipeline idea, even then a product of Washington's fatal urge to bypass both Iran and Russia. Next, Unocal talked to the Turkmenbashi, then to the Taliban, and so launched a classic New Great Game gambit that has yet to end and without which you can't understand the Afghan war Obama has inherited.

A Taliban delegation, thanks to Unocal, enjoyed Houston's hospitality in early 1997 and then Washington's in December of that year. When it came to energy negotiations, the Taliban's leadership was anything but medieval. They were tough bargainers, also cannily courting the Argentinean private oil company Bridas, which had secured the right to explore and exploit oil reserves in eastern Turkmenistan.

In August 1997, financially unstable Bridas sold 60% of its stock to Amoco, which merged the next year with British Petroleum. A key Amoco consultant happened to be that ubiquitous Eurasian player, former national security advisor Zbig Brzezinski, while another such luminary, Henry Kissinger, just happened to be a consultant for Unocal. BP-Amoco, already developing the Baku-Tblisi-Ceyhan (BTC) pipeline, now became the major player in what had already been dubbed the Trans-Afghan Pipeline or TAP. Inevitably, Unocal and BP-Amoco went to war and let the lawyers settle things in a Texas court, where, in October 1998 as the Clinton years drew to an end, BP-Amoco seemed to emerge with the upper hand.

Under newly elected president George W. Bush, however, Unocal snuck back into the game and, as early as January 2001, was cozying up to the Taliban yet again, this time supported by a star-studded governmental cast of characters, including Undersecretary of State Richard Armitage, himself a former Unocal lobbyist. The Taliban were duly invited back to Washington in March 2001 via Rahmatullah Hashimi, a top aide to "The Shadow," the movement's leader Mullah Omar.

Negotiations eventually broke down because of those pesky transit fees the Taliban demanded. Beware the Empire's fury. At a Group of Eight summit meeting in Genoa in July 2001, Western diplomats indicated that the Bush administration had decided to take the Taliban down before year's end. (Pakistani diplomats in Islamabad would later confirm this to me.) The attacks of September 11, 2001 just slightly accelerated the schedule. Nicknamed "the kebab seller" in Kabul, Hamid Karzai, a former CIA asset and Unocal representative, who had entertained visiting Taliban members at barbecues in Houston, was soon forced down Afghan throats as the country's new leader.

Among the first fruits of Donald Rumsfeld's bombing and invasion of Afghanistan in the fall of 2001 was the signing by Karzai, Pakistani President Musharraf and Turkmenistan's Nyazov of an agreement committing themselves to build TAP, and so was formally launched a Pipelineistan extension from Central to South Asia with brand USA stamped all over it.

Russian President Vladimir Putin did nothing -- until September 2006, that is, when he delivered his counterpunch with panache. That's when Russian energy behemoth Gazprom agreed to buy Nyazov's natural gas at the 40% mark-up the dictator demanded. In return, the Russians received priceless gifts (and the Bush administration a pricey kick in the face). Nyazov turned over control of Turkmenistan's entire gas surplus to the Russian company through 2009, indicated a preference for letting Russia explore the country's new gas fields, and stated that Turkmenistan was bowing out of any U.S.-backed Trans-Caspian pipeline project. (And while he was at it, Putin also cornered much of the gas exports of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan as well.)

Thus, almost five years later, with occupied Afghanistan in increasingly deadly chaos, TAP seemed dead-on-arrival. The (invisible) star of what would later turn into Obama's "good" war was already a corpse.

But here's the beauty of Pipelineistan: like zombies, dead deals always seem to return and so the game goes on forever.

Just when Russia thought it had Turkmenistan locked in…

A Turkmen Bash

They don't call Turkmenistan a "gas republic" for nothing. I've crossed it from the Uzbek border to a Caspian Sea port named -- what else -- Turkmenbashi where you can purchase one kilo of fresh Beluga for $100 and a camel for $200. That's where the gigantic gas fields are, and it's obvious that most have not been fully explored. When, in October 2008, the British consultancy firm GCA confirmed that the Yolotan-Osman gas fields in southwest Turkmenistan were among the world's four largest, holding up to a staggering 14 trillion cubic meters of natural gas, Turkmenistan promptly grabbed second place in the global gas reserves sweepstakes, way ahead of Iran and only 20% below Russia. With that news, the earth shook seismically across Pipelineistan.

Just before he died in December 2006, the flamboyant Turkmenbashi boasted that his country held enough reserves to export 150 billion cubic meters of gas annually for the next 250 years. Given his notorious megalomania, nobody took him seriously. So in March 2008, our man Gurbanguly ordered a GCA audit to dispel any doubts. After all, in pure Asian Energy Security Grid mode, Turkmenistan had already signed contracts to supply Russia with about 50 billion cubic meters annually, China with 40 billion cubic meters, and Iran with 8 billion cubic meters.

And yet, none of this turns out to be quite as monumental or settled as it may look. In fact, Turkmenistan and Russia may be playing the energy equivalent of Russian roulette. After all, virtually all of Turkmenistani gas exports flow north through an old, crumbling Soviet system of pipelines, largely built in the 1960s. Add to this a Turkmeni knack for raising the stakes non-stop at a time when Gazprom has little choice but to put up with it: without Turkmen gas, it simply can't export all it needs to Europe, the source of 70% of Gazprom's profits.

Worse yet, according to a Gazprom source quoted in the Russian business daily Kommersant, the stark fact is that the company only thought it controlled all of Turkmenistan's gas exports; the newly discovered gas mega-fields turn out not to be part of the deal. As my Asia Times colleague, former ambassador M.K. Bhadrakumar put the matter, Gazprom's mistake "is proving to be a misconception of Himalayan proportions."

In fact, it's as if the New Great Gamesters had just discovered another Everest. This year, Obama's national security strategists lost no time unleashing a no-holds-barred diplomatic campaign to court Turkmenistan. The goal? To accelerate possible ways for all that new Turkmeni gas to flow through the right pipes, and create quite a different energy map and future. Apart from TAPI, another key objective is to make the prospective $5.8 billion Turkey-to-Austria Nabucco pipeline become viable and thus, of course, trump the Russians. In that way, a key long-term U.S. strategic objective would be fulfilled: Austria, Italy, and Greece, as well as the Balkan and various Central European countries, would be at least partially pulled from Gazprom's orbit. (Await my next "postcard" from Pipelineistan for more on this.)

IPI or TAPI?

Gurbanguly is proving an even more riotous player than the Turkmenbashi. A year ago he said he was going to hedge his bets, that he was willing to export the bulk of the eight trillion cubic meters of gas reserves he now claims for his country to virtually anyone. Washington was -- and remains -- ecstatic. At an international conference last month in Ashgabat ("the city of love"), the Las Vegas of Central Asia, Gurbanguly told a hall packed with Americans, Europeans, and Russians that "diversification of energy flows and inclusion of new countries into the geography of export routes can help the global economy gain stability."

Inevitably, behind closed doors, the TAPI maze came up and TAPI executives once again began discussing pricing and transit fees. Of course, hard as that may be to settle, it's the easy part of the deal. After all, there's that Everest of Afghan security to climb, and someone still has to confirm that Turkmenistan's gas reserves are really as fabulous as claimed.

Imperceptible jiggles in Pipelineistan's tectonic plates can shake half the world. Take, for example, an obscure March report in the Balochistan Times: a little noticed pipeline supplying gas to parts of Sindh province in Pakistan, including Karachi, was blown up. It got next to no media attention, but all across Eurasia and in Washington, those analyzing the comparative advantages of TAPI vs. IPI had to wonder just how risky it might be for India to buy future Iranian gas via increasingly volatile Balochistan.

And then in early April came another mysterious pipeline explosion, this one in Turkmenistan, compromising exports to Russia. The Turkmenis promptly blamed the Russians (and TAPI advocates cheered), but nothing in Afghanistan itself could have left them cheering very loudly. Right now, Dick Cheney's master plan to get those blue rivers of Turkmeni gas flowing southwards via a future TAPI as part of a U.S. grand strategy for a "Greater Central Asia" lies in tatters.

Still, Zbig Brzezinski might disagree, and as he commands Obama's attention, he may try to convince the new president that the world needs a $7.6-plus billion, 1,600-km steel serpent winding through a horribly dangerous war zone. That's certainly the gist of what Brzezinski said immediately after the 2008 Russia-Georgia war, stressing once again that "the construction of a pipeline from Central Asia via Afghanistan to the south... will maximally expand world society's access to the Central Asian energy market."

Washington or Beijing?

Still, give credit where it's due. For the time being, our man Gurbanguly may have snatched the leading role in the New Great Game in this part of Eurasia. He's already signed a groundbreaking gas agreement with RWE from Germany and sent the Russians scrambling.

If, one of these days, the Turkmenistani leader opts for TAPI as well, it will open Washington to an ultimate historical irony. After so much death and destruction, Washington would undoubtedly have to sit down once again with -- yes -- the Taliban! And we'd be back to July 2001 and those pesky pipeline transit fees.

As it stands at the moment, however, Russia still dominates Pipelineistan, ensuring Central Asian gas flows across Russia's network and not through the Trans-Caspian networks privileged by the U.S. and the European Union. This virtually guarantees Russia's crucial geopolitical status as the top gas supplier to Europe and a crucial supplier to Asia as well.

Meanwhile, in "transit corridor" Pakistan, where Predator drones soaring over Pashtun tribal villages monopolize the headlines, the shady New Great Game slouches in under-the-radar mode toward the immense, under-populated southern Pakistani province of Balochistan. The future of the epic IPI vs. TAPI battle may hinge on a single, magic word: Gwadar.

Essentially a fishing village, Gwadar is an Arabian Sea port in that province. The port was built by China. In Washington's dream scenario, Gwadar becomes the new Dubai of South Asia. This implies the success of TAPI. For its part, China badly needs Gwadar as a node for yet another long pipeline to be built to western China. And where would the gas flowing in that line come from? Iran, of course.

Whoever "wins," if Gwadar really becomes part of the Liquid War, Pakistan will finally become a key transit corridor for either Iranian gas from the monster South Pars field heading for China, or a great deal of the Caspian gas from Turkmenistan heading Europe-wards. To make the scenario even more locally mouth-watering, Pakistan would then be a pivotal place for both NATO and the SCO (in which it is already an official "observer").

Now that's as classic as the New Great Game in Eurasia can get. There's NATO vs. the SCO. With either IPI or TAPI, Turkmenistan wins. With either IPI or TAPI, Russia loses. With either IPI or TAPI, Pakistan wins. With TAPI, Iran loses. With IPI, Afghanistan loses. In the end, however, as in any game of high stakes Pipelineistan poker, it all comes down to the top two global players. Ladies and gentlemen, place your bets: will the winner be Washington or Beijing?

source

Also:

U.S. Stands in the Way of International Pipeline Deal

Page the Village Idiot - "Dead Rock Stars"

2009-08-18T15:38:00.001-07:00

DMX - "Ain't No Sunshine"

2009-08-18T15:37:00.001-07:00

Global Warming Ended in 1998; Caused by Sun

2009-08-15T16:59:00.000-07:00

Global Cooling Began in 2002

The sun, a million times larger than the earth, is the nuclear power station that controls the climate of the Earth and every other planet in the solar system.

The heliocentric (sun-centred) cosmology pioneered by Copernicus shattered the anthropocentric mythology that put man at the centre of the universe. This Medieval mythology viewed natural disasters as acts of God caused by human sin. The popular belief that human activity is the main cause of catastrophic global warming is essentially a return to the religious, guilt-ridden mythology of the pre-Copernican age. Read more

Carbon dioxide is not to blame for global climate change. Solar activity is many times more powerful than the energy produced by the whole of humankind. Man’s influence on nature is a drop in the ocean.

Dr. Oleg Sorokhtin, Merited Scientist of Russia and fellow of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences and staff researcher of the Oceanology Institute.

It’s not your fault

1. Climate change is natural.

Climate change has been happening on this earth for millions of years
The global warming of the last hundred years has in been entirely within the range of natural variability
The warmer periods of history such as the Holocene Optimum, the Roman Warm Period, and the Medieval Warm Period, have all proved to be beneficial in terms of human prosperity and progress. The warming 20th century has been no exception.

2. Climate Change is governed by the sun.

The sun is the primary driver of climate change on planet Earth and every other planet. Everything from ice ages to warm interglacial periods (some much warmer than our present interglacial period) has been caused by the natural variations of the sun’s irradiance, magnetic fields, solar winds, solar flares and sun-spots. Plus the solar inter-play with cosmic rays, variations in the earth’s orbit around the sun and the tilt of the earth upon its axis.
The oceans, comprising 71% of the earth’s surface, store and distribute the sun’s heat energy. That heat energy is distributed by ocean currents and ocean evaporation which in turn influence air currents, cloud formation and precipitation. The enormous size of the oceans relative to the atmosphere means that the oceans always dominate the exchange of heat energy between hydrosphere and atmosphere. More than anything else within the earth itself, the oceans are by far the most dominant influence on climate.

3. Climate change is not driven by human CO2 emissions.

The so-called greenhouses gases, which are more than 90% water vapour, act like an insulation blanket to make the climate more equable and the planet liveable. Carbon dioxide and methane, comprising 3.6% and 0.9% of all greenhouse gases respectively, are minor players. Water vapour completely dominates the greenhouse effect.
Human CO2 emissions account for only 2.91% of all CO2 emissions according to the US Department of Energy or 3.67% according to the IPCC’s AR4. Whichever figure we take, human C02 emissions are not much more than 0.1% - one part in a thousand – of all greenhouse gases.
CO2 accounts for 0.038% of the total atmosphere. The human CO2 emissions, being around 3% of 0.038%, are not much more than 1 part per 100,000 parts of the atmosphere. Take a closer look at the numbers and don’t be fooled by the greenhouse scare campaign.
On-going observations and temperature measurements in the real world indicate that the climate system is not very sensitive to rising CO2 levels in the atmosphere. Any modest warming effect of C02 is modified by the “negative feedback” of much bigger players such as surface evaporation, cloud formation and precipitation.
Bottom line: there has never been any proof that human emissions of CO2 are a significant factor in global warming.

4. Global warming has stopped.

World temperatures peaked in 1998 – ten years ago – and the downward cooling trend has been unmistakeable since about 2002. It’s now official that 2008 has been the coldest year this century. The world has continued to cool whilst CO2 levels in the atmosphere have continued to rise. The AWG thesis that rising CO2 levels cause a corresponding rise in temperatures has collapsed.
All the signs indicate that the sun has gone into one of its recurring quiet phases.
If this solar trend continues, the earth will continue to cool despite human CO2 emissions and despite the projections of any of the Climate Models.

Editor's Note: I don't personally believe evidence supports the global warming arguments; however, I still think that humans could and should enact measures to treat the planet better, cut back on pollution, etc... in order to improve the quality of life for all living organisms on Earth.

Quote of the Day

2009-08-15T14:55:00.000-07:00

"The passage from passivity to anger to engagement can begin by recognizing the gap between Obama’s inspiring calls for change and the actual policies he has put into place. It is precisely in the space of this tension between what is and what ought to be that politics can be reinvigorated by educating the public with the very same words that inspired so many of them to vote for Obama in the first place. This education does not rest by pointing to the swindle of fulfillment that followed the election, but asks what can now be done to go back to a politics in which hope is only the beginning, not the end, of what it means to see and act otherwise.

Hope provides the conditions for humans to imagine how things can be different from what they are in the present. When armed with knowledge, it links the power of judgment to the urge to change the world around us. When dismantled in the discourse of cynicism, perfection, or finality, it loses its sense of possibility and dissolves into a world where tensions fade away and conflicts and contradictions cease to exist. A politics after hope recognizes that hope is never finished; it always remains uneasy in the face of unchecked power and never stops its quest for equality and justice. Politics after hope recognizes that the fate of the future is never settled and that democracy is always a process of becoming rather than a state of being."

Henry A. Giroux

40 Years Later: Mama Weer All Crazee Now

2009-08-15T14:38:00.000-07:00

...it’ll be forty years since the Woodstock Music and Arts Fair began.

To my fellow Boomers, for so many of whom (like me) Woodstock was such an existential moment, Bob Dylan’s question seems relevant: How does it feel?

To younger generations who see Woodstock only through the prism of history and who find the Boomers ‘ fascination with and smugness about this event alternately inscrutable and unbearable, John Sebastian’s explanation seems fitting: It’s like trying to tell a stranger about rock and roll.

Here are my stories. Make your own narratives….

August 15, 1969: A couple of friends and I have seen news reports and heard from friends about this fantastic thing happening up in a place called Woodstock, New York. We recruit an older friend (19 – we’re 17) to drive and tell our parents some bullshit about a camping trip. We start to NY about 5 PM with high hopes. As the trip progresses north through the night from NC through VA into the narrow necks of WVA and MD into PA, we hear more and more reports about blocked highways, no food, and other conditions scary to small town Southern boys on their first great adventure. After a breakfast somewhere in PA, we reluctantly turn back. School starts a couple of weeks later – we tell our story to admiring groups both male and female. The fact that we tried to reach Woodstock increases my cool rating geometrically – I get tons of dates (and several free beers at parties) out of an aborted car trip….

May2, 1970: My band and I go to Greenboro, NC, about 30 miles from our small NC town, to see the movie Woodstock. We get to the theater late and have to sit in the front row. After getting past the horror of Richie Havens‘ dental problems, I get blown away by The Who and Crosby, Stills, and Nash – for wildly different reasons. But its all so fantastic, so true, so right, so what we all believe in – the music, the people, hell, even the mud, dope, and chaos – and love. We leave the theater buzzed – and I am convinced that peace and music will change the world.

Two days later the Ohio National Guard kills 4 kids at Kent State. I learn one of my most useful lessons. The guys with the guns will have the last say….

Sometime in 1989: My then wife and I watch Woodstock on our local PBS affiliate. Now a classic cocooned Boomer thirty-something with small kids and a Wall Street Journal believing spouse, I find myself drawn in again by the greatness – not just of CSN or The Who – but by Joan Baez, John Sebastian, and, especially, Country Joe McDonald and the Fish. “What the hell have I let happen?” I remember thinking. My wife, observing my keen response, says a little too snidely, “I guess you’ll have to start playing your guitars again.”

The marriage collapses a year later. A year after that, the band reforms for one more try….

1994, 1999: MTV hypes its “Woodstock” out the wazoo. I don’t even watch from the comfort of my living room.

Planned spontaneity and conformist uniqueness don’t impress me much.

August 13, 2009: As the resident old fart at S&R, I get asked to write the “reflection” on “Woodstock 40 Years On.” How do you tell strangers about rock and roll?

Here’s a try: Give me an “F…” Give me a “U…” Give me a “C….”

Jim Booth

Some Rich Americans Tell Obama to Raise their Taxes

2009-08-15T13:50:00.000-07:00

Petition is one sign that the idealistic wealthy are not a small minority.

"Raise my taxes," says millionaire Chuck Collins.

The scion of the Oscar Mayer family supports a House panel’s healthcare plan that would boost taxes for families earning more than $350,000 a year. He also advocates ending the Bush tax cuts for the rich right away, rather than when they expire at the start of 2011, and closing foreign tax havens to Americans.

Although the financial burden would be sizable, Mr. Collins is busy urging other wealthy Americans to sign a tax-me petition.

“The good news is there are still people out there willing to pay for the common good,” says Collins, whose nonprofit Wealth for the Common Good is collecting the names.

As of July 21, some 210 wealthy people had signed. Collins hopes to get more than 1,000 signatures before delivering it to President Obama and House leaders.

The idealist wealthy are “not as small a minority as one might think,” says Eric Schoenberg, an investor and Columbia University Business School professor, who also signed the petition.

It is “reasonable and fair” for “the people who have done best out of the economic system in the last 20 years” to pay in extra taxes the bulk of the cost of healthcare reform, says Mr. Schoenberg. “Healthcare ought to be a basic right of citizenship.”

His research suggests the really rich are more willing than the modestly rich to share their wealth for the common good.

There are other indications of idealism among business people and the well-to-do:

•Responsible Wealth, a nonprofit group that includes several wealthy members, has been advocating for years that the estate tax be retained.

•A group of business owners and leaders called Business for Shared Prosperity welcomed the July 24 rise in the federal minimum wage from $6.55 to $7.25 an hour, although it costs their firms more money.

“It is an unsustainable and dangerous downward spiral to push American workers into
poverty and expect taxpayers to pick up the bill for the consequences,” states Margot Dorfman, CEO of the U.S. Women’s Chamber of Commerce.

But wait! Don’t these taxes on the rich burden the very people who start the most firms and create the most jobs? Statistics suggest the burden is not overwhelming. Households with incomes over $250,000 have saved more than $700 billion from the Bush tax cuts of 2001 and 2003. The proposed graduated surtax under the House Ways and Means Committee’s healthcare plan would take back $544 billion over the next 10 years, providing about half the cost of the entire plan, calculates the Joint Economic Committee of Congress.

What that means is that even after digging deeper to help pay for expensive healthcare reform, the wealthy would still be paying less in taxes than during the Reagan administration – and far less than in President Eisenhower’s time.

In 1955, the top 400 US taxpayers paid 51 percent of their average income of $12.3 million (adjusted to 2006 dollars), according to Sam Pizzigati, a fellow at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington. In 2006, the most recent data available, the top 400 paid 17.2 percent of their average income of $263 million in federal taxes.

That 17.2 percent rate is also “much lower” than tax rates for the rich in Britain, France, Germany, or Japan, he adds.

Nor, some economists note, did the US economy grow more slowly when taxes on the rich were far higher in the 1950s and 1960s – or grow more swiftly after the Bush tax cuts.

source

The Politics of Pitt: A Holy Trinity

2009-08-13T17:17:00.000-07:00

Mayoral Platform: No Religion, Legalizing Pot And Gay Marriage

Brad Pitt for mayor!

Pitt's interview with Ann Curry aired on Thursday's 'Today' show, and New Orleans' most prominent Katrina rebuilder thanks to his Make it Right Foundation joked about running for mayor of the Louisiana town, as locals have taken to wearing "Brad Pitt for Mayor" T-shirts.

"I don't have a chance," Pitt told Curry. "I'm running on the gay marriage, no religion, legalization and taxation of marijuana platform."

Pitt and partner Angelina Jolie's answer about whether they will ever wed has been, for years, that they will get married when gay marriage is legalized.

The reformed family man also recently told Parade that he used to smoke "grass."

The interview was pretaped in New Orleans a week ago, as Monday Pitt was in LA for his 'Inglourious Basterds' premiere and Wednesday he was in New York for the premiere of 'The Time Traveler's Wife,' which he executive produced.

WATCH:

Max Keiser, How Do Your Really Feel About Goldman Sachs?

2009-08-12T19:31:00.000-07:00

Additional News Crossjostling: (below)

Poll: Canadians 'Flat Out Reject' American-Style Health System

Scenius, Innovation and Epicenters

Letting the Banking Rats Out of the Bag

Imagining It Completed

The 'Anti-Starbucks' Starbucks

Maybe Break Room Live's Funniest Moment Ever...

More of the Same in Latin America

A Visionary Thrives in All Times

America's Biggest Economic Problem? Most of us are broke, literally.

Resist Not

'Evil, Orwellian' - US Right Targets UK Health Care

Same World Odor (No Big Whoop)

Spotting Wiccans: This information could save a Christian life!

GM Says Electric Car Will Yield 230 MPG

One Who is Clear

Predictive Cell Phone Texting Damages Young Brains

Room Full of Cats

Keith Olbermann Unmasks Those Killing Healthcare Reform

Keep Your Eye on the Prize

Jon Stewart Vs. Town Hall Crazies (VIDEO)

Russia Releases UFO Records

Alice: "It would be so nice if something made sense for a change."

Biology Approaching Its Frankenstein Moment

America Dreaming

Saved By Big Government

OmWellness is a new school devoted to licensing drugless health practitioners to "educate as many people as possible, as quickly as possible."

Page the Village Idiot - (Sheriff) "Joe R' Piehole...

And the winner of this month’s Most Retarded Horseshit Written In Defense of Goldman Sachs award goes to…

Superconductivity - Creating a New State of Matter

TARP Watchdog: Geithner Making "$2 Bets All Over The Table In Vegas"

All is Well

WATCH: The 9 Stupidest Products Of All Time: Vol. II

Pee-Wee Herman returns to the stage!

We Will Come Grandly

WATCH: Nouriel Roubini, Nassim Taleb (aka Dr. Doom & The Black Swan) on CNBC

Mass Events & The Energy of Opposition

Freak Wave Hot Spots Identified

The Sounds of Skunk Roadkill Reincarnating

The Religion of WAFFLE

NOFX - "Creeping Out Sara"

2009-08-11T09:06:00.001-07:00

Operating at the Level of Cause

2009-08-10T14:33:00.000-07:00

There is no "secret" that will bring us to anything that we do not earn through the willingness to live up to the version of self to which that thing corresponds, and moreover, to live up to it for its own sake.

Conscious creating, it turns out, is an act of love, an act of giving the self to the ideal rather than trying to get things from the world.

We cannot escape the assumptions of our own consciousness.

When the creative moment is entered into lovingly rather than for some desired effect, then and only then are we operating at the level of cause. This means that it isn't enough for us to visualize and such.

We have to become the thing we want, until all experience of lack has vanished in the joy of our having come home to our ideal.

Then, as far as we're concerned, the world can come along or not.

And the one who practices this way will discover a great secret indeed.

source

Crossjostling the Headlines

2009-08-10T13:12:00.000-07:00

Things Made Of Bacon That Shouldn't Be

China Plans Universal Health Care for its 1.3 Billion People

Glow Baby Glow

Miley Cyrus' Teen Choice Pole Dance

NHL Star Attacked Cab Driver Over 20 Cents

Where Have All the Flowers Gone?

To Read: Righteous Porkchop

Grave Found of Man who Bankrolled Confederates in American Civil War

City Without Limits

Stop Complaining About Right-Wing Protests! The Left Should Be (Re)Learning How It's Done

Weil: The Wrong Diagnosis

Sen. Bernie Sanders Launches "Unfiltered" Online Show

Maher: New Rule (Death to Poochy)

The Last Gasp of the Angry White Man

Lady Gaga, The Illuminati Puppet

Bush told French President: Iraq was a "Quest Foretold in the Bible"

World March for Peace, NYC, Oct 2, 2009 thru Jan 2, 2010

Finance for Dummies

"Ignore 'Best Before' Labels," says UK Environment Minister

The Healthcare Mob Mentality

Phil Donahue Spells Out A Few Things For Hannity

Nader: Wall Street Forecasting (Comedic Doses of Illusion)

Is it Now a Crime to be Poor?

What You Choose to Focus On

Gilbert Gottfried Roasts Joan Rivers

2009-08-10T11:37:00.001-07:00

Hidden Knowledge Inside Sacred Art

2009-08-10T08:43:00.000-07:00

"In ancient civilizations, a class of initiates had precise knowledge of harmonic laws. They knew how to manipulate them to create the precise effect they wanted. And they wrote this knowledge into architecture, art, music, paintings, rituals and incenses, producing Gothic cathedrals, vast Hindu temples, all the marvels of Egypt and many other sacred works that even today, in ruins, produce a powerful effect upon us. This effect is produced because these men knew exactly what they were doing and why they were doing it: it was done entirely through a complex sensory manipulation."

..(more)..

Page the Village Idiot - "Fanny Pack Fever"

2009-08-09T20:36:00.000-07:00

Abraham-Hicks: "Free from Negative Response"

2009-08-09T20:16:00.000-07:00

Crossjostling the Headlines

2009-08-09T10:41:00.000-07:00

The secret history of TARP: How Goldman bailed out Goldman…

Is Obama Punking Us?

This Country Needs an Outburst of Common Sense

Marijuana is Safer: So Why Are We Driving People to Drink?

Economy on a Scaffold

What Obama Needs to Learn from Sarah Palin

Arianna Spars With GOP Rep. Who Posed For Photo With "R.I.P The U.S. Constitution" T-Shirt

Helping Obama Write the Unwritten Future
What the Mainstream Press Can Learn from Matt Taibbi's Takedown of Goldman Sachs

Madonna's 'Stolen' Love Poem

The Only Option for Health Reform Is the Public Option

Australia's Newest Political Party: The Sex Party

The Shocking Benefits of Legalizing Pot

The Crony Capitalist Bailout Nation

Will Sharon Stone Topless On the Cover of Paris Match Destroy American Civilization?

Everything That You Experience

2009-08-09T10:15:00.000-07:00

Because the Law of Attraction is responding
to the thoughts that you hold at all times,
it is accurate to say that
you are creating your own reality.

Everything that you experience
is attracted to you
because the Law of Attraction
is responding to the thoughts
that you are offering.

Whether you are remembering
something from the past,
observing something in your present,
or imagining something
about your future,
the thought that you are focused upon
in your powerful now
has activated a vibration within you.

And, the Law of Attraction is responding to it now.

Abraham-Hicks

Bill Maher: "A Doody-Face Called Me a Pinhead"

2009-08-07T17:23:00.000-07:00

New Rule: Just because a country elects a smart president doesn't make it a smart country. A few weeks ago I was asked by Wolf Blitzer if I thought Sarah Palin could get elected president, and I said I hope not, but I wouldn't put anything past this stupid country. It was amazing - in the minute or so between my calling America stupid and the end of the Cialis commercial, CNN was flooded with furious emails and the twits hit the fan. And you could tell that these people were really mad because they wrote entirely in CAPITAL LETTERS!!! It's how they get the blood circulating when the Cialis wears off. Worst of all, Bill O'Reilly refuted my contention that this is a stupid country by calling me a pinhead, which A) proves my point, and B) is really funny coming from a doody-face like him.

Now, the hate mail all seemed to have a running theme: that I may live in a stupid country, but they lived in the greatest country on earth, and that perhaps I should move to another country, like Somalia. Well, the joke's on them because I happen to have a summer home in Somalia... and no I can't show you an original copy of my birth certificate because Woody Harrelson spilled bong water on it.

And before I go about demonstrating how, sadly, easy it is to prove the dumbness dragging down our country, let me just say that ignorance has life and death consequences. On the eve of the Iraq War, 69% of Americans thought Saddam Hussein was personally involved in 9/11. Four years later, 34% still did. Or take the health care debate we're presently having: members of Congress have recessed now so they can go home and "listen to their constituents." An urge they should resist because their constituents don't know anything. At a recent town-hall meeting in South Carolina, a man stood up and told his Congressman to "keep your government hands off my Medicare," which is kind of like driving cross country to protest highways.

I'm the bad guy for saying it's a stupid country, yet polls show that a majority of Americans cannot name a single branch of government, or explain what the Bill of Rights is. 24% could not name the country America fought in the Revolutionary War. More than two-thirds of Americans don't know what's in Roe v. Wade. Two-thirds don't know what the Food and Drug Administration does. Some of this stuff you should be able to pick up simply by being alive. You know, like the way the Slumdog kid knew about cricket.

Not here. Nearly half of Americans don't know that states have two senators and more than half can't name their congressman. And among Republican governors, only 30% got their wife's name right on the first try.

Sarah Palin says she would never apologize for America. Even though a Gallup poll says 18% of Americans think the sun revolves around the earth. No, they're not stupid. They're interplanetary mavericks. A third of Republicans believe Obama is not a citizen, and a third of Democrats believe that George Bush had prior knowledge of the 9/11 attacks, which is an absurd sentence because it contains the words "Bush" and "knowledge."

People bitch and moan about taxes and spending, but they have no idea what their government spends money on. The average voter thinks foreign aid consumes 24% of our federal budget. It's actually less than 1%. And don't even ask about cabinet members: seven in ten think Napolitano is a kind of three-flavored ice cream. And last election, a full one-third of voters forgot why they were in the booth, handed out their pants, and asked, "Do you have these in a relaxed-fit?"

And I haven't even brought up America's religious beliefs. But here's one fun fact you can take away: did you know only about half of Americans are aware that Judaism is an older religion than Christianity? That's right, half of America looks at books called the Old Testament and the New Testament and cannot figure out which one came first.

And these are the idiots we want to weigh in on the minutia of health care policy? Please, this country is like a college chick after two Long Island Iced Teas: we can be talked into anything, like wars, and we can be talked out of anything, like health care. We should forget town halls, and replace them with study halls. There's a lot of populist anger directed towards Washington, but you know who concerned citizens should be most angry at? Their fellow citizens. "Inside the beltway" thinking may be wrong, but at least it's thinking, which is more than you can say for what's going on outside the beltway.

And if you want to call me an elitist for this, I say thank you. Yes, I want decisions made by an elite group of people who know what they're talking about. That means Obama budget director Peter Orszag, not Sarah Palin.

Which is the way our founding fathers wanted it. James Madison wrote that "pure democracy" doesn't work because "there is nothing to check... an obnoxious individual." Then, in the margins, he doodled a picture of Joe the Plumber.

Until we admit there are things we don't know, we can't even start asking the questions to find out. Until we admit that America can make a mistake, we can't stop the next one. A smart guy named Chesterton once said: "My country, right or wrong is a thing no patriot would ever think of saying... It is like saying 'My mother, drunk or sober.'" To which most Americans would respond: "Are you calling my mother a drunk?"

Bomb Squad Humor

2009-08-06T21:34:00.000-07:00

Sifu Augustine Fong (Wing Chun in Action)

2009-08-06T14:31:00.001-07:00

Stuntman Flies Jet Pack Over Children's Museum

2009-08-06T13:15:00.000-07:00

The guy who flew over the Royal Gorge in a jet pack last November took flight over Denver this morning.

Eric Scott, who piloted his hydrogen-peroxide-powered jet pack across the 1,053-foot-deep Royal Gorge on Nov. 24, flew over the Children's Museum of Denver about 11 a.m.

During his jaunt in November, Scott flew 1,500 feet, using a 21-second burst of deafening thrust to bridge the gorge.

The event at the Royal Gorge set a myriad of first-ever records and was unique in that prior to the attempt, Scott had never flown more than a few hundred yards.

Scott, who is in his mid-40s, has been piloting rocket-powered jet packs for 16 years.

Currently, the 800-horsepower jet pack that Scott wears, developed by Jet Pack
International, can reach speeds of more than 70 mph, can take flight for 33 seconds and reach an altitude of 300 feet.

In his flight across the gorge, Scott reached the break-neck speed of 75 mph.

Bill Maher: A Crime of Not Kissing a Cop's Behind

2009-08-06T10:59:00.001-07:00

Corporations Behind Fake Grass Roots Movement

2009-08-06T10:25:00.000-07:00

In the video below, Rachel Maddow does a detailed analysis of the website, www.recessrally.com.

Maddow looks into the prominent sponsors of the Recess Rally and demonstrates just how much the organization is a result of Republican operatives and elitists as opposed to your "average Joe middle class American."

As Maddow points out, some of the listed supporters of Recess Rally include Michelle Malkin a noted conservative Fox News commentator, a former speech writer for George Bush, a regional field director Bush-Cheney 04, a former Washington D.C. lobbyist, the former Director of the Illinois Republican party, the funder of the swift boat ads attacking John Kerry, and finally the owner of the largest privately-held oil company in America.

These are the "middle class Americans" bringing you the "grassroots" protests.

As a side note at the beginning of the video, Maddow explains how end of life consultations are actually not that controversial and not merely a Democratic idea. It turns out both parties have been supporting the ability of people to make living wills for over twenty years without controversy. It is only now that Republicans are trying to take the non-controversial issue to try and scare old people into believing they will be euthanized.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Below:

AFL-CIO Secretary Treasurer Richard Trumka
sends out a scathing statement
about the town halls:

"Every American has the inalienable right to participate in our democratic process. Our politics is passionate, heartfelt and often loud -- as was the founding of our nation. But that is not what the corporate-funded mobs are engaging in when they show up to disrupt town halls held by members of Congress.

Major health care reform is closer than ever to passage and it is no secret that special interests want to weaken or block it. These mobs are not there to participate. As their own strategy memo states, they have been sent by their corporate and lobbyist bankrollers to disrupt, heckle and block meaningful debate. This is a desperation move, meant to slow the momentum for change.

Mob rule is not democracy. People have a democratic right to express themselves and our elected leaders have a right to hear from their constituents -- not organized thugs whose sole purpose is to shut down the conversation and attempt to scare our leaders into inaction.

We call on the insurance companies, the lobbyists and the Republican leaders who are cheering them on to halt these 'Brooks Brothers Riot' tactics. Health care is a crucial issue and everyone - on all sides of the issue - deserves to be heard."

Elephant Paints Picture of Elephant & Flower

2009-08-05T21:28:00.000-07:00

6,000,800 Vibrators in India as Delhi Gets Spooged

2009-08-05T20:58:00.000-07:00

"...my best friend wants The Rabbit." She cupped one hand in the air and made a buzzing sound when she saw I'd resumed squinting.

"But how does she even know about The Rabbit?" I said.

"Oh they all watch Sex and the City now," she said. "They all want The Rabbit." One gay friend of hers always returns with bagfuls for his lesbian friends, even though he risks seizure at customs and, should anyone official want to push it, a prison term. Sex toys are illegal in India, their purchase or use, one reason for their high demand as gifts from abroad, now that Sex and the City and the internet has spread news of their existence. But while they may have lint removers beat, Section 292 of the, um, penal code states that the first time conviction for purchase or use is maximum two years in the Big House. A second offense, five years.

Apparently, however, a lot of people are willing to risk life in the bone yard. The sex toy industry in India is reputedly a 500 crore a year business, or about $102,000,000 in dollars. That's six million eight hundred vibrators, roughly, if a vibrator goes for $15, which they do in the gray markets of Dehli and Mumbai: in Palika Bazaar, Sarojini Nagar and Ghaffar Market, to be specific, in New Dehli; Crawford Market in Mumbai. Sales might even spike higher still if the sales guys in these backroom business weren't inclined to make heavy breathing offers of up-close product demonstrations on potential women customers, which is what happened, in extremis, when Marie Claire India sent two undercover reporters out to see what they could see.

But while in salesmanship, India might be behind the sex toy curve, in distribution, they seem to have everybody beat. According to one survey, 13 percent of urban Indian women have used sex toys. (No statistics available on urban Indian men; butt plugs and cock rings are still not available here, even grayly, perhaps one legacy of the fact that homosexuality is largely still illegal.) The population of Mumbai and Delhi alone is nearly 30 million, which works out to a lot of customers.

And a lot of industrious distributors, when you consider that they're operating with the handicap that their wares can be, and often are, confiscated. At the Foreign Post Office in Ahmedabad, for instance, inspectors seize at least 500 parcels containing "objectionable and banned items" a month: vibrators, pornographic magazines, inflatable dolls. Addressees are sent notices and given the chance to explain themselves, possibly on health grounds--"unmarried men are advised to use dolls rather than visiting prostitutes and contracting AIDs," Dr. Paras Shah, a noted Indian sexologist, sensibly states--but according to Express India, "the embarrassed person never shows up."

Embarrassment levels in India no doubt run higher than in, say, New York City, where if the post office tried to pull that trick, they likely have postal customers, not employees, on their hands, law or no law. But society there remains sexually conservative, despite the fact that India, of course, give birth to the Kama Sutra. In the Sankrit era, according to the Sutra, sex toys proliferated. The book describes dildos made of gold, wood, and silver, how elephant trunks can be used as sexual apparati. In contemporary India, though, where many women are still in parda, veiled, it's still rare for the India film censors not to snip any scene in a Bollywood movie that shows a couple kissing. Viagra and condoms are legal, but not condoms manufactured with a vibrating ring (the sex toy offense). Six states recently banned sex education in schools, on the grounds that the pictures of bodily changes during puberty were too graphic. Pornographic films are illegal, although anyone with access to the internet, pretty much, can get an eyeful if they want, as my friend was explaining over tea.

She was describing how she'd visited a Bombay internet café where the floor was covered with bodily emissions, using a word that begins with "sp" and ends in a viscous sounding "ge," which caused me to exclaim, "God! You guys are getting as perverted as we are." "Getting?" she said and snickered. Then we both laughed in agreement, though we were both, for the moment, wrong. America will surely stay ahead in that derby till the film censors let the couples kiss."

Sex and the City of Delhi

Olbermann Unable to Ignore Bill-o the Clown

2009-08-05T20:47:00.000-07:00

Well, Lloyd Grove was right that the truce between MSNBC's Keith Olbermann and Fox News' Bill O'Reilly wouldn't last long. Olbermann slammed O'Reilly tonight in his "World's Worst Persons" segment, giving him the silver medal.

However, the gold was awarded to Fox News head Rupert Murdoch for trying to silence O'Reilly out of the fear that the controversial host would hurt the bottom line of the cable news network's parent company. Olbermann raised his fist and exclaimed, "Solidarity, Brother Bill! Free yourself from your corporate shackles!"

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Abraham-Hicks: "Look for the Positive Aspects"

2009-08-05T14:25:00.001-07:00

More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better...

2009-08-05T14:13:00.000-07:00

...Because A Fair Society is the Cure for Most Social Ills

Arizona Heat Evidently Affects Lawmakers' Brains

2009-08-05T13:43:00.000-07:00

Arizona lawmakers and Governor Jan Brewer are moving to fill a $3.4 billion budget shortfall by selling state-owned buildings. These include not only prisons, but also the House and Senate buildings. That’s the state legislature, fellow Americans! Metaphor becomes reality!

The proposed sale has bipartisan support and will require a leaseback by the buying corporation to the lawmakers with the right to repurchase the premises within twenty years.

The Arizona Republic reports that the deal, which includes 32 state properties, would bring in $735 million in upfront money and entail state lease payments totaling $60-70 million a year.

“We need the money,” State Minority Whip Linda Lopez, a Tuscon Democrat said, adding, “You’ve got to find it somewhere.” Well, why not rent out the backs of the state legislators to their favorite corporate funders? At least the public would get full disclosure of ownership.

“I look at it as taking out a mortgage,” practical Arizona House Majority Leader John McCormish, a Republican, told the Wall Street Journal.

Presence

2009-08-03T17:36:00.000-07:00

...from The Field Center's Realities blog

There’s a famous story about Sir Isaac Newton, who was sitting under a tree engrossed in a book of mathematical equations when a marching band came by. Soon after, a young man approached Sir Isaac and asked which way the band had gone, to which Newton replied, “What band?”

The story illustrates the intimate and mysterious association between existence and presence. Anyone who explores this will soon find himself deep in the land of paradox and philosophical curiosities of the most fascinating sort. For example, there’s another famous bit about a tree falling in the forest with no observer anywhere that poses the seemingly innocent question, “Does the tree make a sound?” This question is first and last about presence and its relation to existence, for if by sound one means a certain kind of experience—namely an auditory one—and as the hypothetical stipulates, there’s no one around to have the experience, then technically the tree doesn’t make a sound, but if by sound we mean only a disturbance of the air that could be heard if an experiencer were present to experience it, then it seems that the tree indeed makes a sound, and we’re spared the strange imagining in which a large tree comes crashing to earth in silence.

This is usually as far as the conversation goes around the old question about the falling tree, but it’s really only the tip of the philosophical iceberg, because in the same way that the word sound may be taken as semantic shorthand for a certain kind of experience, so the phrase “tree falling in the forest” may stand for an experience (a visual one, perhaps), and so presuppose an experiencer. Taken to this next level, the question begins to reveal its paradoxical infrastructure: “If a tree falls in the forest, and there’s no one around to experience it, is there a tree and does it fall?” With no experiencer, not even an imaginary one, we don’t have sufficient presence to establish even the hypothetical conditions, viz., that there is something called “tree” (which presupposes an experiencer for whom it is a tree) and that this tree is in the act of what we experiencers describe as “falling.” It appears that disallowing the subjective side of things simultaneously disallows the so-called objective side, so that in a roundabout way, the question eliminates its own ontological prerequisite. If there’s no experiencer, then you can’t posit the question, not even hypothetically.

We may presume that there are many things during the day that never reach the threshold of our awareness. As far as we’re concerned, they don’t exist; that is to say, there is no “they” that we can talk about as existing or not existing. There is a great deal in this worth exploring, but for our purposes here, it’s enough to recognize that there is a close and ineffable kinship between presence and being according to which a thing only comes into being insofar as it becomes present—at least for some observer. A thing that could not be observed then, cannot exist, and strictly speaking couldn’t even count as a “thing.”

All well and good, all intriguing philosophy—but how can we make use of it? Well, first, we need to discount any solipsistic interpretation of this association between presence and being. We’re not saying that something doesn’t exist if some particular person doesn’t observe it; only that a thing exists only by virtue of being observable. So, the fact that you or I are not observing the streets of Paris right now (ruling out of course any readers who are observing the streets of Paris) doesn’t mean that those streets don’t exist, for they meet the ontological requirement by being observable. Indeed, “Paris” already points to something observable, and that which cannot be observed could never be named. Second, having qualified the issue to avoid the solipsism problem, we may note that we can deny a thing existence in some real and useful fashion by denying it presence. We deny a thing presence by refusing to give it attention. As attention is withdrawn, presence withdraws. I’m not alleging here that ignoring a thing neutralizes its existence, as there would be significant problems in a claim of that sort. I am saying, however, that there is a connection enforced by what Field training calls the “nonlocal effect.” In the most practical way, this means that the Particle tendency to lock onto problems, to figure them out, wrestle with them, and so on inadvertently supports and sustains and perpetuates those very problems.

Attention, as the Course tells us, is the venue of intention. The more we attend to something, the more reality it takes on. Many problems can be solved quickly simply through the withholding or withdrawing of attention. This is not the same thing at all as psychological denial. The deliberate use of our power to attend to a thing or not involves no denial of the thing, but only the refusal to continue granting that thing presence, and this has a mysterious effect on that thing’s existence.

There is an opportunity here to conduct a remarkable experiment. Confucius writes, “Great is the man who overcomes the world, but greater still in the man who overcomes himself, for he shall have the world spinning on the palm of his hand.” The object or fact or condition or situation that exists for us, that has presence, arises and is sustained by our granting it attention and presence. The more attention and presence we grant to problems, the more real and present and pressing they become. We can make the experiment of withdrawing our attention and credence from something that’s troubled us rather than dwelling on it, for what we dwell on, we dwell in, ontologically speaking. So, for example, if some health issue has come up, we can see to it without giving it the power to define us. Remember that the selective granting or withholding of awareness that diminishes a thing’s presence and so, its existence, has nothing to do with psychological denial. So, we’re not saying, “ignore it and it will go away, ” since as long as there’s an “it” to be ignoring, “it” still has presence. No, the art lies in acknowledging whatever has presented itself, whatever has acquired presence, but without forsaking our power to participate deliberately and wittingly in the presence of that thing. This means that we don’t allow a thing to have presence by default. When our participation is witting and selective, we have moved that much more into our creative authority. So, I may go to the doctor, but not be so focused on the symptoms that prompted me to see a doctor that those symptoms have the power to define me. Stephen and Ondrea Levine, in their work with people who had been told they had terminal cancer, said that the greatest challenge in their work was to break the patient’s identification with the disease—as though the moment they received the diagnosis, suddenly they became cancer patients, and little else. And yet, no matter what the facts say, we always have the last word in who we are.

This week, instead of allowing situations and worldly conditions to steal presence from you, why not explore deliberately granting or withholding attention and presence, and find out what difference it makes? Many things that quickly would become problems for us pass by during the day unnoticed simply because we don’t notice them. If we did, they might, in their newfound presence, gain a handhold in our consciousness and spring forth into expression, but our failure to notice them protects us. Who knows how many hardships we’re spared by the innocence of our attending? If a tree falls in the forest and there’s no observer, does the tree make a sound? Without an observer, is there even something that can be called “a tree” that can be said to be doing something called “falling?” We are free to pick not only our battles, but the extent to which anything is present for us. What might happen if we took up this freedom to choose, so that the presence of things came not to us, but through us?

Technorati Tags: Field Center, Consciousness, Metaphysics, Reality

Hacker Claims Uncle Sam/Big Oil Conspiracy

2009-08-03T17:13:00.000-07:00

Gary McKinnon is accused of hacking into American military computers. He is charged with roaming around the cyberspace of the Pentagon, and leaving such insulting spoor as “your security is cr-p”. He is accused of guessing passwords, and trying to view secret photos of unidentified flying objects in Nasa databanks. All this will be put to him in court by some brace-twanging prosecution counsel, as though it were the crux of the matter.

And yet Mr McKinnon has never denied it. He has always said that he hacked into American military computers, and that is because he earnestly believes that there is a conspiracy between Uncle Sam and Big Oil to cover up the interception of alien craft that are running on some kind of renewable energy.

A Corporate Reminder of Who Controls the News

2009-08-03T14:00:00.000-07:00

The Olbermann-O’Reilly Feud:

Freedom of the Press and
the Economic Value of the ‘News’

by Lucinda Marshall

Few of us still labor under the delusion that what we are told is the 'news' is necessarily an unbiased reporting of fact. Depending on your political leaning, you probably perceive it as either liberal propaganda or rightwing spew.

But the silencing of the long-running Olbermann-O'Reilly feud is a reminder that what serves as our window to the 'news' is largely dictated by corporate interests. As the New York Times reports, General Electric, which owns MSNBC and News Corp., which owns Fox, decided the bickering between Keith Olbermann and Bill O'Reilly had to end because it was bad for the corporate image. Rarely is the content of news programming so blatantly dictated, but it does point out the wide net of vested interests that hold our trusted sources of information captive.

GE wants you to think they are all about imagination and bringing good things to life. In terms of market capitalization, according to Corpwatch, it is the world's second largest company, and it is #12 in the 2008 Global Fortune 500 with a net income of $20.829 billion dollars. You can't make that kind of money selling light bulbs, so what does GE actually do to earn that kind of income?

In addition to household goods, GE also builds nuclear power plants to power them, and is involved in providing nuclear fuel and reactor services. India recently announced that GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy, "would be among the companies bidding for nuclear energy contracts worth as much as $10 billion." In addition, GE is also a major player in uranium enrichment.

GE is also a significant player in the healthcare field. According to their website, GE Healthcare, "provides transformational medical technologies and services that are shaping a new age of patient care. Our expertise in medical imaging and information technologies, medical diagnostics, patient monitoring systems, performance improvement, drug discovery, and biopharmaceutical manufacturing technologies is helping clinicians around the world re-imagine new ways to predict, diagnose, inform, treat and monitor disease, so patients can live their lives to the fullest". According to The Business Journal (Milwaukee), "GE Healthcare has been awarded two contracts with the Defense Supply Center in Philadelphia valued at a maximum of $63 million a year for up to 10 years." GE alsorecently opening a $165 million mammography production facility.

Another area in which the company has huge stakes is the defense industry. The Louisville (KY) Courier Journal recently reported that GE stands to lose out on significant income unless Congress funds new fighter planes that President Obama and the Pentagon have said are not needed. At stake for GE is $100 billion in potential business over the next three decades. Reuters reports that GE also recently received a $2 million DoD contract to "transform the Twentynine Palms facility, the world's largest Marine Corps base, into a model smart microgrid system."

Not surprisingly, GE is also a major player in the financial markets. Its GE Money unit provides consumer financing through numerous partners. If, for instance, you apply for a credit card through Toro to pay for that new rider-mower, you'll find that the Toro Online Credit Application Center is operated by GE Money Bank. GE Commercial Finance has divisions for capital solutions, corporate financial services, healthcare, energy, real estate and aviation.

In late July, GE reported a 47% earnings fall in the second quarter due in large part to its financial unit.

Without doubt, GE's wide and very substantial stake in so many significant parts of our economy should by itself be enough for us to question whether they can possibly also deliver news in a manner we can trust to be factual. Indeed as The Daily Show's Jon Stewart so painfully pointed out, CNBC's Jim Cramer was a major economy cheerleader even when all evidence pointed to there being major problems that would certainly have an enormous impact on GE's bottom line. And that is certainly not the only instance when NBC/MSNBC/CNBC's integrity has been called into question as Glenn Greenwald notes,

This is hardly the first time evidence of corporate control over the content of NBC and MSNBC has surfaced. Last May, CNN's Jessica Yellin said that when she was at MSNBC, "the press corps was under enormous pressure from corporate executives, frankly, to make sure that this [the Iraq War] was a war that was presented in a way that was consistent with the patriotic fever in the nation"; "the higher the president's approval ratings, the more pressure I had from news executives ... to put on positive stories about the president"; and "they would turn down stories that were more critical and try to put on pieces that were more positive." Katie Couric said that when she was at NBC, "there was a lot of undercurrent of pressure not to rock the boat for a variety of reasons, where it was corporate reasons or other considerations" not to be too critical of the Bush administration. MSNBC's rising star, Ashleigh Banfield, was demoted and then fired after she criticized news media organizations generally, and Fox News specifically, for distorting their war coverage to appear more pro-government. And, of course, when MSNBC canceled Phil Donahue's show in the run-up to the Iraq war despite its being that network's highest-rated program, a corporate memo surfaced indicating that the company had fears of being associated with an anti-war and anti-government message.

Greenwald also reminds us of a glaringly obvious example of when we should have questioned the impact of GE's substantial involvement in the defense industry,

when it was revealed that both news outlets ((NBC and MSNBC) along with most other major television outlets) were presenting as "independent military analysts" a whole slew of former Generals with substantial, undisclosed corporate interests in the policies they were promoting and doing so in coordination with a secret Pentagon propaganda program? Despite front-page NYT promotion, Congressional investigations, and even a Pulitzer Prize awarded to the NYT's David Barstow for uncovering all of that, NBC's Brian Williams (like virtually every other news outlet) to this day has never so much as informed his viewers of this story, and they continue to use some of those very same former generals as "analysts."

Finally, even GE's generosity has an insidious impact on what is considered factual. Here in Kentucky where I live, the GE Foundation has awarded a four-year $25 million grant to provide funding for math and science education to the local school system that will meet newly established "World Class Standards" that will "will revamp the curriculum with the focus of producing high school graduates who can compete successfully in the global marketplace." In an age of environmental crisis and complex energy issues, the involvement in science and mathematics curricula of a major player in a specific energy industry should certainly be suspect, as should the notion that math and science are taught to foster market competition. Almost bizarrely, along with this description comes a banner on the school district's website that says, "Your coffee brought to you by chemistry." Leaving aside the grammar concerns that the banner evokes, one is left to wonder if the coffee bean, along with the 'news' is a relic of the past.

And that's the way it (really) is.

Lucinda Marshall is the Director of the Feminist Peace Network.

www.feministpeacenetwork.org

Shakira - "She-Wolf"

2009-08-01T19:27:00.001-07:00

Shakira - New Music - More Music Videos

Free to Be

2009-08-01T16:56:00.000-07:00

... from The Field Center's Realities blog

We place tremendous importance on our freedom to do this or that, but Field training teaches us that we are not free in our actions, because our beliefs cause them just as they cause our emotions and, ultimately, the nonlocal conditions that show up as our local experiences in the world. The only real freedom we have is the freedom to choose what we believe about self and world, but since the chain from belief to conditions is a causal and therefore deterministic one, this is the only freedom we need.

In using our freedom to believe, we have two fundamental tools: no and yes. Practice often requires that we say no to many things: old payoffs that no longer serve our best interests, evidence that contradicts some better version of self we have chosen inwardly, arguments presented by our intellect or by other people that contradict the inner claim, and so on. This no is much like what fiction writers call the “willing suspension of disbelief.”

At first, we look around us, and we see that things are not as we want them to be, and we believe the facts—that is, we are in a state of disbelief that our fulfillment is at hand, as we have claimed, because we are still allowing our identity to be defined by evidence rather than by our creative authority. As we invoke the no of practice, however, we suspend this disbelief by withdrawing our faith in the contrary evidence as conclusive.

We note it, but we refuse to allow it to mean anything. Once we’ve turned our attention and conviction away from contrary evidence and suspended our disbelief, we’re ready to say yes to the chosen version of self and reality. There is a willingness to lose an old self that must precede the appropriation of the new. The self we’re losing in this moment is a self we no longer wish to be, an old skin we’re shedding as we step into the new skin of the inwardly claimed identity. As we take up residence in this new identity, even though the facts count against it, we feel the relief, fulfillment, peace, and joy that follow causally from the new alignment between belief and desire.

Dwelling in the new point of view in this way is the yes of practice. Left uncontradicted, such a shift in consciousness in its time and according to mysterious efficiencies, causes us to act in a new direction, and most remarkably, also compels the ways and means needed to bring what we have imagined into further expression in our experience in the world.

This is the premise, the hypothesis. It remains for each of us to make the great experiment in the laboratory of his or her experience and find out firsthand what happens when we stop exporting our authority to facts, and as Emerson said, “stay at home with the cause.”

We do not look to facts to give us permission to claim our ideal.

We claim it freely, and the facts have no choice but to demonstrate what we have claimed.

Technorati Tags: Field Center, Consciousness, Metaphysics, Reality

Ron White Jokes About Crown Paper Lawsuit

2009-07-31T14:05:00.001-07:00

Ron White's latest comedy routine includes how he got sued
by Crown Paper
because he made a joke about the smell emanating from their Houston mill. ...

"It's like I let some big cat of the bag,
like people didn't know it stunk
until I let the cat out of the bag,"
he said.

"I grew up next to there, so I thought the whole world
smelled like that.

Later (after having moved away)
I was outside,
and was like
'That smells great, what is that?' ...

It was a sewer treatment plant.

They should bottle that up and sell it to the people in Houston."

White then brought up a Houston Chronicle story
that mentioned that
on some days,
more than 2 million people could smell
what was coming out of the paper mill.

"If it was music and 2 million people could hear it,
they'd make you shut it the fuck off," he said.

He offered up an elaborate scheme to sell off real estate
to foreign countries
to fund the war in Iraq
and take over Mexico and Central America in the process.

White also proposed scrapping
the color-coded alert system
and replacing it with one
that consists basically of
---
"Go out and buy a helmet,"
and
"Put the helmet on."

Congressman Weiner: "America Does Not Need the Health Insurance Companies At All"

2009-07-31T12:11:00.000-07:00

Rep. Anthony Weiner (D-NY), hoping to force the GOP to put up or shut up on health reform, introduced an amendment Thursday night that would have repealed medicare, thereby forcing Republicans to show their support for the largest form of government-run healthcare in the U.S.

Speaking to MSNBC host Rachel Maddow on Thursday broadcast, he took his point even further and wondered aloud why America even needs health insurance companies.

“What we’ve learned is that government-administered healthcare works pretty darn well,” he told MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow on Thursday. “It’s got low overhead and people like it. So, when my colleagues pound the drum and pound the podium about how they hate government-run healthcare, I guess they haven’t looked at what they get.”

The congressman added that he believes medicare works so well and is so simple that America does not need the health insurance companies at all.

“Why do we even need the insurance companies?” he asked. “What constructive role are they playing? They’re taking tens of billions of dollars each year and putting that into profits when that should have been going into healthcare.”

He declared that only a “true single-payer system” will work and said he plans to introduce legislation that would accomplish those ends. “It’s simpler and we know it works,” he said.

This video is from MSNBC’s The Rachel Maddow Show, broadcast July 30, 2009.

Also:

Pharmaceutical Companies Are Paying
the Blue Dog Democrats
To Oppose Health Care Reform

-

David Sirota: Health Care Tyranny by 13 Obstructionists

-

Paul Krugman: Health Care Realities

U.S. Officials Humbled by Communists

2009-07-29T19:45:00.000-07:00

by Robert Scheer

What a hoot. The Chinese Communists invaded Washington on Monday demanding not that we sacrifice our freedoms but rather that we balance our budget. Creditors get to make that kind of call. And the Marxists of Beijing, who have turned out to be the world’s most prudent bankers, are worried about their assets invested in our banana republic.

“China has a huge amount of investment in the United States, mainly in the form of Treasury bonds. We are concerned about the security of our financial assets” was the way China’s assistant finance minister put it. Briefing reporters at the U.S.-China Strategic and Economic Dialogue, he added, “We sincerely hope the U.S. fiscal deficit will be reduced, year after year.” Quite sincerely, one suspects, given a U.S. budget shortfall this year that is slated to reach $1.85 trillion.

Suddenly, it was U.S. officials who were promising deep reform to their disgraced economic system rather than demanding it from incompetent foreigners. President Barack Obama’s economic team of Clinton-era holdovers, who a decade ago had hectored China on the virtues of fiscal responsibility, now were falling over themselves to reassure the Chinese that their $1.5 trillion stake in U.S. government-issued securities is safe, and that they should buy more at this week’s $200 billion Treasury auction. ...

Mark it as a historic Rip van Winkle moment. For those who recall the rhetoric of the Cold War, the idea that we would someday be cooperating with Chinese Communists because they had humbled us economically rather than militarily is a startling turnabout. ...

Robert Scheer is editor of Truthdig.com

Surprise, Surprise

2009-07-29T09:46:00.000-07:00

CFTC: Speculators caused 2008 oil price crisis

rawstory.com — In a major U-turn from its claims during the Bush administration, the Commodity Futures Trading Commission is now set to admit that speculation in oil markets — and not the forces of supply and demand — are behind last year’s massive oil price spike.