Curtain Number 3

First thing you know, old Jed's A Millionaire...band

2010-04-06T10:27:00.003+04:00

JED'S A MILLIONAIRE - "Love (Gotta Believe)"

JED'S A MILLIONAIRE - "She Says"

JED'S A MILLIONAIRE - "In For"...

JED'S A MILLIONAIRE - "Eyes"

JED'S A MILLIONAIRE - "All"

JED'S A MILLIONAIRE - "Nothing" ... version #2

JED'S A MILLIONAIRE - "Fools" ... version #2 ... aka "The Fall of the Romaine Empire" video

JED'S A MILLIONAIRE - "Ghost"

JED'S A MILLIONAIRE - "Someone"

JED'S A MILLIONAIRE - "Nothing"

JED'S A MILLIONAIRE - "Fools"

English Internationale

2008-12-10T21:14:00.001+04:00

dbdb

2008-11-15T22:27:00.001+04:00

The End of the Experts?

By Thomas J. Friedman
Published: July 4th, 2009

The sudden outbreak of peace in Iraq has made me realize, among other things, one incontestable fact: I have no business holding a pen, at least with intent to write.

I know, you’re thinking I’m going too far. I haven’t always been wrong about everything. I recently made some sense on global warming and what we needed to do about it, for instance.

But to have been so completely and fundamentally wrong about so huge a disaster as what we have done to Iraq — and ourselves — is outrageous enough to prove that people like me have no business posing as wise men, and, more importantly, that The New York Times has no business continuing to provide me with a national platform.

In any case, I have made a decision: as of today, I will no longer write in this or any other newspaper. I will immediately desist from writing any more books about how it’s time for everyone to climb on board the globalization high-speed monorail to the future. I will keep my opinions to myself. (My wife suggested that I try not to even form opinions, but I think she might have another agenda.)

Baffled? I don’t blame you. So I’ll cite some facts to support my decision — a practice, I must admit, I have too seldom followed.

Let’s start with the invasion itself. I was pretty much all for it. Mind you, I was not one of the pundits, reporters, or public figures who said that Saddam Hussein was a threat to the United States. I knew better — but I said it didn’t matter!

Back in February of 2003, I wrote in this space: “Saddam does not threaten us today. He can be deterred. Taking him out is a war of choice — but it’s a legitimate choice.” In other words, we should invade a sovereign state and replace its government in order to remake the world more to our liking.

Now the simple fact is, an unprovoked attack on a sovereign state is a war crime, even when linked to grand ideas of the future of mankind. In fact, that’s exactly what Hitler did, for exactly the same reasons. The Nuremburg War Crimes Tribunal called it the “the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.”

What was I thinking? And more importantly, why didn’t anyone stop me?

But wait, it gets worse. Having expressed how acceptable it was to commit Hitler’s signature crime, I then applauded the invasion of Iraq as an “audacious roll of the dice.” It should have occurred to me that this gamble would be unspeakably painful for an untold number of Iraqis who had done nothing to us — in other words, any of them.

Soon, when it became obvious that my pipe dreams for a peaceful and democratic subject nation were just that, I decided to say it was too soon to tell how things would turn out in Iraq, but that we would definitely know in six months to a year. I said this pretty much every six months for five years. And The Times just kept giving me more and more column-inches.

I’m not trying to beat myself up here. I’ve done that plenty already, believe me — and my wife has done the rest! But I have one question: why are newspapers like The New York Times letting people like me make fools of themselves, mislead the American people, and, worst of all, give their wives a lifetime of ammunition?

To err is human, but to print, reprint, and re-reprint error-mad humans like me is a criminally moronic editorial policy.

Nor, of course, is it only me. Just consider who populates the opinion pages of America’s top newspapers. Bill Kristol, who was actually hired by The Times long after being proven wrong on Iraq. Charles Krauthammer. Robert Novak. Mona Charen. Fred Barnes. The list goes on and on of officially-approved wise men (and a woman or two) who never once doubted that Iraq had vast stockpiles of W.M.D.s. And that’s just in newspapers.

We were all wrong again and again — and the consequences were devastating. Can anyone tell me why any of us should ever be asked, let alone paid, for our opinions ever again? Or, for that matter, why Richard Perle or Paul Wolfowitz should be allowed behind any sort of desk whatsoever as long as they live?

Peace in Iraq will undoubtedly have many far-reaching consequences. As promised, I’m not going to speculate publicly about what they might be.

Except one. As of today, I’m putting down my pen, to take up a screwdriver. I am going to retrain as an engineer and spend the rest of my life working to build non-carbon-based energy technologies. And I’m going to spend a lot of time washing my hands.

2008-11-13T03:41:00.000+04:00

Pranksters Distribute Fake New York Times Declaring 'Iraq War Over'

The Yes Men identified as the team behind the joke pages...

2008-10-20T20:16:00.005+04:00

Zia Records Reveals Track Listing for NEW Local Music Compilation!

We are excited to unveil the track listing for the forthcoming
Zia Local Music Compilation Vol. 2 "You Heard Us Back When...."

Thanks to everybody for the great music!

1. The Gunrunners
Support Your Local Band ... Tucson

2. Mike Superhero
I'm Gone ... Tucson

3. Westcott Avenue
Growing Up Really Sucks ... Phoenix

4. The Spider Hole
Not Up My Sleeve, Up Yours ... Phoenix

5. Downcast Fable
Breathing Now ... Phoenix

6. Langston Graves
For Love of Murder ... Las Vegas

7. Flying Donkey Punch
Army of None ... Tucson

8. Yesteryear
Best Man for You ... Las Vegas

9. Ghost
Worried Baby ... Phoenix

10. The New Westerns
The Curse of Neglect ... Phoenix

11. Intrinzik (featuring Virus)
Do It Again ... Phoenix

12. Mandy's List
Pretty Things ... Phoenix

13. 42 Eternal
Walk in the Sun ... Phoenix

14. The Kindled
An Assembly Line, A Masterpiece ... Tucson

15. Joe Blow & the Smoking Tires
Alcohol ... Las Vegas

16. Yeller Bellies
Black-Haired Betty ... Las Vegas

17. Lidine
This Feeling ... Las Vegas

18. Hands on Fire
Take It Back
... Phoenix

19. Creepsville 666
My Baby's A Psycho ... Phoenix

20. Poppermost
Concentrate on Me ... Las Vegas

21. Jim Bachmann & the Day Drinkers
See You Later (I'm Gone) ... Phoenix

22. JB & the DD
Come Back to Me ... Phoenix

The Fall of America, Inc.

2008-10-06T02:13:00.002+04:00

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Along with some of Wall Street's most storied firms,
a certain vision of capitalism has collapsed.

How we restore faith in our brand.

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Francis Fukuyama
NEWSWEEK
From the magazine issue dated Oct 13, 2008

The implosion of America's most storied investment banks. The vanishing of more than a trillion dollars in stock-market wealth in a day. A $700 billion tab for U.S. taxpayers. The scale of the Wall Street crackup could scarcely be more gargantuan. Yet even as Americans ask why they're having to pay such mind-bending sums to prevent the economy from imploding, few are discussing a more intangible, yet potentially much greater cost to the United States—the damage that the financial meltdown is doing to America's "brand."

Ideas are one of our most important exports, and two fundamentally American ideas have dominated global thinking since the early 1980s, when Ronald Reagan was elected president. The first was a certain vision of capitalism—one that argued low taxes, light regulation and a pared-back government would be the engine for economic growth. Reaganism reversed a century-long trend toward ever-larger government. Deregulation became the order of the day not just in the United States but around the world.

The second big idea was America as a promoter of liberal democracy around the world, which was seen as the best path to a more prosperous and open international order. America's power and influence rested not just on our tanks and dollars, but on the fact that most people found the American form of self-government attractive and wanted to reshape their societies along the same lines—what political scientist Joseph Nye has labeled our "soft power."

It's hard to fathom just how badly these signature features of the American brand have been discredited. Between 2002 and 2007, while the world was enjoying an unprecedented period of growth, it was easy to ignore those European socialists and Latin American populists who denounced the U.S. economic model as "cowboy capitalism." But now the engine of that growth, the American economy, has gone off the rails and threatens to drag the rest of the world down with it. Worse, the culprit is the American model itself: under the mantra of less government, Washington failed to adequately regulate the financial sector and allowed it to do tremendous harm to the rest of the society.

Democracy was tarnished even earlier. Once Saddam was proved not to have WMD, the Bush administration sought to justify the Iraq War by linking it to a broader "freedom agenda"; suddenly the promotion of democracy was a chief weapon in the war against terrorism. To many people around the world, America's rhetoric about democracy sounds a lot like an excuse for furthering U.S. hegemony.

The choice we face now goes well beyond the bailout, or the presidential campaign. The American brand is being sorely tested at a time when other models—whether China's or Russia's—are looking more and more attractive. Restoring our good name and reviving the appeal of our brand is in many ways as great a challenge as stabilizing the financial sector. Barack Obama and John McCain would each bring different strengths to the task. But for either it will be an uphill, years-long struggle. And we cannot even begin until we clearly understand what went wrong—which aspects of the American model are sound, which were poorly implemented, and which need to be discarded altogether.

Many commentators have noted that the Wall Street meltdown marks the end of the Reagan era. In this they are doubtless right, even if McCain manages to get elected president in November. Big ideas are born in the context of a particular historical era. Few survive when the context changes dramatically, which is why politics tends to shift from left to right and back again in generation-long cycles.

Reaganism (or, in its British form, Thatcherism) was right for its time. Since Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal in the 1930s, governments all over the world had only grown bigger and bigger. By the 1970s large welfare states and economies choked by red tape were proving highly dysfunctional. Back then, telephones were expensive and hard to get, air travel was a luxury of the rich, and most people put their savings in bank accounts paying low, regulated rates of interest. Programs like Aid to Families With Dependent Children created disincentives for poor families to work and stay married, and families broke down. The Reagan-Thatcher revolution made it easier to hire and fire workers, causing a huge amount of pain as traditional industries shrank or shut down. But it also laid the groundwork for nearly three decades of growth and the emergence of new sectors like information technology and biotech.

Internationally, the Reagan revolution translated into the "Washington Consensus," under which Washington—and institutions under its influence, like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank—pushed developing countries to open up their economies. While the Washington Consensus is routinely trashed by populists like Venezuela's Hugo Chávez, it successfully eased the pain of the Latin American debt crisis of the early 1980s, when hyperinflation plagued countries such as Argentina and Brazil. Similar market-friendly policies are what turned China and India into the economic powerhouses they are today.

And if anyone needed more proof, they could look at the world's most extreme examples of big government—the centrally planned economies of the former Soviet Union and other communist states. By the 1970s they were falling behind their capitalist rivals in virtually all respects. Their implosion after the fall of the Berlin Wall confirmed that such welfare states on steroids were an historical dead end.

Like all transformative movements, the Reagan revolution lost its way because for many followers it became an unimpeachable ideology, not a pragmatic response to the excesses of the welfare state. Two concepts were sacrosanct: first, that tax cuts would be self-financing, and second, that financial markets could be self-regulating.

Prior to the 1980s, conservatives were fiscally conservative— that is, they were unwilling to spend more than they took in in taxes. But Reaganomics introduced the idea that virtually any tax cut would so stimulate growth that the government would end up taking in more revenue in the end (the so-called Laffer curve). In fact, the traditional view was correct: if you cut taxes without cutting spending, you end up with a damaging deficit. Thus the Reagan tax cuts of the 1980s produced a big deficit; the Clinton tax increases of the 1990s produced a surplus; and the Bush tax cuts of the early 21st century produced an even larger deficit. The fact that the American economy grew just as fast in the Clinton years as in the Reagan ones somehow didn't shake the conservative faith in tax cuts as the surefire key to growth.

More important, globalization masked the flaws in this reasoning for several decades. Foreigners seemed endlessly willing to hold American dollars, which allowed the U.S. government to run deficits while still enjoying high growth, something that no developing country could get away with. That's why Vice President Dick Cheney reportedly told President Bush early on that the lesson of the 1980s was that "deficits don't matter."

The second Reagan-era article of faith—financial deregulation—was pushed by an unholy alliance of true believers and Wall Street firms, and by the 1990s had been accepted as gospel by the Democrats as well. They argued that long-standing regulations like the Depression-era Glass-Steagall Act (which split up commercial and investment banking) were stifling innovation and undermining the competitiveness of U.S. financial institutions. They were right—only, deregulation produced a flood of innovative new products like collateralized debt obligations, which are at the core of the current crisis. Some Republicans still haven't come to grips with this, as evidenced by their proposed alternative to the bailout bill, which involved yet bigger tax cuts for hedge funds.

The problem is that Wall Street is very different from, say, Silicon Valley, where a light regulatory hand is genuinely beneficial. Financial institutions are based on trust, which can only flourish if governments ensure they are transparent and constrained in the risks they can take with other people's money. The sector is also different because the collapse of a financial institution harms not just its shareholders and employees, but a host of innocent bystanders as well (what economists soberly call "negative externalities").

Signs that the Reagan revolution had drifted dangerously have been clear over the past decade. An early warning was the Asian financial crisis of 1997-98. Countries like Thailand and South Korea, following American advice and pressure, liberalized their capital markets in the early 1990s. A lot of hot money started flowing into their economies, creating a speculative bubble, and then rushed out again at the first sign of trouble. Sound familiar? Meanwhile, countries like China and Malaysia that didn't follow American advice and kept their financial markets closed or strictly regulated found themselves much less vulnerable.

A second warning sign lay in America's accumulating structural deficits. China and a number of other countries began buying U.S. dollars after 1997 as part of a deliberate strategy to undervalue their currencies, keep their factories humming and protect themselves from financial shocks. This suited a post-9/11 America just fine; it meant that we could cut taxes, finance a consumption binge, pay for two expensive wars and run a fiscal deficit at the same time. The staggering and mounting trade deficits this produced—$700 billion a year by 2007—were clearly unsustainable; sooner or later the foreigners would decide that America wasn't such a great place to bank their money. The falling U.S. dollar indicates that we have arrived at that point. Clearly, and contrary to Cheney, deficits do matter.

Even at home, the downside of deregulation were clear well before the Wall Street collapse. In California, electricity prices spiraled out of control in 2000-2001 as a result of deregulation in the state energy market, which unscrupulous companies like Enron gamed to their advantage. Enron itself, along with a host of other firms, collapsed in 2004 because accounting standards had not been enforced adequately. Inequality in the United States rose throughout the past decade, because the gains from economic growth went disproportionately to wealthier and better-educated Americans, while the incomes of working-class people stagnated. And finally, the bungled occupation of Iraq and the response to Hurricane Katrina exposed the top-to-bottom weakness of the public sector, a result of decades of underfunding and the low prestige accorded civil servants from the Reagan years on.

All this suggests that the Reagan era should have ended some time ago. It didn't partly because the Democratic Party failed to come up with convincing candidates and arguments, but also because of a particular aspect of America that makes our country very different from Europe. There, less-educated, working-class citizens vote reliably for socialist, communist and other left-learning parties, based on their economic interests. In the United States, they can swing either left or right. They were part of Roosevelt's grand Democratic coalition during the New Deal, a coalition that held through Lyndon Johnson's Great Society in the 1960s. But they started voting Republican during the Nixon and Reagan years, swung to Clinton in the 1990s, and returned to the Republican fold under George W. Bush. When they vote Republican, it's because cultural issues like religion, patriotism, family values and gun ownership trump economic ones.

This group of voters will decide November's election, not least because of their concentration in a handful of swing states like Ohio and Pennsylvania. Will they tilt toward the more distant, Harvard-educated Obama, who more accurately reflects their economic interests? Or will they stick with people they can better identify with, like McCain and Sarah Palin? It took an economic crisis of massive proportions from 1929 to 1931 to bring a Democratic administration to power. Polls indicate we may have arrived again at that point in October 2008.

The other critical component of the American brand is democracy, and the willingness of the United States to support other democracies around the world. This idealistic streak in U.S. foreign policy has been constant over the past century, from Woodrow Wilson's League of Nations through Roosevelt's Four Freedoms to Reagan's call for Mikhail Gorbachev to "tear down this wall."

Promoting democracy—through diplomacy, aid to civil society groups, free media and the like—has never been controversial. The problem now is that by using democracy to justify the Iraq War, the Bush administration suggested to many that "democracy" was a code word for military intervention and regime change. (The chaos that ensued in Iraq didn't exactly help democracy's image either.) The Middle East in particular is a minefield for any U.S. administration, since America supports nondemocratic allies like the Saudis, and refuses to work with groups like Hamas and Hizbullah that came to power through elections. We don't have much credibility when we champion a "freedom agenda."

The American model has also been seriously tarnished by the Bush administration's use of torture. After 9/11 Americans proved distressingly ready to give up constitutional protections for the sake of security. Guantánamo Bay and the hooded prisoner at Abu Ghraib have since replaced the Statue of Liberty as symbols of America in the eyes of many non-Americans.

No matter who wins the presidency a month from now, the shift into a new cycle of American and world politics will have begun. The Democrats are likely to increase their majorities in the House and Senate. A huge amount of populist anger is brewing as the Wall Street meltdown spreads to Main Street. Already there is a growing consensus on the need to re-regulate many parts of the economy.

Globally the United States will not enjoy the hegemonic position it has occupied until now, something underscored by Russia's Aug. 7 invasion of Georgia. America's ability to shape the global economy through trade pacts and the IMF and World Bank will be diminished, as will our financial resources. And in many parts of the world, American ideas, advice and even aid will be less welcome than they are now.

Under such circumstances, which candidate is better positioned to rebrand America? Barack Obama obviously carries the least baggage from the recent past, and his postpartisan style seeks to move beyond today's political divisions. At heart he seems a pragmatist, not an ideologue. But his consensus-forming skills will be sorely tested when he has to make tough choices, bringing not just Republicans but unruly Democrats into the fold. McCain, for his part, has talked like Teddy Roosevelt in recent weeks, railing against Wall Street and calling for SEC chairman Chris Cox's head. He may be the only Republican who can bring his party, kicking and screaming, into a post-Reagan era. But one gets the sense that he hasn't fully made up his mind what kind of Republican he really is, or what principles should define the new America.

American influence can and will eventually be restored. Since the world as a whole is likely to suffer an economic downturn, it is not clear that the Chinese or Russian models will fare appreciably better than the American version. The United States has come back from serious setbacks during the 1930s and 1970s, due to the adaptability of our system and the resilience of our people.

Still, another comeback rests on our ability to make some fundamental changes. First, we must break out of the Reagan-era straitjacket concerning taxes and regulation. Tax cuts feel good but do not necessarily stimulate growth or pay for themselves; given our long-term fiscal situation Americans are going to have to be told honestly that they will have to pay their own way in the future. Deregulation, or the failure of regulators to keep up with fast-moving markets, can become unbelievably costly, as we have seen. The entire American public sector—underfunded, deprofessionalized and demoralized—needs to be rebuilt and be given a new sense of pride. There are certain jobs that only the government can fulfill.

As we undertake these changes, of course, there's a danger of overcorrecting. Financial institutions need strong supervision, but it isn't clear that other sectors of the economy do. Free trade remains a powerful motor for economic growth, as well as an instrument of U.S. diplomacy. We should provide better assistance to workers adjusting to changing global conditions, rather than defend their existing jobs. If tax cutting is not a path to automatic prosperity, neither is unconstrained social spending. The cost of the bailouts and the long-term weakness of the dollar mean that inflation will be a serious threat in the future. An irresponsible fiscal policy could easily add to the problem.

And while fewer non-Americans are likely to listen to our advice, many would still benefit from emulating certain aspects of the Reagan model. Not, certainly, financial-market deregulation. But in continental Europe, workers are still treated to long vacations, short working weeks, job guarantees and a host of other benefits that weaken their productivity and will not be financially sustainable.

The unedifying response to the Wall Street crisis shows that the biggest change we need to make is in our politics. The Reagan revolution broke the 50-year dominance of liberals and Democrats in American politics and opened up room for different approaches to the problems of the time. But as the years have passed, what were once fresh ideas have hardened into hoary dogmas. The quality of political debate has been coarsened by partisans who question not just the ideas but the motives of their opponents. All this makes it harder to adjust to the new and difficult reality we face. So the ultimate test for the American model will be its capacity to reinvent itself once again. Good branding is not, to quote a presidential candidate, a matter of putting lipstick on a pig. It's about having the right product to sell in the first place. American democracy has its work cut out for it.

Fukuyama is professor of International Political Economy at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies.

http://www.newsweek.com/id/162401

Time to Write New Economics Textbooks

2008-10-05T21:26:00.010+04:00

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...by Muhammad Yunus
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Textbook and Mindset

In a major way Economics is responsible for creating the world that we live in. Interrelationships among individuals, nations and institutions, day to day activities of all people, are in fact shaped largely by the role assigned to them by Economics.

Economics as a discipline not only attempts to explain what goes on in the sphere of economic activities of people and organizations, but it has also vastly influenced these activities by making people believe in what Economics says about who they are, and what they should do.

Economics textbooks create the mindsets; mindsets create the world.

I think Economics has miscreated this world. It got us into a lot of trouble and many human tragedies. For one thing, seeds of poverty are planted firmly in the pages of Economics textbooks.

Labor or Human Beings?

Economics has committed a strategic mistake in conceptualizing a human being. It has abstracted away from the very essence of a human being.

All human beings are creative beings. Each human being has great potential buried inside him/her.

Economics has reduced human beings to lesser beings than what they are, and consequently still lesser beings than what they could be.

Economics paid no attention to this creative aspect of human beings. It created a category called labor and put all human beings, except the few entrepreneurs, under this category. Labor, as they appear in the text-books, look more like draught animals than human beings. They have no creativity, no ambition, no sense of sacrifice, pride or accomplishment; worst of all, they have no gender.

If you have to squeeze out the very essence of a human being to build a social science theory, who needs that social science?

By not incorporating the difference between man and woman in them, and the basic institutions they come from: the family, Economics also missed out important analytical opportunities as a social science.

Economics assigned creativity only to a select, rather rare, category of people, called entrepreneurs.

Entrepreneurs are treated as royalty in Economics.

Economics has persuaded the world that all other human beings are born to serve under them.

This idea was introduced in Economics as an innocent piece of abstraction. Yet it has done very serious damage to the human society by making an individual believe that he/she is fated to serve others. It has influenced the design of institutions, framing of legislation and policies and shaping politics. Because of this misconstrued vision of the human beings, wage employment emerged as the only legitimate source of employment.

Today we would have lived in a different kind of world if Economics started out with the premise that all human beings are potential entrepreneurs (which they are). All that an individual needed was an opportunity. With this premise in place, the world would have paid attention to creating those opportunities, because textbooks would have required them.

Self-Employment

As wage-employment became the only logical source of employment, Economics textbooks never had any use for the term self-employment.

Since the concept does not find a place in the Economics textbooks, it does not find a place in our thinking and policies.

All human beings suffer for it. Women suffer the most.

If Economics could imagine human beings with more options than what the labor has, it would have created a theory of self-employment which would have made it easy to address the issues of poverty, development, family, population and gender. It could have enriched itself with other socially powerful theories on credit, banking and entitlement.

There has been a major failure of Economics in understanding the poor.

Poverty is not created by the poor, it is created by the theoretical framework that we work with, institutions that we built, policies that we pursued, and the norms that we created. Economics never had a chance to reflect on the poverty of an individual person. Because it never had an individual human being in its mind. All it had in mind was labor.

In many of the third-world countries, the overwhelming majority of people make a living through self-employment. Because theoretical framework of Economics does not have any room for self-employment, it lumped this in a category called the informal sector.

And, because it does not have analytical tools to cope with this situation, it concluded that this is not a desirable situation; this is a symptom of primitiveness of an economy.

The informal sector is the creation of the people, not of any economic theory. This is people's effort to create their own livelihood,...their own enterprise. Anyone with a minimum understanding of people and society would have come forward with the hope and excitement to build upon what exists, take it to higher levels, bring more vitality into it,... rather than pull the rug from under it.

What a shame! Instead of supporting the creativity and energy of the people by creating enabling and empowering policies and institutions, Economics becomes eager to fit people into boxes it created.

Credit Empowers the Poor

Economics completely disqualifies itself as a social science when it comes to its treatment of credit. It is very surprising that Economics never understood the social power of credit.

The fact that credit creates entitlement to resources could have immediately triggered the thought that in the social context it could surely play a very significant and sensitive role. Amazingly, Economics failed to grasp it.

Since credit creates economic, and hence, social power, the institution responsible for deciding who should and should not get credit, who should get how much credit and at what terms, becomes very important socially.

That's exactly what has happened. Those institutions by deciding that they can do business only with the rich, literally have created a financial apartheid. When they announced that the poor are not creditworthy, it almost amounted to pronouncing a death sentence on the poor, for no fault of their own. Economics went along with it.

As a social science, Economics should have recognized credit as a human right and promoted creative efforts to deliver credit to all. If we can redesign Economics as a genuine social science, we can be firmly on our way to creating a poverty-free world.

Social Consciousness-driven Enterprises

Somehow we have persuaded ourselves that the capitalist economy must be fueled only by greed. Since Economics persuaded us that way, we all believe that way. As a result it became a self-fulfilling prophesy. Only personal gain-seekers go into the marketplace and try their talent. Those who are not interested in accumulating personal wealth and income do not find the marketplace very attractive. They use their talents elsewhere.

Marketplace is open for everyone, even for those who are not interested in personal gain,...such as people who get inspired by the prospect of social changes for betterment of the world. Social goals can replace greed as a powerful motivational force. Social consciousness-driven enterprises can be formidable competitors against the greed-based enterprises. Social consciousness and the urge to do good things to people and the planet can be a burning desire in an individual,...even more burning than personal gain.

Why not encourage socially motivated people to come and play in the marketplace? Instead of grumbling about how a pharmaceutical company makes filthy money by charging unreasonable prices, why don't we create our own companies and sell good quality medicine at profit-free prices, or at prices with low profits? I think social consciousness-driven entrepreneurs can be an effective force in the market place.

Before the world surrenders itself to the current interpretation of free-market, that is, recognizing market as the playground of the greedy business people only, we must seriously engage in examining the strength of social consciousness-driven enterprises as players in the same market.

Social consciousness does exist in people. But it can be further promoted through creating supportive legislation and a social reward system.

If we leave no room for this human quality in our theoretical framework, as we have done in present day Economics, we'll be transforming ourselves into the human beings that we imagined, i.e. human beings without social values.

Economics must incorporate within itself that the marketplace is not an exclusive playground for the blood-thirsty profit-seekers, it is a challenging field for all good people who want to set the world in the right course.

Let Us Write New Economics Textbooks

If we can create a right framework with right conceptualization, I see no reason why anybody should remain a poor person. Poverty should be a matter which will find its place in the poverty museum. It will be a part of the history of human indifference to their fellow human beings, and human arrogance about their so-called knowledge.

The sooner we can write new Economics textbooks, the closer will be the day when we'll have a poverty-free world.

This is the text of the address presented at the
Bangladesh Economic Association
and International Economic Association Conference
held in Dhaka, on March 30-April 1, 1998.

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http://www.grameen-info.org/

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Emerson's space

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The New Westerns and David Allan Coe together at last...

2008-08-31T03:10:00.009+04:00

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UPDATE: show postponed?
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David Allan Coe - "If that Ain't Country..."

The New Westerns and David Allan Coe
will be playing together
at Goathead Saloon... in Mesa, Arizona,
on Tuesday, September 30th, 2008.

David Allan Coe is scheduled to hit the stage at 7 p.m.
... followed by Arizona's own, radiofreedoghouse,
aka Danny Western and his gang, The New Westerns.

(below)

note to self: ... relax and breathe
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2008-08-12T22:06:00.001+04:00

all roads now lead to transmutation

The Troublesome Paradox of "The Secret"

2008-07-20T03:35:00.006+04:00

the field center
explains the paradox
of the "The Secret"

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I've had numerous emails asking me to comment on The Secret, the latest and massively popular New Age offering (available as a best-selling book and a DVD movie) on how consciousness allegedly can be used to attract health, love, and prosperity.

First off, one has to hand it to Rhonda Byrne and the crew at Prime Time Productions, who put together this collection of New Age wisdom on the subject, for their keen sense of what would appeal to a mass audience. The packaging is unquestionably first-rate.

Even a cursory reading of the book, however, reveals that it offers no secret at all, but only a reheated collection of the same instruction that's been available in the New Age literature since the 70s on a cultural scale, and since the 1800s and early 1900s somewhat less visibly in the work of New Thought writers such as Phineas Quimby, Emma Curtis Hopkins, Charles and Myrtle Fillmore, Ernest Holmes, Florence Scovel Shinn, Emmett Fox, and others.

The essence of this teaching, to which Field training takes exception, is that one can, through visualizing or using affirmations or prayer or otherwise embodying a consciousness of fulfillment, create corresponding conditions in the world.

Note that Field training does not deny that the outer world corresponds to the inner, but points out that one cannot use this "Law of Correspondence" by setting out to use it.

There is an element of paradox built into the principle that Field training regards as central, and which the various New Age offerings on the subject, including The Secret, miss.

This paradoxical element becomes obvious once it's stated, but it is nearly invisible until then:

If our belief creates reality, and we seek to create, say, prosperity, then it is unavoidable that we must already be believing in a lack of prosperity (else why would we set out to try to create it?) and this belief casts the vote of our faith, as it were, mobilizing the Law of Correspondence against our desire.

It should be apparent that any attempt to use consciousness to solve a problem presupposes believing in the problem. Therein lies the paradox.

The idea that we can create conditions through consciousness techniques is nearly irresistible to anyone who has suspected that our inner life and our outer life are mysteriously commingled, but those who have made the experiment have learned quickly and sometimes the hard way that desire alone is not creative, and that visualizations and affirmations fail as a rule to have any creative effect on the world, which seems to roll on indifferent to our fantasies.

We can want something with every atom of our being, we can visualize and affirm it till the cows come home, and still find the universe unresponsive.

Of course, writing a book that tells us otherwise, that fosters and perpetuates the popular misconception that we can have, say, prosperity at the same time that we're believing in its absence and consequently the need to create it—writing such a book may well fulfill the author's expectation of prosperity, because there will always be a huge market for the idea that we can have what we want simply by wanting it, that "wishing will make it so," but in such cases, the authors have made use of something like a pyramid scheme.

As long as these writers can keep "selling" the idea, prosperity follows surely enough for them, but the tab ultimately is passed to those at the bottom of the pyramid who run out of customers, and are left wondering why this seems to work for others while they can't get results.

I don't say that the authors of these books are doing this intentionally. My guess is that they got excited about an idea and mean well, but this is the effect nonetheless.

The fallback position for the New Age's mistaken approach to conscious creating has been essentially the same as the fundamentalist's, who infers from the failure of prayer that we must not have had enough faith.

So, the New Age practitioner may wonder or even worry what he "did wrong" when the universe fails to deliver the goods.

It doesn't occur to him that the whole model is wrong, that the Law of Correspondence (also called Law of Assumption, Law of Attraction, Law of Creation, Law of Mental Equivalents, etc.) is elegant and unfailing but also in this sense ruthlessly thorough and efficient, and that he overlooked something essential, viz., that what we get in life corresponds not to what we want but to who we are.

The person who believes he lacks prosperity sufficiently to be trying to create prosperity uses the law perfectly, and ends up with more lack, though this was not his aim.

Here, then is the paradox:

We cannot use the Law of Creation to create anything. We can, however, assume the identity we desire for its own sake, that is, solely for the sake of the inner fulfillment.

Paradox requires that practice stop there.

Anyone who could practice this far and no further would find the Law delightfully surprising him, and at that point indeed would have discovered a great secret.

A few weeks ago, I received an angry email from someone who had visited the Field Center site, looked at our "how we're different" chart, and accused me of saying that other models "suck" as he put it.

Most of what he found upsetting, I never said and wouldn't. But even responding charitably, I don't see anything wrong with stating that one approach is better, more revealing, more thorough, or more useful if it really is. And we don't just allege this; we explain why.

Furthermore, we don't claim that Field training is the model. It's a model, certainly not for everyone. That said, nearly every student who has come to Field training came from some New Age approach that, in the end, had not "worked."

What Field training gave these students was an entirely different standard for what counts as "working" when it comes to deliberately taking on the great adventure of living consciously, complete with its creative implications.

It taught them that, as we say endlessly, "the aim of practice is alignment, not manifestation." It taught them to recognize, appreciate, enjoy, and work with the paradox of consciousness-as-cause.

And it freed them from the pervasive and obviously still very popular misunderstanding that we can have anything in the world that we haven't earned by right of identity.

Instead, through their willingness to look beyond the popular model, they saw firsthand that identity is the generative force of creation, that what we want also wants something of us, that we cannot have anything we believe we lack, and that we cannot make an end run around these living principles through pretending, visualizing, repeating affirmations, or any other strategy.

--------------------------------------------------------------------

"The Secret" - Part 2

Last week, on 25 June, the Associated Press ran this story:

The Secret: Big Sales, Loud Criticism.

Here's an excerpt: "While The Secret has become a pop culture phenomenon, it also has drawn critics who are not quiet about labeling the movement a fad, embarrassingly materialistic or the latest example of an American propensity of wanting something for nothing.

Some medical professionals suggest it could even lead to a blame-the-victim mentality and actually be dangerous to those suffering from serious illness or mental disorders.

As with many publishing hits, the 'Oprah Effect' played a role.

Winfrey devoted two shows in February to The Secret, and Larry King and Ellen DeGeneres also featured it on their shows.

It was spoofed on Saturday Night Live when a man portraying a refugee in the Darfur region of Sudan was blamed for having negative thoughts.

However, the fear that The Secret will lead to a blame-the-victim mentality is a serious claim of critics.

For example, the book dismisses conditions such as a genetic predisposition to being overweight or a slow thyroid as 'disguises for thinking "fat thoughts."' And during times in which massive number of lives were lost, the book says, the 'frequency of their thoughts matched the frequency of the event.'

So, according to The Secret, the victims of the Holocaust were responsible for their extermination, the rape victim is asking for it, and the people in Darfur are being murdered because of negative thinking.

You see, this is a prime example of the sort of oversimplifications and confusions typical of the New Age approach to consciousness-as-cause, and one that Field training regards as particularly egregious and shameless.

Our response when asked how we explain the Holocaust and other calamitous or tragic events is that we don't. We recognize that decency places a limit on how far theory can or should be willing to go, and we don't speculate about the experiences of people who are not present to take part in the conversation and present their experience firsthand.

We don't preserve our theoretical model at their expense.

It is true that many who have come through Field training who endured and survived such experiences found that they were not beyond the reach of Field practice to revise and redeem, and that the principles applied even in such severe cases, but this was their call to make, not ours, and this is perhaps why our program doesn't appear either on Oprah or Saturday Night Live.

The great mistake of The Secret and the many models, some of them far more rigorous and thoughtful, is the failure to recognize and incorporate paradox and what we call the "dialectic" into its principles and practices.

As stated in Part 1 of this piece, believing in a problem sufficiently to set about "consciously creating" its solution already places one in a position of checkmate. The game is over, because belief, not willful intent, not visualizing, not prayer, not affirmations, not wishing or hoping or knowing "the secret" is what creates.

This has a far-reaching implication, namely that we cannot use our creative consciousness to create conditions.

We can, however, believe in the desired conditions for their own sake, or as we say, for the sake of alignment rather than manifestation.

This is where practice must stop.

This is the oasis in a desert of contradiction to which we banish our practice the moment we allow it to be strategic.

And this indeed appears to be something of a secret.

At least the New Age doesn't seem to know about it.

This essential element of paradox—this is one of the first things we give our students, and it changes their view of who they are, of what it means to be conscious and creative, and as a result, their lives in many ways, all for the better.

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.

-
--
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the field center

Sunday Lessons at Unity of Tucson

2008-07-16T23:57:00.004+04:00

-

Teachings of Abraham
...are Unity
...are New Thought

Q and A on Abraham w/ Reverend Swartz (audio)

2008-07-16T21:00:00.004+04:00

Secrets of the Occult:

Part 1 ... The Magicians

(video)

Thanks, Alice.

The Federal Reserve Racket

2008-06-30T22:46:00.021+04:00

By Richard Russell
6-29-8

I still can't get over the whole Federal Reserve racket.

Consider the following.

Let's take a situation where the U.S. government needs money.

The U.S. doesn't just issue
United States Notes,
which, of course it could.

These notes would be dollars backed by the full faith and credit of the United States.

No, the U.S. doesn't issue dollars straight out of the U.S. Treasury.

This is what the U.S. does
- -
it issues Treasury Bonds.

The U.S. then sells these bonds to the Fed.
The Fed buys the bonds.

Wait, how does the Fed pay for the bonds?

The Fed simply creates money
"out of thin air" (book-keeping entry)
with which it buys the bonds.

The money that the Fed creates from nowhere then goes to the U.S.

The Fed holds the U.S. bonds, and the unbelievable irony is that
the U.S. then pays interest on the very bonds that the U.S. itself issued.

(With great profit to the private owners of The Fed - - Ed. Note)

The mind boggles.

The damnable result is that
the Fed effectively controls
the U.S. money supply.

The Fed is not even a branch of the U.S. government.

The Fed is not mentioned in the Constitution
of the United States.

No Constitutional amendment was ever created or voted on to accept the Fed.

The Constitutionality of the Federal Reserve has never come before the Supreme Court.

The Fed is a private bank that keeps the U.S. forever in debt,
- -
or I should say, in increasing debt
along with ever rising interest payments.

How did the Fed get away with this outrage?

A tiny secretive group of bankers sneaked through a bill in 1913
at a time when many in Congress were absent.

Those who were there and voted for the bill didn't realize
what they were voting for (as so often happens)...
--
...(shades of the shameful 2002 vote to hand over to President Bush
the power to decide on war with Iraq).

Richard Russell, "Richards Remarks," dowtheoryletters.com, March 27 2007

...and now for some more Carlin for no reason & all seasons

2008-06-29T08:31:00.008+04:00

“The real reason that we can’t have the Ten Commandments in a courthouse: You cannot post ‘Thou shalt not steal,’ ‘Thou shalt not commit adultery,’ and ‘Thou shalt not lie’ in a building full of lawyers, judges, and politicians. It creates a hostile work environment.”

“Bipartisan usually means that a larger-than-usual deception is being carried out.”

“Fighting for peace is like screwing for virginity.”

“If churches want to play the game of politics, let them pay admission like everyone else.”

“I’m completely in favor of the separation of Church and State. My idea is that these two institutions screw us up enough on their own, so both of them together is certain death.”

“Well, if crime fighters fight crime and fire fighters fight fire, what do freedom fighters fight? They never mention that part to us, do they?”

“You know the good part about all those executions in Texas? Fewer Texans.”

“These days many politicians are demanding change.
Just like homeless people.”

“Deep Throat: Think about it. There is actually a semi-important figure in American history who is named for a blow-job movie.
How do school teachers handle this?”

“I don’t think we should be governing ourselves. What we need is a king, and every now and then if the king’s not doing a good job, we kill him.”

“George Washington’s brother, Lawrence, was the Uncle of Our Country.”

“The owners of this country know the truth: It’s called the American dream because you have to be asleep to believe it.”

“In America, anyone can become president.
That’s the problem.”

-

The Lunatic is On the Grass, ... Drunk!

2008-06-26T20:39:00.003+04:00

-
American Musician Nearly Run Over
by Queen of England

Kevin Montgomery: ... "So, i'm walking through Windsor Great Park in outside Windsor Castle......and all of a sudden i'm startled by a car right behind me.......i spun around and the Queen passed by me in a Jaguar.......yes, she was driving......had a lime green hat on......the path in front of the castle is normally only used by pedestrians.......even bicycles are not allowed, but it is her property so i reckon she can do what she wants!!!
I just happened to be filming at the moment she came up behind me, or i would never have gotten it on film.
Anyway, it was kind of cool.........who can say they were that close to the Queen......i'm quite sure that will be our only meeting!!!! British people might not find this interesting, but for an American it was pretty cool." ... (video below)

-

The video above inspired me to come up with new lyrics
to the Sex Pistols' song, "Roadrunner."

Old song:

Roadrunner roadrunner
Going faster miles an hour
Gonna ride by the stop-n-shop
With the radio on

New song:

Drunkdriver Alzheimer
Scare the peasants with my Jaguar
Drivin' fast down the pedestrian path
With my lime green hat on

New Door Opens

2008-06-01T23:46:00.001+04:00

last show

Submitted by SEDER on Sun, 06/01/2008 - 10:35am.

cross posted at aar

After 4 plus years, this Sunday's Seder on Sundays very well may be my last regular appearance on the Air America Radio schedule. I've been told that I am one of those being considered for the 3-6pm slot but,frankly, particularly in this economy, I'd advise you not to place a bet on it.

Anyway,...I will remain and am very appreciative to AAR for letting me continue as the online editor for AirAmerica.com. We are building an important online component to progressive talk.

That said, I am confident this will not be the last opportunity for you to hear/watch me on political talk.

I am proud of my work over the past four years. I started out as a pretty bad broadcaster, but think I 've certainly become mediocre! Whether on the Majority Report, The Sam Seder Show or Seder On Sundays, my ratings have always been an improvement of the show that I have replaced, or better than those that have replaced mine.

Some moments I am particularly proud of..

On the Majority Report, we gave now Senator Jim Webb his first national exposure when he was still a primary candidate, during our Fighting Dem series we did with DailyKos.

I gave Ned Lamont his first national exposure before he declared for Senate in CT, and he ultimately first "unofficially" declared his run with me on a Friday when I was filling in for Randi.

The time I got the right wing caller Dewey to cop to having some "feminization issues".

My long talks with the disputed Senator of Florida, Katherine Harris.

Just last month in the 3-6p slot, in interviewing Phillipe Sands, author of "Torture Team," I played some exclusive audio of John McCain for him which he then went on to cite in Congressional testimony.

I've had a great opportunity to interview folks like Eddie Vedder to Ricky Gervais to Desmond Tutu to Gore Vidal to Howard Zinn to Sen. Russ Feingold to Robert Altman to Fran Liebowitz, Triumph, Lawrence Lessigand on and on and on (and of course, Peaches).

Geek Alert...Believe it or not, some of my biggest thrills were having the opportunity to meet bloggers I had read before starting doing radio--

It was and remains a real honor to have been part of launching Air America and institutionalizing commercial Left Talk Radio.

Finally, thank you folks for the tremendous support you have shown me through the years. I have an unfortunate habit of being outspoken about things that don't behoove me professionally, and I suspect I would have been gone long ago without you folks watching my back.

Be Glad When You're Mad

2008-05-12T10:37:00.001+04:00

Debate Debacle Rap

2008-04-18T10:11:00.003+04:00

The Politics of Optimism

2008-04-17T23:36:00.002+04:00

-

Optimism is a political act.

Entrenched interests use despair, confusion and apathy to prevent change. They encourage modes of thinking which lead us to believe that problems are insolvable, that nothing we do can matter, that the issue is too complex to present even the opportunity for change. It is a long-standing political art to sow the seeds of mistrust between those you would rule over: as Machiavelli said, tyrants do not care if they are hated, so long as those under them do not love one another. Cynicism is often seen as a rebellious attitude in Western popular culture, but, in reality, cynicism in average people is the attitude exactly most likely to conform to the desires of the powerful – cynicism is obedience.

Optimism, by contrast, especially optimism which is neither foolish nor silent, can be revolutionary. Where no one believes in a better future, despair is a logical choice, and people in despair almost never change anything. Where no one believes a better solution is possible, those benefiting from the continuation of a problem are safe. Where no one believes in the possibility of action, apathy becomes an insurmountable obstacle to reform. But introduce intelligent reasons for believing that action is possible, that better solutions are available, and that a better future can be built, and you unleash the power of people to act out of their highest principles. Shared belief in a better future is the strongest glue there is: it creates the opportunity for us to love one another, and love is an explosive force in politics.

Great movements for social change always begin
with statements of great optimism.

-

(from the book, "Worldchanging: A User's Guide for the 21st Century," by Alex Steffen)

Compensation

2008-04-06T07:41:00.024+04:00

-

by Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ever since I was a boy, I have wished to write a discourse on Compensation: for it seemed to me when very young, that on this subject life was ahead of theology, and the people knew more than the preachers taught. ...

I was lately confirmed in these desires by hearing a sermon at church. The preacher, a man esteemed for his orthodoxy, unfolded in the ordinary manner the doctrine of the Last Judgment. He assumed, that judgment is not executed in this world; that the wicked are successful; that the good are miserable; and then urged from reason and from Scripture a compensation to be made to both parties in the next life. ...

Yet what was the import of this teaching? What did the preacher mean by saying that the good are miserable in the present life? Was it that houses and lands, offices, wine, horses, dress, luxury, are had by unprincipled men, whilst the saints are poor and despised; and that a compensation is to be made to these last hereafter, by giving them the like gratifications another day, -- bank-stock and doubloons, venison and champagne? This must be the compensation intended; for what else? Is it that they are to have leave to pray and praise? To love and serve men? Why, that they can do now. The legitimate inference the disciple would draw was, -- `We are to have such a good time as the sinners have now'; -- or, to push it to its extreme import, -- `You sin now; we shall sin by and by; we would sin now, if we could; not being successful, we expect our revenge tomorrow.'

The fallacy lay in the immense concession, that the bad are successful; that justice is not done now. The blindness of the preacher consisted in deferring to the base estimate of the market of what constitutes a manly success, instead of confronting and convicting the world from the truth; announcing the presence of the soul; the omnipotence of the will: and so establishing the standard of good and ill, of success and falsehood. ...

POLARITY, or action and reaction, we meet in every part of nature; in darkness and light; in heat and cold; in the ebb and flow of waters; in male and female; in the inspiration and expiration of plants and animals; ... in the systole and diastole of the heart. ...Whilst the world is thus dual, so is every one of its parts. The entire system of things gets represented in every particle. ...

The same dualism underlies the nature and condition of man. Every excess causes a defect; every defect an excess. Every sweet hath its sour; every evil its good. Every faculty which is a receiver of pleasure has an equal penalty put on its abuse. It is to answer for its moderation with its life. For every grain of wit there is a grain of folly. For every thing you have missed, you have gained something else; and for every thing you gain, you lose something. ...

The farmer imagines power and place are fine things. But the President has paid dear for his White House. It has commonly cost him all his peace, and the best of his manly attributes. To preserve for a short time so conspicuous an appearance before the world, he is content to eat dust before the real masters who stand erect behind the throne. ...

This law writes the laws of cities and nations. It is in vain to build or plot or combine against it.

Things refuse to be mismanaged long. Though no checks to a new evil appear, the checks exist, and will appear. If the government is cruel, the governor's life is not safe. If you tax too high, the revenue will yield nothing. If you make the criminal code sanguinary, juries will not convict. If the law is too mild, private vengeance comes in. If the government is a terrific democracy, the pressure is resisted by an overcharge of energy in the citizen, and life glows with a fiercer flame. The true life and satisfactions of man seem to elude the utmost rigors or felicities of condition, and to establish themselves with great indifferency under all varieties of circumstances. ...

These appearances indicate the fact that the universe is represented in every one of its particles. Every thing in nature contains all the powers of nature. Every thing is made of one hidden stuff; as the naturalist sees one type under every metamorphosis, and regards a horse as a running man, a fish as a swimming man, a bird as a flying man, a tree as a rooted man. Each new form repeats not only the main character of the type, but part for part all the details, all the aims, furtherances, hindrances, energies, and whole system of every other. Every occupation, trade, art, transaction, is a compend of the world, and a correlative of every other. Each one is an entire emblem of human life; of its good and ill, its trials, its enemies, its course and its end. And each one must somehow accommodate the whole man, and recite all his destiny. ...

Thus is the universe alive. All things are moral. That soul, which within us is a sentiment, outside of us is a law. We feel its inspiration; out there in history we can see its fatal strength. "It is in the world, and the world was made by it." Justice is not postponed. A perfect equity adjusts its balance in all parts of life. The dice of God are always loaded. The world looks like a multiplication-table, or a mathematical equation, which, turn it how you will, balances itself. ...

Every secret is told, every crime is punished, every virtue rewarded, every wrong redressed, in silence and certainty. Every act rewards itself. ...

The specific stripes may follow late after the offence, but they follow because they accompany it. Crime and punishment grow out of one stem. Punishment is a fruit that unsuspected ripens within the flower of the pleasure which concealed it. Cause and effect, means and ends, seed and fruit, cannot be severed; for the effect already blooms in the cause, the end preexists in the means, the fruit in the seed.

Whilst thus the world will be whole, and refuses to be disparted, we seek to act partially, to sunder, to appropriate. For example, -- to gratify the senses, we sever the pleasure of the senses from the needs of the character. The ingenuity of man has always been dedicated to the solution of one problem, -- how to detach the sensual sweet, the sensual strong, the sensual bright, &c., from the moral sweet, the moral deep, the moral fair; that is, again, to contrive to cut clean off this upper surface so thin as to leave it bottomless; to get a one end, without an other end. The soul says, Eat; the body would feast. The soul says, The man and woman shall be one flesh and one soul; the body would join the flesh only. The soul says, Have dominion over all things to the ends of virtue; the body would have the power over things to its own ends. ...

Life invests itself with inevitable conditions, which the unwise seek to dodge, which one and another brags that he does not know; that they do not touch him; -- but the brag is on his lips, the conditions are in his soul. If he escapes them in one part, they attack him in another more vital part. If he has escaped them in form, and in the appearance, it is because he has resisted his life, and fled from himself, and the retribution is so much death. ...

You cannot do wrong without suffering wrong.

"No man had ever a point of pride that was not injurious to him," said Burke.
The exclusive in fashionable life does not see that he excludes himself from enjoyment, in the attempt to appropriate it. The exclusionist in religion does not see that he shuts the door of heaven on himself, in striving to shut out others. ...

All infractions of love and equity in our social relations are speedily punished. They are punished by fear. Whilst I stand in simple relations to my fellow-man, I have no displeasure in meeting him. ...

All the old abuses in society, universal and particular, all unjust accumulations of property and power, are avenged in the same manner. Fear is an instructer of great sagacity, and the herald of all revolutions. ...

Experienced men of the world know very well that it is best to pay scot and lot as they go along, and that a man often pays dear for a small frugality. The borrower runs in his own debt. Has a man gained any thing who has received a hundred favors and rendered none? ... He may soon come to see that he had better have broken his own bones than to have ridden in his neighbor's coach, and that "the highest price he can pay for a thing is to ask for it."

A wise man will extend this lesson to all parts of life, and know that it is the part of prudence to face every claimant, and pay every just demand on your time, your talents, or your heart. ...

The good are befriended even by weakness and defect. As no man had ever a point of pride that was not injurious to him, so no man had ever a defect that was not somewhere made useful to him. ...

Has he a defect of temper that unfits him to live in society? Thereby he is driven to entertain himself alone, and acquire habits of self-help; and thus, like the wounded oyster, he mends his shell with pearl.

Our strength grows out of our weakness. The indignation which arms itself with secret forces does not awaken until we are pricked and stung and sorely assailed. A great man is always willing to be little. Whilst he sits on the cushion of advantages, he goes to sleep. When he is pushed, tormented, defeated, he has a chance to learn something; he has been put on his wits, on his manhood; he has gained facts; learns his ignorance; is cured of the insanity of conceit; has got moderation and real skill.

The wise man throws himself on the side of his assailants. It is more his interest than it is theirs to find his weak point. ... Blame is safer than praise. I hate to be defended in a newspaper. As long as all that is said is said against me, I feel a certain assurance of success. But as soon as honeyed words of praise are spoken for me, I feel as one that lies unprotected before his enemies. In general, every evil to which we do not succumb is a benefactor. As the Sandwich Islander believes that the strength and valor of the enemy he kills passes into himself, so we gain the strength of the temptation we resist. ...

In a virtuous action, I properly am; in a virtuous act, I add to the world; I plant into deserts conquered from Chaos and Nothing, and see the darkness receding on the limits of the horizon. ...

I no longer wish to meet a good I do not earn, for example, to find a pot of buried gold, knowing that it brings with it new responsibility. I do not wish more external goods, -- neither possessions, nor honors, nor powers, nor persons. The gain is apparent; the tax is certain. But there is no tax on the knowledge that the compensation exists, and that it is not desirable to dig up treasure. Herein I rejoice with a serene eternal peace. I contract the boundaries of possible mischief. I learn the wisdom of St. Bernard, -- "Nothing can work me damage except myself; the harm that I sustain I carry about with me, and never am a real sufferer but by my own fault."

Such, also, is the natural history of calamity. The changes which break up at short intervals the prosperity of men are advertisements of a nature whose law is growth. Every soul is by this intrinsic necessity quitting its whole system of things, its friends, and home, and laws, and faith, as the shell-fish crawls out of its beautiful but stony case, because it no longer admits of its growth, and slowly forms a new house. In proportion to the vigor of the individual, these revolutions are frequent, until in some happier mind they are incessant, and all worldly relations hang very loosely about him, becoming, as it were, a transparent fluid membrane through which the living form is seen, and not, as in most men, an indurated heterogeneous fabric of many dates, and of no settled character in which the man is imprisoned. Then there can be enlargement, and the man of to-day scarcely recognizes the man of yesterday. And such should be the outward biography of man in time, a putting off of dead circumstances day by day, as he renews his raiment day by day. But to us, in our lapsed estate, resting, not advancing, resisting, not cooperating with the divine expansion, this growth comes by shocks.

We cannot part with our friends. We cannot let our angels go. We do not see that they only go out, that archangels may come in. We are idolaters of the old. We do not believe in the riches of the soul, in its proper eternity and omnipresence. We do not believe there is any force in to-day to rival or recreate that beautiful yesterday. We linger in the ruins of the old tent, where once we had bread and shelter and organs, nor believe that the spirit can feed, cover, and nerve us again. We cannot again find aught so dear, so sweet, so graceful. But we sit and weep in vain. The voice of the Almighty saith, `Up and onward for evermore!' We cannot stay amid the ruins. Neither will we rely on the new; and so we walk ever with reverted eyes, like those monsters who look backwards.

And yet the compensations of calamity are made apparent to the understanding also, after long intervals of time. A fever, a mutilation, a cruel disappointment, a loss of wealth, a loss of friends, seems at the moment unpaid loss, and unpayable. But the sure years reveal the deep remedial force that underlies all facts. The death of a dear friend, wife, brother, lover, which seemed nothing but privation, somewhat later assumes the aspect of a guide or genius; for it commonly operates revolutions in our way of life, terminates an epoch of infancy or of youth which was waiting to be closed, breaks up a wonted occupation, or a household, or style of living, and allows the formation of new ones more friendly to the growth of character. It permits or constrains the formation of new acquaintances, and the reception of new influences that prove of the first importance to the next years; and the man or woman who would have remained a sunny garden-flower, with no room for its roots and too much sunshine for its head, by the falling of the walls and the neglect of the gardener, is made the banian of the forest, yielding shade and fruit to wide neighborhoods of men.

-Emerson-

The Dawning of a Wisdom Age

2008-04-04T06:21:00.006+04:00

-

Safehouse

-

Because each new phase of evolving intelligence
takes place in a fraction of the time
of the previous phase,
...
we can expect the dawning of a Wisdom Age to take place
in years rather than decades.

It will be standing on the shoulders of the Information Age.

Never before have we been able to access so much spiritual wisdom.

A century ago, the only spiritual tradition available to most people was the one that was indigenous to their own culture.

Moreover, with rare exceptions, they did not have the benefit of learning
from a truly enlightened being.

Today, we can access teachings from many different traditions and cultures,
discover their common underlying truths,
and translate that perennial philosophy into the language and terms
of our own time.

Something completely new is emerging: a single spiritual teaching
that is a distillation of the world's wisdom traditions.

This is coalescing and being disseminated globally through a variety of information technologies: books, tapes, Web pages, online forums, and Internet broadcasts.

At the same time, a growing number of people are becoming fully awake,
and proving themselves
to be excellent teachers.

Many are using the Internet to share their wisdom and help awaken others.

Instruction in practices that facilitate awakening are appearing online,
and could become much more sophisticated.

It may even turn out that darshan,
the Indian word for a direct transfer of higher consciousness,
can be transmitted via the net.

Awakening is often a sudden event.

Once a person is ready
—the necessary groundwork done,
the circumstances propitious—
the shift can happen more or less instantaneously.

It's possible that research into the neurological correlates of spiritual awakening
will lead us to methods of promoting the process directly.

There will likely be other unforeseen discoveries
or developments
that help us free our minds.

Whatever they may be,
the more we learn how to facilitate a shift in consciousness,
the faster it will happen.

As this becomes a mainstream phenomenon,
...
humanity will relate to the world in wiser,
more compassionate ways.

-

A Singularity in Time; a chapter by Peter Russell
...from the book, "The Mystery of 2012."

-

Turduvadove

List of Celebrities Who Question Official 9/11 Story Grows...

2008-04-03T08:19:00.011+04:00

-
Willie Nelson (musician)
Charlie Sheen (actor)
Martin Sheen (actor)
Margaret Cho (comedian)
George Carlin (comedian)
Tom DeLonge, (musician; Blink 182)
Marion Cotillard (actress; Academy Award winner, 2008)
Rosie O'Donnell (comedian/talk show personality)
Michael Moore (documentary film maker)
Jon Anderson (frontman of rock band, Yes)
James Brolin (actor)
David Lynch (film maker)
Ed Asner (actor)
Jesse Ventura (former governor/pro wrestler)

Well, you get the picture. Looks like the dam may break.

...

Oh, wait. There's more.

...

Michelle Shocked (musician)
Michael Franti (musician)
James Woods (actor)
Dean Haglund (actor)
Ed Begley, Jr. (actor)
John Gray (author)
Mimi Kennedy (actress)
Janeane Garofalo (actress/comedian & former talk show host)
Howard Zinn (activist & social justice author)
Thom Hartmann (author & talk radio host)
Daniel Ellsberg (Pentagon whistleblower)
Howard Stern (talk radio shock jock)
Ralph Nader (consumer activist & presidential candidate)
Medea Benjamin (co-founder of Global Exchange & Code Pink)
Richie Havens (musician)
Mark Stepnoski (former Dallas Cowboys lineman)
Andreas Von Beulow (former German Defense Secretary)
Robert Baer (veteran CIA officer & geopolitical expert)
Francesco Cossiga (former Italian President)
Paul Craig Roberts (former US Treasury Secretary & Wall St. Journal editor)
David Ray Giffin (theologian)
National Green Party (US)
Louis Farrakkhan (acting head of Nation of Islam)
Sibel Edmonds (FBI translator & whistleblower)
Frank Serpico (NYPD whistleblower & subject of Al Pacino movie)
Barry Zwicker (Canadian television journalist)
Cynthia McKinney (former Congresswoman & Green Party presidential candidate)
Stan Goff (25-year Army Special-Ops veteran)

Also,...

The Japanese Parliament (were recently a captive audience)
Japanese MP Says UN Could Lead New Investigation

March 31, 2008

...and the deception unravels as the list of skeptic grows. (to be continued)

The Unraveling of Neoliberalism

2008-03-28T20:40:00.007+04:00

The end of capitalism
as we know it?

The Western world is in an economic crisis similar in scale to the oil shock of 1973.

What we are seeing is nothing less than the unraveling of neoliberalism
– the dominant economic and ideological model of the last 30 years.

The disintegration of Anglo-Saxon-inspired markets has come about largely because of the confluence of two tendencies of the "free market": speculation and monopoly capitalism.

Contrary to received opinion, free markets – unless subject to civil regulation, asset distribution and persistent intervention – always tend to monopoly.

Similarly, there is nothing inherently efficient about free markets
– they do not of themselves promote sound investment or wise management.

Rather, when markets are conceived wholly in terms of price and return, and when asset wealth and the leverage that this provides becomes as concentrated as it was in the 19th century (which is a scenario we are approaching), then markets encourage nothing other than gambling masking itself as sound investment.

For example, before 1973 the ratio of investment to speculative capital was 9:1; since 1973, these proportions have reversed.

So huge have the numbers, leverage and derivative instruments become that their value now far exceeds the total economic value of the planet.

For instance, in 2003 the value of all derivative trading was $85 trillion, while the size of the world economy was only $49 trillion.

These ratios have risen with the latest estimates that the value of all traded paper instruments exceeds the underlying value of the assets on which they are written by 3:1.

The fact that these assets may themselves be devaluing by up to 50 per cent (US housing values have declined by 25 per cent in two years) means that the overall ratio of global paper value to its leveraged base may indeed double.

This average global figure itself masks even more extreme levels of leverage.

The Carlyle Group de-faulted on $16.6bn (£8.4bn) of debt last week. The private equity firm had been speculating assiduously on its AAA-rated mortgage base – by some estimates, at the end of its life, Carlyle's loan-to-value ratio and hedge exposure was at 36:1. There are, of course, many other private equity firms in a similar position.

This incalculable level of speculation is abetted by the huge concentration of wealth that has occurred since 1973.

Why?

Because if markets tend to monopoly then smaller groups of people control larger amounts of assets.

The latest figures demonstrate this admirably: the richest 10 per cent of the UK population increased their share of the nation's marketable wealth (excluding housing) from 57 per cent in 1976 to 71 per cent in 2003.

Over the same period, the speculative capital that could be deployed or invested by the bottom 50 per cent of the British population fell from 12 per cent to just 1 per cent.

Indeed, the wealthiest 1 per cent of the population, on current government figures, now control more than a third of all the marketable wealth – and this ignores the vast sums held in offshore tax havens.

The New Economics Foundation has shown that global growth has not aided the poor.

In the 1980s, for every $100 of world growth, the poorest 20 per cent received $2.20; by 2001, they received only 60 cents. Clearly neo-liberal growth disproportionately benefits the rich and further impoverishes the poor.

Real wage increases in the top 13 countries of the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) have been below the rate of inflation since about 1970 – a situation compounded in Britain as the measure of inflation massively underestimates the real cost of living.

Thus wage earners – rather than asset owners – have faced a 35-year downward pressure on their standard of living.

Indeed, the golden age for the salaried worker, as a share of GDP,
was between 1945 and 1973 – and not this vaunted age of liberalisation.

The trouble is that nobody in power recognises this crisis for what it is
– an asset insolvency crisis brought about by massive debt leverage.

Neo-liberals are still reacting as if the emergency was one of liquidity.
They are wrong.

Governments should bail out not banks and speculators but the customers who now have every reason to fear for the future.

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/comment/outside-view-the-end-of-capitalism-as-we-know-it-799494.html

-

Also: ... Socialism for the Rich!

... Banks want bailouts, but can't forgive Third World debt?

... Plunge Protection Team bails out Wall Street. But not Main Street?

... Noam Chomsky: Neoliberalism and the Global Order

----

Turduvadove

...

So Much for Cramer's Credibility

2008-03-28T08:32:00.009+04:00

-
...down the tubes with Bear Stearns.

What was Cramer thinking?

(He had a chance to apologize, but opted to say that his viewers were stupid and misheard him.)

I guess that's what can be expected from someone who rose through the ranks of Goldman Sachs, another of the Big 3 Wall Street investment firms.

So the Federal Reserve Chairman, Ben Bernanke, and the Treasury Secretary, Henry Paulson, former CEO of Goldman Sachs, decide it's necessary to bail out Bear Stearns.
Gee. I wonder if they'll bail out Goldman Sachs, if need be?

Corporate welfare. So much for the magic of free markets & deregulation.

Cramer can claim his comments about Bear Stearns were taken out of context but they weren't. And, I know supply-siders and believers in neoliberalism will try to rewrite history after Wall Street gets bailed out from the current subprime/derivatives fiasco that we are in the midst of now.

Alas, unfortunate, dramatic events bring about change quicker.

Okay, happy thoughts, Sir Real. :)

There is some good empirical evidence suggesting that the global puppet masters & their parlor tricks are coming to light, finally.

And, if so, then the most significant historical event which I will have lived through will be the "unraveling of neoliberalism."

Hallelujah. Thank you, Goddess, in advance, for this blessing.

UPDATE: 4/4/08

Well, the guy who wrote Cramer the e-mail question about the liquidity of Bear Stearns called in to the "Mad Money" show today, & backed Cramer's version of events. And, the caller said that he had money in accounts at Bear Stearns & was worried about losing his money; and that he was not referring to owning Bear Stearns stock. (Cramer was assuring him his money was safe.)

So, Cramer, I guess now deserves the benefit of the doubt again. Why the television show displayed Bear Stearns' stock chart while Cramer was asking the question remains a mystery. The nuance which, in theory, would restore Cramer's credibility, doesn't completely absolve Cramer. Because, he made no reference to Bear Stearns possibly being worthless when he discussed the company on the show, March 10th.

And it was clear that Cramer's colleagues on CNBC thought he was referring to the stock when they called him on it throughout the day, the following Monday,
I think it was.

Normally, Cramer is more clear about what he's talking about, if he's specifically not referring to stocks. And, his colleagues at TheStreet.com listed Bear Stearns as a recommendation on their stock charts all the way until Bear Stearns collapsed, and then retroactively removed the recommendation.

So, the whole unfortunate situation which puts Cramers reputation at risk...is still kind of a sketchy scene.

Had Cramer apologized wholeheartedly for the confusion, rather than trying to dodge it, the situation might not have blown up. The caller today (4-4-08), did validate Cramer's argument; but why the hell he was talking a non-stock question on a stock-picking show, without informing his audience that he was going off-topic, is a mystery. And a screw-up.

I still give kudos to Cramer for writing the book, "You Got Screwed," which explained how Enron, Worldcom, Tyco, Jack Grubman, Arthur Anderson, etc... screwed Main Street & the little investors...was very revelatory. And, it would be nice if Cramer wrote the sequel, "You Got Screwed Yet Again." But, he's gonna have to be a little more critical about his buddy, Henry Paulson, the Treasury Secretary.

Paulson was the former CEO of Goldman Sachs; the same company where Cramer used to work;... & it seems clear Paulson's loyalties are not with Main Street;... & it seems clear that Goldman Sachs' stock price has gotten through this latest Wall Street-created mess relatively unscathed compared to the other investment banks.

The economics editor of The Guardian paper in England put it fairly bluntly this way a few days ago, claiming America was conned:

"It is somewhat surprising that there is not already rioting in the streets, given the gigantic fraud perpetrated by the financial elite at the expense of ordinary Americans."

To what degree Cramer can really speak truth to power when some of his friends are responsible for the subprime/derivatives fiasco going on now...remains to be seen.

It was nice to hear him criticize Congress' $6 billion dollar hand-out to the homebuilders today, even as they've offered nothing to Americans at risk of losing their homes. I mean didn't these homebuilders already get rich during the boom years, just recently? Aren't these homebuilders all worth hundreds of millions of dollars, personally, already? A country of, by, and for the corporations is one thing, but this seems a bit sick and twisted. According to Cramer, it happened because the homebuilders had withheld their donations to Congress of late.

What kind of bizarre reality are we living in?

Anyway.

Love. Love. Love.

Leaving Jesusland

2008-03-11T06:18:00.002+04:00

One Trillion Dollars

2008-03-11T06:15:00.002+04:00

-
"As our seemingly endless primary process reaches the homestretch and the focus shifts to the general election, we need to pull the plug on the media's disturbing habit of acting as if foreign policy and domestic policy are completely separate entities -- a pair of high stakes board games that can only be taken off the shelf and played one at a time. To hear the media tell it, combining the two would make about as much sense as using your Monopoly pieces to play Risk.

Buzz up!on Yahoo!But while there is almost nothing about the Iraq war that can be labeled a success, we can declare that it has been exceedingly successful in showing how intertwined foreign and domestic policy actually are. In the book, The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict, Nobel Prize-winning economist Joseph Stiglitz, along with co-author Linda Bilmes, argue that, even using "conservative assumptions," the Iraq war will cost at least $3 trillion dollars and likely as much as $5 trillion.

Stiglitz also argues that the war has played a major role in the current subprime credit crisis and our long, hard slog toward recession. Because of the cost of the war, the Fed flooded the system with credit. "The regulators were looking the other way and money was being lent to anybody this side of a life-support system," Stiglitz told The Australian's Peter Wilson.

The book ... notes that the cost is 60 times the $50 - 60 billion we were told the war would cost by Don Rumsfeld. The Iraq war is already the second costliest war in American history, trailing only World War II.

Stiglitz makes the case that no country can fight a protracted war without deep and long-lasting effects on domestic policy. Particularly a protracted war paired with tax cuts." ...

---

(The entire Arianna Huffington article is ... HERE.)

---

---

No Country for Adult Infants

2008-03-05T22:07:00.002+04:00

-

First they put away the dealers,
keep our kids safe and off the street.
Then they put away the prostitutes,
keep married men cloistered at home.

Then they shooed away the bums,
then they beat and bashed the queers,
turned away asylum-seekers,
fed us suspicions and fears.
We didn't raise our voice,
we didn't make a fuss.
It's funny there was no one left to notice
when they came for us.

Looks like witches are in season,
you better fly your flag and be aware
of anyone who might fit the description,
diversity is now our biggest fear.

Now with our conversations tapped
and our differences exposed,
how ya supposed to love your neighbor
with our minds and curtains closed?
We used to worry 'bout big brother,
now we got a big father and an even bigot mother.

And you still believe
this aristocracy gives a fuck about you.
They put the mock in democracy
and you swallowed every hook.

The sad truth is
you'd rather follow the school into the net
'cause swimming alone at sea
is not the kind of freedom that you actually want.

So go back to your crib and suck on a tit
go bask in the warmth of your diaper.
You're sitting in shit and piss
while sucking a giant pacifier,
a country of adult infants.
A legion of mental midgets,
a country of adult infants,
a country of adult infants.
all regaining their unconsciousness.

NOFX

A Legacy of Progress ... (The Sixties)

2008-02-26T21:36:00.007+04:00

---

(...from the new book, "America Dreaming," ... by Laban Carrick Hill)

---

“To me all the problems began in the Sixties.”
-
--- retired Texas Republican Congressman
and House Majority Leader Dick Armey

---

“Whatever the future holds, and as satisfactory as my life is today,
I miss the Sixties and always will.”
-
---former Democratic State Senator in California, former SDS activist
and Chicago Seven defendant Tom Hayden

---

A more equitable nation
MAKING A
A LEGACY OF PROGRESS
RAINBOW
or the rise of a welfare state?

---

When it comes to the ‘60s, everyone seems to disagree. Armey and Hayden are not unique in their completely opposite assessments of the era. No two people seem to be able to agree on the legacy of the ‘60s. Some saw a more equitable and humane nation, open to all its citizens. Others decried the rise of the welfare state, where the government intervened to take away personal responsibility.

Passionate reactions confirm just how important and influential the era was. Whether or not you believe this decade had a positive influence on contemporary culture, it has affected us all---even those who were born a decade or more later. Every aspect of the nation changed, from the highest levels of government and corporate culture to how we dispose of our garbage.

Just a quick glance around your neighborhood will provide real evidence.

In almost every village, town, and city in the country, people set aside their used plastic, glass jars, aluminum, metal, and newspapers. Then, once a week, these items are either set curbside in blue containers to be collected or dropped off at waste management centers for recycling. As well, a significant portion of the American populace compost kitchen and yard wastes in their backyards. Before the ‘60s all of that trash would have been buried in the town dump in such a way that it would not decompose for a millennium or more. That town and city dumps are now called waste management centers tells us a lot about how our thinking has changed about the environment.

On the streets today, many of the cars are hybrids that contain engines running on a combination of batteries and gasoline. These cars emit significantly less pollution than traditional gasoline-fueled vehicles and have become the fastest-growing segment in the automotive industry. But the passage of the clean air and water acts in Congress are still threatened by companies opting out of the compliance and by developers drilling in protected areas.

On a national level, minorities have gained significant representation, influence, and power in government. Perhaps the most dramatic example is in Memphis, Tennessee, the city where Martin Luther King was assassinated. Memphis now has an African-American mayor, an African-American U.S. congressman, and a predominantly African-American city council. When King died, the government establishment was all white, despite the fact that nearly half of the city’s citizens were black. Birmingham, Alabama, nicknamed Bombingham in the ‘60s for all the racial bombings, is also governed by an African-American mayor. This change in the power structure of local governments is common all over the South as well as in other parts of the country.

---

SUSTAINABILITY

In the late 1990s a new approach to thinking about humankind’s relationship with the environment was captured in the coining of the term “Sustainability.” Though the word has been around for centuries, only recently has it become popular to use to describe an attempt to provide the best outcomes for the human and natural environments both now and into the future. Sustainability describes the attempt to coordinate economic, social, institutional, and environmental areas to protect and nourish both the human and nonhuman environment.

---

Despite this real progress, not all African Americans have found a route to the American Dream. Although blacks account for only 12 percent of the U.S. population, 44 percent of all prisoners in the United States are black. About a third of all African-American men are under the supervision of the criminal justice system, and about 12 percent of African-American men in their twenties and thirties are incarcerated. These astronomical incarceration rates have huge social and economic consequences for black women, black children, and black communities.

Still race, ethnicity, and gender have on the whole become less of a factor in the public sphere. Despite the fact that women and minorities have not yet won the highest office in the nation---the presidency---they are represented on the Supreme Court and as heads of key federal departments, such as secretary of state and attorney general. One encouraging indication of how the country’s views on race have changed is Nike’s “Be Like Mike” advertising campaign n the 1990s. Considered the greatest basketball player ever, Michael Jordan so inspired kids and adults that he transcended racial boundaries to become America’s iconic hero. Before the ‘60s this would never have happened.

For women, changes begun in the ‘60s have meant a steady movement toward equality in the workplace and at home. Though women’s salaries are still not comparable to men’s they have increased steadily. In 1963, women earned 58 cents for every dollar a man made. Today, that has risen to 76 cents to every dollar a man makes. Corporations have changed their policies to allow women maternity leave, which was not the case before the Women’s Liberation Movement. This openness to women’s issues has also made it possible for men to get paternity leave. It has encouraged corporations to offer its employees on-site day care and leave for elder care. None of this would have happened without women speaking up for their rights. Though women still struggle with balancing career goals and motherhood, the real difference from the ‘60s is that women are in this struggle, instead of in the battle to be allowed to have a job at all.

The most visible area of improvement for women has been in sports. With the 1972 enactment of Title IX by the U.S. government---which guarantees equal access to sports for women---women’s participation in sports has skyrocketed from 290,000 high school girls to more than 1.9 million high school girls participating in competitive sports. The benefits of Title IX also surface in other areas of women’s lives. High school girls who participate in competitive sports are less likely to become pregnant while in school and are more likely to graduate from high school. The downside of increased participation by women has been that men’s sports programs at high schools and colleges now have to compete for the same dollars. This has led some schools to eliminate expensive sports programs such as football in order to balance the needs of women’s programs.

---

Another highly controversial issue to come out of the ‘60s was the emergence of women’s reproductive rights. Birth control pills allowed women to be in charge of their bodies in ways that were inconceivable in the previous generation. Women could choose whether to become pregnant or not. This allowed women to go to college and start careers. Although the landmark abortion case, Roe v. Wade did not occur until 1973, it was clearly a legacy of the women’s rights movement. The Supreme Court’s granting women the right to choose whether or not to terminate a pregnancy in the first trimester is an enduring controversy that still divides the nation.

---

WHO SAYS … Too Much Freedom is Too Much?

Nearly every night gay bars and clubs were raided in cities across America. Gays and lesbians were harassed, beaten and arrested simply because of their sexual orientation in the ‘60s. In the early morning of June 28, 1969, around 1:30 a.m., the gay community had finally had enough. Police raided an illegal bar, the Stonewall Inn, in Greenwich Village. Rather than simply run, like most patrons did when police raided a gay bar, customers resisted. Within minutes the police were overwhelmed. More than 2,000 people chanted “Gay Power!” and threw bottles and rocks at the police. Over the next few days gays and lesbians battled the police. Hundreds were beaten and injured. The Stonewall Riot became the signature event that launched the gay rights movement and began the long, difficult fight to change public opinion on homosexuality.

In 1965, 82 percent of men and 52 percent of women said that homosexuality represented a “clear threat” to the American way of life. By 2005, a CBS poll recorded just how much opinions had changed over forty years. Fifty-seven percent of Americans now believed that homosexuals should be allowed to enter into either marriage or civil union relationships. Another 2005 poll, this time by Gallup, showed that 90 percent of the respondents believed that gays and lesbians deserved protections against employment discrimination. Unfortunately, only seventeen states and the District of Columbia ban discrimination based on sexual orientation, while only eight states ban discrimination based on gender orientation. The gay rights movement has made extraordinary advances since Stonewall in 1969, but LBGT (Lesbian, Bisexual, Gay, and Transgender) people are the victims every day of small and large discriminations that go unnoticed by the rest of the country’s population.

---

For Native Americans, the most obvious difference has been the fact that the U.S. government has changed its policy of trying to eliminate their culture. Now Indian tribes have a lot more freedom not just to celebrate and practice their cultural heritage but also to make their own choices about their lives. One of the biggest indicators of this change is the increase of people who claim Native American heritage. In 1960, only 524,000 people identified themselves as American Indian. By 1990, that number had risen to 1.9 million, and by 2000, the number more than doubled to 4.1 million. That’s nearly and 800 percent increase.

Many tribes across the country have established profitable casinos, which have raised the living conditions of its members. Consequently, the median household income of Native Americans ($31,799) has risen above that of African Americans ($28,679) and Hispanics ($31,703). This is a significant change for the positive when you consider that Native Americans were the poorest minority in the country and were subject to a government policy of annihilation. The sad fact, however, is that American Indians, like most other minorities in the United States, still lag behind the dominant white culture when it comes to economic success and opportunity.

When looking at the progress Hispanics have made in America, one number stands out: Between 2000 and 2050, the Hispanic population is expected to triple, from 35.6 million to 102.6 million. The voice and power of Americans of Hispanic origin are increasing. California is home to 12.4 million Hispanics, while Texas is home to 7.8 million. Thirteen states---including Arizona, New York, Georgia, Illinois, and Washington---have Hispanic populations of more than a half a million. Bill Richardson, the governor of New Mexico, is Hispanic. One characteristic that describes Hispanic culture and heritage is diversity. Hispanic people come from all over South America, Central America, the Caribbean, and Mexico. What binds them is that they can trace their origin or descent to Spain. While Hispanics are making considerable progress, they still trail behind their non-Hispanic White counterparts in income, jobs, education, and housing. The hope is that as the country becomes more brown and less white, more and more opportunities will open up. Only time will tell.

The era of the Sixties exposed many fault lines in our culture and gave voice to many who had none previously.

The legacy is that overt discrimination and government-sanctioned discrimination against minorities has been outlawed. There are now laws in place that guarantee many of the rights and liberties that were limited during the ‘60s. Where progress most noticeably has lagged has been with economic opportunity. Sociologist Eric J. Krieg argues that “racism is built into the very structure of our economic system.” In short, while our laws prohibit racism, our economic system of unfettered capitalism still leaves those without money vulnerable. He sees this vulnerability manifest itself in neighborhoods of the economically weak---those who live in low-income communities and communities of color. These neighborhoods are most likely also to be the home of the most dangerous hazardous waste sites. As an example, he cites the HUD public housing in North Cambridge, Massachusetts. “These enormous towers and open spaces with soccer fields were built on top of a landfill,” explains Krieg. “Here you have a great economic decision, saving state money by placing people in need of housing right-square in the middle of the most polluted section of town.” When Krieg sees figures of high rates of childhood leukemia and asthma as well as low scores in local schools, he’s not surprised. “If you live in a poisonous environment, that home is going to be a contributing factor in the causes of bad health and education,” he concludes. It’s basic logic, when common sense tells us our home is our castle---or perhaps our grave.

Most people witnessed the dramatic disparity between the affluent and the poor in 2005, when Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. The poor communities in New Orleans, which were predominantly African-American, suffered the most. The neighborhoods were largely located in the most vulnerable areas below sea level. Unlike more affluent communities, which were on higher ground, these areas were most at risk of flooding and also least able to protect themselves. It was also these poor communities that were not evacuated, because the city did not provide transportation to those who did not have their own cars and trucks. What Hurricane Katrina highlighted was a vulnerability that poor communities have because they are not affluent. Because they are poor and lack economic power, they do not have strong representation in the business community or in government.

The era of the ‘60s exposed many fault lines in our culture and gave voice to many who had none previously. That some of the issues raised and some of the revolutions started are still ongoing demonstrates how deep seated these problems are and how necessary it is that our democracy continue to debate them. The lesson learned from the ‘60s was that all people---young, old, and in between---could make a difference.

That was a very important lesson indeed.

---

(...from the new book, "America Dreaming," ... by Laban Carrick Hill)

Kid Rock cleans up ... Amen

2008-02-09T23:40:00.000+04:00

Have you visited the Safehouse? Please do.
We've got totally (to the max) updated links to all Sederville bloggers who have posted Open Mics. Love. Love. Love.

And now to the lecture at hand: ...

Okay, so...

...

The song, “Amen,”… Kid Rock’s second music video release from his latest album, “Rock and Roll Jesus” has been cleaned up ... & is now on one of the country music television video charts, CMT? ... and also on the MTV 2 video charts.

According to Kid Rock, he believes it is the best song he has ever written. I might possibly agree. The album is definitely his best ever, although I’d probably ditch the chorus in the song, “Sugar Tonight.” The song appears midway thru the album, and it’s very annoying to my ears. Everything else on the album is quite brilliant.

I originally was disappointed with the possibly inadvertent racist, anti-immigrant, content of the original “Amen” video, which earlier surfaced on YouTube. Fortunately, Kid Rock edited out the rotten parts prior to releasing the video to television. It was a very smart move on his part, because the song is beautiful.

(A similar thing happened with a recent Gin Blossoms song, “Long Time Gone,” which aired briefly on YouTube, from their most recent album, “Major Lodge Victory.” Violent imagery, which had nothing to do with the lyrics of the song, was bizarrely included in the original video.)

It is truly remarkable how some musicians of late have chosen to self-edit themselves.
I do not feel it is about being politically incorrect, but instead is about sending the right message. In a country such as America, which has been ruled of late by misleaders & dividers, our musicians are needed more than ever.

Thank you, Kid Rock, for the great songs & message.
The misogyny we’ll blame on rock ‘n’ roll.

(Last note: If you go to the Kid Rock website, you’ll find that the old, nationalistic/racist version of “Amen” begins to play once the new version ends. That I find okay, since there were cool things in the original video; it’s just that the shortcomings sent an unfortunate, most likely unintended, message.)

Okay, well...

Current "Amen" Video:

Former "Amen" Video (below):

As for the Gin Blossoms,... their unauthorized violent video no longer exists in cyberspace.

All that I can find is this not so great live version of
"Long Time Gone"... (below):

Time to chill ? Come visit the Safehouse?

Have you had your hugs and drugs today?

Small is the New Big

2007-12-31T12:37:00.000+04:00

In 1960, Volkswagen shook up the car world
with a full-page ad
that had just two words on it:

Think Small.

It was a revolutionary idea
-- a call for the shrinking of perspective, ambition, and scale
in an era
when success was all about accumulation and territorial gain,
even when you were just driving down the street.

At the same time, as America was becoming the world’s superpower,
growing the dominant economy and setting the pace for global markets,
the Beetle took off as a counter-culture rockstar –
representing exploding individuality
in reaction to the conformity of the 1950s.

America never quite got used to small when it came to cars.
But ask two-thirds of America,
and they will tell you they work for small business.

Americans overwhelmingly favor small, reasonable ideas
over big, grandiose schemes.

And they yearn for the lifestyles of small-town America.

Many of the biggest movements in America today are small
-- often hidden for but a few to see.

Microtrends is based on the idea
that the most powerful forces in our society
are the emerging, counterintuitive trends
that are shaping tomorrow right before us.

...

The power of individual choice has never been greater,
and the reasons and patterns for those choices
never harder to understand and analyze.

The skill of microtargeting
– identifying small, intense subgroups
and communicating with them
about their individual needs and wants
-- has never been more critical
in marketing or in political campaigns.

The one-size-fits-all approach to the world is dead.

Thirty years ago sitting in Harvard’s Lamont Library,
I read a book that started out,
“The perverse and unorthodox thesis of this little book
is that the voters are not fools.”

Its author, V. O. Key, Jr., made an argument
that since that day has guided how I think
not just about voters,
but consumers,
corporations,
governments,
and the world at large.

If you use the right tools and look at the facts,
it turns out that the average Joe is pretty smart,
and making very rational choices.

Yet almost every day,
I hear experts say
that voters and consumers
are misguided scatterbrains,
making decisions
on the basis of the color of a tie.

That’s why politicians pay consultants
to tell them
to wear earth-tone suits.

That’s why many commercials feature pointless stories
with no relation to the products.

Too often, candidates and marketers don’t believe
the facts or the issues matter that much.

Oftentimes, it is they who are the fools.

...One could reasonably estimate that
2/3 of all communications
are wasted
with messages and images
that only their creators understood.

...The perspective I'm presenting is that
thirty years later,
V. O. Key, Jr.’s observation
is not only sound,
but should be the guiding principle
of understanding the trends
we see in America and around the world.

People have never been more sophisticated,
more individualistic,
or more knowledgeable
about the choices they make in their daily lives.

Yet, as Key observed, it takes intensive, scientific study
to find the logical patterns that underlie those choices.

When faced with people’s seemingly contradictory choices,
it can be a lot easier to chalk them up to brown suits and Botox.

And indeed, the contradictions today are striking.

While people are eating more healthy foods than ever,
Big Mac sales have never been higher.

While Fox News is number one in the ratings,
the antiwar movement dominates most news coverage.

While America is growing older,
most of what we see in advertising and entertainment
has been created with youth in mind.

While people are dating as never before,
they have never been more interested
in deeper, longer-lasting relationships.

While more people than ever before
are drinking clear, natural water,
more people are also drinking “monster” energy drinks
loaded with chemicals and caffeine.

In fact, the whole idea that there are a few huge trends
which determine how America and the world work
is breaking down.

There are no longer a couple of megaforces sweeping us all along.

Instead, America and the world
are being pulled apart
by an intricate maze of choices,
accumulating in “microtrends”
– small, under-the-radar forces
that can involve as little as 1 percent
of the population,
but which are powerfully shaping our society.

...

Small is the new big.

-

...to read more, please click HERE.

Abraham - "68 Seconds of Pure Thought"

2007-12-29T12:33:00.000+04:00

LOVE EVERYBODY Gives Away Ending to "Stay Mad for Life."

2007-12-28T05:39:00.003+04:00

...After having bought six Cramer books.

Okay, well... Here's a summary of the ending of Jim Cramer's new book, "Stay Mad for Life."

---

Ten Things Pros Do Right but Amateurs Get Wrong

1. Pros always have cash.

2. Pros learn to start living and stop worrying about the quarterly report.

3. Pros try not to invest in things they don't know.

4. Pros recognize that not everything is analyzable.

5. Pros want to know the downside, not the upside.

6. Pros always look; they never avert their eyes from a downturn.

7. Pros accept that not everything works or is going to work at once.

8. Amateurs are worried that they aren't making enough,
...but pros are worried about making too much.

9. Pros know that cuffing it without doing homework can reduce you to--
...well, no offense --- an amateur!

10. Pros understand the upside, but they know that things can go wrong.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------

Cramer Names Five Bull Markets

1. Aerospace and Defense

2. Agriculture

3. Oil and Oil Service

4. Minerals and Mining

5. Infrastructure

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Cramer Picks Twenty Stocks For The Long Term

1. Caterpillar (CAT)

2. Goldman Sachs (GS)

3. ConocoPhillips (COP)

4. XTO Energy (XTO)

5. Transocean (RIG)

6. Hologic (HOLX)

7. Inverness Medical Innovations (IMA)

8. CVS Caremark (CVS)

9. McDonald's (MCD)

10. Freeport-McMoRan (FCX)

11. Hewlett-Packard (HPQ)

12. Corning (GLW)

13. Google (GOOG)

14. International Game Technology (IGT)

15. Pepsi (PEP)

16. Procter & Gamble (PG)

17. New York Stock Exchange (NYX)

18. Union Pacific (UP)

19. Boeing (BA)

20. Sears Holdings (SHLD)

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Cramer Recommends Some Mutual Funds

...Agressive Growth

1. CGM Focus Fund (CGMFX)
2. Dreyfus Premier Strategic Value (DAGVX)
3. Bridgeway Aggressive Investor (BRAGX)
4. Rice Hall James Micro Cap Portfolio (RHJSX)
5. Legg Mason Partners Aggressive Growth (SHRAX)

-

...Growth

1. Buffalo Small Cap (BUFSX)
2. FBR Small Cap (FBRVX)

-

...Value

1. Putnam Small Cap Value (PSLAX)
2. Heartland Value (HRTVX)
3. Berwyn (BERWX)
4. Muhlenkamp (MUHLX)

-

...Honorable Mentions

1. SSgA Aggressive Equity Fund (SSAEX)
2. Robeco Boston Partners Small Cap Value II (BPSCX)

----

And, that's it. Now you know.

The Science of Getting Rich

2007-12-23T09:25:00.001+04:00

There Will Always Be Those Who Thrive

2007-12-23T09:06:00.000+04:00

-

There are always those who thrive when masses are dying of sickness. There are always those who thrive economically when economic decline seems to be the order of your nation. There are always those who are clear-minded, even in environments of confusion. You do not need everyone, you do not need anyone, to align with your desire—only you need to align with your desire.

...Simply put: you’ve got to figure out how to feel good, no matter what. You’ve got to stop saying, "I feel good, mostly, but under these conditions; and that condition needs to change before I can feel better." Because now you are giving all of your power away to others who are making decisions about their lives, which have nothing to do with your lives.

Can I not be affected by them?

So, you say, "Well, how can I separate what they’re doing? It feels like what they’re doing has something to do with my life. It feels really connected to me. How can you say that it is not connected?" And we say, it is only connected because you are making it connected.

So then you say, "So, what do I do? I put blinders on? I hide myself? How can I drive down the street without being aware of different people having different opinions about whatever is in the news today? How do I keep from bumping up against things that my emotional Guidance System responds to? How do I keep from feeling outrage or concern or blame, or guilt? How do I live in this world and not respond to what’s going on?" And we say, we would not want you to live in a world where you are not responding to what’s going on. All we are suggesting is that you practice who you are and how you feel, so much, that your response to what they are doing doesn’t become more of who you are, than your response to what you are desiring. What we are suggesting is, that you think so much about who you are, and what you are doing—that what others are doing that feels like it is happening in relationship to you—is a miniscule part of the picture of that which is You.

We want you to be so grounded in your environment and attitude and Energy of Well-being, that when someone that you know contracts a disease, you don’t feel vulnerable, because, by association, you don’t superimpose their experience over yours. But you only are able to do that when you’ve practiced your own intent and belief in your own Well-being long enough that you don’t feel tentative. If you feel tentative, you’re easily swayed. If you feel tentative on your subject of your physical Well-being, then you are easily swayed into an Energy, or a feeling, of discomfort, and even sickness. In other words, it’s all about how you are projecting your thought—how you are practicing your vibration—what you are teaching yourself, vibrationally.

It all depends on your practiced focus

As we are moving forward here today, we will assist you in recognizing what the vibration of your Being is. And since nothing matters to you other than your personal, individual alignment with your personal, individual goals or desires, then that is where our work is.

We are not here to debate the rightness or the wrongness of what you, or anyone, chooses. We are not taking sides, for, or against, anything. We are here to help you understand that, as individuals, your life can be as wonderful or as horrible as you allow it to be. And it all depends upon the focus that you practice. And therein lies the basis of anyone’s success: How much do I practice the thoughts that bring me joy, and how much do I practice the thoughts that bring me pain?

Must we "allow" ourselves to experience pain?

So, if you’re walking along in a body that feels good and in an environment that feels good, and you see a raging, fiery, hot stove, do you think that it would be a good thing for you to learn how to walk up to the hot stove, lay your body up against it, and survive? Is that what The Art of Allowing is? Learning to allow or endure the most uncomfortable of situations, but keep your mouth closed and don’t squawk about it, is that what Allowing is? Not even close.

Allowing is: Walking through the room where the hot stove exists, and recognizing that there may be benefit from it, and utilizing that benefit, if there is. And if there is not benefit for you, then walking on by and ignoring it, understanding that others may choose to participate with it, or not. Walking through the room, having your experience with it, coming to your personal, individual conclusions about it, and then practicing thought that causes you, then, to live a comfortable life experience.

And so, you say, "Well, Abraham, that’s a pretty elementary analogy. I understand the value of the stove, and I can see where it can serve me or not serve me. And I’ve learned my place with it, and I can extract the benefit from it. And it is really rare, it only happened once or twice when I was really little, that, in my not knowing, I bumped up against it and had a negative experience. So, Abraham, are you telling me that everything is like that stove?" And we say, yes, exactly. Every thought, every condition, every exposure to every experience. You can participate with it; you can receive positive experience from it, or negative experience from it, but you get to choose. Or, you can receive no experience from it. You can make it a vibrational non-issue in your experience.

You’re not powerless in a power-seeking world

Where humans get into trouble, is where they say, "But now I have to find my experience or my relationship with this stove (or whatever) and I want everyone else to have the same experience with it. I want us to join together in clubs and groups, and I want us to express our harmony about the idea. And we will form bands of protesters that will push against those who disagree with us. And eventually, we will sort it out on a world forum, and we will come to one agreement." And we say, why does it have to be that way? Why can it not be individual agreement? And you say, "Because..." and here’s the crux of your worry, "because I’m but one person with one opinion. And those that do band together in their opinions will run over the top of me. I’m powerless in a world that seeks power." And we say, that is what we are wanting to help you to understand: We want to help you regain your clarity about your individual power. Everyone has it. No one can ever take it away from you. No one can ever do anything "bad" to you. No one can assert into your experience. Everything, without exception, comes only by your individual invitation to it.

So you say, "But, Abraham, I would not ask for something that I do not want." And we say, you do it all the time, because you do not understand the process of asking. The process of asking is achieving vibrational harmony with something. When you give something your attention and it becomes your dominant vibration relative to the subject, that is your asking. You say, "No, I’m asking for Well-being. How could not Well-being come into my experience?" And we say, because you often are not a vibrational match to Well-being. You’re finding too many things to fuss about. You’re finding too many things to be upset about. You’re finding too many injustices—too many things that make you feel negative emotion.

Nothing’s more important than to feel good

The only way that we have ever seen that any of you can use the Guidance that you were born with is by making this statement and really meaning it and coming to live it: "Nothing is more important than that I feel good. Nothing is more important than that I am consciously aware of the vibrational mix of that which I am giving my attention to. Nothing is more important than that I read the vibration of my Being in this moment, to know whether it’s a life-giving moment, or a life-squelching moment; whether it is the allowing of Well-being, or the disallowing of Well-being."

So, Deliberate Creating is not so much about looking out into the world and saying, "Oh, there are things that are good that I want to create or attract into my experience, and there are things that are bad that I don’t want to create or attract into my experience." Deliberate creating is more about deliberate allowing. Deliberate allowing is more like deliberate vibration. Deliberate vibration is more about deliberately feeling good—deliberately feeling good. Feeling good: not because there is a reason to, and not because the president is making the best decision, and not because my body looks exactly how I want it to look, and not because everybody is treating me in the way I think I should be treated—but feeling good because I want so much to feel good, that I look only where I feel good when I look. "I stopped saying to the world, or to my mother, or to my daughter, or to my husband, or to my friend, or to my government, or to anyone, I stopped saying, ‘You need to do something different so that I can feel good,’" which is so disempowering, because you know they’re not going to do what you want them to do! You can’t get big enough; you can’t get enough bombs; you can’t get enough armies; you can’t get enough resources to make them think like you do!

Your only path is to want so much to feel good, that you train yourself, thought by thought, subject by subject, in the direction of what does feel good, so that you allow yourself vibrational alignment with the Source and resources and circumstances, and events, that allow the perfection of your life—by your choice, to unfold.

Individually, you are each such powerful Beings

You are such powerful Beings! As we behold you individually, one by one, we say, you have as much power as the president of this nation for the controlling of your life experience. In fact, there’s not one of you in this room who doesn’t have more power than he does right now. The bombardment of ideas, the bombardment of perspectives, the bombardment of information, true and false, that he’s receiving—he cannot possibly align with Source under these conditions. You can.

So then you say, "Ah, that’s worrying. He’s making decisions and he’s not aligned with Source?" And we say, his worldwide influence is miniscule in comparison with the billions of people who are individually requesting, from their personal perspective, what they desire. Your government is not the vortex through which your Well-being flows. The vortex through which your Well-being flows is within you! It is vibrationally felt by you. It is, if you’re wanting to put your finger on it, it is right in your solar plexus where your emotional center is. And so, reclaim it. Make this statement and mean it: "Nothing is more important than that I feel good. Thought by thought, moment by moment, I’m going to open my valve and I’m going to let the good times roll."

A parking lot brawl, escalated

Let’s bring it down to something that’s easy to get your thoughts around for a moment. So, let’s say that there are two people who have a disagreement that you don’t understand, that are arguing in the parking lot. And as you walk by, you hear their argument, but you are used to things going well for you. And so, while you couldn’t help but hear them, you wonder, sort of, how you even got there. You don’t give it very much attention. But someone that you are with turns and hears them a little bit, and says to you, "Wait up for just a moment." Now, your natural instinct isn’t to get involved in something like this, but you have another intention, and that is to stay with the friend, or lover or mate, that you came with. So, while you do not have an intention to get involved in any argument, in fact, that’s not the nature of you, you do have an intention to stay with this person who has other peripheral intentions. And so, it turns out that the person that you are with has had a parking lot or two scuffles of his own, and is only peripherally interested, so he just stops for a moment and as he listens, he hears something that stirs something within him, and now he feels that he must take action, because he can see that the big one is clearly going to beat up on the little one.

And so, your friend now gets involved, and now you’re involved. Now, somebody else comes, and somebody else comes, and before you know it, you have a whole lot of people that are, sort of, gathered around this issue that really did not have anything to do with the beginning of it. But the more you listen, and the more you begin to talk among yourselves, the more you begin to take sides. And then you can clearly see that this one is right, or you can clearly see that this one is right. And now, because of your involvement with it over a period of a few days or weeks or months, or years, it begins to feel very personal to you as you begin to really relate to the issue. And so, you get these things activated within yourself. And so, that, in a very scanty way, is exactly the sort of thing that escalates into these culminations that evolve into world events. It is our promise to you, that if mass consciousness were not involved nothing could ever escalate to be something that is played out on the world stage. It would play out in the parking lot. But the more people get involved in it, then the more energy is around it, and then, the more large the events must come about.

Twin Towers, 9/11/01, and culminations of Energies

When your Twin Towers were struck by airplanes on 9/11, it was a huge culmination of energies that had been going on for a long time. But when you think about it, it was a very small representation; it certainly was not a world war; it certainly was not a world event. It was proportionate to the energies that had been stirred. But now, as a result of all of the attention that’s been offered to it, it is becoming a bigger energy. And it could not amass that energy, if there were not millions of people that are getting collectively involved with it. In other words, it’s just a parking lot brawl that got bigger—that’s all it is.

But a leader of a nation… In other words, Jerry says, from time to time, "Why don’t George and Saddam just go fight it out?" [good idea] And Esther says, "Because Saddam would whup George, and then we would be in trouble. In other words, I’m not sure I really want the balance of power to rest on that. We will start choosing our presidents with different criteria, if that were the new rule of the world."

So, that’s why, the two statements that we made earlier, we really want you to hear both of them. One: there will always be war, whether it’s in a parking lot, or it will be as big as you choose to participate within and give power to it. But second: Well-being is always the dominant Energy. And so, you speak it in terms like, "The pendulum is swinging." And we say, don’t make someone else’s parking lot brawl about you. Don’t become involved in it. Don’t let them bring you into it. Don’t let them make you use it as your excuse to deny the Energy. If you are really wanting to bring your government to the place that it cannot wage war, then don’t get involved in it and add your Energy to it, you see. It is so wonderful when you realize that you can be joyful without anybody else ever figuring it out. And that the majority of people, when they focus upon their own experiences, do live in joy. We would make the parking lot brawl, no matter how big it seems, a non-issue to our vibrational experience. And if everyone would do it, there wouldn’t be enough Energy for George Bush or Saddam to have a war. They’d be having a parking lot brawl.

Abraham-Hicks

Congressman Wexler Takes 'Impeach Cheney' Appeal to the Web

2007-12-23T08:53:00.000+04:00

Having been spurned by the major newspapers,
Congressman Robert Wexler is now taking his
'Impeach Cheney' appeal to the Internet.

As the House Judiciary Committee continues to refuse any action
on proposals to impeach Vice-President Dick Cheney,
three of that panel's members tried to take their case
to influential op-ed pages of the nation's largest newspapers.

They were turned down by every one
-- including the New York Times, Washington Post and Miami Herald --
...so now one of the lawmakers has taken his campaign to the Internet.

Rep. Robert Wexler (D-FL) on Friday launched a new Web site, WexlerWantsHearings.com
...
to advance his call
to impeach Cheney.

The site hosts an op-ed article
censored by the nation's major newspapers
and outlines the case
for impeaching Cheney.

"The truth is the mainstream media
have no interest in this issue,"
Wexler said Friday.

"They have bought into the notion that impeachment hearings
are outside the bounds of what the Congress ought to be doing,"
the six-term Congressman elaborated, during a conference call on Friday."

The House Judiciary Committee has before it a resolution,
introduced by Rep. Dennis Kucinich (D-OH), calling for Cheney's impeachment,
and accusing the vice-president of a raft of high crimes,
including manipulating intelligence in the run-up to the Iraq war,
obstructing federal investigations,
and conspiring to expose the identity of covert CIA agent, Valerie Plame.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has said impeachment is strictly off the table,
and the Judiciary Committee seems unlikely to move forward with any hearings. Wexler encouraged impeachment supporters to sign a petition on his new site,
to allay the notions of Democratic leaders
that impeachment supporters are little more than "a fringe,
marginal group of people."

Wexler said the House has the constitutional obligation
to begin impeachment hearings to investigate malfeasance
within the Bush administration,
and he blamed the lack of enthusiasm thus far
on the "bad taste" left by the GOP's last impeachment crusade.

"People are just afraid that we would just be putting the shoe on the other foot
and just doing ... what the Republicans did to Bill Clinton,"
Wexler told the conference call, which was organized by Democrats.com.

The "kangaroo court" Republicans used to impeach Clinton,
on grounds that he lied about his liaison with an intern,
cannot become the precedent by which
the constitutional tool is judged,
Wexler said.

Although Bush and Cheney will be leaving the White House for good in 13 months,
Wexler said impeachment hearings were necessary because of the need to ferret out possible criminality in the administration.

"We have to follow the evidence where it leads," he said.
"We have an obligation to do it,
and to do it as thoroughly as possible."

Wexler posted the following video appeal
on his impeachment Web site.

The article above was originally posted at Raw Story.

And, the video below shows Faux(Fixed)News
spinning comments taken out of context
as Congressman Wexler was goofing off
with Stephen Colbert
on Comedy Central.

Love.

Dogfight

2007-12-23T02:55:00.000+04:00

Olbermann: "Bunnypants Must Be Either Dishonest or Transcendently Stupid."

2007-12-23T02:29:00.000+04:00

No Breadlines in the Headlines

2007-12-09T09:30:00.000+04:00

-----------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.majorityreportradio.blogspot.com/
(contains the updated Sam Seder Show Open Mic blogger links)
----------------------------------------------------------------

"I never thought that the GOP
posed a threat to the well-being of our nation.
...
But these days, I no longer recognize my old party."

Editor's note: The following passage is excerpted from
John W. Dean's new book, "
Broken Government

with permission of Viking, © 2007
by John W. Dean.

By John W. Dean

Sept. 11, 2007

In almost four decades of involvement in national politics, much of them as a card-carrying Republican, I was never concerned that the GOP posed a threat to the well-being of our nation. Indeed, the idea would never have occurred to me, for in my experience the system took care of excesses, as it certainly did in the case of the president for whom I worked. But in recent years the system has changed, and is no longer self-correcting. Most of that change has come from Republicans, and much of it is based on their remarkably confrontational attitude, an attitude that has clearly worked for them. For example, I cannot imagine any Democratic president keeping cabinet officers as Bush has done with his secretary of defense, Donald Rumsfeld, and attorney general, Alberto Gonzales, men whom both Democrats and Republicans judged to be incompetent. Evidence that the system has changed is also apparent when a president can deliberately and openly violate the law -- as, for example, simply brushing aside serious statutory prohibitions against torture and electronic surveillance -- without any serious consequences. Similarly, but on a lesser scale, Alberto Gonzales faced no consequences when he politicized the Department of Justice as never before, allowing his aides to violate the prohibitions regarding hiring career civil servants based on their party affiliation, and then gave false public statements and testimony about the matter. When the Senate sought to pass a resolution expressing "no confidence" in the attorney general, the Republicans blocked it with a filibuster. The fact that Bush's Justice Department has become yet another political instrument should give Americans pause. This body was created by Congress to represent the interests of the people of the United States, not the Republican Party, but since the system of law no longer takes account when officials act outside the law (not to mention the Constitution), Republicans do so and get away with it.

In the past the White House (whether occupied by Republicans or Democrats) placed tight restrictions on who could contact the Department of Justice regarding pending business. It was typically limited to only the president, the vice president, the White House chief of staff and White House counsel, who were authorized to speak with the attorney general, the deputy attorney general or the top assistant and associate attorneys general. However, in the Bush White House no less than a startling 471 White House aides are authorized to speak with 30 senior Justice Department officials. It is not an exaggeration to say that the Bush administration has made the Justice Department a political extension of the White House in the area of law enforcement, which is unprecedented and seriously dilutes the credibility of the government when it goes to court. It will take years to depoliticize the Justice Department, and countless nonpolitical career attorneys -- including some of the most experienced and able men and women ever to serve in the department -- have left because of the way Bush's people run it. Ironically, when Republicans find Democratic officials with even a toe across the line, they raise unmitigated hell for that official. But when a Republican official crosses the line, Republicans close ranks around the miscreant, as they have done with the former chief of staff to the vice president, I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby.

Libby, a sophisticated Washington attorney, leaked Valerie Plame Wilson's covert CIA identity. Libby had leaked her name as part of the effort to discredit Valerie Wilson's husband, former ambassador Joe Wilson, who had traveled to Niger to determine for the CIA if Saddam Hussein had purchased uranium -- a claim that would be made by the Bush White House. When Ambassador Wilson wrote a New York Times op-ed putting the lie to that claim, Scooter Libby led the attack against him, notwithstanding the fact that he was telling the truth. One of his tactics was to claim that Wilson's wife, a covert CIA operative, had sent him on a boondoggle. Libby, as Cheney's national security adviser, was quite familiar with the potentially dire circumstances of leaking the identity of a covert agent. When special counsel Patrick Fitzgerald (the U.S. Attorney in Chicago) was appointed to investigate, Libby lied to the FBI and then to the grand jury about how he had learned of Valerie Wilson's CIA connection, claiming a newsman had told him, when, in fact, he had been told by the vice president. Although Special Counsel Fitzgerald found no criminal statute had been violated in leaking Valerie Wilson's name, he indicted and convicted Scooter Libby for false statements, perjury and obstruction of justice. Even before federal judge Reggie Walton (a Bush appointee) sentenced Libby to 30 months in prison and a $250,000 fine, Republicans were demanding that Bush pardon him.

Republicans have offered an array of explanation and justifications for a Libby pardon, but when one cuts through the smoke, what they are really arguing is that one of their own should not be punished criminally. It is an absurd position. Conservatives once claimed they stood for law and order, and that no person was above the law, but their words belie their true beliefs as expressed in their actions. Frankly, I hoped that Bush would pardon Libby, as it would have served as a particularly egregious and conspicuous example of the Republican double standard -- the authoritarian's "do as I say, not as I do" mentality. Voters understand hypocrisy, and another solid abuse of process (and power) could only help the Democrats get back into the White House.

Having watched the GOP's evolution as it embraced the radicalism of authoritarian conservatism, slowly ceding control to its most strident faction, the authoritarian conservatives, I can no longer recognize the party. These new conservative leaders have not only sought to turn back the clock, but to return to a time before the Enlightenment when there were no clocks. As former vice president Al Gore nicely stated it, the Republicans have undertaken an "assault on reason." Indeed, they have rejected their own reasoned philosophy by ignoring conservatism's teachings -- based on well-documented history -- about the dangers of concentrations of power. They have done so by focusing on the presidency as the institution in which they wish to concentrate the enormous powers of the federal government. Nixon led the way, and Reagan, Bush I, and Bush II learned from his mistakes. Nixon scowled as he scolded and secretly investigated his opponents in the name of national security; his GOP successors have smiled and reassured Americans they are operating to protect them as they have proceeded to convert the American presidency into an elective monarchy, with its own high council, which was once known as the federal judiciary.

Fortunately, the power of the authoritarian conservatism that has so dominated the Bush/Cheney presidency is waning, although it is not likely there will ever be less than about one in four Americans who will follow such authoritarian leadership without question. For authoritarian conservatism to win another presidential contest, its candidate would have to attract independent voters in addition to their hardcore base. But polling of independents reveals that they have largely become disgusted with the Republicans, and lean heavily toward the Democrats. In surveying all of the Republican contenders for the GOP nomination, I have found that to the man, they all are far more authoritarian than even the most authoritarian of the Democrats. This raises the almost certain likelihood that, regardless of how great a distance any of these GOP candidates might attempt to place between himself and the Bush/Cheney presidency during a general election campaign, in fact, if elected he is going to continue in the vein that has already caused this nation so much trouble. (There is no doubt that the GOP will select an authoritarian standard-bearer, because these are the people who are most active in the primaries and the most devoted workers in the general election. It is almost impossible for a non-authoritarian to win the Republican nomination, as the party is now structured.)

As I was writing this closing section an old friend from the Nixon White House called. Now retired, he is a lifelong Republican who told me that he voted for Bush and Cheney twice, because he knows them both personally. He asked how my new book was coming, and when I told him the title, he remarked, "I'll say the government's broken." After we discussed it, he asked how I planned to end the book, since the election was still a good distance away. I told him I was contemplating ending midsentence and immediately fading to black -- the way HBO did in the final episode of the Sopranos, but that I would settle for a nice quote from him, on the record. He explained that he constantly has to bite his tongue, and the reason he does not speak out more is because one of his sons is in an important (nonpolitical) government post, and we both know that Republicans will seek revenge wherever they can find it. How about an off-the-record comment? I asked. That he agreed to.

"Just tell your readers that you have a source who knows a lot about the Republican party from long experience, that he knows all the key movers and shakers, and he has a bit of advice: People should not vote for any Republican, because they're dangerous, dishonest and self-serving. While I once believed that Governor George Wallace had it right, that there was not a dime's worth of difference in the parties; that is not longer true. I have come to realize the Democrats really do care about people who most need help from government; Republicans care most about those who will only get richer because of government help. The government is truly broken, particularly in dealing with national security, and another four years, and heaven forbid not eight years, under the Republicans, and our grandchildren will have to build a new government, because the one we have will be unrecognizable and unworkable."

Have you had your
hugs
anD
rugs
today?

What about the New Westerns?

Is that the wailing of Caterwauls?

And, alas, do we?....

...

Do we enter
the new year
trippin'
& flipping
all about
with high-flying
trailblazing
Sons and Lovers?

Sure hope so.

Love. Love. Love.

As we remain ... always ...
blank forever.

Love to be continued...

Hollywood, we'll be right over.
Just waiting for some cold beer to go.

What Have We Here?

2007-12-06T09:19:00.000+04:00

Union Bust This

2007-12-05T08:01:00.000+04:00

Dear Deluded Mass Media, North American Union Agenda Exists

Despite official maps, documents, plans and bills in Congress the reality of the NAU and trans border superhighway is still denied as Ron Paul is attacked for speaking out about it.

Steve Watson
Infowars.net
Monday, Dec 3, 2007

The media campaign to deny the reality of the move towards a North American Union in the mold of the European Union, which would encompass a merging of the economies of The US, Canada and Mexico, continues with a sharp focus on attacking presidential candidate Ron Paul who has spoken about the move on numerous occasions.

The North American Union issue came to the fore last week when Congressman Ron Paul was sardonically asked during the CNN GOP debate if he believed in it as his many supporters have suggested.

Dr Paul put the record straight by explaining that it is ludicrous to call the very real NAU movement a conspiracy theory.

“The CFR exists, the Trilateral Commission exists,” Paul explained. “And it is a ‘conspiracy of ideas,’ this is an ideological battle. Some people believe in globalism, others believe in national sovereignty. And there is a move on toward a North American Union, just like early on there was a move for a European Union that eventually ended up. So we have NAFTA and a move toward a NAFTA highway, these are real things.”

Despite Ron Paul's explanation that these things are real, and despite overwhelming and manifestly provable evidence that they are real, the hacks at CNN spent much of their post debate coverage attacking the Congressman on the issue as if he were insane.
The post debate coverage in the video below features these attacks followed by a look at the various legislation, maps and websites that document the reality of a move toward a North American Union and a trans national corridor.

(Article continues below.)

Ron Paul again had to explain on CNN yesterday that plans for the NAU and an accompanying highway exist in reality despite continued mind numbing denial:

The framework on which the American Union is being pegged is a cross border North American Free Trade Agreement super highway that stretches from southern Mexico through the US up to Montreal Canada.

The organisation overseeing the implementation of the highway is
NASCO, the North America SuperCorridor Coalition Inc.,
which describes itself as a “non-profit organization dedicated to developing the world’s first international, integrated and secure, multi-modal transportation system along the International Mid-Continent Trade and Transportation Corridor to improve both the trade competitiveness and quality of life in North America.”

NASCO has received $250 million in earmarks from the U.S. Department of Transportation to plan the NAFTA Super Highway as a 10-lane limited-access road (five lanes in each direction) plus passenger and freight rail lines running alongside pipelines laid for oil and natural gas. One glance at the map of the NAFTA Super Highway as produced by NASCO makes clear that the design is to connect Mexico, Canada, and the U.S. into one transportation system.

Toll roads are to be placed upon existing roads in Security Prosperity Partnership agreements that bypasses Congress, agreements between the bureaucracies of the US and Mexican governments, to raise capital to build the Super highway that will go South of Texas and into Mexico.

Security Prosperity Partnership documents reveal that out of 85 interstate highways, 83 of them are slated to go under this agreement and toll roads are going down on them already. The money from this operation with further fund the dismantling of US sovereignty by seizing the infrastructure at it's very heart in a bloodless coup.

The highway is to be linked to the Trans-Texas Corridor
the first leg of the highway which will connect Mexico with the US.

This is being overseen by the Texas Department of Transportation (TxDOT)
which is a member of NASCO.

The NAFTA corridor movement also involves CANAMEX,
another trade organization that promotes a Western tri-lateral route
utilizing I-19, I-10, I-93 and I-15 in the states of Arizona, Nevada,
Utah, Idaho and Montana to link the three countries in trade.

See below (click to enlarge).

Another non-profit group, the North American Forum on Integration (NAFI),
identifies four bands of NAFTA corridors (Pacific, West, East and Atlantic),
all relying primarily upon internationalizing north-south existing interstate highways into NAFTA trade corridors. See below.

The NAFI website states the following:

"Following the implementation of NAFTA, coalitions of interest have been formed in order to promote specific transport channels, to develop the infrastructures of these channels and to propose jurisdictional amendments to facilitate the crossing of borders. These coalitions include businesses, government agencies, civil organizations, metropolitan areas, rural communities and also individuals, wishing to strengthen the commercial hubs of their regions."

"The North American trade corridors are bi- or tri-national channels for which various cross-border interests have grouped together in order to develop or consolidate the infrastructures. The North American corridors are considered multimodal in the sense that they bring into play different modes of transport in succession."

"The infrastructures may include roads, highways, transit routes, airports, pipelines, railways and train stations, river canal systems and port facilities, telecommunications networks and teleports."

The architects of this unification are not just in name merging the agencies and the laws and the regulations, they are physically getting rid of the borders by buying off and lobbying the politicians at the state level, who then hand the roads over to international bodies and their subsidiary companies.

At the end of January we reported on the revelation that one of the foreign toll road conglomerates, Macquarie, has agreed to buy dozens of newspapers in Texas and Oklahoma that have up until now been harsh critics of the Trans Texas Corridor superhighway. This indicates a clear example of influence peddling pointing to racketeering, and a desperate lunge to silence dissent against the sellout of American infrastructure and the North American Union.

The mainstream media will keep telling you none of this is real, that its on a par with invading space aliens and that if you believe in any of it you are totally crazy.

The further incontrovertible evidence for a NAU agenda is overflowing, you could write entire books on the issue.

The initial Security and Prosperity Partnership agreement was signed by President Bush, Mexican President Vicente Fox and then-Canadian Prime Minister Paul Martin in Waco, Texas, March 23, 2005. It established working groups, under the North American Free Trade Agreement office.

Security and Prosperity Partnership (SPP) documents released under the FOIA show that a wide range of US administrative law is being re-written in stealth under this program to "integrate" and "harmonize" with administrative law in Mexico and Canada, just as has become commonplace within the EU.

The documents contain references to upwards of 13 working groups within an entire organized infrastructure that has drawn from officials within most areas of administrative government including U.S. departments of State, Homeland Security, Commerce, Treasury, Agriculture, Transportation, Energy, Health and Human Services, and the office of the U.S. Trade Representative.

Further documents (PDF link) from last year's SPP meeting in Banff which were obtained by Judicial Watch under the FOIA, refer to an "evolution by stealth" agenda for the SPP, explaining that the Congress and the American people would not willingly go along with such a move.

This stealth agenda has also been carefully pointed out in a Hudson Institute White Paper entitled Negotiating North America: The Security and Prosperity Partnership (PDF)

The most important feature of the SPP design is that it is neither intended to produce a treaty nor an executive agreement like the NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) that would require congressional ratification or the passage of implementing legislation in the United States. The SPP was designed to function within existing administrative authority of the executive branch."

The paper also states "mobility across the border is central to the idea of an integrated North American economic space."

The Hudson White Paper also reminds us that the 2005 Council on Foreign Relations document
called "Building a North American Community" bragged that its recommendations are "explicitly linked" to SPP. The Council on Foreign Relations document called for establishing a "common perimeter" around North America by 2010, the development of a biometric North American border pass, and the adoption of a North American tariff."

Further CFR documents have revealed that the group wants to "establish private bodies that would meet regularly or annually to buttress North American relationships, along the lines of the Bilderberg conferences." (Bilderberg are the power brokers behind the formation of the EU and the single European currency)

During the recent secretive SPP meeting an advisory Council created last year known as the North American Competitiveness Council met on issues including border regulation and competitiveness in the automotive, transportation, manufacturing and services sectors. The council is expected to meet annually with security and prosperity ministers and will engage with senior government officials on an ongoing basis.

The most recent SPP meeting in Canada also saw the US army enforce a huge 25km security perimeter as well as cracking down on protests, barring media and shutting down public forums in the vicinity of the event.

Eighteen states have introduced resolutions calling on their federal representatives to halt work on the North American Union (they include Virginia and South Carolina). Three of these states (Idaho, Montana and Oklahoma) have passed their resolutions.
Oklahoma, which is in the path of the superhighway component of the North American Union passed their resolution in the Senate 97-0. (see Basic Search Form link - top left - type in SCR10)

This came after it was revealed that the Mayor of Oklahoma City, with the approval of 90 other officials, signed a document endorsing an economic and political integration of the U.S. with Canada and Mexico.

22 U.S. Congressmen, including NC's Virginia Foxx and Walter Jones, along with all three Republican Congressmen running for President, have signed on as co-sponsors of HCR40, which calls on the executive branch to end all work on the North American Union and the proposed superhighway.

Even the Sierra Club of Canada is sounding the alarm against the North American Union.

The standardization and centralization of policy into a North American Union framework is very real, a fact we personally came face to face with this week after our office received a letter from the Texas Workforce Commission demanding that we provide business information for the purposes of assigning a North American Industry Classification System (NAICS) code to our location.

Click for enlargements.

The NAICS website reveals that "The North American Industry Classification System has replaced the U.S. Standard Industrial Classification (SIC) system. NAICS will reshape the way we view our changing economy."

"NAICS was developed jointly by the U.S., Canada, and Mexico to provide new comparability in statistics about business activity across North America."

The fact that we received this letter and that businesses across America are being forced to submit census information for the purposes of registration in a North American database that includes Mexico and Canada is no "conspiracy theory," its another documented step on the road to full harmonization and integration.

The planned introduction of the Amero, a pan-American currency lambasted in the Globe piece as another conspiracy theory, is common knowledge amongst all financial analysts worth their salt. Steve Previs of Jefferies International talked about it on a CNBC segment in November last year.

Just last week, renowned money manager Stephen Jarislowsky told a parliamentary committee in Canada that "we have to really seriously start thinking of the model of a continental currency just like Europe," as he advocated the creation of a North American currency to replace the Canadian dollar, the U.S. dollar and the peso.

Robert Pastor, one of the architects of the plan for a regional government, has authored a book and speaks at confabs in front of governmental officials, promoting the adoption of the amero as a common monetary currency to replace the dollar and the peso.

Former Mexican President Vicente Fox himself admitted the plan for a North American "euro-dollar" currency during an appearance on Larry King Live recently.

The latest media attacks come on the back of a recent Boston Globe piece entitled The amero conspiracy, the latest in a long line of public relations stunts on behalf of the establishment to attempt to hoodwink Americans into thinking that the NAU is crackpot conspiracy fodder on a par with bigfoot, when in reality a plan for merging the Americas is on the record and its protagonists have long bragged about their goal to destroy U.S. sovereignty in pursuit of world government.

The ultimate goal, to bring together the Pan American Union, the Asian Union and the European Union into a structure of world government, is also often scoffed at by the media as another conspiracy theory, but the agenda to end U.S. sovereignty in the interests of centralizing global power is a concept that has been pushed by elitists for decades and their intentions to do so are on the record.

Here are just a handful of quotes from top power brokers attesting to that fact, as well as warnings from those who oppose it.

"In the next century, nations as we know it will be obsolete; all states will recognize a single, global authority. National sovereignty wasn't such a great idea after all."
Strobe Talbot, President Clinton's Deputy Secretary of State, as quoted in Time, July 20th, 1992.

"If instant world government, Charter review, and a greatly strengthened International Court do not provide the answers, what hope for progress is there? The answer will not satisfy those who seek simple solutions to complex problems, but it comes down essentially to this: The hope for the foreseeable lies, not in building up a few ambitious central institutions of universal membership and general jurisdiction as was envisaged at the end of the last war, but rather in the much more decentralized, disorderly and pragmatic process of inventing or adapting institutions of limited jurisdiction and selected membership to deal with specific problems on a case-by-case basis ... In short, the 'house of world order' will have to be built from the bottom up rather than f rom the top down. It will look like a great 'booming, buzzing confusion,' to use William James' famous description of reality, but an end run around national sovereignty, eroding it piece by piece, will accomplish much more than the old-fashioned frontal assault."
Richard N. Gardner, in Foreign Affairs (April 1974)

"Ultimately, our objective is to welcome the Soviet Union back into the world order. Perhaps the world order of the future will truly be a family of nations."
President George Bush Texas A&M University 1989

"There does exist and has existed for a generation, an international . . . network which operates, to some extent, in the way the radical right believes the Communists act. In fact, this network, which we may identify as the Round Table Groups, has no aversion to cooperating with the Communists, or any other groups and frequently does so. I know of the operations of this network because I have studied it for twenty years and was permitted for two years, in the early 1960s, to examine its papers and secret records. I have no aversion to it or to most of its aims and have, for much of my life, been close to it and to many of its instruments. I have objected, both in the past and recently, to a few of its policies . . . but in general my chief difference of opinion is that it wishes to remain unknown, and I believe its role in history is significant enough to be known."
Professor Carroll Quigley, in his book Tragedy and Hope, 1966.

"We are on the verge of a global transformation. All we need is the right major crisis and the nations will accept the New World Order."
-David Rockefeller

"Today, America would be outraged if U.N. troops entered Los Angeles to restore order. Tomorrow they will be grateful! This is especially true if they were told that there were an outside threat from beyond, whether real or promulgated, that threatened our very existence. It is then that all peoples of the world will plead to deliver them from this evil. The one thing every man fears is the unknown. When presented with this scenario, individual rights will be willingly relinquished for the guarantee of their well-being granted to them by the World Government."
Dr. Henry Kissinger, Bilderberger Conference, Evians, France, 1991

"The Trilateral Commission is intended to be the vehicle for multinational consolidation of the commercial and banking interests by seizing control of the political government of the United States. The Trilateral Commission represents a skillful, coordinated effort to seize control and consolidate the four centers of power political, monetary, intellectual and ecclesiastical. What the Trilateral Commission intends is to create a worldwide economic power superior to the political governments of the nationstates involved. As managers and creators of the system, they will rule the future."
U.S. Senator Barry Goldwater in his 1979 book: With No Apologies.

Every time the agenda for full political and economic integration is advanced one step further, whether by treaties, lawfully binding agreements or rhetoric about what the next step will be, the establishment media steps in to scoff at such patently observable developments and label them "conspiracy theories".

We have previously seen articles in other major publications that exactly mirror each other in denying the existence of the NAU. The establishment media has promoted this consistent hoax and repeatedly engaged in mass public deception.

This tactic of smearing anyone who attempts to raise the issue and to categorically deny reality comes directly from those who are pushing the NAU.

The following is another presentation that pits the reality of the NAU agenda against the continued denial of its existence:

Many of the afore mentioned media hit pieces surmise that the entire subject of the North American Union is an urban myth that "feeds on American fear of immigration and globalization", just as Bush outlines above.

Other media hit pieces against the North American Union "conspiracy" seem to hinge on the notion that the globalists pushing for it don't call it a "union" but a "community". This is akin to when David Rockefeller dismissed the notion that he was aiding the creation of a global government, instead asserting only that he believed in "global governance". The media are basically ninnying about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

Whatever you want to call it - a plan for political, economic and social integration of the Americas is afoot and it is being rammed through with little or no say from Congress or the American people.

However, as the old saying goes, any kind of PR is good PR. The rapid move toward a North American Union is finally getting mainstream attention, as witnessed by the increased effort on behalf of the corporate media to deny its reality and implement the usual technique of branding it a myth or baseless conspiracy theory. As the attacks become more pronounced, the clearer it will become that the move toward a NAU is a very real prospect.

http://infowars.net/articles/december2007/031207NAU.htm

The Importance of Good News

2007-11-28T09:54:00.000+04:00

The Importance of Good News (Nov. 25, 2007)

Subject: any good news?
From: Nathalie
Date: Sun, November 25, 2007
To: Editor

My name is Nathalie.

I just happened on your website and loved Grey Bear's letter
and also was very impressed with the gatekeeper articles.

To keep our spirits up, we need to stay in the Light.

Do you ever have access to good news, or any triumphs/accomplishments by folks
who are working for the common good of humanity?

I would very much like to read such articles as well,
it would be so encouraging and just as enlightening,
don't you think?

Please keep up the good work, it is so vital.

Nathalie

***

Hi Nathalie,

Yes, there are a fair number of articles that show people can accomplish amazing things
when they put their mind to it.

You can read the Sylph pages and go through the Orgone Adventures
to see what others have done.

Also, ZS Livingstone and others show that it's not as dire as it appears.

You can also read what I have to say about those who promote Doom & Gloom.
You're absolutely right, we need to keep enthusiasm and good news in front of us
to prevent the dark side from winning the psychological game.
They work so hard to create a sense of despair and hopelessness.

TV is a Wasteland of negative emotions.

That's why I slam the Doom and Gloomers like Amitakh Stanford, or Steve Quayle,
or Sorcha Faal, or Zeta Talk, etc.

Their job is to engender despair and hopelessness,
while pretending to be bearers of hard truths.
They are working for hidden puppet masters.

All of the "news" we hear over radio or TV is CONTRIVED.

The recent fires this past weekend in Malibu California were set (arson),
just as the previous month's "wild fires" in southern California were set.
They put out baloney about "downed power lines" or a "camp fire"
caused the latest fires this weekend.

Give me a break!

The War on Terror is a contrived fabrication so they can give us Homeland Security,
Blackwater mercenaries, bloated Pentagon budgets,
the 'international' version of the FBI,
and excuses for Big Brother ID tracking
and taking away our constitutional guarantees.

"Al Queda" is a creation of the CIA. The invasion of Iraq was contrived.
The real Osama bin Laden has probably been dead for 4 years or more.

The Katrina Hurricane and the well publicized droughts are created by artificial means.

There is no Global Warming crisis and certainly no "Peak Oil" crisis.
They are all contrived hoaxes to scare us into submission
to draconian controls and police state rules.

We must remind ourselves that those who engender a sense of overpowering gloom
are working hat and glove with the other side.

Strength is derived from optimism and a will to overcome.
We must not allow defeatist to gain the upper hand. They are the enemy.

Sincerely,

Ken

What Benefits One Must Benefit All

2007-11-26T02:56:00.000+04:00

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http://www.majorityreportradio.blogspot.com/
(contains Sam Seder Show Open Mic blogger links)
----------------------------------------------------------------

1. The money consciousness is an attitude of mind; it is the open door to the arteries of commerce. It is the receptive attitude. Desire is the attractive force which sets the current in motion and fear is the great obstacle by which the current is stopped or completely reversed, turned away from us.

2. Fear is just the opposite from money consciousness; it is poverty consciousness, and as the law is unchangeable we get exactly what we give; if we fear we get what we feared. Money weaves itself into the entire fabric of our very existence; it engages the best thought of the best minds.

3. We make money by making friends, and we enlarge our circle of friends by making money for them, by helping them, by being of service to them. The first law of success then is service, and this in turn is built on integrity and justice. The man who at least is not fair in his intention is simply ignorant; he has missed the fundamental law of all exchange; he is impossible; he will lose surely and certainly; he may not know it; he may think he is winning, but he is doomed to certain defeat. He cannot cheat the Infinite. The law of compensation will demand of him an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.

4. The forces of life are volatile; they are composed of our thoughts and ideals and these in turn are molded into form; our problem is to keep an open mind, to constantly reach out for the new, to recognize opportunity, to be interested in the race rather than the goal, for the pleasure is in the pursuit rather than the possession.

5. You can make a money magnet of yourself, but to do so you must first consider how you can make money for other people. If you have the necessary insight to perceive and utilize opportunities and favorable conditions and recognize values, you can put yourself in position to take advantage of them, but your greatest success will come as you are enabled to assist others. What benefits one must benefit all.

6. A generous thought is filled with strength and vitality, a selfish thought contains the germs of dissolution; it will disintegrate and pass away. Great financiers are simply channels for the distribution of wealth; enormous amounts come and go, but it would be as dangerous to stop the outgo as the income; both ends must remain open; and so our greatest success will come as we recognize that it is just as essential to give as to get.

7. If we recognize the Omnipotent power that is the source of all supply we will adjust our consciousness to this supply in such a way that it will constantly attract all that is necessary to itself and we shall find that the more we give the more we get. Giving in this sense implies service. The banker gives his money, the merchant gives his goods, the author gives his thought, the workman gives his skill; all have something to give, but the more they can give, the more they get, and the more they get the more they are enabled to give.

8. The financier gets much because he gives much; he thinks; he is seldom a man that lets anyone else do his thinking for him; he wants to know how results are to be secured; you must show him; when you can do this he will furnish the means by which hundreds or thousands may profit, and in proportion as they are successful will he be successful. Morgan, Rockefeller, Carnegie and others did not get rich because they lost money for other people; on the contrary, it is because they made money for other people that they became the wealthiest men in the wealthiest country on the globe.

9. The average person is entirely innocent of any deep thinking; he accepts the ideas of others, and repeats them, in very much the same way as a parrot; this is readily seen when we understand the method which is used to form public opinion, and this docile attitude on the part of a large majority who seem perfectly willing to let a few persons do all their thinking for them is what enables a few men in a great many countries to usurp all the avenues of power and hold the millions in subjection. Creative thinking requires attention.

10. The power of attention is called concentration; this power is directed by the will; for this reason we must refuse to concentrate or think of anything except the things we desire. Many are constantly concentrating upon sorrow, loss and discord of every kind; as thought is creative it necessarily follows that this concentration inevitable leads to more loss, more sorrow and more discord. How could it be otherwise? On the other hand, when we meet with success, gain, or any other desirable condition, we naturally concentrate upon the effects of these things and thereby create more, and so it follows that much leads to more.

http://www.psitek.net/pages/PsiTekTMKS47.html

(...from the book, "The Master Key System," by Charles Haanel, 1917.)

Hi Alice. :)

Greetings, citizens of Sederville. :o)

Have you heard the New Westerns?

The Advancing Woman

2007-11-17T21:00:00.000+04:00

The Battle of Ideas

2007-10-21T23:19:00.000+04:00

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The real battle of life is one of ideas;
it is being fought out by the few against the many;

on the one side is the constructive and creative thought,

on the other side the destructive and negative thought;

the creative thought is dominated by an ideal,
the passive thought is dominated by appearances.

On both sides are men of science,
men of letters, and men of affairs.

On the creative side are men who spend their time in laboratories,
or over microscopes and telescopes,
side by side with the men who dominate the commercial,
political, and scientific world;

on the negative side or men who spend their time investigating law and precedent, men who mistake theology for religion,
statesmen who mistake might for right,
and all the millions who seem to prefer precedent to progress,
who are eternally looking backward instead of forward,
who see only the world without, but know nothing of the world within.

In the last analysis there are but these two classes;
all men (And women.) will have to take their place
on one side or the other;
they will have to go forward, or go back;

There is no standing still in a world where all is motion. ...

-Charles Haanel-

Have you had your hugs anD rugs today?

Love.

2007-10-06T21:48:00.000+04:00

First We Take Manhattan

2007-10-06T10:16:00.001+04:00

Something Special Is Happening in Dubai

2007-09-24T20:58:00.000+04:00

This is a common observation from many first-time visitors to Dubai,
but it carries greater weight today for one simple reason:
Dubai is a city that means business.
It also has the figures to back up its tremendous economic feats.

GDP rose 263% between 1990 and 2003,
proof of Dubai’s status as the fastest-growing city on earth.
With a population that is expanding 5% annually
and the number of tourists projected to reach 15 million
by the end of the decade,
the city is well on its way to sustaining growth
for years to come.

But for His Highness Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid Al Maktoum,
United Arab Emirates (UAE) Vice President
and Prime Minister and Ruler of Dubai,
this is only the beginning.

Sheikh Mohammed announced the government’s bold vision
with his Dubai Strategic Plan 2015
and highlighted how Dubai will become
the city of the future.

The Strategic Plan for Dubai is based on five indicators:
1) Economic Development
2) Social Development
3) Infrastructure, Land and Environment
4) Security, Justice and Safety
5) Government Excellence

According to the Dubai Strategic Plan,
sustained economic development
is based on six vertical building blocks:
travel and tourism, financial services,
professional services,
transportation and logistics services,
trade and storage, and construction.

In addition to the six vertical building blocks,
the Dubai Strategic Plan 2015
highlights seven horizontal enablers:
human capital; productivity; science,
technology and innovation;
costs of doing business and living;
quality of life;
economic policy and institutional framework;
and laws and regulations.

The six vertical building blocks,
coupled with the seven horizontal enablers,
are evidence of the meticulous attention to detail
that Sheikh Mohammed and his government have shown
toward Dubai’s future.

Already recognized as the leading financial services hub
for the region,
and home to a premier aviation industry,
an ever-growing tourism sector
and a vibrant real estate market,
Dubai is set to cement its position
as an economic powerhouse
based on diverse and innovative revenue streams.

The implementation of this proposed strategic growth path
will drive GDP growth to 397 billion dirhams (US$108billion)
by 2015
and increase per capita GDP to US$44,000.

This approach will strengthen Dubai’s healthy economic mix
by ensuring a focus on key sectors
while further promoting diversification.

The development and advancement
of Dubai’s economy and infrastructure
play an important role
in its strategy for a brighter future.

But, as Sheikh Mohammed highlights
in the Dubai Strategic Plan 2015,
the future of Dubai is not only about
infrastructure and towers.
It is about people,
with a particular emphasis on social development
— a vital issue for Sheikh Mohammed.

Dubai’s government and leaders have embarked
on a positive, holistic plan for its future
with concrete goals within grasp.
Excellent governance set with strong
corporate responsibility
and social development
will truly make Dubai a city
where the future begins.

-

...from the July 23, 2007 edition of Forbes Magazine

(Click title link at top for complete Dubai article.)

The World Gets A Mulligan

2007-09-19T06:40:00.000+04:00

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The world just got a mulligan,...courtesy of Ben Bernanke.

...IMHO, ... with the first interest rate cut in 4 years in the U.S.
Half a percent. To 4.75%.

The first cut in over 4 years.

Now we just need more people to realize
it's an expanding Universe.

But, also,...
... we need honest, transparent government regulation within the financial markets worldwide,
as we unravel and sort out this financial derivative global speculative Ponzi scheme mess,...

We need legitimate economic experiments practiced throughout the world,
not quack creationist black magic hokum
such as supply-side economics, deregulation & neo-liberalism.

We need sane people in charge of helping to create a sane global society, which advocates social & economic justice & fairness.

We need the American politicians in office today, & the ones elected in 2008, to figure out a way of increasing Americans' wages & lowering Americans' expenses. And there are a few tax policies & funding experiments which could do it.

And, we need laws enacted that take away the incentives of the bad guys to keep doing whatever it is they do;...whether it be pollution surcharges &
other "nuisance" charges which they should pay
because they are essentially being "free riders" &
taking more than they're giving.

Things have got to start becoming more fair, with every single person paying their own fair share if they are able, if we're gonna function successfully as global citizens & grow as individuals.

And, there must be a global safety net
for the weakest among us.

It's time to stop blaming the victims.

Oh yeah, and let's get rid of that part where a corporation is considered a person;
and is therefore granted all the privileges that come with that,...;
...but then when they don't want to bear the repercussions for their bad behaviors,
they argue in court that they are not people &
therefore cannot be thrown in jail, etc...

Sure their companies will be fined, not them,
&
the shareholders of their company
will actually bear the cost,
...which might then,
come Christmastime,
...shame these corporate execs & shysters
into taking smaller million dollar bonuses
then they normally otherwise would have.

Yeah, right.
Anyway.

All the privileges & none of the responsibilities
of being a person.
A win-win situation for corporations.
Yeah, we gotta ditch that corporate personhood thing.

And let's once & for all
bury for good
this supply-side
economic baloney.

Oh yeah, I already mentioned that.

Anyway.

The world was given
a little extra time
to start working better together
as fellow citizens.

So, let's hope today
is the start of getting
this new ball rolling.

Ranting with love,

Sir Real

Sir Real's economic background:

Began college in 1985.
Graduated from the University of Arizona in 2003.
It took him 18 years to get a bachelor's degree in Economics.
He graduated with a 2.003 GPA.
And if hindsight were 20/20,...
he never would have attended college
to begin with.

He has spent his entire professional career as an unemployed economist. ;o)

Officially, and unofficially, he ain't an expert on shit.
He reads books on economics as a hobby.
His two favorite economists are Joseph Stiglitz & Paul Krugman.

He believes that scarcity is a myth
perpetrated on the masses
by the global elite.

He is currently reading Seth-dictated books by Jane Roberts
to figure out what Framework 2 is.

Love. Love. Love.

Have you had your hugs anD rugs today?

pink

2007-08-20T22:03:00.001+04:00

You Are the Creator of Your Own Reality...

2007-08-18T08:59:00.000+04:00

You are the creator of your own reality because you are the chooser of the thought right now.

Don’t be hard on yourself.

If you’re standing in a place
where you’ve been chopped off at the knees,
where you’ve been hit in the gut,
where you’re feeling awful, don’t feel bad.

Don’t beat up on yourself for not being able to choose
the best thought you’ve ever thought.

Just choose the best thought you can find from where you are.

In other words, just fork off gently
in the direction of what is important to you.

And before you know it, your path will get brighter and sweeter,
and brighter and sweeter.

And the people who watch you will say, “You know, you amaze me.
Things go well everywhere you go. Why is that so?”

And you say, “I’ve come to expect it.”

And many of them will say, “Agh.”

They don’t want to hear how you expect things to go well.

They’ll say, “Oh, that’s because you’re rich.
Oh, that’s because you have an entourage that travels with you.”

We promise you, no entourage can buck your current.

There is no one in the world who can prepare your path for you, you see.

You are all as rich as everyone else
because you all have the resources of the Universe
at your fingertips.

And when you take the time,
when you care enough to take the time to find the better-feeling thought, now, you’re moving toward something that will please you.

Every step you take, you are marching toward a manifestation.

And if you feel good while you’re stepping
—you are marching, marching, marching
toward things that are going to delight you
when they get there.

And if you are ornery, if you’re unhappy,
if you are frustrated, if you are blameful,
if you are angry, if you are hateful,
if you are revengeful, if you are fearful,
if you are depressed
—you are marching, marching, marching
toward things that are going to augment
that feeling of depression, of anger,
of frustration.

In other words,
the way you feel must net you more stuff
that feels like the way you feel.

The better it gets, the better it gets, the better it gets,
the better it gets, the better it gets, the better it gets,
...
the worse it gets, the worse it gets, the worse it gets,
the worse it gets, the worse it gets.

You cannot defy the Laws of the Universe—please give it up!

Stop trying to use your words and your action
for the stuff that attitude and mood, and vibration are to do.

In other words, mold yourself into place.

Do the vibrational work before you do the action work,
and the action work will be a fraction of what it has been before.

If you take the time to do the vibrational work first,
you won’t have to offer nearly as much action.

You’ll begin to discover that the things
that are important for you just unfold for you
because the Universe is at your fingertips.

The fairies of the Universe are there for you.

You are the center of an enormous entourage that means to please you.

And when you, through your magnificent deciphering of contrast,
give birth to a rocket of desire,
that rocket of desire is duly noted, understood,
and absolutely agreed with by all of the resources
of the Universe.

And now all you’ve got to do,
is to get in the vibrational compliance
with what you are asking for.

(Isn’t that nice to know?)

There are 3 steps to the Creative Process:

Step One, you don’t have to worry about;
contrast makes you take that step.

Contrast causes you to desire or focus, or prefer.

Step Two, not your work, anyway.

Source and all of the resources of Source answer your request.
That’s that vibrational alignment.
That’s that one point of vibrational relativity that happens instantaneously.

So, your only work is Step Three.

And Step Three is: Can I find a thought right now that feels a little better than the thought I’ve been thinking?

That’s all Step Three is.

Finding a thought that causes me to feel a vibration (or a feeling) of relief.

So, there is allowing of what I want, or disallowing of what I want.

There is allowing of what I want, or resisting what I want.

You are either practicing the art of allowing, or the art of resisting.

When you’re forking off toward things you want,
you’re practicing the art of allowing.

When you’re forking off to things you don’t want,
you’re practicing the art of resistance.

And every day, and every moment of your life experience
is a perfect reflection of how you’ve been forking. (Good.)

Abraham-Hicks

Why does Wall Street always get bailed out?

2007-08-18T03:07:00.000+04:00

Fortune
Why does Wall Street always get bailed out?
Friday August 17, 9:39 am ET
By Allan Sloan, Fortune senior editor-at-large

Wall Street loves to talk about letting financial markets weed out the weak. But when the Street itself gets in trouble, it sticks out its little tin cup, asking for help. And gets it.
The subprime-mortgage-market meltdown is a classic example of the way small fry get devoured, but the whales of Wall Street get rescued. Here's the deal: People with crummy credit who took out mortgages are being allowed to fail in record numbers. The mortgage companies that made those loans are being allowed to fail.

The Street itself? It's bailout city. Even before the Fed made a symbolic half-point cut in the discount rate, it and other central banks from Switzerland to Singapore were trying to rescue the Street by injecting hundreds of billions of dollars into the financial markets and announcing they will put up more, if needed.

Hello? If you believe in markets - which I do - this rescue is especially galling, because Wall Street enabled this mess in the first place. How so? By happily sucking up hundreds of billions of dollars' worth of suspect mortgages from marginal U.S. borrowers-and begging mortgage makers to create more of them. The Street sliced and diced this financial toxic waste into a variety of esoteric securities, making a nice markup when it sold them and generating a continuing stream of profits when it made markets in them.

Somehow analysts at credit-rating agencies, looking at computerized scenarios rather than at the real world, decided that the bulk of the securities backed by these trashy loans could be rated triple-A.

It's really amazing: Most of the loans to substandard creditors borrowing 100% of the purchase price of homes they couldn't afford were rated the same as GE and the federal government. That makes no sense. But the money rolled in, and Wall Street-by which I mean the world's biggest and most important financial institutions-didn't care about the real world or ask any questions. It was too busy making money, and cashing bonus checks generated by subprime-mortgage profits.

But the world's central banks aren't letting the big guys fail. Think of it as the Escape of the Enablers. The reason this is happening, of course, is the same reason that the Fed orchestrated a bailout of the infamous Long-Term Capital Management hedge fund a decade ago-and about 20 years ago didn't close some of the nation's biggest banks, even though they were effectively insolvent because unrealized losses had wiped out their capital.

It's the "too big to fail" syndrome. In a world in which big players make incredibly large and complex deals with one another - that's what derivatives are - regulators don't dare let a big or important institution fail for fear that the collapse of one would lead to "cascading failures," and other institutions wouldn't be able to collect what the collapsed institution owed them.

The Fed's job, you see, isn't to protect you and me and our retirement portfolios, or even many of the nation's largest companies and biggest employers. The Fed's job is to protect the financial system. That's why it's trying to rescue the gigantic subprime enablers while letting borrowers and mortgage companies go under.

Your collapse or mine wouldn't bother Fed chairman Ben Bernanke or the world's other central bankers. But if, say, a big German institution loaded to the eyeballs with subprime securities croaked, Bernanke and his fellow central bankers would care a lot.

Sure, we know that Ben and the boys will always bail out the biggies. And none of us - I think, anyway - wants the world's financial system to implode. But I'd feel a lot better if the Street had to pay a serious price to its rescuers--say, having to fork over a big equity stake and pay a loan-shark interest rate. That way taxpayers, who are picking up the tab for the rescue, would get paid bigtime for taking on bigtime risk.

After all, that's the Wall Street way.

Greenspan, Bush Errors Finally Home To Roost

2007-08-11T19:44:00.000+04:00

by Joseph Stiglitz ... (August 9th, 2007)

The pessimists who have long forecast that America's economy was in for trouble finally seem to be coming into their own.

Of course, there is no glee in seeing stock prices tumble as a result of soaring mortgage defaults. But it was largely predictable, as are the likely consequences for both the millions of Americans who will be facing financial distress
and the global economy.

The story goes back to the recession of 2001.

With the support of US Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan,
US President George W. Bush
pushed through a tax cut
designed to benefit the richest Americans
but not to lift the economy out of the recession
that followed the collapse of the Internet bubble.

Given that mistake,...
the Fed had little choice if it was to fulfill its mandate to maintain growth and employment:
it had to lower interest rates.

Usually, low interest rates lead firms to borrow more to invest more,
and greater indebtedness is matched by more productive assets.

But, given that overinvestment in the 1990s
was part of the problem underpinning the recession,
lower interest rates did not stimulate much investment.

The economy grew, but mainly because American families were persuaded to take on more debt, refinancing their mortgages and spending some of the proceeds.
And, as long as housing prices rose as a result of lower interest rates,
Americans could ignore their growing indebtedness.

In fact, even this did not
stimulate the economy enough.

To get more people to borrow more money,
credit standards were lowered,
fueling growth in so-called "subprime" mortgages.

Moreover, new products were invented, which lowered upfront payments,
making it easier for individuals to take bigger mortgages.

Some mortgages even had negative amortization:
payments did not cover the interest due,
so every month the debt grew more.

Fixed mortgages, with interest rates at six percent,
were replaced with variable-rate mortgages,
whose interest payments were tied to the lower short-term T-bill rates.

What were called "teaser rates"
allowed even lower payments
for the first few years:
...
they were teasers, because they played off the fact
that many borrowers were not financially sophisticated,
and didn't really understand what they were getting into.

Alan Greenspan egged them to pile on the risk by encouraging these variable-rate mortgages.

But did Greenspan really expect interest rates to remain permanently at one percent - a negative real interest rate?

Did he not think about what would happen to poor Americans with variable-rate mortgages if interest rates rose, as they almost surely would?

Of course, Greenspan's behavior meant that under his watch,
the economy performed better than it otherwise would have.

But it was only a matter of time before that performance became unsustainable.

Fortunately, most Americans did not follow Greenspan's advice to switch to variable-rate mortgages.

Even as short-term interest rates began to rise, the day of reckoning was postponed,
as new borrowers could obtain fixed-rate mortgages at interest rates that were not increasing.

Remarkably, as short-term interest rates rose,
medium- and long-term interest rates did not,
something that was referred to as a "conundrum."

One hypothesis is that foreign central banks that were accumulating trillions of dollars finally figured out that they were likely to be holding these reserves for years to come, and could afford to put at least some of the money
into medium-term US Treasury notes
yielding (initially) far higher returns than T-bills.

The housing price bubble eventually broke, and, with prices declining, some have discovered that their mortgages are larger than the value of their house.

Too many Americans built no cushion into their budgets,
and mortgage companies,
focusing on the fees generated by new mortgages,
did not encourage them to do so.

Just as the collapse of the real estate bubble was predictable,
so are its consequences:
housing starts
and sales of existing homes
are down
...
and housing inventories
are up.

By some reckonings, more than two-thirds of the increase in output and employment over the past six years has been real estate-related,
reflecting both new housing and households borrowing against their homes to support a consumption binge.

The housing bubble induced Americans
to live beyond their means.

Net savings has been negative
for the past couple of years.

With this engine of growth
turned off,
it is hard to see
how the American economy
will not suffer from a slowdown.

There is an old adage about how people's mistakes
continue to live long after they are gone.

That is certainly true of Greenspan.

In Bush's case, we are beginning to bear the consequences
even before he has departed.

---

(The author is a Nobel laureate in economics.
Copyright: Project Syndicate, 2007.
www.project-syndicate.org.)

2007-07-30T11:31:00.001+04:00

Back to the Future?

2007-06-23T22:22:00.001+04:00

People!
...
and their
"I Love You"
video from 1967

(click link above)

They chose the name "People!" in order to stand in direct contrast to bands such as The Beatles, The Animals, The Monkees, The Turtles, and The Byrds. They were regarded as a popular band and played a variety of styles, including country rock, psychedelic rock, impressionistic avante garde, classical music, bluegrass, and a rock opera, which they had written. Some of their music has been compared to that of Iron Butterfly and Vanilla Fudge, though the comparison's are slight, almost to the point of non–existence. That was part of the problem. People! didn't sound like any other band and their music was too far ahead of its time, so they didn't fit into any niche and therefore "couldn't find the market". "Although they were never widely known, they made their mark in several areas. In 1967 they recorded one of the first MTV style rock videos and which debuted on the Dick Clark show, "American Bandstand".

In 1966 People! was first signed to Capitol Records, releasing their first single Organ Grinder/Riding High in 1967
and their first album, I Love You, in 1968.

Both the album and the single, I Love You (written by Chris White and originally released by The Zombies in 1965), appeared on the charts, the single making the US Top 10. Commercially, the album did fairly well. The hit-single "I Love You" sold over one million copies, and managed to reach #1 status in some countries, such as Japan, Israel, Australia, Italy, and South Africa. In the USA, the single was on Billboard Magazine's top-twenty list for ten weeks, peaking at #7 on 17 June 1968. It had sold more than enough copies to have reached number #1 but...
(more)

And 40 years later, ...
you could CLICK HERE
and hear Sarah Silverman's updated song,
... called "I Love You More."

Kansas, I don't think we're in Toto, anymore.

Hippie Talk

2007-06-23T22:21:00.001+04:00

What Did The Hippies Want?

We wanted intimacy--not a neighborhood where you didn't know anyone on the block, or you competed, kept up with the Joneses.

A hunter-gatherer or early agricultural community meant that people lived, worked and sought deeper contact with the holy spirit as a group, and they all knew one another, from cradle to grave. I used to call my hippie friendships "a horizontal extended family," as opposed to the ancient tribal extended family, which was multi-generational, and therefore, vertical.

We wanted a culture which acknowledged the human body, not just for sex, but to hug each other, to be naked without shame, to revere the body with natural foods, beneficial exercise, herbs, baths, massage, deep understanding. This was not part of the culture from which we came.

We wanted a culture that thrived on gift-giving. We hitchhiked, shared our food and drugs, gave away our possessions. People who could afford to buy land invited others who could not to live there.

We opened free stores, free clinics, free kitchens, not just in the Haight, but everywhere we went. We wanted be living proof that God was taking care of us and therefore there was no need to hoard.

We wanted to live without the constraints of time. We wanted to wake up each day and decide what would be the most fun to do that day--or just find out as it went along. We wanted to go with the flow, follow our bliss, be here now. This was in complete opposition to the culture from which we came.

We wanted new ways to value one another, rather than by wealth, status, looks, achievements, machismo, as our culture of origin had taught us, and continues to teach us through the media. We wanted to value one another for being lovable and real.

We valued spiritual depth, which we referred to as "heavy." We admired one another for being happy. We admired those who offered selfless service or peaceful resolution of conflict.We wanted a spirituality that actually caused you to grow as a person, not one in which people attended religious gatherings for social status. We wanted to be guided by our own Inner Spirits, rather than by priests.

We thirsted for the spiritual awareness and grace we experienced on psychedelics, without psychedelics, or in addition to them. Many hippies would spent their last cent on a weekend workshop that promised to "change your life forever." That was how so many gurus found followers in those days.

We wanted to live in harmony with the earth, the plants and animals, the indigenous peoples of the earth, with each other, with ourselves. We were the fuel behind the rapid expansion of the environmental movement. We experimented with living arrangements that we thought would harmonize with nature. We sought out indigenous tribal elders as our teachers.

We wanted to make the things we wore and used with our hands, grow our food and medicine, feel all kinds of weather--all the experiences our modern urban lives had excluded in the name of convenience and comfort. We wanted to live on the road, have adventures, build things that hadn't been built before, and live in them.

We wanted to live our mythic selves, give ourselves names that resonated with our souls, dress in costumes that expressed our dreams, do daring deeds, dance as if no one was looking, decorate our homes with magical things, listen to music that took us out of ordinary reality into altered states of awareness.

We wanted to see life without violence. We wanted media that contained truth. Some of us risked our lives to find out what the government was doing and let the underground press know. We wanted to talk about things in print that we were not allowed to discuss in our culture of origin.

We wanted to live without stupid, arbitrary rules, either for ourselves or for our children. Some of our children, as adults today, say they wish we had been more protective of them, or offered more structure. We only knew what we endured, being as culturally different from our culture of origin as Chinese are from Italians, and punished for it, and wished to spare our children these experiences. However, some portion of kids raised by hippie parents grew up to be hippies themselves. At that point, one can say, a new culture was born and continues.

(Alicia Bay Laurel)

PROJECTION & our filtered realities

2007-06-23T22:16:00.000+04:00

When we look
at someone else
and observe their actions
and believe that we know
their motivations
and how they feel,
...
we are projecting.

We are assuming that we know
all there is to know
about the situation
that the other person is in.

We are assuming that whatever history of experience
they have personally had leading up to the present,
it is either insignificant, or, the same as our own.

We are assuming that
their action speaks for itself
as if every action
which a person takes
has a specific meaning
which never changes
no matter where that action
is taken, with whom it is taken,
or, under the circumstances
it is taken.

We are assuming
that the feelings,
or lack of feeling,
expressed by the other person
particularly relates
to the values we associate
with that feeling.

We believe that
we know the other person
as if they were ourselves.

We award them the honour
of our experience, traumas,
ability to perceive
and to express
--- or lack thereof,
and our obsessions
and compulsions.

We assume that
they operate under
the same expectations, needs,
and assumptions that we do.

That is a lot
of assumptions!

(more interesting stuff below)

Benefits of Self-Projection.

Dangers of Self-Projection.

Destructive Self-Projectors.

Constructive Self-Projectors.

Metaphor of the "Titanic".

Coping with Projection Perceptions.

We've Got A Home To Go To...

2007-06-23T22:15:00.000+04:00

...and It's Called Paradise

“We have reached the point in the cycle of evolution within the multiscreen cinema when a fantastic shift is taking place. The Third and Fourth Dimensions of consciousness are merging into the Fifth Dimension. It is like a ladder being pulled up until, eventually, the whole vortex/pyramid returns to Oneness. The structure which creates each of the dimensions is an energy “net” or “web” called a matrix. You might think of it as the steel structure of a building. The multiscreen cinema is a series of matrixes or energy grids interconnecting with each other. The whole “building” (vortex) is one matrix and so is each dimension, galaxy, solar system, universe, and planet within that overall structure. The human body is also a matrix and the energy lines of the body matrix provide the basis of the ancient healing art of acupuncture. Again, you could relate this matrix structure to those Russian dolls, one inside the other, with the biggest one encompassing all of them.

The matrix energy web sets the format and nature of each dimension, universe, galaxy, solar system and planet, and everything that exists within them. It is a gigantic thought form created by Oneness. It’s the movie screen, if you like. The matrix is the blueprint, the “computer” program, which creates and holds together this three-dimensional world and interconnects with all the other matrix levels. When a matrix changes, everything within it changes, and our matrix is changing…now! In fact they all are, on every level of the vortex and we are heading for a fantastic multidimensional galactic orgasm.”

(David Icke)

...??...

Their Opinion Matters Not At All

2007-06-23T22:13:00.000+04:00

-

Because others cannot vibrate in your experience,
they cannot affect the outcome of your experience.

They can hold their opinions,
but unless their opinion affects your opinion,
their opinion matters
not at all.

A million people could be pushing against you,
and it would not negatively affect you
unless you push back.

They are
affecting
what happens
in their
experience.

They are affecting their point of attraction,
...but it does not affect you
unless you push against them.

-Abraham-Hicks-

Have you had
your hugs anD rugs
today?

Woolytooth Not Extinct After All

2007-06-23T22:12:00.001+04:00

Thought to have been extinct (footage and all), the 90's hard-rockin' Tucson band, Woolytooth, was believed to have vanished over a decade ago. But, the band has suddenly resurfaced on MySpace, with some live songs intact. There is no time. www.myspace.com/woolytooth

Manipulating Harmonic Laws

2007-06-23T22:10:00.000+04:00

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"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)..

3 Things Would Transform the World For Better

2007-06-23T22:08:00.000+04:00

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One: as individuals, we step out of the fear of what other people think of us because that is the prison that most people live in. And once you're in the fear of what someone else thinks, you are not living YOUR life in YOUR truth; you are living someone else's version of what they think you should be. In other words, you're in the herd now. If we step out of the fear of what other people think, as individuals, and say, to use the title of one of my books, I Am Me, I Am Free, and if you don't like it, that's fine-you have a right not to like it-but this is me! At that point we cease to be a sheep. And if enough of us do it, we cease to be a herd of sheep.

Second: we allow everyone else to express their uniqueness, even though it differs from ours. You know, "What a crime; call the police; my goodness me, this person thinks different than me!" Once we do that, we cease to be a sheep dog for the rest of the herd. Just those two things alone, and this whole edifice of imposed power starts to crumble because the very basis of it is crumbling.

Third: the balance point, no one seeks to impose what they believe on anyone else, so all are respecting everyone's free will, so that my belief is not imposed on anyone else.

-David Icke-

Have you had your hugs anD rugs today?

Your Truth

2007-06-23T22:07:00.001+04:00

THE truth does not exist
as an objective reality.

Perspective creates perception,
and perception creates experience.
...
The experience that
perception creates for you
is what you call "truth."

Your truth is what
you actually experience.
...
...
Everything else is what
someone else has experienced
...and has told you about.

This has nothing
to do with you.

...from the book, "Home With God" by Neale Donald Walsch

...??...

Children Are Smiling and Going to School

2007-06-23T22:02:00.001+04:00

GUEST: I’ve heard about the secret government in health conspiracies and very powerful men that want to control resources and create a lot of evil for the human race. I’m a naturopath. I work with health, and I’m frustrated by the health cover-ups that this so-called secret government has caused. And I’m wanting good for my clients. I’m wanting a way for them to have health.

ABRAHAM: You raise a very good question. And we want to give you an answer that will leave you in a place of feeling relief.

Let’s say, just for the sake of this discussion, that it’s not just paranoid people picking up on a stream of thought and magnifying it. Let’s pretend that everything you heard is true.

As you project thought, that thought exists eternally, which means that every thought that you’ve ever thought exists. It also means that every thought that everyone else has ever thought exists—and by Law of Attraction those thoughts are coalescing. So there are literally rivers of thoughts that you can tap into by focusing upon something long enough that you find vibrational harmony with it.

You cannot protect yourself from something that you do not want because as you addressing this thing that you do not want—you are finding vibrational harmony with this thing that you do not want. And now that you have found vibrational harmony with it, it comes to you. And then you say, “See, they were right. That terrible reality that they talked about is accurate and I have proof of it.” And we say, “All you’ve proved is that you have the ability to find vibrational harmony with something you don’t want.”

Every thought that has ever been thought still exists. And so, as an individual, what you are really wanting to do is appreciate that it exists, so that from it you can get a basis of your own desire. And then, as you individually align with your basis of desire—then that’s the life that you live.

This free will, that means so much to you when you are getting your way—you would like to take away from those who are getting their way if their way does not agree with your way. Fortunately, you can never orchestrate that from your position. Many of you try. You get together and you say, “This is true evil. This is absolutely a wrong thing. Let’s get enough of us together that we can push against that.” And all you do as you get a bunch of you together to push against it is create more of it and make sure that you are more likely to be in vibrational harmony with it. We will put your mind at ease just a little bit by offering you one very clear statement. Your government is not that clever. You are giving them way too much credit.

Every feeling of victim, every feeling of paranoia, every feeling of vulnerability, that has been projected from the beginning of man’s experience here on this planet, is running like a river. And every now and again someone will tap into that stream and speak it as truth—and what they are speaking is their truth. What they are speaking is what they are finding vibrational harmony with. What they are speaking is an option that is certainly available to all of you.

Most of you are not aware of what the vibrations, that you are offering, are attracting back to you.” So, if you mean well, if you want well, but you are not getting well, and you don’t understand because nobody’s explained to you the correlation between what you are thinking and feeling and what you are getting—that’s a breeding ground for paranoia. Because then you say, “Well, I’m certainly not doing it to myself. Somebody else must be doing it to me.” And as it shows up everywhere you go, it must be somebody really, really good, somebody who has spies and networks and satellites. “How could I keep having these same negative experiences everywhere I go? I know I’m not doing it to me. So somebody else must be doing it. And if they’re this good, they must be really good. It must be government or other galaxies. It’s a huge conspiracy.”

And we say, It’s a self-perpetuated conspiracy. It’s you hooking into victimhood or into the vulnerability and holding yourself apart from Well-being, and then blaming somebody else because the Well-being doesn’t come to you. Law of Attraction says Well-being can’t come to you when you’re so aware that you are standing over here where you don’t want to be. So you blame your plight on your mother or on the government or on some evil conspiracy, and we say, All you need to do is just relax and lighten up and let your Energy raise, and Well-being will come back to you. And then, who do you give that credit to?

When Well-being happens, why aren’t there any “giant conspiracies of Well-being” out there? You never hear it, do you? “The government has secret things that are happening that are making things go well for me. Traffic lights are turning green and friends are calling me and dollars are flowing. There’s a conspiracy of health in our neighborhood. I look around and almost everyone I see is up and alive and well. Children are smiling and going to school. The traffic, for the most part, is going very well. Only a fraction of our traffic ever goes wrong. A conspiracy. A conspiracy.”

-Abraham-Hicks-