A tour du net, Saturday, June 3:

• Pat Boone:
  
  

  I'm not referring to the dreaded avian flu, the one we've been reading about that's transmitted from bird to bird, and possibly to some humans or other creatures. No, I'm talking about another affliction. This one is a mental, emotional and verbal malady that seems to incubate most often in the young – particularly those who have already exhibited tendencies toward rebellion, rejection of authority, resentments of various types, grievances, self-righteousness, self-importance, self-indulgence and (of course) impatience.
  
  This fever is transmitted quickly among impressionable and poorly informed young people who generally are looking for quick "fixes" to problems and who have often not learned yet that valuable possessions – like freedom, for example – cost dearly. In a majority of cases, the newly affected ones have been given almost everything that's important to them with little or no expenditure of their own, and therefore they naturally assume that's to be expected all life through. Therefore, they haven't developed any kind of immunity to the Ditsy Chicks Bird Flu. In fact, they often welcome it!
  
  Just in case you're not aware of this contagious ailment, let me describe the three main telltale symptoms. The first is usually an onset of anger and frustration, often disguised as humanitarianism, which is actually present in many cases.
  
  

  
  
  Dude, freedom means you're free to rebel.
  
  Deal with it.
  
  Oh- and all possessions are fleeting.
  
  
  
• Steven Seagal, who is evidently coming to Portland:
  
  

  (Portland Mercury): What can people expect from the Steven Seagal live show?
  
  Steven Seagal: As a Buddhist I don't really like to expect anything. We [of] the Buddhist path kind of consider that a recipe for disaster.

  
  
  
• Noah Levine, punk Dharma guy, coming to some fancy Breitenbush place in Oregon June 2-8. From Willamette Week:
  
  

  Levine says the events are also different because he tries to stay outside the business-driven mentality that has seen the cost of alternative spirituality rise out of reach for many of those who most need it. New Age is a booming industry, with yoga classes averaging $15 at such Portland studios as Yoga in the Pearl and weekend retreat prices shooting up as well—a meditation program at Watsonville, Calif.'s popular destination ashram, Mount Madonna Center, costs $678 with the privilege of private sleeping quarters. "There are people charging exorbitant amounts for these spiritual teachings that should be accessible to everyone," says Levine. "The majority of the teaching I do is by donation, to take it out of that consumer exclusivity." Apparently that conscientious approach to inclusivity can't keep the price down all the time: Aspiring rebel Buddhhists will have to cough up anywhere between $65 and $115, not including the cost of room and board, to get enlightened at Breitenbush.

  
  
  The Portland Buddhist festival's free.
  
  
• The Chrevolet Impala experiences the circle of life and death.
  
  

  The Impala "comes across as the best that the American companies can do," said Brian Moody, a road test editor at Edmunds. com, a Web site that offers buying advice to consumers. "In a vacuum, it's hard to find anything wrong with it. And then you drive the Camry and the Accord."
  
  The strength of those two cars is a reason Asian auto companies took a record 40 percent of the American market in May, when Detroit's market share fell to its second-lowest level in history, less than 53 percent...
  
  With more than two million Camrys on the road, the name "has become almost a household word," said Tom Libby, an industry analyst with J. D. Power & Associates.
  
  Yet, the Impala was an even bigger household name back when Toyota was barely a blip on the radar. Since 1958, the year after Toyota first sold cars here, Chevrolet has sold more than 14 million Impalas, making it one of the most recognizable cars in automotive history.
  
  But unlike Camry, which has been sold continuously in the United States since 1982, always aimed at the family market, G.M. stopped selling the Impala for two stretches in the 1980's and 1990's. From its roots as a fast, chrome-laden car with six taillights, the Impala grew in size, then shrank and, in the eyes of critics, became generic.
  
  Like many other G.M. models, it is sold to rental car companies, government agencies and corporations, markets where Toyota generally does much less business. The Impala is also a police car, bought by, among others, the New York Police Department. About 20 percent of the Impalas go to so-called fleet sales, down from almost half last year (about 10 percent of Camrys are sold to fleets).
  
  Chevrolet is trying to veer away from the bulk sales and sell more to consumers. One goal with the new Impala, said its marketing manager, Mark A. Clawson, is to put features on the car that Toyota does not offer.

  
  
  
• The new asteroid crater found is quite cool:
  
  

  SCIENTISTS believe they have finally solved one of Earth's greatest mysteries: what caused the great extinction of life hundreds of millions of years ago.
  
  The answer was revealed yesterday when an American team announced it had discovered the world's biggest meteor crater almost two kilometres under the ice in Antarctica.
  
  They say a meteor almost 50 kilometres wide caused a 500-kilometre-wide crater deep under the Wilkes Land region of Antarctica, directly south of Australia.
  
  The massive explosion from the impact probably created the continent of Australia, forcing it to break away from the existing land mass.
  
  The incredible discovery caused huge excitement among Australian scientists last night. It could be the missing link in the geological formation of the continents. It would also answer why life on Earth was almost completely wiped out hundreds of millions of years ago.
  
  The meteor the size of Sydney struck 250 million years ago and must have been the biggest explosion ever seen on the planet, far bigger than the 10-kilometre-wide meteor which hit east of Mexico 65 million years ago, wiping out the dinosaurs.
  
  Ohio State University scientists who found the crater said the massive Antarctic crater could explain the global extinction in the Permian-Triassic period when all animal life on Earth died out, clearing the way for the dinosaurs.
  
  The massive impact probably broke up the ancient continent of Gondwanaland, pushing Australia out on its long drift north to its current position. The landmass that became India shot off first, while Africa and South America broke off later.
  
  "This Wilkes Land impact is much bigger than the impact that killed the dinosaurs, and probably would have caused catastrophic damage at the time," said Ralph von Frese, professor of geological sciences at Ohio State University.

  
  
  What will creationists say to that?
  
  
• And last, but not least, Robert Fisk has some unsettling points about Iraq:
  
  

  I remember clearly the first suspicions I had that murder most foul might be taking place in our name in Iraq. I was in the Baghdad mortuary, counting corpses, when one of the city's senior medical officials, an old friend, told me of his fears. "Everyone brings bodies here," he said. "But when the Americans bring bodies in, we are instructed that under no circumstances are we ever to do post-mortems. We were given to understand that this had already been done. Sometimes we'd get a piece of paper like this one with a body." And here the man handed me a U.S. military document showing with the hand-drawn outline of a man's body and the words "trauma wounds."
  
  What kind of trauma is now being experienced in Iraq? Just who is doing the mass killing? Who is dumping so many bodies on garbage heaps? After Haditha, we are going to reshape our suspicions.

  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  

The Falun Gong post...

A few years ago I was treated to a pitch by members of Falun Gong, and was accompanied by a (neutral) Chinese professor of Chinese studies at a local university, as well as my wife, who helped translate some of the more bizarre claims of the pitch. Li Hongzi represented himself as a successor to the Buddha and Boddhisattvas, claimed in effect only he could profit from the teaching of Falun Gong, claimed that his method was "the best" of the 84,000 doors of Buddhism, and in general did the "I'm the leader of the cult" thing in a Chinese paradigm. This I all had translated to me, by folks who didn't have an axe to grind, one way or the other.

I had later done a bit of background work on my own, and the claims that "Falun Gong is a superior form of Buddhism" is kind of like saying "Buddhism is a superior form of Islam." From one source:

Falun (Law Wheel) and Falun Gong

Q: What does the Falun consist of?

A: The Falun is an intelligent being consisting of high-energy substances. It transforms Gong (cultivation energy) automatically and it does not exist in our dimension.

Q: What does the Falun look like?

A: It can only be said that the color of a Falun is golden yellow. This color does not exist in our dimension. The background color of the inner circle is a very bright red. The background of the outer circle is orange. There are two red-and-black Taichi (Yin-Yang) symbols, which belong to the Tao School. There are also two other red-and-blue Taichi symbols, which belong to the Great Pre-Taoism School. These are two different schools. The swastika symbol "" is golden yellow. People with Tianmu (third eye) of a lower level see the Falun rotate similar to an electric fan. If one can see it clearly, it is very beautiful and can inspire the practitioner to cultivate even harder and strive forward vigorously.

Q: Where is Falun located initially? Where is it located later?

A: I really only gave you one Falun. It is located at the lower abdomen, the same location where the Dan (energy cluster) we talked about is cultivated and kept. Its position does not change. Some people can see many Falun spinning. Those are used externally by my Fashen (law body) to adjust your body.

Q: Can Falun be developed through practice and cultivation? How many of them can be developed? Is there any difference between these and the one given by master?

A: Falun can be developed through practice and cultivation. As your energy potency continues to strengthen, more and more Falun will be developed. All Falun are the same. The only thing is that the Falun located at the lower abdomen area does not move around, because it is the root.

Q: How can one feel and observe the presence and rotation of the Falun?

A: There is no need to feel or observe it. Some people are very sensitive, and will feel the rotation of Falun. During the initial period after Falun is installed, you may feel a little unused to it being in your body, you may have abdominal pain, or feel like something is moving and have the sense of warmth, etc. After you have adapted to it, you will not have any sensation. But, people with supernormal capabilities can see it. It is just the same with the stomach; you do not feel the movement of your stomach.

Q: The direction in which the Falun rotates on the Falun emblem is not the same as the one on the student pass (referring to the first and second seminars). The Falun printed on the student pass for the seminar rotates counterclockwise. Why?

A: The goal is to give you something good. Its outward emission of energy adjusts everyone’s body, so it does not rotate clockwise. You can see it rotating.

Q: At what time does master install the Falun in the students?

A: We want to discuss this with all of you here. We have some students who have practiced many different practices. The difficulty lies in the fact that we have to get rid of all the messy and disorderly things that exist in the body, keeping the good and throwing away the bad. Therefore, this is an additional step. After that, Falun may be installed. According to the level of his cultivation, the size of Falun installed varies. Some have never practiced Qigong before. Through readjustment and with good inborn quality, some people may have their sicknesses eliminated in my class, leaving the level of Qi and entering into the state of "Milky White Body". Under those circumstances, Falun can also be installed. Many people have poor health. They are undergoing adjustments continuously. How can Falun be installed before the adjustments are completed? This is only a minority. Do not worry. I have already installed the Qiji (energy mechanism) that can form the Falun.

Q: How is the Falun carried?

A: It is not carried. I send out the Falun and install it in your lower abdomen. It is not in our physical dimension, but in a different one. If it were in this dimension, with the intestines that are inside of your lower abdomen, what would happen if it started to spin? It exists in another dimension and is in no conflict with this one.

Q: Will you continue to give out Falun in your next class?

A: You will get only one. Some people sense the rotation of many Falun. These are for external use, only for the purpose of adjusting your body. The biggest feature of our exercise is when energy is emitted, a string of Falun are being released. Therefore before you start to practice, you already have many Falun spinning in your body, adjusting your body. The Falun that I truly give to you is the one located in the lower abdomen.

(Read the whole bit here. I'm sure Theravadins will be surprised to know they have "supernormal abilities.")

What this has to do with The Four Noble Truths, or The Eightfold Path, or relying on one's self, or anything that Buddhists would recognize is beyond me.


So it was with a bit of surprise that I came across a bit of pro-Falun Gong propaganda over at getreligion.org, which uncritically takes The Epoch Times as a reliable source. (Incidentally, it's likely The Epoch Times connection that leads most Chinese I know to suspect that the incident over the Bush/Hu Jintao press conference was staged; the Bush folks they say simply can't be so incompetent as to not know who they were letting in to that press conference. I'm not so sure -they're not very competent.)

While I'm against thuggery of course, and I don't think the governments should rely on brutality to deal with spiritual fraudsters, I also think that there ought to be a basic fidelity to what people actually express when they express themselves, and Falun Gong has as much in common with Mahayana Buddhism as say, Bahai'ism does with Judaism.

Fair and Balanced Treatment of War Crimes

By now the progressive blogosphere is (rightly) aghast at the bald-faced smear of American troops who died for their country by Bill O'Reilly who appears to be a Nazi sympathizer with his recent remarks.

But a brief check of the web will tell you about Dachau, and what Americans did there to German soldiers captured.

Unfortunately for O'Reilly that's still a horrible comparison: gunning down helpless, innocent families and others simply cannot compare to a vengence killing of perpetrators of genocide and mass killing.

There will be from time to time, though, incidents in war when soldiers crack, and when things like this happen. Though it doesn't excuse such war crimes, we have to understand that an inevitable consequence of war is the misuse of war powers, but that is precisely why such misuses must be investigated and prosecuted when found, the Bill O'Reillys of the world notwithstanding.

The Great Matter of Life and Death...

I used this phrase recently to describe our family interaction...here is one reason why it's apt:

You as you are: buddha- nature. This does not mean that you have directly realized it, nor that you are living from an experience of All. It does mean that you have all the potential that is needed to directly awaken to this nature and to actualize it in your very life. Yasutani Roshi says buddha-nature is of three kinds: fundamental- cause buddha-nature (shoin bussho), or the fact of already being buddha-nature; capacity-to-realize buddhanature (ryoin bussho), or you must realize it for it to be of any worth; and cooperating-cause buddha-nature (enin bussho). The cooperating-cause already exists inside of us, whether it be a teacher, the sound of bamboo, the sangha—all together, everything is already cooperating for us to realize this fundamental nature.

Buddha-nature. So what is the essence of all life? It is indeed tricky to speak of the basic characteristics of buddha- nature because when we do, we immediately make it into a thing. Nevertheless, it is important to speak of it. The fundamental characteristic of buddha-nature is sunyata (Sanskrit), often translated as emptiness, or, more accurately, empty of all independent existence. All is empty of any fixed condition. Yasutani Roshi says, “Everything is in a temporary state as defined by particular causes and conditions.” (This leads us directly to the aspects of cause and effect and the formation of the ego-centered self, which we will explore later.)

We often speak of this characteristic as impermanence or change. Everything is in a condition of not lasting, of having no fixed identity, although appearing right now as a brunette, an oak table, a blue jay, you and me, or whatever. All is without a fixed-reference point. All is without a fixed “I” which is in constant birth and death according to conditions. Practice is to see through this fixed sense of self. We say: Empty out the subject; empty out the object; empty out the emptying out. This is the Great Matter of Life and Death which we penetrate.

You can see this transcendance of subject and object moment to moment if you have a child, and it is indeed humbling. It's why I have to respectfully disagree with some folks who think "entering the stream" is for avowed monks only.

Scary article on the aftermath of Enron

in Salon.

Alas, the root causes of Enron are still with us, and getting worse. I am pained to report that in the breeding grounds of corporate crime, the teeming Gold Coast mansions and sweaty polo clubs, little has changed in the executive attitudes that brought us Enron. If Ken and Jeff are the incorrigible Billy Halop bullies in this melodrama, we -- society as a whole, my friends -- must share the blame. Did we not hear their yelps of greed? Their defensive blame shifting? The keening of their flacks?

How easily we forget the root causes: the pampering, the permissiveness. How easily we forget the SEC's granting Enron, in 1997, the exemption from the Investment Company Act that it needed in order to structure its operations to shift debt off the books. The media functioned as an unofficial pep squad, and the earliest warnings were sounded not by reporters but by "short-sellers," market players who bet that stock prices will decline.

Shorts are always on the lookout for a good stock fraud, which makes them almost universally despised, particularly by corporations with something to hide. Short-sellers were the earliest naysayers concerning Enron, with short-seller James Chanos acknowledged to be a source for Bethany McLean's early groundbreaking article in Fortune. Chanos saw to it that the bad news about Enron traveled fast -- and, in the process, he made a few bucks. As both the bearers and profiteers of bad news, short-sellers are hardly winning popularity contests. They were already ancient, reliable scapegoats by the crash of 1929, and remain so today.

But the traditional hatred of shorts was forgotten after the Enron scandal broke in late 2001. During that brief window of time, Congress and the SEC were stirred to action, and even the somnolent financial press became enlivened. The details of Enron (basically a lot of crooked accounting with some insider trading thrown in) were murky, and that proved propitious when it came time for the putative guardians of our financial markets to come up with "solutions."...

What Sarbox has never done, and never could do, is change corporate behavior, anymore than you can stop a car thief by taping a Do Not Steal sign to the dashboard. Remember that CEOs who are going to pull off a mega-scam like Enron, or even a routine stock swindle or accounting trick, are not going to be deterred by a law book or someone with a stinkin' badge. They have a more pragmatic view of corporate responsibility -- they feel they don't have any. If you listened closely, you heard the Enron management credo at the trial. It is the same philosophy that has been employed by second-story men and Mafia bosses since the dawn of the first proto-scam. It can be summed up as, "If it's broke, it ain't broke, and anyway it ain't my fault."

Under this credo, if a company has some kind of difficulty, whether it be a massive fib on its balance sheet or a simple tendency to lose money, the problem is not the company, and heaven forbid not the CEO or the board of directors. It is them. The objects of blame can be short-sellers, "Wall Street," journalists, independent analysts (another post-Enron Good Thing we are supposed to cherish) or sometimes all of the above working in cahoots. Lay and Skilling personally acknowledged the popularity of this latest corporate rage at their trial, when they testified that Enron was a victim of evil short-sellers working in league with journalists, unfairly driving down the share price.

The them defense is gaining currency, bringing the paranoia of UFO-ers and four-shooters-at-Dealey-Plaza wackadoos into the boardrooms and business news programs of America. The media, instead of scoffing at such rubbish -- there are notable exceptions -- either ignores them or actively promotes their cause.

First of all, these crooks create an opportunity for short-sellers, whose work (with a disclosure or two therein) is entirely legit. I have invested in the Grizzly Fund, a short fund, for example.

It went down yesterday, but overall, it's been up.

A company for which I used to work used this "short sellers" excuse. In retrospect, I should go the SEC and complain, but it's been well over 7 years since I worked there, and likely the statute of limitations has expired on any corporate hanky-panky. Moreover, their CEO has since left, good riddance to him.

Read the rest of the article, if you have any idea that the mainstream media will tell you the full story on the rackets involved in "investing."

Sirota's right: Stossel is a two-bit propagandist

Via Huffington Post:

You may have noticed that Stossel is out hawking a book called "Myths, Lies, and Downright Stupidity" purporting to debunk those things. Instead, what we see is that Stossel is spewing them - and using his media platform as a megaphone of dishonesty. Stossel, in many ways, is exactly why I wrote my new book Hostile Takeover - to strip bare the opportunists, shills and half-wits who dominate our political debate and show them for what they really are: pathological liars.

Here's what I mean. According to the right-wing, Scaife-owned Pittsburgh Tribune-Review, Stossel appeared on ABC's "The View" to talk about his book's assertion that the minimum wage supposedly hurts low-income workers. The host was surprised that someone could make such a ludicrous claim. "Why does raising the minimum wage -- this one I don't get -- actually hurt poor people?," she asked Stossel. "I don't understand that one at all."

Stossel replied with a straight face: "The truth is that people on the margins lose jobs when minimum wages go up. We used to have people washing windshields at gas stations. We don't anymore because of the minimum wage. There's no opportunity for kids, for entry-level workers."

This is simply looney tunes, as anybody who searches through this blog can verify.

There simply is no evidence that minimum wage laws hurt workers; in fact, the evidence is that it helps the economy, because these workers have the lowest marginal propensity to squirrel away money. They spend it, and stimulate the economy.

Two Must Reads from Alternet, surrounding a Chomsky

One is an excerpt of Michelle Goldberg's book on the religious right, subtly titled, "Tyranny of the Christian Right":

If current trends continue, we will see ever-increasing division and acrimony in our politics. That's partly because, as Christian nationalism spreads, secularism is spreading as well, while moderate Christianity is in decline. According to the City University of New York Graduate Center's comprehensive American religious identification survey, the percentage of Americans who identify as Christians has actually fallen in recent years, from 86 percent in 1990 to 77 percent in 2001. The survey found that the largest growth, in both absolute and percentage terms, was among those who don't subscribe to any religion. Their numbers more than doubled, from 14.3 million in 1990, when they constituted 8 percent of the population, to 29.4 million in 2001, when they made up 14 percent.

"The top three 'gainers' in America's vast religious marketplace appear to be Evangelical Christians, those describing themselves as Non-Denominational Christians and those who profess no religion," the survey found. (The percentage of other religious minorities remained small, totaling less than 4 percent of the population).

This is a recipe for polarization. As Christian nationalism becomes more militant, secularists and religious minorities will mobilize in opposition, ratcheting up the hostility. Thus we're likely to see a shrinking middle ground, with both camps increasingly viewing each other across a chasm of mutual incomprehension and contempt.

...There's still a long way, though, between this damaged version of democracy and real theocracy. Tremendous crises would have to shred what's left of the American consensus before religious fascism becomes a possibility. That means that secularists and liberals shouldn't get hysterical, but they also shouldn't be complacent...

It would take a national disaster, or several of them, for all these bulwarks to crumble and for Christian nationalists to truly "take the land," as Michael Farris, president of the evangelical Patrick Henry College, put it. Historically, totalitarian movements have been able to seize state power only when existing authorities prove unable to deal with catastrophic challenges -- economic meltdown, security failures, military defeat -- and people lose their faith in the legitimacy of the system.

Such calamities are certainly conceivable in America -- Hurricane Katrina's aftermath offered a terrifying glimpse of how quickly order can collapse. If terrorists successfully strike again, we'd probably see significant curtailment of liberal dissenters' free speech rights, coupled with mounting right-wing belligerence, both religious and secular.

The breakdown in the system could also be subtler. Many experts have warned that America's debt is unsustainable and that economic crisis could be on the horizon. If there is a hard landing -- due to an oil shock, a burst housing bubble, a sharp decline in the value of the dollar, or some other crisis -- interest rates would shoot up, leaving many people unable to pay their floating-rate mortgages and credit card bills. Repossessions and bankruptcies would follow. The resulting anger could fuel radical populist movements of either the left or the right -- more likely the right, since it has a far stronger ideological infrastructure in place in most of America.

Military disaster may also exacerbate such disaffection. America's war in Iraq seems nearly certain to come to an ignominious end. The real victims of failure there will be Iraqi, but many Americans will feel embittered, humiliated and sympathetic to the stab-in-the-back rhetoric peddled by the right to explain how Bush's venture has gone so horribly wrong. It was the defeat in World War I, after all, that created the conditions for fascism to grow in Germany.

It's not for nothing that I would bet that these folks would, if they were to get into power, manage the economy almost as well as Mao did during the "Great Leap Forward."

It's really all you have to know about long-term investment trends: the Republicans have created a monster that says nothing but the US is an investment risk.

Thanks in part to these folks electing the current government, we have this dark picture as described by Noam Chomsky:

The selection of issues that should rank high on the agenda of concern for human welfare and rights is, naturally, a subjective matter. But there are a few choices that seem unavoidable, because they bear so directly on the prospects for decent survival. Among them are at least these three: nuclear war, environmental disaster, and the fact that the government of the world's leading power is acting in ways that increase the likelihood of these catastrophes. It is important to stress the government, because the population, not surprisingly, does not agree.

That brings up a fourth issue that should deeply concern Americans, and the world: the sharp divide between public opinion and public policy, one of the reasons for the fear, which cannot casually be put aside, that, as Gar Alperowitz puts it in America Beyond Capitalism, "the American 'system' as a whole is in real trouble - that it is heading in a direction that spells the end of its historic values [of] equality, liberty, and meaningful democracy."

The "system" is coming to have some of the features of failed states, to adopt a currently fashionable notion that is conventionally applied to states regarded as potential threats to our security (like Iraq) or as needing our intervention to rescue the population from severe internal threats (like Haiti). Though the concept is recognized to be, according to the journal Foreign Affairs, "frustratingly imprecise," some of the primary characteristics of failed states can be identified. One is their inability or unwillingness to protect their citizens from violence and perhaps even destruction. Another is their tendency to regard themselves as beyond the reach of domestic or international law, and hence free to carry out aggression and violence. And if they have democratic forms, they suffer from a serious "democratic deficit" that deprives their formal democratic institutions of real substance.

The other must read from Alternet is this bit on the crushing debt of our nation's younger members:

"Government no longer has our back," explains Tamara Draut, author of the recently published book Strapped, in an email. "Young adults today, working to get into the middle class -- they're being hit by a one-two punch: The economy no longer generates widespread opportunity, and our public policies haven't picked up any of the slack."

Her words ring uncomfortably true. As a "young adult" (age 29, thank you very much) from the generation Draut is covering, I've watched more than a few college-grad friends struggle to pay off their towering school loans and credit card debt -- usually on "creative sector" annual salaries ranging from $25K to $40K (while attempting to thrive in notoriously overpriced cities such as New York, Boston and San Francisco).

According to Strapped, Gen X-ers have it much worse than our Baby Boomer parents, because while typical earnings for college grads have stayed the same for three decades, the costs of housing, education and health care have grown exponentially -- much faster than inflation.

The grim financial situation many young folks are now facing is part of a broad governmental failure to regulate the rising costs of higher education, to boost the minimum wage to a livable wage, and to create a sufficient number of full-time jobs -- with benefits -- to ensure that America's massive twenty- and thirty-something work force is healthy and paid well enough to provide for their families.

I would hasten to add, though, if younger folks voted like elder folks, government would pamper to them every bit as much.

Is there any better sell signal than "The economy is fundamentally sound?"

Evidently John Snow was pushed out because he wasn't saying the economy was doing well very often.

And the "official story" was that he, er, uh...did a good job?

By many metrics, Snow's three-year term at Treasury should be rated a success.
Since he joined Treasury in February 2003, the economy has been on steady footing, averaging about a 3.7% growth rate in gross domestic product over that time.
In addition, Snow never faced a dramatic standoff with currency markets, with the dollar remaining fairly constant after a sharp run up in the Clinton years and a decline in the first two years of the Bush administration.

Check the Euro lately, dudes?

Karen Armstrong: right and wrong.....

In Salon today, Karen is right when she quotes Confucius:

His disciples asked him, "What is the single thread that runs through all your teaching and pulls it all together?" And Confucius said, "Look into your own heart. Discover what it is that gives you pain. And then refuse to inflict that pain on anybody else." His disciples also asked, "Master, which one of your teachings can we put into practice every day?" And Confucius said, "Do not do to others as you would not have them do to you." The Buddha had his version of the Golden Rule. Jesus taught it much later. And Rabbi Hillel, the older contemporary of Jesus, said the Golden Rule was the essence of Judaism.

Wrong when she considers the roots of fundamentalism:

And Saddam Hussein, a secularist supported by us in the West for 10 years, even when he gassed the Kurds. We supported him because he was a secularist. If people are resistant to secularism in Iraq now, it's because their most recent experience of it was Saddam. So this kind of chauvinism that says secularism is right, religion is all bunk -- this is one-sided and I think basically egotistic. People are saying my opinion is right and everybody else's is wrong. It gets you riled up. It gives you a sense of holy righteousness, where you feel frightfully pleased with yourself when you're sounding off, and you get a glorious buzz about it. But I don't see this as helpful to humanity. And when you suppress religion and try and get rid of it, then it's likely to take unhealthy forms...

[F]undamentalism has developed in every single one of the major traditions as a response to secularism that has been dismissive or even cruel, and has attempted to wipe out religion. And if you try to repress it -- as happened in the Soviet Union -- there's now a huge religious revival in the Soviet Union, and some of it's not very healthy. It's like the suppression of the sexual instinct. If you repress the sexual instinct and try to tamp it down, it's likely to develop all kinds of perverse and twisted forms. And religion's the same.

It is not simply secularism per se, but rather the fact that oppression was used for a long period of time, as well as "ideology-ism."

If you raise people to believe that they live in a box, and cannot get out, and reward them and punish them to maintain this illusion, some- perhaps most- will act in non-productive ways based on maintaining and fostering this illusion.

A militant secularism or religious fundamentalism is just another head added to the one already owned.

Religion is hard work, whether it's a bonafide religion or a "philosophy." It is living out the Great Matter of Life and Death.

Miscellaneous things for today

• A truck accident in Kabul leads to violent demonstrations.
  
  
• Worth reading: the first chapter of "What to Eat," by Marion Nestle, which documents the subtle war supermarkets play for your mind.
  
  
• There's a "Spider-Man" burglar on the loose in Osaka.
  
  
• Lest we forget: The Vice-Chairman of the Texas Republican Party has had an association with radical anti-semitic elements:
  
  

  
  
  Barton also has ties to extremist elements. In his literature, Christian Reconstructionist authors and organizations are sometimes recommended. Reconstructionist activist Gary DeMar's book God And Government is suggested reading, and Reconstructionist-oriented groups such as the Plymouth Rock Foundation and the Providence Foundation are touted as resources.
  
  Perhaps most alarming, Barton also has had a relationship with the racist and anti-Semitic fringes of the far right. According to Skipp Porteous of the Massachusetts-based Institute for First Amendment Studies, Barton was listed in promotional literature as a "new and special speaker" at a 1991 summer retreat in Colorado sponsored by Scriptures for America, a far-right ministry headed by Pastor Pete Peters. Peters' organization, which is virulently anti-Semitic and racist, spreads hysteria about Jews and homosexuals and has been linked to neo-Nazi groups. (The organization distributes a booklet called Death Penalty For Homosexuals.)
  
  Peters' church is part of the racist "Christian Identity" movement. and three members of The Order, a violent neo-Nazi organization, formerly attended Peters' small congregation in LaPorte, Cole. After members of The Order murdered Denver radio talk show host Alan Berg in the mid 1980s, critics of Peters' ministry in Colorado charged that his hate-filled sermons had spurred the assassination.

  
  
  Speaking of Barton, Walt Starr has the canonical list of religious-right made-up quotes.
  
  
  
• The world's largest Buddhist monument was not destroyed in the recent huge earthquake in Java, but a huge 1000 year old Hindu temple complex was reduced to rubble.
  
  
• Dog bites man: The New York Post doesn't like the new film on Tom DeLay...in imitation of Steve Colbert, they overlook DeLay's law-breaking to say, " Even inveterate DeLay haters will be nonplussed by the allegations that DeLay used corporate contributions to finance campaigns: Doesn't every politician above the level of student-council president do that? Democrats and Republicans alike routinely worm their way around soft-money rules."
  
  
• Tom at Blogmandu critiques Zaadz, yet another site/group I'd never heard of before...and Ken Wilber makes an appearance on that site, if you poke around a bit.
  
  
• Evidently Wiccan veterans still can't get Wiccan headstones.
  
  

"The Hitler with a song in his heart..."

Life imitates art, except even stranger. Coming on the heels of the success of the revival of "The Producers," the BBC informs us that Mongolia is producing a rock opera about Ghengis Khan, highlighting his "softer side."

The rock opera is one of a number of events marking 800 years since Mongolia's foundation.

Lyricist Dojpalem Ganzorig said he wanted to show the country's founder - viewed as a ruthless conqueror by much of the world - in a different light.

"He was a good husband, a good son, and a good friend and I wanted to show him that way," he said.

"Not as a tyrant or someone with a bad character which is how some people see him."

The production tells how Genghis Khan united the Mongol tribes and became their leader against the odds.

It combines operatic singing with a rock beat, although traditional Mongolian elements like throat-singing and the horse-head fiddle also feature.

Uh, millions of people were killed.

A check of Google has revealed nobody making any plans to make a musical about George W. Bush, however.

Why didn't Kerry do this earlier?

One could say he was "consulted" that this would be a distraction from his campaign, but an overwhelming counter-attack to the Swift Boat Liars would have been, uh, presidential. Well, better late than never.

Three decades after the Vietnam War and nearly two years after Mr. Kerry's failed presidential bid, most Americans have probably forgotten why it ever mattered whether he went to Cambodia or that the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth accused him of making it all up, saying he was dishonest and lacked patriotism.

But among those who were on the front lines of the 2004 campaign, the battle over Mr. Kerry's wartime service continues, out of the limelight but in some ways more heatedly — because unlike then, Mr. Kerry has fully engaged in the fight. Only those on Mr. Kerry's side, however, have gathered new evidence to support their case.

The Swift boat group continues to spend money on Washington consultants, according to public records, and last fall it gave $100,000 to a group that promptly sued Mr. Kerry, a Democratic senator from Massachusetts, for allegedly interfering with the release of a film that was critical of him...

Mr. Kerry, accused even by Democrats of failing to respond to the charges during the campaign, is now fighting back hard.

"They lied and lied and lied about everything," Mr. Kerry says in an interview in his Senate office. "How many lies do you get to tell before someone calls you a liar? How many times can you be exposed in America today?"

His supporters are compiling a dossier that they say will expose every one of the Swift boat group's charges as a lie and put to rest any question about Mr. Kerry's valor in combat. While it would be easy to see this as part of Mr. Kerry's exploration of another presidential run, his friends say the Swift boat charges struck at an experience so central to his identity that he would want to correct the record even if he were retiring from public life...

In February 2005, Mr. Kerry's supporters formed their own group, the Patriot Project, to defend veterans who take unpopular positions, particularly against the Iraq war. One of their first tasks was to visit newspaper editorial boards in defense of Representative John P. Murtha, a Pennsylvania Democrat and veteran whose military record has been attacked by Republicans and conservative blogs since he called for pulling the troops out of Iraq...

The veterans group, led by Mr. O'Neill, a former Swift boat commander who was recruited by the Nixon administration to debate Mr. Kerry on "The Dick Cavett Show" in 1971, began its campaign in early 2004 by criticizing Mr. Kerry's protests against the Vietnam War. But backed by Republican donors and consultants, they soon shifted to attack his greatest strength — his record as a military hero in a campaign against a president who never went to war.

If you've ever seen the episode of "The Dick Cavett Show," you'd know that O'Neill was demolished by Kerry on that show.

Still, it's unconscionable that a group of conservatives spent up to $30 Million to slander and libel somebody who put his ass on the line in a rotten war, and it's good to see that, even belatedly, the Swift Boat Liars are being shown for what they are.

(Some of the new evidence is shown in this Kos diary.)

Lawsuit in the making...

Evidently, it's not a conspiracy; department stores really do enact a prejudice against people of smaller stature.

Some faces: Where were their minds?

George W. Bush after saying he regretted saying "Bring it on," Vietnamese Buddhist master Thich Nhat Hanh, and Lyle Lewis Sanders, convicted child molester.

Memorial Day Weekend Backgrounder: WWI

I think that this Memorial Day Weekend it's a good idea to post a diary revisiting why this holiday was expanded to commemorate not just those who had fallen in the Civil War, but all wars. It's about the Industrial Revolution, the evolution of modern warfare, the rise of international movements, the failure of them at the expense of nationalism and isolationism, and the lessons for us.

Gwynne Dyer in his book "War: The Lethal Custom" notes that the US Civil War had ominous foreshadowing of WWI, with its use of the telegraph, the machine gun, and trenches. They should have seen it coming.

About WWI Dyer writes:

All the European armies had professional general staffs long before 1914, and they devoted their time to making elaborate plans on how the next war should be fought. (Indeed, their plans were a major factor in making it more likely that war would come.) They understood the effects of new weapons like the machine gun, which had seen use in small wars and "colonial wars." Even civilians like Hilaire Belloc knew that European troops would always beat the natives because

Whatever happens we have got
the Maxim gun and they have not.

But the generals had not done the crucial calculation, which was to multiply the width of the front that an individual infantryman could hold by the millions of men who would be available in a European War. The answer of course was that the armies could spread out to fill all space in a continuous front.

And so they did...

Dyer's book is especially cogent in its description of WWI, but to appease the copyright gods, let me summarize.

The net result of this method of war was the application of the modern industrial revolution in a perverse, reverse kind of way, where mass destruction of material, men, horses, farms, and land was carried out at horrendous rates.

Years' worth of production of shells were being consumed in battles that lasted days in which up to a million people were killed.

The US entered this war, and when our tanks and troops arrived and fought, Germany and the other Central Powers eventually collapsed. (Some of our troops were armed with shotguns, which was viewed every bit as much as a war crime as the use of poison gas in some other times and places. You see, you didn't need to aim when using a shotgun, and they were quite effective at relatively close ranges.)

After all the slaughter - it was at its time the most horrific slaughter Europe had ever known with about 15 million killed, and affected Brittish birth rates for the next generation- it was only fitting that Memorial Day, originally commemorating America's worst military slaughter, would be extended.

I know I could go on forever about this, and explore topics such as:

• How civil liberties were suppressed by the Wilson administration, leading the way for Bush's henchmen to make the arguments they do today to attack civil liberties,
• How the League of Nations was strangled in its crib because it had no enforcement authority (like the UN today does, if a member of the Security Council becomes a rogue state)
• How the screw-ups of WWI gave birth to Nazi Germany, Communism, and the colonization of Iraq and other countries in the Middle East.

Many many things about this war need to be told and re-told.

For more about WWI, Here is an excellent source.

Good to see the religious left speaking up...

This bit on the Institute for Religion and Democracy [sic] bears recording:

The Republican Party-aligned Institute on Religion and Democracy sent out a press release today attacking Jim Winkler, general secretary of the United Methodist Board of Church and Society, for a speech he gave in March of this year critical of President Bush. IRD spokesman Mark Tooley (also a writer for conservative activist David Horowitz's web site) claims that Winker confuses "partisan politics with the Gospel." The irony is too great to ignore. Not only is Tooley using the very same words that I've used in public criticism of IRD but the IRD press release attacking Winker was sent out by - wait for it - 2004 Bush campaign worker John Lomperis. Lomperis routinely sends out attack pieces against progressive Christians who don't conform to IRD's own partisan political agenda without disclosing his own partisan political activities. Don't be surprised. IRD is, after all, funded by some of the biggest financial backers of President Bush. Tooley, a former CIA employee, has called United Methodist bishops opposed to the Iraq war anti-American. Their goal, as I've stated before, is to silence mainline Christian voices critical of the conservative political policies advanced by this administration and their tactics include sowing division in mainline churches by making personal attacks against church leaders. Here they go again. IRD has proven time and time again that they'll say or do nearly anything to advance the Republican agenda. They'll even misrepresent the teachings of Jesus on issues of war, peace, justice and the environment if it furthers their agenda.

The best horse would run at the shadow of the whip...

That is my response to the trial balloon being raised in the NY Times about the possibility that the US may engage in direct talks with Iran...

WASHINGTON, May 26 — The Bush administration is beginning to debate whether to set aside a longstanding policy taboo and open direct talks with Iran, to help avert a crisis over Tehran's suspected nuclear weapons program, European officials and Americans close to the administration said Friday...

European leaders make no secret of their desire for the United States to join in the talks with Iran, if only to show that the Americans have gone the extra mile to avoid a confrontation that could spiral into a fight over sanctions or even military action.

But since the Iranian revolution of 1979 and the crisis over the seizure of American hostages in November that year, the United States has avoided direct talks with Iran. There were sporadic contacts during the war in Afghanistan, in the early stages of the Iraq war and in the days after the earthquake in Bam, Iran, at the end of 2003.

European officials say Ms. Rice has begun discussing the issue with top aides at the State Department. Her belief, they say, is that ultimately the matter will have to be addressed by the administration's national security officials, whether talks with Iran remain at an impasse or even if there is some progress...

Administration officials said President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld have opposed direct talks, even through informal back channels. As a result, many European officials say they doubt that a decision to talk is likely soon.

The prospect of direct talks between the United States and Iran is so politically delicate within the Bush administration that the officials who described the emerging debate would discuss it only after being granted anonymity...

State Department officials refused to talk about the issue, even anonymously. But over the last week, administration spokesmen have been careful not to rule out talks.

OK, so the title of this post is misleading, just as the title of the article is misleading.

What this really is is a policy dispute fissure opening between the State Department, run by Bush's tutor in foreign policy, and the neo-cons, which may or may not include Bush.

Still, I guess the title- borrowed from Bassho, applies to Rice, who evidently has learned that there are limits to being a suck-up to a screw-up, especially when the power to screw-up is immense.

Better late than never.
Update: Evidently, from this article on Iran, the Rice faction's argument is that this is the time to act with respect to direct talks on Iran.

Mr. Ahmadinejad is pursuing a risky strategy that could offer him a shot at long-term influence over the direction of the country — or ruin. He appears motivated at least in part by a recognition that relying on clerics to serve as the public face of the government has undermined the credibility of both, analysts here said.

The changing nature of Iran's domestic political landscape has potentially far-reaching implications for the United States. While Iran has adopted a confrontational approach toward the West, it has also signaled — however clumsily — a desire to mend relations. Though the content of Mr. Ahmadinejad's letter to President Bush was widely mocked here and in Washington for its religious focus and preachy tone, it played well to Iran's most conservative religious leaders. Analysts here said it represented both Mr. Ahmadinejad's independence and his position as a messenger for the system, and that the very act of reaching out was significant.

"If the U.S. had relations with Iran under the reform government, it would not have been a complete relationship," said Alireza Akhari, a retired general with the Revolutionary Guard and former deputy defense minister, referring to Mr. Khatami's administration. "But if there can be a détente now, that means the whole country is behind relations with the West."...

Mr. Ahmadinejad, who was elected last June, has adopted an ideologically flexible strategy. He has called for restoring the conservative values of the Islamic Revolution, yet at the same time has relaxed enforcement of strict Islamic social codes on the street. During the spring, when the warm weather sets in, young women are often harassed by the volunteer vigilantes known as the Basiji for their dress, but not this year. More music seems to be available in stores than in the past — small but telling changes, people here say.

No wonder the neocons are pissed; this guy Ahmadinejad- through sheer luck likely, not competence or genius- might rob the neocons of their war.

Sick. Torturing kids is sick.

By any commonsense standards, this is not "moralism."

Tennessee pastor Michael Pearl with his wife, Debi... claim to have raised five "whineless" children. At the core [of the book "To Train Up a Child"] is the notion that when parents "train" a child to obey early on, even before he or she is able to make conscious, or conscience-based, decisions, home will be a place of peace and harmony. Here, the term "train" is a reference to Proverbs 22:6: "Train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not depart from it."

Neither Pearl has advanced training in child development or a related field. "These truths," the tall, white-beaded Michael Pearl, 60, writes in his book, "are not new, deep insights from the professional world of research, [but] rather, the same principles the Amish use to train their stubborn mules, the same technique God uses to train his children."

As you may have guessed, the Amish do not train their mules by giving them "timeouts." Judge and her husband followed the Pearls' advice when trying to train their infant son Noah not to grab forbidden objects: "Switch their hand once and simultaneously say, 'No.' Remember, you are not disciplining, you are training. One spat with a little switch is enough," reads the book. "They will again pull back their hand and consider the relationship between the object, their desire, the command and the little reinforcing pain. It may take several times, but if you are consistent, they will learn to consistently obey, even in your absence."

...While the Pearls are well known in fundamentalist Christian circles, they were largely unknown to the secular world until March, when their discipline methods were tied to the death of a North Carolina boy and the alleged abuse of two of his siblings. The children's adoptive mother, Lynn Paddock, 45, a devotee of the Pearls' teachings, is currently behind bars. She is charged with first-degree murder in the death of 4-year-old Sean, who suffocated when wrapped tightly in blankets, reportedly to keep him from hopping out of bed. She is also charged with felony child abuse in connection with welts found on two of Sean's other five siblings. Nowhere in the Pearls' book do they advocate restraining with blankets; however, Sean's siblings had apparently been struck with a particular type of "rod" recommended by the Pearls: a length of quarter-inch plumbing supply line.

Paddock's attorney, Michael Reece, confirmed to Salon that Paddock owned "To Train Up a Child" and was a devotee of the Pearls' teachings. He maintains that Sean's death was accidental and that there's a difference between corporal punishment -- which he acknowledges may be "unpopular" -- and abuse. And actually, Paddock's connection to the Pearls may serve as part of Reece's defense of his client. "She's following a recognized philosophy even if it's not a mainstream one. The only one who advocates the PVC pipe is Pearl, " he says. "You can pull a switch off a tree all day long. There's no other reason to buy a PVC pipe -- that's clearly from him."

I've said it before and I'll say it again, if you, as an adult, with all your power don't know how to get your kid to behave without resorting to physical violence at the drop of a hat, there's a problem.

Tone that down! Stop calling them names...

Digby has THE reply to those who don't like "name calling" when calling someone a fascist is simply apt.

Occasionally, I get taken to the carpet for my angry tone. Occasionally, the person complaining is right, but most of the time they're not. And here's why.

The unprincipled fuck in the video at the link gets paid to compare a Vice President of the United States to a Nazi propagandist (and notice: no one tells him he's gone "too far," no one tries to interrupt what he's saying; this is considered reasonable discourse on Fox News). And why does this shithead get paid to do such a thing? It's not because he believes it. He knows he's spouting bullshit. No, this asshole gets paid to say things like that because he knows Gore's argument is good and he can't attack it on his merits.

Now, you may respond that calling this unprincipled fuck an "unprincipled fuck" simply perpetuates his sin or worse, that I don't have any way to attack his position on its merits.

You're 100% right about your first objection. It does perpetuate a pithecanthropic level of discourse for a very good reason: there is no possible way to avoid doing so without being a total fool. You think you can "politely engage" someone who compares an American vice-president who served his country honorably for 8 years - not to mention his previous services to America in government - to a Nazi? You can't, or rather, you shouldn't. Nor can you ignore it (although the vice-president should). The terms of engagement have been set by this slimeball - the rhetorical battle-field must always be level. There is no higher ground and attempts to claim it will lead to your destruction (see Daschle, Tom for details).

As for that second objection you could make, well I gotta admit it: you are right once again. I do have no way to attack his position on his merits, again for a very good reason. What he is discussing is not Gore's ideas or global climate change. No, what he's talking about, the only subject is, "how exactly comparable is Al Gore to Josef Goebbels" and I will not dignify this scumbag's comparison by explaining in measured, avuncular tones why such a comparison is, and I hesitate timidly before saying it, "unfortunate?" There is no way to attack his position on the merits because there is no merit to his position. And he knows it.

That came to me as I was watching a woman from a progressive organization against the Bill O'Reilly and Ron Luce. O'Reilly is complaining "why are you calling them fascists?" And of course Luce is claiming to speak for an entire generation of American young people, and that the only alternative to "young people being shaped by the culture" is to "be shaped by" his ideology.

And this is not the essence of the denial of personal freedom?

To be free is not to be bound. Or to be bound if one so chooses.

I prefer not to be. Certainly not to such ideologues.

"Moralism" and "Personal Responsibility"

I hadn't considered linking to a post on Evangelical Outpost for quite some time, but today's post is a good one illustrating the essence of the moral blindness and pitfalls of the religious right.

Joe Carter first of all sets up a straw-man definition of "moralist":

But if I claim to be a moralist you would not presume that I study morality, but think that, like Gladys Kravitz, I’m simply an intolerant, prudish, busybody.

Such is the degraded state of language (and morality) that “moralist” has become a synonym for judgementalism rather than being defined as a “teacher or student of morals and moral problems.” “Moralist” has joined terms like liberal, fundamentalist, and Puritan in the lepers’ colony of language. While some people choose to live with these labels, most others avoid them in order to prevent being infected by their malignant connotations.

Before we discard the term, though, we should question why we would abandon such a useful word when there are so few suitable alternatives. Admittedly, moral philosophers also study morals and moral problems. But unless one has a PhD and an office in the Ivory Tower, calling oneself a “philosopher” is considered pretentious. The same holds true for almost every other subject worthy of study. To say a person is a theologian, bioethicist, or economist implies they are “professionals” with the necessary degrees and vocational credentials. Unless we consider morality a subject unsuitable for “amateurs”, why would we want to toss aside “moralist?”

The obvious answer is that the term has become weighted down with too much baggage. Before we can reclaim the term...

Yourdictionary.com defines moralist as:

1. A teacher or student of morals and moral problems.

2. One who follows a system of moral principles.

3. One who is unduly concerned with the morals of others.

Now Carter may be referring to definition 3, above, and of course Carter is preaching to his own choir, but let's get really simple:

1. We are all teachers and students of moral problems.
2. When we are unduly concerned with the morals of others we are by definition ignoring our own morals, and therefore are poor teachers and students of moral problems.

It is not enough to say, as Carter does:

While pharisaism is indeed a form of moralism, not all moralism is pharisaical. After all, Jesus was as much of a moralist as his Pharisee critics. The difference is that he had a God-centered view of morality that was rooted in grace, while they had a man-centered view of moral behavior that was founded in legalism.

because that itself is every bit as much a form of legalism as any; it is the promotion of an ideology rather than a behavior as evidenced by one's own skill.


Better to focus on own's own practice, if one is a Buddhist.

If one were a Christian, undue concern with others' behavior would be the sin of pride.

(Update, thanks to comment by greensmile:) The issue is not one of rescuing the notion of moralists or moralism but of rescuing morality from a certain type of moralist.