Hadley *didn't* "misspeak" Nepal/Tibet mixup.

From my Kos diary today:

The dialog was ridiculed far and wide in the blogosphere, showing how inept Bush regime toadies were. Bush regime national security adviser Stephen Hadley "mixed up" Nepal and Tibet during an interview with George Stephanopolous on Sunday.

But was it a mistake?

Media Matters has a good reference:

GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS (host): Let's talk about the Olympics. President Carter came out against a boycott, but President Bush has been under tremendous pressure to stay away from the opening ceremonies. Prime Minister Gordon Brown of Britain won't go. Chancellor Angela Merkel of Germany won't go. The president has said his plans have not changed. Does that mean he'll attend the opening ceremonies, or not?

HADLEY: What the president said is that he will go to the Olympics. He wants to support our Olympic athletes -- the wonderful men and women who are going to participate.

STEPHANOPOULOS: So that means he'll go see events but he won't go to the opening ceremonies?

HADLEY: The president has said he is going to the Olympics. I think this whole issue --

STEPHANOPOULOS: How come you can't -- how come you don't want to answer the question?

HADLEY: This whole issue of opening ceremonies is a nonissue. I think it is a way of dodging what really needs to happen if you're concerned about Nepal.

STEPHANOPOULOS: So does that mean the president will be going to them?

HADLEY: The president is going to the Olympics. The president is going to -- thinks that the way to deal with the issue of Nepal is not by some -- a statement that you're not going to the opening ceremonies and say, "Therefore, I've checked the Nepal box."

STEPHANOPOULOS: But he may not go to the opening ceremonies, you just don't want to say it.

HADLEY: No, the president is going to the Olympics. What he's doing on Nepal is what we think the international community ought to be doing, which is approaching the Chinese privately through diplomatic channels, and sending a very firm message of concern for human rights, of concern for what's happening in Nepal, urging the Chinese government to understand that it is in their interest to reach out to representatives of the Dalai Lama, and to show while the whole world is watching China that they are determined to treat their citizens with dignity and respect.

Nepal? That's not Tibet, right?

Right.


Just like Iran is not Iraq...



Did ya know this?

Nepal's Maoists, poised to win national elections by a large margin, have called on King Gyanendra to abdicate "gracefully" rather than be removed.

Baburam Bhattarai, the Maoists' second-in-command, on Wednesday said: "The best thing for the king would be to bow out gracefully to pave the way for a democratic republic."

The statement came as the Maoists continued to further their lead in Thursday's elections to the 601-seat Constituent Assembly...

In an effort to establish a communist republic, the Maoist fight to take down the monarchy left at least 13,000 people dead.

The king took power in 2001 after eight members of the royal family were killed by Crown Prince Dipendra, who also shot himself.

Gyanendra then took absolute power in 2005 to fight the Maoists.
Some politicians have said Nepal should keep a monarch as a national symbol of neutrality between China and India.

Not many in the West know about this, but this is fodder for conspiracy theories amongst Indians and others who hail from this region.

Was Hadley's Nepal/Tibet mixup an attempt to indirectly blame China for the bad karma floating around in Nepal? Are they to blame? Are we by installing Gyanendra?

My interpretation is: I don't really know the answers to those questions, but I think Hadley was deliberately phallus-waving towards China in that region of the world, and certainly that is how China would have taken it.

A bit of a corrective about Tibet...

Since Danny Fisher has been strongly for advocating for the Dalai Lama's position in the recent Tibet brouhaha (e.g., here, here, here and here) I thought it would be good to add a bit of perspective to this, and so revising my diary from Kos a few days ago might help in this regard:

So the Dalai Lama's in the US, the Chinese are claiming that theocracy is over and done within Tibet, and they also don't like a recent resolution passed by the US House of Representatives which asked China to end its crackdown on protests in Tibet and to enter directly into a dialogue with the Dalai Lama.

Now, here's the rest of the story...

As well as being ridiculously well educated in communication theory and other aspects of electrical engineering, I like to follow popular science & history.

It's well known among earth scientists that the Himalayas started to get that way when the Indian subcontinent slammed into the rest of Asia a few million years ago (they are among the youngest, if not the youngest mountain range in the world.)

Now what that means is that the earth's crust has been pushing upward as these two massive land masses (and tectonic plates) keep pushing up against each other.

Which got me thinking...

I'd bet that means that hard to get mineral deposits - you have to go miles deep for some mines in the world - are probably not miles deep in some regions of the Himalayas.

And sure enough...

BEIJING: Chinese geologists have found deposits of copper, iron, lead and zinc ore along the Qinghai-Tibet Railroad route, the state news media said Thursday, adding that the area may also have petroleum potential.

China opened a railroad to Lhasa, the Tibetan capital, in 2006, paving the wave for an influx of Chinese investment in the poor remote region but also prompting warnings from some that such development could endanger the plateau's fragile environment and undermine Tibetan culture.

Already, mining firms have permanently booked cars on the train to ferry employees to Qinghai and Tibet, Chinese media reported last year.

Total possible reserves could equal more than 20 million tons of copper and 10 million tons of lead and zinc, the official Xinhua press agency said, citing the country's top geological surveyor, Meng Xianlai. Meng is director of the China Geological Survey, under the Ministry of Land and Resources.

Deposits include the Yulong copper find in the Tibet Autonomous Region, with a proven reserve of 7.89 million tons, Meng said, second only to the country's largest copper mine, operated by Jiangxi Copper...

Yulong Copper's major shareholders are Zijin Mining Group, the second- largest Chinese gold miner, and Western Mining, one of the largest Chinese mining and development companies.

Now I'm not one of those folks who believes that one side (e.g. the Chinese) is all evil and the other side (the Dalai Lama) is all good. And vice versa. And I'm a Buddhist. And I think it'd be a good thing for China to have open discussions with HH the Dalai Lama.



Having said all that, the main reason I've written this is simply to note, yet again, how our media has left out - like the Chinese media - a key component of the story, which is kind of obscene given the recent worldwide issues with natural resources such as mineral ores. And frankly, I've not heard this from HH the D.L. himself.


When you also consider, besides the rich mineral resources in Tibet the fact that poverty is still a huge problem in all of China, even by the way in which they measure it, it's clear that different reasons begin to emerge for this whole Tibetan thing that have little to do with the Dalai Lama or "cultural genocide," or anything like that.

The vast, vast majority of the Chinese that I speak with view the Dalai Lama as a cat's paw for the US and other western powers (though many don't put it that politely). They don't do this because they're "fooled" by Chinese propaganda, which they view more cynically than we view our media, generally. They're just more inclined to "follow the money" and see the reason-behind-the-reason in their own media as well as the US media. (Nota bene: I'm leaving out the folks from Falun Da Fa that I've spoken with, for the same reasons that in forming an opinion of Tom Cruise, I'd likely not weight opinions from Scientologists very heavily.)

The Dalai Lama's been reasonable representative for Tibetan Buddhism, I think, but in this whole thing not to have mentioned the issues of resources in China and poverty in China just ain't very Mahayana of him, and I'm sure not mentioning the mineral resources issue strikes his negotiating competitors as disingenuous to say the least.

And if I know about the above, you can be damned certain that he knows about the above, or certainly should know about the above.

Leonard Cohen Findings on Youtube...

Closing time. Not embedded.

Some Youtube findings...

Bad Production & Good

This:



Shows how a mediocre song can be transformed into a great song with good production values.

The post below, Phil Ochs' "Crucifixion," sounds like crap on its recorded version because it's horribly over-produced. (I can't find a recorded version such as in the Youtube video - I guess it exists somewhere, but sure as hell not on iTunes.) It's a song crying for the Billy Bragg treatment, i.e., performance only with highly amplified, distorted, electric guitar.

What many Obama supporters worry about...

Time for Tabloid Religion News...

Yes, the Maharishi's dead...as is Timothy Leary, but the real news is the rise in Satanism!

The Vatican has never given up belief in the reality of demonic possession, but the practice of actual exorcisms has waned over the last few centuries. Now, however, the Vatican's chief exorcist has revealed that Pope Benedict XVI takes the problem very seriously and is "setting up exorcism squads to deal with the rampant growth of Satanism."

Father Gabriele Amorth is both the senior exorcist of the diocese of Rome and the founder of the International Association of Exorcists. He has condemned the Harry Potter novels as containing "the signature of the Prince of Darkness" and recently warned that diabolical influences can reach even into the Vatican.

Amorth told IBN that "the action of the Devil is a lot more widespread than in the past, not because he has more strength, but because he is given more space." He went on to complain that these days "prists and bishops know nothing about the subject. ... They believe in the Devil, but they don't believe much in the actions of the Devil, so they prefer to send everyone to psychiatrists."

Pope Benedict, who "is said to be a firm believer in the existence of evil," has called for hundreds of priests to be trained as exorcists and made available to every Bishop. "Thank God there is a pope who wants to fight the devil head on," Amorth told IBN.

Which reminds me of some advice...

Father Merrin: Especially important is the warning to avoid conversations with the demon. We may ask what is relevant but anything beyond that is dangerous. He is a liar. The demon is a liar. He will lie to confuse us. But he will also mix lies with the truth to attack us. The attack is psychological, Damien, and powerful. So don't listen to him. Remember that - do not listen.

This is truly hell

Surfing Wikipedia I came upon the bio of Vladimir Mayakovsky. You've heard of him, right?

On the evening of April 14, 1930, Mayakovsky shot himself. The unfinished poem in his suicide note read, in part:

The love boat has crashed against the daily routine. You and I, we are quits, and there is no point in listing mutual pains, sorrows, and hurts.

Mayakovsky was interred at the Moscow Novodevichy Cemetery.

n 1930, his birthplace of Bagdadi in Georgia was renamed Mayakovsky in his honour. Following Stalin's death, rumours arose that Mayakovsky did not commit suicide but was in fact murdered at the behest of Stalin, however, there is no evidence that he was murdered. During the 1990s, while KGB files were being declassified, there was hope that new evidence would come to light on this question, but none has been found and the hypothesis remains unproven.

After his death, Mayakovsky was attacked in the Soviet press as a "formalist" and a "fellow-traveller" (попутчик) (as opposed to officially recognised "proletarian poets", such as Demyan Bedny). When, in 1935, Lilya Brik wrote to Stalin about this, Stalin wrote a comment on Brik's letter:

"Comrade Yezhov[head of the NKVD at the time], please take charge of Brik's letter. Mayakovsky is still the best and the most talented poet of our Soviet epoch. Indifference to his cultural heritage is a crime. Brik's complaints are, in my opinion, justified..." (Source: Memoirs by Vasily Katanyan (L.Yu.Brik's stepson) p.112)

These words became a cliché and officially canonized Mayakovsky but, as Boris Pasternak noted [1], it "dealt him the second death" in some circles.

Poetically, Mayakovsky had no followers among Russian poets, his style was never properly analysed or further developed. Mayakovsky, however, was the most influential futurist in Lithuania and his poetry helped to form The Four Winds movement [2]. He was also an influence on the writer Valentin Kataev.

Can you imagine? Having a boatload of talent, but because a detested jerk recognizes your talent, you are persona non grata with your peers, who think you're a jerk because a jerk respects your talent.

That is truly hell. Luckily Mayakovsky had already killed himself.

Weird science stuff....

From this article from the NYT...

If true, it would mean that you yourself reading this article are more likely to be some momentary fluctuation in a field of matter and energy out in space than a person with a real past born through billions of years of evolution in an orderly star-spangled cosmos. Your memories and the world you think you see around you are illusions.

This bizarre picture is the outcome of a recent series of calculations that take some of the bedrock theories and discoveries of modern cosmology to the limit. Nobody in the field believes that this is the way things really work, however. And so there in the last couple of years there has been a growing stream of debate and dueling papers, replete with references to such esoteric subjects as reincarnation, multiple universes and even the death of spacetime, as cosmologists try to square the predictions of their cherished theories with their convictions that we and the universe are real. The basic problem is that across the eons of time, the standard theories suggest, the universe can recur over and over again in an endless cycle of big bangs, but it’s hard for nature to make a whole universe. It’s much easier to make fragments of one, like planets, yourself maybe in a spacesuit or even — in the most absurd and troubling example — a naked brain floating in space. Nature tends to do what is easiest, from the standpoint of energy and probability. And so these fragments — in particular the brains — would appear far more frequently than real full-fledged universes, or than us. Or they might be us...

Inflation is a veritable cosmological fertility principle. Fluctuations in the field driving inflation also would have seeded the universe with the lumps that eventually grew to be galaxies, stars and people. According to the more extended version, called eternal inflation, an endless array of bubble or “pocket” universes are branching off from one another at a dizzying and exponentially increasing rate. They could have different properties and perhaps even different laws of physics, so the story goes.

A different, but perhaps related, form of antigravity, glibly dubbed dark energy, seems to be running the universe now, and that is the culprit responsible for the Boltzmann brains.

The expansion of the universe seems to be accelerating, making galaxies fly away from one another faster and faster. If the leading dark-energy suspect, a universal repulsion Einstein called the cosmological constant, is true, this runaway process will last forever, and distant galaxies will eventually be moving apart so quickly that they cannot communicate with one another. Being in such a space would be like being surrounded by a black hole.

Rather than simply going to black like “The Sopranos” conclusion, however, the cosmic horizon would glow, emitting a feeble spray of elementary particles and radiation, with a temperature of a fraction of a billionth of a degree, courtesy of quantum uncertainty. That radiation bath will be subject to random fluctuations just like Boltzmann’s eternal universe, however, and every once in a very long, long time, one of those fluctuations would be big enough to recreate the Big Bang. In the fullness of time this process could lead to the endless series of recurring universes. Our present universe could be part of that chain.

A bit of Oregon on New Year's Eve...

Yeah, yeah, finally got a digital camera of my own...

Jack Welch's Legacy

Must-read from John Hockenberry:

Perhaps the biggest change to the practice of journalism in the time I was at NBC was the absorption of the news division into the pervasive and all-consuming corporate culture of GE. GE had acquired NBC back in 1986, when it bought RCA. By 2003, GE's managers and strategists were getting around to seeing whether the same tactics that made the production of turbine generators more efficient could improve the production of television news. This had some truly bizarre consequences. To say that this Dateline correspondent with the messy corner office greeted these internal corporate changes with self-destructive skepticism is probably an understatement.

Six Sigma--the methodology for the improvement of business processes that strives for 3.4 defects or fewer per million opportunities--was a somewhat mysterious symbol of management authority at every GE division. Six Sigma messages popped up on the screens of computers or in e-mail in-boxes every day. Six Sigma was out there, coming, unstoppable, like a comet or rural electrification. It was going to make everything better, and slowly it would claim employees in glazed-eyed conversions. Suddenly in the office down the hall a coworker would no longer laugh at the same old jokes. A grim smile suggested that he was on the lookout for snarky critics of the company. It was better to talk about the weather.

While Six Sigma's goal-oriented blather and obsession with measuring everything was jarring, it was also weirdly familiar, inasmuch as it was strikingly reminiscent of my college Maoism I class. Mao seemed to be a good model for Jack Welch and his Six Sigma foot soldiers; Six Sigma's "Champions" and "Black Belts" were Mao's "Cadres" and "Squad Leaders."

Finding such comparisons was how I kept from slipping into a coma during dozens of NBC employee training sessions where we were told not to march in political demonstrations of any kind, not to take gifts from anyone, and not to give gifts to anyone. At mandatory, hours-long "ethics training" meetings we would watch in-house videos that brought all the drama and depth of a driver's-education film to stories of smiling, swaggering employees (bad) who bought cases of wine for business associates on their expense accounts, while the thoughtful, cautious employees (good) never picked up a check, but volunteered to stay at the Red Roof Inn in pursuit of "shareholder value."

To me, the term "shareholder value" sounded like Mao's "right path," although this was not something I shared at the employee reëducation meetings. As funny as it seemed to me, the idea that GE was a multinational corporate front for Maoism was not a very widespread or popular view around NBC. It was best if any theory that didn't come straight from the NBC employee manual (a Talmudic tome that largely contained rules for using the GE credit card, most of which boiled down to "Don't") remained private.

I did, however, point out to the corporate-integrity people unhelpful details about how NBC News was covering wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that our GE parent company stood to benefit from as a major defense contractor. I wondered aloud, in the presence of an integrity "team leader," how we were to reconcile this larger-scale conflict with the admonitions about free dinners. "You make an interesting point I had not thought of before," he told me. "But I don't know how GE being a defense contractor is really relevant to the way we do our jobs here at NBC news." Integrity, I guess, doesn't scale.

Is there any wonder that the folks in the know rightly insist on net neutrality?

HT: davetob @ Kos

There really is such a thing as enlightenment

While psychologically, it might appear to be the same as any other conversion experience from the fact that one clearly exhibits an entirely new viewpoint, I am not sure that one enlightenment experience is as good as any other.

Hakuin, while reading the Lotus sutra, said that he experienced his greatest enlightenment; that sutra's viewpoint clearly does not in any way comport with fundamentalist Christianity (it could be the subject for a whole bit of comparative religion to relate the Prodigal Son parable in the Lotus sutra versus that in the New Testament).

Moreover, having been raised and believing in Christianity for a good part of my life, I would have to say that the experience of dropping away of body and mind - an ordinary and extraordinary experience - simply doesn't exist in any flavor of Christianity.

And that flavor, on the balance, is more apt to save the ass of all sentient beings than my being assured of forgiveness of sins by a deity.

And there's quite a few pantloads of sentient beings that need saving.

Here's a bit of US history you won't get from the revisionists...

Of course, it's from the NY Times...

THREE hundred and fifty years ago today, religious freedom was born on this continent. Yes, 350 years. Religious tolerance did not begin with the Bill of Rights or with Jefferson’s Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom in 1786. With due respect to Roger Williams and his early experiment with “liberty of conscience” in Rhode Island, this republic really owes its enduring strength to a fragile, scorched and little-known document that was signed by some 30 ordinary citizens on Dec. 27, 1657.

It is fitting that the Flushing Remonstrance should be associated with Dutch settlements, because they were the most tolerant in the New World. The Netherlands had enshrined freedom of conscience in 1579, when it clearly established that “no one shall be persecuted or investigated because of his religion.” And when the Dutch West India Company set up a trading post at the southern tip of Manhattan in 1625, the purpose was to make money, not to save souls. Because the founding idea was trade, the directors of the firm took pains to ensure that all were welcome...

So what was the result? As expected, Stuyvesant arrested Hart and the other official who presented the document to him, and he jailed two other magistrates who had signed the petition. Stuyvesant also forced the other signatories to recant.

But the door had been opened and Quakers continued to meet in Flushing. When Stuyvesant arrested a farmer, John Bowne, in 1662 for holding illegal meetings in his home, Bowne was then banished from the colony. He immediately went to Amsterdam to plead for the Quakers. There he won his case. Though the Dutch West India Company called Quakerism an “abominable religion,” it nevertheless overruled Stuyvesant in 1663 and ordered him to “allow everyone to have his own belief.” Thus did religious toleration become the law of the colony.

The Bowne house is still standing. And within a few blocks of it a modern visitor to Flushing will encounter a Quaker meeting house, a Dutch Reformed church, an Episcopal church, a Catholic church, a synagogue, a Hindu temple and a mosque. All coexist in peace, appropriately in the most diverse neighborhood in the most diverse borough in the most diverse city on the planet.

America's religious tradition - the tradition I was brought up with - is one of diversity and tolerance. I remember walking by that very same Quaker meeting house near Main Street in Flushing, with its roots way back to the story above; it's the place Thomas Merton used to go to before he became a monastic and before he discovered Zen Buddhism.

Turns out we Zen Buddhists are as American as apple pie.

A few random links & thoughts...

• Yes, it's the same crap everywhere.
  
  

  Today, Chelsea Premium Outlets operates in dozens of locations in the U.S. and abroad, including the sprawling Woodbury Common Premium Outlets, about an hour north of New York City. Current Woodbury tenants include Jimmy Choo, Tory Burch and True Religion.
  
  Generally, such brands and designers at least attempt to cultivate an air of exclusivity, which would seem to be at odds with a mammoth outdoor mall that cultivates an air of low-price treasure hunting. But consider True Religion. While the broad story of luxury’s fate in the contemporary market is often told as a steady decline from class to mass, the brand is an example of an equally pronounced countertrend: lux-ing up previously workaday products, like jeans. True Religion has been a star of the high-end denim trend, with its jeans retailing for $150 or more in boutiques and pricey department stores. The company describes itself as a “premium aspirational brand.” ...
  
  Most every upscale brand is now engaged in this dance with the mass market. “The stratification of retail doesn’t exist anymore,” says Paco Underhill, the founder of Envirosell, a research and consulting firm, and the author of “Why We Buy” and “Call of the Mall,” books that examine the science of retail. Ever-increasing consumer access to goods of all kinds makes it harder for an exclusive brand to actually exclude and makes competition among both brands and stores that much more intense. Shunning the outlet setting doesn’t insulate premium brands from these trends. “Department stores discount them anyway,” Underhill says. At least in an outlet mall, the brand owners can control their own store environments, staff included; that’s better than having their wares in the sales-rack jumble.
  
  




• I've been perhaps a wee bit to hard in my thinking on the folks that run those Sambokyodan centers. (Although perhaps not on Dennis Genpo Merzel Roshi, that "Big Mind" thing is an issue, because you can drop acid if all you want is an experience; that's not what Buddhism's about. ) But I think I've been a bit to hard on many of the Sambokyodan folks because they've got a lot of hurtin' people, and they've got to serve them amidst the hurt that the folks who come to them display, and within their own enlightenment.



• Dispersion of people has been a human existence thing since we dispersed out of Africa. Someone tell the NY Times.
  

  
  The loss of such intimate connections could potentially help redefine family and what anthropologists call “social fields.” Far-off relatives become strangers, while relatives and close friends living nearby cocoon themselves for the holidays, creating new rituals.
  
  It’s back to nuclear families.
  
  Establishing a Thanksgiving tradition of having dinner with friends, e-mailing or sending a webcam greeting instead, seeing your parents every other holiday season — these are all signs of new familial constellations in the 21st century, experts say.
  
  On the other hand, if traditional holiday plans are not canceled or modified and the traveling remains grueling, visitors may have high, if not unrealistic, expectations of their hosts.
  
  “With the enormous amount of money and effort it takes to get together with people you barely see, all of the tensions will be exaggerated,” said Vered Amit, a professor of anthropology at Concordia University in Montreal. “I can see people saying, ‘I spent all this money, I came all this way and for what?’ It’s supposed to be a certain way. It puts an enormous amount of pressure on those kinds of contacts and connections that wouldn’t be there normally.”
  
  

  
  
  
  
  



• Buddhists will be in New York for quite some time.
  

  You can fit in one more major world religion just a couple of doors down from the synagogue, at the modest temple run by the Buddhist Association of New York, one of the many Buddhist temples in Chinatown. If you’re lucky, you’ll catch orange-robed monks chanting.
  
  But if not, take in the relaxed atmosphere and wonder if in 50 more years it will be a Buddhist temple, not a synagogue, that will be under restoration as the latest newcomers help transform the neighborhood.




• I saw this on a link from the Oregonian, how somebody was in a forum saying "See! This proves the US was founded on Christianity. And I couldn't help but think "slavery."



• I'm glad Danny Fisher has the space to be concerned about the stuff he's concerned about.
  
  
  
  If you start a family, your concerns will change. Your entire practice will change. Totally. Updside. Down.
  
  Seriously, Danny, keep up the good intentions. One day I woke up, had a wife, a Ph.D., and a wonderful son, and there were completely different exigencies than what you have, not in ethics or morality, but of style. There's a lot right in front of one's nose when one has a family.
  
  



• And appropos of that last point, and as a pointer to how not to do family practice, it's Festivus...
  
  
  
  
  I don't have many grievances this year and I've forgotten what they were; besides, I've been to busy to nurse 'em...

Romney's religion, by Lawrence O'Donnell

Watch it here...

Converse with genuine Shaolin monks...

Thanks to the internets.

You'll find many Buddhists from all over the world there, including, but not limited to the real folks from Shaolin.

It's a welcome respite from the New-Agey faux-Buddhist creationists, (e.g., here) as well as Western carricatures...

December 8: Rohatsu Day: Enlightenment Day

Although in different schools of Buddhism the enlightenment of Siddhartha Gautama is observed at different times (at least in part due to the lunar year/solar year differences), in the school in which I practice, in the Japanese Rinzai tradition, the enlightenment of the Buddha is traditionally observed on December 8.

Harada-roshi ("roshi" means literally "old teacher," and is actually the Japanese pronunciation of what the Chinese use for the word "teacher") has a good summary for the whole thing:

The Buddha was enlightened on the eighth of December when he looked up at the morning star, the planet we call Venus. The brightness of this planet was seen by Buddha from the depths of one week of samadhi [deep awareness]. The Buddha received that brightness with the same eyes of zazen [sitting meditation] that enable us to realize perfect enlightenment.

One week straight of this deepest possible samadhi was burst through by the brilliance of that morning star. A whole week's experience of that world burst the brightness of the morning star, plunging into the Buddha's eyes and giving rebirth to the Buddha's consciousness.

He cried:
That's it! That's it! That's it. That's me! That's me that's shining so brilliantly!

The Buddha had realized that his own True Nature was the very same - an identity - with that of all beings. To realize such a thing is to be deeply awed, humbled, and yet to know, as a later master would say, that you can enter any world as if it were a playground.

This is not some mumbo-jumbo New Agey feel good kind of a thing, some means of escape, an opiate, but rather the Source by which we can attend to one another's - and our own - suffering and misery, at the very least by figuring out the origin of such suffering and misery and attending to it mindfully.

So in gratitude for all everyone at Kos, for the sake of all beings, I will try to be a little more mindful today.

Most eloquent take-down of Romney I've seen

From Andrew Brown at the Guardian:

"Any person who has knelt in prayer to the Almighty, has a friend and ally in me," he said. "And so it is for hundreds of millions of our countrymen: we do not insist on a single strain of religion - rather, we welcome our nation's symphony of faith."

But, while the speech tells us nothing whatever about Mormonism, it does show a lot about what he believes his audience wants to hear, and still more about the way that religions really function in politics. What he is really saying in all this is the one belief that Mormons share with all other successful American religions: that America is God's promised land, which is powerful because Someone up there loves it.

Mormonism is a kind of pop-art cartoon version of this belief. Where mainstream American Protestantism, following the British model, supposed that God had made American Protestants the new Israel in a metaphysical, though real sense, Mormons claimed that some Jews, and Jesus himself after his resurrection, had physically travelled to North America, and founded a civilisation there long before the Pilgrim Fathers arrived. Also, the Native Americans are the descendents of some of these Jews, who turned bad and were cursed with a dark skin for their wickedness. You can see why Governor Romney might not want to delve into the specifics of these divinely inspired truth...

Religious liberty thus becomes the defining feature of American culture in his speech. In fact, in common with most American nationalists, he uses "liberty" as entirely synonymous with American power. "No people in the history of the world have sacrificed as much for liberty. The lives of hundreds of thousands of America's sons and daughters were laid down during the last century to preserve freedom, for us and for freedom loving people throughout the world. America took nothing from that century's terrible wars - no land from Germany or Japan or Korea; no treasure; no oath of fealty."

The point is not whether this is historically ludicrous. It is whether it appears credible and desirable to his audience. Obviously it does. It reinforces the central idea that American power is a consequence of American virtue and in particular that it arises from the constitution, which he treats - as his audience does - as containing a sacred revelation that supercedes all others. "When I place my hand on the Bible and take the oath of office, [to defend the constitution] that oath becomes my highest promise to God. If I am fortunate to become your president, I will serve no one religion, no one group, no one cause, and no one interest. A president must serve only the common cause of the people of the United States."...

There is only one problem with the speech if it is understood as an appeal to Americans shared understanding of themselves as a holy tribe: it places secular Americans firmly outside the tribe.

Chilling. The idea of a deity divinely blessing the waterboarding at Guantanamo, the thugs of Blackwater, the notion of slavery itself, ought to be repugnant to anyone who has anything more than contempt for the notion of the sacred.

Romney's "religion" speech and reactions

I commented about it here at Kos.

I generally have a negative view of most of what David Brooks writes, but today's piece is actually worth reading w.r.t. Romney:

When this country was founded, James Madison envisioned a noisy public square with different religious denominations arguing, competing and balancing each other’s passions. But now the landscape of religious life has changed. Now its most prominent feature is the supposed war between the faithful and the faithless. Mitt Romney didn’t start this war, but speeches like his both exploit and solidify this divide in people’s minds. The supposed war between the faithful and the faithless has exacted casualties.

The first casualty is the national community. Romney described a community yesterday. Observant Catholics, Baptists, Methodists, Jews and Muslims are inside that community. The nonobservant are not. There was not even a perfunctory sentence showing respect for the nonreligious. I’m assuming that Romney left that out in order to generate howls of outrage in the liberal press...

In order to build a voting majority of the faithful, Romney covered over different and difficult conceptions of the Almighty. When he spoke of God yesterday, he spoke of a bland, smiley-faced God who is the author of liberty and the founder of freedom. There was no hint of Lincoln’s God or Reinhold Niebuhr’s God or the religion most people know — the religion that imposes restraints upon on the passions, appetites and sinfulness of human beings. He wants God in the public square, but then insists that theological differences are anodyne and politically irrelevant.

As I noted in a comment on someone else's Kos diary:

One would hope that one would see Romney's speech for what it was: nothing courageous like Kennedy's speech was (and I'm not really a big fan of Kennedy), but instead designed to divide, blatantly opportunistic, the type of slick operation of the guy who'd work at a place called Bain Capital, make sure lots of folks were impoverished by layoffs and call the result "value creation."

Also if you want to see why Hugh Hewitt's not got much respect from me; look at his drooling over Romney.

It's not even worth linking to.

Huckabee: Scary Psychotic

As John Avarosis said, "Did God want him to let that convicted rapist go too, because it appealed to the Clinton-hating fringe?"


Murray Waas at the Huffington Post writes:

While on the campaign trail, Huckabee has claimed that he supported the 1999 release of Wayne Dumond because, at the time, he had no good reason to believe that the man represented a further threat to the public. Thanks to Huckabee's intervention, conducted in concert with a right-wing tabloid campaign on Dumond's behalf, Dumond was let out of prison 25 years before his sentence would have ended.

"There's nothing any of us could ever do," Huckabee said Sunday on CNN when asked to reflect on the horrific outcome caused by the prisoner's release. "None of us could've predicted what [Dumond] could've done when he got out."

But the confidential files obtained by the Huffington Post show that Huckabee was provided letters from several women who had been sexually assaulted by Dumond and who indeed predicted that he would rape again - and perhaps murder - if released...

Huckabee kept these and other documents secret because they were politically damaging, according to a former aide who worked for him in Arkansas. The aide has made the records available to the Huffington Post, deeply troubled by Huckabee's repeated claims that he had no reason to believe Dumond would commit other violent crimes upon his release from prison. The aide also believes that Huckabee, for political reasons, has deliberately attempted to cover up his knowledge of Dumond's other sexual assaults.

"There were no letters sent to the governor's office from any rape victims," Huckabee campaign spokesperson Alice Stewart said on Tuesday when contacted by the Huffington Post.

Subsequently, however, the campaign provided a former senior aide of Huckabee's who did remember reading at least one of the letters.

But Huckabee and his aides insist that his receipt of the letters is irrelevant because the decision to release Dumond was made by the parole board. Huckabee on Tuesday again denied allegations by former parole board members that he lobbied them to release Dumond. "I did not ask them to do anything," he said. "I did indicate [Dumond's case] was sitting at my desk and I was giving thought to it."

Charmaine Yoest, a senior adviser to the Huckabee campaign, told the Huffington Post: "I think what should be considered here is that if he [Huckabee] could have changed what happened, he would. His whole life has been about respect for life and understanding the value of each individual life. Nobody regrets the loss of life here more than him."

In 1996, as a newly elected governor who had received strong support from the Christian right, Huckabee was under intense pressure from conservative activists to pardon Dumond or commute his sentence. The activists claimed that Dumond's initial imprisonment and various other travails were due to the fact that Ashley Stevens, the high school cheerleader he had raped, was a distant cousin of Bill Clinton, and the daughter of a major Clinton campaign contributor.

And, if you haven't read Matt Taibbi's take-down of Huckabee, you owe it to yourself.

Really, it's a form of abuse in the extreme to let creationists near the White House.