Barack Obama's record...

Just in case someone asks, droogie6655321 at Kos did the homework so you don't have to do it...

I will shamelessly quote nearly the whole thing...

My heart just sinks every time some well-meaning (but ignorant) Obama supporter calls into a radio show and gets heckled by Sean Hannity or whoever about Barack Obama's legislative accomplishments.

This happened just yesterday. Hannity offered an Obama supporter a steak dinner if he could name three pieces of legislation that had Obama's name on them. The caller clumsily changed the subject.

Sensing he had the caller on the ropes, Hannity lowered the bar to a single piece of legislation. And alas, the caller could not name the legislation.

Hannity smugly switched off the caller's volume and said directly to the audience, "Ladies and Gentlemen, checkmate." And Droogie exited his car, entered his house and ate tacos sadly.

Listen, I know how talk radio works. Even if he had been able to list three pieces of legislation, Hannity still would have badgered the caller about William Ayers and Jeremiah Wright.

Hannity is not the issue. The issue is that ordinary people are being told that Obama has a thin resume and has accomplished very little in his Senate career. I have a Republican co-worker who I spar back and forth with on this issue.

Even when I told him of one bill, he said, "Well, that's probably the only bill." It's never enough for some people, but that doesn't mean you should go into the world uninformed.

So here are just a few highlights from Barack Obama's career as a Senator: specific pieces of legislation, what they meant and how they were passed.

The Secure America and Orderly Immigration Act

Introduced by Sen. John McCain in May 2005, and cosponsored by Sen. Edward Kennedy. Barack Obama added three amendments to this bill.

While the bill was never voted on in the Senate, the Comprehensive Immigration Reform Acts of 2006 and 2007, respectively, drew heavily upon the wording of this bill.

The Lugar-Obama Cooperative Threat Reduction.

Introduced by Sen. Barack Obama, Sen. Dick Lugar and Sen. Tom Coburn.

First introduced in November 2005 and enacted in 2007, this bill expanded upon the successful Nunn-Lugar threat reduction, which helped secure weapons of mass destruction and related infrastructure in former Soviet Union states.

Lugar-Obama expanded this nonproliferation program to conventional weapons -- including shoulder-fired rockets and land mines. When the bill received $48 million in funding, Obama said, "This funding will further strengthen our ability to detect and intercept illegal shipments of weapons and materials of mass destruction, enhancing efforts to prevent nuclear terrorism."

Federal Funding Accountability and Transparency Act of 2006

This act of Congress, introduced by Senators Obama and Coburn, required the full disclosure of all entities or organizations receiving federal funds in FY2007.

Despite a "secret hold" on this bill by Senators Ted Stevens and Robert Byrd, the act passed into law and was signed by President Bush. The act had 43 cosponsors, including John McCain.

The act created this Web site, which provides citizens with valuable information about government-funded programs.

Democratic Republic of the Congo Relief, Security, and Democracy Promotion Act

This law helped specify US policy toward the Congo, and states that the US should work with other donor nations to increase international contributions to the African nation.

The bill marked the first federal legislation to be enacted with Obama as its primary sponsor. Following this legislation's passage, Obama toured Africa, traveling to South Africa, Kenya, Djibouti, Ethiopia and Chad. He spoke forcefully against ethnic rivalries and political corruption in Kenya.

Honest Leadership and Open Government Act

In the first month of the 110th Congress, Obama worked with Sen. Russ Feingold to pass this law, which amends and strengthens the Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1995.

Specificially, the changes made by Obama and Feingold requires public disclosure of lobbying activity and funding, places more restrictions on gifts for members of Congress and their staff, and provides for mandatory disclosure of earmarks in expenditure bills.

The House passed the bill, 411-8, on July 31. The Senate approved it, 83-14, on Aug. 2. At the time, Obama called it "the most sweeping ethics reform since Watergate."

Deceptive Practices and Voter Intimidation Prevention Act

Following the Republican-sponsored voter intimidation tactics seen in mostly black counties in Maryland during the 2006 midterm elections, Obama worked with Sen. Chuck Schumer to introduce this bill.

The bill has been referred to the United States Senate Committee on the Judiciary. Obama said of the bill, "This legislation would ensure that for the first time, these incidents are fully investigated and that those found guilty are punished."

The Obama-McCain Climate Change Reduction Bill

The Obama-McCain bill, which is co-sponsored by Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., would cut emissions by two-thirds by 2050.

Iraq War De-Escalation Act of 2007

Introduced by Obama, this binding act would stop the planned troop increase of 21,500 in Iraq, and would also begin a phased redeployment of troops from Iraq with the goal of removing all combat forces by March 31, 2008.

Explaining the bill, Obama said it reflects his view that the problems in Iraq do not have a military solution. "Our troops have performed brilliantly in Iraq, but no amount of American soldiers can solve the political differences at the heart of somebody else's civil war," Obama said.

Amendments to the 2008 Defense Authorization Bill

Obama worked with Sen. Kit Bond to limit, through this bill, the Pentagon’s use of personality disorder discharges in the FY 2008 Defense Authorization bill.

This provision would add additional safeguards to discharge procedures and require a thorough review by the Government Accountability Office. This followed news reports that the Pentagon inappropriately used these procedures to discharge service members with service-connected psychological injuries.

"With thousands of American service members suffering day in and day out from the less visible wounds of war, reports that the Pentagon has improperly diagnosed and discharged service members with personality disorders are deeply disturbing," said Senator Obama.  "This provision will add additional safeguards to the Department of Defense’s use of this discharge and mandate a comprehensive review of these policies."

The Comprehensive Nuclear Threat Reduction provision

Working with Sen. Hagel and Rep. Adam Schiff, Obama authored this provision, which would require the president to develop a comprehensive plan for ensuring that all nuclear weapons and weapons-usable material at vulnerable sites around the world are secure by 2012 from the threats that terrorists have shown they can pose.

A provision from the Obama-Hagel bill was passed by Congress in December 2007 as an amendment to the State-Foreign Operations appropriations bill.

"It is imperative that we build and sustain a truly global effort under an aggressive timeline to secure, consolidate, and reduce stockpiles of nuclear weapons and weapons-usable material to keep them out of the wrong hands. The comprehensive nuclear threat reduction plan required by this provision is an important step in that effort," Obama said of the provision.

These are just a selection of the bills that Obama has introduced and co-sponsored. You owe it to yourself to be able to cite a few of these off the top of your heads so you can give people the gist of them when they challenge the Senator's accomplishments.

At the end of the day, I will take Obama's good judgment over McCain's longevity in Washington any day of the week. It's more important for a politician to learn from his or her mistakes than it is for them to present the same old failed ideas over and over and expecting a better result.

It's true Obama is a relative newcomer on the politican scene, but he has already accomplished much in the areas of nuclear non-proliferation, government accountability, environmental responsibility and others.

So get out there and let some people know what our guy is capable of. Don't be caught unaware when someone asks you for your candidate's resume!

Bookmark this, follow the links, share with friends. Wash, rinse, repeat. Always repeat.

What Buddhists shouldn't do when given a microphone...

Link

PARIS — Christian Dior, the French fashion brand, has become the latest global company to learn a hard lesson about the danger of offending Chinese pride.

Facing the possibility of a boycott of its products, the luxury company said on Thursday that it had dropped the American actress Sharon Stone from its advertising in China after she suggested last week that the recent earthquakes in Sichuan Province were karmic retribution for Beijing’s treatment of Tibet...

Ms. Stone said last week during the Cannes Film Festival: “I’m not happy about the way the Chinese are treating the Tibetans because I don’t think anyone should be unkind to anyone else. And then the earthquake and all this stuff happened, and then I thought, is that karma? When you’re not nice that the bad things happen to you?”

I'm not sure if Stone is a Buddhist or not, but that comment was heartless and idiotic, and not unlike John Hagee saying a Katrina devastated New Orleans because of the gays or something like that.

Junk Food, Stress, Monkeys and Modern America

Danny Fisher, by way of this article from the NY Times on meditation, inadvertantly reminded me of this article from last week...(mostly) about what's in the title of this post...

The ladies who lunch do not obsess about their weight in the rhesus monkey compound at the Yerkes National Primate Research Center in Atlanta. Food is freely available, and the high-status females do not pride themselves on passing it up. They don’t seem to stigmatize obesity — there is no equivalent of a Kirstie Alley joke — and they certainly don’t turn themselves into Social X-Rays.

In fact, the dominant females ordinarily eat a little more than the subordinates. The lower status monkeys can get as much food as they want but seem to have less of a desire to eat, perhaps because of the higher level of stress hormones in their brain. The anxiety of constantly toadying to their social superiors seems to curb their appetite, researchers suspect, at least when their regular high-fiber, low-fat chow is on the menu.

But suppose you tempted them with the equivalent of chocolate and potato chips and ice cream? Mark Wilson, a neuroscientist at Emory University, and a team tried that experiment at Yerkes by installing feeders with a constant supply of banana-flavored pellets — not exactly Dove bars, but they had enough sugar and fat to appeal even to human palates. (In the interest of science, I sampled a few pellets.)

Once these foods were available, the low-status monkeys promptly developed an appetite. They began eating significantly more calories than their social superiors. While the dominant monkeys dabbled in the sweet, fatty pellets just during the daytime, the subordinate monkeys kept scarfing them down after dark...

In that experiment, the dominant monkeys didn’t show much interest in pressing a lever that administered an intravenous dose of cocaine. But the subordinate monkeys, who started off with compromised dopamine receptors, kept pushing the lever to get more cocaine, just as the subordinates in the new study kept munching on the fatty pellets. Dr. Wilson suggests that the snackers are reinforcing the dopamine systems that had been diminished by stress.

“Essentially, eating high-calorie foods becomes a coping strategy to deal with daily life events for an individual in a difficult social situation,” Dr. Wilson said. “The subordinates don’t get beat up, but they get harassed by high-ranking monkeys. If they’re sitting somewhere and a dominant monkey comes over, they give up their seat and move away. They’re always looking over their shoulders.”

These results seem to jibe with the famous Whitehall study of British civil servants, which found that lower-ranking workers were more obese than higher-status workers. Even though the subordinate workers were neither poor nor lacked health care, their lower status correlated with more health problems.

The new monkey data also jibe with an American study that looked at women’s snacking tendencies. After they worked on puzzles and recorded a speech, the women were tempted with an array of chocolate granola bars, potato chips, rice cakes and pretzels provided by the research team, led by Elissa Epel, a psychologist at the University of California, San Francisco.

The women who seemed most stressed by the tasks, as measured by their levels of cortisol, ate more of the sweet, high-fat snacks, the same pattern observed in the subordinate monkeys with high cortisol levels. But as Dr. Wilson and others caution, there are plenty of other factors besides status and stress that affect humans’ diets and waistlines.

Debra A. Zellner, a psychologist at Montclair State University, tested both men and women by putting bowls of potato chips, M&Ms, peanuts and red grapes on a table as the participants in the study worked on solving anagrams. Some of the people were given unsolvable anagrams, and they understandably reported being more stressed than the ones given easy anagrams.

Well, Americans are certainly more stressed due to the economy, due to suburban planning forcing long commutes, due to every last nickel being squeezed everywhere.

Americans don't hardly cook at home anymore, I'm told. (We eat out way too often.)

This low cost petroleum lifestyle isn't so healthy.

Marx was only 1/2 right: sometimes the satire goes first...

From today's WSJ:

Fertilizer prices are rising faster than those of almost any other raw material used by farmers. In April, farmers paid 65% more for fertilizer than they did a year earlier, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. That compares with price increases of 43% for fuel, 30% for seeds and 3.8% for chemicals such as weedkillers and insecticides over the same period, according to Agriculture Department indexes.

Those skyrocketing costs are making it harder for farmers to expand their harvests in response to the global food crisis that has sparked rioting, rationing and export controls in many countries. Food prices have soared in recent months as the world's growing demand for grain, which has exceeded production for much of this decade, has reduced stockpiles to extremely low levels...

Major fertilizer producers deny any allegations of gouging. They say they are simply raising prices to reflect tight supplies and growing demand after years of relatively low prices.

But there's an unusual piece in the pricing puzzle: In several countries, obscure laws shield makers of potash and phosphate from certain antitrust rules. In the U.S., for example, phosphate makers are among a handful of industries empowered by the 1918 Webb-Pomerene Act to talk with competitors about pricing and other issues...

Phosphate, a mineral found in fossilized marine life, provides essential nutrients for plant-cell development, while potash, a rock mined from the earth, helps plants grow strong. Prices of both are climbing faster than those of nitrogen, which is manufactured in a process that requires lots of natural gas.

In North America, nitrogen fertilizers are applied liberally to corn and wheat fields. Urea, a nitrogen-carrying fertilizer, is selling for around $600 a ton, twice the price a year ago, mostly because of a steep run-up in natural-gas prices.

The price of phosphate has climbed to about $1,000 a ton, up from $365 last year, according to Green Markets, a trade publication, while the price of a ton of potash is now more than $700, up from $230.

Even though - like with oil, we're consuming the biomass of What Went Before, and therefore yet another leading indicator of how screwed we are, I realized that this is one possible solution to the problem...:

... A hospital lobby. A line of people are being ushered through. A sign says 'Blood Donors' with an arrow in the direction they're all going. Mr Samson is in a white coat.
Samson Blood donors that way, please.
Donor Oh thank you very much (joins the line).
Samson Thank you. (Grimshaw comes up to him and whispers in his ear, Samson looks at him, slightly surprised) What? (Grimshaw whispers again) No. No, I'm sorry but no. (Grimshaw whispers again) No, you may not give urine instead of blood. (Grimshaw whispers again) No, well, I don't care if you want to. (Grimshaw whispers again) No. There is no such thing as a urine bank.
Grimshaw Please.
Samson No. We have no call for it. We've quite enough of it without volunteers coming in here donating it.
Grimshaw Just a specimen.
Samson No, we don't want a specimen. We either want your blood or nothing.
Grimshaw I'll give you some blood if you'll give me...
Samson What?
Grimshaw A thing to do some urine in.
Samson No, no, just go away please.
Grimshaw Anyway, I don't want to give you any blood.
Samson Fine, well you don't have to, you see, just go away.
Grimshaw Can I give you some spit?
Samson No.
Grimshaw Sweat?
Samson No.
Grimshaw Earwax?
Samson No, look, this is a blood bank - all we want is blood.
Grimshaw All right, I'll give you some blood.
He holds out a jar full of blood.
Samson Wher did you get that?
Grimshaw Today. It's today's.
Samson What group is it?
Grimshaw What groups are there?
Samson There's A...
Grimshaw It's A.
Samson (sniffing the blood) Wait a moment. It's mine. This blood is mine! What are you doing with it?
Grimshaw I found it.
Samson You found it? You stole it out of my body, didn't you?
Grimshaw No.
Samson No wonder I'm feeling off-colour. (he starts to drink the blood; Grimshaw grabs the bottle) Give that back.
Grimshaw It's mine.
Samson It is not yours. You stole it.
Grimshaw Never.
Samson Give it back to me.
Grimshaw All right. But only if I can give urine.
Samson ...Get in the queue.

If you're in Portland on June 7...

Come down to the Portland Buddhist Festival.

June 7, 2008, 12:00 pm to 4:30 pm
Colonel Summers Park, SE 17th and Taylor, Portland, Oregon

.....Food and Festivities.....
+Buddhist talks and workshops
+Teachings and activities for Adults and Children
+Tabling by Buddhist Communities

planning meetings April 27, May 18

Contact bpfportland@yahoo.com for more information.

Note: People aren't simplistic.

Link

The New Paradigm for Financial Markets includes Soros’ verdict on the credit crisis. He thinks, as has been widely reported, that it is the most severe since the 1930s, and that it marks the end of a 25-year “era of credit expansion based on the dollar as the international reserve currency”...

His insights are clear and concisely expressed. They are worth reading for anyone interested in the topic. But what is most interesting, and obviously engages Soros at an emotional level, is the idiosyncratic philosophy he has developed to explain the metaphysics of how markets work. Even before the emergence of the efficient markets hypothesis, which has dominated academic thinking on markets for at least three decades, Soros had devised his own theory to prove markets were not efficient. He acted on this philosophy as an investor with spectacularly successful results.

That philosophy derived from his undergraduate studies at the London School of Economics under Karl Popper. The “relationship between thinking and reality”, Soros calls “reflexivity.” It fills the book’s centre in chapters which he admits many will find “heavy going”. In markets, Soros says, participants’ thinking plays a dual function: they try to understand the situation (the “cognitive function”), and to change it (the “manipulative function”). The two functions can interfere with each other; when they do so the market displays “reflexivity”.

So an investor’s misperception of reality can help to change that reality, begetting further misperceptions. When market actors’ decisions affect outcomes, patterns emerge. If a lot of people are bullish about internet stocks their price goes up. Soros used the theory to predict, and profit from, a series of “initially self-reinforcing but eventually self-defeating boom-bust processes, or bubbles”. Each bubble “consists of a trend and a misconception that interact in a reflexive manner”.

A key implication of this is that markets do not tend towards “equilibrium”, as predicted by modern portfolio theory. And they will not move in the “random walk” promulgated by efficient markets theory, which holds that prices always incorporate all known information and so move randomly in response to new information.

So "The New Paradigm for Financial Markets: The Credit Crisis of 2008 and What It Means" has to be added to my reading list, along with Ariely's book "Predictably Irrational."

Oh, wait, I gotta put in one more quote...

Many will dislike Soros’ politics. Others will find the book self-indulgent. He calls himself a “failed philosopher” and badly wants his theory to reach a broader public. It is hard to imagine it would have been published were he not so famous and successful.

I have become fond in recent years - especially with the exigencies of my current project - of quoting Deng Tsao Ping's "It does not matter if a cat is black or white, as long as it catches mice." I could rephrase the last sentence in this as "It is hard to imagine it would have been published were he not so famous and successful his results indicative of the usefulness of his approach."

Within economics you have the classic issue of measure/probability theory: the underlying space - think of the set of all humans engaging in the economy or all humans' economic actions -just doesn't behave as the theory demands it to in order for all the other nice juicy stuff to follow.


Soros is right. Conservative economics - supply side Reagan/Thatcher/Norquist BS is as dead as a McDonald's Big Mac.

Keith Olbermann at his best...

Book Review: The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins

In The Godless Delusion, Dawkins doesn't mention Buddhism much at all, except to say he thinks they're philosphies, not religions. This Buddhist disagrees on that point. Dawkins arguments against the existence of a monotheistic god are cogent, powerful, and above all, far more accessible than the tripe you get at infidels.org. Unfortunately, as a man trained in biology, every argument looks like it can be addressed with evolution. That said, one argument - the argument that says an "Intelligent" "Designer" would have to be hopelessly complex and hence far more unlikely than an evolved ecosystem built up by its own bootstraps a step at a time - is actually quite new to me.

Also unfortunately, he himself doesn't quite get probability theory, or to put it another way, he readily and humbly admits he's confused by quantum theory, but when he says "no no no there's no randmoness" in evolution, he protesteth too much. However, his wonderment shines through even here.

His basic arguments are spot on though.

Two points:

1. He doesn't quite mention theological positions of folks like mine - perhaps because there's so much kinship with his position, he doesn't see the difference. That is, he does not see that much of what he's saying is eventually irrelevant to folks like me, because the question's irrelevant, except perhaps as fodder for keeping busy in coach class.

2. He brings up what is likely some nonsensical controversial book about language and voices in one's head- the title escapes me at the moment and I am too comfortable frankly to get my copy of Dawkin's book to look it up. His point is that perhaps at one time the dialog in one's head was regarded as real. Perhaps it was, but as we have no model for how the ancients perceived consciousness until...yeah, Buddhists...OK, maybe some Hindu writings address such issues, I'm not familiar...but until Buddhists wrote about enlightenment, there wasn't a heckuva lot the ancients wrote about consciousness, though I'd suspect that at least among the lower classes, R.D. Laing's quote of Kierkegaard was probably right: the ancients probably did see angels and halos and all that what-not. Again, it doesn't matter because the dialog in your head is just that anyway; it's the picture of the cake...and that implies that we're likely miles apart from Quakers, despite the alleged similarities of practice.

All in all, very much worth reading. Go out and read it today, in fact, it's in paperback, and a bargain.

Ok, how do you talk about a nice wristwatch on a Buddhist blog?

When I first moved out to the Northwest, I realized that the old Seiko 5 that I had had for decades was beat up, didn't quite look professional, especially when my company's early literature talked about wearing suits and all that.


I had wanted a replacement watch. I didn't really want a quartz movement - first of all there were the batteries. Secondly, a pure (automatic) mechanical movement such as the Seiko 5 had required no attention.




Unfortunately, I could not at the time, find a jewelry dealer in Vancouver that sold a decent non-quartz watch. It was the sticks, you know.

And Rolexes? I couldn't afford one, I wouldn't afford one, and they reeked of being yuppie toys to me.


So I wound up getting an at-the-time nice looking, but essentially cheap Citizen Quartz Chronograph, which tended to need batteries more often than I expected, and at times when it was unfortunate to replace them.

Still, it served me faithfully, more or less, for about 12 years though it got quite beat up. And of course I never actually used any chronograph functions.

And then...I realized that it was really beat up, from being on my wrist in all those coach-class international flights. It looked ridiculous on my hand when I met the CEO of my company.

I just didn't have the ceremonial robes down right, so to speak.

What had really tipped me in the direction of getting a new watch, though, was this article, which I read because my wife got me a subscription to Forbes Life, because frequent flyer miles were expiring, and, you know, it'd be a waste not to use them... Your logic may vary - anyway a variety of magazines started showing up at my home, but that's another story. Ok, let's just say, Forbes Life is conspicuous consumption porn, but it's worthwhile compared to Fortune.

Anyway, I came upon this article, and the engineer in me was fascinated.

The first collectible watch I ever bought was a Rolex Bubbleback, the only timepiece in the 1940s to enclose a self-winding movement in a waterproof case. Admittedly that wasn’t especially impressive by the time I acquired it in 1991—modern quartz didn’t need winding, and watertight plastics were abundant—but what mattered to me was the sheer inventiveness, the audacity of making a watch bulbous as a submarine just so that it could be powered by swimming. In the mid-20th-century, Rolex thrived on technical bravado, making sport of staid jewelry counters by displaying watches inside goldfish bowls, while other companies such as Patek Philippe and Vacheron Constantin tested the limits of mechanical complexity with watches that tracked phases of the moon or multiple time zones.

Today, that grand old tradition of bold mechanical innovation is back with a vengeance. Aided by the latest advances in chemical and mechanical engineering—and computers, of course—an agile new generation of independent watchmakers is building timepieces that would have been unimaginable in the ’40s, or even the ’90s. Richard Mille combines platinum and steel with resilient new materials developed for fighter jets. Franck Muller engineers gears that rotate only once every thousand years. The most extraordinary contemporary timepieces don’t remind me of 20th-century wristwatches so much as 18th-century philosophical toys such as the mechanical doll that delighted savvy audiences by writing Descartes’famous line “Cogito ergo sum” with a quill pen.

(Note the irony of the last sentence...)



Too, I was reminded of the remonstration Meryl Streep's Miranda Priestly made regarding her profession in "The Devil Wears Prada," which struck me as valid: people design this ridiculously expensive stuff not only so that the wealthy have something to conspicuously consume, but also because it helps the rest of us define our image of ourselves to each other. It's a bit of communication.

Andy Sachs: No, no, nothing. Y'know, it's just that both those belts look exactly the same to me. Y'know, I'm still learning about all this stuff.

Miranda Priestly: This... 'stuff'? Oh... ok. I see, you think this has nothing to do with you. You go to your closet and you select out, oh I don't know, that lumpy blue sweater, for instance, because you're trying to tell the world that you take yourself too seriously to care about what you put on your back. But what you don't know is that that sweater is not just blue, it's not turquoise, it's not lapis, it's actually cerulean. You're also blithely unaware of the fact that in 2002, Oscar De La Renta did a collection of cerulean gowns. And then I think it was Yves St Laurent, wasn't it, who showed cerulean military jackets? And then cerulean quickly showed up in the collections of 8 different designers. Then it filtered down through the department stores and then trickled on down into some tragic casual corner where you, no doubt, fished it out of some clearance bin. However, that blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs and so it's sort of comical how you think that you've made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you're wearing the sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room. From a pile of stuff.

That movie is probably the only good date-movie I've seen in 5 years, but that's another trajectory...



I realized that it's high time I searched for a decent non-quartz watch. One that's not as accurate as my cell phone's time function.

I also realized there's the huge sub-stratum of society - like the folks who build model railroads obsessively or collect rocks (not necessarily jewels) who collect watches.

I'm not one of them. But I understand the allure. Here's what I got: the Oris BC3:




This watch should be environmentally correct, last decades to be handed down to my son, and didn't set me back anywhere near like a Rolex. It's readable on a plane on an international journey, it's readable without my reading glasses, and it's got a saphire crystal, so it won't likely get any kind of a serious scratch while I'm alive.

Moreover, you can see the movement moving through the saphire crystal see-through back, and it's movement's movement is reminiscent of Mary Roach's description of the human heart beating - it's doing some kind of wild St. Vitus dance in there. The watch appears alive; its second hand dances across the face.

It's deliriously, beautifully, obsolete and irrelevant. That's quite similar to a description once made by Thomas Merton about monks.

And somehow, I can't think it's totally, completely immoral to have a decent reliable watch in this day and age whose only future environmental footprint is characterized by its tuneups that will be needed years from now.

One final plus: my 6 year old asked me, "Daddy, why does it sound like it's going so fast?" He had never heard a mechanical wristwatch before, and so I got to explain to him about mechanical analogs of phase locked loops and whatnot.

The trouble with the death penalty...

Now that the "Supreme Court" has OK'd lethal injection, it's killing time again in prisons...

“The Supreme Court essentially blessed their way of doing things,” said Douglas A. Berman, a professor of law and a sentencing expert at Ohio State University. “So in some sense, they’re back from vacation and ready to go to work.”

Experts say the resumption of executions is likely to throw a strong new spotlight on the divisive national — and international — issue of capital punishment.

“When people confront a new wave of executions, they’ll be questioning not only how people are executed but whether people should be executed,” said James R. Acker, a historian of the death penalty and a criminal justice professor at the State University at Albany.

Texas leads the list with five people now set to die here in the Walls Unit, the state’s death house, between June 3 and Aug. 20. Virginia is next with four. Louisiana, Oklahoma and South Dakota have also set execution dates.

Some welcome the end of the moratorium.

“We’ll start playing a little bit of catch-up,” said William R. Hubbarth, a spokesman for Justice for All, a victims rights group based in Houston.

“It’s not like we have a cheering section for the death penalty.” Mr. Hubbarth said. But, he added: “The capital murderers set to be executed should be executed post-haste. It’s not about killing the inmate. It’s about imposing the penalty that 12 of his peers have assessed.”

Which means that the "State," that entity representing you and me, create a behavior, on behalf of you and me, explicitly bound by the behavior of another.

And this particular behavior is based on the notion that if you kill someone who is causing the worst kind of trouble, you will reduce the numbers of people who cause that kind of trouble.

The problem is you cannot extirpate vile hatred this way. You cannot exile desperate murderousness from the human heart this way.

So you're only making more murder, on our behalf.

Freakin' wonderful. All we need is more of this...

Coincidentally...

A mystery donor leaving $1 million to Naropa University informs me of its founder....

Naropa was founded in 1974 by a Tibetan lama, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche, a charismatic spiritual leader who also cut a rakish and unforgettable presence in Boulder. The reputation of Rinpoche was of a hard-partying man and a genius who was the first to adapt Buddhism to American tastes.

Rinpoche attracted a rebel generation to Naropa, including Howl poet Allen Ginsberg, who founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa, named after the famous "beat" writer.

At Naropa, a more measured Buddhist influence spread, too, with visits from ordinary teaching lamas to the Dalai Lama.

Chogyam Trungpa was rakish indeed, if Wikipedia's right...

An incident that became a cause célèbre among some poets and artists was the Halloween party at the Fall, 1975, Snowmass Colorado Seminary, a 3-month period of intensive meditation and study of the Hinayana, Mahayana, and Vajrayana vehicles of Tibetan Buddhism. The poet W. S. Merwin had arrived that summer at the Naropa Institute and been told by Allen Ginsberg that seminary was where it was really at. Although he had not gone through the several years worth of practice required, Merwin was insistent he attend, and Trungpa eventually granted his request - along with his girlfriend as well. At seminary the couple stayed to themselves. At the Halloween party, after many, including Trungpa himself, had taken off their clothes, Merwin was asked to join the event, but refused. On Trungpa's orders his Vajra Guard forced entry into the poet's locked and barricaded room; brought him and his girlfriend, Dana Naone, against their will, to the party; and eventually stripped them of all their clothes, onlookers ignoring Naone's pleas for help and for someone to call the police.

Also this week:

Albert Hofmann, the mystical Swiss chemist who gave the world LSD, the most powerful psychotropic substance known, died Tuesday at his hilltop home near Basel, Switzerland. He was 102...

He then took LSD hundreds of times, but regarded it as a powerful and potentially dangerous psychotropic drug that demanded respect. More important to him than the pleasures of the psychedelic experience was the drug’s value as a revelatory aid for contemplating and understanding what he saw as humanity’s oneness with nature. That perception, of union, which came to Dr. Hofmann as almost a religious epiphany while still a child, directed much of his personal and professional life.

Dr. Hofmann was born in Baden, a spa town in northern Switzerland, on Jan. 11, 1906, the eldest of four children. His father, who had no higher education, was a toolmaker in a local factory, and the family lived in a rented apartment. But Dr. Hofmann spent much of his childhood outdoors.

He would wander the hills above the town and play around the ruins of a Hapsburg castle, the Stein. “It was a real paradise up there,” he said in an interview in 2006. “We had no money, but I had a wonderful childhood.”

It was during one of his ambles that he had his epiphany.

“It happened on a May morning — I have forgotten the year — but I can still point to the exact spot where it occurred, on a forest path on Martinsberg above Baden,” he wrote in “LSD: My Problem Child.” “As I strolled through the freshly greened woods filled with bird song and lit up by the morning sun, all at once everything appeared in an uncommonly clear light.

Who was a spiritual adpept? Who was the imposter? Both? Either? Neither?

My 2 cents: It's irrelevant. The whole damn question. And luckily there are other choices...and they don't involve brain-checking at the door or signing properties over to somebody who's really "just some guy."

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.

This is very funny

It's on Jewtube, of course...


Find this video and thousands of others at vSocial!

9/11: Heckuva job, Bush...

Is America safer? No.

Is America freer? No.

Has bin Laden been caught? No.

But the escalation is really, truly working! They mean it!

“The toothpaste is out of the tube. And, try as they might, the military’s information nannies are not going to be able to stuff it back in,” said Noah Schatman of Wired Magazine in an e-mail from Taji, Iraq. He said soldiers will pay $55 a month for a private connection.

The military is so petrified it will lose information control screensavers were installed on military computers warning blogs could jeopardize security, said Schatman, who runs Wired’s Danger Room blog and has tracked the unofficial use of the Internet by soldiers.

The campaign has led some soldiers to steer clear of the Internet. Others do it anyway as confusion reigns because of conflicting signals sent from Washington, he said.

“President Eisenhower warned of the growing military industrial complex in his farewell address. Since Dick Cheney can now afford solid gold oil derricks, it’s safe to say we failed Ike miserably. After losing two friends and over a dozen comrades, I have this to say: Do not wage war unless it is absolutely, positively the last ditch effort for survival,” wrote Spc. Alex Horton, 22, of the 3rd Stryker Brigade in Army of Dude. “In the future, I want my children to grow up with the belief that what I did here was wrong, in a society that doesn’t deem that idea unpatriotic,” he blogged.

Sgt. Thomas Strickland, 27, of Douglasville, Ga., calling himself the Rev Wayfarer, was one of the earliest to speak out publicly. Two days before he drowned in a vehicle accident at Mahmudijah on his second tour he condemned the leadership in “One Foot in the Grave.” He asked what the chain of command had been doing since his first tour. “We were winning somewhat when I left. And now we are being pinned down in our own (expletive deleted) homes. Insurgents are pushing locals out of their homes and taking over my area at will.”

Spc. Eleonai Israel of Bowling Green, Ky., court-martialed and given a less than honorable discharge last month after refusing to go on combat missions, said that like Horton he never heard a peep about what he said on his MySpace site during his year in Iraq.

“The truth will come out, and there is nothing they can do to hide it. The occupation is a disaster. I’m convinced that everyday it continues that it makes America, and the Iraqis less safe,” he said on his MySpace Blog. He now works for the presidential campaign of Democrat Mike Gravel of Alaska.

Of course that liberal publication run by the marines is, biased...

Stock Markets: Look out Below!

As folks who're following the economy & sub-prime crisis know, many in the financial media have been howling for a rate cut from the Fed since August...It may not be a foregone conlcusion...

Many Fed watchers believe the Fed district bank presidents are more reluctant to cut the federal funds rate than the members of the Fed board of governors.
In the past few days, some bank presidents have stressed that the Fed must avoid the "moral hazard" problem by bailing out investors who took excessive risk.
Plosser put it this way: "It is not appropriate for the Fed to ensure against financial volatility per se, or against individuals or firms taking losses or failing."
Plosser suggested that he is not yet certain whether the tight credit and financial turmoil is a "temporary disturbance" that would not throw the economy off track or a "shock" that would require a rate cut.
"I believe it is important to understand and appreciate this underlying stability of the economy in the face of temporary disturbances as we seek to assess monetary policy in the face of developments in housing," Plosser said.

It is of course the Federal Reserve Board of Governors who make the actual decision to set the Federal funds rate; but the idea that dissenting voices exist in that corporate world is intriguing.

Meanwhile, next week might see some kind of Armageddon in the commercial paper market, at least in the UK (and all this stuff is connected now):

LEADING bankers are warning of the worst crisis in the money markets for 20 years, which will come to a head this week when $113 billion (£57 billion) of commercial paper – market IOUs – comes up for refinancing.

This huge refinancing, mainly through London, exceeds the $100 billion that became due in mid-August, and which sparked the most serious phase in the money-market crisis, which has seen banks scrambling for funds and market interest rates rising sharply. “This is a serious pressure point,” said one leading banker.

Another senior executive of one of Britain’s top five retail banks said: “These are the worst conditions I have seen in money markets for 20 years”.

The huge amount of commercial paper becoming due is the hangover from the crisis in credit markets that began with American sub-prime mortgages. Many of the off-balance-sheet structured investment vehicles (SIVs) set up by the banks were borrowed in the form of asset-backed commercial paper.

It may be impossible for central banks to avert this crisis, because the issue is may be much, much bigger than the sub-prime market.
Here's something I wrote on my own blog almost two years ago.

There's the war in Iraq, there's bird flu, there's soaring oil prices, there's the trade deficit, the Federal deficit, bad emergency response in Santa Ana season... but I bet you never worried about collateralized debt obligations.

Neither did I until I read the above link.

As Jim Jubak wrote way back then:

To understand this epidemic of risk, why it is such a danger to the global financial markets -- and us -- and why the Fed can't do much about it except jawbone, you can try to master the details of the $8.4 trillion market for something called credit derivatives. Or you can answer one simple question about the airline industry.

That's the issue: the sub-prime crisis may not be a cause of the market instability, but a symptom of something much, much bigger.

It wasn't just home-buying deadbeats who were getting loans for houses, but it was deadbeat companies like airlines who were getting loans.

And none of this crap can be valued correctly at present.

And no bank wants to loan if they don't know what the collateral's value is.

Look out below.

And also take all the financial media with a grain of salt...for example, this bit from Forbes...

Subprime Risks: Overblown


...On the other hand, financial stocks are one of the biggest weightings in my portfolios. As a professional investor for 25 years and an owner of an investment firm, I know this area firsthand. So for me, the real lesson behind a circle of competence is that it gives me the courage to buy and hold stocks during market dislocations and not wait for things to calm down.

Hmmm...I don't suppose he thinks the title is apt because if it's not overblown, (or if as is noted above, it's a symptom and not the cause) then his "circle of competence" isn't.

Here's another gem from Forbes:

The Fall 2007 Rally

...What makes me so sure that we're in a rally, not a long-running decline? Four things. The first has to do with the shape of a bull market termination. The final peak does not arrive sharply. It tends to have a gentle upward slope, as the final but diminishing round of suckers is drawn in. And then the decline (usually) begins with a gentle slope, too (October 1987 was the exception proving the rule--over almost instantly), as some buyers continue to come in even after the bull market is over. The bull market leading up to the July 16 peak was too sudden and the plunge too sharp to presage a real bear market.

Second, bear markets don't start from old news. In this case the old news is that many subprime borrowers are going to default on their mortgages. While this misfortune is still unfolding, the basic facts have been out for a while. A fundamental rule of markets is that old news runs out of power. It takes new information to move stock prices.

Third, it usually takes a severe credit crunch to set a genuine bear market in motion. This credit crunch, at least for corporate borrowers, is not severe. You measure crunch by the spread in yields between junk bonds and Treasury bonds of like maturity. In 2000 that spread widened by three to four percentage points, a harbinger of both a broad tumble in stock prices and an economic contraction. In that case, moreover, the widening spread came atop rising Treasury interest rates--weak corporate borrowers had two strikes against them. Contrast that with what's happening now. Junk spreads widened by only a percentage point before going back the other way, and much of the widening was from a fall in Treasury rates, hardly bearish. This is a phony credit crunch.

Yeah, trillions of dollars worth of debt can't be accurately valued as to its risk/return profile, and this credit crunch is phony.

It's not phony; even people with good credit are being turned away right now.