Tuesday, December 01, 2009


What
once lived here is
now taking wing at my main
website, brianbrownewalker.com. There
you'll find the blog, and also, before you know it,
some kinda cool electrofunkadelic rastachocolate hybrid
multimedia-ific versions of my books. And a new
church, maybe, where foolishness, skin, love,
Rumi and Richard Pryor are revered.
Perhaps a plan -- overdue, alas --
to overthrow the military
industrial complex.
Time will tell.
Come say hi.
Peace.

Monday, November 30, 2009


Sitting
work is called
quiet sitting because
it is a matter of cleaning
all the pollution from your mind.
Once the pollution is gone and your mind
is clear, truth naturally becomes evident.
The reason people cannot see truth is
simply because their minds are too
noisy and they cannot see
through things and
events as they
really
are.

...I
always tell
people that the
first essential of practice
is to even the temper well. You
should not practice sitting hastily;
wait until positive energy rises
and the medicine is
produced -- only
then is the time
right.

When
it comes to
contemplating
emptiness, it is essential
to attain reversal of attention
inward, the state of turning the light
around. Rolling the eyes up into the head is
not reversal of attention, or is it turning the light
around when the eyes see darkness. You must reach
the point where the eyes do not see, the ears do not hear,
and the breathing in the nose is very subtle. Then you
have no eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body, or mind;
you are aware only of the existence
of the primary opening,
nothing
else.

When
you arrive here,
the light of your true
nature emerges. This is called
the celestial monarch of
the four elements
offering a
bowl.


Obama
says, "I feel very
confident that when the
American people hear a clear
rationale for what we're doing there
and how we intend to achieve our goals,
that they will be supportive." If there’s a clear
rationale for what we’re doing in Afghanistan
why haven’t we heard it yet? If Candidate
Obama kept telling us Afghanistan was
the “war of necessity,” how come
President Obama never
told us why that
is?

Obama’s
strategy team already
went through one high-level strategy
session in March and came with a paper pile
of trash. We would disrupt terror networks,
turn Afghanistan and Pakistan into
real countries, and get the
international community
involved.
Sure.

...Speaking
of boots, the Washington
Post reports that shortly after
President Obama announces his latest
Afghanistan plan, as many as 9,000 Marines
will deploy to resume an offensive in Southern
Afghanistan, the one that stalled out when McChrystal
first took over. The current official explanation of why
the original offensive went flat is that we didn’t have
enough troops at the time. But the time, the story
was that the Taliban fighters faded away in the
presence of a superior force and struck
elsewhere. How many shiny Ohio
quarters would you care to bet
that they’ll fade away
this time
too?




Will
Tiger Woods
finally talk to the
police? Who will replace
Oprah? (Not that Oprah can
ever be replaced, of course.) And
will Michaele and Tareq Salahi, the couple
who crashed President Barack Obama’s first state
dinner, command the hundreds of thousands of
dollars they want for an exclusive television
interview? Can Levi Johnston, father of
former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s
grandson, get his wish
to be a contestant on
“Dancing With the
Stars”?

The
chatter that
passes for news, the
gossip that is peddled by the
windbags on the airwaves, the noise
that drowns out rational discourse, and
the timidity and cowardice of what is left of
the newspaper industry reflect our flight into
collective insanity. We stand on the cusp of one
of the most seismic and disturbing dislocations
in human history, one that is radically
reconfiguring our economy as it
is the environment, and our
obsessions revolve around
the trivial and the
absurd.



What
really matters
in our lives—the wars
in Iraq and Afghanistan, the
steady deterioration of the dollar,
the mounting foreclosures, the climbing
unemployment, the melting of the polar ice caps
and the awful reality that once the billions in
stimulus money run out next year we will
be bereft and broke—doesn’t fit into
the cheerful happy talk that
we mainline into our
brains.

We
are enraptured
by the revels of a dying
civilization. Once reality shatters
the airy edifice, we will scream and yell
like petulant children to be rescued, saved and
restored to comfort and complacency. There will be
no shortage of demagogues, including buffoons like Sarah
Palin, who will oblige. We will either wake up to face
our stark new limitations, to retreat from imperial
projects and discover a new simplicity, as well
as a new humility, or we will stumble
blindly toward catastrophe and
neofeudalism.

...I
spent two
years traveling the
country to write a book
on the Christian right called
“American Fascists: The Christian
Right and the War on America.” I visited
former manufacturing towns where for many
the end of the world is no longer an abstraction.
Many have lost hope. Fear and instability have plunged
the working class into profound personal and economic
despair, and, not surprisingly, into the arms of
demagogues and charlatans of the radical
Christian right who offer a belief in
magic, miracles and the fiction
of a utopian Christian
nation.

Unless
we rapidly
re-enfranchise these
dispossessed workers, insert
them back into the economy, unless
we give them hope, these demagogues will
rise up to take power. Time is running out. The
poor can dine out only so long on illusions. Once they
grasp that they have been betrayed, once they match the
bleak reality of their future with the fantasies they are fed,
once their homes are foreclosed and they realize that
the jobs they lost are never coming back, they will
react with a fury and vengeance that will
snuff out the remains of our
anemic democracy and
usher in a new
dark age.

Nasruddin
earned his living
selling eggs. Someone
came to his shop one day and
said, “Guess what I have
in my hand.” “Give
me a clue,” said
Nasruddin.

“I
shall give
you several: It has
the shape of an egg, the
size of an egg. It looks like an egg,
tastes like an egg and smells like an egg.
Inside it is yellow and white. While it is
liquid before it is cooked, it becomes
thick when heated. It was,
moreover, laid
by a hen.”

“Aha!
I know!” said
Nasruddin. “It is
some kind of
cake!”




Sunday, November 29, 2009


To
calm the mind
means to find the right
balance. If you try to force your
mind too much it goes too far;
if you don't try enough it
doesn't get there, it
misses the point
of balance.

Normally
the mind isn't still,
it's moving all the time,
it lacks strength. Making the
mind strong and making the body
strong are not the same. To make the
body strong we have to exercise it, to push
it, in order to make it strong, but to make the
mind strong means to make it peaceful, not to
go thinking of this and that. For most of us
the mind has never been peaceful, it has
never had the energy of samadhi, so
we establish it within a boundary.
We sit in meditation, staying
with the One who
knows.

If
we force
our breath to
be too long or too
short we're not balanced,
the mind won't become peaceful.
It's like when we first start to use a pedal
sewing machine. At first we just practice pedaling
the machine to get our coordination right, before we
actually sew anything. Follow ing the breath is
similar. We don't get concerned over how
long or short, weak or strong it is,
we just note it. We simply let it
be, following the natural
breathing.

When
it's balanced,
we take the breathing
as our meditation object.
When we breathe in, the beginning
of the breath is at the nose tip, the middle
of the breath at the chest and the
end of the breath at the
abdomen.

This
is the path
of the breath.
When we breathe out,
the beginning of the breath
is at the abdomen, the middle at
the chest and the end at the nose tip.
We simply take note of this path of the breath
at the nose tip, the chest and the abdomen, then at
the abdomen, the chest and the tip of the nose.
We take note of these three points in order
to make the mind firm, to limit mental
activity so that mindfulness
and self awareness
can easily
arise.

When
we are adept
at noting these three
points we can let them go
and note the in and out breathing,
concentrating solely at the nose-tip or
the upper lip where the air passes on its in
and out passage. We don't have to follow the
breath, just establish mindfulness in
front of us at the nose-tip, and note
the breath at this one point --
entering, leaving,
entering,
leaving.

There's
no need to think
of anything special,
just concentrate on this
simple task for now, having
continuous presence of mind.
There's nothing more to do, just
breathing in and out. Soon the mind
becomes peaceful, the breath refined.
The mind and body become light.
This is the right state
for the work of

I
believe
that many a
person has examined
man with a microscope in
every age of the world; has found
that he did not even resemble the creature
he pretended to be; has perceived that a civilization
not proper matter for derision has always been and must
always remain impossible to him -- and has put away
his microscope and kept his mouth shut. Perhaps
because the microscopist (besides having an
influential wife) was built like the rest
of the human race -- ninety-nine
parts of him being moral
cowardice.

I
am such
a person myself.
I used my microscope
during fifteen years, and then
put the result on paper five years ago.
When ever I wish to account for any new
outbreak of hypocrisy, stupidity, or crime
on the part of the human race, I get out
that manuscript and read it, and am
consoled, perceiving that the
outbreak was in obedience
to the laws of man’s
make, and was not
preventable.

My
wife does
not allow the
manuscript to be
published, and as ninety-nine
parts of me forbid me to make myself
comprehensively and uncompromisingly
odious, it has not been difficult to
persuade me to restrict the
reading of it to
myself!

But
you shall
read it when you
come to see me; then
perhaps you will believe
with me that civilizations are
not realities, but only dreams;
dreams of the mind, not of the heart,
and therefore fictitious, and perishable;
that they have never affected the heart and
therefore have no valuable progress; that the
heart remains today what it always was, as
intimacy with any existing savage tribe
shall show. Indeed the average of the
human ‘brain’ is not a shade higher
today than it was in Egyptian
times ten thousand
years ago.







Saturday, November 28, 2009


Try
with all your
might and work
very, very hard to make
the world a better place. But
if all your efforts are to
no avail -- no hard
feelings.

Start
a huge, foolish
project like Noah;
it makes absolutely
no difference
what people
think of
you.



Cities
should provide
service opportunities
and training for all ages to
instill confidence, self-reliance,
and pride. One of these programs
could be an Edible Schoolyard that is
cared for by students and led by professional
farmers and volunteers. It would provide 100 percent
of the school meals to the student body, and excess
food would be delivered to the ill and elderly.
In addition, schools would produce zero
waste by composting all bio matter.
The school could also compost
neighborhood bio matter to
fund its agricultural
efforts.

Because
I am a woman,
I must make unusual efforts
to succeed. If I fail, no one will say,
‘She doesn’t have what it takes’;
they will say, ‘Women
don’t have what it

Amid
the pages of
the September issue
of Details was the article
"How Internet Porn Is Changing Teen
Sex," in which writer Eric Spitznagel quoted
a young man barely able to drink legally
as saying, "Pubic hair is disgusting.
Girls should keep their
vaginas porn-star
trim."

Elsewhere,
in a recent column
on Salon.com, Mary Elizabeth
Williams detailed the obnoxious, belittling
effect pornography has had on her sex life: "'You
like that, baby? You like that?' he asked, though he
didn't notice I wasn't answering. And then,
somewhere around the 18th time he said
it, it hit me — I wasn't just having
bad sex. I was having
bad porn
sex."

Blame
it on the ease
with which any plugged-in
American can access porn of all types,
from amateur to violent to bestial. Across the
country, sexually active straight men of all ages
are taking bedroom cues from skin flicks, getting
wrongheaded ideas about how women's bodies
should look and bad information about
what's sexy. Subsequently, they're
pissing off — and, according to
Williams, smacking their
erections on — their
lovers.

That
all being
said, you might
assume women don't
like porn. You'd be wrong.
According to a 2007 Nielsen survey,
a third of people visiting XXX websites
were female, with almost thirteen million
women admitting to looking at Internet porn
at least once a month. And physiologically, men
and women differ little in their response to pornographic
images. One 2006 McGill University study found that females
shown porn clips reached maximum arousal just one minute
after their male counterparts, while both genders began
displaying signs of arousal within thirty seconds
of exposure. Dick-smacking aside, there's
definitely something women appreciate
about porno, so there must be
something men looking to
please those women can
learn from. The
question is,
what?

A
general
agreement among
most of my friends is that
if we watch porn, we kinda prefer
to watch lesbian porn," said a straight
female friend of mine from Manhattan, echoing
a sentiment I heard a lot when asking women what
lessons guys should actually take from their porno.
"I guess that stems from the fact that we'd
rather watch footage of women actually
enjoying themselves, not being
sexually exploited by
some hairless
dude."

It's
the stuff
panty raids are
made of. Turns out
that many women are doing
exactly what horny teenage boys
fantasize they do: dimming the lights,
locking the door and turning themselves on
with movies of other naked women. "Men should
watch lesbian porn to see how the woman on
the receiving end is actually enjoying
herself," said another friend, "not
being ridden like a horse
while standing on
her head."



is the only women’s
magazine in the world currently
doing erotic male pictorials designed especially
for a female audience. We also include a range of
intelligent sex- and non sex-related articles,
and we’re completely free from
fashion, diets and
celebrity
gossip.


Foreigners
must frequently
look at the United States
and shake their heads, wondering
how such a great nation could have sunk
so low due to a disproportionate and essentially
misguided response to a terrorist attack eight years ago.
The attackers who carried out 9/11 succeeded
through a lot of luck and a mixture of
complacency and incompetence on
the part of America’s intelligence
and law enforcement
agencies.

Terrorism
did not threaten
our form of government
or our way of life then and does
not do so now. An assessment by France’s
highly regarded Paris Institute of Political Studies
last week suggested that Osama bin Laden’s
al-Qaeda has likely been reduced to
a core group of eight to ten
terrorists who are on the
run more often
than not.

Let
us say,
hypothetically,
that American forces kill
or capture Osama bin Laden and
Mullah Omar, enabling President Obama
to declare victory and bring our troops home.
Would he? Not according to the Pentagon's plan for
a fifty-year "Long War" of counterinsurgency
spanning Iraq, Afghanistan, Pakistan,
the Horn of Africa, the
Philippines and
beyond.

Military
intellectuals envision
a prolonged cold war against
Al Qaeda, with hot wars along the way.
It happens that the Long War is over Muslim lands
rich with oil, natural gas and planned pipelines.
The Pentagon identifies them as hostile
terrain where Al Qaeda and
its affiliates are
hidden.

Among
the top experts
responsible for this
fifty-year war plan, concocted
in 2005 in windowless offices in the
Pentagon, is Dr. David Kilcullen, a former
Australian soldier, an anthropologist,
former top adviser to Gen. David
Petraeus and current aide
to Gen. Stanley
McChrystal...

Kilcullen's
recent book, The
Accidental Guerrilla,
presents the case for a Long
War of fifty or even 100 years' duration,
with chapters on Iraq (a mistake he believes was
salvaged by the military surge he promoted in 2007-08),
Afghanistan (where he recommends at least a five-to-ten
year campaign), Pakistan (whose tribal areas he sees
as the center of the terrorist threat) and even
Europe (where, he says, human rights laws
create legislative "safe havens"
for urban Muslim
undergrounds).

...Civilian
casualties strewn
across these battlefields have
been obscured by the fog of war, but
hundreds of thousands of people, mainly civilians,
could ultimately die in Iraq, Afghanistan and
Pakistan, each of them leaving
a legacy of vengeful
violence.

These
projections reveal
a staggering audacity--not Obama's
audacity of hope but an audacity of martial
commitment. A fifty- to 100-year military campaign--
the subtitle of Kilcullen's book is Fighting Small Wars in
the Midst of a Big One--will span thirteen presidential
terms and twenty-five Congressional sessions,
casting a long shadow over generations
of politicians not yet
running for
office...

The
audacity
becomes ever more
dangerous without checks and
balances. Without his acknowledging it,
Kilcullen's plan plays directly into what he believes
is Al Qaeda's strategy of exhausting the United
States militarily and economically.
And yet he thinks the
Long War is
inevitable.

The
world
counterterrorism
community that is planning
the Long War, Kilcullen
has said, is "small
and tightly
knit"...

But
of course,
these accidental guerrillas
are no accident at all. They inevitably
and predictably emerge as a nationalist force
against foreign invaders. Their resistance to imperialism
stretches back far before Al Qaeda. In fact, Al Qaeda was
born with US resources, as a byproduct of resistance
to the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan and
earlier oppression of hundreds
of Islamic radicals
in Egyptian
prisons.

...Adherence
to the model also
forces Kilcullen and other
counterinsurgency devotees to downplay
the secretive and violent underside of their approach.
The cult of clandestinity is symbolized by General
McChrystal, whose entire career in
Iraq remains a classified
secret.

What
we do know
about McChrystal comes
from the leading mainstream
narrator of the Iraq War, Bob Woodward,
in his book The War Within. Woodward writes
that the key to the Iraq surge, in addition to buying
off the Sunni insurgency, was a top-secret program of
extrajudicial executions run by McChrystal, which was
"possibly the biggest factor in reducing" Baghdad's
violence during that election year. One US adviser
in charge of tracking down and killing
insurgents, according to Woodward,
said the efficiency of the
program gave him
"orgasms."

...That
Kilcullen may be
the true progeny of the
"best and brightest" is evident from
his attempt--in 2004 writings--to salvage the
US Phoenix program from its discredited image in
histories of the Vietnam War. Kilcullen has written that
he favors a "global Phoenix program" against
insurgents today. "Contrary to popular
mythology," he believes that the
"maligned" Phoenix program
was "highly effective" in
disrupting the Vietcong
infrastructure.

Under
Phoenix, according
to the 1971 Congressional testimony
of William Colby, the former pacification
director in South Vietnam, more than 20,000
Vietcong suspects--many of them the civilian infrastructure
in Vietcong-controlled areas--were killed from 1968 to 1971.
Run by the CIA through South Vietnamese police units,
the program employed methods of torture
including electric shocks to testicles
and vaginas, and truncheons
to the ears.

Tens
of thousands
of South Vietnamese villagers
were uprooted and resettled in fortified
"strategic hamlets," in accordance with the
counterinsurgency doctrine of protecting the civilian
population. Thirty years later the Iraq surge seems
to have included another version of the Phoenix
program, directed by McChrystal.
Countless Iraqis were
targeted and
killed...

This
may be the part
where an inbred secrecy
ultimately leads to a brilliant but
delusional Apocalypse Now sensibility,
expressed in the Joseph Conrad character Kurtz's
exclamation "Exterminate all the brutes!" The
further tragedy of counterinsurgency is that
it does not stop in the face of failure
but starts all over again
from its own
ashes.

In
the end,
its secrets will
not be kept from its
victims in Afghanistan and
Pakistan, who suspect and know all too
well who is killing them, but from well-meaning
Americans living in our own gated communities
amid democratic structures that seem
unable to save us from a remote
controlled, engineered
ignorance.



I’d
like to see
him go on TV Tuesday
night and say, “My fellow Americans,
I was wrong. Our war in Afghanistan has nothing
to do with national security anymore and we can’t afford
it, and I’m not sending one more kid into harm’s way
to fight there. As of tonight, I’m ordering a
complete withdrawal.” But the odds of
that happening are slimmer than a
licorice rope. Obama
couldn’t take
the heat.

Former
four-star Barry
McCaffrey, the military-industrial
ghoul who was the worst of the retired military
media analysts who helped sell the Iraq war to the
American public, is, incredibly, back on the air
with NBC. He’s pushing the “no exit strategy,
no timeline in Afghanistan” line. McCaffrey
has ties to DynCorp International,
a company that has a five-year
contract to support bases
in Afghanistan.

A
swell fellow,
that McCaffrey is,
but he’s really just a symptom
of a larger American disease. Our wars,
even though they’re destroying our economy,
are making a lot of people rich. The cash caisson,
the gravy ship and the wild blue budget continue
to grow. War is our only export, and counter-
insurgency is the perfect tool of the Long
War mafia because counter-
insurgency wars are
unwinnable.
"I love you but shut the fuck up"




Friday, November 27, 2009


How lucky
the heart where
love makes its home,
for love makes it forget the
cares of the world! Love is like
a bolt of lightning, which sets
fire to patience and reason
and reduces them
to nothing.

The lover
becomes careless of his
own safety. Mountains of blame
weigh no more for him than
a straw; criticism only
increases his
passion.

Jami





When
will it occur
to our foreign policy
wonks just how counterproductive
our foreign policy practices are? The only
things our military interventions overseas
accomplish are to provide our enemies
with targets and give them
superb reasons to
hate us.

The
neocon cabal
warns us of all the horrible
things that will happen if we withdraw
our troops from the Middle East and Central Asia.
The worst of their campfire ghost stories describes how a
regional war will break out if we don’t stay around. Heh.
These people can’t do anything to each other worse
than what we’re doing to them. Let a regional
war break out. Let them fight among
themselves. We don’t need to
be in the middle
of it.

Sages
from the ancient
stoics to our parents have
admonished us time and again not
to worry about what other people think of us.
To continue to pour blood and treasure into AfPak is
mindless shame, and it’s a shame we’re going
to keep doing it. Let them have their
propaganda victory. We’ll sit
around and enjoy
our holiday

This
is sad.
We’re watching
a man -- a fundamentally
decent man, from what I've seen
in the six-plus years I've been watching
him -- lose his soul. And lose it
to what Jeff Huber rightly
calls "campfire ghost
stories."

I’ve
thought
about murdering a
couple of people in my life.
My reasons were good ones, if
there is such a thing, like someone
mucking about with my daughter in a way
that gets a person impaled in a lot of places.
But I didn’t do it because ultimately I felt
like it would set me back personally,
in my soul development. I sat with
it long enough that I could
actually feel that.
Sitting is good
that way.

I’ve
lived long
enough now to
have absorbed a lot of
killing stories, and I very honestly
don’t know of one where the murderer,
however “well” motivated or within his or her
"rights", benefited from the act. I know some
people who've killed in war, know them
well. However they felt about
it then, they don't feel
good about it now.
Not one of
them.

And
war is murder.
Send guys with M4s
and Predators somewhere,
they're going to kill people. So this
is about ordering murder, Mr. Obama.
And we aren't pursuing Adolf Hitler here, sir,
we're maiming and killing innocents, by and large,
people who farm in valleys which they reasonably want
us to leave. Are you willing to order the murder of these folks
and their daughters so you can please the Pentagon and the
bloodthirsty part of the public? So you can be a successful
politician and "enjoy" a second term? Would you be
willing to have the skin burnt off of, or the life
chased out of, one of your own girls so you
could look "strong"? Because that seems
to be, generally, the way things
work in this world of ours.
What goes around
seems to come
around.



Killing
should be the province
of the great executioner alone.
Trying to take his place and kill is like
cutting wood in the place of the
master carpenter: the odds
are you’ll hurt your
own hand.






The general
who advances without
coveting fame, who retreats without
being ashamed, whose concern is to keep the
people safe and honor the sovereign --
she will be the treasure
of the nation.





So
I was
thinking,
what’s the context
of museums? I guess it’s
the religion of the empires, it’s
capitalist temples of looted shit that
we’ve isolated and made worth a lot of money
by removing it from its context, somehow.
And it’s not necessarily negative, cause
I love museums. I love taking
things out of context and

Kunduz,
Afghanistan —
Far from the heartland
of the Taliban insurgency in
the south, this once peaceful northern
province was one place American
and Afghan officials thought
they did not have
to worry
about.

Afghan
officials cut the
police force here by a third
two years ago and again earlier this year.
Security was left to a few thousand
German peacekeepers. Only one
Afghan logistics battalion
was stationed
here.

But
over the last
two years the Taliban
have steadily staged a resurgence in
Kunduz, where they now threaten a vital NATO
supply line and employ more sophisticated tactics.
In November, residents listened to air raids by
NATO forces for five consecutive nights,
the first heavy fighting since the
Taliban were overthrown
eight years
ago.

The
turnabout
vividly demonstrates
how security has broken down
even in unexpected parts of Afghanistan.
It also points to the hard choices facing American,
NATO and Afghan officials even if President
Obama decides to send more soldiers to
Afghanistan, as he is expected
to announce next
week.

Even
under the most
generous deployments now under
consideration, relatively few additional
troops are expected in the north; most will
be directed to the heartland of the
Taliban resistance in
the south and
east.

...the
Taliban have
re-emerged with such
force that during the presidential
election in August, police officers were
fending off attacks on the outskirts of the
city of Kunduz, and militants were
poised to overrun the
center, officials
said.



"We
did not have
a terrorist attack on
our country during
President Bush's
term."




Thursday, November 26, 2009


A
true
revolution of
values will lay hand on
the world order and say of war,
"This way of settling differences is
not just." This business of burning human
beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes
with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs
of hate into the veins of peoples normally humane,
of sending men home from dark and bloody
battlefields physically handicapped and
psychologically deranged, cannot
be reconciled with wisdom,
justice, and
love.

A
nation
that continues
year after year to spend
more money on military defense
than on programs of social
uplift is approaching
spiritual


The
general is
the bulwark of the
nation. When the bulwark is
strong, the nation is strong.
When the bulwark is
weak, the nation
is weak.



MM:
Have you seen
the most beautiful
woman in the
world?

RB:
Yes, sometime
around 1984 when I
worked at a store. The store
was empty and in came a Hindu
woman. She looked like a princess
and well could have been one. She bought
some hanging costume jewelry from me. I was
at the point of fainting. She had copper skin, long
red hair, and the rest of her was perfect. A timeless
beauty. When I had to charge her, I felt embarrassed.
As if saying she understood and not to worry, she
smiled at me. Then she disappeared and I have
never again seen anyone like her. Sometimes I
get the impression that she was the goddess
Kali, the patron saint of thieves and
goldsmiths, except Kali was also
the goddess of murderers, and
this Hindu woman was not
only the most beautiful
woman on earth, but
she seemed also to
be a good person,
very sweet and
considerate.



One
morning,
while I was still
in grad school and
driving back into the city
after a weekend in the country,
I sat at a stoplight and watched two
young men in dress shirts cross the street.
I'll never forget it, the contempt and revulsion
that flooded me as I thought "I bet if I knew
what gets you off, I'd want to vomit." I was
despairing because that's what's deep
under the overwhelming anger that
comes with despising half
the human race:
despair.

My
work on cam
was making everything
toxic. Anal was de rigueur,
the request for it perpetual, rude,
clueless; people sent me links to women
being fucked with baseball bats and Coke cans;
and none of my customers could spell. I was trying to
stay raw and capable of writing poetry by listening to In the
Aeroplane Over the Sea constantly, "Communist Daughter"
and "Two Headed Boy Pt. 2" particularly, over and over
again. Semen stains the mountaintops, semen stains
the mountaintops. Maybe that's the first stage
of becoming familiar with the male mind;
go to the dark places and stay
there until you're brave
enough to strike a

MM:
If you hadn’t
been a writer, what
would you have
been?

RB:
I would like
to have been a homicide
detective, much more than being
a writer. I am absolutely sure of that.
A string of homicides. I’d have been someone
who could come back to the scene of the crime
alone, by night and not be afraid of ghosts.
Perhaps then I might really have become
crazy. But being a detective, that
could easily be resolved with
a bullet to the
mouth.

M.M.:
Have you shed one
tear about the widespread
criticism you’ve drawn
from your
enemies?

R.B.:
Lots and lots.
Every time I read that
someone has spoken badly
of me I begin to cry, I drag myself
across the floor, I scratch myself, I stop
writing indefinitely, I lose my appetite, I smoke
less, I engage in sport, I go for walks on the
edge of the sea, which by the way is less
than 30 meters from my house and
I ask the seagulls, whose ancestors
ate the fish who ate Ulysses:
Why me? Why? I’ve
done you no
harm.


The
2010 Pentagon
budget means “every man,
woman and child in the United States will
spend more than $2,700 on [defense] programs
and agencies next year. By way of comparison, the
average Japanese spends less than $330; the
average German about $520; China’s
per capita spending
is less than


During
the presidential
campaign I called Afghanistan
"the right war." Let me say this: with
the full information resources of the American
presidency at my fingertips, I no longer believe that
to be the case. I know a president isn't supposed to say
such things, but he, too, should have the flexibility to
change his mind. In fact, more than most people,
it's important that he do so based on the best
information available. No false pride or
political calculation should
keep him from
that.

And
the best
information
available to me
on the situation in
Afghanistan is sobering.
It doesn't matter whether you
are listening to our war commander,
General Stanley McChrystal, who, as press
reports have indicated, believes that with approximately
80,000 more troops -- which we essentially don't have
available -- there would be a reasonable chance of
conducting a successful counterinsurgency war
against the Taliban, or our ambassador to that
country, Karl Eikenberry, a former general
with significant experience there, who
believes we shouldn't send another
soldier at present. All agree on
the following seven
points:

We
have no partner in
Afghanistan...

Afghanistan
floats in a culture of
corruption...

Despite
billions of dollars of
American money poured into
training the Afghan security forces,
the army is notoriously under-
strength and largely
ineffective...

The
Taliban
insurgency is
spreading and gaining
support largely because the Karzai
regime has been so thoroughly discredited,
the Afghan police and courts are so ineffective and
corrupt, and reconstruction funds so badly misspent.
Under these circumstances, American and NATO
forces increasingly look like an army of
occupation, and more of them
are only likely to solidify
this impression...

Al-Qaeda
is no longer a
significant factor in
Afghanistan...

Our war
in Afghanistan has
become the military equivalent
of a massive bail-out of a firm determined to
fail...the American people will be spending $100 billion
a year or more on this war, probably for years to
come. Simply put, this is not money we can
afford to squander on a failing war
thousands of miles from
home...

Our
all-volunteer
military has for years
now shouldered the burden
of our two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Even if we were capable of sending 40,000-80,000
more troops to Afghanistan, they would without question
be servicepeople on their second, third, fourth, or
even fifth tours of duty. A military, even the
best in the world, wears down under
this sort of stress and
pressure...

The
way to
safety in our
world is, I believe, to
secure our borders against
those who would harm us, and to
put Americans back to work. With
this in mind, next month I've called
for a White House Jobs Summit, which I
plan to chair. And there I will suggest that, as
a start, and only as a start, we look at two programs
that were not only popular across the political spectrum in
the desperate years of the Great Depression, but were
remembered fondly long after by those who took
part in them -- the Civilian Conservation Corps
and the Works Progress Administration.
These basic programs put millions of
Americans back to work on public
projects that mattered to
this nation and saved
families, lives,
and souls.

We
cannot afford
a failing war in Afghanistan
and a 10.2% official unemployment rate
at home. We cannot live with two Americas,
one for Wall Street and one for everyone
else. This is not the path
to American
safety.

As
president,
I retain the right
to strike at al-Qaeda or other
terrorists who mean us imminent harm, no
matter where they may be, including Afghanistan.
I would never deny that there are dangers in the
approach I suggest today, but when have
Americans ever been averse to danger,
or to a challenge either? I
cannot believe
we will be
now.

It's
time for change.
I know that not all Americans
will agree with me and that some will be
upset by the approach I am now determined to
follow. I expect anger and debate. I take full responsibility
for whatever may result from this policy departure.
Believe me, the buck stops here, but I am
convinced that this is the way forward
for our country in war and
peace, at home and
abroad.


As
protests
resounded outside, the
University of California Board of
Regents approved a 32 percent fee increase for
students attending the state's premier public schools.
The vote in a windowless University of California, Los
Angeles, meeting room took place Thursday as
hundreds of students and union members
gathered nearby, waving signs, pounding
drums and chanting "We're fired
up, can't take it no more"
and "Shame on
you."

The
$2,500 increase
will push the cost of an
undergraduate education to more
than $10,000 a year by next fall, about triple
the cost of a decade ago. The fees, the equivalent of
tuition, do not include the cost of housing, board and books.
"Our hand has been forced," UC President Mark Yudof
told reporters after the vote. "When you
don't have any money, you
don't have any
money."

Armed
police, some with
beanbag-firing shotguns,
lined up behind steel barricades,
watching over the protesters...Board members
said the 229,000-student system had been whipsawed
by years of state budget cuts, leaving no option other
than turning to students' wallets. Yudof has
said the 10-campus system needs a
$913 million increase in state
funding next
year.




M.M.:
John Lennon,
Lady Di or Elvis
Presley?

R.B.:
The Pogues.
Or Suicide. Or Bob Dylan.
Well, but let’s not be pretentious:
Elvis forever. Elvis and his golden voice,
with a sheriff’s badge, driving a
Mustang and stuffing
himself full of
pills.




Wednesday, November 25, 2009


He
who knows
the opponent and
knows himself need not fear in
a hundred battles. He who knows only
himself and not the opponent will
lose one for each that he wins.
He who knows neither
will fail every
time.




President
Barack Obama is
about to step on his own dick --
and on yours, and on mine -- if all the
leaking is true about adding 34,000 troops to
the 68,000 already in Afghanistan (that's American
troops -- General Stanley McChrystal, who is short
on honor, also commands 42,000 NATO and
200,000 Afghan troops.) And the leaking
wouldn't be going on, nor be so
uniform, if it weren't true,
so consider this one
fait accompli.

There
are, by our own
intelligence estimates, less
than 100 members of Al Qaeda in
Afghanistan. Al Qaeda constitutes and
organizes itself all over the world,
sort of like the Terminator after
taking a whupping. The 9/11
attacks were hatched
in Hamburg, not
Afghanistan,
by the
way.

There
are people shooting
at us and bombing us in Afghanistan,
to be sure. As former CIA agent Robert Baer and
retired USMC captain and formerly highest-ranking
U.S. civilian in Zabul province Matthew Hoh
explain here, that's because
we're there:




Afghans
are a tribal hill
people. This is
their country
from the
air:



And
they like --
no love -- to fight.
Their national game is
buzkashi, which is a little like
polo, except they tear the head off a goat
and race back and forth on horseback
trying to heave it across each other's
goal lines, losing plenty of teeth
and eyeballs, and no small
number of lives,
along the
way.



They
are a version
of hard with which
folks like us ought not fuck.
They kicked the ass of the British when
what was then the world's greatest empire tried
to occupy and control their country. They kicked the ass
of the Soviet Union when what was then one of the
world's two greatest empires tried to occupy and
control their country. Britain and the Soviets
left their blood and their treasure
all over Afghanistan,
like so --



-- and
they left with
dick. Dicks in hand,
those lucky enough to
still have them. Hugely,
hugely impoverished.
Roundly defeated.
Idiots. Ass-hats.
Fools.

And
that is the fate to
which Barack Hussein Obama
is now consigning America: the latest in
the long line of idiots, ass-hats, and fools who
tried to conquer a country that has never
been conquered in history and lost
their asses, literally and
process.

Along
the way, we --
by which I mean
Commander in Chief Barack
Hussein Obama, and by inescapable
extension you and me -- have
done and are doing this sort
of thing to the daughters
of Afghanistan:



That
particular little
girl was ruined for life
by a U.S. helicopter attack.
But we have a lot of ways of chewing
up little girls -- read about the drone programs
going on in Afghanistan and Pakistan and all the innocents
they kill, and read about the covert mercenary army at
work there on your nickel and mine. Wake up
tomorrow and read about the next hot
new program, because there will
be one, evidently, thanks to
Barack Obama and his
masters in the
Pentagon.

People
get a certain look in
their eye when you occupy
their land and set their
daughters on fire.
It's sort of like
this --



-- but
turned up to 11.
That guy's only turned up
to 6, because he's just playing buzkashi.
Kill, rape, or maim for life his daughter, and
you don't want to see the look in his eye.
America ain't stronger than that.
Nothing is stronger
than that.

Why
is this happening,
and how is it possible? Well,
partly because of evil, is my guess,
and partly because of stupid.
Here's the stupid we've
become:





That's
the extreme version,
but the principle pertains.
And the evil part, well, perhaps that
goes something like this. Because
there is a lot of money in

Welcome
to Earth, planet of
gun-runners. And say hello
to the new Gun-Runner
in Chief, Barry
Magic.



Avoiding
the well-organized and
the aligned, evading the impassioned
and the confident, not attacking uphill nor
charging at the dug-in, refusing to be baited, not
being drawn into ambush by a force feigning flight,
not interfering with troops headed for home,
leaving surrounded armies an outlet,
not pressing desperate foes --
this is the true art
of war.








In
days of
yore, gay men
had to develop a form
of intuition known as gaydar.
Today gaydar lives on the iPhone and
relies on global positioning satellites to
accurately locate the ready and
the willing. There are
other variations of
too.





Our
eyes assess
by comparison,
not direct evaluation.
You see blue and
green spirals
here:


Mais non!
It's the exact same
color:


Evidently
humans are easy
to fool.





Tuesday, November 24, 2009


Beyond
our occupation,
each of us has a vocation,
a calling toward sacred service.
This calling may be understood as our
life’s purpose, our personal contribution to
the transformation of the world. Spiritual chivalry
is the cultivation of our capacity to answer the call.
It is to swear oneself body, heart, and soul to the
ideals of truth, justice, peace, and beauty —
and thus sworn, to go forth
into the battle
of life.

“I
don’t oppose
all wars,” an Illinois state
senator had famously told a rally on
the very afternoon in October, 2002, that the
Iraq War Resolution was introduced in Congress.
“I’m opposed to dumb wars.” Iraq was a
dumb war; Afghanistan was, or
could be, a smart
one.

There
was considerable
truth in the narrative. But
it contained an almost subliminal
suggestion that somehow the clock could
be turned back—that the events of the Afghanistan
war’s first months could be replayed, this time with a better
outcome. When Obama moved into the White House, he
brought the narrative with him. In August, at a Veterans
of Foreign Wars convention, he said of the conflict,
“This is not a war of choice. This is a war of
necessity.” By October, he had ordered in
thirty-four thousand more troops,
doubling the overall American
deployment in
Afghanistan.

But...
does it make
sense, for example,
to spend lives and treasure
trying to eradicate “safe havens” in
Afghanistan when Al Qaeda has so many
other—well, options, from Sudan to Hamburg?
Will a bigger, longer, and presumably bloodier occupation
advance or retard the ultimate aim of discouraging Islamist
terrorism? Will adding American troops—at a million
dollars a year per soldier—encourage Afghans to
fight for themselves or prompt them to leave
the fighting to us? Can Afghanistan’s
nominal government, with its
President elected by fraud
and its recent rating as the
second most corrupt on
earth, be finessed
or somehow
remade?

The
sum we are
already spending
annually on Afghanistan
is greater than its gross domestic
product. Are there nonmilitary ways we
could deploy that sum which would advance our goals
as efficaciously? Would even forty thousand additional troops
suffice for anything resembling the ambitious nation building
program that General Stanley McChrystal, the top military
commander in Afghanistan, has proposed? (Counter-
insurgency theory suggests that it would take
more than ten times that many; would
forty —or ten, or twenty—thousand
be only a first installment?) Any
counterinsurgency campaign,
we’re told, requires
a very long
commitment.

Is the
voluntary association
of democracies called NATO,
organized to deter war more than to
wage it, capable of sustaining a twenty or thirty
years’ war? For that matter, does the United States—
a decentralized populist democracy struggling
with economic decline and political
gridlock—have that capacity?
And what about
Pakistan?





In
my memoir,
I talk about a buddy who,
whenever he was about to get jumped, use
to recite the last half of Rakim's Microphone Fiend.
It was like armor for his nerves. I think about that
whenever I hear society mocking the mask which
young black boys don in urban America.
We manufacture the conditions, and
then rail at kids for creating
a code of survival in
response.

In
my time,
hip-hop was an
art-form based on that
code. If you were a kid living in
a city, and thus acclimated to the rules
of that city, if you spent time trying to understand
which blocks were off-limits, if you ever assembled friends,
in the manner of land-lords assembling vassals, if you
never went to see your girlfriend solo, if, in
other words, you lived with the threat
of random violence, then hip-hop
was the language of
your life.

Hip-Hop,
at that point, took
the pose and iconography
of the streets and melded it with
the traditional job of the party MC --
moving the crowd. From that fusion, you
got a mythological figure--the MC as a literary
swordsmen who, in a violent world, dispatched
his enemies with words. Rakim, to me, was the
first person who really took that imagery,
that melding, off into the
stratosphere.


So follow me or were you thinking you were first?
Let's travel at magnificent speeds throughout the universe.
What can you say as the earth gets further and further away,
Planets as small as balls of clay.
Astray into the Milky Way, world's out of sight,
As far as the eye can see, not even a satellite.
Now stop and turn around and look,
As you stare into darkness, your knowledge is took.
So you keep staring and suddenly you see a star,
You better follow it, cause it's the R...



To
all my
nonbelieving,
sort-of-believing, and
used-to-be-believing friends:
I feel like I should begin with a confession. I am
sorry that so often the biggest obstacle to God has
been Christians. Christians who have had so much to
say with our mouths and so little to show with our
lives. I am sorry that so often we have forgotten
the Christ of our Christianity. Forgive us.
Forgive us for the embarrassing things
we have done in the name
of God.

...At
one point
Gandhi was asked
if he was a Christian, and
he said, essentially, "I sure love
Jesus, but the Christians seem so unlike
their Christ." A recent study showed that the top
three perceptions of Christians in the U. S. among young
non-Christians are that Christians are 1) antigay,
2) judgmental, and 3) hypocritical. So what we
have here is a bit of an image crisis, and much
of that reputation is well deserved.
That's the ugly stuff. And that's
why I begin by saying
that I'm
sorry.

Now
for the good
news.

I
want to
invite you to
consider that maybe
the televangelists and street
preachers are wrong — and that God
really is love. Maybe the fruits of the Spirit
really are beautiful things like peace, patience,
kindness, joy, love, goodness, and not the
ugly things that have come to
characterize religion, or
politics, for that
matter.

...God
may indeed
be evident in a priest,
but God is just as likely to be
at work through a Samaritan or a prostitute.
In fact the Scripture is brimful of God using folks like
a lying prostitute named Rahab, an adulterous king named
David...at one point God even speaks to a guy named Balaam
through his donkey. Some say God spoke to Balaam
through his ass and has been speaking through
asses ever since. So if God should choose
to use us, then we should be grateful
but not think too highly
of ourselves.





The
really beautiful
thing about the culture
war, from an entertainment
standpoint, is that it is fundamentally
irresolvable. There isn’t a concrete set
of issues involved, where in theory
both sides could give in a little
and find middle ground,
reach some sort of
compromise.

That’s
because there
are no issues at all.
At the end of this decade
what we call “politics” has devolved
into a kind of ongoing, brainless soap opera
about dueling cultural resentments and the really
cool thing about it, if you’re a TV news producer
or a talk radio host, is that you can build the
next day’s news cycle meme around
pretty much anything at all,
no matter how
irrelevant —

It
doesn’t
matter what the
argument is about. What’s
important is that once the argument
starts, the two sides will automatically coalesce
around the various instant-cocoa talking points
and scream at each other until they’re
blue in the face, or until the
next argument
starts.

And
while some
of us are old enough
to remember that once upon
a time, these arguments always had at
least some sort of ideological flavor to them, i.e.
the throwdowns were at least rooted in some sort of
real political issue (war, taxes, immigration, etc.) we’ve
now got a whole generation that is accustomed to
screaming at cultural enemies as an end
in itself, for the sheer dismal fun of it.
Start fighting first, figure
out the reasons
later.

Sarah
Palin is the
Empress-Queen of
the screaming-for-screaming’s
sake generation. The people who dismiss her
book Going Rogue as the petty, vindictive meanderings
of a preening paranoiac with the IQ of a celery stalk
completely miss the book’s significance, because
in some ways it’s really a revolutionary
and innovative piece of
literature.

Palin —
and there’s just no
way to deny this — is a supremely
gifted politician. She has staked out, as her
own personal political turf, the entire landscape of
incoherent white American resentment. In
this area she leaves even Rush
Limbaugh in the
dust.

...Sarah
Palin’s battlefield,
on the other hand, is whatever
is happening five feet in front of her face.
She is building a political career around the little
interpersonal wars in the immediate airspace surrounding
her sawdust-filled head. And in the process she connects
with pissed-off, frightened, put-upon America
on a plane that’s far more elemental
than the mega-ditto
schtick.

...Palin’s
extraordinary ability
to inspire major national controversies
around these injustices done to her immediate
person is going to guarantee her some kind of major role
in American politics for the next dozen years. In this regard she
is going to have a willing ally in her supposed keen enemy,
the mainstream media, which likewise loves
nothing more than a political narrative
that has nothing
to do with
politics.

...With
Going Rogue,
the 2012 reality show
has already begun. As brainless
political theater, she can’t be topped.
It’s just too bad for conservatives that she
happens to be unsustainably divisive and, as
Newsweek points out, a really good bet to permanently
marginalize the Republican party by reducing it to a pissed
off, semi-coherent mob that repulses independent voters
on a visceral level. To paraphrase John Doman’s
Deputy Ops Rawls character from The Wire,
she’s “brilliant — fuckin’ shame it’s
gonna end our careers,
but still.”








Monday, November 23, 2009


So
we say true
understanding will
come out of emptiness.
When you study Buddhism you
should have a general house cleaning
of the mind and spirit. You must
take everything out of your
room and clean it
thoroughly.



As
long as we
have some definite
idea about or some hope
in the future, we cannot really
be serious with the moment that exists
right now. You may say, "I can do it tomorrow,
or next year," believing that something that exists today
will exist tomorrow. Even though you are not trying so hard,
you follow a certain way. But there is no certain way that
exists permanently. There is no way set up for us.
Moment after moment we have to find our
own way. Some idea of perfection, or
some perfect way which is set up
by someone else, is not
the true way

Tenderness
contains an element of
sadness. It is not the sadness of
feeling sorry for yourself or feeling deprived
but it is a natural situation of fullness. You feel so
full and rich, as if you were about to shed tears. Your eyes
are full of tears, and the moment you blink, the tears
will spill out of your eyes and roll down your
cheeks. In order to be a good warrior, one
has to feel this sad and tender heart.
If a person does not feel alone
or sad, he cannot be
a warrior at

It
is with
such activity
in mind that the
words of the late John
F. Kennedy come back to
haunt us. Five years ago he said,
"Those who make peaceful revolution
impossible will make violent revolution inevitable."
Increasingly, by choice or by accident, this is the role
our nation has taken, the role of those who make peaceful
revolution impossible by refusing to give up the privileges
and the pleasures that come from the immense profits
of overseas investments. I am convinced that if we
are to get on the right side of the world revolution,
we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution
of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from
a thing-oriented society to a person-oriented
society. When machines and computers,
profit motives and property rights, are
considered more important than people,
the giant triplets of racism, extreme
materialism, and militarism are
incapable of being
conquered.

We
live in a
fallen world.
On rare occasions,
an emotion other than greed
motivates someone, and
the world changes
a little.

This
is the great
abyss between
what our politicians
say and what actually
happens. I don't think that
death is recognized by the leaders
of our free world. The word "death"
doesn't apply. There's no body count in
Iraq. Nobody knows how many people have
been killed. Even the American soldiers who have
been killed have been kept under wraps. As for the
mutilated, Americans I'm talking about for the
moment, they are mutilated for life -- again,
countless thousands of people -- not
referred to, ashamed, and they
cannot recognize the reality
bombs are, what
missiles do.


When
there is an
advantage to be
had, then strike. When not,
abstain. Do not fight if you are not
yourself endangered. Do not fight out of spleen.
Anger may give way to happiness again; irritation may
ease into well-being. But a kingdom destroyed can
never be restored, nor the dead returned to life.
An enlightened ruler should be careful,
and a good general is ever cautious.
This is the way to keep
peace and save
lives.




McCain,
Graham, Lieberman,
Skelton, McConnell and the
rest of the G.I. Josephine crowd
don’t have national security on their agenda.
They just like war. President Obama was Bugs Bunny
class maroon for calling Afghanistan a “war of necessity.”
We no sooner need to deploy troops to Afghanistan than
we need to deploy them to Pluto. Al-Qaeda is all but
gone from everywhere, and who gives a rat’s
rhetoric about the Taliban? The Taliban
just wants us to leave
Afghanistan.

We’re
funding militias
in Afghanistan to fight the
Taliban. We’re also funding the Taliban.
We’re so screwed up we can’t figure out which way
to point our pistols. I’d love it if Obama could un-funk
American foreign policy, but fear that he punted
the game away when he called Afghanistan
a “war of necessity.”
Alas.

Obama
has made some
good moves. Talking to
Iran was one of them. Cancelling
the Bush administration’s rope-a-dope
deal to deploy a missile defense system that
didn’t work to Poland and the Czech Republic
was another one. Committing to leave Iraq
was also good, though I’m not sure the
Pentagon and its paramours in
Congress and the press are
going to let that
happen.

I’m
hoping Obama
has finally realized that
Afghanistan is a bad investment,
and that he can’t fix a violent, corrupt
country by pouring arms and money
into it. Unfortunately, I
don’t think he’s
there yet.

I
also don’t
think he’s reached
the point where he’s ready
to stand up to his generals and
his Secretary of Defense. The singular
failing of the Obama presidency may turn out to be
that he kept David Petraeus, Ray Odierno, Mike
Mullen, and Robert Gates on the job and that
he put Petraeus protégé McChrystal, who
was Dick Cheney’s personal
assassin, in charge of
Afghanistan.

The
open warfare
between the Pentagon
and the White House needs to
be stomped, and the White House needs
to have won. The egotistical four-stars and their
stooge boss Gates got too used to the idea that they ran
the country, and that kind of thinking in military circles
has to stop. We’re Americans, for heaven’s sake, not
Prussians. We don’t exist to support our military.
Our military exists to support us, and it’s
not doing a very good job of it. It creates
more terrorists than it kills
or captures.

Our
military has
turned putrid. We did
pretty darn good during the post
Desert Storm years when we leaned largely on
naval and air forces to show the flag and perform
surgical strikes. Boots on the ground have led
to quagmires in Iraq and Afghanistan,
just as they did in
Vietnam.

The
last thing we
want to do is put tens
of thousands more boots in
Afghanistan. We’ve already made this
mistake in Korea and Vietnam
and Iraq. How many more
times will we
make it?

Those
who can make you
believe absurdities can
make you commit
atrocities.


There
are some
614 coal-fired
power plants in the
United States, and it is
up to us to shut them down.
No one in the White House will
do it. No one in Congress will do it.
And no one at the coming U.N. climate
change conference in Copenhagen will do it.
We will build local movements to carry out acts
of nonviolent civil disobedience to halt the burning
of coal, or the polar ice caps will continue to dissolve,
the Greenland ice sheet will disappear, the glaciers in the
Alps, the Himalayas and Tibet will melt, and widespread
droughts, rising sea levels and temperatures, acute food
shortages, disease and gigantic mass migrations will
envelop the globe. We are killing the ecosystem on
which human life depends. One of the major
polluters is coal, which supplies about half
of the country’s electricity. NASA’s James
Hansen has demonstrated that our only
hope of getting our atmosphere back
to a safe level—below 350 parts per
million CO2—lies in stopping the
use of coal to generate electricity.
We are currently at 390 parts
per million carbon
dioxide.

...The
average American
family uses more energy
between the stroke of midnight
on New Year’s Eve and dinner on
Jan. 2 than the average
Tanzanian family
uses all
year.





Sunday, November 22, 2009


You
have to
disappear.
The world has
to be left behind,
the body has to be
left behind, the mind
has to be left behind, and
then you have only one thing
to lose -- yourself. You have enjoyed
everything. You have enjoyed the purity of
individuality; now you have to enjoy the disappearing
of individuality. You have seen the beauty of
individuality; now you have to see the
disappearance and its beauty, and
the silence that follows, that
abysmal serenity that
follows.

This way,
each individual will
go on moving into nothingness.
And one day, the whole existence moves
into nothingness and a great peace, a great night,
a deep, dark womb, a great awaiting for the dawn...
And it has been happening always, and
each time you are always born
on a higher level of
consciousness.

Try
to be so
wakeful that
you don't fall asleep
again. Remain so alert that
the future is not allowed to deceive
you again as you had allowed it before.
What has become past is nothing, but once
it is your future then you get deceived by it. Now
it is past; now another future is arriving. Every moment
future is arriving, and future can deceive you only if you are
asleep. Then again it will become past. Now let me tell you
one thing: if you remain alert and you don't allow
the future to deceive you in the present, the
past disappears. Then there is no memory
left of it, no trace of it. Then one is just
a clean slate, a sky without any
clouds, a flame without
smoke.

That's
what the state
of enlightenment is --
so alert that only the witness is
real and everything else is nothing but ripples
on the surface of the water. Everything is passing,
everything is a flux. Only one thing remains
and remains and remains, and that is
your consciousness, your
awareness.

...You
have to
understand
one thing: that
enlightenment is not
an escape from pain but
an understanding of pain, an
understanding of your anguish, an
understanding of your misery -- not a cover-up,
not a substitute, but a deep insight: "Why am I miserable,
why is there so much anxiety, why is there so much anguish,
what are the causes in me that are creating it?" And to see those
causes clearly is to be free from them. Just an insight into your
misery brings a freedom from misery. And what remains is
enlightenment. Enlightenment is not something that
comes to you. It is when pain and misery and
anguish and anxiety have been understood
perfectly well and they have evaporated
because now they have no cause to
exist in you -- that state is
enlightenment.

Enlightenment
is the ultimate peak of
sanity -- when one becomes
perfectly sane, has come to a point
where silence, serenity, consciousness
are twenty-four hours his, waking or sleeping.
There runs a current of tranquility, blissfulness,
benediction which is a nourishment, food from the
beyond. Eastern psychology accepts mind as the lowest
part of human consciousness - dismal and dark. You have
to go beyond it. And enlightenment is not the end, because
it is only individual consciousness. Individuality is still
like two banks of a river. The moment the river
moves into the ocean, all banks disappear,
all boundaries are annihilated.
You have gone beyond
enlightenment.

With
thought the
mind has boundaries.
But without thought the mind
is just infinite space. That is why in
thoughtless awareness one stops to be a
drop and becomes oceanic. And then there is
great energy. This energy wipes out everything
which is dead. It wipes out the whole karmic
past, and with no effort at all.
The greater absorbs the
lesser and remains
untouched.



The Daily Show With Jon StewartMon - Thurs 11p / 10c
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The
book’s most
frequently dropped
names, predictably enough,
are the Lord and Ronald Reagan
(though not necessarily in that order).
Easily the most startling passage in “Going Rogue,”
running more than two pages, collates extended excerpts
from a prayerful letter Palin wrote to mark the birth of
Trig, her child with Down syndrome. This missive’s
understandable goal was to reassert Palin’s faith
and trust in God. But Palin did not write her
letter to God; she wrote the letter from
God, assuming His role and voice
herself and signing it “Trig’s
Creator, Your Heavenly
Father.”

...The
fact-checking
siege of “Going Rogue” —
by the media, Democrats and aggrieved
McCain campaign operatives alike — is another
fruitless sideshow. Palin’s political appeal has never had
anything to do with facts — or coherent policy positions. The
more she is attacked for not being in possession of pointy
headed erudition, the more powerful she becomes as
an avatar of the anti-elite cause. As Rich Lowry,
the editor of National Review, has correctly
observed, “She represents less a
philosophical strain on the
right than an affect and
a demographic.”

...Yet
among Republicans
she still ties Mitt Romney in the
latest USA Today/Gallup survey, with
65 percent giving her serious presidential
consideration, just behind the 71 for
her evangelical rival, Mike
Huckabee.


In
the enemy’s
version of history,
the West—meaning the United
States, Israel, Britain and what used to
be called Christendom—has a long history of
exploiting the Muslim world. We occupy Muslim lands
to steal their resources. We install corrupt lackeys as their
rulers. For all our high and mighty talk about fairness
and justice, we reserve these luxuries for ourselves.
In this warped worldview, we deserve any
atrocities that jihadist “warriors”
might commit against
us.

Protesting
that all this is absurd
and obscene does not make it go
away. And our troops’ military success
actually helps to further the
jihadist narrative about
a “crusade” against
Islam.

It’s
ironic that
many of the officials
and commentators who are
so upset about the decision to
give KSM a civilian trial were also
quick to call the Fort Hood killings an
act of terrorism. If the suspect, Maj. Nidal
Hasan, is indeed a terrorist—and not just a
deranged man who snapped—then his awful
rampage helps demonstrate the point I’m making.
Hasan reportedly considered the U.S. military deployments
in Iraq and Afghanistan a war against Islam, at one point
arguing that Muslim soldiers should be excused from
combat as conscientious objectors. In other words,
he apparently bought at least part of the
jihadist line. If killing a terrorist in
Kandahar creates one in Killeen,
we’ll never make
progress.





Why
wants to run for public
office again when pictures like
this are circulating in the world is
a mystery to me. We'll have
to stay tuned, I
suppose.