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Thank the Universe (and Kevin @freedemocracy.blogspot.com) for things that make me laugh....

aliceiswonderland@gmail.com (Alice) — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 07:00:00 +0000

Capitalism Is Dying a Natural Death

aliceiswonderland@gmail.com (Alice) — Wed, 17 Mar 2010 02:57:00 +0000

Posted By topeditor On March 16, 2010 Siv O'Neall

Capitalism is indeed dying in our midst, but, regrettably, political systems do not leave the stage of history (and power) without struggle. They have to be pushed off the centerstage. And that’s the task for the planet’s revolutionists. To act as the midwife for a new, far more just and rational global paradigm.

By Siv O’Neall || Dateline: March 16, 2010

The curtain is going down on the lone-superpower world we know and it is now a most urgent question if and when and how forces for true democracy, human rights, peace and civilization can come out and dissipate the cloud that has spread over what was once an almost decent way of life.

The long-time descent into totalitarian capitalism and neglect for anything but corporate profit has just about finished its course. The party is over. Bankruptcy is next. What we don’t know yet is how far-reaching this economic freefall is going to be.

Predecessors such as the German Reich are brought to mind, but the similarities are far from parallel. The inhumanity is on the same scale but the hypocrisy is even worse than in the worst fascist regime. Hypocrisy rules the world. No slogans the rulers of the United States or the rest of the Western world pronounce as their ideologies and goals can be taken for their face value. Lies are the only things that come out of the mouths of our so-called leaders and that is the way they have set up the sordid game to their own advantage.

We the people are not supposed to be aware of how we are being treated like dregs to be discarded. The powers that be imagine that, as long as we are not told the truth about how we are being cheated out of our birth rights, we will lie down like whipped dogs and lick the feet of our torturers.

How far we have come from the somewhat civilized society that the Founding Fathers had in mind for the people of the thirteen states can only be measured if we consider the abysmal lack of basic needs and basic rights that is now the norm in the United States. In fact, there are no areas left in the year 2010 that have been spared from the general decline, cultural, economic or humane. Human rights are in tatters, the standard of living for the vast majority of American families can go nowhere but further downhill, the voices of the people are left unheard, the standard of cultural institutions, quality education and all the privileges that are linked to it are being starved out of existence.

The prostitutes of the mainstream media [with their right-wing confreres leading the way] are making the utmost possible din so as to effectively drown the voices of reason. The general sluggishness of people is being enhanced by the non-stop propaganda fed them through the mass media, the fake view of the world as a place where satisfaction can only be had from over-consumption and from participating in the violence that is constantly displayed to us as a model of life via these mass media, the artificial uppers and downers that are offered to us by the entertainment industry to fill in the void of our souls.

The environment is being plundered savagely with no concern whatsoever for the survival of mankind, the survival of the planet and all its millions of different species. Biodiversity is a forgotten concept, except for the rare rebels who go against the stream and try to make their life-saving voices heard over the din of the machines of the killer corporations.

Those predators are clearly only out to maximize their profits without the slightest concern for the catastrophic effects on the environment.

The majority of people never see what the real world is all about. How can they? The distorted “values’ that money can buy are the only ones that are real to them.

A sunrise over the ocean, a maple leaf swirling in clear spring water, the little hand touching your cheek, the beauty of words coming from a writer’s soul what happened to the marvels of life? What happened to the real world?

So how did this Ersatz world come about?

The question must be asked: WHO gave this fascist megalomaniac his media platform?

Capitalism, the way it is playing out today, is incompatible with true democracy. This insanity, this absurd form of capitalism is altogether negating a humane system of running the world with any consideration at all for the people on the planet.

Free Market capitalism, the Chicago School of Economics professor, Milton Friedman’s brainchild[1], globalization, the catchword for the Empire’s total domination over the rest of the world, Washington’s New World Order, enriching the very few and strangling the masses call it what you like but it’s a fantasy that is now finally crumbling. It all amounts to “screw the people’ and “greed is the power that makes the world go round’. The religion in the U.S.A. is greed and it’s the only true religion there is.

However, the giant is crumbling. A fast-spreading gangrene is eating away at the interior of the nation, its elite-oriented and half-starved educational system, its sad excuse for a working healthcare system, its decaying infrastructure. The very souls of the people are withering away, as their jobs are lost, their homes are foreclosed, their constitutional freedoms no longer respected, civil rights being increasingly downplayed by the police and federal authorities.

All this is adding to and interacting with the economic meltdown and the destruction of the environment, which at this point doesn’t even guarantee a livable future for the coming generations.

A multi-lateral world can not be stopped, as the giant is playing out its last trumps in case it has any left. Emerging countries are becoming emerged countries. There have not been many signs of awareness of this evolution of the geopolitical reality from President Obama, but rather a continuation of the Neocon imperialism, which will, if allowed a free rein, lead the planet to disaster. It will render the environment unlivable and thus destroy the way of life of the billions of people all over the world. With the environment in ruins, there is just no way back. The corporations whose greed is responsible for the current situation do not seem to realize or care about the direction in which they are steering our planet.

Hagiographic portrait of Milton Friedman, Free Market missionary, and one of the most toxic intellectuals of the 20th century, an unrepentant apologist for murderers and mass exploiters of all kinds till the bitter end.

The Free Market was set up with unilateral power for the giant in the West and unheard of wealth for the very few as its unique goal. The tools would be the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank, which were working on the single track of stealing the national resources of the greatest number of countries possible and squeezing money out of financially strapped nations by lending their governments money at a high interest rate.

The ultimate condition for the nations in dire economic straits, was always the cutting back on social services, devaluing the national currency and increasing taxes on the already half-strangled people, thus starving the beast. Such is the ever-present major strategy of these Washington henchmen; the super-tools for U.S. world domination. And, of course, along came the accumulation of further wealth to add to the already astronomic wealth of the corporations. Madness! To what end?

Countries which had previously enjoyed a fairly good standard of living, but had gotten squeezed by the Free Market economy, free trade agreements, such as NAFTA, CAFTA, FTAA [2] and bilateral agreements, saw their relatively comfortable lives wither away, such as many Asian nations in the nineties during the Asian financial crisis [3]. Poor 3^rdWorld nations were suddenly rendered more impoverished than ever before, having their national resources taken over by the multinational hydras. Wherever the heavy boots of the IMF and the World Bank get a foothold in a financially troubled nation, they manage to suck the blood out of the nation’s resources and their financial independence.

Free-market capitalism can not possibly go along with true democracy. The concepts represent opposite poles in the running of the economic systems of the world. The most outstanding mark of run-away capitalism is its denial of any civic and human rights to the working people. Privatization, which is the principal gospel of this decadent world order will eventually make us pay for the air we breathe and the polluted water we drink.

If national elections are allowed to survive in order to make for a semblance of democracy, it is only because they have no real meaning the way they are run today. They constitute no real danger to the system that is running the world since they are strictly controlled by corporations that are hand in glove with the imperialists. They are part of the system.

And yet, a majority of U.S. citizens are under the impression that their votes count for something in the running of internal and external politics. They seem to be slowly waking up, however, to the fact that their opposition to the ongoing wars and the tax cuts for the wealthy count for nothing.

The creation of the lone superpower

At the end of World War II, with Europe exhausted and virtually powerless as a commercial partner, the U.S government saw clearly that they would have to shore up the war-damaged European countries in order to create a market place for their newfound wealth. The Great Depression was over at last thanks to the boost to the economy that the war had brought to the nation. Now the U.S. needed commercial partners. So the Marshall Plan was born. Later on came the Hollywood Superman Ronald Reagan and as his megalomaniac and expansionist plans for the country were set in motion, the kernel of the Neoconservative movement was simultaneously taking shape.

During all this time a handy bogeyman was created in the Communist fiend. From the McCarthy era in the fifties to the Kennedy fiasco of the Bay of Pigs attempt to invade Southern Cuba in 1961, to the horror of the Vietnam war, to the criminal meddling in various Central American and Latin American countries, it was always the Communist threat that served as a pretext for invasions of countries that stood in the way for U.S. power and expansionism. Those countries that could not be bought up or propagandized into cooperating with the Empire were simply invaded and taken over. A blaring exception was of course the great embarrassment of the Vietnam War, when no country was ever taken over. But that didn’t even teach the imperialists a lesson. The people, yes, but the psychotic neocons, no. If anything, the lesson drawn by the neocons from that insane war was on the contrary that the U.S. had to show the world that it was still the Lord of the planet, including outer space.

Invade, crush, kill and take over national resources was the trademark of U.S. foreign policies. Until the Soviet Union imploded and the vastly overblown propaganda about the giant in the east that was threatening to end the supremacy of the number one superpower finally became open for all to see. Ever since the end of World War II, with a powerful boost given to it by the Kennedy brothers, the Communist scare has been hovering over the Western world, based on a minimum of reality but above all hysterical propaganda. It was the octopus that was spreading its tentacles all over the world. If the Soviet military power was in fact impressive, it was because they put all their rubles into the arms industry and neglected the well-being of their people.

Fear and eternal war are the capitalist tools

When the Soviet Union disintegrated, the U.S. suddenly found itself bereft of a handy target to blame the evils of the world on. A new enemy had to be created and we all know how the “War on Terror’ came about, based on the absurd theory, touted hysterically, that the Muslims were now all set to take over the Western world. Al Qaeda may well have been a creation by Washington but, as could be expected, it then became a reality [4].

Continuous war is of the essence to a superpower to sustain the fear that is necessary to keep the people in blinders. Hysteria and ignorance are the sine qua non for an eternal war. Non-stop propaganda is also a major tool without which the slogan “Pax Americana’ would have been a laughing stock from its very creation. And of course the mass media played the game since they were being paid to do so.

Fear was the tool that was needed in order to fool the people of the world and draw a veil of emotional blindness over their minds. What made the creation of this visceral fear and anger at all possible was of course the attack on the World Trade Center and the following 9/11 hysteria. Without this enormous propaganda tool, the major wars that have followed, the total contempt for U.S. citizens’ constitutional rights and the U.S. Constitution in general would have been just wishful thinking by the neocon thugs.

Of course we can’t know how much longer the “lone superpower’ is still going to be breathing. It is now on life support and we can only vaguely guess what the world is going to be like after the colossus stops breathing. No words of reconciliation to the rest of the world by President Obama will save the shipwreck that is the United States of America.

What arrogance, what hubris, to believe that the United States would be able to create the millenary Reich where all other nations would be willing allies, due to the propagandized “cultural, moral and military superiority’ of the Master behemoth. If not allies, they would become subdued and subservient because they would have lost their internal strength, as was the intention with Iraq, Afghanistan and probably now also with Pakistan. The Empire was going to appear so unbeatable that no other nation would ever be able to go against their formidable power. They were to be God on earth and everybody who looked into the shining light of their claim to divine power was going to see that resistance would be useless.

Wait a minute haven’t we seen this before? It seems to be a lesson never learned that even an Empire is bound for a swift fall when the winds turn and the scales fall from the eyes of the people in the rest of the world. And, as is perfectly obvious, the hubris was not born with the Neocons plotting in the underground during the Reagan presidency. It goes all the way back to the cruel near wiping-out of the native American population. Nobody can stand against the superpower. It is the bearer of God-given authority to rule the continent, to rule over war-torn Europe, to rule over the Americas, to rule over the resource-rich countries, to rule the world.

The psychopaths who created this absurd fantasy should by all rights be the first victims of the downfall of the Empire. In the long row of history’s empires, has there ever been one that so misjudged the power of national pride and the firm decision by the invaded people to go on running their own nation, running their own lives on territories that had been theirs for millennia?

Asia is coming together

The world is changing however. We will find out one day if it is already too late or if there is still a chance that people and the environment might be saved.

Asia is organizing to become increasingly independent of the West. They are creating their own economic cooperation organizations, such as AFTA [5] (ASEAN ^[1] Free Trade Area), born out of ASEAN, the “Association of Southeast Asian Nations’, a”geo-politicaland economic organization of ten countries located in Southeast Asia, which was formed on 8 August 1967 by Indonesia, Malaysia, thePhilippines, SingaporeandThailand”. This organization now includes ten countries located in Southeast Asia.[6]

The AFTA project was launched in 1993 with the objective of creating a Free Trade Area in eastern Asia. It undertook some bold measures during the Asian financial crisis in the nineties, which clearly showed up the need for mutual economic interdependence between Southeast and Northeast Asia.

In November 2001 an ambitious plan was submitted to create a regional bloc. It recommended that East Asia would move from a region of nations to a cohesive regional community where collective efforts would be made for peace, prosperity, and progress. They identified the following sectors for cooperation: economic, financial, security, environmental, social and cultural. [7]

China, the next superpower?

China’s economy is the third-largest in the world and it is the biggest holder of U.S. Treasury bonds. It is the top owner of U.S. government debt and it is also one of the “emerging nations’ that can be said to have already emerged. It is now in a full-fledged position to become a superpower. The day the United States of America declares bankruptcy, China will probably be ready to take over in conjunction with other developed nations.

Right now, China is giving Obama the cold shoulder. It is a fact that trade with the U.S. has recently picked up, but basically China is economically so much ahead of the former superpower that they can well shrug their shoulders at the hypocritical demands that Washington puts forth. Who is to urge China to respect civil rights and to diminish pollution to save the environment? Or to convince China that there should be more equality of living conditions? Washington’s hypocrisy knows no limits.

Obviously we can not be looking forward to a world where one inhuman superpower would be replaced by another one. We are not blind to the kind of life we would be living under Chinese rule. But such a thought seems so far from realistic that the solution we have to look forward to as a new World Order would rather be a multi-lateral organization where no one power would have too much influence over the rest of the world.

As for the other emerging nations, such as India and Brazil, they still have a way to go. A low quality of education, an average low standard of living, faulty healthcare, a sadly insufficient fight against pollution and contempt for human rights are among the major problems for these countries, as well as for China. However, the United States could well be pointed to as equally lacking in every one of these areas. There is also a horrifying lack of equality in all these countries, but then again, the richest country of them all, the U.S. of A. shares the guilt of these only relatively wealthy countries.

Latin America Is Gathering Strength

In another part of the world, there is Latin America that is currently fighting for its independence from the Empire. The birth of Mercosur ^[2], the Common Market of the South, took place on March 26, 1991. Since its creation including Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay, Venezuela also joined on 17 June 2006. Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador and Peru currently have associate member status.

Panama and Mexico have also announced their intention to join Mercosur.

On the other hand, Venezuela has also initiated ALBA (a symbolic acronym since alba means dawn), Venezueal’s answer to imperialist free trade agreements (”Bolivarian Alliance for the Americas’ or “Alianza Bolivariana para los Pueblos de Nuestra América’), which, to begin with, comprised Venezuela and Cuba. Later, Bolivia, Ecuador and Nicaragua have joined the alliance. Some islands in the Caribbean are also members. Honduras became a member in August 2008, but, interestingly enough, after the coup in June 2009 to overthrow President Manuel Zelaya, its membership was withdrawn.

“On December 16, 2009, the Honduran congress met to withdraw the country from theALBA ^[3], claiming a “lack of respect” from Venezuela since the country’s joining in 2008, citing in particular Hugo Chavez’ remarks about a potential invasion of Honduras to restore Manuel Zelaya to office, after he was removed on 28 June 2009 in the2009 Honduran coup d’état. Withdrawal from ALBA was ratified by the Honduran Congresson January 13, 2010. Economic relations with Venezuela continue, including viaPetrocaribe.

Mercosur and ALBA are the Latin American answer to NAFTA, CAFTA and FTAA, the U.S.- sponsored so-called free trade agreements, which are for anything but free trade, constantly raising trade barriers against foreign nations for the profit of the United States.

Conclusion

The United States, the lone superpower is no more. The sooner the leaders realize this, the softer will be the fall when the giant finally breaks down. Barack Obama gave Europeans and many others some kind of hope for a change of path by the callous behemoth. But no such thing has happened and no such thing will happen. Only the downfall of the Empire can now save the world. Unless it is already too late.

Are we seeing the emergence of another kind of New World Order, one of less arrogance, one of multi-lateral cooperation? The world is crying out for a new order where life-and-death issues will be handled by all the world’s nations and not trampled on by one greedy colossus that imagines it is the monarch of the planet.

••••

[1] “Friedman ^[4]’s political philosophy, which he considered classically liberal and libertarian, emphasized the advantages of free market economics and the disadvantages of government intervention and regulation, strongly influencing the opinions of American conservatives and libertarians.” His influential bookCapitalism and Freedom was published in 1962.

[2] La Riva/Puryear: Abolish NAFTA, CAFTA, FTAA, WTO, IMF, World Bank. Also see NAFTA/FTAA/CAFTA ^[5]page

[3]Asia’s financial crisis – There is no basis for the claim that the Asian financial crisis was due to a lack of sound economic fundamentals. The currencies of the affected countries were forcibly devalued and their financial systems were brought to ruin by the activities of speculators. The crisis has, however, revealed one glaring weakness: the absence of a lender of last resort for the region. (by Chandra Hardy)

More about the Asian financial crisis at Third World Network ^[6]

[4] The name “is now just a loose label for a movement that seems to ta rget the west”, says Marc Sageman^[7], a psychiatrist who has long studied terrorism networks. “There is no umbrella organisation. We like to create a mythical entity called [al-Qaeda] in our minds but that is not the reality we are dealing with.” (The Financial Times)

[5] “From the inception of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN ^[1]) in 1967 to 1991 economic cooperation among its members was virtually non-existent. However, in January 1992 the leaders of the member states agreed to work towards an ASEAN Free Trade Area (AFTA). Following an uncertain initial phase the leaders rededicated themselves in 1995 to an accelerated implementation of the AFTA agreement.”

[6] More about this geo-political and economic organization at Wikipedia ^[8]

[7] More information about ASEAN and AFTA at What Is Integration

Author’s Bio: Siv O’Neall was born and raised in Sweden where she graduated from Lund University. She has lived in Paris, France and New Rochelle, N.Y. and traveled extensively throughout Europe, the U.S. and other continents, mainly several trips to India. Siv retired after many years of teaching French in Westchester, N.Y. and English in the Grandes Ecoles (Institutes of Technology) in France. In addition to her own writing, Siv has also provided Axis of Logic with translation services. She has been living in France, first Paris, then Lyon, for 30 years. In addition to her political activism and writing, her life is filled with family, music, animals, reading, traveling and she also feels that ‘A thing of beauty is a joy for ever’.

Our Cindy Sheehan talks to Pres. Hugo Chavez

aliceiswonderland@gmail.com (Alice) — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 07:00:00 +0000

Posted By topeditor On March 9, 2010

Chavez to Sheehan: “We are not anti-American, we are anti-Imperialism”

Cindy Sheehan: My request to interview President Hugo Chavez Frias of Venezuela was finally granted March 2 while we were down in Montevideo, Uruguay with President Chavez for the inauguration of the new left-ish President and freedom fighter, Jose Mujica.

Bylined to: Cindy Sheehan Published: Sunday, March 07, 2010

THE REASONS I WENT DOWN TO VENEZUELA with my team of two cameramen were two-fold:

First of all, I just got tired of all the misinformation that is spread in the US about President Chavez and the people’s Bolivarian Revolution. In only one example, the National Endowment for Democracy (another Orwellian named agency that receives federal money to supplant democracy) spends millions of dollars every year in Venezuela trying to destabilize Chavez’s democratically elected government.

The other reason we went to Venezuela was to be inspired and energized by the revolution and try to inspire and energize others in the states to rise up against the oppressive ruling class here and take power back into our own hands.

Empowerment of the poorest or least educated citizens of Venezuela is the goal of the Bolivarian Revolution. President Chavez said in the interview that “Power has five principles” and the first one is Education and he calls Venezuela a “big school.” Indeed since the revolution began 11 years ago, Venezuela’s literacy rate has risen significantly to where now 99% of the population is now literate. In that sense alone, Venezuela has already been totally transformed, to the chagrin of conservatives.

People Power is another principle of power and we witnessed this in a very dramatic fashion in the barrio of San Agustin in Caracas. San Agustin is a shantytown built on the sides of some very steep and tall hills — the only way the citizens could get to and from their homes was to climb up and down some very steep and treacherous stairs. Well, two years ago, the neighborhood formed a committee and proposed that the government build a tram through the hills and on January 20, the dreams of the citizens of San Agustin became a reality and the Metro Cable was christened. Not only did the residents get a new tram, but many of the shacks were torn down and new apartments were built. Residents had priority for low, or no, interest loans to buy the apartments.

Even though I am very afraid of heights, I rode the Metro Cable to the top of the hill and we were awarded with amazing views of Caracas and the distant mountains. All the red, gleaming tramcars are given names of places in Venezuela or revolutionary slogans. But our “treat” was still ahead of us when we made our way down the side of the hill by those steep and treacherous stairs. In combination with the stairs and the heat, by the time we were at the bottom, my legs were shaking like Jello and my heart was thumping. I could not even imagine walking up those stairs! Young children, pregnant women, pregnant women with young children, old people, etc, had to go up and down the stairs to get to an from their homes! With the installation of the tram, the lives of the people of San Agustin were improved immeasurably and it is all due to the education and sense of empowerment that comes from organizing and ultimate victory.

The Metro Cable serves about 12,000 people per day at a cost of ten cents per round trip ticket — and all of the employees come from the barrio.

After the trip up the hill and steep climb down, we met with the community organizers after a traditional Venezuelan lunch of beans, rice, fried plantains and a little bit of meat for the meat eaters. Note: the “traditional” Venezuelan lunch is identical to the traditional Venezuelan breakfast and is very yummy.

About 98% of the organizers were women who spoke very articulately and passionately about how their lives have improved since Chavez arose to power from the people’s revolution and how they would defend Chavez and the revolution with their very lives.

Knowledge is power and perhaps that’s why before the Revolution, only primary school was free and fees were charged for secondary education. Now in Venezuela, school is free all the way through doctoral studies. We see how the ruling class in our own country is gutting education and are tying to make it as difficult as possible to get a University education. A smart and thinking public is a dangerous public.

There is so much to write about our trip and about the Bolivarian Revolution that this will have to be a series of articles by necessity. We learned so much! Also, my complete interview with President Chavez will be available soon in audio and video and then a full-length documentary entitled: TODOS SOMOS AMERICANOS (We are all Americans) will hopefully be available and premiere by June 1.

There is a very touching scene at the end of my interview with President Chavez when President Evo Morales of Bolivia comes in the room. President Morales was also in Montevideo for Mujica’s inauguration.

I asked both the Presidents if they had any words of inspiration for the people of the US. They both emphasized the need for grassroots unity, but they especially wanted to stress their affection for the people of the US.

With President Morales standing by his side and nodding vigorously, President Chavez said: “We are NOT anti-American, we ARE anti-Imperialism.”

Yo tambien, mis hermanos.

Peter Gabriel: No Guitars, No Drums, All Covers

aliceiswonderland@gmail.com (Alice) — Sun, 14 Mar 2010 14:45:00 +0000

It's shaping up to be a banner year for Peter Gabriel. The progressive-rock icon just turned 60. Genesis, the band he founded, will be inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Gabriel is also kicking off New Blood, a limited concert tour with full orchestra. And he's just released his first solo album in eight years.

Scratch My Back features Gabriel performing a dozen cover songs by younger artists such as Bon Iver and Regina Spektor, as well as more familiar faces like Talking Heads and David Bowie. Gabriel set a single creative restriction for this project: "No drums and no guitars." In the coming months, some of these artists will release covers of Gabriel's songs, as well.

In an interview with Weekend Edition Sunday guest host Audie Cornish, Gabriel talks about the role of lyrics in deciding which songs he wanted to interpret.

"There are so many more things that I love the music of than the lyrics," Gabriel says. "The lyrics was often the reason I didn't do a lot of songs that I like. 'Cause when you actually sort of strip them naked, it's not always that they're going to stand up. You know, some rock lyrics work well in one environment, but don't hold up if you separate them from their roots. And I think all of these lyrics are great lyrics regardless of the music."

Gabriel and his team drastically re-orchestrated many of the songs on Scratch My Back, stripping them down and scoring them anew.

"For me, it's quite a grown-up record," he says. "It's not easy listening. And I love stuff like that: that you don't necessarily like at all at first, but grows on you. And I think some of these songs are like that, or particularly these arrangements.

"And I think it's a record that we see as a journey," Gabriel adds. "I know records are being seen very much as a selection of songs right now. And this is obviously, in its origin, a selection of songs. But I think the way we put it together, it's an old-fashioned album in the sense that you start at one point and end up at another."

Gabriel also talks about recording songs by The Magnetic Fields, Regina Spektor and Paul Simon. He calls Simon's "The Boy in the Bubble," from the album Graceland, "one of the great pop lyrics of the last century."

"We sort of sucked out all the African elements, and you're left with the skeleton, which is an extraordinary thing in itself," he says. "And I think a lot of people, myself included, heard the lyrics in a different way, in a new context."

Listen to the Story

Weekend Edition Sunday

[10 min 34 sec]

Really...It Is...

aliceiswonderland@gmail.com (Alice) — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 18:54:00 +0000

Reading Is Sexy t-shirts and gifts

Valentine Kiss - by Bri Chan

aliceiswonderland@gmail.com (Alice) — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 08:00:00 +0000

Memories...

aliceiswonderland@gmail.com (Alice) — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 15:05:00 +0000

Barbara Lee
WAR MADE EASY

7 Years After Killing, Family of Slain US Peace Activist Rachel Corrie Heads to Israel for Wrongful Death Suit Against Israeli Gov’t

aliceiswonderland@gmail.com (Alice) — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 22:53:00 +0000

From: www.democracynow.org

Rachel Corrie, a twenty-three-year-old student from Evergreen College in Olympia, Washington, was crushed to death by an Israeli army bulldozer in Gaza seven years ago as she stood before a Palestinian home facing demolition. Today, a trial opens in Israel in a lawsuit brought by Corrie’s family against the Israeli government. The eyewitness testimony is expected to challenge Israel’s version of events with evidence that she was clearly visible to the soldiers, standing before the bulldozer in her florescent orange jacket. We spend the hour with Rachel Corrie’s family: her father Craig, her mother Cindy, and her sister Sarah.

MP3 of the segment

A Prayer for Change, by Reverend Billy

aliceiswonderland@gmail.com (Alice) — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 14:56:00 +0000

Reverend Billy
March 8, 2010

Aung San Sun Kyi, Nelson Mandella, Chief Joseph, Harvey Milk — teach us!

Revolution aint what it used to be.

Emma Goldman, Cesar Chavez, Leonard Peltier, Sojourner Truth –teach us! The President used the word “change” to stop it. The change we seek couldn’t be clearer, but it is mimicked by Presidents and corporate marketing. By the time we shout “Justice” we’re in a commercial selling underwear, perfume, votes…

Revolution aint got the same song. Paul Robeson, Woody Guthrie, Joan Baez, Public Enemy, Joe Strummer — please pull our songs into a new valley, a new union hall. The songs we thought would change everything become Muzak before they get to the elevator speakers. And the words. If we read the words in a library our reading room is privatized before turn we the page. We look down and logos cover our feet like leeches in the 18th century.

Che, Subcommandante Insurgente Marcos, Mumia Abu-Jamal, Judi Bari from Earth First — teach us! The change we seek is clear to the reactionaries too, and they discovered the disguise of scale. On the one hand they remove mountaintops and change the climate. So our citizenship is a slow state of shock. Then they go tiny, too. The corporations search for the DNA that makes us shop. They want to throw that switch. They look forward to the deletion of any mental dissent.

Walt Whitman, Mahatma Gandhi, Dr. Martin Luther King — please prepare us for the strangeness, the mystification of entrenched power. The killers hide in the air that we breathe and lurk in the dreams of our children. Where is the dirty coal executive? Where is the banker? Who do we push against? We swat at the pixels that buzz at our eyes like flies on the eyes of corpses. No, not corpses – consumers!

Could we be as brave as the heroes from revolutions past? We are facing a different foe. The powers-that-be are shape-shifting constantly. Consumerism and Militarism are so ambient, so plastic, so media-become-real. Resistance itself must be re-invented, in the sense that each of these heroes we’ve prayed to – each was a creator. Angela Davis‘ strategy for change was different than that of Bernadette Devlin, or the students in Tiananmen Square, or Toussaint L’ouverture.

Isn’t another name in revolution’s hall of fame — the Earth? We can pathologize all of these recent natural disasters as feverish seizures of a delirious planet. Then sometimes the earth seems coolly intelligent, as media-savvy as any video-taped underground movement – in its response to the poisoning from its human species.

Life on Earth — teach us! After all the heroes and martyrs and risings-up of the people, we sometimes feel as if we’ve gotten nowhere. The power of the corporations grows every hour and we don’t seem to have a response. You, the Earth where we live, you are responding. We sense that you are making your move, feverishly rising, interrupting, killing some of us and saving us all.

Amen.

Study finds median wealth for single black women at $5

aliceiswonderland@gmail.com (Alice) — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 08:00:00 +0000

Tuesday, March 09, 2010

By Tim Grant, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Women of all races bring home less income and own fewer assets, on average, than men of the same race, but for single black women the disparities are so overwhelmingly great that even in their prime working years their median wealth amounts to only $5.

In a groundbreaking report released Monday by a leading economic research group, social scientists turned a spotlight on the grave financial challenges facing an often overlooked group of women, many of whom could not take an unpaid sick day or repair a major appliance without going into debt.

"It's rather shocking," said Meizhu Lui, director of the Closing the Gap Initiative based in Oakland, Calif., who contributed to the report "Lifting as We Climb: Women of Color, Wealth and America's Future."

PDF

Racial disparities in net worth

Among the most startling revelations in the wealth data is that while single white women in the prime of their working years (ages 36 to 49) have a median wealth of $42,600 (still only 61 percent of their single white male counterparts), the median wealth for single black women is only $5.

"Even for those of us who have been looking at the wealth gap for a while, we were shocked and amazed at how little women of color have," Ms. Lui said.

Researchers at the Insight Center for Community Economic Development, based in Oakland, Calif., analyzed data from the 2007 Survey of Consumer Finances, a voluminous report the Federal Reserve Board issues every three years that examines household finances in this country.

Wealth, or net worth, measures the total of one's assets -- cash in the bank, stocks, bonds and real estate; minus debts -- home mortgages, auto loans, credit cards and student loans. The most recent financial data was collected before the economic downturn, so the current numbers likely are worse now than at the time of the study.

Black women, in general, were more likely to have participated in the subprime loan crisis with upper-income black women being five times more likely to have received a high-cost mortgage than upper-income white men.

"The popular image is they spend too much, which is the reason they are running up credit card and consumer debt, but the cost of living has risen faster than income, and they need to go into debt for basic daily necessities," Ms. Lui said. "It's compounded because unemployment is twice as high in the black community than it is in the white community."

For all working-age black women 18 to 64, the financial picture is bleak. Their median household wealth is only $100. Hispanic women in that age group have a median wealth of $120.

"That means half of [black women] have a net worth of more than $100 and half have a net worth of less than $100," Ms. Lui said. "So that gives you an idea of how far in debt some women of color are."

Married or cohabitating white women have a median wealth of $167,500. Married or cohabitating black women have a median net worth of $31,500.

The reasons behind the daunting financial challenges black women face are numerous and complex.

"There are excuses and circumstances that have evolved in society, which put black women where they are," said Esther Bush, executive director of the Urban League of Greater Pittsburgh, who said in Pittsburgh more than 70 percent of African-American families are headed by single women.

The recession has hit single mothers especially hard.

According to a recent report by the Institute for Women's Policy Research and the Women and Girls Foundation of Southwest Pennsylvania, more than four out of 10 families headed by single mothers in Pittsburgh and more than one in three in Pennsylvania, live in poverty.

In Pittsburgh and across the country, the financial burdens of single parenthood fall mostly on women, but black women are more likely to endure the work and responsibility of raising children on their own. They are more likely to be the backbone of their families and communities, with greater responsibilities to support struggling friends and families.

In a 2008 study of black women and their money, the ING Foundation found that black women -- who frequently manage the assets of their households -- financially support friends, family and their houses of worship to a much greater degree than the general population.

They also are more likely to be employed in jobs and industries -- such as service occupations -- with lower pay and less access to health insurance. And when their working days are done, they rely most heavily on Social Security because they are less likely to have personal savings, retirement accounts or company pensions. Their Social Security benefits are likely to be lower, too, because of their low earnings.

Rather than strictly comparing income, researchers in the Insight study looked at the wealth gap. The current economic crisis has shown that a person's wealth affects not only retirement security, but also a person's ability to handle financial setbacks such as a job loss or a health emergency.

High unemployment and high incarceration rates for black men also lower the likelihood of single black women finding a partner to help build a more secure financial future.

Ms. Lui said the Insight report would be used to encourage the government to close the wealth gap and improve the outlook for women of color, just as it did for Americans who received land through the Homestead Act, and education through the GI bill.

"If wealth was based on hard work, African-Americans would be the wealthiest people in our nation," she said. "It's not about behavior. It's about government policies. Who does the government help and who is it not helping?

"Our government knows how to build wealth for people. They've done it for others and they can do it for all of us. They need to focus some attention on women of color. Look at the situation and see what we need."

Tim Grant: tgrant@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1591.

Happy 100 Years of International Women's Day

aliceiswonderland@gmail.com (Alice) — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 05:10:00 +0000

From: http://yenupeace.blogspot.com

All Women lets Unite!

We must never give up to fight for equal rights, only us women can ourselves can create a change.

The roots of International Women's Day are in the struggles of working women and their socialist/communist supporters.
History say that the mass protest by women garment and textile workers in New York City in 1857 occurred on March 8 & 2 years later also in march the same women won a drive to unionize. They were fighting against brutal working conditions, low wages, and the 12-hour day.

1908

On March 8, 1908, socialist women organized a demonstration of 15,000 in New York. Their demands were pay raises, shorter hours, the vote, and an end to child labor. After that, the Socialist Party of America decided with a declaration to celebrate a National Women’s Day in the U.S, so the NWD was held in February 28 1909

Women continued to celebrate NWD on the last Sunday of February until 1913.

1910 a second International Socialist Congress of Working Women was held in Copenhagen, Denmark. The attendees represented socialist parties, working women’s clubs, and unions, and included the first three women elected to the Finnish parliament, at a time when few women had the right to vote.

U.S. delegates went intending to propose an international women’s day, but a feminist Clara Zetkin (Leader of the 'Women's Office' for the Social Party in Germany) did it first. 100 Women from 17 countries, representing unions, socialist parties & the first three women elected to the Finnish parliament, voted yes to Zetkin's suggestion & International Women's Day was created.

1911 on March 25, the 'Triangle Fire' in New York City shirtwaist factory, caused the deaths of 146 workers, mostly women, This disastrous scandal "helped" build the International Ladies Garment Workers Union, one of the first primarily female unions and became one of the largest unions in the U.S.

1913-1914
1913 many big IWD demostrations for peace took place in Europe & Russian women observed their first IWD, on the last Sunday in February 1913. IWD was transferred to 8 March and this day has remained the global date for International Women's Day ever since.

World War I began in August 1914. But for many years IWD was suppressed by capitalist governments and a few socialist parties, that had betrayed international working-class solidarity by backing their own nations in the war.

1917 But the most memorably IWD so far was in Russia on March 8. Leon Trotskij’s "History of the Russian Revolution", describes it perfectly, (its a wonderful book) The last Sunday in February, Russian Women started a huge revolution"strike" for Bread & peace. 4 days later they overthrew the all-powerful Tsar's, who was forced to abdicate and the provisional Government granted women the right to vote. This then led to Lenin's Bolshevik Party's revolution, eight months later, October 1917.
The only successful proletarian revolution in history, understood that Soviet women would never achieve political and social equality unless they were allowed out of the stultifying isolation of the home and into the workplace. Even in the midst of a civil war and foreign invasion, the early Soviet government did what it could to socialize ‘‘women’s work’’ while instituting, for the first time in history, full legal and political equality for women. Free abortion was available on demand; dining halls, laundries and day-care centers were established, and the new regime sought to ensure equality of economic opportunity in the civil service, in industry, in the party and in the armed forces.

Since those early years, International Women's Day has assumed a new global dimension for women in developed and developing countries alike. The growing international women's movement, which has been strengthened by four global United Nations women's conferences, has helped make the commemoration a rallying point for coordinated efforts to demand women's rights and participation in the political and economic process. Increasingly, International Women's Day is a time to reflect on progress made, to call for change and to celebrate acts of courage and determination by ordinary women who have played an extraordinary role in the history of women's rights.

All my Love & Blessings goes out to every women in this world that are every day are abused in anyway.

For all women that do not have the chance to be a voice & whose efforts are not valued every day, for all women that are raising our new generation in this world.

We must fight for all these women in the world, fight for Dignity Justice & Equality.

*
More from www.democracynow.org

March 08, 2010

International Women’s Day Marked Around the World

Thousands of events are being held around the world to celebrate International Women’s Day, an idea that was launched 100 years ago when a group of women from seventeen countries gathered in Copenhagen, Denmark to champion the rights of women. Activists across the globe are drawing attention to a variety of concerns, including discriminatory laws, the high rate of pregnancy-related deaths in many parts of the world, the skewed sex ratio in China and India, the disproportionately high number of women who are killed and victimized by wars, the comparatively heavier burden of poverty on women, and the continuing disparity between men and women in terms of the quality of available employment and wages received.

Guest:

Kavita Ramdas, President and CEO of the Global Fund for Women. She is following discussions at the United Nations as the Commission on the Status of Women meets to review the implementation of the Beijing Platform for Action that came out of the Fourth World Conference on Women in 1995.

Blue

aliceiswonderland@gmail.com (Alice) — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 08:00:00 +0000

Bluebird

there's a bluebird in my heart that

wants to get out

but I'm too tough for him,

I say, stay in there, I'm not going

to let anybody see

you.

Charles Bukowski
*

Archangel Michael ...info from lots of the people he channels to and through

aliceiswonderland@gmail.com (Alice) — Sun, 07 Mar 2010 02:59:00 +0000

http://www.michaelteachings.com

The Michael teachings explore the spiritual philosophy of the mid-causal plane entity Michael, popularized in the best-selling book, "Messages from Michael" by Chelsea Quinn Yarbro.
The Michael teachings provide a liberating set of tools that help chart our spiritual progress as we journey from first incarnation to last.

Learning about the roles (server, priest, artisan, sage, warrior, king, scholar) and the overleaves system, teaches us to validate our overall development in the reincarnational cycle (soul age), show where we are on the path, what lessons we will encounter, why we are here, and what is yet to come. It also helps us understand the unique qualities we bring to the world, and why people and societies are the way they are.
The teachings are very spiritual at their core, with many words and ideas that are primarily in Eastern religions, but unlike the religions and beliefs, seek to embrace the human experience in every form as a valid learning experience and an integral part of the whole being.
This site offers the largest resource of Michael teachings articles, Michael channeling, and related material available online, including monthly chats (where you can ask Michael questions), a database of students, a FAQ, and an active discussion list.
MichaelTeachings.com is a labor of love that was created for students, channels, and those wonderfully inquisitive souls still destined to discover the teachings.

Peace to you...

In a hurry? Try Michael in a Nutshell

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The Akashic Records

aliceiswonderland@gmail.com (Alice) — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 08:00:00 +0000

From: http://cof-interspiritual-mindfulness.blogspot.com

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The akashic records (akasha is a Sanskrit word meaning "sky", "space" or "aether") is a term used in theosophy (and Anthroposophy) to describe a compendium of mystical knowledge encoded in a non-physical plane of existence. These records are described as containing all knowledge of human experience and the history of the cosmos. They are metaphorically described as a library; other analogues commonly found in discourse on the subject include a "universal computer" and the "Mind of God". People who describe the records assert that they are constantly updated and that they can be accessed through astral projection. The concept originated in the theosophical movements of the 19th century. It is frequently used in New Age discourse.

Specific accounts

In his books Journey of Souls and Destiny of Souls, Evidence of Life between Lives, Michael Newton, a hypnotherapist who has worked with subjects in deep states, has many accounts of the akashic record, or "Book of Life". Souls prior to being incarnated go to a 'library' and view the pages associated with the life they are considering. The pages are not necessarily sequential. Although there may be definitive way points along the course of our lives, our free will can change paths, events and outcomes. As the soul prepares for a life with the intent of learning a particular lesson or satisfying a karmic debt, the soul will also choose a family and a body that will help them with the lessons for this incarnation. For many, some of those images survive "birth amnesia" and become our intuition serving them during their lives.

C.W. Leadbeater, who claimed to be clairvoyant, conducted research into the akashic record. He said he inspected this at the Theosophical Society headquarters in Adyar (Tamil Nadu), India during the summer of 1910 and recorded the results in his book Man: How, Whence, and Whither? The book records the history of Atlantis and other civilizations and the future society of Earth in the 27th century.

Edgar Cayce stated that each person is held to account after life and "confronted" with their personal akashic record of what they have or have not done in life in a karmic sense. The idea is comparable to the Biblical Book of Life, which is consulted to see whether or not the dead should be admitted to heaven.

Ervin Laszlo in his books Science and the Akashic Field and Science and the Reenchantment of the Cosmos brings the latest new science of the akashic field and its function as the source of all manifestation and interconnectedness, flowing out and in via the vacuum field or zero-point energy, which he equates with akasha—cosmic mind, universal consciousness, and the field that unifies all things.

Jane Roberts in the Seth books describes a different version of a similar idea. Seth asserts that the fundamental stuff of the universe is ideas and consciousness, and that an idea once conceived exists forever. Seth argued that all ideas and knowledge are in principle accessible by "direct cognition". Direct cognition shares semantic congruency with intuition and allows for the possibility of direct knowing without time elapsing and without knowledge needing to be transferred e.g. in speech or text. This is similar to what Robert Monroe refers to as rotes in his out-of-body book trilogy.

Robert L. DeMelo in his theoretical physics ebook The General Principles of Reality A takes another approach. He uses implicit logic to deduce the potential existence of an infinite knowing universal consciousness of which we are all a part. Essentially each contributes to its own existence. His logical deduction compares the common properties between space and time and applies them to consciousness. He concludes his ebook by referring to this infinite consciousness as God.

According to Max Heindel's Rosicrucian writings, the "Memory of Nature" (akashic records) may be read in three different inner worlds. In the reflecting ether of the etheric region, there are pictures of all that has happened in the world. These may be of events at least several hundred years back, or much more in some cases, and they appear almost as pictures on a screen, with the difference that the scene shifts backward. The Memory of Nature may be read, in a higher world, in the highest subdivision of the Region of Concrete Thought of the World of Thought. Lastly, it may be read in the World of Life Spirit, covering events from the earliest dawn of our present manifestation. This is possible only for spiritual adepts or spiritual entities; it is through grace that access to the records is granted.

The Urantia Book asserts the validity and reality of these "living records" in several accounts. In Paper 25 is found the statement: "The recording angels of the inhabited planets are the source of all individual records. Throughout the universes other recorders function regarding both formal records and living records. From Urantia to Paradise, both recordings are encountered: in a local universe, more of the written records and less of the living; on Paradise, more of the living and less of the formal; on Uversa, both are equally available."

And in Paper 25:

"The Memory of Mercy is a living trial balance, a current statement of your account with the supernatural forces of the realms. These are the living records of mercy ministration which are read into the testimony of the courts of Uversa when each individual's right to unending life comes up for adjudication, when "thrones are cast up and the Ancients of Days are seated. The broadcasts of Uversa issue and come forth from before them; thousands upon thousands minister to them, and ten thousand times ten thousand stand before them. The judgment is set, and the books are opened." And the books which are opened on such a momentous occasion are the living records of the tertiary seconaphim of the superuniverses. The formal records are on file to corroborate the testimony of the Memories of Mercy if they are required."

In The Law of One, Book I, a book purported to contain conversations with a channeled "social memory complex" known to humans as "Ra," when the questioner asks where Edgar Cayce received his information, the answer received is, "We have explained before that the intelligent infinity is brought into intelligent energy from eighth density or octave. The one sound vibratory complex called Edgar used this gateway to view the present, which is not the continuum you experience but the potential social memory complex of this planetary sphere. The term your peoples have used for this is the "Akashic Record" or the "Hall of Records."[2]

"Future Life Reading" - Helen Stewart Wambach (1925-1985), who lived in Concord, California, claimed to be able to read the akashic record. She said she could hypnotize people and enable them to experience their possible future lives in various alternate universes.

In Thiaoouba Prophecy, Michel Desmarquet tells of being abducted in 1987 from Australia by supreme alien beings. During a visit of nine days with them, he is guided through the akashic record. He uses the synonym of psychosphere. He says the akashic record is like a "vibratory cocoon, which turns at a speed seven times that of light. This cocoon acts as a blotter, as it were, absorbing (and remembering) absolutely every event occurring on the planet. The contents of this cocoon are inaccessible to us on Earth - we have no way of ‘reading the land.’"

Evidence

So far, the only presented evidence of akashic records has been the claims of those who purport to gather information from them. These claims cannot be empirically tested, and thus is not deemed a serious matter of scientific inquiry. Neither the Christian nor Vedic/Hindu traditions generally recognize their scriptures and beliefs as being rooted in the akashic record, though specific groups or individuals may subscribe to such a belief. However in Islamic belief, under the concept of Qadar, there is a notation of so called "the Book of Decree", or "Al-Lawh Al-Mahfud" which is also defined as a preserved tablet that holds the records of all the events that ever happened and also that are going to happen. (See: Predestination in Islam) Section 1 Jup Part 2 of the Shri Guru Granth Sahib (Sikh Holy Book) references an Akaashic ether, "the earth, its support, and the Akaashic ethers." Many translations have "Akaashic" capitalized.

In popular culture

According to Hindu tradition, the Vedas are apaurueya "not of human agency", are supposed to have been directly revealed to the rishis, and thus are called śruti ("what is heard").

See also

• The Aquarian Gospel of Jesus the Christ
• Esoteric cosmology
• Mindstream
• Store consciousness
• Terma (Buddhism)
• Seth Lloyd

Posted by A CIRCLE OF FRIENDS INTERSPIRITUAL MINDFULNESS MEDITATION GROUP

Opera in the Fruit & Veggie Market

aliceiswonderland@gmail.com (Alice) — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 15:25:00 +0000

March 3rd, 2010
From: www.openculture.com

The place: A produce market in Valencia, Spain. The day: Just a day like any other. But then suddenly Verdi’s La traviata booms out over the speakers, and opera singers, initially masquerading as shopkeepers, take center stage. Stick with it until the end. The customer reaction is precious. We’ve added this one to our YouTube favorites.
Thanks Charlie for the tip …

by Dan Colman

Jason Leinwand

aliceiswonderland@gmail.com (Alice) — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 08:00:00 +0000

From: www.phantasmaphile.com

Jason Leinwand "Releasing an Inner Serpent G-d" 2007

Jason Leinwand is one of my favorite recent discoveries of the past year. I dig him so much in fact that I chose one of his pieces to be the promo image for my current group show VISION QUEST (up til Feb 21st so go see it soon! Plug end.) What's amazing about his work is that while it looks super neat as a jpeg, it is absolutely mind. blow. ing. in person. This is because each piece is made up of layer upon layer of collaged colored paper elements, all obsessively cut out and arranged in mesmerizing mandala-like patterns. You have to see this stuff, for real. I am also crazy about the way he blends pop cultural references with mystic iconography. Get a load of his artist statement:

...I make collage because it is simple, involves repetitive actions, directs structure, and is unforgiving.
I imagine a relationship to Color, upon first sight, cannot be much different from experiencing the divine; a kaleidoscopic lure of light and warmth. An invitation to explore this light inevitably leads to the discovery of a Darkness. Through color, my work examines Hindu, Buddhist and Shamanic themes where the acceptance of this Darkness or Fear can lead to higher realms of consciousness and new states of being. This pairing of Color with Darkness becomes the focus of collaged meditations aimed at a better understanding of the Self and a means to conquer Fears.
My work is about Being. Bright, colorful, paper collages functioning as the Mandala or the Yantra: a meditational tool aimed at self-discovery, spiritual awakening, and devotion to the Divine Being. Navigating Consciousness through laser beams, Shakti, and joy. Confronting Fear by maintaining a rigorous process, Kali, and death. Experiencing Harmony from symmetry, UFO’s, and the cosmos. Densely layered patterns, shapes, and line hold together deep, symmetrical spaces where mind and body potential is revealed and explored. In either case, an attempt to create a magic Sacred Space where our primordial questions about Being, co-exist with comic books, science fiction, Timothy Leary and Terrance McKenna. A magic Sacred Space where the divine mother goddess can just as easily caress and nurture you as ferociously rip your face off.

So, so awesome.

THE HOLY GHOST POSTS: VIOLINAIRES + CARLTON COLEMAN + THE WILLIAM SINGERS

aliceiswonderland@gmail.com (Alice) — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 08:00:00 +0000

posted by O.W. @ soul-sides.com

The Violinaires: Groovin' With Jesus
Put Your Hand in the Hand
From Groovin' With Jesus (197?)

One of the best known gospel funk songs out there is the appropriate titled "Groovin' With Jesus" by the venerable Violinaires. This Detroit-founded group has a long, deep history - Wilson Pickett was once a member and the Rolling Stones apparently wrote for them. This comes out of their early '70s catalog (and if you've ever perused the gospel section at a record store, you know how prolific they could be) and they're very clearly experimenting with some secular flavor. Frankly, I have yet a hear anything even remotely on this level, at least in terms of how well it kicks that '70s funk sound. Humble Pie and the Lifesavas knew the real.

I included a second song off the same album...one that you would have assumed might kick a little break based on experience but no. Yet, this is probably one of the best versions of the song I've ever heard. Despite the opening drum break on other versions, they tend to slide in campy country rock and the Violinaires keep their version quite soulful throughout.

Rev. Carlton Coleman: Rockgospeltime Pt. 2
From Rock Gospel Time (Brunswick, 1970)

Coleman is probably best known in soul circles for having worked with James Brown on the novelty cut, "The Boo Boo Song". By 1970, Coleman...no longer "King Coleman" but Rev. Carlton Coleman, was on Brunswick and recorded one of the more eclectic albums for that label (which is saying a lot). That LP was a mix of long (and I do mean long) monologues about Coleman's unique "Rock Gospel Time" philosophies with a few really funky cuts, among them "Share It" and this mostly instrumental jam, "Rockgospeltime Pt. 2"

The William Singers: He Lifted Me
From He Lifted Me (Checker, 1973)

Thought I'd finish off with another Checker release (the studio seemed to be encouraging these kind of gospel-meets-funk fusions), this one from the William Singers. I think it's safe to say this cut, in particular, borrows heavily from Chicago's dense music scene with a classic funky blues riff powering the cut.

War Politics, By NORMAN SOLOMON

aliceiswonderland@gmail.com (Alice) — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 06:12:00 +0000

Playwright Lillian Hellman said: “I cannot and will not cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions.”

The statement was in a letter to the House Un-American Activities Committee. The year was 1952. We tell ourselves that the McCarthy era was vastly different than our own -- but what about the political fashions of 2010?

This year’s fashions cut mean figures on Washington’s runways. Conformities lie, and people die.

While the escalating disaster of war in Afghanistan keeps setting deadly blazes, the few anti-war voices on Capitol Hill usually sound like people whispering “Fire!”

In 2010, this is what the warfare state looks like: a largely numbed state, mainlining anesthetics that induce routine torpor. In that context, the conformity of mild dissent is apt to be mistaken for outspoken moral acuity.

On the back of an envelope, or anywhere else, check this math:

$1,000,000 x 100,000 = $100,000,000,000

In round flat numbers, that’s the cost of deploying 100,000 U.S. troops in Afghanistan for one year -- $100 billion. The initial “cost” includes none of the human consequences.

In a numbed process, filtered through media and political buzz phrases, we talk about one number, then another. Numb and number.

For domestic acceptance, a far-off war depends on the pumped-up anesthetics of verbal abstractions and hollow numbers, permeating news media and political discourse. Wooden words and figures, bolted together; every number a lie when wrenched into claiming to tell a human truth.

The number we get, the farther from warfare’s human consequences. While more lives are being shattered elsewhere, conscience hems and haws to fit this year’s fashions.

When Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “Beyond Vietnam” speech on April 4, 1967, he told listeners that he had moved during the course of two years, finally, “to break the betrayal of my own silences and to speak from the burnings of my own heart.”

At the podium of Riverside Church in New York City, he said: “I come to this magnificent house of worship tonight because my conscience leaves me no other choice.”

Dr. King noted that the human spirit has “great difficulty” moving against “all the apathy of conformist thought within one’s own bosom and in the surrounding world.”

In his own way, King was saying what Hellman had said 15 years earlier -- when she declared herself unwilling to “cut my conscience to fit this year’s fashions.”

This year, with the escalating occupation of Afghanistan widely believed to be on automatic policy pilot, conscience is fashionably cloaked with acquiescence. Many in Congress who say they don’t support the war keep voting to fund it -- and keep their voices muffled. The brandished wrath of the House Speaker or the

White House chief of staff is most effective as a preemptive club.

A dozen years after Hellman defied HUAC, a senator defied the fearful conformity of 1964. Seeing the escalation of the Vietnam War on the near horizon, Wayne Morse spoke truth to -- and about -- power. The contrast with today’s liberal baseline on Capitol Hill is painfully evident if you watch footage of Senator Morse for two minutes.

Norman Solomon is the author of Made Love, Got War.

Happy Birthday Chopin

aliceiswonderland@gmail.com (Alice) — Tue, 02 Mar 2010 03:40:00 +0000

The mystery of Chopin's birthday

Fryderyk Chopin was born at Zelazowa Wola in Mazovia, in the Warsaw region of Poland. His father Nicholas had been born in France in 1771 in Marainville, a village in Lorraine – a area which at that time was ruled over by the Polish King Stanislas Leszczynski.

Nicholas, of humble origin, but very able and intelligent, had accompanied the Polish agent of his village to Warsaw in 1792, and from then on identified totally with Poland, preferring to speak Polish rather than French.

The Manor of Zelazowa Wola

In 1802 Nicholas Chopin was engaged by Count Skarbek to be tutor to his four children at his estate of Zelazowa Zola, and in 1806 he married a poor relation of the family, Justyna Krzyzanowska, then living with the Skarbeks and acting as their housekeeper. The couple had a daughter in 1807 and then moved out of the main house into a thatched cottage close by, where their only son was born on possibly the 22nd of February and possibly the 1st of March 1810.

The child was named Fryderyk after Fryderyk Skarbek, the Count’s eldest son, who was to be godfather. Actually they had to wait some time to receive the 18-year old Count’s consent, as he was studying in Paris, and when the christening eventually took place on the 23rd April at the parish church of Saint-Rock in Brochów, a proxy stood in for young Fryderyk Skarbek. The date of the birth was duly entered as the 22nd of February in the baptismal register. (It is interesting to note that Chopin’s godfather was to become a distinguished economist, historian and writer, and that he and Chopin became good friends in later life).

Despite the date in the parish register, Chopin’s family always celebrated his birthday on the 1st of March.
To complicate things further, Jane Stirling – his Scottish pupil and benefactor – said that Chopin had told her she was the only one who knew his real birth date. She wrote it down, put it in a box, and this box was apparently placed in Chopin’s grave in the Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris.

Some sense can be made of this. In the nineteenth century people were much more vague about actual birthdays than we are today, and in a Catholic country such as Poland the name day would have been just as important, if not more so. However, in Britain it is the birthday which counts, and one can imagine Jane Stirling asking her beloved Master when his birthday was, so she could give him a present. He may have told her, adding that she was not to tell anyone else, as he did not want a lot of fuss.

Whether the writing in Jane’s box would even be legible now is dubious, so even if it is the real date we may never know the truth.

The Chopin Society celebrates the 22nd of February, as our Founder, Lucie Swiatek, favoured that date, though generally the 1st of March is more frequently regarded as correct.

© Copyright Rose Cholmondeley 1998 (with acknowledgements to Iwo and Pamela Zaluski).

Etude Op10 #1

Click here for a ton more Chopin tunes to listen to...

Senate Extends Patriot Act A Refuge for Cowards

aliceiswonderland@gmail.com (Alice) — Mon, 01 Mar 2010 16:03:00 +0000

By JAYNE LYN STAHL

Bill Maher recently told Larry King that the Senate is where "legislation goes to die." Well, not this time.

Wednesday night, after all the cameras were gone and the Senate was filled just with senators, a voice vote was taken sans debate and a resolution passed that extends provisions of the USA Patriot Act, which were scheduled to sunset on Sunday, for another year.

The Democrats who are said to have worked hard to neutralize this legislation that had a built-in sunset clause did little more than wring their hands.

Republicans, so adept at lip synching that same old song about national security, were quick to point to Ft. Hood, and the bungled bombing of an airline on Christmas Day as the rationale behind the Patriot Act. But, what these strident proponents of homeland security neglected to mention is that both the Ft. Hood incident and the aborted bombing of a Southwest Airlines jet happened after the Patriot Act had been in full play for nearly a decade. Go figure.

The House Judiciary Committee passed a measure intended to protect against abuse of library records by the FBI, as well as restrict the use of National Security Letters,governmental demand letters for information. The House bill was also meant to challenge carte blanche surveillance of someone designated as a "lone wolf."

But, thanks to Senate Democrats' temporary state of paralysis, there will no doubt be more warrantless police searches of a suspect's home after their arrest as happened in San Diego, U.S. v. Lemus, a case that the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit refused to hear last week with another prominent George W. Bush-era figure, Jay Bybee, sitting on the bench. Bybee, you'll recall, was one of the masterminds of the 2002 "torture memos."

Does anyone know why legislation mired in controversy wasn't subject to full debate in the Senate? Why were the Senate Republicans allowed to bully Democrats into submission? Maybe Democrats don't want to look weak on national security right before a major midterm election. But, in the end, are they more interested in facades than facts?

Here are some facts. According to the Associated Press, those parts of the Patriot Act given a reprieve for another year "Authorize court-approved roving wiretaps that permit surveillance on multiple phones, Allow court-appointed seizure of records and property in anti-terrorism operations, and permit surveillance against a so-called 'lone wolf,' a non-U.S. citizen engaged in terrorism who may not be part of a recognized terrorist group."

Boiled down to the lowest common denominator, all three provisions amount to neutering the Fourth Amendment, as well as eradicating the legal presumption of innocence.

But, facts aren't always convenient. Just ask Mr. Cheney. After all, it is he trying to convince us that the U.S. is no safer today, under President Obama, than it was before 9/11, despite the Patriot Act, so why then should the law that was conceived, and launched on Cheney's watch continue to see the light of day?

Yet, after a historic televised debate on the need to overhaul national health care and in the quiet of the night, a gang of fear-mongerers were allowed to shout down, by voice vote, changes that would have provided a modicum of insulation against FBI, and law enforcement excesses making one thing crystal clear: Congress is now a refuge for cowards.

With any luck, the three important parts of the Patriot Act just extended will meet their maker next February, but not unless Democrats draw a line in the sand. There can be no national security where there is erosion of constitutional protections.

Jayne Lyn Stahl is a widely published poet, essayist, playwright, and screenwriter, member of PEN American Center, and PEN USA.

Raw With Love, by Charles Bukowski

aliceiswonderland@gmail.com (Alice) — Sun, 28 Feb 2010 08:00:00 +0000

little dark girl with
kind eyes
when it comes time to
use the knife
I won't flinch and
I won't blame
you,
as I drive along the shore alone
as the palms wave,
the ugly heavy palms,
as the living does not arrive
as the dead do not leave,
I won't blame you,
instead
I will remember the kisses
our lips raw with love
and how you gave me
everything you had
and how I
offered you what was left of
me,
and I will remember your small room
the feel of you
the light in the window
your records
your books
our morning coffee
our noons our nights
our bodies spilled together
sleeping
the tiny flowing currents
immediate and forever
your leg my leg
your arm my arm
your smile and the warmth
of you
who made me laugh
again.
little dark girl with kind eyes
you have no
knife. the knife is
mine and I won't use it
yet.
*

"If you act, as you think, the missing link..."

aliceiswonderland@gmail.com (Alice) — Sat, 27 Feb 2010 21:20:00 +0000

"It's a poor sort of memory that only works backwards, " the Queen remarked

-Alice in Wonderland

The Political Philosophy of Oscar Wilde by Wendy McElroy

aliceiswonderland@gmail.com (Alice) — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 18:56:00 +0000

February 25, 2010

The renowned playwright Oscar Wilde once said, “A man who can dominate a London dinner-table can dominate the world.” At the height of his career in 1895, Wilde dominated London dinner-tables, stages, and opinion. Two of his plays opened that year to rave reviews by both critics and the public. His epigrams and activities were repeated — often by him — in the best of homes while his philosophy of art and life were printed in newspapers of note. Wilde was intensely admired and intensely disliked because he was, among other things, a propagator of radical ideas.

Aesthetically, Wilde advocated art-for-art's-sake — the theory that art should be judged on its own merits rather than upon the morality or politics it expressed. Personally, he declared pleasure to be the purpose of life even though the Victorian era surrounding him assigned that role to “duty.” He was also homosexual. These aspects of Wilde have been documented in hundreds of books and essays but Oscar Wilde “the libertarian” and advocate of social reform has received comparatively little attention.

In the book Liberty and the Great Libertarians, Charles Sprading includes an excerpt from Wilde's essay “The Soul of Man Under Socialism.” This essay and the lengthy poem “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” — of which Benjamin Tucker published the first American book edition in 1899 — are Wilde's most important political works. Wilde was primarily a playwright, a poet, and a novelist who only occasionally strayed into political theory. His importance as a libertarian stems from the events and consequences of his life as much or more than from his political writing. This is particularly true in the area of penal reform.

Part of the reason Wilde's libertarianism is overlooked is because like many 19th-century libertarians, including Tucker himself, Wilde sometimes called himself a “socialist.” Just as the term “liberal” has evolved, however, the term “socialist” was often used in a different way than it is today.

“The Soul of Man under Socialism” is Wilde's most direct commentary on politics but the ideal of socialism expressed is confused and contradictory. For example, Wilde assumes socialism will create a society in which production problems are solved and machines perform all drudgery, leaving the individual free to express himself. Thus, self-expression or “individualism” is the goal of Wilde's socialist vision. Individualism is defined as the ability to pursue artistic goals without submitting to the “tyranny of want.” Wilde presents a paradox: namely, embracing “the collective” will not only result in individualism but also in artistic expression without social or state control. Thus, the essay does not argue for socialism on economic or moral grounds but on rather naive artistic ones.

Wilde's arguments against private property are equally vague, contradictory, and aesthetic.

Wilde believed private property had a “decaying” effect on man's soul. “It [private property] has made gain nor growth its aim,” he explained. “So that man thought that the important thing was to have, and did not know that the important thing was to be.”

What the essay consistently expresses without confusion is Wilde's rejection of state control over the individual. He writes,

What is needed is Individualism. If the Socialism is Authoritarian; if there are Governments armed with economic power as they are now with political power; if, in a word, we are to have Industrial Tyrannies, then the last state of man will be worse than the first.... I confess that many of the socialistic views that I have come across seem to me to be tainted with ideas of authority, if not of actual compulsion. Of course, authority and compulsion are out of the question. All association must be quite voluntary. It is only in voluntary associations that man is fine.

In its final form, Wilde's socialism closely resembles Tucker's libertarian anarchism. Wilde writes,

Individualism, then, is what through Socialism we are to attain to. As a natural result the State must give up all idea of government. It must give it up because, as a wise man once said many centuries before Christ, there is such a thing as leaving mankind alone; there is no such thing as governing mankind. All modes of government are failures. Despotism is unjust to everybody, including the despot, who was probably made for better things. Oligarchies are unjust to the many, and ochlocracies are unjust to the few. High hopes were once formed of democracy; but democracy means simply the bludgeoning of the people by the people for the people.... The form of government that is most suitable to the artist is no government at all.

This essay is not considered important by the English Socialist movement, perhaps because its voluntaryism opposed the movement's dominant tendencies. But according to Wilde biographer Robert Sherard, the essay was popular with the public.“ [M]illions of copies were sold in Central and Eastern Europe.... In America large pirated editions were printed and sold by revolutionary groups. In England its most immediate result was to create feelings against Wilde among the influential and moneyed classes.”

Wilde's ideas created a backlash and his transparent homosexuality caused gossip. When the prominent father of one of Wilde's lovers decided to make a public stir, Wilde ignored the advice of friends. On April 3, 1895, he brought the Marquis of Queensberry to trial on charges of libel based on a note that Queensberry had written to Wilde, accusing him of posing as a “somdomite” [sic]. The trial was a disaster. Not only did Wilde lose his case but information from it made him liable for criminal prosecution.

On Friday, April 26, 1895, Wilde was tried under Section 11 of the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1895. The Act had come into effect four months prior with a clause that created the new offense of indecency between male persons in public or in private. Until this point, private acts had been outside the legal sphere. On the basis of private and consenting acts, Wilde was prosecuted twice and eventually sentenced to two years at hard labor. The last one-and-a-half years were spent in Reading Gaol.

The trials of Wilde were sensational. The best legal professionals of the day were brought into conflict over a notorious man being prosecuted under an unpopular law — the recent Act was nicknamed “the blackmailer's charter.” Although Wilde retained a tenuous foothold in the sophisticated society he had charmed, he was now thoroughly disliked by the general public.

The first prosecution (April 26, 1895) ended inconclusively with the jury unable to agree on some of the counts. The government could have dropped the case at this point. Nevertheless, on May 20, 1895, Wilde was tried again on similar but amended charges. He was found guilty.

The impact of the last case was immense. Considering the controversy it caused and the reform that followed, the ensuing imprisonment of Wilde was a mistake even from the government's point of view. “In view of the sensation which he had created,” the biographer Hesketh Pearson observed, “he should have been told to leave the country.”

Why did the matter continue? Sir Frank Lockwood, then Soliciter General, is reported as saying that he dared not drop the matter for “if I did so it would be said all over the world that we dropped the case owing to the names mentioned in the Marquis of Queensberry's letters.” These letters had been introduced by the marquis into the first trial and identified various members of “high society” as homosexuals. Among them was Lockwood's nephew by marriage.

Wilde did not receive a fair hearing in court or in public opinion. Newspaper coverage was so prejudiced that one editor risked being sent to jail for contempt of court by publishing the details of the jury's voting in the second of the three trials even though Wilde had not yet been convicted of any offense. The atmosphere of the court in the third trial was best expressed by Justice Willis who, in passing sentence declared it to be totally inadequate as the case had been the worst one he had ever tried. Presumably this included murder trials.

One of the few newspapers to strongly protest the prosecutions and imprisonment was Benjamin Tucker's Liberty. “[T]he imprisonment of Oscar Wilde,” Tucker wrote, “is an outrage that shows how thoroughly the doctrine of liberty is misconceived. An man who has done nothing in the least degree invasive of any one; a man whose entire life, so far as known or charged, as been one of strict conformity with the idea of equal liberty ... is condemned to spend two years in cruel imprisonment at hard labor... Men who imprison a man who has committed no crime are themselves criminals.”

Controversy continued during Wilde's imprisonment. Prison life was brutal. Hard-labor prisoners were confined to badly ventilated cells for twenty-three hours of every day, with only primitive sanitation. They slept on planks of wood. Letters in the London Daily Chronicle complained loudly about the miserable conditions in which Wilde lived and his resulting mental state. The controversy prompted R.B. Haldane, a Liberal M.P. and member of the Home Office Committee, to visit Wilde and investigate the claims.

Wilde was released from prison on May 19, 1897. That same month a letter from him was published in the Daily Chronicle under the heading “The Case of Warder Martin, Some Cruelties of Prison Life.” The letter described a small child who spent 23 hours a day in hideous conditions in solitary confinement for stealing food, an offense for which he was not convicted. When the child refused to eat the wretched prison food, Warder Martin tried to encourage him with a sweet biscuit; Martin was dismissed for doing so.

Most of this letter dealt with the treatment of children in prison. Children were subjected to the same brutality as adults but as Wilde observed: “a child can understand a punishment inflicted by an individual such as a parent or guardian, and bear it with a certain amount of acquiescence. What it cannot understand is a punishment inflicted by society. It cannot realize what society is.” The letter continues to describe individual children Wilde had seen during his imprisonment. “The child’s face was like a white wedge of sheer terror … the next morning I heard him breakfast-time crying and calling to be let out. His cry was for his parents…. Yet he was not even convicted of whatever little offense he has been charged with.” Wilde also described the plight of a retarded prisoner who was punished constantly for his harmless but strange behavior. The man went insane.

This letter attracted a great deal of attention and, according to Francis Winwar, it “succeeded in bringing prison reform.” Biographer Frank Harris credited the letter with bringing about improvement in the treatment of children in British prisons.

On March 24, 1898, Wilde published another controversial letter in the Chronicle. This letter, headed “Don’t Read This If You Want to Be Happy Today,” was prompted by the Home Secretary’s Prison Reform Bill which was then under debate in the House. The Bill suggested such reforms as increasing the number of inspectors and official visitors who had access to the prisons. Such reforms were “useless,” Wilde argued, and again pointed to the wretched conditions of prison life.

The misery and tortures that prisoners go through in consequence of the revolting sanitary arrangements are quite indescribable. And the foul air of the prison cells … is so sickening and unwholesome that it is no uncommon thing for warders, when they come in the morning out of fresh air and open and inspect each cell, to be violently sick.

The reform measures he suggested were: adequate food, improved sanitation, adequate reading material, visitors once a month, the right to send and receive a letter at least once a month, non-censorship of mail, and adequate medical care. The letter ends: “And the first and perhaps the most difficult task is to humanize the governors of prisons, to civilize the warders, and to Christianize the chaplains.” The letter was signed “the author of ‘The Ballad of Reading Gaol.’”

“The Ballad of Reading Gaol” is one of the most acclaimed poems of the English language. It is also a major piece of literature in penal reform. The Ballad deals with the hanging of a prisoner named C.T. Wooldridge that occurred while Wilde was imprisoned. It chronicles Wilde’s horror and despair.

Like two doomed ships that pass in storm
We had crossed each other's way:
But we made no sign, we said no word,
We had no word to say;

In the Ballad, Wilde does not question the validity of any particular law, but deals with the cruelty and degradation caused by all Law:

I know not whether Laws be right,
Or whether Laws be wrong;
All that we know who lie in gaol
Is that the wall is strong;
And that each day is like a year,
A year whose days are long.

But this I know, that every Law
That men have made for Man,
Since first Man took his brother's life,
And the sad world began,
But straws the wheat and saves the chaff
With a most evil fan.

Because of Wilde’s notoriety, “The Ballad of Reading Gaol” was published under the pseudonym C.3.3. — the number assigned to Wilde at Reading Gaol — Block C, third cell on the third floor. The poem was immensely popular. The first edition of 800 copies (plus 30 copies on vellum) sold within the first week and was quickly followed by a second edition of 1000. Within three months there were six printings and translations appeared in almost every European language. It has remained one of the most published works in English.

It was widely and loudly received. Even the London Times devoted a lead article to praising it. Although the ballad was poetry, it was received as though it were a pamphlet on prison reform. The Daily Chronicle’s review was typical; the Chronicle devoted two-thirds of a column on the leader page and concentrated heavily on the horrors of prison life portrayed by the poem rather than the poem itself.

Liberty devoted a column to reviewing this (as Tucker put it) “incomparable poem.” He urged “every reader of Liberty … to help this book to a wide circulation by asking for it at the bookstores and newsstand in his vicinity.” One-quarter of the next issue’s space was used in reporting the response of other publications to the Ballad.

Shortly after its publication Wilde wrote to George Ives, a criminologist and leading figure in penal reform: “I have no doubt we shall win, but the road is long and red with monstrous martyrdoms. Nothing but the repeal of the Criminal Law Amendment Act would do any good.” Wilde planned another work on prison life but he died before it could be actualized.

The aftermath of prison killed Wilde, both psychologically and physically. During his imprisonment, his beloved mother died. His wife divorced him and Wilde never again saw the two sons for whom so much of his work had been written. He was bankrupt and deserted by friends. Upon release Wilde left England but even in France, where he initially settled, many hotels refused to house or feed him. Although money was a constant problem and inhibited his ability to write, he sent checks to prisoners he knew were being released. Other than “The Ballad of Reading Gaol,” Wilde produced no work of quality after his release.

Physically, Wilde’s death was the result of an injury to his ear caused when he fainted one Sunday during compulsory religious services. Despite his complaints of great pain, Wilde was denied treatment for months. It was only through the pressure of Wilde’s friends and officials that he was eventually hospitalized for the injury. Unfortunately, it formed into an abscess.

Many people considered Wilde's social conscience to be a break with his past but Wilde had consistently opposed injustice. Years earlier in 1886, a bomb exploded in the Chicago Haymarket killing several policemen; a show trial resulted and ended in the hanging of a group of socialist anarchists who became known as the “Chicago Martyrs.” In England,

George Bernard Shaw assumed the thankless task of circulating a petition on their behalf. With one exception he was unable to obtain a single signature of note to protest the injustice. Shaw wrote that of all “heroic rebels and sceptics on paper, there was only one of them who had sufficiently the courage of his convictions to make a public gesture on behalf of the anarchists. This was Oscar Wilde.”

Wilde’s sympathy toward radicals was shown again when a young poet, John Barlas, felt impelled by social indignation to commit an act of “propaganda by deed.” It consisted of firing a revolver in the House of Commons. Although he and Barlas were not on good terms, Wilde went forward to bail him out and afterwards stood as his security when Barlas was bound over.

His sympathy toward penal reform can be traced back to “The Soul of Man” in which he wrote, “One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed, but by the punishments that the good have inflicted; and a community is infinitely more brutalized by the habitual employment of punishment, than it is by the occasional occurrence of crime.”

Throughout his career, Wilde also spoke out against censorship. The rehearsals for his play “Salome” were in their third week when, in June 1892, a license necessary for public performance was denied on the grounds that the play introduced biblical characters onto the stage; this was prohibited by an ancient law whose original purpose was to suppress Catholic mystery plays. Wilde deplored this action in a lecture at the Author’s Club and in interviews. In more dramatic moments he declared intentions to renounce his British citizenship. Nevertheless, “Salome” was not produced in England until 13 years later, 5 years after Wilde’s death.

Today Wilde is remembered, and rightly so, on the merits of his later plays which satirized the moral/political/social customs and standards of his day. He was a brilliant man with a tragic life that — as Benjamin Tucker put it — was “one of strict conformity with the idea of equal liberty.”

Wendy McElroy is the author of The Reasonable Woman: A Guide to Intellectual Survival (Prometheus Books, 1998).

Dolphins Clandestinely Killed In 'The Cove'

aliceiswonderland@gmail.com (Alice) — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 08:01:00 +0000

[Sam Seder already did a radio show about this so....that must mean that NPR is behind the Sam Seder curve...or something...]

February 24, 2010

Listen to the Story

Talk of the Nation

[17 min 6 sec]

text sizeA A A

February 24, 2010

Every year, thousands of dolphins are secretly killed in the Japanese fishing town of Taiji.
National Geographic photographer-turned-filmmaker Louie Psihoyos and a covert team documented the slaughter for the film, The Cove.

Can Barbie's spiked heel help crack engineering's glass ceiling?

aliceiswonderland@gmail.com (Alice) — Wed, 24 Feb 2010 15:34:00 +0000

Mattel, Inc.

"Slide rule in your pocket? Or are you just happy to see me?"

Barbie has a new career as a computer engineer, and technical women are cheering the development as another way to help attract girls to careers in science, high-tech, biotech and the other occupations of the future.

Backers include the likes of IEEE Fellow Dr. Karen Panetta, director of the NerdGirls program that aims to break down the negative sterotypes of women engineers and help young female students translate their interest into degrees.

Leah Jamieson, a past president of IEEE and Dean of the College of Engineering at Purdue University speaks regularly on the importance of encouraging women to pursue careers in technology.

These are important messages for young girls hoping to secure their futures and for our society as it tries to afford the widest opportunity to all.

But will a hunk of plastic help? Will the business end of Barbie's spiked-heel help break the glass ceiling -- stylishly?

Meanwhile, Mattel, Inc., owner of the brand, says computer engineering Barbie comes "dressed in a funky tee with binary code design . . . with Bluetooth headset, laptop bag, and pink laptop." Tattoos and body piercings optional, I suppose,?

Posted By: Tom Abate