Grant Morrison: "Like skin cells or perhaps more like immune cells, we as individuals are all part of one immense intelligent living creature which has its roots in the Cryptozoic era and its living tendrils - including us - probing forward through the untasted jelly of the 21st Century. The body of this vast and intelligent lifeform - the biota as it's known - is still in its infancy and still at the stage in its life cycle where it must consume the planet's resources like a caterpillar on a leaf. What looks like environmental destruction to us is, I believe, the natural acceleration of an impending metamorphosis; just as a caterpillar gorges itself to power its transformation into a butterfly, so too does the biota consume everything in its path, in preparation for its own imminent transformation into adult form."
The First Thanksgiving: The first official Thanksgiving wasn't a festive gathering of Indians and Pilgrims, but rather a celebration of the massacre of 700 Pequot men, women and children...
Celebrating Genocide!: On Thanksgiving Day, we give thanks. We give thanks for being the invader, the exploiter, the dominator, the greedy, the gluttonous, the colonizer, the thief, indeed the genocidaire, rather than on the other side of imperialism's zero-sum murderous game.
Why I Hate Thanksgiving: What Columbus did to the Arawaks of the Bahamas and the Taino of the Caribbean, Cortez did to the Aztecs of Mexico, Pizarro to the Incas of Peru, and the English settlers of Virginia and Massachusetts to the Powhatans and the Pequots. Literally millions of native peoples were slaughtered. And the gold, slaves and other resources were used, in Europe, to spur the growth of the new money economy rising out of feudalism. Karl Marx would later call this "the primitive accumulation of capital." These were the violent beginnings of an intricate system of technology, business, politics and culture that would dominate the world for the next five centuries.
The End of American Thanksgivings: Nobody but Americans celebrates Thanksgiving. It is reserved by history and the intent of “the founders” as the supremely white American holiday, the most ghoulish event on the national calendar. No Halloween of the imagination can rival the exterminationist reality that was the genesis, and remains the legacy, of the American Thanksgiving. It is the most loathsome, humanity-insulting day of the year – a pure glorification of racist barbarity.
Hogtied and Abused at Fort Benning: I decided that I shouldn't go along with this dehumanizing action any longer. When I lowered my arms and said, quietly, "I'm sorry, but I can't any longer cooperate with this," I was instantly pushed to the floor. Five soldiers squatted around me, one of them referring to me with an expletive (this f_ _ _ er) and began to cuff my wrists and ankles and then bind my wrists and ankles together. Then one soldier leaned on me, with his or her knee in my back. Unable to get a full breath, I gasped and moaned, "I can't breathe." I repeated this many times and then began begging for help.
Miami Heat: Unprovoked Attacks on Peaceful Demostrators: I got back from Miami on Sunday. It was a different scene than Seattle, although the tear gas was just as real. The cops were much more aggressive and their tactics were clearly designed to create whatever pretext they felt they needed to bash, shoot, spray, threaten, and gas people at random.
Military Morals: Boot camp is a friggin’ cult. (Christian fundamentalists with their blind obedience have no moral compass left in them either, once their pogroms are underway). Why do I say this offensive stuff? Because I have seen what the military does to a human soul.
The New York Times: a proposal for ethnic cleansing in Iraq: With popular resistance mounting to its military occupation of Iraq, the Bush administration is casting about in increasing desperation for a new strategy to salvage the principal aims of its war—the seizure of oil resources and the establishment of a US client regime in a strategically vital region.
New Bush Tape Raises Fears of Attacks: A tape today surfaced in U.S. media outlets of someone purporting to be George W. Bush at a U.S. military base in Baghdad. Intelligence analysts around the world are studying the videotapes. "It certainly looked and sounded like him, but we get so few glimpses at Bush in real-life situations that it is hard to tell," said one operative from a Western intelligence agency. People who know Bush said it appeared to him. "That's him, all right," said one longtime associate. The tape shows the man claiming to be Bush praising U.S. attacks in Iraq.
GO F*CK YOURSELF, MR. PRESIDENT: I am so sick of George W. Bush: sick of his petulant preppie voice, sick of his studied belligerence, and, most of all, damned sick of his threats. If we don't toe the line and support his crazed foreign policy of "preemptive self-defense," he constantly claims, we will reap the whirlwind.
The Bush plan for Cuba: President Bush's recently unveiled plan to bring down the Fidel Castro government in Cuba bears close resemblance to the one for Iraq and is designed with the 2004 Presidential election in focus.
Attacked for telling some home truths : Why is The New York Times providing space for the advocacy of war crimes by US soldiers? I doubt the US channels will broadcast any images of "brutal measures" – they've already had the chance to do so and have declined. But atrocities?
Winning Hearts and Minds – US Style: "I see 'hearts and minds' as a tactical doctrine. To me, it means that's where we should aim first. Shoot them in the body or in the head, but just make sure you shoot them first." – Specialist Jack Craig, US military police
US moves to silence Iraq’s most popular TV news channel: In another indication of the “freedom” and “democracy” that Washington is bringing to the people of Iraq, the US-appointed Iraqi Governing Council (IGC) shut down the Baghdad bureau of the country’s most watched television news channel on November 24. Without warning, more than 20 police and Interior Ministry officials arrived at the Al Arabiya facility, ordered its closure and seized its broadcasting equipment “until further notice”.
Grace in the Christian Ethos, by Kenneth Smith, excerpt.
At the opening of this exploratory discourse, I set out what I take for granted about the vital meaning that grace ought to have in the minds and souls of bona fide or authentic Christians.
(...)
Arguably, grace is the quintessential and founding Christian belief that sets the tone for the rest of its creed. Grace is not so much a doctrine or an objective metaphysics as a profoundly subjective principle, a fertile force within the believer's psyche that incurs sublime confidence in divinity, an existential-moral axiomatics that composes all thinking, believing and behaving in this key: life is a gift, and specifically a gift of love, something divinely meant to be good, healthy, sane, wondrous, and edifying. Life is meant to call forth the moral authenticity of spirit from us, to draw us upward beyond any merely natural or egocentric perspective. More vital than anything we can do for ourselves in developing or cultivating our worldly or natural goods and talents is the primal metabolism of soul that makes it capable of being nourished, growing from strength to strength, keeping its own proper form and authority over itself. Grace is the felt authority of infinite spirit over finite spirit, the presence of divine benevolence within our immediate consciousness and will. Grace is spirit believing in its own indomitable authority, its competence to thrive in the face of a world that is alien if not directly antagonistic to it. If God's commandments or other dictates are the expression of paternal authority, then grace is the presence of a kind of nourishing maternal love for created spirits: it is analogous to what mystical Judaism so remarkably knew as the Shekhina, the feminine aura or felt "presence" of God which is not His actual, active Being but virtually another kind of spiritual organism in itself. Faith is the immediate fruit of grace and the organ also by which grace is most profoundly perceived; faith should truly be in no way tender-minded about itself, or shameful or timid of how it may appear in the eyes of the world--grounded in grace, it is the profoundest and most vigorous form of self-confidence, of aptness for life, the radiant and naked certainty of "the evidence of things not seen."
Grace is an intuitive, not just an intellectual belief in a world-scheme or Logos that favors spirit, that assures finite spirit that it is to come into the inheritance of its Father's Kingdom, the consummation of all the promises latent in spirit. Grace is an "a priori" assurance that all that can happen to us is for the good, for our spiritual enhancement or maturation: it is a "belief" preconditioning the possibility of all more specific beliefs, a primal "myth" that preconceives life as something valuable and nourishing. In Christian mythos, when God finished the work of Creation, He looked at it and "saw that it was good": grace is nothing less than the visceral communication to human spirits of this authoritative divine contentment with the right ordering of His cosmic work of art. As the euphoria of the sun's splendor is to the body and senses, so grace is to the spirit. Grace is openness not just to man's finite forms but to God's infinite forms of order, and it is properly described as "sublime," an experience that carries us out of the domain of ego's petty self-preoccupations and into a transcendent point of view, a sense of the cosmos in which our finite spirit becomes communicant with the Way or the Purpose of infinite Spirit. It is a perfect analog, at a spiritual level, of the amor propria or instinctual self-love and self-delight with which God has blessed all healthy creatures at a natural level, as Aquinas recognized. Grace is the self-certainty of our true self in spirit, superior and more sane and healthy by far than the fracturing and divisive amor propria of ego. Grace's felt presence is the certification that life is proceeding in the proper key, that it is apt for everything in the composition that God has designed to follow.
Grace is our trust in divine authority prior to any possible experience or exercise of our wills in taking existential risks, and utterly outside of our worldly "realizations" of what we are taught to regard as "good for us" or in our best self-interest. Grace is our assurance that human existence has been conformed to our deepest needs to fulfill ourselves, our reason to believe that our finite spirit will prove triumphant in the face of a hostile world, our hope that--not in a shallow but a profound sense--all has been harmoniously preordained to be "for the better." Grace is the ultimate confidence that, even at its most taxing or horrendous or despairing, life deserves from us a response of profoundest thanksgiving. Life, no matter how brutish or abusive or unjust, is still something meant to provoke us to grow, to evoke spirituality in us as a liberation from a merely secular, merely psychological way of looking at things. That sensibility of thanksgiving is the ultimate meaning of God in Christian life, the overflowing gratitude of every religiously cognizant creature for the wonder of life. Life is an abundance or a benison, the intimate and expansionary richness of lovingkindness, and the natural order that makes life possible and defines supranatural forces as miracles is itself already a miracle. Grace, the recognition of the attunement of life to something higher and more profound, is Christianity's ultimate and keenest "a priori" template for how life should be valued, for the art of living in utmost harmony with nature and spirit.
Grace is the believed-in predestination and providentiality--the foreordination that senses the latent divinity in all that exists and occurs--that make the vicissitudes of life ultimately confluent in a higher meaning: just as a mother's womb is by natural providence already lined with blood-rich tissues for the implantation of a fertilized egg, so too grace reveals that God has "made a place for me in the presence of mine enemy," a home for spirit within the harshness of this world, a spiritually hospitable and nutritious niche within an otherwise-vicious and demoralizing order. The world was designed in spite of all to be a womb for soul, a "matrix." Contrary to modern alienation and the stochastic or accidentalist notion of the universe--with its sense that life is utterly purposeless in itself and human beings must, without any higher resources, cobble together some kind of amoral strategy for "just getting by"--grace embraces human "individuality" or "subjectivity" under a divine design, a sublime architecture of purposes into which even the "accidents," "evils" and "tragedies" of human existence have already been woven. Grace does not at all mean that everything in life has been predesigned to tilt in one's favor (as finitely or naturally conceived), or that one's own self is the ultimate center of the universe and the sole focus of God's benevolent attentions (although for many people the experience of grace has been profoundly confused with just such egocentrism and naive psychological euphoria). Life under grace is not devoid of pain or even atrocious wrongs, but it is, all in all, so subtly composed as to make it possible for us to triumph, to see, to hold our spiritual sanity together. Life is not merely happenstance or meaningless mechanical conflicts within an amoral reality--as grasped by value-neutral or objective science and its modernized vision of "atoms and the void"--but rather, life is thoroughly organic, a coordinated family of tasks and orchestral resources that is God's infinite and incomprehensible work of art, His determination to culture us into spirits in spite of our contrary human nature. In suffering the adversities of this world we are seasoning the wisdom that is spirit: truly, as Nietzsche saw, "Whatever does not kill me makes me stronger," sharper, harder.
New particle: "A mysterious sub-atomic particle has been revealed that does not fit any of the models currently used by physicists.
The discovery either suggests that a new family of molecule-like sub-atomic particles exists, or that theorists must substantially re-think their theory of the masses of sub-atomic particles.
'If the molecular interpretation is correct, then it would be one of the first compelling cases for a new type of matter - it opens up a whole new realm of study,' says Gerry Bauer, at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, one of the team involved in confirming the existence of the new particle. "
Omertà
amidabuddha.org's Daily Meditation: "There seem to two kinds of searchers: those who seek to make their ego something other than it is, i.e. holy, happy, unselfish (as though you could make a fish unfish), and those who understand that all such attempts are just gesticulation and play-acting, that there is only one thing that can be done, which is to disidentify themselves with the ego, by realizing its unreality, and by becoming aware of their eternal identity with pure being." - Fingers Pointing Toward the Moon by Wei Wu Wei
jettisoning real scientists in favor of yes-men
Why Wal-Mart will rule the world
Obesity is no longer just a curiosity. It is no longer just an "alarming trend."
The Bush Credibility Gap: A chronology of Bush saying one thing then doing another
Free speech comes to Iraq:
U.S. troops arrest Iraqi for criticising them
Scientists are discovering the neurobiological basis for romantic love, trust, and self
Hard-Hitting Krugman
Mark Evanier's
great Art Carney story: "There's a great story about one time Carney got in trouble on live TV. It was a 'Honeymooners' sketch on the Gleason show, and Gleason exited a scene and ran off to his dressing room to change clothes -- which he should not have done. He forgot that the scene had been rewritten and extended. He was supposed to go back in and engage Art/Ed in more dialogue but he forgot, leaving his sidekick sitting at the Kramden dining table, waiting for Ralph to return and play the rest of the dialogue. When Ralph didn't come, Art realized he had to fill -- this is live TV, remember -- so he walked over, opened the ice box and found there was nothing in it but an orange. He took it, sat down and did two minutes of orange-peeling. A stage manager finally got Gleason back so the scene could resume but as Jackie himself told the story, those two minutes were the funniest two minutes in the entire hour, maybe the entire season. The kinescope is apparently lost but I'm sure it was wonderful. Because Art Carney didn't know how to be anything less."
Neurotechnology and Society (2010-2060)
"A study that compared humans with other species concluded there are 1,000 times too many humans to be sustainable."
OutrageRadio.com
Bush - Nazi Dealings Continued Until 1951
Joseph Chilton Pearce
ALEXANDRIA
Icicle Networks
Elmo Pelts
Second world press freedom ranking
Christopher Priest's Slipstream Top 10
Berke Breathed interview
Brian Eno's "250 Projects for a Better Future."
Uncensored Gore
Operation Northwoods by Mack White
Eco smells a rat