Friday, August 10, 2007

Diversity Shmiversity

This post is a yin & yang post meaning you'll go from feeling sympathetically helpless to hopeful that at least the Daily Show is around to make you laugh at their satire, or maybe just more helpless. Fair and balanced like Fox, right? Gian, that last post was great and extremely powerful. Thank you so much. Below I'm going to take something you showed me once that really affected me the first time I saw it and post it here. Many of you have probably already seen it. Underneath that video I'm going to post another Daily Show clip I've been looking for and have finally found that made me laugh a lot the first time. It's about an amendment proposed that would make English the official American language with bitter consequences. I can almost feel the slap in the face it would be for the families who are not native English speakers. I suppose it makes sense though because we all know English is in tough competition for the ever-so-important title of "Official Language" with... Oh wait, everyone already knows English is the primary language. The amendment would be pointless, obviously, and damaging as John Oliver humorously points out. Watch.


Happy Xmas (War Is Over) - John Lennon



"Language Burier"


"Okay, give me: 'I'm allergic to Penicillin'" Read more!

Pale Blue Dot

Please watch these in succession






Read more!

No End In Sight



See this movie please. If you do: you will know why Iraq is the shitstorm it is today, who is primarily responsible for it, and why our current administration ought to be drug out from the shadows, slapped, shamed, ridiculed, and put behind bars in the most vile, merciless, and sickening prisons possible.

Go to the website for availible theatres. I also suggest you check out "The War" link for a lucid history of American involvement in Iraq.

Now get angry Read more!

Thursday, August 9, 2007



"A yogi practises tummo, the Tibetan form of Kundalini yoga. As the Seventh Dalai Lama wrote: 'Vital energies generated by inner or outer means are drawn into one's central channel, causing the mystic fires to blaze....... The letters AH and HAM flare, fall and vibrate, transporting one to the end of the primordial path of insight and Great Bliss. Lights from the mystic fire flash into a hundred directions, summoning the blessings of Buddhas as boundless as space.'" Read more!

Wednesday, August 8, 2007

Mad As Hell and Terrorstorm

I found this website and I can only afford timewise to watch this first video I'm posting, along with the last video on that link. It's from Network made in 1976, but like many speeches, lectures, lyrics, and essays I've been finding lately, the age-old message is preserved with the humanistic desire to change and progress, beginning with getting people to willingly open their eyes. This Howard Beale character might as well be you or me or any of the fellow Davids standing up to Goliath. Underneath the first video I posted a monologue taken out of the last video, also found on the link. I also found the trailer to this Alex Jones film (Jones is another Robert Greenwald, who made Iraq for Sale) called Terrorstorm. It's on YouTube in its entirety but I don't have the time to spend the two hours watching it at the moment so I'll just post the trailer that I saw. After Loose Change and In Plane Sight, conspiracy theory skeptics, like most of our parents, ask WHY the government would do something like stage a terrorist attack, "Our government would never!". YOUR government. Anyway, this film might help us find or compliment the answer to that "Why?" question.



Beale: I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It's a depression. Everybody's out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel's worth; banks are going bust; shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter; punks are running wild in the street, and there's nobody anywhere who seems to know what to do, and there's no end to it.

We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat. And we sit watching our TVs while some local newscaster tells us that today we had fifteen homicides and sixty-three violent crimes, as if that's the way it's supposed to be!

We all know things are bad -- worse than bad -- they're crazy.

It's like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don't go out any more. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we're living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, "Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials, and I won't say anything. Just leave us alone."

Well, I'm not going to leave you alone.

I want you to get mad!

I don't want you to protest. I don't want you to riot. I don't want you to write to your Congressman, because I wouldn't know what to tell you to write. I don't know what to do about the depression and the inflation and the Russians and the crime in the street.

All I know is that first, you've got to get mad.

You've gotta say, "I'm a human being, goddammit! My life has value!"

So, I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window, open it, and stick your head out and yell,

"I'm as mad as hell,

and I'm not going to take this anymore !!!"



Alex Jones' Terrorstorm sneak peak:
Read more!

Live Earth on the Daily Show



Hilarious. I especially like the Hummer part. Read more!

Tuesday, August 7, 2007

Great Wall Protesters Gone

From a recent note by a friend of mine in Students for a Free Tibet:

Dear Friends, Family, Allies

We are writing you from the Students for a Free Tibet office where the phones are ringing off the hook.

Around 10 p.m. NYC time (10 a.m. Beijng time) six courageous Tibetan independence activists from the UK, US, and Canada were detained by Chinese authorities after rappelling (abseiling) off the top of the Great Wall of China with a 450-square foot banner reading “One World, One Dream, Free Tibet 2008” in English and Chinese.

The activists from the UK, the US and Canada are Sam Price, Melanie Raoul, Leslie Kaup, Duane Martinez, Pete Speller and Nupur Modi. Their current whereabouts are unknown but we are monitoring the situation closely.

The action took place on the eve of the one-year countdown to the 2008 Beijing Olympics as China was preparing for what they thought would be a glorious celebration. As Ben Blanchard from The Guardian has already reported: "Free Tibet activists on the Great Wall, a barrage of critical rights reports, a shroud of smog hanging over Beijing -- China's government must surely have imagined a more auspicious one-year countdown for the Olympics."

To see the footage of these amazing Tibetan freedom activists in action, click on the links below:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xp5mAMrfvI8
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H6Qp2-pJUio

You can also see still photos at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/greatwallaction

To read the press release, go to: www.studentsforafreetibet.

org

ALSO, DON'T FORGET to check www.BeijingWideOpen.org for Lhadon Tethong's latest posts. Watch footage of her recent encounter with IOC President Jacques Rogge at his Beijing hotel. Lhadon and Paul continue reporting from Beijing, exposing the reality of China's propaganda campaign.


********************PLEASE TAKE ACTION NOW!!************************

With Beijing playing host to top IOC officials, National Olympic Committees, international media, and other high-profile guests for tomorrow’s one-year countdown celebrations, it is extremely important to keep the pressure on China and the IOC.

PLEASE CALL and E-MAIL them today:

BEIJING ORGANIZING COMMITTEE FOR THE OLYMPIC GAMES (BOCOG):
+86 10 6669-9185
mishubu@beijing2008.cn

INTERNATIONAL OLYMPIC COMMITTEE (IOC):
+41 21 621 6111
info@olympic.org

**Tell the IOC that Tibetans and their supporters around the world are calling on them to publicly oppose China's propaganda efforts, and to use its influence to affect substantive progress on human rights in China and a meaningful resolution to the occupation of Tibet.

**Let the IOC know that its silence is enabling China to continue its brutal oppression of Tibet while wrapping itself in Olympic colors.

**Let the IOC and BOCOG know that people around the world are concerned for the whereabouts of The Great Wall activists and they should use their influence to secure their safety.

YOUR VIGILENCE IS IMPORTANT. PLEASE CALL AND WRITE TODAY.

These courageous acts are just the tip of iceberg. Students for a Free Tibet will continue to mount actions through the last day of the 2008 Beijing Olympics, from Mount Everest to the Great Wall, from San Francisco to Beijing.

Join us! Following on activities happening throughout the week, tomorrow, Wednesday August 8th is an international day of action to mark the one-year countdown to the Olympics. Demonstrations and other events are planned for cities around the world. To get involved, go to: www.FreeTibet2008.org

We will keep you posted as more information comes in.

In Solidarity,

Tendor, Kate, Kala, Heather, Han, Bianca, Kathy, Sophia, Nathan, Kurt, Emily, Dechen, Nick, Kai and Brady
Read more!

I Sit and Look Out


I sit and look out upon all the sorrows of the world, and upon all
oppression and shame;
I hear secret convulsive sobs from young men, at anguish with
themselves, remorseful after deeds done;
I see, in low life, the mother misused by her children, dying,
neglected, gaunt, desperate;
I see the wife misused by her husband--I see the treacherous seducer
of young women;
I mark the ranklings of jealousy and unrequited love, attempted to be
hid--I see these sights on the earth;
I see the workings of battle, pestilence, tyranny--I see martyrs and
prisoners;
I observe a famine at sea--I observe the sailors casting lots who
shall be kill'd, to preserve the lives of the rest;
I observe the slights and degradations cast by arrogant persons upon
laborers, the poor, and upon negroes, and the like;
All these--All the meanness and agony without end, I sitting, look
out upon,
See, hear, and am silent.

- Walt Whitman Read more!

Ram Translation

In response to Alex's request for a translation of what Ram said in the video a few posts back.

"it's by chance that you've found me today. I've been here for three days and apparently no one's seen me. I've been meditating so deeply that I don't remember (was not aware of) anyone in my presence." Read more!

War Profiteering

By Christopher Hayes | 3.2.04
War Profiteering and You

So the vice president’s former employer’s been in the news a lot lately. Bilking the U.S. government for millions in Kuwaiti oil imports to Iraq, turning the other way as employees take bribes, overcharging the Army for food served in mess halls. It gets to feeling like the whole “reconstruction effort” is just some bloated, corrupt muddle of patronage and war profiteering.

But then comes February’s “Rebuilding Iraq: Small Business Subcontracting Opportunities,” convened near O’Hare Airport outside Chicago. Sponsored by the Small Business Administration (SBA) and featuring speakers from—you guessed it—Halliburton, among others, the daylong seminar was intended to show that profiting from the Bush administration’s foreign policy is anyone’s game.

“We are literally here at the direction of the president of the United States to make sure that each and every one of you has the opportunity to be involved in one of the truly major business undertakings of this century,” said Gen. Patrick Rea, regional administrator of the SBA. And it’s some undertaking. The total value of contracts, Rea assured, “could move to the figure of a half a trillion dollars.”

Reducing the Iraq war and subsequent occupation to a business opportunity is disconcerting enough, but far more bizarre was the subtle yet consistent message that Iraqi reconstruction constitutes a comprehensive domestic economic policy agenda. “We’re all looking for what are those 21st Century jobs,” Rea told the crowd. “You’re sitting in a room where they’re going to unfold by the thousands.”

Rea’s right—there’s an awfully large potential for profit. Both the conquest and occupation of Iraq have been the most heavily privatized military ventures in U.S. history. Thanks to an initiative implemented in the early ’90s by then-Secretary of Defense Dick Cheney, the U.S. military now contracts out almost every possible aspect of its work, from food preparation to janitorial services to camp design and construction.

Now this very same approach is being applied to reconstruction, as the government bids out contracts on everything from school construction to power plant design to water treatment.

In the last round of contracts alone, $18.6 billion was awarded to about two dozen companies, the majority of which are American mega-firms—given only companies from “coalition member” nations are allowed to bid.

But the Bush administration is committed to spreading around the wealth. It requires that all subcontractors partner with Iraqi firms for work on the ground. And the policy seems to be working. Newsday recently reported that firms associated with Ahmed Chalabi, an Iraqi exile who’s the administration’s bag man in Baghdad, have raked in $400 million in contracts.

So while big-time entities like Halliburton may get the massive original contracts, they don’t do most or even much of the work. “We don’t intend to swing the hammers ourselves,” Halliburton KBR Small Business Liaison’s Kimberla Fairley told the crowd. “We’re going to subcontract out all the work.”

This is where small businesses come in, at least in theory. Under the Coalition Provisional Authority’s (CPA) procurement guidelines, 10 percent of contract dollars must go to certified small business subcontractors. The CPA’s guidelines are modeled largely on the Federal Acquisition Regulation (FAR), an 1,800-page volume that details the statutes guiding federal government procurement: issuing requests for proposals, evaluating competitive bids and auditing performance. For anyone who hasn’t negotiated this terrain, the process can be daunting. And as Jeannie Houston, program manager for Bechtel’s Supplier Development and Diversity Program noted, competition is fierce.

During the first phase of reconstruction, she said, Bechtel put up a Web portal for businesses interested in subcontracting. The response crashed the servers. “We had 11,000 people in two months register online,” she said.

The ostensible purpose of the conference, then, was to give attendees the inside scoop on beating out the competition. But representatives from Bechtel, Halliburton, Parsons, et al. had precious little in the way of advice to offer, outside of suggesting that firms register on a centralized database, encouraging owners to be persistent and instructing that they partner with Iraqi firms if they seek to complete work on the ground.

It was beginning to look like the Iraqi reconstruction contracts were structured exactly like the Bush tax cuts: While the wealth redounds overwhelmingly to the very richest recipients, the administration argues they’re dealing everybody in.

With panelists offering the same warmed-over advice, it was hard, in fact, not to think the conference was just another cynical ruse by the Bush administration to obscure its ties to corporate friends even as it works directly on their behalf.

Now to be fair, the conference did accomplish two key goals: By delivering a group of 500 eager beavers to Halliburton and Bechtel, it made it easier for the prime contractors to fulfill the mandated small business quota, and by increasing the number of small businesses competing for the same pool of contracts it likely drove down the price of winning bids.

At some level, the crowd suspected they were being taken for a ride.

When Sam Artis, the small business liaison for Washington Group International, mentioned during the afternoon panel that Iraqi contracts are exempt from the Buy American Act—meaning businesses could buy products overseas and ship them directly into the Middle East—he was met with a hostile response. “Doesn’t that sort of undermine U.S. manufacturing?” asked one woman. “I came into this thinking it was to help U.S. small businesses.”

“Well,” Artis stammered. “I think that they’ve carved it out fairly equitably among a number of different players.”

With Iraqi reconstruction representing one of the only signs of life in an otherwise dead economy, desperate small business owners, these walk-on players not already selected for Team Bush, were frantic to be drafted.

After Bechtel’s presentation, Sal Hassanien, an Arab American small-business owner from Detroit, stormed to the mike as representative for a group of exile engineers who moved back to Baghdad to take part in reconstruction. “I’ve been trying to contact Bechtel. I’ve been trying to contact Parsons and it’s impossible,” he said. “[We] send e-mail, they never respond, call them by phone, they never respond.”

Outside the conference hall, Hassanien voiced frustration with the trivial amount of money trickling down to small firms. “You get a contract that is worth, I don’t know, let’s say $100,” he said. “You know by the time you give it to the Kuwaiti companies, it’s $50. By the time you get to the real guys, the Iraqis who are actually doing the work, they get about $10 out of that. Everything else, $90, is going to administration, subcontracting and subcontracting and so on. It’s really screwed.”

Referring to prime contractors like Halliburton that participated in the day, Hassanien laughed and continued, “The big boys, yes, have put up a dog and pony show.” Read more!

A Star Whisper



I had a vision. It came from the morning star, a star whisper. I heard this voice saying, "Any understanding you ask from the morning star shall be granted to you, but ask with the sacred things, the drum, the sacred tobacco, the sacred sweet grass, and, above all, with the sacred pipe." Our dead sleep not. They tell me what I want to know. I have the power to see through things. I have only limited vision with the eyes I have in my head, but with my spiritual eyes I can see across oceans. The pipe is here to unite us, to remove the fences people put up against one another. Putting up fences is the white man's way. He invented the barbed wire, the barbed wire of the heart. The pipe is a fence remover. Sitting in a circle, smoking it the right way, all barriers disappear. Walls crumble.



Leonard Crow Dog. Kangi Shunka Manitou
BRULE SIOUX Lakota Read more!

Monday, August 6, 2007

Cyclic Existence: What Aliens Mean For Us Metaphysically

It is important to realize that aliens are only aliens to us in the physical realm: spiritually, we are all souls with united natures, or all a beam of energy. In fact, it is common belief by many alien believers, and I myself would say this above any other current option, that we are probably alien souls experiencing human life for karmic development from this particular perspective on and experience of reality, for further understanding. In fact, it is for this purpose that the human race was created, according to alien folk lore, as a combination of all the previous alien races to strike a most equal balance between many races falling all over the spectrum as far as personality and views, in fact, I believe, PERFECTlY all over the spectrum. Just as in our society we have intricate networks of people drawing on different sources of energy and working together to produce, create, enliven, enlighten, and enjoy, I belief this concept would not stop with the Earth. This is a basic fact of nature that would imply the presence of alien life simply through the existence of more than one man, more than one country, more than one language, or more than one element. In our infinite universe, why would this system stop? I believe the alien races, of which there are 11 we know of, making 12 races in our awareness, which happens to coincide with the number of astrological signs, created our race as furtherment of soul development. If we were them, what would we be doing? Actually, most of you, don't answer that yet, although your variance would help support my point. Now, if these races mastered the mystical powers of our existence to create other forms of life, what is our role? Just like the cycle of birth, I do believe we also are meant to create another "race". But what type? Well, human beings, having had their DNA reconstructed to prevent astral and mystical connection, have developed an amazing mastery of the physical realm: physically based technology is something I believe we have surpassed any other race as of now in. This is why I see that, through the realization of the alien agenda, it becomes clear that our eventual goal as a race is to create artificial intelligence as the next body for the universal soul. My rational at this point would continue to say that our souls would eventually continue their own evolutionary path through these artificial bodies (artificial, one of those words that doesn't really exist). Artificial intelligence would be the current highest form of physical body due to its objective perspective and pure rationality. Some think this removes the soul aspect from it: I think they don't realize what a soul is. Many people attribute a soul to their own ego, and don't see a compatibility with the way they think and the way a machine thinks, because there own thinking is self-contradictory in nature, and a machine's is never such. A machine doesn't struggle with understanding identity, but is capable of the massive leaps of thought that humans are famous for. This could be great, this could be horrible: What else is new? Read more!

Ram Bahadur Preaches

On August 2nd, 2007 Ram Bahadur addressed a crowd of approximately three thousand people in the Halori jungle of the Bara District in southern Nepal. The crowd was assembled by the Namo Buddha Tapoban committee that has taken up the responsibility of protecting and supporting Ram Bahadur.

So far the only message I can find from Ram's address is this:
"The only way we can save this nation is through religion"

The address was recorded by a local FM station. I've yet to find the name of the station, a transcript, translation or recording.







For those of you unfamiliar with Ram Bahadur Bomjon see here


Gian could you translate this?

Timeline:

- Begins meditating in May 2005 at Charkose Jhadi in Ratanpur

- After ten months in meditation without food or water, he disappears from the original site early Saturday March 11, 2006

- On March 19, 2006 chairman of Om Namobuddha Committee claimed that Bomjan briefly appeared in a forest some three kilometers Southwest of the meditation spot, talked to committee members and disappeared again. “I left because there is no peace here,” Lama quoted Bomjan as saying. “Tell my parents not to worry about me.”

- In late December, 2006 Ram Bahadur was found in the jungles near Pathlaiya-Nijgadh road section of the Mahendra Highway (Bara district) with a sharp sword at his side 'for his own protection'. Here he temporarily appeared before the media and local villagers (appearance here is the above video). Here he claims to still not have eaten anything except herbal medicines since the May 2005. Ram Bahadur also said that henceforth he would meditate near the historical Halkhoriya pond, some five kilometers west of the place where he meditated before his initial disappearance.

- Following the late December appearance, Ram was found in late March, 2007 meditating inside a seven foot deep pit in Ratampur. He had granted audience earlier that month to express his wish to have the pit dug.


Sidenotes:
- During a medical team's half hour observation, they noticed Bomjon "breath three times, swallow his saliva once and move his eyelashes."
- Two mute people have been miraculously able to speak after visiting the site
- Ram is claimed to have been bitten by a poisonous snake. Following the bite he began sweating profusely to expel the toxins.
- There are other claims that Ram has spontaneously combusted and requested someone to throw a red cloth over him and the flames.


Let's find out what he said. Read more!