The Living Room

Not here

Posted on September 26, 2011 by Michaela

By Amy Goodman

If 2,000 Tea Party activists descended on Wall Street, you would probably have an equal number of reporters there covering them. Yet 2,000 people did occupy Wall Street last Saturday. They weren’t carrying the banner of the Tea Party, the Gadsden flag with its coiled snake and the threat “Don’t Tread on Me”. Yet their message was clear: “We are the 99% that will no longer tolerate the greed and corruption of the 1%.” They were there, mostly young, protesting the virtually unregulated speculation of Wall Street that caused the global financial meltdown.

One of New York’s better-known billionaires, Mayor Michael Bloomberg, commented on the protests: “You have a lot of kids graduating college, can’t find jobs. That’s what happened in Cairo. That’s what happened in Madrid. You don’t want those kinds of riots here.”

Riots? Is that really what the Arab Spring and the European protests are about?

Perhaps to the chagrin of Mayor Bloomberg, that is exactly what inspired many who occupied Wall Street. In its most recent communique, the Wall Street protest umbrella group said:

“On Saturday we held a general assembly, two thousand strong. … By 8pm on Monday we still held the plaza, despite constant police presence. … We are building the world that we want to see, based on human need and sustainability, not corporate greed.”

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The remains

Posted on September 25, 2011 by Michaela

The beauty of death
By Khalil Gibran

Part 3 – The remains

Unwrap me from this white linen shroud and clothe me
With leaves of jasmine and lilies;
Take my body from the ivory casket and let it rest
Upon pillows of orange blossoms.
Lament me not, but sing songs of youth and joy;
Shed not tears upon me, but sing of harvest and the winepress;
Utter no sigh of agony, but draw upon my face with your
Finger the symbol of Love and Joy.
Disturb not the air’s tranquility with chanting and requiems,
But let your hearts sing with me the song of Eternal Life;
Mourn me not with apparel of black,
But dress in color and rejoice with me;
Talk not of my departure with sighs in your hearts; close
Your eyes and you will see me with you forevermore.

Place me upon clusters of leaves and
Carry my upon your friendly shoulders and
Walk slowly to the deserted forest.
Take me not to the crowded burying ground lest my slumber
Be disrupted by the rattling of bones and skulls.
Carry me to the cypress woods and dig my grave where violets
And poppies grow not in the other’s shadow;
Let my grave be deep so that the flood will not
Carry my bones to the open valley;
Let my grace be wide, so that the twilight shadows
Will come and sit by me.

Take from me all earthly raiment and place me deep in my
Mother Earth; and place me with care upon my mother’s breast.
Cover me with soft earth, and let each handful be mixed
With seeds of jasmine, lilies and myrtle; and when they
Grow above me, and thrive on my body’s element they will
Breathe the fragrance of my heart into space;
And reveal even to the sun the secret of my peace;
And sail with the breeze and comfort the wayfarer.

Leave me then, friends – leave me and depart on mute feet,
As the silence walks in the deserted valley;
Leave me to God and disperse yourselves slowly, as the almond
And apple blossoms disperse under the vibration of Nisan’s breeze.
Go back to the joy of your dwellings and you will find there
That which Death cannot remove from you and me.
Leave with place, for what you see here is far away in meaning
From the earthly world. Leave me.

Posted in Original Poetry | 1 Comment

Important, but impotent

Posted on September 25, 2011 by Michaela

By Danny Schechter

One of the most astute critics of the United Nations was a man who worked there for years and worshipped its ambitions. His name was Conor Cruise O’Brien, an Irish diplomat and extraordinary writer who savaged the institution he once adored.

“The main thing that endears the United Nations to member governments, and so enables it to survive, is its proven capacity to fail, and to be seen to fail,” he wrote. “You can safely appeal to the United Nations in the comfortable certainty that it will let you down.”

Despite this track record, assured by the duplicity of governments who pay lip service to UN ideals and then use the institution to carry out policies and projects they would prefer not to initiate unilaterally.

Members are called “the international community” but there is little to the phrase except for cordiality among diplomats who rapidly become careerists – along with a bevy of international civil servants who labour in the catacombs of the bureaucracy, following Byzantine rules and protocols that are rarely evaluated for real world effectiveness.

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Posted in The world we live in Now | Tagged United Nations, United Nations General Assembly | 1 Comment

Wanted: Real leaders

Posted on September 25, 2011 by Michaela

By Thomas Friedman

TO Barack Obama, John Boehner, Harry Reid, Mitch McConnell, Nancy Pelosi and Eric Cantor, I just have two words of advice: Herbert Hoover.

I know you’re all familiar with that name. Hoover lives in infamy in U.S. history for having been on duty when the Great Depression happened. You’re all courting a similar fate. Your collective behavior is setting all of you up to be known as our generation’s Herbert Hoovers — the leaders who were on duty when we entered our second great economic meltdown.

But unlike Hoover, who was just practicing the conventional economic wisdom of his day when we fell into the Depression, you have no excuses. We know what to do — a Grand Bargain: short-term stimulus to ease us through this deleveraging process, debt restructuring in the housing market and long-term budget-cutting to put our fiscal house in order. None of this is easy and the economy will not be fixed overnight; it will take years. But there is every chance it will get healed if our two parties construct the Grand Bargain we need.

But the more I read the papers the more I’m convinced that “we the people” are having an economic crisis and “you the politicians” are having an election — and there is frighteningly little overlap between the two.

What’s worse — both parties seem to have concluded lately that no compromise is possible and therefore their differences will just have to be settled by the 2012 election. No problem! I’m sure our markets will be patient until the next president is in place in early 2013! And I am sure the European debt crisis will be happy to take the next year off. In fact, that must be why Republicans held another presidential debate on Thursday night and the European economic crisis and how it might affect us — and what we must do to insulate ourselves — merited no discussion.

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Tagged Barack Obama, Economy, Election, Leadership, Republican | 2 Comments

Faster than light

Posted on September 24, 2011 by Michaela

…we know nothing

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iProtest

Posted on September 24, 2011 by Michaela

Activist Debby Chan takes on one of the world’s favourite brands in her fight for workers’ rights.

Posted in Breaking the mould, The world we live in Now | Tagged Activism, brand, worker's rights | Leave a comment

Life, health and stress

Posted on September 23, 2011 by Michaela

Mark Newkirk

Posted in Teacher & Teachings | Tagged Consciousness, disease, Sress | 2 Comments

Too big to be true ?

Posted on September 23, 2011 by Michaela

By Dennis Overby

Roll over, Einstein ?

The physics world is abuzz with news that a group of European physicists plans to announce Friday that it has clocked a burst of subatomic particles known as neutrinos breaking the cosmic speed limit — the speed of light — that was set by Albert Einstein in 1905.

If true, it is a result that would change the world. But that “if” is enormous.

Even before the European physicists had presented their results — in a paper that appeared on the physics Web site arXiv.org on Thursday night and in a seminar at CERN, the European Center for Nuclear Research, on Friday — a chorus of physicists had risen up on blogs and elsewhere arguing that it was way too soon to give up on Einstein and that there was probably some experimental error. Incredible claims require incredible evidence.

“These guys have done their level best, but before throwing Einstein on the bonfire, you would like to see an independent experiment,” said John Ellis, a CERN theorist who has published work on the speeds of the ghostly particles known as neutrinos.

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Posted in Breaking the mould, The world we live in Now | Tagged Albert Einstein, Cern, Neutrino, Speed of light | 1 Comment

The ascending

Posted on September 23, 2011 by Michaela

The Beauty of Death
By Khalil Gibran

Part 2-The Ascending

I have passed a mountain peak and my soul is soaring in the
Firmament of complete and unbound freedom;
I am far, far away, my companions, and the clouds are
Hiding the hills from my eyes.
The valleys are becoming flooded with an ocean of silence, and the
Hands of oblivion are engulfing the roads and the houses;
The prairies and fields are disappearing behind a white specter
That looks like the spring cloud, yellow as the candlelight
And red as the twilight.

The songs of the waves and the hymns of the streams
Are scattered, and the voices of the throngs reduced to silence;
And I can hear naught but the music of Eternity
In exact harmony with the spirit’s desires.
I am cloaked in full whiteness;
I am in comfort; I am in peace.