We Are the Most Lied-To, Gullible Populace on the Planet

Wowsers. This book of Noam Chomsky’s, Failed States, is just chock full of facts that show up our media and our government as a pack of liars.

The list of atrocities committed by our own government (like the 1985 bombing in Beirut, Lebanon, which was actually committed by the CIA, a known fact at this point, though the media never bothered to correct the perception they created by passing along the government’s story that it was a terrorist) just boggles the mind. Presidents from both parties over the years have protected the oil companies’ interests in the Middle East with crime after crime against civilian populations over there. Some of them we’ve never heard a word about, some we’ve heard about but with a twisted slant to blame it all on terrorism. Wherever, in the Middle East, South America, or Asia, real democracy has flowered, we’ve stamped it out in favor of fascist regimes (like that of Saddam Hussein, who was put in power by JFK in the 60s) willing to cooperate with our interests.

If you want to know the facts about what’s really going on in the middle east, get this book. Like they’re stamping on our mail these days, those words of one of my cousins however many times removed and however imperfect himself, John Adams, “Let us dare to read, think, speak and write.” We need to wake up as a country and deal with the fact that we are living under a long-term fascist regime that started long before any of us were born, right back to the founding of our country, which purports to value freedom but which only gives it lip service, and which is actually set up to benefit the few, the super-rich, who head these multi-national corporations. It started with cotton. Now it’s oil.

The primary obstacle to progress for us as a species is America and our corrupt government. This is not a partisan issue, either. The Democrats are just as complicit, though BushCo, with its clumsy handling and constant underestimation of our intelligence, has certainly taken it to new heights, or should I say lows?

Please, let’s stop acting like mushrooms, kept in the dark and fed a load of BS. Let’s seek the truth, and it doesn’t have anything to do with Illuminati or reptilian hybrids. It’s got to do with money and power.

Divided We Fail

Here’s a new link for the blogroll. It’s called “Divided We Fail,” and it’s part of AARP. They’re obviously in it to try to fix social security, but they’re making health-care a big issue, too.

What I love is their symbol: it’s a donkey-elephant hybrid. It’s a powerful image that says it all.

That’s why I changed my subtitle up there: for a long time it was, “It’s Time the World Got It’s Head Out of It’s Ass.” But we really do need to come together, America. My international readers, forgive me, but we are in so much trouble over here that I think it’s important to focus on our problems at home. After all, our dysfunctions affect the entire world. If we can fix our problems, there’s a good chance things will get better for everyone.

Bayer Ranks High in the List of Evil Corporations

If you’re concerned about a shadowy group of Europeans pulling our political strings and ruining good people’s lives (what some like to call the Illuminati, though anyone with sense has to see that these folk are not enlightened in the least), check out the Wikipedia article on Bayer AG.

Here are some interesting snippets:

As part of the reparations after World War I, Bayer had its assets, including rights to its name and trademarks, confiscated in the United States, Canada, and several other countries. In the United States and Canada, Bayer’s assets and trademarks were acquired by Sterling Drug, a predecessor of Sterling Winthrop.

Bayer became part of IG Farben, a conglomerate of German chemical industries which formed the financial core of the Nazi regime. IG Farben owned 42.5% of the company that manufactured Zyklon B, a chemical used in the gas chambers of Auschwitz. When the Allies split IG Farben after World War II for involvement in several Nazi war crimes, Bayer reappeared as an individual business. Bayer executive Fritzter Meer, sentenced to seven years in prison by the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal, was made head of the supervisory board of Bayer in 1956, after his release.

Isn’t that great? I’m thinking of writing a short story based on the transactions…imagine, businessmen making a deal over boxes of poison gas. “Thanks for doing your part for the Final Solution, Fritz. And here’s a bag of money for it, to boot.”

Bayer AG is involved in an ongoing controversy with French and Nova Scotian beekeepers over claimed pesticide kills of honeybees from its seed treatment insecticide imidacloprid. France has since issued a provisional ban on the use of Imidacloprid for corn seed treatment pending further action. A consortium of U.S. beekeepers has also filed a civil suit against Bayer CropScience for alleged losses.

I’m wondering if this could explain the problems bee keepers in America have been having with the as-yet unexplained hive collapse syndrome which is threatening our food supply.

Austrian journalist Klaus Werner alleged in his Black Book on Brand Companies, that the Bayer subsidiary H.C. Starck financed the civil war in the Democratic Republic of Congo by trading illegally with the mineral coltan. The allegations were also confirmed by a U.N. panel of experts. Bayer alleged that since 2001 it didn’t trade any more with congolese coltan, but never proved where their resources came from.

How much these people care about human lives: zero. Which would explain the following:

In October 2001, Bayer was taken to court after 24 children in the remote Andean village of Tauccamarca were killed and 18 more severely poisoned when they drank a powdered milk substitute that had been contaminated with methyl parathion.

The white powder that resembles powdered milk and has no strong chemical odour was packaged in small plastic bags that provide no protection to users and give no indication of the danger of the product within. The bags were labelled in Spanish only, and carried drawings of healthy carrots and potatoes but no pictograms indicating danger or toxicity.

Let’s worry about reality, folks, not science-fiction human-reptilian hybrids. There are evil homo sapiens on this planet. No extraterrestrial DNA needed.

F. David Peat and the Pari Center: Creating the New Paradigm

I’m adding this link to my blogroll, under Building a Better World. This physicist is exploring the basis for our conception of the world, and he’s doing so using both physics and linguistics, which I think is fascinating. He’s really interested in creating a new paradigm, a new understanding, that will help us move forward. I’m all for that!

Majutsu found this guy while investigating some interesting ideas for an essay he’s thinking of writing. Mr. Peat and the Center surfaced while he was looking into the potential consciousness of agents we might not normally consider capable of such a process. What’s very cool is that what Maj is discovering is that science seems to be confirming what my own intuition has been telling me experientially: that Mind is immanent.

Song of Anat

Please abandon fear. Realize that everyone is divine. We all live in a world spun of language, imagery, and sheer vibration emanating from us that we embed in every vase, wall, plant or animal around us. These beings, the company we keep in our heads and in the world we choose to live in, are fabricated out of the music of our hearts. The song we sing from the center of our skulls, deep in the pituitary, pumping out serotonin, neuroepinephrine, dopamine like a giant umbrella of psychedelic eminence, radiating pastel skies, rage, sadness and joy in undulating protrusions. Not only does this song ring in our ears as sound, but sings in our eyes as light, and our nose as smell. Hormonal waves ripple emotion and physical throbbing through our bodies in cycles of minutes, hours and years. We do yoga all day, how we hold our spine, whether we look down in command, surveying our creation in confidence, or look up in awe, mothered by the great divine. Small to large we are a continuous pole of vibration living in a world of vibrating beings, some made by us, some made by others. We are also made by others, and our children spiritual and physical make others. We are one and we are many, carving each other with our song. Remember we are free to move. We are free to be crazy. We are free to smash myths. We are free to give sex to all beings, as many or as few as we desire, to sing of love as we please. We are also free to break morals, to lie, to cheat, to take without permission from those screaming in pain. Or instead, we are free to plant love, to raise all up to be the radiant stars of divinity they are but have forgotten. The cultural symbols of the past drift through us like seaweed along with our personal song waving through the waters of life we shroud ourselves in. Despite your habits and your wrappings, your bonds, remember your freedom. Sex is rhythm, work is rhythm, breathing is rhythm, let your song and your love be pure. Rise queen. Rise king. Take to your throne as lord of the universe. You are god. Sing into being a world of beauty. Your lover is waiting for you to remember who you are. Break through that wall, overcome that hurdle, abandon that fear, cut loose those chains. Remember who you are. You are god. Sing loudly. Sing strong. Sing peace. Sing so no one lies in any gutter, no one falls in any fear, no one trembles afraid, unloved. To let a soul go down unloved is the only sin I know, because you failed as the lord to not create beauty and peace. To let such wrong blacken your world is to throw down your crown and roll in the despair of amnesia. A divine being powerless to sing love deep into the four directions? I love you and I miss you so much, my great one. Arise and take your crown. Dispense your song and dance your dance. Beat the drum of your world loudly, for you are god.

Song of Solomon is the only part of the Bible that should be read

Kabbalah notes:

The schechinah is a female spirit , who as a symbol generated by the unconscious, ties together the various aspects or modalities of the mind. The kabbalah is the itemization of the mind’s modalities, so as to gain both self-knowledge and control of the self. Many of the letters or paths of the kabbalah take the form of abstractions of sexual relations with the schechinah or abstractions of her sexual anatomy. Whether a man or woman is the practitioner, the inner self, or the schechinah, is this divine female, and one’s divinity is attained by imitating her divine intercourse with the lord of the universe. She is in constant loving embrace with the world. As she says, “His left hand is under my head, and his right hand embraces me.” The earth, symbolized by a bull, without mind, is dead. This is why when you first meet the schechinah she is alone and yearning, a widowed goddess, for the earth cannot be seen as a lord without her love. “By night on my bed I sought him whom my soul loves: I sought him, but I found him not.” But it is the love and activity of the schechinah for her lover that returns him to life, joins he and she together in the joyous dance that is the mind at play and in love with the earth.

Below is the elucidation of some paths or energies in my meditations:

Daleth- Door. Understanding. Entry into the temple where one is taught by the schechinah.
Mem - Water. Breast milk. Pain and loss. Tears. Her crying face with her absent lover, keening. That which ties us to life, also the joy and nourishment of existence, food, plants and animals for food, clothing, medicine, and spirituality.
Peh - Mouth. Fellatio. Aggressiveness, drive. Taking over, domination. Energy to do tasks.
Shin - Tooth. The fangs of criticism and self-abrogation. Trial. The harsh aspects of life and nature.

It is clear that the Bible does contain a mystical system. The Song of Solomon is probably the clearest and most accessible pathway to understand the coherent and effective mystical tradition that is behind the poetry of the Bible. The danger of misapplying the remainder of the Bible into aberrant and irrational attitudes that are destructive to self and others is so high, that I believe nothing should be read except the Song of Solomon until that poem is understood. If you read the Song of Solomon and it doesn’t make perfect sense to you, then you should put the Bible away and not read another word of it for a long time. Go meditate, learn, study, love, live. Read the poem only when you are drawn to it because you have already seen it manifested in your own heart. Otherwise, don’t touch that potentially poisonous book of difficult poems. The Song of Solomon is a gate keeper for the rest of the kabbalah. If this path, which is not generic or advantageous to all, does not work for you, there is still the beauty of life, poems to chant, songs to sing and mountains to climb, but to misapply deep unconscious symbols to reality, like fundamentalists apply bad theology to worse politics, is as dumb as spending today the money you dreamed you had last night. It won’t work, and it disrespects the schechinah to such an extent that the mental damage may be hard if not impossible to undue.

Majutsu sez…

“Americans want science confined to a money-making box, not wandering in church asking questions.” We had a big discussion about labels today, whether I ought to call myself an atheist or a secular humanist, or one of my own making, which I’ve been using and which my former mentor says he likes: agnostic secularist.

And it’s not that I’m not sure whether or not there’s a personal deity. I know that’s not so. Or at least I’m confident enough to consider people like Richard Dawkins to be perfectly reasonable, if somewhat impatient with people who value their heritage more than the need to feel 100% rational. Personally, for example, I think it’s just fine that some Christians and some Jews and even some Muslims have managed to pare away the extraneous BS of superstition and ignorance and cultural overlay to find the core of their faiths, which have enough truth to them (the smallness and insignificance of the individual as compared to the Whole, the importance of kindness and the other virtues, etc.) to be valuable when taken with a grain of salt (and never, ever insist that anyone agree with your take! enough evangelism, already, which ought to be called dominionism, at this point…let’s call a spade a spade). Heck, we even used the Bible recently to illustrate a point to our kids (the parable of the Good Samaritan, which has political connotations lost on most of us…). But I like using “agnostic” to say that I am not certain. That I’m not saying I know what happens when you die, or how the world came to be (I mean, I know life evolved, but I’m talking about what happened in the millisecond preceding the Big Bang), but that I do not know and further I don’t consider it important. What IS important is secularism. That religion and government remain forever separate. Religion is just too personal a choice to be legislated. Period. And the problems we all face together as one species on this beleaguered planet, problems of our own making that require solutions other than war OR prayer.

But back to Maj’s statement about science, it’s so true. These folk love science so long as it’s making them money. They gladly embrace it while it fills their coffers, but badmouth it if it seems to contradict the religious tenets that give them power. Another six weeks or so, and we escape the Bible Belt. I can’t tell you how eager I am.

Lawrence Ferlinghetti is My Kind of Poet

An anarchist. I just listened to his “Greedy Blues” at Rhapsody, from the album *Mob Action Against the State.* He also gives a nice diatribe beforehand, about global capitalism and monoculture. I don’t have time to listen to the rest of the album yet, but I think I’ll have to.

He’s one of those rare poets, like me, who takes his responsibility as an artist seriously.

Living Life En Pointe

The way those ballerinas go up on their toes…they make it look effortless, as if the very word “heavy” were foreign to them, but the truth is it takes strength, a ton of practice, special shoes, and it hurts.

My husband was terminated last Friday from the network (the paycheck part — his medical privileges are intact and he could choose to transition to vendor), on All Souls’ Day, by the senior vice president in charge of finances, officially without cause. 60 days pay. We’d just refinanced over the summer, with crappy terms, so we could buy a third car and let Jess use Maj’s old one. (He was making enough for a big bonus due in two months…hmmm.)

In the meantime, I’ve been working like mad on this butterfly tent exhibit. It opened two weeks ago. Three more days. I was interviewed yesterday about butterfly gardening for a local TV show, and tomorrow I’ve got another with a print press rep. Everyone has loved it. It’s really something to see children walk through something you’ve put together and point up, in wonder, agape. But to also have adults say, breathlessly, “I’ve never seen anything like this,” really makes you feel like you did something nice for the community.

So we’re taking the opportunity to relocate. We could stay, but why would we want to? Welcome to the brain drain, Bible Belt.

Maj already has some good leads. We’re looking way North, places like Missoula, where we can get off the grid, raise our own food (or participate in the community garden), cob our own house, and have friends who’ve done the same thing, all while he can still practice medicine and help people who need it with the specialized knowledge he’s taken so much time and energy to accumulate (and then there’s the money spent, too).

Up in the Rockies, I’d get a large number of hummingbirds we don’t get here, or even on the eastern seaboard or northern New York, where we’re also looking.

Yep, I think I’m going to pull a Jeffers, except I’m not going to go all the way to the ocean. I’ll settle for sky.

The lady I’ve been working with over the past few months on this State Fair thing, the county agent in charge of that half of the building, is a really nice middle-aged twice-divorced lady who’s in the process of seeing her 90-year-old mama out the door. Mama’s a devout Baptist, and Terry and I have been having some really nice conversations, about faith, and all that stuff. In the face of death, everything else just falls away as unimportant.

I’m supposed to be worrying about Thanksgiving dinner right now. I’m not.

Now This is Good All Around

Part of our ongoing encounter with Jessica has involved our realizing the need to take our finances more seriously. So we’re tackling our debt and preparing to invest, when we’re clear of it. At ebay, where I’ve been getting great deals on things for home decor (rather than spending tons at the shops ’round here), like planters and the most adorable rusty Victorian door knocker that still has remnants of its original paint, which is much more colorful and charming than what we see all the time as reproductions and which is going to go on my very weathered wooden door (which is about 100 years old) after I’ve finished cleaning and sanding it and painting it with very yellow oil paint of my own making (thanks to Mother Earth News for the recipes), I followed this link at the bottom of the screen. This is how we’ll do it. I’ve heard about these micro-loans going on. I’m so excited that we can be a part of it.