hmmmmmmmmm?

Ana takes us down the road to inner silence one sound at a time:

Listening for the silence beyond the sound has helped me to be a little more mindful, and to keep my heart open in difficult situations. More important, the silence created by humming has allowed me to dive deeper than I thought I was capable of, and helps manage my emotions in a healthy, congruent way, through some painful storms.

One Two Punch

The US Continues to needlessly provoke Iran and gas goes up accordingly.

You’ve got to love this country, eh? Or they’ll shoot you.

Just so you know, Hillary’s got more testosterone than you.

Those Durn Christians - I

Imagine. If everyone acted the way Jesus told us to:

“The manager comes by, the dishwashers come by, the waiters come by to say hi,” Diaz says. “The kid was like, ‘You know everybody here. Do you own this place?’”

“No, I just eat here a lot,” Diaz says he told the teen. “He says, ‘But you’re even nice to the dishwasher.’”

Diaz replied, “Well, haven’t you been taught you should be nice to everybody?”

“Yea, but I didn’t think people actually behaved that way,” the teen said.

What would be the cost - in Churches and politics and war?

Just a Joke

Take a listen to RadioLab’s new show on the War of the Worlds. They start with the classic radio broadcast of the tale by Orson Welles in 1938 and the panic it caused. Then they go on to all the other times the show was pitched on the radio and caused a panic. They even talk about a 1968 broadcast in Buffalo that caused so much panic the Canadian army was pulled up to the Peace Bridge - and the other two NY-ON bridges - to repel extraterrestrial invaders.

The question, of course, is why we get sucked in by such. And, of course, no one would fall for that now - until they start talking about the Blair Witch Project.

It’s the telling of tales that seems to be our downfall: we love to listen to stories. We get sucked in and pulled into the story so hard that as unbelievable as it is, we live it. They have a White Coated Expert™ talk about the psychology of it, discussing a James Bond movie. But I have many such experiences: my DVD library is filled with discs that I prefer to own exactly because they allow me to live something other than my daily life. I love the TV show Alias because of that, or MASH or Roseanne. I love reading The Lord of the Rings or listening to The Illuminatus Trillogy.

The problem comes not from tales or even tale-induced panic (although they talk about 6 deaths resulting from War of the Worlds). That’s the way we’ve been wired since the Monolith first taught us to use bones as weapons - maybe even longer. The problem comes from our unwillingness to use critical thinking - to accept any tale at face value as true and to act on that acceptance as if we had a verifiable, scientific fact.

Instead of a belief.

And an unfounded one at that.

And, I wonder, how this all ties into things we may want to believe without evidence anyway. I think of the “James Tomb” or the “Holy Thorn” relic or even the myth of the “Holy Cross” and all the other “really historical” things we Christians venerate. Or even the stories of the Bible and how much we want to believe them and therefore they must be true, really.

Religion never comes up in the show, but RadioLab logically points to current newscasts and how they duplicate the experience of it all. But they also hint at 9/11.

I think there’s a lot there for us to chew on.

Israel’s Foreign Minister: Iran?

As we seem to be sliding ever closer to a war on yet another front, our ally in the Middle East seems to be of a split mind:

Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni said a few months ago in a series of closed discussions that in her opinion that Iranian nuclear weapons do not pose an existential threat to Israel, Haaretz magazine reveals in an article on Livni to be published Friday.

Livni also criticized the exaggerated use that Prime Minister Ehud Olmert is making of the issue of the Iranian bomb, claiming that he is attempting to rally the public around him by playing on its most basic fears. Last week, former Mossad chief Ephraim Halevy said similar things about Iran.

While the cynic in me sees an Iran war - Nukular, no less - as the perfect excuse to suspend the few remaining shards of the Constitution (the reason I keep saying “if we have an election”), the hopeful side of me still imagines we’ll find a way out. Mmm. Maybe Livni and Halevy will get a louder voice? On the other hand, Haaretz is “moderate liberal” so I would expect such news from them. As implied in my preceding post, expected news is more suspect.

(Props to DovBear.)

Brain Grains

Go over to FreeRice. A word shows up and you click on the word that means closet to the same thing. This can be confusing for the anal-retentive like myself “spelt” does not mean “wheat” but ok. “Apocryphal” does not mean “false” but, ok. Ge the word right and 10 grains of rice are donated to hungry people. Doesn’t sound like a lot? They gave away 16 Million grains of rice on Saturday. Just to be clear that’s about 320kg of dry rice which (if my math is correct, which it may not be) comes out to about 1,612 cups of rice or about that many meals. Not bad for a day’s word games.

FreeRice. Go play.

How does it work? Here’s from the F.A.Q.:

If you have all this rice to donate, why don’t you just give it to the hungry people right now?

We are not sitting on a pile of rice―you are earning it 10 grains at a time. Here’s how it works. When you play the game, advertisements appear on the bottom of your screen. The money generated by these advertisements is then used to buy the rice. So by playing, you generate the money that pays for the rice donated to hungry people.

Who distributes the donated rice?

The rice is distributed by the United Nations World Food Program (WFP). The World Food Program is the world’s largest food aid agency, working with over 1,000 other organizations in over 75 countries. In addition to providing food, the World Food Program helps hungry people to become self-reliant so that they escape hunger for good. Wherever possible, the World Food Program buys food locally to support local farmers and the local economy. We encourage you to visit the United Nations World Food Program to learn more about their successful approach to ending hunger.

Will the rice I donate make a difference?

The rice you donate makes a huge difference to the person who receives it. To a mother or father watching a loved child die in their arms from hunger, the rice you donate is more precious than anything in the world.

(Props to JewSchool.)

Let us pray.

Via the Radical Anabaptists, we find the Litany of Resistance:

One: Let us resist and confront evil everywhere we find it
All: With the help of God’s grace

One: With the waging of war
All: We will not comply

One: With all preparation and training for war
All: We will not comply

One: With the forces of fear
All: We will not comply

One: With the legalization of murder
All: We will not comply

One: With the legalization of genocide
All: We will not comply

New Peace Cross

Playing with the logo for the Order of the Holy Cross, as well as the “peace cross” idea… here:

Story Update:

Thanks to Serge for finding this one:

Following on my 9 August post, “Kill & Convert or Die“, we have this great news from the LA Times:

Last week, after an investigation spurred by the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, the Pentagon abruptly announced that it would not be delivering “freedom packages” to our soldiers in Iraq, as it had originally intended.

… [snip] …

Apparently the wonks at the Pentagon forgot that Muslims tend to bristle at the word “crusade” and thought that what the Iraq war lacked was a dose of end-times theology

New Propaganda Record?

On 23 July, Our Great and Heroic Leader mentioned “al Qaeda 93 times in the 29-minute speech” (source). That’s once every 18.7 seconds.

Try saying al Qaeda once every 18 seconds the next time you go to an airport… I’ll bet you’ll discover the meaning of “look Ma, no cavities!” (left to search in me, my spouse, my dog or my neighbour’s dog either.)

Now… how scared did Our Great and Heroic Leader try to make us? Or should I say, how hard is he trying to bully us into doing his will?