Hundreds rounded up in Tibet crackdown-3/11 Democrats Cancel All Hearings in Anticipation of Health Care Negotiations-3/11 Senate Health Care Bill Dead on Arrival, Pro-Life House Democrats Say-3/11 Pelosi: We Need to Pass Health Care Bill to Find Out What’s In It-3/10 House Republicans Call For 1-Year Earmark Halt-3/11 Activist judge rules ACORN has a right to your money-3/11 Obama Justice Dept. shut down FBI's ACORN investigation-3/11 Unemployment tops 20% in eight California counties-3/11 Canadian dollar likely to trump US greenback: experts-3/11 U.S. Sales Tax Rates Hit Record High-3/10 Greece hit by strikes, riots over austerity plan-3/11 Mexico's Slim Becomes 'World's Richest' Person-3/11 New Poll Shows Carteresque Trend for Obama-3/11 Patrick Kennedy in bizarre tirade on House floor-3/11 Expert: Reagan Gets the Shaft in Textbooks-3/11 Tom Hanks: America Wants to ‘Annihilate’ Terrorists Because ‘They’re Different’-3/10 Stupid is as stupid says. Editor |
6.9, 6.7, 6.0, 5.4, 4.9, & 5.0 -- Chile-3/11 Strong Earthquake Hits Chile as New President Sworn In-3/11 USA Today Defends Michael Mann on Front Page, Misrepresents ClimateGate-3/11 Report Says California Global Warming Law Will Cause Job Losses-3/10 48 Hawaiian Species Listed As Endangered, Putting 40 Square Miles of Kauai Off-Limits-3/11 Chief exorcist Father Gabriele Amorth says Devil is in the Vatican-3/11 Dude, where you been? He's been there since the dark ages. Editor Calif. boy who called 911 thanks dispatcher-3/11
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The Obama Moratorium: No offshore drilling while he’s in office-3/11 Wash. Examiner, by Barbara Hollingsworth-- The Obama administration’s six-month delay in approving new offshore drilling leases in federal waters will become a new three-year ban, Interior Secretary Ken Salazar quietly told reporters last Friday. Which means that no new oil and gas leases will be approved during President Obama’s term even though two –thirds of the American public supports such activity, according to a December 2009 Rasmussen poll. Sixty percent also believe that gas and oil prices will drop if the government allows offshore drilling, opening up an estimate 14 billion barrels of oil and 55 trillion cubic feet of natural gas On July 14, 2008 President George W. Bush lifted an executive ban on Outer Continental Shelf leasing. On October 1, 2008, in a bipartisan agreement, Congress lifted another longstanding ban on new oil and gas leasing in the OCS. Drilling was supposed to begin this July. But Salazar said he intends to discard the 2010-2015 lease plan developed by the Bush administration in favor of a new plan that won’t even go into effect until 2012. “Secretary Salazar has finally confirmed what had long been feared – that the Obama Administration has no intention of opening up new areas for offshore drilling during his four-years in office,” said Rep. Doc Hastings, the ranking Republican on the House Natural Resources Committee. So for the next three years and probably more, trillions of dollars in domestic energy assets will remain untouched while billions of dollars more are spent on foreign oil. end Amazon Hits Back at Colorado Web Sales Tax -3/10 WSJ, by Geoffrey A. Fowler-- Amazon.com Inc. pulled the plug on its marketing affiliates in Colorado after the state enacted a law that imposes new sales-tax regulations on online retailers. On Monday, Amazon sent an email to members of its associates program, who earn a fee for providing links to the online retailer on their own Web sites. In the email, Amazon informed them it was ending its business with them as of that day. "As a result of the new law," Amazon said, "we have decided to stop advertising through associates based in Colorado." ... Who Decides What’s In Your Kids’ Textbooks?-3/9 Fox, by Shannon Bream | This week in Texas, the State Board of Education (SBOE) will consider curriculum modifications that could impact millions of students across America. That's because what Texas ultimately decides has great influence among textbook publishers. The Lone Star state is one of their biggest customers in the world, so publishers craft their books to meet Texas standards. Those books are then sold nationwide. While the Texas SBOE debates whether to include things like Christmas, Paul Revere and the Liberty Bell - some are calling the textbook showdown the newest frontline of the culture war in the U.S. It's a battle Jay Sekulow, Chief Counsel for the American Center for Law and Justice, is watching closely, "Well, if you grab the minds of the young people you grab the minds of the next generation." Sekulow believes a child's school board meeting is the most important governmental event a parent can plug into. "Parents don't check their rights to raise their children at the door to the schoolhouse," Sekulow cautions. He knows the stakes are high this week in Texas because, "This curriculum, once established, will affect a generation of students - how they think." Others are concerned that conservative, religious interests are attempting to stuff Texas textbooks full of their viewpoint. "There is a whole movement to convince Americans that this was founded as a Christian nation, and that's simply not the case," says Barry Lynn of Americans United for Separation of Church and State. Lynn also worries, as others do, that elected board members - and not educators - are the ones making the final curriculum decisions. "The idea of electing people to make judgments about these topics, which frankly they often know nothing about, is a terrible idea," Lynn says. Gilbert T. Sewall, Director of the American Textbook Council, says elected officials are often impacted by what he calls the "squeakiest wheel" - regardless of their ideology. "I think there's no doubt that identity politics have contributed to the decline of textbook quality over the last 20 years," Sewall laments. He says groups from nutritionists to gender activists have demanded their way into textbooks, but points to the one as the most prominent, "The most visible groups are the Christian right that wants to use American history textbooks to recapture the soul of the nation." ... Don't go wobbly on us now, Ben Bernanke-3/9 Telegraph (UK), By Ambrose Evans-Pritchard-- Barack Obama's home state of Illinois is near the point of fiscal disintegration. "The state is in utter crisis," said Representative Suzie Bassi. "We are next to bankruptcy. We have a $13bn hole in a $28bn budget."-- The state has been paying bills with unfunded vouchers since October. A fifth of buses have stopped. Libraries, owed $400m (£263m), are closing one day a week. Schools are owed $725m. Unable to pay teachers, they are preparing mass lay-offs. "It's a catastrophe", said the Schools Superintedent. In Alexander County, the sheriff's patrol cars have been repossessed; three-quarters of his officers are laid off; the local prison has refused to take county inmates until debts are paid. Florida, Arizona, Michigan, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and New York are all facing crises. California has cut teachers salaries by 5pc, and imposed a 5pc levy on pension fees. The Economic Policy Institute says states face a shortfall of $156bn in fiscal 2010. Most are banned by law from running deficits, so they must retrench. Washington has provided $68bn in federal aid, but that depletes the Obama stimulus package. This is not to pick on America. Belt-tightening is the oppressive fact of 2010-2012 for half the world. Hungary, Ukraine, the Baltics and the Balkans are already under the knife. Latvia's economy may contract by 30pc from peak to trough as it carries out an "internal devaluation", ie wage cuts, to hold its euro peg. The eurozone's fiscal squeeze is well advanced in Ireland. Brussels has told Greece to cut by 10pc of GDP in three years, Spain by 8pc, Portugal by 6pc. Britain must slash soon, or face a gilts strike. The Bank for International Settlements says Britain needs a primary surplus of 5.8pc of GDP for a decade to stabilise debt at pre-crisis levels, given the ageing crunch as well. The figure is 6.4pc for Japan, 4.3pc for the US and France. It warns of "unstable dynamics", posh talk for a debt spiral. "Action is needed now." Indeed, though cutting too fast would tip the West back into slump and kill tax revenues, solving nothing – a risk that austerity priests rarely acknowledge. Pacing is everything. Mervyn King, the Bank of England's Governor, seems strangely alone in facing the implications of this for central banks, and in seeing the absurdity of a recovery strategy where everybody tightens at once and surplus states keep on dumping excess capacity abroad. "I was struck by the mood at the G7, where several of the major economies around the world said quite openly that they were relying on external demand growth to generate growth. That can't be true of everybody," he said. ... Vanessa Williams: Looking a White Gift House in the Mouth-3/10 TownHall, by Ben Shapiro-- On Sunday night, Sandra Bullock won Best Actress at the 82nd Academy Awards for her portrayal of gun-toting Republican Leigh Anne Tuohy in "The Blind Side." "The Blind Side" is essentially a high-class, made-for-TV movie based on the true story of the Touhy family's adoption of impoverished and abandoned black teenager Michael Oher, who would go on to play as an offensive lineman in the NFL. The movie is heartwarming, and Bullock is excellent in the part. She clearly deserved her Oscar. Leave it to the gals on "The View" to tear apart this heartwarming story. Vanessa Williams, sitting in for Whoopi Goldberg, trashed the film, even though she'd never seen it. Williams said: "It brings up a theme for black folks of 'OK, here's another white family that has saved the day.' Another black story that has to have a white person come in and lift them up. And I'm not saying it's not true and it didn't happen, it's one of those 'do I really want to save the same theme again?'" Joy Behar, the ugly liberal harridan who thinks genital jokes demonstrate extraordinary wit, quickly sided with Williams. Somehow liberals get away with detritus like this on a regular basis. If someone voiced moral doubt about a movie depicting a black family adopting a white child, they'd be raked over the coals -- and rightfully so. Transracial adoption should be seen as the greatest hallmark of the tremendous racial acceptance that now dominates our culture. But extreme liberals -- and black extreme liberals in particular -- can get away with bashing transracial adoption because they rely on the lexicon of political correctness, which suggests that "cultural autonomy" is threatened by such adoptions. In 1972, for example, the National Association of Black Social Workers stated that white families adopting black kids amounted to "cultural genocide." They have now removed that phrase from their critique of transracial adoption, but they maintain the position that such adoptions should be discouraged. The argument goes something like this: Black culture is distinct and separate from white culture. If black children are brought up within white culture, they lose their heritage. Therefore, black children should preferably be brought up by black parents, no matter the other qualifications for good parenting. To that end, many judges have ruled on an individual basis that certain white parents cannot adopt black children. In August 2006, The New York Times reported on Nick and Emily Mebruer, a white couple living in Lebanon, Mo., who wanted to adopt a black child. The white judge initially ruled that they were "uniquely unqualified" to parent a black child because of their "limited interaction with black people and culture." Another couple, Martina Brockway and Mike Timble, a white Chicago couple, wanted to adopt a black child. In preparation for that adoption, the Times happily reported, they had decorated their 3-year-old natural daughter's room with "Black-themed children's books like 'Please, Baby, Please' by the filmmaker Spike Lee and his wife, Tonya Lewis Lee." The pushback against transracial adoption relies on false notions of racial identity. Clearly, white parents who adopt black children need to inform their children about the unique history blacks have in America as well as the challenges they will sometimes face from the now-rare individuals who mistreat based on race. But the idea that whites and blacks in America do not have shared morals, shared ideals and shared visions is not just mistaken -- it is pernicious. Blacks and whites alike share love of freedom promised in the Declaration of Independence; blacks and whites alike share love of family and faith. Those are far deeper values than the frivolous trappings of rap or jazz or Spike Lee that the left would have us designate as "black culture." Living with values is not race specific. The Touhys and Michael Oher are evidence of that fact. Randall Kennedy, a black professor at Harvard Law School, sums it up well: "The emergence of 'rainbow families' formed by adoptions is a fascinating, poignant, encouraging landmark in the maturation of American race relations." Scorn for such families in the name of cultural segregation is not just destructive to the children who could be adopted into such families, but it is also destructive of American values as a whole. Collins Tuohy, the Tuohy's daughter who was the same age as Michael Oher when the Tuohy family took him in, recently did an interview with the UK Telegraph. She said her fear was that people would always see Michael as "'the black kid that lived with the white family.' And he is way so much more than that." He is more than that because America is more than that, no matter what Vanessa Williams thinks. end. ABC Pushes View Whites Should Not Adopt Black Children-3/11
Rare 'solar corona' caught on camera-3/10 Telegraph (UK), The elusive 'solar corona' - a plasma gas atmosphere around the sun where temperatures reach two million degrees - visible only during a total eclipse, has been captured on camera. ... Graham Hancock Reads Entangled Graham Hancock Reads From His New Novel Entangled-3/11 Daily Grail |
Facebook has a new application that helps users quit smoking. After that, people can move on to finding a cure for their other addiction — Facebook. Fallon Last week, the temperature was in the 20s and yesterday it got up to 59 degrees. It’s crazy, I keep having to change my outfit and my position on global warming. Fallon Democratic Majority Leader Sen. Harry Reid says that it’s good news that only 36,000 jobs were lost in February. Think of how happy he’ll be in November when he loses his job. Leno
Andrée Peel-3/10 Daily Mail (UK), Andrée Peel, who died on March 5 aged 105, was a much-decorated heroine of the French Resistance; known as Agent Rose, she helped dozens of British and American pilots escape from occupied Europe and only escaped death at the hands of the Nazis by the skin of her teeth. ...
China leveraging its status as America's banker for worldwide power-3/9 GeoStrategy-Direct, China's holding of $1.5 trillion of U.S. debt is a major vulnerability for the U.S. economy and security, according to a hearing of the congressional U.S.-China Economic and Security Review Commission. Commission member Michael Wessell, quoting industrialist John Paul Getty, told the hearing that “if you owe the bank $100 that's your problem. If you owe the bank $100 million, that's the bank's problem.” China currently holds $1.5 trillion of U.S. debt, he said, and Beijing currently is using its status as America's banker to convey new political power. ... (subscribers only) • China orders journalists to retrain in communist theory-3/11 Perspectives Of A Russian Immigrant (No. 7)-3/10 IBD,
By Svetlana Kunin--
People often ask me why I left the Soviet Union. The real question is: How is it possible so many Americans ask such an absurd question?
One seminal figure in the struggle for freedom in the USSR was Andrei Sakharov (1921-89), the leading figure in the development of the Soviet hydrogen bomb. A member of the Soviet elite, he enjoyed a better quality of life compared with most of his fellow citizens.
Yet he witnessed the grotesque treatment of citizens who dared question government policies. From the early 1960s, he became a leading spokesman for human rights in the Soviet Union.
The Truth
Sakharov saw the true nature of socialism: "This position of the intelligentsia in society renders senseless any loud demands that the intelligentsia subordinate its strivings to the will and interests of the working class (in the Soviet Union, Poland and other socialist countries).
"What these demands really mean is subordination to the will of the party or, even more specifically, to the party's central apparatus and its officials. Who will guarantee that these officials always express the genuine interests of the working class as a whole and the genuine interests of progress rather than their own caste interests?"
Sakharov's international prestige prevented party leaders from eliminating him. Under constant KGB surveillance, he was exiled in 1979 from his native Moscow to Gorky, a city that at the time was closed to foreigners. He was able to return to Moscow in 1986.
Another courageous Soviet dissident was Natan Sharansky, born in 1948. He became actively involved in the fight for religious and intellectual freedom in the USSR, as well as the right to emigrate. After his arrest in 1977, he spent 16 months in solitary confinement and later was transferred to a Siberian prison camp.
In the same era that Soviet dissidents experienced the worst forms of oppression because of their fight for freedom of speech and the right to practice their own religion, American intellectuals such as Howard Zinn (1922-2010) wrote about how capitalist America was unfair compared with socialist countries.
Zinn had this take on history: "Objectivity is impossible and it is also undesirable. That is, if it were possible it would be undesirable, because if you have any kind of a social aim, if you think history should serve society in some way; should serve the progress of the human race; should serve justice in some way, then it requires that you make your selection on the basis of what you think will advance causes of humanity."
While Natan Sharansky and other Soviet dissidents were jailed in the Soviet Union, Chicagoan Bill Ayers (born in 1944) was involved with Students for a Democratic Society, an organization that found the Soviet model inspirational. This group evolved into the Weathermen — a communist, militantly anti-American group.
Did they not hear of Sakharov and Sharansky? They were far from the only ones to reveal what really went on behind the Iron Curtain in the society built on the theory of class envy and collective good.
The Welsh journalist Gareth Jones reported on the Holomodor, the centrally planned famine that killed millions from 1932 to 1933 in the Soviet Ukraine. Food and grain were confiscated from farmers in the name of the "collective good."
In 1963, "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich" by Alexander Solzhenitsyn was smuggled to the West. This book revealed life in the Soviet gulag system, where millions of people perished.
In 1971, Soviet dissident Vladimir Bukovsky managed to pass to the West more than 150 pages that documented the use of psychiatric institutions for political prisoners in the USSR. Soviet authorities incarcerated Bukovsky for seven years, and he spent an additional five years in exile.
Meanwhile, Zinn, living a comfortable life in the capitalist USA, was busy writing anti-American history books. He was never persecuted or imprisoned for his anti-American views. Rather, he continued to teach, and his books, full of his fantasy propaganda, are a principle source of teaching material in American education. And Ayers is involved in designing curricula for American public schools.
"I wanted my writing of history and my teaching of history to be a part of social struggle," said Zinn. "I wanted to be a part of history and not just a recorder and teacher of history. So that kind of attitude toward history, history itself as a political act, has always informed my writing and my teaching."
After collapse of the USSR and the opening of KGB archives, more evidence of the true nature of a totalitarian socialist system was made available.
The Slide
Today, as former Soviet republics move toward the free-market model of capitalism, Democrats in America are transforming this country around the concepts of social justice and the collective good, the defining principles that animate oppressive socialist societies.
Writing in the New York Times in 1968, Sakharov warned:
"Intellectual freedom is essential to human society — freedom to obtain and distribute information, freedom for open-minded and unfearing debate, and freedom from pressure by officialdom and prejudices. Such a trinity of freedom of thought is the only guarantee against an infection of people by mass myths, which, in the hands of treacherous hypocrites and demagogues can be transformed into bloody dictatorship." end Portland firefighters union sticks it to the city-3/9 The Oregonian, By Steve Duin-- Even Tom Hurley, it's safe to say, figured there were limits on how much you could milk the Portland Fire and Police Disability Fund. For 12 years after an independent medical examiner ruled he could stop playing hurt and return to work, Hurley received a monthly disability check at the taxpayers' expense. But even Hurley -- the latest, and laziest, in a long line of firefighters -- eventually decided the jig was up. He ignored the funds' orders to return to work, attend mandatory training or explain his absences. He'd moved on. He was a chef, re-trained at the city's expense. When the fund finally terminated his $3,200 monthly benefit in 2007, Hurley didn't bother to appeal. His union, however, did. City Commissioner Randy Leonard sees considerable irony in that. While Hurley is "reviled" among Portland firefighters, Leonard says, their union is concerned that ethical members of the frat might be fired without just cause. The city failed to define the wages, hours and working conditions of Hurley's new low-hazard job, Leonard said, and an arbitrator ruled these are basic requirements of a city contract, subject to bargaining. Leonard and Commissioner Dan Saltzman are going to war over this. Leonard believes the arbitrator's ruling -- which would hand Chef Hurley $103,000 in lost disability payments and restore that $3,200 monthly boondoggle -- is "final and binding. There is no appeal." To challenge the Portland Fire Fighters Association at this point is obnoxious and short-sighted, Leonard adds, when the city is "asking them to take a pay freeze and consider a furlough. They're going to tell us to put our proposal where the sun don't shine." Bring it on, Saltzman says: "When these cases go to arbitration, it seems we uniformly lose. I'm fed up with it. Let's hold off on implementing the arbitrator's ruling, negotiate a return-to-work program that meets everyone's goal and give Hurley another opportunity to return to work." But, alas, there is a larger issue at play here, and one that suggests the union has totally played -- or outplayed -- the city. Hurley's case should have never gone to an arbitrator in the first place, Commissioner Nick Fish insists. When Hurley was denied benefits from the disability fund, Fish notes, the union filed a grievance against the city to obtain a remedy. That, Fish says, "produces an absurd result." Allowing the union to submit a disability claim to arbitration, he adds, is as ridiculous as going that route with PERS benefits: "You can't operate the (fund) like just another city bureau. You don't want an arbitrator making rulings. With all due respect to arbitrators and the Employment Relations Board, the legal questions should be decided in court, not with tribunals that are predisposed to assume there is a contract right at issue." Several labor experts I spoke with Monday agreed with Fish that questions of whether a dispute is within the scope of the arbitration clause should be decided in court, not by an arbitrator. But Hurley's case ended up before arbitrator Williams Reeves of Ashland because the union was aggressive and creative in its game plan, and the city attorneys were ill-prepared and overmatched. To the detriment of taxpayers, the union cleverly deduced that the way to get around disability reforms was to grieve the bargaining process. ...
Hundreds flock to see Virgin Mary painting 'crying tears of oil' in France!-3/8 |
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'Negatively strange' antihypermatter made out of gold-3/8 The Register, By Lewis Page-- Atomsmash boffins' reverse alchemy bizarro-stuff triumph – Topflight international reverse-alchemy boffins say they have managed to transmute gold into an entirely new form of "negatively strange" antihypernucleic antimatter, ultra-bizarre stuff which cannot possibly occur naturally - except perhaps inside the cores of collapsed stars. The transmutation was carried out at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC), a powerful* atom-smasher located at America's Brookhaven National Laboratory. Blasting a pair of high-energy gold nuclei into each other as is their wont, RHIC boffins found they had created something very odd indeed. Essentially, according to their explanation, you've got your regular old Periodic Table of elements, which no doubt we all recall at least dimly from skool, which is based on the number of protons (Z) in an atom's nucleus. Then different isotopes of each element have differing numbers of neutrons (N), as in the case of hydrogen, deuterium and tritium (a proton and no, one or two neutrons). Regular old boring antimatter, having antiprotons and antineutrons, simply has minus values of Z and N. Easy peasy. But more advanced boffinry also calls for a third axis showing the number of "strange" quarks present - normal protons and neutrons contain only "up" and "down" quarks. An isotope containing one or more "strange" quarks is a hypernucleus, lying above the regular chart of stuff and anti-stuff on the Strangeness (S) axis. All previous matter and antimatter seen had been normal or positively-strange hypernucleic sorts. But international boffins analysing the RHIC gold-buster results have now discovered a an anti-deuterium nucleus containing an antiproton, an antineutron - and, gobsmackingly - an "anti-strange" quark. It is thus a "negatively strange"** anti-hypernucleus lying below the plane of ordinary matter and antimatter, the first stuff ever known to do so. “This experimental discovery may have unprecedented consequences for our view of the world,” comments Horst Stoecker, German boffinry chief. “This antimatter pushes open the door to new dimensions in the nuclear chart — an idea that just a few years ago, would have been viewed as impossible.” ...
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Searching for Zheng: China's Ming-Era Voyager-3/9 Time Mag., By Ishaan Tharoor-- One of the more famous paintings of the medieval Ming dynasty, which ruled China for about three centuries, is that of a court attendant holding a rope around a giraffe. An inscription on the side says the animal dwelled near "the corners of the western sea, in the stagnant waters of a great morass." According to legend, the giraffe was found in Africa, along with zebras and ostriches, and brought back with the grand 15th century expeditions of Zheng He, China's greatest mariner. More than half a millennium later, Zheng has become a potent symbol for modern China. In 2005, the country marked the 600th anniversary of the seven voyages from 1405 to 1433 undertaken by Zheng's vast "treasure fleets" with nationwide celebrations; the opening ceremony of the 2008 Olympic Games in Beijing dramatized his explorations from Southeast Asia to the Middle East and the shores of Africa. On Feb. 26, China's Ministry of Commerce announced it was funding a three-year project with the assistance of the Kenyan government to search for Ming-era vessels that had supposedly foundered off the East African coast. "Historical records indicate Chinese merchant ships sank in the seas around Kenya," Zhang Wei, a curator for a state museum, told China's official Xinhua news agency. "We hope to find wrecks of the fleet of the legendary Zheng He." ... |
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Reverse Spins' Astrology section including recommended astrologers. For an excellent Vedic Astrologer who is charting new territory go here.
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A Matter of Faith?-3/9 Salina Journal, by Gary DeMuth-- Two near-death experiences changed Kathy Copp's view of life -- and the afterlife. An accidental drug overdose at age 18 resulted in what she called "the most beautiful experience of my life." "I experienced a very gray, shadowy tunnel, and as I moved down it, I recognized all kinds of people who appeared to be standing along the sides of the tunnel," she said. "All had passed away, so I knew I was dying, too." Copp moved towards what she called "a totally blinding light" at the end of the tunnel, where she felt an overwhelming sense of total encompassing love. Then she was back in her body, saved from death by her nursing student roommate, upset that she didn't get to stay in the light. Her second near-death experience occurred years later. Soon after Copp, then 26, gave birth to her third child, she began hemorrhaging and lost consciousness. This time, while going down the same shadowy tunnel, several deceased family members told her she had things to finish, a baby to care for. Again, she found herself whisked back to her body. As a result of these two near-death experiences, Copp said she has no fear of dying. "I became more spiritual and less religious," said Copp, 56, a retired antiques dealer who lives in Salina and Lyons. "I have not been a churchgoer since age 18, but I feel like I have a much closer connection to God. I don't want to die anytime soon, but when the time comes, I will not be fearful at all. It was too beautiful." Thousands of people around the world like Copp have claimed to have had near-death experiences, and many of their accounts are strikingly similar. Similarities include a sense of floating above one's body and dispassionately watching medical personnel or others working to save their life; a swirling motion and the experience of moving along a dark tunnel towards a bright white light; a sense of enveloping love and comfort; an encounter with spiritual figures or angels; the reappearance of those who have come before, which include departed loved ones and even pets; and a life review, where the events of your life literally flash before you. But are these people really experiencing a spiritual event or is it a physiological result of a dying brain shutting down? Compiling stories For more than 20 years, Herb Smith, a professor of philosophy and religion at McPherson College, has been compiling stories of people's near-death experiences. He has interviewed dozens of people, from senior citizens to children, who have "died" as a result of car accidents, near-drownings and heart attacks. Smith said he was struck by the universality of their near-death experiences, which ranged from seeing a white light at the end of a tunnel to hovering above an operating table observing surgeons working on their bodies. While Smith considers himself a "religious rationalist," and is skeptical by nature, the commonality and passion conveyed by those who have shared their near-death stories have convinced him of their authenticity. "To these people, a near death experience is not a dream, not a drug trip, but is emphatically real," he said. Yet not everyone who nearly dies has a near-death experience, Smith said. He knows this from personal experience: as the result of an accident 10 years ago in India, Smith lost a third of his blood. He went into a coma and hovered for 90 minutes between life and death. While in his coma, Smith said, he didn't experience a thing. No tunnel. No white light. No dead relatives. No life review. "Generally, only about one out of three people in that situation has a near death experience," he said. "There was a student here at the college who was in a car accident and had to be revived five times but didn't have a near death experience either." But his own lack of a near-death experience didn't stop Smith from believing the stories of others. How I found God and peace with my atheist brother-3/10 Daily Mail (UK), Peter Hitchen's traces his journey back to Christianity-- During his teenage years and early 20s, Peter Hitchens lost his faith and rebelled against everything he had been brought up to believe in. Here, in a moving and thought-provoking account from his controversial new book, he describes his spiritual journey back to God - and the end of his feud with his brother ... The new Buddhist atheism-3/20 Guardian (UK), by Mark Vernon-- A book setting out the principles of a pared-down Buddhism has won praise from arch-atheist Christopher Hitchens-- In God is Not Great, Christopher Hitchens writes of Buddhism as the sleep of reason, and of Buddhists as discarding their minds as well as their sandals. His passionate diatribe appeared in 2007. So what's he doing now, just three years later, endorsing a book on Buddhism written by a Buddhist?
The new publication is Confession of a Buddhist Atheist. Its author, Stephen Batchelor, is at the vanguard of attempts to forge an authentically western Buddhism. He is probably best known for Buddhism Without Beliefs, in which he describes himself as an agnostic. Now he has decided on atheism, the significance of which is not just that he doesn't believe in transcendent deities, but is also found in his stripping down of Buddhism to the basics.
Reincarnation and karma are rejected as Indian accretions: his study of the historical Siddhartha Gautama – one element in the new book – suggests the Buddha himself was probably indifferent to these doctrines. What Batchelor believes the Buddha did preach were four essentials. First, the conditioned nature of existence, which is to say everything continually comes and goes. Second, the practice of mindfulness, as the way to be awake to what is and what is not. Third, the tasks of knowing suffering, letting go of craving, experiencing cessation and the "noble path". Fourth, the self-reliance of the individual, so that nothing is taken on authority, and everything is found through experience.
It's a moving and thoughtful book that does not fear to challenge. It will cause consternation, not least for its quietly harsh critique of Tibetan Buddhism as authoritarian. It is full of phrases that stick in the mind, such as "religion is life living itself."
Hitchens calls it "honest" and "serious", a model of self-criticism, and an example of the kind of ethical and scientific humanism "in which lies our only real hope". The endorsement makes sense because Batchelor's is an account of Buddhism for "this world alone". His deployment of reason and evidence, coupled to the imperative to remake Buddhism and hold no allegiance to inherited doctrines, would appeal to Hitchens. And not just Hitchens.
For it's also striking that the first date on the tour Batchelor is currently undertaking to launch the book was hosted not by a temple or meditation centre, but by the humanist chaplaincy of Harvard University. Batchelor's preferred term is "secular" Buddhism, but his work clearly appeals to some atheistic humanists – not least Greg Epstein, the humanist chaplain at Harvard. ...
Robin Hood and the Templars of Doom-3/8 Fortean Times, By John Paul Davis -- The forgotten history of England's most famous outlaw-- In the heart of Yorkshire lies a grave different from any other in England. Guarded by heavy iron bars in the grounds of a private residence in the old parish of Dewsbury and hidden within the shadows of ancient woodland, it stands forlorn and dilapidated after centuries of exposure to the elements. According to 18th-century folklore, the slab that covered the grave, already severely damaged by that time, possessed magical powers; passers-by would take away pieces of the stone as a cure for ailments, depleting what remained of the outer shell. While the site itself might be of interest to the archæologist, for the historian the grave presents a different challenge. The flat stone slab is decorated with a long cross ending with a stepped base, as used in the Middle Ages to represent Christ’s death on Calvary, and flanked by a vague inscription that has long ceased to exist. In its place now stands an 18th-century tombstone marked with a curious epitaph commemorating the life of the man whose remains are said to be interred below. Although the inscription is written in an unrecognisable form of archaic English, the message is clear. In modern English it reads:
New book claims Robin Hood stole from the rich and lent to the poor-3/7 Telegraph (UK), A new book has claimed that Robin Hood was not as selfless as he is often depicted, suggesting he stole from the rich and lent money to the poor as an early kind of loan shark.-- ... Robin Hood: The Unknown Templar, points to several passages in an old English ballad that depict Robin loaning £400 to an impoverished knight. ...
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Ancient Texts Present Mayans As Literary Geniuses-3/9 Univ. of Buffalo, Book elicits praise from scholars of Mayan culture throughout the world-- Literary critics, cultural scholars and aficionados of the Mayans, the only fully literate people of the pre-Columbian Americas, have lined up to call the first fully illustrated survey of two millennia of Mayan texts assembled by award-winning scholar Dennis Tedlock, "stunning," "astounding," "groundbreaking" and "literally breathtaking."
The book is "2000 Years of Mayan Literature," published in January by the University of California Press. Its author, a SUNY Distinguished Professor, James McNulty Chair in English and Research Professor in Anthropology at the University at Buffalo, has long been recognized as one of the world's principle experts in Mayan culture and literature.
Tedlock is a distinguished ethnopoeticist, translator, linguist and poet, best known for his definitive translation of "Popol Vuh: The Mayan Book of the Dawn of Life and the Glories of Gods and Kings," for which he won the PEN Translation Prize.
In "2000 Years," a beautifully illustrated and highly readable book, Tedlock makes the intellectual world of the ancient Mayans visible and meaningful in distinctive new ways.
His most notable accomplishment is that he establishes for the first time that two millennia of Mayan writings produced in various writing systems and media -- from stone glyphs and paper documents produced in the post-Columbian Roman alphabet -- constitute a single literary history and tradition.
Tedlock's application of a literary designation to stone-carved Mayan glyphs is undoubtedly his most important and emphatic claim he makes and it is one he supports with scholarship of sweeping scope.
He makes the case that hieroglyphic texts represent a visible (not oral) literature that originated long before Old English was born, and centuries before Europeans came to the Americas. This has not been understood, he says, because while there has been much progress in the glyphs' decipherment, an appreciation of their literary value has lagged behind.
"These carvings have traditionally been described as 'inscriptions' and their ancient writers as 'scribes,'" he says, "as if no one was actually composing the written material."
Tedlock analyzes this material not just as discrete bits of data, but as a series of narratives, a task, he says, which "requires paying attention to the whole story the writers tell" through a unique literature that employs complex visual art forms to recount complex stories.
He describes what Mayans dreamed and the stories they told themselves about astronomy, math, medicine and other sciences to history, mythology, poetry and spiritual practice.
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At Reverse Spins: Saint Germain takes Godfre back in time to Mayan and Incan times, Incan Memories 'Archaeology': Priestesses tombs unearthed on Crete-3/9 USA Today, by Dan Vergano-- Unearthed tombs on Crete reveal a dynasty of priestesses reigned on the isle during the "Dark Ages" of ancient Greece. In an Archaeology magazine report, writer Eti Bonn-Muller details the results from last summer's excavation of the tombs of Orthi Petra at Eleutherna on Crete, where a team found the burials of a high priestess of Zeus and three acolytes this summer. "People then may have considered them sorceresses, or intermediaries with the gods," Bonn-Muller says. Led by archaeologist Nicholas Stampolidis, the team dates the four burials to 2,800 years ago. Earlier digs had discovered the cremated remains of other priestesses, buried together in large "pithoi" jars from 2,900 to 2,700 years ago. All of the women appear related, based on distinctive features of their teeth, the team reports. "What's really remarkable is the find shows these women were a dynasty that lasted at least 200 years in this location," Bonn-Muller says. ...
Magic Songs of the West Finns, Vol. I-3/7 New at Sacred Texts, by John Abercromby [1898]-- This is the first volume of John Abercromby's extensive study of Finnish magic songs and their background. First he details the history, ethnography and linguistics of the Finns, indeed, constructs a century-long history of the entire Finno-ugric group from the evolution of vocabulary. Finally in the last (long) chapter he gets to the first part of the exposition of the 'magic songs.' This is a summary of the various characters in the songs including a whole range of Finnish gods, goddesses, heroes, wizards, nature-spirits, and so on. He also goes into detail about Finnish Shamanistic practices, including drumming, trance ceremonies, and guide spirits. This book is a treasure trove of Finnish lore, and invites repeated browsings. Our Lady of Knock 'visionary' dies in accident hours after birth of first child-3/7 Irish Central, By Antoinette Kelly-- Irish visionary Keith Henderson praying at Knock last year for an apparition by the Virgin Mary An inexplicable road accident has claimed the life of the "visionary" who predicted that Our Lady would appear at Knock last year just hours after the birth of his first child. Keith Henderson, 34, died a few hours after his wife Sharon had given birth to the couple's first child. His car, a Toyota, hit a pole in the village of Tarmonbarry in County Roscommon at 2.45 a.m. Police say they do not know what caused the car to speed off the road and into the pole. Henderson was pronounced dead at the scene. His distraught wife insisted on leaving the maternity wing of Mullingar Hospital to travel to Roscommon Hospital to identify her late husband. The couple had moved from Dublin last year along with Sharon's father, Ronald. It was her father who was forced to break the heartbreaking news at his daughter's bedside. Local priest Fr Eamon O'Connor said: "This is a terrible tragedy. I was only talking to him last Sunday after Mass and he was very much looking forward to the birth of their baby. "Keith's faith was very important to him. We were all very shocked to hear of his death in this road accident. "Our sympathies, prayers and support go out to them all at this very difficult and sad time.'' Last year, Henderson and a spiritual healer called Joe Coleman, also from Dublin, led thousands of hopeful pilgrims in prayer as they waited to see Our Lady at the famous church in Knock. People travelled from all over Ireland, England and parts of Europe to pray with them and join the vigil. ... Music and lyrics: How the brain splits songs-3/10 Weaponizing Mozart-2/27 Reason, How Britain is using classical music as a form of social control ... Men with wider faces are not only perceived as untrustworthy, they may deserve the reputation-3/9 More from MegaSpedding's Francis Bacon Biography Videos-3/3 The Undiscovered Google: 7 Services You Need to Try-3/10 Uri’s seeking Egyptian treasure on his Scots isle-3/8 Catalyst could power homes on a bottle of water, produce hydrogen on-site-3/6
Whale: To Eat, or Not to Eat?-3/10 Study finds why vitamin D is crucial-3/9 Immune system cells rely on ‘sunshine’ nutrient to fight infection ... Lights keep vegies full of vitamins-3/8 Bill Gates Talks About Vaccines to Reduce World Population-3/8 Drinking sugar-sweetened beverages daily linked to diabetes-3/6 Homeopathic Medicine: Europe's #1 Alternative for Doctors-3/4 The Great Grocery Smackdown-3/4 The Atlantic, Will Walmart, not Whole Foods, save the small farm and make America healthy? ... Study: Teen pot, alcohol use rising-3/2 Fighting Alzheimer's with a touch of beauty-2/28 A pioneering care project demonstates how literature, music, art and love can improve the lives of dementia sufferers Beware of McCain's Freedom-Destroying Dietary Supplement Regulatory Bill-2/25 Studies: Belief in God relieves depression-2/25 Do Our Organs Have Memories?-2/23 |
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