Al Gore recently sold his cable channel to Al Jazeera. Current TV, as it was called, was carried by mainstream providers like Time Warner, who quickly dropped the channel rather than show Al Jazeera programming.
While many providers in the US dismiss Al Jazeera as mere propaganda, it is the number one source of news for many in the Arab world. It does cover stories that would never see the light of day in the US media, and like most news sources, it carries the biases of its own culture, but sense when have we in the US become afraid to even listen to how our actions appear to others?
Cable stations have no trouble carrying FOX News and MSNBC which are the Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dum of western propaganda, why not practice a little of that free speech we claim separates us from other nations?
Source: Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting
http://www.stumbleupon.com/submit?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.fair.org%2Fblog%2F2013%2F01%2F04%2Fwill-americans-be-able-to-watch-al-jazeera-america%2F
Today at St. Andrew’s we will begin a sermon series on the environment called “Earth, Wind, Fire and Water.” Our lesson today will be about “Fire” or the crisis of energy. Obviously, the Bible doesn’t directly address carbon footprints, but it does address the need for stewardship of the earth. In today’s sermon we look at the parable of the ten foolish virgins. “Virgins” were women who had left the culture to care for sacred temples. In their day, women needed to renounce sex to escape the cultural roles prepared for them. In our day it is consumerism that binds our souls
If we consider the earth to be a temple, the parable has much to say about our own calling break out of the culture and to be keepers of the flame.
I will make three suggestions:
That we leave the myth of eternal progress and move to one of “Sabbath” or earth care.
That we move from a sense of despair to a sense of sacred duty.
That we move from an identity of being mere consumers to being keepers of the flame.
Thanks to Bob Jensen for suggested readings on energy. There are also great environmental sites I’ll post from time to time.
Michael Klare
http://www.tomdispatch.com/authors/michaelklare
Richard Heinberg
http://www.postcarbon.org/person/36200-richard-heinberg
When most people hear the topic of climate change they go into a stupor. It’s depressing to think about it. We’re not quite sure what any of us can do, so we just try not to think about it.
So when the “Earth Care” committee of our church asked me to speak about the environment this month, I wasn’t sure how to do a series that wouldn’t sound like academic lectures on carbon footprints. I’ve finally settled on a sermon series called “Earth, Wind, Fire and Water.” We’ll look at each of those elements as sacramental. We will remember that for much of history, people believed ourselves to be composed of these four “elements.” We will then juxtapose that poetic view with how we are actually treating those elements in our natural world. We will then consider how we might actually put reverence for the elements back into practice.
Tomorrow’s sermon, “Fire,” will address the subject of energy in general. We will turn to the story of the foolish virgins in Matthew 25:1-13 to consider how our species might move from the myth of eternal “progress” to the realities of entropy. We will consider the call to Sabbath, not as mere austerity, but our sacred task of “tending the flame.’
Jill Stein was the Green Party Presidential candidate. You may remember her getting arrested trying to get into the debates to represent her party. What follows is a summary of her analysis.
By making the Bush tax cuts permanent for those earning up to $450,000, families earning $50.000 a year will feel an increase of $1,000. The President has already committed to huge budget cuts. He has agreed to limit taxes on the wealthy. Finally, he has said he is willing to cut Social Security, Medicare and other health programs. If anyone cannot see the train wreck coming it is because they do not want to.
The deal also ushered in an additional $205 billion in wasteful corporate tax favors. New racetracks will get tens of millions, Goldman Sachs gets $1.6 billion in tax-free financing for its new massive headquarters, banks get a $9 billion dollar loophole for offshore financing, and U.S. multinationals are allowed to dodge taxes on income earned by foreign subsidiaries – giving them all the more reason to move jobs offshore. -Jill Stein
However we vote in an election, options for transforming our economic system must vastly enlarge as soon as we leave the voting booth. To save our nation, and our world, we must stop living as narcissistic and passive individuals. We must join together in solidarity to work for human betterment. Obama won the Presidency by appealing to those high aspirations. For whatever reason he is unwilling or unable to implement them. It is time the American people stopped believing in heroes and begin to believe that we ourselves can realize those values by working in solidarity for our fundamental and universal human rights.
http://www.jillstein.org/stein_bipartisan_fiscal_scam_lays_groundwork_for_austerity
A California woman was fooled into having sex in a dark room with a man she thought was her boyfriend. The woman had been drinking and fell asleep when her boyfriend left. Another man snuck into her house and began to have sex with her. She thought it was her boyfriend until a passing light revealed the horrifying truth.
Saying that the defendant’s act was “despicable” a California judge ruled that the court could not presume an absence of consent if the woman were not married.
“Has the man committed rape? Because of historical anomalies in the law and the statutory definition of rape, the answer is no, even though, if the woman had been married and the man had impersonated her husband, the answer would be yes,” -Judge Thomas L. Willhite Jr.
The idea that women are not the property of men seems to be hard to drop. Until recently, many state laws did not recognize the possibility of spousal rape. In this California case, a man slipping into a woman’s house and fooling her into having sex while she is drunk does not seem to qualify as rape so long as the woman has not legally bound herself to a man in the state of marriage.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/01/03/california-appeals-court-_n_2406167.html
Westboro Baptist Church is that small group of around 40 people that shows up at funerals to say, “God hates fags.” So long as they just attacked the families of deceased gay and lesbian people they weren’t so much national news, but when the church began showing up at the funerals of fallen soldiers saying America was being punished for allowing homosexuals to live in the country, the church was almost universally condemned.
I’m almost certain that most fundamentalist Christian recoil at the tactics of Westboro Baptist Church. But Westboro has simply moved to the logical conclusion of fundamentalist rhetoric. Someone who takes certain parts of the Bible literally would be stoning adulterers, and killing homosexuals, defacing Muslim temples, etc.
What many fundamentalist Christians don’t like about Westboro Baptist Church is the way their own beliefs look when really put into practice. When fundamentalist televangelists and local preachers blame national tragedies like Newtown on our nation’s toleration of gay and lesbian persons or people of other faiths, they may not have the courage to ride the train all the way out, but they have built a rhetorical track that leads straight to Westboro.
This small church of no more than 40 people has created a vivid example of the logical conclusion of self-described “Bible-believing Christians” — they just haven’t started stoning adulterers or seafood lovers. When Mike Huckabee and Bryan Fischer blame the Newton shooting on banning school prayer, they place themselves along the continuum with Westboro Baptist Church. -Paul Raushenbush, Huffington Post.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/paul-raushenbush/thank-you-westboro-baptist-church_b_2396991.html?utm_hp_ref=email_share
Because our bodies are born of the earth, there is one life hidden in us all- a radiant being, that permeates every plant, animal, and person we will ever meet. Christ is one symbol of that universal life, but to be a Christian does not mean merely to join the Christian Church. To “follow Christ” means to blossom out of, to be irradiated by, and to live for, that one common life. This can happen whether or not one has even heard of the historical Jesus.
As much as I love religion, I never forget it is a very dangerous craft. A religious community is a very human institution, which means the more it believes it speaks for God, the more insane it has actually become.
It’s relatively easy to see in the Catholic Church that when followers are asked to submit to God, the priests have some very specific and very Catholic ideas in mind. Invariably the follower ends up submitting to God only as understood by the church hierarchy, which actually means submitting to the hierarchy itself.
In the Protestant church, we’re much cleverer than that. We say, “If you want to obey God, just obey the Bible. Sounds fair enough, but then, we insist that there is only one correct way to interpret the Bible, which just so happens to be our own denomination’s method. That’s how we disguise what we are doing. We pretend that the Bible is all we care about, but our interpretation of the book keeps putting us in control of other people: Christian over non-Christian, men over women, straight people over gay. We insist we aren’t trying to control others — it’s just one of those darn things that just keeps happening. Reading the Bible literally (which means not realizing that we are interpreting it through our own bias) keeps putting us in charge.
Someone once said of Noah’s Ark that if it weren’t for the rain on the outside, one could not stand the smell on the inside. So it is with every religious community. We are not fully human if we do not share life in community, but it is also a fact of the religious life that the more we try to mimic the angels, the more we play the devil.
There was once a man who bred monkeys. They were eventually going to be pets so he needed them to be co-operative and kind. The breeder decided to base his work on free market principles. He allowed the biggest meanest animals to hoard most of the food and then tried to introduce restraints that would protect the vulnerable members of the community. To the man’s surprise, his method kept breeding meaner and meaner monkeys. Whatever restraints he tried to build into the system were thwarted by clever bullies who quickly learned how to get around the restraints with bribes and threats.
If anyone came from a different planet and heard our defense of capitalism, they would feel we have much in common with the foolish monkey breeder. The richest 1% of Americans now hoard 25% of the wealth of our nation. They maintain their status by making workers compete with sweatshop and prison labor overseas. So while profits have never been higher, worker wages are stagnant or shrinking. If workers organize, the work is taken overseas where there are no government protections against wage theft. Capitalism is not only enslaving workers, it is destroying the planet. The hoarders would rather deny science than curb their ambitions. So even the melting of the planet’s ice caps is seen as a business opportunity as capitalism lures us into the path of certain oblivion.
Sanity means realizing what we reap we will sow. Only a fool still believes in the invisible hand of the market. If we build an economic system that rewards co-operation, we can yet save our planet. Worker owned co-ops are the fastest growing economic model and represent a new hope of transforming capitalism from master to servant. But if we continue to surrender responsibility to an economic system that rewards the meanest and cleverest hoarders, we should not be surprised when we wake up one day to be their slaves. Even worse, if we are successful in that system, we wake up one day, look in the mirror, and find the biggest meanest monkey of all.