Simone Weil once said the difference between slaves and citizens is that slaves are subject to their masters and citizens to the laws. Those who choose between masters are still slaves. Even if leaders are perfect, wise and just, we lose our freedom when we surrender responsibility to them.
We must regain a faith that people can govern themselves. We are not merely herd animals in want of a good shepherd. Sheep cannot choose their own shepherd. If they knew what was good for them, they would not need a leader in the first place. If average people do not have the qualities to govern themselves, how are they to recognize those qualities in another? If average people have those qualities, then they do not need to be led.
In a democracy, good leadership blends into the background. Such leaders are stable and often boring. The leadership qualities people usually look for in an election are martial, that is, military. Then, we are surprised time after time when such leaders lead us to war. The better a leader is at marshalling hierarchical power, the fewer freedoms will be available to the people.
Whether we are liberal or conservative we all must learn to live by the principles we espouse. If we do not take responsibility for our own governance, the words “democracy” and “freedom” will just be pretty flowers we place upon our chains.
It sometimes feels that talking about religion in the United States is like trying to teach baseball to people who’ve already been beaten with the bats. The symbols of Christianity have been so abusive to some people that the symbols do not seem to point to love and life, but only to trigger memories of dogma and domination.
For some of those wounded people, the best way to get past such trauma is to learn from other religious practices. For many, yoga is a good way to return to a healthy idea of what religion can be. The word “yoga” is related to the word “yoke” that Jesus used to refer to his own approach.
Most Westerners do not realize that yoga is much more than the stretching exercises we usually call “yoga”. Almost anything we do can be yoga if approached with mindfulness. According to Patanjali, the founder of yoga, the point is to still the mind. In other words, the point of any religious practice is not to fill our heads with beliefs, or to make us fearfully obedient. The purpose of any healthy religious practice is to break our everyday trances and to help us feel our original relationship to nature and each other.
Jesus said the point of any religious practice is to bring us to love. Following the call of Jesus means, for many, leaving Christianity as it is usually practiced. Any practice that awakens you to love will lead you where you need to be. It may even be possible to return to play the real game of baseball without having a spasm everytime someone raises a bat.
Thorne Dreyer was already “raising Cain” when I arrived in Austin in 1969. He is still shouting in the wilderness on his radio show on KOOP. What follows is an update on Occupy Austin. To read and or listen, click here
I’m sorry soldiers are being shot, but what is the “North Atlantic Treaty Organization doing in places like Libya and Afghanistan in the first place? Is it possible the U.S. is runing out of toadies? To read story, click here
Some males cannot bear the thought of a woman who is having sex, but who is not under the thumb of a man. Many males believe such women should be punished by being forced to bear children if they are sexually active. Women’s health care seems to be a sinister plot to such guys. When Sandra Fluke testified this week that many co-eds cannot afford contraception and the costs of college at the same time, Rush Limbaugh said the word that many such males associate with sexually active women who do not cower before patriarchy…
To listen to clip, click here
It is one of the most famous quotes in science. It was what Einstein is reported to have said in horror of the randomness of quantum mechanics, “Quantum mechanics is certainly imposing. But an inner voice tells me that it is not yet the real thing. The theory says a lot, but does not really bring us any closer to the secret of the “old one.” I, at any rate, am convinced that (God) does not throw dice.”
Einstein didn’t believe in God in the traditional sense. He understood the symbol more as framework from which to speak of the universe in terms that are meaningful in our ordinary human experience. His point was, perhaps, that he couldn’t accept the concept of randomness in what he wanted to see as a mathematical matrix. But Einstein lost that debate, and now every honest thinker must figure out how to adjust to the discovery that life does have random elements to it.
Perhaps it is helpful to look at dice themselves. Nothing controls the roll of the dice, but the opposite sides of the dice always add up to seven. In dice, as in cards, there are patterns that a gambler learns and over time knowing the patterns make all the difference. Perhaps wisdom is less learning a set plan, than learning a strategy that turns the random roll of dice into patterns that are not random at all.
“A shill, plant or stooge is a person who helps a person or organization without disclosing that he or she has a close relationship with that person or organization.” -Wikipedia
Gen. Barry McCaffrey is one of a host of retired Generals who go on television as objective analysts without disclosing that he is also working for the Pentagon propaganda machine. Gen. McCaffrey has ties to DynCorp which profits from the war. According to David Barstow, Pulitzer Prize winning journalist, he had a financial stake in the policies he advocated for while pretending to be a third party analyst.
My favorite McCaffrey quote is when he said the killings of U.S. personnel in Afghanistan demonstrate the “shallow impact [the United States] has on this primitive society.”
Apparently bombing “primitive people” in an illegal war is not enough to bring them to our standards of civilization.
To read article, click here
When our politics become binary we are unable to imagine a third possibility; Namely, that our hero and our villain both work for the same people. A politics of personalities is like a puppet show. Whether we side with Punch or Judy, we fall victim to the real puppet-masters. Focus on principles, not personalities.
Of course, the President should have apologized for the accidental burning of Korans in Afghanistan., but some demagogues will use anything the President says for political purposes even if it hurts the country. In this case, the real conservatives rose up to speak against people like Karl Rove. The greatest casualty of the neo-con movement and the radical right has been the reasonable conservatives who are perfectly capable of seeing a complex world. In this article, Media Matters lifts up conservative voices of reason that are usually left out of such reports.
To read article, click here.
Mark “Thor” Hearne, after working with the Bush Cheney political capaign, founded the American Center for Voting Rights. The group focused on voter fraud, and recommended requiring photo ID for those seeking to vote. The move hit particularly hard at the elderly and the poor. No documented examples of individuals using fake ID’s was presented but the movment had great appeal to some Republicans possibly because its affect was to eliminate voting groups who are traditionally Democratic. After testifying before Congress the group quickly folded it’s tent and Mark Hearne returned to private practice.
To read more, click here.
