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A
country based on
these three powerful words deserves to be saved!
I've been wanting to write a book about zen hell for a long time. Millions of words have been written and spoken about Christian hell. Billions of words, enough words to crush whole nations, to imperil our very world. But I haven't found much on the subject of zen hell. With Dictator Lite Bush still in office and our nation in economic free fall, with the bombing Iran and escalation of war in to Pakistan still prominently hot on the back burner, and with global warming and overpopulation heightening the world's predicament, life is becoming more terrifying and surreal by the day. It seems like a perfect time to start my book, because I think I'm there, I think I'm living in it: zen hell. We're living in apocalyptic times. The book I'm writing can't even keep up. I've put it on hold, and for now I'm content to put up some interesting blog entries and to answer all of your e-mails and comments about them. For the past few years, the main order of business of this Web site has been to impeach Bush. This was never possible, it turned out, because we had been sold out from the get-go of the Bush 2 administration by our corrupt, cowardly representatives in Congress. Now that Obama has been elected, I have to radically change gears. Change or no change, that is the question. We must be vigilant from the very beginning of the Obama presidency. We must swear to ourselves and to one another: never again! We must never allow ourselves to be degraded and our country to be wounded by criminal leaders. We must truly become the leaders. Here is a starting point. People are already talking about the Clinton recycles and right-wing operatives Obama is choosing for his cabinet and advisors. Here is an evenhanded article, "This Is Change? 20 Hawks, Clintonites and Neocons to Watch for in Obama's White House," by Jeremy Scahill, that gives you a nice (but unfortunately scary) thumbnail description of the people he's already chosen. I hope and pray that Obama will be able to control these powerful people and direct their power for evil towards working for the good, but I fear that it's totally up to us.  Do you see me? My family and some
friends and
I are lying down in sand
at Ocean Beach in San Francisco in the upper
left part of the H. This
picture was taken from a helicopter Saturday
morning on January 6,
2007. There are 1,200
of us. This was a fun demonstration, except for
a dog drooling on my
face and emitting an ear-splitting
howl while this picture was taken. See how far I
will go for peace and
justice? Scroll down for a cool picture showing
the Golden Gate Bridge.  If
you are longing to see my old zen meditation
/ yoga Web site, it's
still there:
Contact
Me. I write
back! Note:
The
following documents and links are still
interesting and important,
but fortunately, many of them are somewhat
irrelevant now that Obama
has won! Hurray! I'm extremely busy
being a wage slave, husband,
dad, homeowner, and blog poster, but bear with
me and I'll have some
great stuff for you here soon! Bush didn't know the three branches of our government! Stolen Election 2000. Is it OK to steal 50,000 black votes? Ask Jeb Bush. Right click to download this PDF--otherwise it takes a while to load. Environmental "Crimes Against Nature": This amazing speech by Robert F. Kennedy Jr proves actual treason by the Bush administration. Bush's Failure to Act During 9/11 Attacks What happened to Building 7? The 9/11 Commission sure didn't care! 49 stories high! Right click to download this MP3 file. Who is the real terrorist? Bush makes bomb threat against USA. Here is the amazing PNAC document in which Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and other prominent plotters reveal that they were dreaming of a "new Pearl Harbor" a full year before 9/11. Check out the top of their page 51 for yourself, and you will feel your skin crawl. And check out the "Rogues Gallery" I added to the front of this document. You'll recognize many of the perpetrators. (Right click to download.) American Terrorism that has taken place during my lifetime U.S. War Crimes in Iraq Pink
Sings to George Loose
Change The little (German) man inside Bush's head, operating the controls. This is too funny! 9/11:
A Closer Look Public
Enemy
Number One! Funny and short. How
do you run a convention on
a record of failure? Stolen Election 2004, by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., in Rolling Stone Bush
hears
the truth about himself
Brilliant column by
Alexander Cockburn succeeds in one page
where the Baker-Hamilton
Iraq Study Group report fails in 160. Bunker Buster! Cool! Let's try it! My cosmic essay: "The Uninverse is Making Itself"  Chimp-O-Matic
 "We
may
congratulate ourselves that this cruel war
is nearing its end. It has
cost a vast amount of treasure and
blood...It has indeed been a trying
hour for the Republic; but I see in the near
future a crisis
approaching that unnerves me and causes me
to tremble for the safety of
my country. As a result of the war,
corporations have been enthroned
and an era of corruption in high places will
follow, and the money
power of the country will endeavor to
prolong its reign by working upon
the prejudices of the people until all
wealth is aggregated in a few
hands and the Republic is destroyed. I feel
at this moment more anxiety
for the safety of my country than ever
before, even in the midst of
war. God grant that my suspicions may prove
groundless."
By the middle of the twentieth century, President Eisenhower warned us of the still growing threat of a corporatist tyranny in the Military Industrial Complex during his Farewell Address.
This is one of the best
things I've ever
written! So short! So true! I wrote this
in 2006. The cost
(see first
sentence) has gone up to about $2.5
billion per week, enough to put
37,000 American kids 4 years of college!  Here's a flag I
designed
for our great nation of Murka, in case John McCain
wins the election.
I'm the new Betsy
Ross!
This is an amazing quote. How arrogant to think that the Universe isn't right yet, until I do this or that, until we accomplish this or that. Check it out. I printed out about 10 of this quote and taped it all over my house. Humans have been
so steeped
in gods and religions, that even Einstein, anti-religious
though
he was, seemed to be a little hung up on
God. "I refuse to
believe that God plays dice with the Universe,"
he famously said. But
once you get past childhood programming and
indoctrination, the Creator
becomes immediately less mysterious. You're
lookin' at it, buddy. The
Universe is making itself!
You're looking at the vast ancient thing that made you. It's mostly freezing cold and dark, but it has billions of little hot spots (stars), orbited by hard cold (or warm or hot) spherical rocky things (planets). You can see the Hand that made you. It's NOT invisible or unknowable! But don't get me wrong. I'm not an atheist. To be an atheist, you have to believe in God, at least as something that you are opposed to believing in. I'm religious, yet I don't need to invent Gods or believe in other people's invented Gods to be so. I'm in awe as I watch the Universe continue to create itself right before my eyes. It's observably a continuum. It has never stopped making itself. And we get to see it! We didn't miss out, entirely, on Creation after all! Nothing kills the wonder one feels at Creation more than a holy book that says the Universe was made in six tiring days, like some kind of science project, and that on the seventh day, when it was all done, God had to rest. And that's it. Creation is over. The stage has been built, and now we're stuck here with no other choice but to act out our miserable parts, never forgetting to bow to the guy (Gods are mostly male) who made the theater, begging him to give us a good review. No Bibles and hard Sunday pews for me. I'm in church every second. I'm watching a miracle so much more amazing and shocking than Jesus walking on water. A miracle that is both empowering to behold, and humbling. How did something come from nothing? How could there even BE nothing? This we will never know. Our minds will never be able to understand something-from-nothing unless perhaps we develop some kind of inner, spiritual, psychic "technology," unless we become so "enlightened," so "Buddhistic" (if you will), that it becomes apparent. That's the one thing we can't know: how it started. Another thing we can't know is why it started. We can't know if there even IS a how or a why. But once it started, we know for a fact that it acted by discoverable rules. Gravity was in force throughout. The whole thing was made out of the same stuff--(unless our Universe is just a tiny part of a Multiverse; then, who knows?). Analyzing meteorites from the farthest reaches of space proves that carbon, hydrogen, iron, etc. can be found everywhere. Life forms developed via evolution, as the sciences of genetics, biology, geology, chemistry, paleontology, and mathematics prove beyond doubt. Evolution is a tool, the use of which does not detract in any way from the wonderfulness of the Creator, if there is one, any more than Jesus' hammer, in the days when he was a carpenter, detracted from what he built with it. And there is no miracle to "how life started." Obviously, the Universe IS alive--it is a thing that generates life as part of itself. Life can be found at the polar ice caps and in scalding hot hydrothermal vents 7,000 feet below the sea. The Universe acts logically on the mechanical level, but on the psychological level, regarding the most intelligent animal on Earth, its behavior is very strange. My brother George, an ER doctor, sees a lot of strangeness: a 62-year-old alcoholic lady has walked the skin off her bare feet, so you can see muscle and bone. A good looking young man has carefully mashed up his own shit into a liquid and injected it into his arm with a hypodermic syringe. Surrounded by modern medical equipment, a Catholic priest in medieval vestments reverently baptizes a Tampax, sprinkling holy water on a glop of protoplasm in a stainless steel tray. Just read your morning paper and you see that the the behavior of nations is every bit as bizarre. The Big Bang. Wow, what a trippy beginning for our scientific "creation story," the story presently most plausible (albeit incomplete) to people who are too smart to go along with the primitive mythologies believed by our present-day flat-worlders. I'm no genius--I had to take algebra three times in junior high to pass it--but I'm at least able to see reality. More than half of the people on this planet are not. They still believe intensely in some holy book and in some holy main man--Jesus, Mohammad, Krishna, Buddha. We should have great pity for our present-day flat-worlders. But also great fear of them. If we continue to accept religious fundamentalism and the religious fundamentalists around us as normal, we are choosing death over life. Life got complicated on this planet, and this ship can no longer be piloted illogically, or first we will all experience hell on earth--at least a fifth of us already are--and then most, perhaps all, of humanity will perish. If there are any survivors of the shipwreck, the living will truly envy the dead. Despite some special humans having sent men to the moon and broken the genetic code, many of us are still basically stuck in the Dark Ages, as ignorant as medieval European peasants. Our president, the master of our thousands of nuclear missiles, was sworn into office with his hand on the Bible. Just take a look at the Bible verse below and marvel! When taking on such an awesomely responsible job, should our president put his hand upon verses about rape, genocide, incest, and torture, written by wackos thousands of years ago?Here is how God punishes and forgives David:
Thus
says
the Lord: "I will bring evil upon you out of your
own
house. I will take your wives [plural] while you
live to see it, and
will give them to your neighbor. He shall lie with
your wives in broad
daylight. You have done this deed in secret,
but I will bring it
about in the presence of all Israel, and with the
sun looking down."
Then David said to Nathan, "I have sinned against the Lord." Nathan answered David: "The Lord on his part has forgiven your sin: you shall not die. But since you have utterly spurned the Lord by this deed, the child born to you must surely die." (2 Samuel 12:11-14 NAB) The child dies seven days later. This has got to be one of the sickest verses of the Bible. God Himself brings the completely innocent rape victims to the rapist. And then He kills a child! And what about churches? An intelligent extraterrestrial sociologist would say that churches, temples, mosques, and shrines are places where mental illness is spread like a computer virus to young minds, minds that lack the anti-virus software (reason) to deal with it. True, churches often provide good civic and humanitarian services. But just take the Catholic church for example: This organization, unbroken and uninterrupted for almost two thousand years, killed and plundered throughout the Middle East during the Crusades, carried out the Inquisition, accused tens of thousands of European women of witchcraft and tortured them to death, burnt supporters of Copernicus at the stake, and imprisoned and threatened Galileo with torture. And today this same organization, still using the same symbology and terminology and maintaining the same hierarchy that was in place centuries ago, is paying off over a billion dollars worth of child molestation lawsuits in Los Angeles alone! The support of fundamentalist "Christians" of all denominations allowed George W. Bush, an ignorant life-long failure with a famous name, to come to power, and has resulted in the slaughter of tens of thousands of Iraqi children during the past couple of years! It has resulted in the deaths of 2,168 of our bravest citizens and the wounding of over 15,000 more, a high percentage of the wounds grievous. The fundamentalist-inspired killing didn't stop with the Crusades or the Salem witchcraft trials--it's happening again! It's happening now. The bibles of the world are amazing works, ancient books of fables, legends, history, and moral precepts recorded by men. They contain wonderful poetry and striking symbology (what could better describe our sad relationship with our beautiful planet than the story of the Garden of Eden and the fall of man?). There is a reason they have lasted so long. However, they become dangerous when read by people unable to read with discernment. Thomas Jefferson wrote, "But the greatest of all reformers of the depraved religion of his own country, was Jesus of Nazareth. Abstracting what is really his from the rubbish in which it is buried, easily distinguished by its lustre from the dross of his biographers, and as separable from that as the diamond from the dunghill, we have the outlines of a system of the most sublime morality which has ever fallen from the lips of man. The establishment of the innocent and genuine character of this benevolent morality, and the rescuing it from the imputation of imposture, which has resulted from artificial systems, invented by ultra-Christian sects (The immaculate conception of Jesus, his deification, the creation of the world by him, his miraculous powers, his resurrection and visible ascension, his corporeal presence in the Eucharist, the Trinity; original sin, atonement, regeneration, election, orders of the Hierarchy, etc.) is a most desirable object." [to W. Short, 10/31/1819] Note his words: the philosophy of Jesus in the Bible is like a "diamond" in a "dunghill." To quote another great American patriot, Thomas Paine, "I would not dare to so dishonor my Creator God by attaching His name to that book (the Bible)." Not only do adherents to holy books cause untold violence in the world, but they waste time. Time that could be spent, for example, in political activity. "We the People" means that we are all together. A chain is only as strong as its weakest link. You can't be a farmer and not plant and harvest food, and you can't be an American and not participate in political life. A belief that the world doesn't matter and that the Rapture will soon occur makes it easy to disregard serious threats to our children and grandchildren such as global warming, overpopulation, and the serious environmental vandalism being done to our beautiful planet, such as cutting down the last 2,000-year-old redwoods and preparing to crisscross the pristine Alaskan Game Refuge with oil pipelines and oil infrastructure. It doesn't matter what we do to Mother Earth because we're going to be with Jesus soon and the rest of you suckers will be burning in hell forever. Fundamentalism results in blindness. It REQUIRES blindness. The "religious right" in America are shocking the rest of the world with their blindness. These lovers of God and Jesus and the Bible are the among the last supporters of a president who is conducting widespread torture all over the world. It is huge news, front-page news in every European country, that hundreds of CIA "rendition" flights are flying in and out of Germany and England, and that it is now known beyond any doubt that the CIA has torture prisons in Poland and Romania. These stalwart Bush supporters, who believe our present government is NOT criminal, should go back in time and live in Germany in 1939. They would probably be real happy there, as were millions of people from all walks of life, who believed Hitler's rhetoric of hate and fear. Socrates said, "The unexamined life is not worth living." Either you believe this philosophy and follow it with all your heart, or else you are choosing the other path: "I choose to be stupid because, in the short run, it's more comfortable." 40 percent of American high school science teachers no longer teach evolution. Fundamentalist "neocons" such as Bush and Cheney are maneuvering to stack the Supreme Court in order to pervert the law--they would force a 45-year-old woman with severe back trouble who accidentally gets pregnant, as well as a pregnant 14-year-old ghetto crack addict on welfare, to have a baby. (Ironically, these neocons are the ones who would do as little as possible to provide education and health services for the little crack baby once it was born.) In a world with loose nuclear weapons all over the place (for sale cheaper than the cost of rapper Eminem's private jet), a world threatened by global warming and pollution, a world dangerously overpopulated and rife with needless suffering, it's time to call a spade a spade. National Geographic in the September 2005 issue isn't afraid of hurting the feelings of some "Christians," when it states, "Those who would doubt evolution are arguing against the entire enterprise of science." It's time to stop treating fundamentalists as if they are normal. They should not be hated or persecuted, and religion should never be banned. But whenever we hear fundamentalism being mixed with politics, we should beware, and we must keep these mentally ill people far away from political power. This statement
by Einstein is all the religion anyone
needs:
A human being is
a part
of the whole, called by us "Universe,"
a part limited in time and space. He experiences
himself, his thoughts
and feelings as something separated from the
rest--a kind of optical
delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is
a kind of prison for
us, restricting us to our personal desires and
to affection for a few
persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free
ourselves from this
prison by widening our circle of compassion to
embrace all living
creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty.
--Albert Einstein Go out and watch the Universe make itself. Ironically, some
of the most
fearsome terrorists are
the very people conducting The War on Terror. In order to sell their planned invasion of Iraq to us, George W. Bush, Tony Blair, and Condoleezza Rice said that we should fear "mushroom clouds . . . in forty-five minutes" (read it again). This is called "terrorism"--in the form of a bomb threat. Jeff Syrop
Technical Writer Ten
Reasons to Impeach
George Bush
and Dick Cheney
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