Here’s Berkeley economist Brad DeLong’s guess of what the government-censored NYT article originally said.
And here’s another, from Jeffrey Lewis, Executive Director of the Managing the Atom Project at the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs.
Four posts today. Well, I woke up very early: possibly a hangover from when I was a kid and would get up at the crack of dawn to see what Santa had brought.
Anyway, check out Jewish in a Winter Wonderland.
It’s a very funny piece by the executive producer of “Sex and the City,” and her experience of being a non-Christian with a hankering to celebrate Christmas definitely resonates with mine as a Buddhist with similar leanings.
Oh, yes, on my third post of the day I finally remember to wish you a Merry Christmas!
As a Buddhist I’ve spent previous Christmases in a variety of ways. The first substantially different Christmas was back in 1983, when I went on a two-week meditation retreat in Carn Dearg lodge in Gairloch, Wester Ross (that’s in Scotland). That time it was well into the afternoon before I realized it was the 25th, and I remember it struck me that there was nothing intrinsically Christmasy about Christmas. If I hadn’t checked the date I would never have known that it was a special day in the western calendar.
The lesson of this was that the festivity of festivals comes essentially from within. There is no “season of goodwill” without people actually exhibiting goodwill. I think people tend to automatically assume that they will feel and act differently just because the page of the calendar has flipped, but of course that’s not the case.
Anyway, for several years I was on retreat at that time of year, and Christmas just didn’t exist for me. For years I opted out of giving and receiving gifts, and instead spent hours each day meditating. Sometimes I wouldn’t be on retreat, and Christmas would just be a normal day, although I admit I could be a bit stubbornly resentful on my ignoring of the festival going on around me. After all, this was a nominally Christian day, and I was not going to compromise on my Buddhist beliefs.
Later I came to appreciate more that Christmas isn’t really very Christian. My favorite parts of the day are pagan: the tree, the lights, the gifts, the feasting, the traditions like kissing under the mistletoe — even that “jolly old elf,” Santa Claus.
The reason we celebrate Christmas on December 25th is that this was the traditional birthday of the Roman sun god Mithras, who was probably the single most important deity in the empire in the early days of Christianity. What better time to honor the Sun than at the time its light is weakest? Mithraists celebrated their deity each Sunday (that’s why it’s called Sunday) with bread and wine. Christianity borrowed all this, down to the birth-date, in order to gain more legitimacy.
The festival day became amalgamated with other winter celebrations such as Yule, which was a Germanic pagan 12-day festival based around the solstice. Bringing evergreens into the house reminds us of life in the midst of Winter’s quasi-death. Mistletoe, sacred to the Celtic Druids, reminds us of fertility.
The ironic thing is that Christmas, having been co-opted from Paganism by Christianity, has now in turn been co-opted by Capitalism, our new religion, and that it’s taken Buddhist practice to help me to avoid the gross commercialism of the day and to appreciate the simpler things, and as I’ve grown older I’ve enjoyed more and more the opportunity to spent time with my family. Last night I was feasting with my wife’s great aunts and uncles, and a couple of the people there may not be around for the next Christmas Eve gathering. It’s so important to appreciate the ones we love while they’re still here.
So I wish you all a Merry Dies Natalis Solis Invicti (Birthday of the Unconquered Sun), a good Yule, and a Happy Christmas. Concentrate on appreciating the people more than the gifts, and remember that it’s only a season of goodwill if you let your heart soften and connect with others.
I know Buddhism teaches that everything is impermanent, but sometimes in the face of change all I want to do is to howl “NOOOOOOOOOOO!” at the universe. Today is one of those days.
Bill Amend, the author of the brilliant comic-strip “Foxtrot” appears to have announced that he’s pulling back to a Sunday-only strip. Still, my own grief aside, I wish Bill Amend well. He points out that he’s been at it now for 19 years, and I can only imagine what it’s like to meet a daily deadline for that length of time.
Nice New York Times Op-Ed piece today — The Peaceful Crusader — about Saint Francis of Assisi, “the first person from the West to travel to another continent with the revolutionary idea of peacemaking.”
The piece focuses on St Francis journey to meet with the Egyptian ruler, al-Malik al-Kamil, and his fruitless attempts to stop the Third Crusade through dialog with Cardinal Pelagius Galvani.
When I was writing my book on Buddhism and vegetarianism I came across some beautiful stories about St. Francis and his very benign attitude towards animals. The stories reminded me of Buddhist tales about Bodhisattvas. An inspiring man.
While Matthew LaClair has received death-threats from America’s Christian Taliban for standing up to a proselytizing history teacher and Democratic congressman-elect and practicing Muslim Keith Ellison has similarly been threatened for saying he will use the Koran in a private ceremony, let’s not forget that the U.S is a very tolerant country.
By contrast, America’s good friend and ally, Saudi Arabia, operates under strict sharia law — a particularly puritanical form of Islamic belief.
The Washington Post today carries a story about an extremely brave lawyer, Abdul-Rahman al-Lahem, who is challenging the country’s religious courts. These courts seek to police Saudi Arabia’s morals in a draconian fashion, for example by sentencing a rape victim to be lashed for being alone with a man, or jailing a reporter for voicing the opinion that homosexuality may be genetically influenced.
I wish Mr. Lahem well, and take Saudi Arabia as an example of why we must be vigilant in maintaining the separation of church and state.
This is not a joke. This is not a political stunt. This is modern America.
Below is an extract from a government-censored op-ed piece published yesterday in the New York Times about the last 20 years in the relationship between the US and Iran. Although all of the information in this piece is in the public domain, the government has decided that we are not allowed to see it, and parts of the article had to be published blacked out.
In order to demonstrate that the redacted information is in the public domain, the NYT took the unusual step of publishing a list of the original sources, which I’ve reproduced below. The sources are “underground publications” such as the NYT, The Washington Post, and USA Today. My God, what has America come to?
After the 9/11 attacks, xxx xxx xx xxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxx xxxxxx xxxxxxx xx set the stage for a November 2001 meeting between Secretary of State Colin Powell and the foreign ministers of Afghanistan’s six neighbors and Russia. xxxx xxxxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxxxx xxxxxx xxxx xx xxxxxx xxxxxx xxxxxxx xxxx xxx xxxxxx xxxxxx xxxxxx xxxx xxxxx xxxxx xx xxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxx xxxxx Iran went along, working with the United States to eliminate the Taliban and establish a post-Taliban political order in Afghanistan.
In December 2001, xxxxxx xxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxx x Tehran to keep Gulbuddin Hekmatyar, the brutal pro-Al Qaeda warlord, from returning to Afghanistan to lead jihadist resistance there. xxxxx xxxxxxx so long as the Bush administration did not criticize it for harboring terrorists. But, in his January 2002 State of the Union address, President Bush did just that in labeling Iran part of the “axis of evil.” Unsurprisingly, Mr. Hekmatyar managed to leave Iran in short order after the speech. xxx xxxxxxxx xxxxxx xxxxxx xxxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxx xxxx xxxx xxx the Islamic Republic could not be seen to be harboring terrorists.
xxx xxxxxx xxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxx xxxxxxxx xxxx xxxxxxx xxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxx xxxxx xxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxx xxxx xxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxx xxxx xxx xxxxxx xxxxxxx xxxxxx xxxxxxxxxx xxxxxxxxxxxxx xxxx xxxxxxxx xxxx xxxxxxxx xxxx xx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxxxxx xxxx xxxxx xxxx xxxxx xxx xxxxxxx xxxxxxx xxxx xxxxx xxxxx xxxxxx xx xxxxx xxx xx xxxxxxx This demonstrated to Afghan warlords that they could not play America and Iran off one another and prompted Tehran to deport hundreds of suspected Al Qaeda and Taliban operatives who had fled Afghanistan.
A while back I highlighted a Dove commercial showing how artificial images of female beauty are created. To save you going back to look for that post here’s the video itself.
And here’s a very clever and funny spoof. Even though this is a serious issue I think we should all be able to laugh at serious stuff, otherwise life gets a bit dry.
Actually, you can take a serious message from both videos. In the real Dove video the message is that behind the beautiful image you see on the billboard is a rather ordinary looking woman plus hundreds of hours of make-up, hairstyling, photography, and editing. This artificial image deludes us into wanting to buy products that imply that we’ll look like that too. It’s all a delusion.
I read into the spoof the message that alcohol, tobacco, and fast-food companies imply we’ll have some kind of satisfying experience if we buy their products, but all they do is offer us ugliness and ill-health. It’s another kind of delusion, and a powerful one at that.
When I did youth work in Scotland I once spent a weekend in the mountains with a girls’ group teaching them outdoor survival skills. They were all ravenously hungry by the end of the weekend, but on the way home they flat-out refused to eat anything unless it came from a McDonalds. They wouldn’t be seen dead in a Burger King. I can’t pretend to understand why McDonalds had such a hold over them, but their marketing obviously works.
Matthew LaClair is a hero. After registering complaints that his history teacher, David Paszkiewicz, was inappropriately proselytizing in the classroom, he has lost friends, become a target of abuse, and has even received a death threat.
Paszkiewicz was taped saying that evolution and the Big Bang were not scientific, that dinosaurs were aboard Noah’s ark, and that only Christians have a place in heaven. He also taught that those (including one specific Muslim student) who didn’t accept Jesus Christ as their savior were going to hell. This wasn’t a one-time throw-away comment made in response to a question by a student, but seems to have been a pattern of using the classroom as a pulpit, starting almost from the first day of class.
This is of course unacceptable under the U.S. constitution, where public schools are not allowed to proselytize, and yet it’s largely Matthew who is being treated as the offender. Some of Matthew’s critics take the preacher’s — sorry teacher’s — side and have said Matthew should be suspended. Matthew reportedly now goes to school surrounded by hostile stares. I can imagine this in the Bible Belt, but this is happening in New Jersey.
The United States constitution is a bold experiment in the separation of church and state, but it’s obvious that many Christians in America are in antagonism to their own constitution. I’m sure they think of themselves as being patriots, but in fact they are deeply unpatriotic.
In my volunteer work teaching meditation and Buddhism in prisons I’ve on some occasions come across people I’ve thought shouldn’t have been in prison at all. Once case was an 18-year-old man who had been imprisoned as a sex-offender for having sex with his 16-year-old girlfriend. Readers in the UK (where I come from) will at this point be scratching their heads, because in that country the age of consent is 16. In New Hampshire, and in many other states, it’s 18.
Neither this young man nor his girlfriend was even aware that the age of consent in New Hampshire was 18, and that they were breaking the law. Nevertheless he ended up in prison, branded as a sex offender, very vulnerable to sexual and physical abuse himself by other inmates, forced to register as a sex-offender, and stigmatized for the rest of his life.
I just read about a similar case in the New York Times today (Free Genarlow Wilson), where a young man of 17 — himself a minor — was imprisoned in Georgia for having consensual oral sex with a 15-year-old girl. That was, arguably, a very foolish act, but it doesn’t make Mr. Wilson a child-molester, and it’s absurd that he’s being treated as such and that he will spend at least the next ten years of his life in prison.
This kind of ruling does nothing to promote respect for the law, and it’s deeply concerning that a young man should have his life ruined for an act committed while a minor, and an act, moreover that has since been downgraded to a misdemeanor that does not require registration as a sex offender. It’s absurd that Genarlow Wilson is serving a long sentence for something that is no longer even considered a serious offense, and I congratulate the New York Times for highlighting his case.
President George W. Bush, October 25, 2006: “Absolutely, we’re winning.”
President George W. Bush, December 19, 2006: “We’re not winning.”
One statement was before the November election and the other was after it.
Intelligent children are more likely to become vegetarians later in life, according to a BBC report.
A Southampton University team found those who were vegetarian by 30 had recorded five IQ points more on average at the age of 10.
Read more here
There’s some strange logic is an op-ed piece today in the NYT, written by Mark Maurer, president of the National Federation of the Blind.
Maurer disagrees with a Federal judge’s ruling that blind people are discriminated against because US banknotes are all the same size and color, making it impossible for people who are visually impaired to know which denomination they are holding. The NFB are arguing against this ruling and in support of the Bush administration.
Maurer’s position is that “while blind people cannot identify paper currency by touch, that does not prevent us from spending money.” The problem with this logic is that there’s more to life than spending money. How likely is it that a person who is blind is able to work effectively as a store clerk, bank cashier, or in any other job that requires counting money?
I’ve only visited seven or eight countries in my life, but each one has banknotes that would be easily identifiable by blind and visually-impaired people. The US seems to lag behind in in this regard, and this is one of those social justice issues that seems to have no downside. Sure, redesigning America’s banknotes would cost money, but on the other hand it would also reduce fraud — and allow blind people to work in a greater variety of jobs.
My impression is that Mr. Maurer is cowed by the fear of a backlash against blind people for standing up for their rights. That’s most unfortunate, and in my mind it calls into question his fitness for being head of the National Federation for the Blind.
Here’s a short video posted by a family who just traveled to Ethiopia.
Now the family you’ll see are not the adoptive parents, but a family who filmed a video for the parents, who will be traveling over soon. Here’s the story.
The adoptive family are going through Wide Horizons for Children, which is the same adoption agency we’re using. This was a dramatic adoption for the family involved because just after getting their referral they’d been told by a doctor in the US that judging by the clinical measurements there was a good chance of severe developmental abnormalities. This of course threw the family into an emotional tail-spin since they’d asked for and expected a child with normal developmental possibilities and aren’t in a position to be able to care for a child with special needs.
My wife’s been following the whole story on the Wide Horizons’ discussion group on Yahoo.
Anyway, two other medical opinions suggested that the child was healthy, and another family (the couple you’ll meet) kindly shot some footage for the parents. This explains the emphasis on the baby’s physical development and also the fact that the baby is “looking at mommy” while staring at the camera.
So, meet Bonkoka!
[LATER NOTE:] It turns out that the Ethiopian government does not allow the public display of video or photographs of orphans, and so the creators of this video were asked to remove it. I can understand this: you don’t want to give the impression that you’re “advertising” orphans. Still, it’s a shame. Bonkoka was a cutie.
A new “inspirational ” video game based on the popular fundamentalist Christian “Left Behind” novels is apparently teaching young Christians the finer art of killing non-believers. According to this MSNBC report the maker’s website claims that the violence is purely defensive:
“Christians are quite clearly taught to turn the other cheek and to love their enemies. It is equally true that no one should forfeit their lives to an aggressor who is bent on inflicting death.”
Um, remind me again, who was that inspiring religious figure who willingly died at the hands of Pontius Pilate? Don’t ask the makers of this game — they don’t seem to know much about him either.
The Bush administration’s kowtowing to the religious right has resulted in Christian groups being paid to proselytize prison inmates, according to this New York Times article.
I found this when I was looking up the address of our nearest IKEA, which sadly is located too far away, down in Stoughton, Darkest Massachusetts. The store is larger than some airports I’ve visited, but with better parking. It’s located in a small town, which is no doubt a great boost to the local economy because half the population are now traffic cops, trying to keep relieve the congestion that starts about two miles from the store.
I love the place.
Anyway, the conception of IKEA as a video game is perfect. It’s almost as if the IKEA architects had based their building plans on a multilevel game: you walk through the door and you can see the warehouse right there in front of you, and you know the lamp you really want is in there somewhere, but before you can get your prize you have to navigate a labyrinthine maze of fake rooms full of crazed shoppers, avoiding unnecessary purchases of ridiculously inexpensive and well-designed goods. Last time I was there, in place of a Level 7 Balrog of Doom (or whatever) they had something even scarier — a live Swedish folk band. I think I saw Lara Croft running out the door as I went in.
Interesting article in the
The writer doesn’t answer his own, doubtless rhetorical, question and also doesn’t articulate what I think are the two overriding reasons for this strategy, which are that our born-again president doesn’t want to run the risk of NASA discovering life on another planet, and that he wants to stymie climate research.
So allow me to present my conspiracy theory:
1. We have a born-again president, who like other fundamentalist Christians doesn’t believe in evolution, despite the mass of evidence supporting it. He believes that Creationism, under its new guise of “Intelligent Design” should be taught in schools. It would be a major problem for fundamentalist Christians if life were to be discovered on another planet, because that would cause us to think more about the origins of life. Who created that life? Why would God create microbes and put them on Mars, or Europa?
Since the Viking probes in the late 1970s, not one of the probes that we’ve sent to Mars has conducted experiments to test for living organisms. (The Viking landers may actually have discovered evidence of life, but that’s another story). At the same time, our Mars missions have come ever closer to showing that the conditions for life (volcanic heat, liquid water) exist on Mars in abundance. There’s even evidence of biological methane production. In addition, recently life has been show to exist in increasingly unlikely places on Earth, such as in boiling water, ancient salt deposits, and buried in rocks deep below our feet.
Life on Mars is an increasingly likely possibility, almost a probability. So let’s not look! Heavens, we might find it! Instead, let’s spend massive amounts of money on an International Space Station, and then when that’s hanging there in the sky like the $100 billion Christmas tree ornament from hell, let’s start building a replica of it on the Moon. That’s a good way to keep those pesky scientists busy.
If this is the republican agenda then it’s extremely cunning. But then this administration is not lacking in cunning.
At the same time this hypothetical agenda is deeply flawed as a way of thwarting evolutionary research. The Moon is a repository of ancient rocks that have been blasted off of the surface of the Earth and preserved in ideal (cold, dry) conditions. Any microorganisms on those rocks would have been beautifully freeze-dried. Even the fragile DNA (maybe RNA in the very first organisms) would be beautifully preserved.
The Moon is a giant specimen cabinet, chock full with a collection of preserved life from our own planet — a collection that is utterly disordered but absolutely complete. While records of the first life on Earth have, here at home, been sucked deep below the Earth’s surface and recycled, on the Moon you’ll find preserved prehistoric Earth organisms literally lying on the surface waiting to be picked up.
The Bush administration isn’t much interested in science (it’s riddled with inconvenient truths) so they probably don’t know they’re sending us to an evolutionary treasure-trove, but if they woke up to this fact (and got back into power) they could do the same with the Moon Base as they did with the International Space Station — cut the personnel so that the structure can be built and maintained but so that there isn’t enough man-power to do any actual research.
2. We have a pro-business, anti environment president, who believes (or wants to believe) that human-induced global heating is a myth, despite the near-consensus amongst scientists and the massively overwhelming evidence that human activity is indeed warming our planet in a way that could be catastrophic for our species.
Until recently, NASA had as part of its mission statement, “to understand and protect our home planet.” That phrase was recently cut. A Bush appointee, George C. Deutsch, told a Web designer to add the word “theory” at every mention of the Big Bang. NASA’s top climate scientist, James E. Hansen, claimed that NASA tried to stop him from speaking publicly after he gave a lecture calling for prompt reductions in emissions of greenhouse gases linked to global warming.
Many of the programs to be cut in order to fund the return to the moon focus on finding evidence of Earth-like planets such as the Terrestrial Planet Finder and SIM Planet Quest, or relate to climate research (decisions have been made not to replace a number of Earth-observing satellites). Oh, and a plan to examine the ice-covered ocean on Europa has been canceled as well, even though the National Academy of Sciences and NASA advisory committees believe that the exploration of Europa is, after Mars, the highest research priority in our solar system. Too much chance of finding life? Actually, I don’t think NASA is in on the conspiracy, give or take a Bush appointee or two, but when you’re told to throw billions into a hole on the Moon, you have to take the money from other, more scientifically, productive, areas of your work.
It seems to me that there’s enough evidence to suggest that the Bush administration is pumping money into massively expensive operations — like the ISS and the proposed Moon Base — in order to stop climate research and astrobiology, thus keeping the fossil fuel and fundamentalist Christian lobbies happy.
But why not just cut NASA’s funding altogether, rather than giving them billions and telling them to waste it? Two reasons: One, there would be a scientific outcry, and you’d allow the scientists the opportunity to get in the media and talk about climate research and evolutionary research. Bad! Two, there would be an outcry from your friends in business, who love being given billions of dollars of tax-payers’ money, and from the politicians in whose states such billions are being spent, providing well-paid jobs. Worse! These senators and state representatives are the people who keep conservative presidents in office.
Spending massive amounts of money on going back to the moon is a Win-Win proposition: a win for fundamentalist Christians and a win for big business.
“Free Buddhist Audio” is a newly-launched site offering a large selection of talks on Buddhism.
The site was formerly Dharmachakra, an FWBO nonprofit organization that distributed CDs (and before that, cassettes) of talks by Sangharakshita and other members of the Western Buddhist Order. Now the site’s gone digital and has been renamed, and everything is free!
“Free Buddhist Audio” offers MP3 downloads, Podcasts, and also PDF transcriptions of talks and seminars. It’s an astonishing resource, and well worth repeated visits.