bodhi tree swaying

There are times, living in the US, that I miss my native Britain’s robust consumer protection legislation.

From the BBC:

A Christian group has been banned from claiming that God can heal illnesses on its website and in leaflets.

The Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) said it had concluded that the adverts by Healing on the Streets (HOTS) – Bath, were misleading.

It said a leaflet available to download from the group’s website said: “Need Healing? God can heal today!”

The ASA said it had been alerted to the adverts by a complainant, and concluded that they could encourage false hope and were irresponsible.

This is the second article I've seen predicting that Obama's health care act is the nail in the coffin of the health insurance companies. I hope that one day we'll look back on this era and wonder how people could have allowed anything so monstrous to flourish.

And people may also regard Obama as a political genius to have sneaked this past the GOP.

The End of Health Insurance Companies Accountable care organizations will shift the focus of medicine away from treating sickness and toward keeping patients healthy.

The deliberate inflicting of pain is now being accepted by government as a way of keeping the population in line.

The use of pepper spray in wartime, we should be constantly reminding ourselves, is an official war crime. It’s chemical warfare, and it’s torture.

If these policemen were soldiers, and the students were citizens of a foreign country, those in uniform would be facing prison sentences for what they’d done. Why do police forces have the right to perpetrate with impunity what are effectively war crimes against their own people? Why do we accept this so easily?

From the Atlantic:

James Fallows: Pepper-Spray Brutality at UC Davis

In case you haven’t yet seen the YouTube footage of what happened yesterday at UC Davis, here it is. The first minute has the main drama:

Let’s stipulate that there are legitimate questions of how to balance the rights of peaceful

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The Occupy Wall Street campaign has been widely seen in the media as a coalition of flakes, unsure of why they’re actually there, without any clear message. And while there may be a grain of truth in that there is no one clear leader articulating demands, as Glenn Greenwald said,

Does anyone really not know what the basic message is of this protest: that Wall Street is oozing corruption and criminality and its unrestrained political power—in the form of crony capitalism and ownership of political institutions—is destroying financial security for everyone else?

I admire Glenn’s passion, and while he’s right, I think he’s articulating the wrong emotional message. He’s articulating disgust (“oozing,” “corruption,” “crony”). The problem with this is that disgust isn’t an attractive quality. It’s offputting. People aren’t generally inspired by disgust. And when they …

Sometimes a piece of research turns up that boosts my faith in human nature.

Wired magazine today carries an article, Happy Words Trump Negativity in the English Language, about a paper published in the online journal, arXiv, on the relative frequencies of emotionally positive and negative words in the English language.

The researchers took four bodies of words:

1. Twitter,
2. The Google Books Project (English),
3. The New York Times, and
4. Music lyrics

They then found the 5000 most frequently used words from each “corpus” and had them rated on a scale of 0 to 9 in terms of their emotional connotations, with 50 independent evaluations per word.

A word with a score of 1 would thus be the least happy word, a word with a score of 5 would be neutral, and a word that rated a 9 would be the happiest word.

The …

I’ve been meaning for a while to write about a fascinating study that touches on Terror Management Theory — something I mention in my book, Living as a River.

A Canadian study showed that when faced with thoughts about their own mortality, a sample of people in the US

expressed relatively more positive reactions to intelligent design theory and its proponent, Michael Behe, and “significantly greater negativity” toward evolutionary theory and its proponent, Richard Dawkins.

People, in other words, would rather believe fairy stories than believe that their lives and deaths were meaningless. But…

In one of their experiments, featuring 269 psychology students, half of the participants read a passage by cosmologist and science writer Carl Sagan.

In it, he argued that “humans can attain meaning and purpose by seeking to understand the natural origins of life.” Even if we are “merely matter,” he

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Scientists have been studying the phenomenon of Group Intelligence, which “is not strongly tied to either the average intelligence of the members or the team’s smartest member.” This is very interesting. So what, you might wonder, determines group intelligence?

(T)he researchers found that when a group had a high level of collective intelligence, the members tended to score well on a test that measured how good they were at reading other people’s emotions.

So, empathy. If groups are to perform well, the individuals in the group should have the emotional intelligence to be able to read each other’s feelings. This is interesting to me as a Buddhist (who often works with other Buddhists in teams), because there are indications that Buddhist practice increases empathy.

(T)hey also found that the proportion of women in the group was a predictor of collective intelligence

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John Pappas at Great Plains Buddhist has put together some nice, jokey Buddhamas cards. I like to think of this one as “Sangha Claus.”

In our Buddhist household we do celebrate Christmas, but as you might expect it’s not a religious holiday for us — or at least if it’s religious it’s a purely pagan religious festival, with a tree, decorations, gifts, family, and feasting.

Today, thanks to a wonderful series of connections, I had the great pleasure of talking with a Chumash elder, Cho’Qosh Auh’Ho’Oh. The day before yesterday I’d never heard of her. Then I was in an interview, about my book, Living as a River, with Jeff Ferrannini of “Planetary Spirit,” a radio show out of Emerson college in Boston. During the course of our discussion, Jeff told me he has a Hopi prophecy that he wanted to read out. I was bowled over by what he read me, because of its (especially the second part’s) affinities with the message of Living as a River.

“You have been telling the people that this is the Eleventh Hour, now you must go back and tell the people that this is the Hour. And there are things to be considered . .

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First up, I’ve been absent from my blog for some time. One reason is that I was busy with my book tour. But then that only took three weeks, so that’s not the complete reason. Another reason was just that I’m very busy anyway, trying to run a small business (the publishing wing of Wildmind) in a difficult economy, while my wife has increased her working hours and I’m having to take on more childcare. And that, in fact, is the main cause of my absence. I’d also, however, got into the lazy habit of letting Twitter do my blogging for me, by using a plugin to turn a digest of my tweets into blog posts. I’d originally intended this to be a supplement to my “real” blogging, but of course the beermat placed under the wobbly table leg tends to move from being a temporary fix a …

From the Boston Globe:

As usual, the Founders were way ahead of us. They thought hard about how to build a country of many different faiths. And to advance that vision to the fullest, they read the Koran, and studied Islam with a calm intelligence that today’s over-hyped Americans can only begin to imagine. They knew something that we do not. To a remarkable degree, the Koran is not alien to American history — but inside it.

No book states the case more plainly than a single volume, tucked away deep within the citadel of Copley Square — the Boston Public Library. The book known as Adams 281.1 is a copy of the Koran, from the personal collection of John Adams. There is nothing particularly ornate about this humble book, one of a collection of 2,400 that belonged to the second president. But it tells an important story, and reminds us how

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Ron Paul has taken a brave stance that will make him unpopular with many conservatives.

It is repeatedly said that 64% of the people, after listening to the political demagogues, don’t want the mosque to be built. What would we do if 75% of the people insist that no more Catholic churches be built in New York City? The point being is that majorities can become oppressors of minority rights as well as individual dictators. Statistics of support is irrelevant when it comes to the purpose of government in a free society—protecting liberty.

Via Think Progress

Ron Paul is a man I disagree with on many things, but he’s spot on here. This is where libertarianism and liberalism overlap.

Here’s a great quote from an article about The Spirit Level, Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett’s book on the social damage inflicted by inequality:

Once countries reach a certain level of wealth, what affects the citizenry is not the growth in GDP but the level of inequality. Man is a social primate and people who worry about their status and feel too keenly the humiliations their superiors inflict on them become anxious, mistrustful, isolated and stressed. This pattern holds whether you look at inequalities within different countries or between more equal or unequal states in the US or counties in Chile.

It looks like a book worth reading.

From David Brooks:

In 1950, thousands of teenagers were asked if they considered themselves an “important person.” Twelve percent said yes. In the late 1980s, another few thousand were asked. This time, 80 percent of girls and 77 percent of boys said yes.

Read the full article…

Interesting and provocative stuff from writer (and meditator) Robert Wright:

This autumn will see the publication of a book that promises to help us out here: “What Technology Wants,” by Kevin Kelly, a long-time tech-watcher who helped launch Wired magazine and was its executive editor back in its young, edgy days.

Don’t let the title of Kelly’s book terrify you. He assures us that he doesn’t think technology is conscious — at least, not “at this point.” For now, he says, technology’s “mechanical wants are not carefully considered deliberations but rather leanings.”

So relax; apparently we have a few years before Keanu Reeves gets stuffed into a gooey pod by robotic overlords who use people as batteries. Still, it’s notable that, before Reeves played that role in “The Matrix,” the movie’s directors gave him a copy of Kelly’s earlier book, “Out

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Below is an extract from Emily Colette Wilkinson’s review of Marcus Aurelius: A Life, by Frank McLynn. The parallels with the Buddhist approach are striking, and I can’t help feeling again that it’s a tragedy that Stoic philosophy — the original Western Buddhism? — was stamped out by that Middle-Eastern upstart religion, the early Christian church.

Marcus’ creed held that virtue was its own reward and the only life goal worth pursuing. On the Stoic view, we have no power to determine whether we’ll be rich or poor, famous or infamous, sick or healthy, but we can control whether or not we are good. Thus, life’s pleasures and pains–poverty, disease, fame, death-become “indifferents” to the Stoics–i.e. matters that have no direct bearing on our moral wellbeing and so are irrelevant. As a Stoic, I might be poor and sick and

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Sanghapala, a fellow member of the Triratna Buddhist Order (formerly the FWBO) brought this video to my attention. It’s a really fascinating insight by Dan Pink into what really motivates people to excel.

We learn:

For mechanical skills, the higher the reward, the better the performance. But, for even moderately demanding cognitive skills, a larger reward leads to poorer performance.

The way money works as a motivator is that if you don’t pay people enough, they won’t be motivated. Once people are comfortable with the amount they’re being paid, money isn’t an issue and they can concentrate on their work. Once the money issue is dealt with, there are three factors that lead to better performance:

1. Autonomy: if you want engaged workers, they have to be self-directed.
2. Mastery: people like to develop excellence. It’s satisfying to do something …

A long term study of students at the university of Michigan suggests that empathy has been declining since the 1980s and 1990s, with a particularly steep drop after 2000:

“We found the biggest drop in empathy after the year 2000,” said Sara Konrath, a researcher at the U-M Institute for Social Research. “College kids today are about 40 percent lower in empathy than their counterparts of 20 or 30 years ago, as measured by standard tests of this personality trait.”

Konrath conducted the meta-analysis, combining the results of 72 different studies of American college students conducted between 1979 and 2009, with U-M graduate student Edward O’Brien and undergraduate student Courtney Hsing.

Compared to college students of the late 1970s, the study found, college students today are less likely to agree with statements such as “I sometimes try to understand my friends better by imagining how things look from their perspective” and “I

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From a fascinating article by Paul Bloom:

Not long ago, a team of researchers watched a 1-year-old boy take justice into his own hands. The boy had just seen a puppet show in which one puppet played with a ball while interacting with two other puppets. The center puppet would slide the ball to the puppet on the right, who would pass it back. And the center puppet would slide the ball to the puppet on the left . . . who would run away with it. Then the two puppets on the ends were brought down from the stage and set before the toddler. Each was placed next to a pile of treats. At this point, the toddler was asked to take a treat away from one puppet. Like most children in this situation, the boy took it from

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Delivered 28 August 1963, at the Lincoln Memorial, Washington D.C.

I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation.

Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity.

But one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely …