bodhi tree swaying

The Times (the Times, not the New York upstart) has a fantastic photo gallery of the Bhutanese coronation, as well as an accompanying story.

What with Obama’s victory and a large group of Muslim clerics taking a very public and vocal stand against terrorism, I can’t help but feel optimistic about the possibility of positive change.

From UPI:

About 6,000 Muslim clerics from around India approved a fatwa against terrorism Saturday at a conference in Hyderabad.

Maulana Qari Mohammad Usman Mansoorpuri, president of the Jamaiat-Ulama-i-Hind, called terrorism the most serious problem facing Islam, The Hindu reported. He blamed Islamic radicals for their actions and the news media for failing to distinguish between the radicals and the majority of Muslims.

“We have no love for offenders whichever religion they might belong to,” he said. “Our concern is that innocents should not be targeted and the career of educated youth not ruined. The government should ensure transparency in investigation.”

India has the world’s second-largest Muslim population after Indonesia, although Hindus outnumber Muslims. The meeting

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Judith Warner:

Two images will forever stay in my mind to mark this epoch-breaking Election Day. One is that of Jesse Jackson’s face, drenched in tears, in Chicago’s Grant Park on Tuesday evening.

And the other is a photo that ran in The Times on Wednesday. In it, a black mother and daughter sit on the floor of a church in Harlem. The mother, Latrice Barnes, having heard of Obama’s victory, is doubled up in tears; her daughter, Jasmine, is reaching a tentative hand up to soothe her. To me, she looks like the future, reaching out to heal the past.

Tears to Remember – Judith Warner Blog – NYTimes.com

From the NYT:

In studies over the past few years, researchers have demonstrated how quickly trust can build in the right circumstances. To build a close relationship from scratch, psychologists have two strangers come together in four hourlong sessions. In the first, the two share their answers to a list of questions, from the innocuous “Would you like to be famous? In what way?” to the more serious, like “If you could change anything about the way you were raised, what would it be?”

In the second session, the pair competes against other pairs in a variety of timed parlor games. In the third, they talk about a variety of things, including why they are proud to be a member of their ethnic group, whether Latino, Asian, white or black. Finally, they take turns wearing a blindfold, while their partner gives instructions for navigating a maze.

Trivial as

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I’m grateful to BoingBoing for drawing my attention to this rare silent (but color) footage of Tibet in the 1940s.

From the BFI National Film archive, via BoingBoing:

“Tibetan Scenes was made by Tsien-Lien Shen in the early 1940s – he was resident Chinese Commissioner in Lhasa from 1942-47. The colour film records many of the ceremonial events that took place in Lhasa, including the New Year ceremonies, and Shen himself appears in the film. There is also evidence of the presence of the Chinese in Lhasa.

Although the majority of the film focuses on Tibetan ceremonies, there are some invaluable scenes capturing everyday life in Lhasa, as monks, porters, market stall sellers and the occasional yak compete for space.”

This film

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Further to the post in which I draw attention to conservatives that rejoice in Obama’s grandmother’s death, this is from a flyer by the Westboro baptist Church, which regularly pickets funerals to tell us how much they (and their god) hate homosexuals:

Westboro Baptist Church
3701 SW 12th St. Topeka, Kansas 66604
785-273-0325
www.godhatesfags.com

NEWS RELEASE
WBC to picket the funeral of Madelyn Payne Dunham, – pursuant to the picketing laws of Hawaii or Kansas or, etc., wherever burial occurs, – in religious protest and warning to the living; to wit: “Prepare to meet thy God.” Amos 4:11.

Yes. Dying time is truth time, and reflection time, and time for meditating on the weighty issues of life: getting right with God, life, death, Heaven, Hell, sin, righteousness, judgment to come, etc. Obama says his grandmother Dunham raised him, and, her “influence on

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Scientific American reports:

In Colorado voters shot down Amendment 48, the “Personhood Initiative,” by a three-to-one margin. The measure would have defined human life as starting “from the moment of fertilization”—which in essence would have made abortion a crime and put the brakes on embryonic stem cell research there.

I’m not pro-abortion by any stretch of the imagination, and neither is my wife. We (or more strictly she) would never have an abortion, and I wouldn’t encourage anyone to have an abortion. I do support abortion (albeit with some reluctance) when the life or health of the mother is seriously in danger. I can understand when someone chooses to have an abortion because of some serious developmental abnormality of the fetus. I’m pro-contraception. I’m pro sex-education (countries with better sex ed have lower teen pregnancy rates).

But I consider the idea of …

I can just see the Onion headline now: “Barack Obama, Dalai Lama announce merger.”

I’m guessing this was taken at the time HH was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor. Anyone know for sure?

I want to make sure I can find this easily in the future, so I’m posting it here:

If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible; who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time; who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.

It’s the answer told by lines that stretched around schools and churches in numbers this nation has never seen; by people who waited three hours and four hours, many for the very first time in their lives, because they believed that this time must be different; that their voice could be that difference.

It’s the answer spoken by young and old, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, black, white, Latino, Asian, Native American, gay, straight, disabled and not disabled – Americans who …

A really fascinating post on the Buddhist Channel, via the Buddhist Blog on a new study showing that nonviolent campaigns are more successful than violent ones:

Nonviolent resistance is not only the morally superior choice. It is also twice as effective as the violent variety. That’s the startling and reassuring discovery by Maria Stephan and Erica Chenoweth, who analyzed an astonishing 323 resistance campaigns from 1900 to 2006.

“Our findings show that major nonviolent campaigns have achieved success 53 percent of the time, compared with 26 percent for violent resistance campaigns,” the authors note in the journal International Security. (The study is available as a PDF file at http://www.nonviolent-conflict.org).

The result is not that surprising, once you listen to the researchers’ reasoning.

“First, a campaign’s commitment to nonviolent methods enhances its domestic and international legitimacy and encourages more broad-based participation in the resistance, which translates

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Sometimes a comic strip hits the truth spot on, as with today’s Stone Soup, one of my daily reads, as I was mentioning the other day:

I believe psychologists talk about “confirmation bias,” which is the tendency for us to seek out or to accept information that reinforces our existing beliefs. One of the plagues of modern politics (and the wider “culture wars”) is this very tendency. Republicans tend to watch the right-leaning Fox news, and Democrats prefer to watch left-leaning MSNBC. Thus we limit our exposure to other viewpoints and never really make the effort to appreciate them.

Then things go a stage further and we build up what are in fact mutually-exclusive alternative realities. For some people Obama is a crypto-Islamic terrorist-sympathizing Marxist. For me he’s a very decent guy — very moderate politically. I don’t think that on the left the

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There was a lot of coverage a few weeks back about research showing that people with a tendency to experience anxiety are more likely to favor right-wing political views. To put it bluntly, Republicans scare easily.

That’s amply demonstrated in a post that the excellent Mahablog links to, in which Jonah Goldberg purports to write from 2012, reporting on Obama’s failed presidency. It’s a bizarre, even hysterical, piece of writing in which, apparently, Obama’s administration will be damaged by Biden making bizarre statements:

…he told the Russian foreign minister he’d “rather punch a nun in the throat” than cooperate on an Iranian nuclear deal, the Obama administration knew they had a problem on their hands.

The strange comments and behavior kept coming: at an international summit on child poverty, he accused the Dalai Lama of issuing a “brain fart,” he phoned Supreme Court

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I just want to praise Daniel Zubairi and other brave Republicans who stood up to a pair of racists at a McCain rally. It’s good to see people taking a stand against this kind of ignorance and hatred.

(Afterthought: It’s ironic that the McCain campaign wouldn’t let Zubairi be interviewed on TV after this incident. Zubairi is an asset to his party, but I guess the McCain team would rather not address racism head on and may be embarrassed at the idea of having a Muslim speaking on their behalf).

Does this “evil” guy look familiar?

“Paid for by the Republican Party of Virginia”

Classy.

From TPM, via WoodMoor Village Zendo.

Wired reports:

The Sacramento County Republican Party hosted a graphic this week comparing Obama to Osama bin Laden, with the caption “The only difference between Obama and Osama is BS,”The Sacramento Bee reports. The text of the graphic adds, “Waterboard Barack Obama.”

The site — an official GOP site — recycles many already-debunked lies about Obama, attributing to him damaging quotes that were actually fabricated by other Republicans, such as this one that was invented by the Arizona Conservative, which claims that Obama refuses to say the Pledge of Allegiance with an equally false quote: “I don’t want to be perceived as taking sides. There are a lot of people in the world to whom the American flag is a symbol of oppression. And the anthem itself conveys a war-like message.”

Kristof is a man with a fine conscience and a passionate concern for Africa, born of having visited some of the poorest people there and having seen their sufferings. He describes today how Bush’s “religious” sentiments and ignorance will cause the deaths of African women, and how McCain plans to keep up these “good works.”

The Bush administration this month is quietly cutting off birth control supplies to some of the world’s poorest women in Africa.

Thus the paradox of a “pro-life” administration adopting a policy whose result will be tens of thousands of additional abortions each year — along with more women dying in childbirth.

The saga also spotlights a clear difference between Barack Obama and John McCain. Senator Obama supports U.N.-led efforts to promote family planning; Senator McCain stands with President Bush in opposing certain crucial efforts to help women reduce unwanted pregnancies in Africa and Asia.

There is something about

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I’m having a rather frustrating week, with not enough time for writing — just two days out of the whole week are days I can sit down and work on my book. And that’s not leaving much time for writing here, either. So in lieu of any substantive comments of mine on the political storm going on (assuming I’m capable of such a thing), let me refer you to a few posts by other Buddhists.

WoodMoor Village Zendo decries how McCain and Palin’s discourse is creating an atmosphere of polarization and potential violence. I quite agree. This is a big concern of mine. The US has a history of political violence, and most of it has been directed at figures on the left: JFR, RFK, MLK, to name but a few.

The Buddha Diaries reprints a letter to John McCain that Peter wrote on HuPo. Again the theme is how …

The following video was posted at the WoodMoor Village Zendo website. Digital Dharma also covers this story. It’s a really disturbing expose of the brutal practice of hunting wolves from airplanes.

I’m still thinking about Buddhism and politics, and there are some recent posts in the buddhoblogsphere that give food for thought.

At Peaceful Turmoil an unnamed blogger asks thus:

Schaudenfreuda [sic] is not a spiritual virtue. Yet parody can be a way of expressing suppressed or impolite things and giving people a new perspective. So what does that mean for those who do not support Sarah Palin or the Republican ticket for the White House in 2008 who also commit themselves to compassion and sympathy for others? Is it OK to laugh?

This gives rise to a couple of thoughts. First, schadenfreude, which is taking pleasure in another’s pain, is indeed neither spiritual nor a virtue. Second, laughing at someone is not necessarily the same thing as taking pleasure in their pain. We can laugh out of embarrassment, or because the person has said something unintentionally funny, or because a sense …

A couple of great articles on McCain’s bad week:

Oh, the Drama!

McCain, the former fighter pilot who seems to have found his calling as a kamikaze politician.

The Bull Leaves the China Shop

…he’s proven to be a bull in a china shop–or, more accurately, a bull that 1) misleadingly says the china shop is in disarray before he enters; 2) vows not to leave until he cleans up; 3) enters and shatters everything in sight; 4) blames everyone else for the damage and 5) leaves, claiming a job well done.

Incidentally, I watched the debate at my father-in-law’s place and thought that McCain did well. In fact I thought that Obama was on the defensive and that McCain had the upper hand. Obama struck me as taking too cerebral an approach, much as Kerry did in 2004 with all these four or five-point lists, and that it was McCain who …