Malc's Blog

Home made amusement

2011-08-15T16:50:00.000+08:00

Yesterday I took our picture calendar off the wall to look at the pictures. I started putting it back but carelessly the picture side was facing the wall.
At this my wife began to laugh. Nothing amuses her more than watching me make silly mistakes, hearing about silly mistakes I have made, like filling my basket at the supermarket and reaching the cashier's desk finding I have no money with me. This kind of thing sends her into fits of hysterical laughter. She is waiting, and hoping, for the time when I start off to walk to the town having forgotten to put on my pants.
Anyway when I realised what I was doing with the calendar I started laughing too. I decided to give my wife a good hard smack or two. It's a thing I do sometimes, especially at moments like this. She was wearing very short, tightly fitting, thin shorts clearly showing every curve and valley, so a hard smack would land well and feel good. The first one didn't land right so I pulled her towards me, both of us convulsed with laughter, and gave her two more as hard as I could. Through the laughter, clinging perversely to me and getting the words out with difficulty, she always tries to say that I am the one who should get spanked, but I always reply that when I make a mistake, she must be the one to get spanked. That makes us both laugh even more. I have a sore hand, she has a sore arse. That's married life!

Accepting what is.

2011-08-14T16:04:00.000+08:00

Recently I've realised that to wish something was other than it is is worse than useless. By all means plan to change it (or leave it as it is); but don't waste any thought on regretting it.

My 15 year old son has taken to smoking. At first, I was dismayed; but then I realised that if I cannot control that, there's no point in anything except acceptance. Whatever he does, or doesn't do, I will still love him, so why spend time regretting?

I recently read the first volume of my father's diaries, which he kept almost without a break throughout his life. At the age of fifteen, he enjoyed smoking and his father was not against it, in fact even sent him a box of cigars for his birthday while he was away at boarding school. As far as I know, smoking had no bad effects on him.

Arguing with reality.

2011-08-14T08:10:00.000+08:00

When you argue with reality, you lose.

The Silver Swan

2011-07-22T10:34:00.003+08:00

The silver swan, who living had no note,
When death approached, unlocked her silent throat;
Leaning her breast against the reedy shore
Thus sung her first and last, and sung no more:
Farewell all joys! O death, come close mine eyes;
More geese than swans now live, more fools than wise.

The Cloud

2011-07-15T08:26:00.000+08:00

With thanks to Darryl Bailey, Dismantling the Fantasy
Once upon a time, a group of friends lay on a hillside watching a cloud. They had become fascinated with its appearance while walking in the country. It was a marvellous cloud, massive and surging, one moment appearing to be a house and the next a bevy of balloons. In turn there were forests and cities, animals and people, comings and goings, no end of activity.

As it so happened, an old man, a stranger, was wandering close by. When the group of friends saw him, they cried out in their excitement,

Old man, come join us! Come watch this cloud!

After hurried introductions and the shifting of bodies, he took his place within the group.

The afternoon passed pleasantly as the cloud continued to surprise. There were soldiers at war and children at play. There were creatures of the wild: birds, mammals, and fish, as well as beasts of work and burden. There was a mother and her child. There were the many scenes of life: birth, death, sickness, youth and old age. There were lovers and fighters, friends and enemies, the interaction of groups, and single, poignant portraits.
Time wore on, the afternoon dwindled, and eventually the old man stood to leave. He thanked his new friends and made his goodbyes, but hesitated, looking at the gathering.

May I ask you a question?

Of course, they replied, in their various ways.

Were you at all concerned for those we saw this afternoon?

Who? they asked.

The figures we saw in the cloud: the soldiers, the animals, the children.
The friends looked at each other, perplexed.

One answered, Old man, there were no people, no animals; there was only the cloud.
The others nodded in agreement.

How do you know that?

How do we know what?

How do you know there was only the cloud?

It’s obvious, anyone can see it.

See what?

There is only the cloud; it’s still there.

What about the forms we saw?

There were no forms; there is only the cloud and it has no particular form.

How do you know that?

Just look, and you can see it.

What do you see?

There are no forms there.

How do you know that?

Because they’re always changing. No form is ever really there; whatever form you think you see is always altering, rearranging in some way.

How do you know that?

Just look! That’s all you have to do.

There were no soldiers, no animals, no children?

No. It may have seemed like that, but there was only the cloud.

There were no soldiers deciding to fight, no lovers deciding to love?

How could those false appearances decide to do anything? There is only the movement of the cloud.

So the cloud decides to move?

No. The cloud does not decide to move. It has no form. It simply moves. That’s its nature.

How do you know that?

Have you ever seen a cloud that stopped changing? Every aspect of it is shifting in some way. It doesn’t decide to do it; it’s on automatic. The movement simply happens.

There were no people? There was no birth and death?

Birth and death of what? There is only the cloud. It seems like many forms coming and going, but it’s always only the unformed cloud.

And no one is deciding to do anything?

No. The forms that appear to be there are not really there, because each one is altering in some way and eventually disappears. There is simply action or motion. The forms are not the reality; they are false appearances. There is only movement, a streaming that has no particular form.

But the lovers who moved closer together …?

There were no lovers, no soldiers, no animals. There is only the cloud.

The old man pondered this slowly.

There were no forms there? No decisions to act? No birth and death?

That’s right! said the friends, thinking they had finally gotten through to him.

But how do you know that for certain?

Just watch! The forms that you see are changing all the time. They never stop. No particular form is ever really there. If you had to describe a cloud, you wouldn’t say it looked like a horse or a soldier. That wouldn’t give you a true sense of the cloud. A cloud is constantly changing. The appearance of form is not the reality. The altering is. That’s the basic fact. There is no coming or going, no birth or death, no decisions being made, no matter how much it seems like that. There is only motion. Anyone can see that if they watch it long enough.
The old man considered this carefully.

You’re absolutely certain?

Yes! We’re absolutely certain.
And you can tell all of this from seeing this constant change, this motion, this dynamic?

Yes.

The old man contemplated this.

May I ask another question?
The friends remained silent, waiting.

Are you actually people?

What are you talking about? Of course we’re people.

But you’re changing.

What?

Everything you are – your bodies, thoughts, emotions, interests, urges, desires, capacities, decisions, focuses, ideas, activities – in fact, more than just you, all things that you know of.

What about them?

They’re constantly changing.
Yes, sighed the members of the group, they’re changing.

Do you change them?

No, old man, they simply ...
The friends stood staring at him, their minds racing, exploding to find some other response.
He gazed back at them. They looked.
He looked.
For what seemed to be a very, very, long time. Then he smiled, turned, and wandered away.

Suzanne Foxton's story

2011-07-06T15:54:00.000+08:00

Suzanne's blog is at http://www.nothingexistsdespiteappearances.blogspot.com/

Here is her story as told to Renate McNay. Actually, as she says, there is no "story".

More on our non-existence.

2011-07-05T10:31:00.001+08:00

Further to my last post in which I quoted Pir Vilayat Khan (1916 - 2004) as saying that "The assumption of being an individual is our greatest limitation," here is some amplification of this statement, from writing by David Carse:

"There is physical functioning and there is mental functioning. Physical functioning is experienced as bodily activity of various kinds. Mental functioning is experienced as thoughts and mental activity. And it is because of these activities, what the Buddhist tradition calls the skandhas, the thought processes, sensory perceptions, and so on, the functioning of the body/mind organism, that there is an assumption made that there is something, someone, here doing these things. But that’s an unfounded assumption. To perceive that the skandhas are empty of an individual self doing them, is to awaken. All there is, is Consciousness."

Pir Vilayat Khan was a Sufi (Islam), David Carse is expounding the ancient Indian teachings of Advaita (meaning "Not two") and quoting Buddhist teachings as well.

No-one has actually yet shown that an individuality exists. It's assumed, that's all. It seems obvious; but questioning what seems obvious is the way to find out something new, to make a discovery. At one time, it was obvious to most people that the Earth was flat and the centre around which Sun, Moon and planets revolved (although I have to admit this was not what much older civilisations, such as the Sumerians, thought). It took Copernicus to dislodge this erroneous view.

You think you are somebody?

2011-07-02T11:12:00.014+08:00

"The assumption of being an individual is our greatest limitation."

Pir Vilayat Khan

It is ... that investment in self-identity that continuously re-creates the illusion of separation from oneness. It is the dream of individuality.

Tony Parsons

There is no such thing as a person. There are only restrictions and limitations. The sum total of these defines the person. The person merely appears to be, like the space within the pot appears to have the shape and volume and smell of the pot.

Nisargadatta

Is this a record?

2011-06-26T15:21:00.000+08:00

I happened to catch sight of my wife's yahoo mail inbox page a few days ago. She had 30,638 - that's thirty thousand six hundred and thirty-eight - UNREAD emails in her Inbox. There are probably more now. If she sees me smiling, she will ask what's funny, and I tell her "thirty thousand six hundred ..." and before I can finish she will start laughing.

She's a person who finds it very difficult to throw anything away. Sometimes I will find in odd corners of the house objects that I threw into the trash bag a while before. Tidying the house is a very difficult task! I can't count the pairs of old, broken and worn-out shoes I have surreptitiously bagged up and thrown out, I have to be very careful not to let her see what I am doing, if she sees me she will tell me she is going to have them repaired, but from experience I know this will never happen.

Do any of my readers have this in their lives?

Hindsight

2011-06-23T11:32:00.001+08:00

OK, Kitty, here's a little more of my life story just for you!

In my last post I mentioned Jenny, a blonde, good-looking girl with a gentle temperament I knew at Bristol University. We met at a dance class, fitted together quite well and started going to dances and just for walks together. Once or twice we walked up to the Cabot tower on Brandon Hill - I remember the pouring rain and the reflections of the lights of the city in Jenny's rain-spotted glasses (John Cabot was actually an Italian but made a voyage of discovery starting from Bristol.) This was our view of the University from there:

More often we walked over the Clifton suspension bridge, where we stopped in the middle somewhere to kiss. I had to be careful that Jenny's glasses would not fall off and into the river Avon far, far below.

On this page there are some lovely panoramic views from and of the bridge.

One evening - our relationship was about six months old then - as we were setting out to go over the suspension bridge, Jenny announced that she was wearing her slacks "in the skin", by which I understood her to mean she was not wearing panties. Would that be right? You will find it hard to believe how innocent and ignorant of the ways of girls I was in those days, even though I had spent 18 months in the army: I read into that remark of hers no significance whatever. I'm really embarrassed to think about it even now.

We had crossed the bridge and were walking along a road then - and probably still, if I can judge by Google Earth - bordered by woods at least on one side, when suddenly, without provocation, Jenny slapped my face. I had no idea what prompted her to do this. She then invited me to retaliate, but I declined politely.

Soon after this incident, Jenny let me know she wasn't interested in me any more. If only I had known then what I know now! And there were plenty of bushes from which a handy switch could have been cut or broken off, too. I was such a wimp in those days - alas! Perhaps I still am??? I am quite sure ~~most~~ all readers of this blog will be able clearly to picture what should have been done.

Past Lives?

2011-06-19T10:43:00.003+08:00

Kitty, I'm so glad you liked "Liebesbotschaft." I listened to it again just before writing this, it never fails to start tears to my eyes and wonderful feelings somewhere inside me. The rippling piano accompaniment, an effective representation of the flowing stream, is not easy to play, though quite simple. Schubert's modulations (change of key) are so telling! In a few days I will post another of my favourite Schubert songs here. I have published the text of the words of Liebesbotschaft, in German and English, as a comment on that blog post, in case anyone is interested.

Dannah - you wanted to read about Elizabeth. She was a physics student in her 2nd year, I was still a first year student, though a year or two older than her. We both attended a lecture by CF Powell, Physics Professor, well known for his work on photographing the effects of cosmic rays at high altitudes. I saw this girl from my place at the back of the tiered lecture theatre, she was sitting somewhere down at the front, with her back to me. I immediately found myself seeing mental pictures of life with her in the Canadian forests (I have never told her about this.)

The details and chronology of my few meetings with her in Bristol are not clear in my mind, but I was to play the piano accompaniments to three of Vaughan Williams' "Songs of Travel" (poems by R.L. Stevenson) to be sung by another student at a public concert; I forget his name but I remember he was fond of archery. It's customary for an accompanist to have an assistant turn the pages of the music book while he is playing, and I asked Elizabeth - a good musician as are many scientists - if she would do that for me. I hardly knew her, but she agreed. That made that event memorable for me, having her sitting next to me and helping me at a somewhat stressful time seemed exactly right.

Just before the end of the academic year the Student Union Ball took place - the major social event of the year, really. Some time before that I had broken up with my previous girl friend, Jenny (that story might interest certain readers of this blog, too!), and had no one to take to the ball. I did not want to go alone. Elizabeth seemed to my inexperienced eye to be outside my league, as she seemed to know a lot of students and was a good deal more sociable than me, I thought she would have a number of invitations to choose from; I was very gauche and uncertain with women, however, I plucked up the courage to ask her if she would come to the ball with me and much to my surprise, she immediately agreed.

I had been used to dancing with Jenny, who was a fluid mover, easy to lead and we had often gone to dance classes together. Dancing with Elizabeth felt unfamiliar and a bit wooden (I'm sure she will not be reading my blog, but I think she would agree with me!). After the ball, in the early hours of the morning, I escorted her back to her Hall of Residence, and that seemed to be the end of that relationship, more or less. The year finished with little further contact that I can remember.

But it seemed fate had other plans; I kept running into Elizabeth, sometimes half intentionally, sometime quite by chance. While I was living in London I found out that she lived quite near me, in the house of a well-known conductor, and although I was already married then (but not happily), I visited her. We did exchange a few letters but they were not love-letters. I seem to remember even visiting her at her parents' home in a southern suburb of London. I met her once again by chance at a music camp somewhere in the South of England.

In due course I left London and took a job in Oxford. In a restaurant in Queen Street I ran into Elizabeth again, and we talked. I hadn't known she had moved to Oxford. She was then living in Chalfont Road, Oxford - a road I knew well as my cousin's grandmother had lived there and I sometimes visited. I lived with my aunt further out, and Elizabeth gave me a ride on the back of her scooter. This showed me once again a very weird and unusual effect: when I was with her, and for time after, I lost all interest in other women.

This has never happened with anyone else. What ever woman I happen to be with, and however much attracted to her I may feel, I never lose the impulse to weigh up other women I happen to see. But with Elizabeth, that impulse disappeared without trace. Sitting on the back of her scooter, she was the only woman of any interest to me. The attraction didn't seem to be physical sex, that never occurred to me. It took hours for this effect to wear off.

At the time of that ride, Elizabeth told me she was getting married, and told me her future husband's name. Since then, I never saw her again. I have never read the book on Schubert she wrote, though I would like to (the price is too high). I feel glad she has attained some measure of success and respect, she's a good woman and industrious too.

Human relations have many factors bearing on them, and past lives is one of the most interesting.

2011-06-18T21:51:00.003+08:00

Here is one of my favourite songs from one of my favourite composers - "Liebesbotschaft" (Love's Message), by Franz Schubert, sung by Petre Munteanu, a Romanian tenor. Schubert wrote it about 1828, the year of his death at the early age of 31.

Since boyhood Schubert's music has been a source of great pleasure for me, especially the two song-cycles "Die schöne Müllerin" (The Maid of the Mill) and "Winterreise" (Winter Journey); but this song does not belong to either of those groups. For me it exemplifies the unmatched ability of Schubert to conjure wonderful feelings with simple tunes and accompaniments on the piano.

P.S. I have added the original German words by Rellstab, and a translation into English, as a comment to this post.

(A footnote here: A definitive biography of Schubert has been written by a woman called Elizabeth whom I was very attracted to in my early twenties - i.e. about 60 years ago. I first saw her in a physics lecture given by C.F. Powell (a Nobel laureate) at Bristol University and immediately saw mental pictures of her living with me in the forests of Canada - in a previous life I suppose. The attraction was not sexual but seemed to have some other basis - but I won't continue this story as it really has nothing to do with Liebesbotschaft! Material for another post perhaps.)

Don't be a victim!

2011-06-13T11:21:00.004+08:00

Let's assume for a moment that there is something about my life I don't like and want to change.

I want to explore the idea that everything in our lives is a result of our beliefs.

I like this idea because it forces me to take responsibility for my life and to avoid thinking of myself as a victim. Once you get the feeling that you are at the mercy of others, you become a victim. Much better to look inside yourself and see if you can discover just what you have done or believed that has guided your life into its present state. ASSUME that you have done, or believed, something that has resulted in your life being as it is now.

Suppose you have a "disease", for example. Such as alcoholism, or cancer. Most people in the western world regard disease as something that has hit you, out of the blue: you are its victim. You have to take drugs or visit a shrink or a surgeon. You have to "battle the disease." Avoid this line of thought studiously and instead, regard the disease as an essential part of you, for the moment. The disease is telling you something you need to know. It's a cry from your body that something about your life has to change.

So far as I can understand, the need for alcohol arises because alcohol can cause you to forget or ignore painful feelings which you do not know how to deal with otherwise. In my case, I am not addicted to alcohol, I can go without it for many days and not feel the need to take it. I like it, however, and usually drink a little every day - say 3/4 inch of Tequila in the bottom of a small tumbler, and only after 5 p.m.

Now comes the interesting part: I have a tremor, very noticeable in my hands but present elsewhere in my body. It is present all the time. It's worse in my right hand than in my left. It makes writing extremely difficult, for example signing my name to withdraw money at the bank. Lifting a cup of coffee to my mouth requires both hands to avoid splashing it everywhere. When it first became noticeable, about three years ago, I thought there must be some nervous damage, and I remembered that my father also had this tremor. Perhaps it's inherited?

One day I inadvertently poured too much Tequila into my glass, almost twice as much as usual; nevertheless I drank it all and became slightly tipsy. It happened that I needed to sign a document that evening. I discovered to my astonishment that I could write perfectly well, there was no sign of a tremor. Next day, the tremor was back.

A little research on the internet showed me that this phenomenon is known in medical circles: alcohol relieves tremor symptoms; but nobody knows how that works. Of course, it is no use considering it as a cure, as I would probably become addicted to alcohol. But it showed me that alcohol was allowing me to stop doing, or believing, whatever it was that was causing the tremor. It showed me that my nervous system was working properly, not defective. If something was inherited, that something must be somewhat insubstantial, like a belief, for example. Just what exactly is it that I am doing, or believing, that causes it?

I haven't found that out yet - sometimes ordinary life is too interesting to spend time introspecting like this. (excuses, excuses.) Then again, it is very difficult to expose one's basic beliefs as one is so close to them and so used to them one doesn't recognise them as beliefs, even. If in this case the alcohol is doing its job of causing me to forget, temporarily, painful beliefs, what can those beliefs be? Must be something that's basic to my life.

(I'll continue this later, time is running out)

The "Little House on the Prairie"

2011-06-12T21:41:00.000+08:00

Emilie and others suggested "The Little House on the Prairie" series as good reading matter, and I bought the first 5 books from Amazon. I enjoyed them very much and finished to lot in about three days. I won't buy the others, though. What a life! It certainly makes one wonder if the automobile is a blessing or a curse. I don't have one and don't miss it.

Sorry for not explaining my absence

2011-06-12T10:22:00.000+08:00

Saffy, Sue - and other readers, I do appreciate your concern. Yes I'm fine. Just suddenly, blogging became empty, meaningless. I am not a consistent person, my life is full of U-turns! I'll probably get back to it some time soon. I haven't been reading any blogs either. Spending much less time on my computer and more on everyday stuff like mending things, reading books, making jam. Trying to understand the nature of reality: it appears certain that there is no reality "out there", it's all within us; but how do we alter our beliefs to accommodate this apparent fact? Otherwise it is just a useless piece of book-knowledge. We have to be convinced in our hearts that that is the way things are.

To one who forgot the meaning of love

2011-05-03T12:11:00.001+08:00

I'm one who felt that celebrating Osama's death was not something I would be happy with. "The scales of Justice" is a fiction and no one can balance them. Maybe his death was necessary for self-defence, but I cannot see it as a happy event.

In some ways, I felt sad. Sad that people were celebrating someone's death because he was dead, not because his life was worth celebrating. Somehow, it seemed very mean-spirited and ungodly to celebrate the death of someone who had forgotten the meaning of love. Instead I wanted to send him a prayer of love to help him recover, to know that someone cared for him, that someone wanted him to turn to his God, not away from Him.

It's all in the mind!

2011-05-03T11:22:00.004+08:00

Every morning I walk into the town, a distance of just under a mile. Sometimes my feet feel stiff, and I seem to lack energy (I do reluctantly classify myself as an old man). The journey is something of a chore. But suddenly I spot, walking in front of me about 50 yards away, the back view of a young woman of pleasing proportions and interesting movement.. Miraculously, my tiredness vanishes, my feet are willing and I speed up so that I can overtake her and see if she is as pleasing from the front as she is from the back.

Even after passing her, I still have that burst of energy right to the end.

Though in theory I know that my thoughts and desires control my actions more directly and more effectively than my will, it always surprises me when it happens so obviously.

Shit happened

2011-04-27T11:27:00.001+08:00

Mouse posted an account of her doings with one of the toilets in her house, and it reminded me of the last time we dealt with ours. I made a long comment on that and since it illuminates our life here in Philippines, I reproduce it as a post on my blog:

Spewing shit is nasty. Ours does that sometimes, then the pipe to the septic tank has to be cleaned out with a long length of hard plastic tubing. It comes back out of the pipe all shitty, you haven't to be afraid of handling shit and fortunately neither Rose nor I are afraid of it. Plumber, you are saying? Don't make me laugh.

The last time shit happened - just a few months ago - the clean-out didn't work, so we had to take the top off the septic tank and poke about in the inlet pipe, the configuration of which I had forgotten.

In the end, I decided more radical action was needed, so I cycled into town and asked the septic tank man ("Poso Negro", no idea what that means) to come and empty ours since it hasn't been emptied for 20 years, and he drove up baclwards with a big truck and a couple of strong young men who also were not shit-scared and the pump in the truck sucked it all up in about 30 minutes. Top back on, useless plastic tubing left in the hot sun to dry then coiled up, hands washed: back to normal.

Morning housework

2011-04-27T09:14:00.003+08:00

Our dining table was getting very worn-looking and Rose decided to polish it. That scrubber she is using is a slice of coconut shell, and the fibres make excellent polishing brushes for floor or furniture. It will last for a long time and costs us nothing as we have cocos in our yard.

P.S. Here's an interesting little article - could be expanded I'm sure ...

2011-04-26T12:01:00.002+08:00

Today I went to read a blog I enjoy and the latest post told how she had to stop posting for a while and could not reveal the reason for fear it would identify her and her family.

I always feel bad when I think of how we have to disguise ourselves in order to live comfortably. That's why I don't disguise myself in my own blog. I have no reason to hide anything, although I understand that many believe they do.

I wonder what would happen if everyone lived their lives openly? No aliases? Would it be good, would life be even possible? What exactly would go wrong, if anything? Are there people who live their whole lives with no secrets, and if so, how does it go?

P.S. I'm not just talking about D/s here, I'm talking about the whole world, a world where Wikileaks would have no impact. I have often thought about this.

Why am I so interested in blogs written by submissive women?

2011-04-21T11:57:00.002+08:00

I an trying to understand my self and my marriage here, that's all. Anyone is welcome to add their comments.

I find some of the blogs written by submissive women fascinating. To me, those women have exceedingly attractive qualities. My wife has elements of submission: she asks what to do in many workaday situations; she consents to my spanking her whenever I wish, though she does not like it; she tells me where she is going, and if I ask, her purpose; she agrees to certain rules, such as no internet use before lunch; she asks what I would like in any situation, if it's not already known. In the twenty years we have been married, she has never refused sex, though occasionally has not been very co-operative. She does have two bad habits: collecting clutter and neglecting necessary housework; but she doesn't smoke, use bad language, spend money unthinkingly, or indulge expensive tastes. She has very useful healing gifts with which she can relieve the aches and pains of her friends and relatives.

Yet, somehow ... something seems missing. There's no passion, and she doesn't seem to want any.

She does not submit with her thoughts. Her heart does not belong to me. If I ask her what she is thinking (something I seldom do) I will not get a credible answer. She is very secretive with her mind. If she seems to be having difficult thoughts or feelings, she will never volunteer them to me. If I try to have a conversation about something, I will be doing 99% of the talking. I can wait for a long time for some input from her. Yet if she gets on the phone with a friend, she can talk almost non-stop for 45 minutes, and the friend may not be getting many words in edgeways.

Another blogger has recently quoted this poem by Paelus, found on the-iron-gate.com:

Surrender

Trust Me with your heart.
Place it in My hands,
To crush or caress.
Trust that I will not hurt you.
Give it to Me because you desire Me to possess it,
Not because it is My will.

Trust Me with your mind.
Place it in My hands, also,
To destroy or reshape.
Trust Me to mold it according to your needs
Not simply to suit My own purposes.

Trust Me with your body.
It too, place in My hands.
Mine, to batter or protect.
Trust Me to keep you safe
And to provide for you that which is needed
to ensure your happiness.

Trust Me with your very soul.
Place it in My hands, as well.
Lay it bare before Me, vulnerable to My will.
Trust that I will guide you safely through the darkness
protecting your interests at all times,
regardless of My desires.

Above all, trust Me with your complete and total surrender.
Trust that I will honor and cherish
your submission to Me
Trust that I will not abuse this gift
That you so lovingly give to Me.

I appreciate that this may appeal to some, but it's not something I need. If a woman asked to give me that degree of submission, I believe, if I liked her sufficiently and circumstances allowed, I would accept and do my best to fulfil the responsibility. But I prefer to watch and encourage people to grow in their own ways, not in some way that I have decided. I dislike giving people instructions more than once, and I certainly will not give instructions to do things which have no practical purpose, such that I often read about on some of these blogs. I don't like calling someone to account for sins of commission or omission. BDSM rôle play has very little attraction for me (I have tried it with my wife), only real-life, actual genuine situations and requirements interest me.

Well, that's all for the moment. I may continue this theme, especially if someone adds an insightful, relevant comment.

NOT a salve for sore butts

2011-04-16T20:47:00.006+08:00

I have been making hot sauce today. We like "Tabasco" sauce but it's expensive at $2.40 a small bottle so I make our own.

I buy a handful of small chili peppers ( called harang here), break off the stalks and chop them up a bit. Put them in about 300 ml water and simmer for 30 minutes. Add more water to about 100 ml if there is less than that left after boiling.

I then put them in the blender and run for about 5 seconds, then force the result through a fine mesh coffee strainer. Discard what won't go through. Add vinegar enough to double the amount of filtrate, add 1/4 tsp salt and mix. Pour into capped jar and keep in refrigerator.

The resulting product is EXTREMELY potent. Do not let it near your eyes, or any other sensitive membrane such as prick or cunt. Wash your hands carefully with soap after finishing. Avoid rubbing your eyes. I guess it could be applied to the skin post- or even pre-spanking to intensify and prolong sting, but I take no responsibility for the reactions! Use only microscopic amounts for any purpose. For food, we just dip a teaspoon in, pull it out and rub the bottom on the fishcake or whatever.

Reading the Story of O

2011-04-15T15:10:00.004+08:00

I read on someone's blog this afternoon that one of her training tasks was to re-read "The Story of O". This is not something I would want any sub or wife of mine to read. It's a story of abuse, abandonment and desolation and has little literary value, and is an example of how NOT to live, how NOT to care for someone. I certainly would not ask my wife to read it, and if I did and she started, I think she would soon give it up, probably wondering why on earth I suggested it.

If I were to give someone a reading task, it would be a book with broad human values depicted. Depending on the woman and her educational level, I might choose Anne of Green Gables; The Secret Garden; Sense and Sensibility; The Alchemist; Doctor Zhivago; Silas Marner; Kim; Great Expectations; even Madame Bovary or Jane Eyre.

The reason these classics are still widely read is that they deal fairly with universal human doings and feelings. Many of them I have read to my son (I have read to Claude more than 40 substantial books and uncounted short stories, fairy stories etc since he was 4 years old) and as a result he has a very wide vocabulary and an acquaintance with a little of the worlds great literature. This is the kind of reading I would ask a sub to do, because I know that after she has finished such a book, she will be wiser, and perhaps happier.

What would be the recommendations of others here?

Rough, angry speech to our son

2011-04-13T15:13:00.001+08:00

I have a problem with my wife's rough speech. So often when she talks to our son, she speaks roughly and makes it into scolding or some sort of confrontation. Claude often doesn't answer her until she has spoken several times, getting angrier each time, and this makes it worse. The more she shouts and gets angry, the less he wants to respond. I really don't like this, never in my own childhood was there any shouting or rough speech, I don't want it in my house now, but I don't know how to prevent it. I think probably my wife experienced it at home with her parents. She seems to find it quite normal.

There is another, related problem, too: when she speaks to Claude, Rose uses her own dialect, which Claude understands and speaks fluently but I do not, and I have not been capable of learning it, or even hearing it enough to distinguish the words. I don't like her having an argument with Claude in my hearing in a language I don't understand, and I have told Rose this several times but she takes no notice. My spirits sink low if I hear this rough speech with Claude starting. She does speak English to me, but is not fully comfortable with it, I have to pick my words carefully if I want to make sure she is understanding me.

I am not a dominant man and tend to withdraw if things are not going right between us.

Any useful suggestions?

Skipping the funeral

2011-04-11T11:50:00.000+08:00

Yesterday I typed out the Housework schedule I mentioned in a post recently. Earlier, I had told Rose that I wanted to get back to to it. She didn't jump for joy. Or, in fact, make any noticeable response. This is quite in character.

Right now she and Claude have gone to a funeral. I have not personally ever spoken to the deceased, so I stayed at home as funerals here mean walking a long way and spending much time with people one hardly knows - at least for me they do.

2011-04-11T11:41:00.002+08:00

Yesterday I sat at my piano as I had the urge to play one or two of Bach's chorales. I wanted to hear "Schmücke dich, O liebe Seele" (Adorn yourself, dear Soul). When I started playing it, tears sprang into my eyes and my fingers made mistakes.

How is that music can affect us? A succession of sounds only: or is it, perhaps, more than that?

The paradox of me/not me

2011-04-10T08:48:00.001+08:00

What we call reality is a strange business. How can we know it? Everything we see or perceive in any way is within us, yet if I can perceive something, I know that it is not me. I am doing the perceiving and cannot be perceived. I am a little piece of perceivingness, like a little window. Everything I can know about "reality", including its very existence, is within me, yet is not me. I have no evidence that there is anything separate from me, yet nothing I perceive can be me because I am the one doing the perceiving. It's a paradox!

Just turn this over in your mind, please, and tell me what you experience about it.

P.S. Perhaps I am not a "little piece" of perceivingness, but actually I am just perceivingness restricting its view?

The seamless universe

2011-04-10T08:36:00.000+08:00

In a recent comment, Steel Rose said: "The synthesis of body, mind and soul is the ultimate goal, yes?"

I am not sure about the synthesis of body, mind and soul. Perhaps the distinction between these three is entirely artificial, they are already one and we have divided them to make things more interesting?

In this universe everything is made of energy. Even solid matter is made of particles which themselves are simply packets of energy. There seem to be different types of energy and no-one has to my knowledge yet sorted out the difference between, for example, Chi and electromagnetic fields. Then there is the energy of the Zero Point Field. Whatever the truth about this may be, it doesn't seem likely that the universe is split into several unrelated fields.

What do others think about this?

2011-04-09T10:47:00.003+08:00

Coming up behind Rose as she was leaning over the table, and talking quietly into her left ear in a meant-to-be-menacing tone, "You're going to get fucked."

"hee-hee!" very quietly.

"And your arse smacked."

"Hee-hee!" even quieter.

Yep. Happened as predicted.

2011-04-09T10:35:00.001+08:00

Steel Rose made a comment on my post yesterday and this is a response to that.

Yes I understand your aversion to religion. I was educated in a boarding school where Christianity was taught, but later I realised that the people who had been teaching me had little understanding of what they were teaching. They felt that it must be useful but could not explain how. I abandoned that religious outlook.

Nevertheless, I came back - not to any Christian church, but to spirituality, when I began to understand the control our egos hold over us and how that control stunts and distorts our lives. I remember that after work one day, when I was about 25 and living in London, I stopped in a bookshop in Oxford Street and bought Eugen Herrigel's "Zen in the Art of Archery." Passing Hyde Park, I went in, sat down on a park bench and read the whole book through before continuing my journey home. I realised that the archery Master had something infinitely valuable to teach. Herrigel (whose education in philosophy was something of a disadvantage to him in this) after some years of lessons with the Master, suddenly one day became able to let "It" shoot. I understood then that somehow we have to let "It" run our entire life. That is, in a nutshell, what spirituality is all about, and what religion has hi-jacked to express in often distorted ways, mixed with power hunger.

What is "It"? It cannot be described or defined, but you know it when you see it!

Our egos are fearful of letting go their grip on us. Ego should be our servant, but it is our master instead. I see submission to another human as a metaphor for the longing to lose ourselves, lose our egos, with which we identify and believe to be our selves. When we break the ego's control there is a sudden realization - "enlightenment" in Buddhist terms - that we are not our egos.

We stop defining ourselves.

"It" takes over and our life is completely transformed.

Unfortunately, the ego is nothing if not tenacious and a few seconds, minutes or hours later we begin to question this and usually find ourselves back in its grip. But the step has been taken and never again will we feel so powerless.

2011-04-08T22:31:00.001+08:00

This was originally a comment on Tammy and Jake's blog, but I want to record it here.

My thoughts on letting go.

It's not only submissives that have this problem with letting go. Anyone who does spiritual work has letting go to do. I sometimes practise when I am walking every morning, my journey takes almost 15 minutes and if I don't lose my place on the way (I usually do) it can be fifteen minutes of letting go.

It's important to let go of the desire to let go. That may sound ridiculous but it's true: so long as that desire to let go is in you, you haven't done it and will never do it. Though it may feel like you are going to vanish into nothingness, it's not necessary to hold on to anything whatsoever. When we have let go of everything, life bears us up and carries us along. We become suddenly a hundred times more conscious, more alive.
One reason spanking helps is because your conscious mind is forcibly taken off its struggle, thus enabling it to let go. Subspace results.

A very interesting description of letting go can be found at the beginning of Eckhart Tolle's book "The Power of Now." Also read Tony Parsons' book "The Open Secret" for another radical letting go. You can find Tony Parsons on the internet, he has recorded an interview on youtube somewhere.

Usually letting go, when it happens, is temporary: a few moments of freedom, then the ego asserts its control again; but sometimes it is permanent and life-changing.

It's my view that submissive women are seeking the same release as the mystic seeking God. Just that they are doing it in different ways with different immediate goals. Everyone is doing it in the way that seems right for them.

2011-04-08T20:38:00.001+08:00

A neighbour asked us to a birthday party for her two-year-old son. Two years is considered a critical age stage here, and parties for this event are common. This one was to be held in the Girl Scouts building in town, a mile from our house. Four o'clock was the stated time, and Rose, who was already in town for other purposes, went there. As one might have expected, there was no-one there. Social events usually start about one hour after the scheduled time, and I must admit this irritates me, having been brought up in England by a methodical father. To me, this habit of un-punctuality is an instance of Filipinos being unable to do what they say they are going to do, and this attitude is largely responsible for Filipinos not being taken seriously by the rest of the world.

Rose called me to warn me not to come yet, so I had time to wash at leisure, feed the dogs and cat and scan the internet for any Forex trading opportunities: I didn't find any besides the trade that I had already closed a hour before (at a profit of $7.32.) Claude, who was fast asleep, having spent the entire previous night awake playing with his cousins at a vigil for a dead relative, was obviously not going to come, so at about 4:45 I locked up the house and cycled off to the town, having first accomplished the tricky task of getting my bike out of the gate without letting one of the dogs out as well - our young male dog is an unruly creature and wily with it.

Arriving at the party, there were a great many people there that I did not know and a few that I did. I took some of the food offered and sat outside on a concrete slab in the big open space to eat it. I watched the sunlight shifting gradually on the buildings around and breathed in the cool evening air under a cloudless sky. Our hostess was trying to get me to sit in a more honourable place but I preferred the fresh air and some distance from the monotonous loud music. Rosie wasn't there yet, having gone to the shops to get a birthday gift for the little boy.

When she arrived, Rosie got food and sat with me while I wondered to myself how to get her back to working the housework schedule I instituted about a year ago and which she gradually abandoned without my doing anything about it. I really dislike telling people to do what they already know they should be doing. The men in the blogs I read, who seem to be all take-charge types, don't have this problem!

Buying Fish

2011-04-06T17:24:00.000+08:00

Went to the fish market this afternoon to buy fish for the dogs. Tamban (small silver coloured fish 4 to 6 inches long that we like to eat smoked) is my usual choice. As soon as I arrived there, a woman offered me Tamban at 40 pesos (less than $1) a kg, so I bought 2 kilos. They were smaller than average and the price was lowish. She put in about ten extra fish so I got more than 2 kg. I could have tried bargaining and she probably would have agreed to 2 kg for 70 but then she wouldn't have put any extra in for me, and our cooking pot holds just over 2 kg so I handed over 80 pesos without discussing price.

Facebook sucks

2011-04-06T09:35:00.004+08:00

I closed my Facebook account yesterday, it's too difficult to arrange my stuff as I want it, too difficult to delete and correct stuff. Facebook likes everything their own way and this doesn't suit me. So I'm going back to blogging.

I'm at a loss to understand how Facebook has become such a valuable company. Where do they get their money from? From advertisements, I suppose, but who would buy anything through an ad on Facebook? Not me, anyway.

I shut it down in a fit of annoyance, without explaining to my contacts there first. I should have done that I guess, but I'm not going back in again just to do that. Have to tell them some other way.

A blog I like to read:

2008-12-04T18:47:00.001+08:00

Fantastic Spanking: Allow Me To Introduce Myself

2008-12-04T13:14:00.005+08:00

These questions were found here:

http://wednesdayweird.blogspot.com/

1.) If you knew one of your close friends was cheating on their significant other, would you get involved? (EX: Tell their SO, try to talk to your friend about it, etc) Why or why not?

I would be interested, but would not take sides or pass information. Don't want to spoil the fun or do any damage.

2.) If your SO was cheating on you and one of your close friends knew, would you want them to tell you? Why or why not? Yes I would want to know, as I believe it highly unlikely; anyway she shares information about her online male contacts with me, and has occasionally mentioned real life attractions too.

3.) Have you ever stuffed your bra or underwear to make the size of your breasts or penis seem larger? NO

4.) Would you sleep with a friend's significant other behind their back if it were guaranteed you'd never be caught? Maybe ...

5.) Do you think you are more intelligent than your significant other? Intellectually yes, but socially she is more intelligent

6.) Do you ever fantasize about cheating on your significant other? Are you ever tempted to really go through with it? Yes; and No

7.) Have you ever had cyber sex, text sex or phone sex with someone other than your significant other during a relationship? Not in my present marriage; but in my last marriage, yes.

8.) Would you cheat on your significant other twice monthly for half a year to have all your debt permanently erased? No debts, sorry!

BONUS! Have you ever fantasized about having sex with any blogger friends? Would you be daring enough to reveal five of them? You want FIVE?? Not blogger friends, but others. No revealing though.

how to be happy

2008-12-04T12:11:00.002+08:00

I came across this article from the Christian Science Monitor. I agree with most of what she says, only that I don't think "Expect less" is the answer, though "want less" certainly is.

"

Want less, spend less – wealth is relative to desire

It's when we are satisfied with what we have, that we become rich.

By Diane Cameron

from the December 3, 2008 edition

Guilderland, N.Y. - We are concerned about the economy. We worry about the stock market, investments, and retirement. We hesitate to open bank statements. We are told: It will get better. It will get worse. It will rebound.

How do we cope? We have to make do with less. Lots of articles offer advice: Eat at home. Take the bus. Rearrange, don't redecorate.

At the heart are these questions: What can you live without? Can we be happy with less? Can we do it when the American way seems to be distilled lately to all about believing that we need and deserve more?

What I keep thinking about is what it was like when I really did have less.

In my 20s I lived in Washington, D.C., and made $13,000. I had an apartment and a car. I packed my lunch and saved up to go out for dinner. Was I really as happy as I remember? Yes. Most of us probably were. The reason isn't complicated.

We wanted less.

I was proud to be paying rent. I wanted to drive instead of take the bus so making the car payment for my used 1971 VW Beetle was great. I bought clothes on sale or at consignment stores, and when friends moved they passed along furniture they didn't want.

But over time, through reading and traveling and meeting people, I learned about nicer cars and better clothes. I bought into the status symbol they stood for. I began to want a real couch and a newer car and I began to fantasize about someday buying a house. Later my hopes included owning a Subaru and – I laugh to remember this – I thought I'd have the perfect wardrobe when I could buy one (yeah, one) really good purse.

Today, four houses later and many closets filled with shoes and purses, I can feel deprived simply by thinking about making my car last a couple more years. Everything I have now is nicer than what I had at 25, but it's easy to feel poor. Why? Because I have seen – and imagined – better.

Wealth is relative to desire.

Every time we yearn for something we can't afford, we become poor – regardless of our resources. It's when we are satisfied with what we have, that we become rich. The hard part is understanding that and adjusting accordingly.

We know there are nicer things and we see people who have them. For this you can blame television and magazines.

Through them, we can see easily what others buy and own and wear. Every new thing whispers its promise of happiness then gradually slides into the background of everyday life. Then we notice that someone else has a different or nicer thing. And we suddenly need it, too. This isn't the same as ambition or reaching for a goal; it's more about tweaking how we think about what we want.

This is why many of us recall feeling better when we were younger. We felt as if we had enough because we hadn't yet begun to compare ourselves with others. We didn't expect that we should have a lot more. It's our expectations that trip us up. We substitute one material desire for another, convinced each time that the next whatever will make us happy. And we then seek out that happiness through spending money.

But what we need is less desire, not more money. There are two ways to make a man richer, writer-philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau reasoned: Give him more money or curb his desires.

The solution this year: Expect less and want less. Perhaps the way to sort a real desire from just wanting is to wait a few weeks and see if the want changes. Or maybe to listen carefully to the dialogue inside. Is the inner voice saying "I like this" ... or "They will be impressed"?

• Diane Cameron is a freelance writer living in Guilderland, N.Y."

Visual delights

2008-11-22T11:22:00.004+08:00

Yesterday I was walking around in our lot, looking at the plants and whatever else was to be seen. I noticed the beautiful patterns made by the differently shaped trees of the many species we have. Over the roof of the house, against a grey, watery sky I could see the feathery leaves of one small tree and in front of it but not obscuring it were the round, regularly spaced leaves of a bauhinia. They made such a beautiful contrast in shape and shade of green, the bauhinia being a solid dark green and the other a much lighter shade. Visual delights are something I very much appreciate.

I went to the kitchen window, knocked on it and beckoned Rose to come and look too. We stood together, me behind her holding her gently, and gazed at this sight for a minute or two. Later she told me how much she enjoyed standing there with me holding her. It's unlike her to offer this kind of information and I was delighted to hear it.

dancing thanks

2008-11-21T19:08:00.004+08:00

I made fried meatballs and fried egg with rice for supper, and cooked some green beans too. Claude helped, particularly with coating the meatballs ready for frying.

We sat down and ate with enthusiasm. After he had finished eating, Claude jumped up, and while doing a kind of rotating, jumping dance, said "Thank you for the very, VERY nice chicken-coated meatballs (jump, turn) and fried egg (jump, turn) and rice (jump, turn) and beans." He then disappeared back into the computer room.

He always thanks me for the meal but doesn't always do a dance to go with it.

Caring for others

2008-02-13T09:03:00.002+08:00

"When the oxygen mask drops, put it on yourself first!" This advice for aircraft passengers applies to other situations, too. If I don't look after myself I cannot look after others properly.

The pond puzzle again

2008-02-10T02:59:00.000+08:00

Well, the mystery is solved: it leaks (see previous post).

One morning last week we actually noticed that the water was lower than it had been a few hours before. But it doesn't leak all the time. A good heavy shower or a morning's steady small rain will replenish it, so we aren't going to do anything about it - yet.

Here's an interesting snippet. I haven't read the book and I had decided to stop reading books to acquire more knowledge and try and use the knowledge I actually have, such as it is. I might fall for this one, though.

Carol Ritberger, Ph.D., is a medical intuitive, radio host, and an innovative leader in the fields of personality typology and intuitive medicine. She is the author of Your Personality, Your Health, What Color is Your Personality?, LOVE...What's Personality Got to Do With It? and Managing People... What's Personality Got to Do With It?
As the result of a near-death experience, Carol can literally see the human aura to identify where there are energy blockages that prevent the body from functioning properly.

This book is the result of 25 years of using that ability to gain an understanding of why we become ill and learning how the impact of stress, emotions, and personality type have on the health and well-being of the physical body. Her education includes personality behavior psychology and behavioral medicine. She holds doctorates in religious psychology and in esoteric philosophy and hermetic science.

Learn more about Carol by visiting her website at ritberger.com. You can also listen to her every Friday 12:00pm - 1:00 pm PST on her Internet talk show. Just log on to HayHouseRadio.com.

A mystery

2008-01-02T15:40:00.006+08:00

A weird thing happened the night before last. We have a small goldfish pond, 2 meters square with an average depth of about 0.5 meters - i.e. it holds about 2 cubic meters of water. When I went to feed the fish in the morning, the water level was about 8 inches below its normal level. At first, I though there must be a leak; but the level was not falling, so I discarded that idea.

Having thought about it, I think someone must have come in to our lot and taken a lot of water. Were they wanting the fish? We have so many, hundreds of small ones, I could not tell if any were missing. The two big ones we have were still there.
Problems:
1) the amount of water taken was about 2 x 2 x 8 / 39 cubic meters - about 0.82 cubic meters. This amount of water weighs 820 Kg. There must have been a lot of hard work removing 820 Kg of water in the middle of the night. They could have siphoned it out with less work, but they would not get many fish that way, if any.
2) What did they do with the water? The ground was wet with rain, we could not see any signs of excessive water nearby.
3) Why did our three dogs raise no alarm? They are normally good watch dogs and they were out there in the yard, free to roam about. My wife went to bed after 01:00 and I woke and got up at 03:15, so there were only two hours when there was no one awake that night to hear a disturbance.
4) Who would want so much water and what for? Anyone wanting water had only to draw it from the well a few yards away and easily accessible, there is no shortage of water here at this time. If they wanted the fish, what for?

My wife thinks it was not any human that did it. OK, what then?

The pond is now full again, we have had rain since then and a pipe from the gutter provides a lot of water during a shower.

re-setting a tooth

2007-12-20T10:28:00.000+08:00

About a year ago a tooth of mine was hurting, and it was loose. It was an upper right molar and very useful. I visited my dentist and she told me it would have to be extracted, if not root-canaled.

I made an appointment to have it extracted, but fortunately for me, when the time came the dentist could not make it there. I let it slide. The dentist went abroad - married an Italian man.

I practice Qi-gong, and I began to notice that during my practice, I could feel my tooth being affected in some way, as if energy, or something, were going there. Over the next few months, my tooth became less and less troublesome. Now, a year after the missed appointment, it feels almost completely healthy - though not so strong as it should be.

Water - a fascinating substance

2006-03-28T14:43:00.000+08:00

From Gary Craig's EFT newsletter

By Deirdre Brocklebank

I have been asking myself could there be more to the vibrational impact of EFT on the body than we realise? For instance, how does the tapping impact on the body outside the energy system? As an adult body is about 70% water it seemed to be appropriate to begin my research on this. This focus led me to the fascinating work with water by internationally renowned Japanese scientist Dr Masaru Emoto and the correlation between his principles and those of EFT.

Of particular relevance to EFT is that after many years of research Dr Emoto has demonstrated that molecules of water are affected by our thoughts, words and feelings. Since the earth and humans are composed mainly of water his message can be seen as one for personal health, global environmental renewal, and a practical plan for the creation of peace that starts with each of us. Dr Emoto regards his work as a exploration of how the cosmos works. Water has taught him about the ‘delicacy of the human soul and the impact that “love and gratitude” can have on the world.’

Dr Emoto has visually recorded the impact of different vibrations on water by freezing it and by photographing the resulting crystal formations. Some of his photographs are shown in his books “The Hidden Messages in Water” and The True Power of Water.”

The following principles are basic to Dr Emoto’s work and of relevance for EFT.

Water is the life force and it is sensitive to all vibration.
The entire universe is vibrating and everything has a unique frequency (sound).
The Universe is naturally in balance and harmony, and discord has a destructive vibration.
The words “love” and “gratitude” form the fundamental principles of the laws of nature and also of the phenomenon of life.

Every living cell requires water and we are dependant on the fluid flow in all the different systems in our bodies including the body's electrical system. Dehydration, will cause the energy system to be sluggish or severely repressed and this is one of the recognised causes of Psychological Reversal (PR) in EFT. For this reason, and also because people can become very thirsty while doing EFT, it is necessary to drink water during the session. Correct hydration is also essential for accuracy with muscle testing.

Dr Emoto discovered a close correlation between peoples’ emotions and affected body parts. Of particular interest to EFT is that he found that excess fear resonated with the kidneys. The kidneys maintain the constancy of fluids to our internal environment. They filter fluid from the bloodstream and are the major excretory organs. His findings concur with the Five Elements Cycle in Chinese medicine in which the kidneys are affected by the negative emotion of fear. In EFT the collarbone point is also the Kidney 27 point in acupuncture. I have found this to be a very powerful point in EFT which is not surprising given its connection to the kidneys, water and the emotion of fear.

Einstein’s Theory of Relativity explains that physical matter including the human body is made of energy at the sub-atomic level. The principle is universally accepted in the scientific world and the Science of Quantum Mechanics generally recognises that substance is nothing more than vibration. EFT practitioners have been successfully applying this principle for years and the clinical results prove it.

Dr Emoto calls this universal vibration hado which means “all the subtle energy that exists in the Universe.” Water is sensitive to hado and according to Dr Emoto, water acts as a mirror of the vibrations created in the world. This energy can be positive or negative.

Humans are each vibrating with their own unique frequency and have the sensory skills necessary to feel the vibrations of others. My EFT experiences have enabled me to develop my skills in this regard. As a result, I now often intuitively tune into the subtle as well as the stronger more obvious emotions that my clients experience during EFT sessions with them.

I also feel a range of physical sensations that they too experience during the sessions. As our frequencies change, we literally resonate with one another. I believe this is because I tap together with the client and often speak the same or relevant words for the problems on which we are focussed. Gary has discussed this effect in his Borrowing Benefits concept.

Another phenomenon that I have experienced with EFT is that many of my clients tell me that after doing the technique they have unexpectedly been able to relate better to people with whom they previously had conflict. These were not necessarily people that they consciously addressed using EFT. So even though the person themselves has not necessarily made a conscious effort to “make peace” with another, their vibration had so changed after the EFT that they experienced greater resonance with the other’s energy. I believe that it is highly likely that this change has occurred as a result of tapping into the meridian system plus changes in the vibration of water in the body.

Dr Emoto has developed a device that measures various vibrations of the body at cellular level. He has expanded its use to measuring hado in his development of hado medicine for which the fundamental principles are vibration and resonance. According to Dr Emoto, “When the cellular vibrations in different parts of the body are disturbed due to various reasons, our body can make a wrong turn. When this situation occurs, a new external vibration can be given to the disturbed cell so as to resonate with it, thus, its intrinsic vibration is restored.”

The description of how these principles work aligns very closely to the Psychological Reversal phenomenon in EFT. This is caused by self-sabotaging, negative thinking which often occurs subconsciously and is therefore outside our awareness. It is a polarity reversal in the body’s energy system –the energy is there but it doesn’t flow correctly. It is generally present when a person confuses words, numbers and/or concepts and when they are thinking negatively, and acting irrationally and irritably when they are doing EFT.

In EFT, the correction for Psychological Reversal is made by tapping (ie introducing new external vibration) and making a Setup statement which acknowledges the problem (negative words) and creates self acceptance despite the problem being present (positive words). This changes the vibration in the meridian system, and most likely in the water in the body as well.

Of great significance to EFT is Dr Emoto’s contention that water carries information both negative and positive to all the cells in the body, coupled with his visual recording of water’s ability to understand the meaning of words.

He discovered that the vibration from negative words has the power to destroy, whereas, the vibration of the “good” words has a positive effect. The words may either be written or spoken. He considers that all the vibrations both good and bad impact on water in the body. This has a profound impact on our health and general attitude and demeanour.

Tapping into the meridian system with EFT while stating negative and positive words also has a profound effect. This is because when a disruption of the energy system is calmed and relieved, the person no longer experiences pain and/or or negative emotions from the original memory or thought, as the associated feeling has been “disconnected” according to Sylvia Hartmann, the founder of EmoTrance.

Dr Emoto also discovered that water exposed to the written words “love and gratitude” produced the most beautiful and perfect of all the crystals that he recorded. He contends that these words form the fundamental principles of the laws of nature and the phenomenon of life. He found that while “love” has healing powers on its own, the words “love and gratitude” together form immunity in healing. EFT incorporates the words “love” and “accept” into the Setup statement. Even though acceptance of oneself is a type of gratitude it could be even more beneficial, given Dr Emoto’s research, to incorporate the word “gratitude” and other similar words expressing thanks when doing EFT.

Dr Emoto states that words spoken with determination have strong powers. He was able to observe this in 1999 when 350 people assembled to pray for the cleansing of Lake Biwa in Japan. The algae that normally formed in the lake did not appear that year. He used Einstein’s equation of E=MC² to explain the phenomenon of the healing of the lake. He considers that the “C” can equate to “consciousness” as well as to the speed of light which is the normal interpretation. In this case “M” could equal the number of people consciously focussed. This concept is not new to EFT practitioners who have experienced Gary’s Borrowing Benefits phenomenon, as referred to earlier.

Everyone knows that negative emotions and feelings are a part of us. It is also quite obvious that with an attitude of positive thinking our health often improves.

Dr Emoto believes that we can correct our hado by using the opposite word. So for example, “hate” has a opposing frequency to “gratitude”, “anger” to “kindness”, “fear” to “courage”, “anxiety” to “peace of mind”, “pressure” to “presence of mind” and so forth. The EFT work by Patricia Carrington on choices beautifully exemplifies the efficacy of this.

Dr Emoto’s research has also demonstrated that while words have their own unique vibrational frequencies these can be effected by the vibrations of the person speaking or writing the words. The implications for EFT centre on the importance of using the individual’s own words rather than only those of the therapist when tapping, unless of course there is agreement on the words.

The following is another of Dr Emoto’s findings that is worth developing for EFT. He found that water responds to intent so we can say positive prayers to water which gains the power to potentially answer our prayers. He believes that we can send stronger hado to water by praying in the past tense rather than the future tense, as though the prayer has already been answered. According to Dr Emoto we can make our thoughts and intentions stronger by doing this. He also believes that it is important to have a strong image of the desired result. Loudly vocalising the words gives off a stronger hado than writing them on paper. He suggests that a practical way to create your own hado water is by writing words on a piece of paper and sticking it to your water bottle with the words facing inwards. Dr Emoto recommends drinking five glasses of this water per day. If you don’t have a specific wish then he suggests using the words love and gratitude.

I decided to do a small practical experiment with four people and seven glasses of water to test some of Dr Emoto’s principles. The purpose of the experiment was to revise muscle testing in a workshop while testing whether written words could affect the taste of water. One person was muscle tested by three different people for glasses of water which were each exposed to one of seven words. These words were unseen by the person being tested and the testers, until after all the testing had been completed.

Results confirmed that water exposed to different words changed taste. When the person was muscle tested, “nice” tasting water tested strong and “not nice” tasting water tested weak. Three glasses tasted neutral. For these, the muscle response was very weak for water exposed to “ungrateful”, strong for “live” and very weak for “bad”.

The results were useful for finding issues to pursue with EFT. For example the person in this experiment liked the taste of, and muscle tested very strong to water exposed to the word “die”. However, on two occasions she didn’t like the taste of the water exposed to the word “live” and she muscle tested weak on this. When asked later how she felt about dying she answered that she was quite happy about the thought of it. By contrast, living was a challenge at the time because she was about to retire and was not sure about her financial future.

Conclusion

There is a strong correlation between Dr Emoto’s findings and EFT principles.

Dr Emoto’s pioneering research has provided sound evidence of the impact of thoughts, words and feelings on the body through the medium of water.

Whereas Dr Emoto’s work measures the impact at a personal and global level, EFT provides a therapeutic approach to influence and manage negative emotion at the individual level. Thanks to Dr Emoto’s work, it is now possible to understand more about the wider therapeutic implications of tapping into the meridian system through EFT.

Deirdre Brocklebank

Religious freedoms

2006-03-27T07:57:00.000+08:00

I personally do not see how it is possible to live peaceably on the same planet as people who insist that you should follow only their religion. Isn't this just bigotry? Also, in this particular case, prevarication?

For me, the sooner Islam and other organised religions disappear, the better. Doesn't look as though it's going to happen soon, though. If I believed in Satan, I would agree with those who say that organised religion is Satan's most successful achievement.

Christian Science Monitor

from the March 27, 2006 edition - http://www.csmonitor.com/2006/0327/p01s04-wosc.html

Conversion a thorny issue in Muslim world
By Rachel Morarjee and Dan Murphy
KABUL, AFGHANISTAN; AND CAIRO - Under pressure from the US, the Vatican, and other Western leaders, Afghanistan's fledgling democracy Sunday sidestepped a politically charged case in which prosecutors had sought the death penalty for a Muslim man who converted to Christianity.

Rather than pass judgment on Abdul Rahman, an Afghan who converted while living abroad 16 years ago, the court declared him mentally unfit for trial Sunday. "He is a sick person," said Mohammed Eshaq Aloko, Afghanistan's deputy attorney general. Afghan officials said Mr. Rahman would be transferred to a hospital for psychiatric evaluation.

The case has not only thrown a spotlight on the laws and practices of an Afghan government that the United States helped to install but is a reminder of the limits - sometimes severely enforced - placed on religious freedoms by many countries in the Muslim world.

While state executions for apostasy are rarely carried out, laws allowing them remain on the books in not only Afghanistan but in Saudi Arabia, Iran, and Sudan.

More generally, while countries like Egypt and Pakistan guarantee religious freedoms in their constitutions, they limit religious speech and local police frequently lean on people to recant if they seek to convert.

In recent years, religious tension between Muslims and Christians has soared in many countries, and states like Egypt and Pakistan frequently find themselves caught between extremists on both sides.

Last year for instance, Egyptian Christians and Muslims clashed over a girl the Christians claimed had been forced to convert to Islam. The Muslim side said the girl was a willing convert, and had married a Muslim.

In Pakistan, while apostasy cases are rare, vigilante attacks against alleged apostates and others thought to offend Islam are common. "There's not been a single case of apostasy in Pakistan in the last 10 to 15 years, at least not one that has attracted a lot of attention," says Najam Sethi, editor of the liberal Lahore-based newspaper, Daily Times.

But as much of the Muslim world, including Pakistan, takes a more negative view of America and its wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, there has been greater popular pressure on religious freedoms, with courts and governments usually reluctant to intervene.

In Pakistani villages, Muslims who convert to Christianity are occasionally killed by their own family members, to protect the family's honor. In major cities, Islamic militant groups have launched attacks against Christian churches for their supposed sympathy for America. In Alexandria, Egypt, last October, three rioters died as they sought to attack a church for distributing DVDs of a play deemed offensive to Islam.

This context is what has made Rahman's case so difficult for the secular- leaning and pro-US Afghan President Hamid Karzai.

"Afghanistan is in the eye of the storm, in terms of anti-Western feeling," say Mr. Sethi. "If the Supreme Court [had] upheld its decision, and then passed the buck on to Mr. Karzai to say, 'OK, it's up to you, you have the power of clemency,' then that puts Karzai in a bad spot as far as Islamists are concerned."

Sunday's pronouncement of Rahman by prosecutors and the judge as unfit would now seem to spare President Karzai this embarrassing quandary.

Ansarullah Mawlavezada, the judge who had been set to try Rahman's case, as well as other court officials, say that the case came to court after the family reported him for being a Christian. A lawsuit had been filed in a child-custody dispute, and his ex-wife alleged that he beat one of his two daughters while she was reading the Koran.

Rahman has said that he converted to Christianity when he was working for an aid agency in Pakistan 16 years ago.

Afghanistan is a deeply conservative country where 99 percent of the population is Muslim and an estimated 10,000 Christians can practice only in secret. Out on the street, many ordinary Afghans chimed in with the mullahs calling out at Friday prayers for Abdul Rahman to be put to death.

"The order of God is execution for this person and no one can change it. This person has denied God and the Koran and he should be punished in a way that will stop other Muslims from converting," said Sayed Saber, a 32-year-old in Kabul.

President George Bush, who called the case "deeply troubling," phoned Karzai last week to press for Rahman's release. Simultaneously, mujahideen who had been funded by the US in their fight against the Soviet Union, mobilized supporters across the country to press for execution. Karzai was caught in the middle. "It is a question of a tightrope for Karzai," said Paul Fishstein, the director of the Afghanistan Research and Evaluation Unit in Kabul.

The issue of religious freedoms is one in which, as in Afghanistan, modern laws are clashing with ancient traditions. Rahman's case illustrates a glaring contradiction between Afghanistan's constitution, which upholds the right to freedom of religion on one hand but enshrines the supremacy of sharia law on the other.

Most mainstream schools of Islamic jurisprudence call for converts to be executed. Though the Koran promises only hellfire for apostates and also says "there should be no compunction in religion,'' Islamic jurists have typically argued that execution is mandated, citing stories of comments made by the prophet Muhammad.

"The prophet Muhammad said that anyone who rejects Islam for another religion should be executed," said Mr. Mawlavezada, the judge.

Though some liberal Islamic scholars disagree, pointing out that no such rule exists in the Koran, they have been largely silenced in Afghanistan. Last year, Afghan writer Ali Mohaqeq Nasab spent almost three months in jail last autumn for an article questioning the traditional call for execution.

What happens next for Rahman is uncertain, though it appears likely that the government will find a way to sweep the case under the rug.

Officials said they're likely to allow him to go abroad for medical treatment.

"If his family can afford to send him overseas for medical treatment then of course we would give him a passport," says Mr. Aloko, the deputy attorney general. In that case, he would be free to seek asylum elsewhere and avoid a return to his homeland and its legal system.

• David Montero in Karachi, Pakistan, and Scott Baldauf in Delhi contributed to this report.

If like me your eyesight is deteriorating, read this and consider doing something about it.

2006-03-20T20:31:00.000+08:00

From Gary Craig's regular EFT newsletter
:

Vision problems affect a major segment of the world's population. As a result, glasses and contact lenses compete for being the #1 health aid on the planet. Fortunately, EFT can be a material boost for those seeking better vision and this detailed, well written article by Christine Wheeler, MA (from Canada) gives us creative approaches and insights into her personal pursuits in this regard.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

By Christine Wheeler, MA

In third grade, the school nurse conducted eye tests, which resulted in my first pair of glasses. I had 20/200 vision at age nine. That means that what most people see from 200 feet, I needed to be at 20 feet to see. It was considered normal in my family as everybody wore glasses. It was like a rite of passage to be fitted with my first pair of glasses just before my 10th birthday.

My vision continued to deteriorate and I had a new, stronger prescription nearly every year for the next 30 years. Finally, in 2004 my vision had been stabilized for a couple of years so I decided to have laser vision correction in June 2004. At this point, my vision was “off the charts” meaning that I couldn’t see the biggest letter on the eye chart and my vision was estimated at about 20/400. My left eye was worse than my right eye at about 20/500.

The surgery was quite miraculous and within four days, my vision was 20/40 in my right eye and 20/50 in my left eye. I had regular checkups over the next 6 months, and in December 2004, both eyes were 20/20.

I was working on the computer about 10 hours a day and noticed my vision changing in about February of 2005. I put it down to eyestrain and tried to take longer breaks from working on the computer. By the next month, the change in my vision was so alarming that I thought I might have a serious problem and made an emergency appointment with a specialist in eye diseases. Fortunately, he found nothing abnormal so I went back to my laser surgeon to see what might be wrong.

The vision in my left eye had deteriorated from 20/20 to 20/50 in just a couple of months. The optometrist said that this was very unusual and that I needed to come back in six weeks to see “how much worse it gets” and that the only thing they could do was another surgery on that eye. He took an infrared image of the eye that mapped the shape of the cornea.

Well, the challenge was issued and I decided to immediately start using EFT to correct my vision and avoid another laser surgery. I had six weeks.

So the tapping started and I tapped every day for about three weeks. I would tap every night before I went to sleep and sometimes I would sit and tap for 30 minutes during the day in addition to the bedtime ritual. I never rated my intensity when doing the tapping as I imagined the intensity to be the 20/50 eye test score. I did some general tapping on the issue and these I used daily:

Even though my vision keeps deteriorating, I deeply and completely accept myself.

Even though my left eye’s vision is only 20/50, I choose to have perfect vision in both eyes.

Even though everyone in my family has poor eyesight and I thought that was my destiny as well, I choose to have perfect vision.

Even though I can’t remember ever having perfect vision, I deeply and completely accept myself and forgive myself for any contribution that I might be making to my deteriorating vision.

Even though I can’t remember ever having perfect vision, I DESERVE to have perfect vision.

Even though the doctor expects my vision to get worse, I choose to believe that my vision can improve – it improved with this miracle surgery, it can improve with EFT.

Sometimes when the inclination to do so struck me, I did the entire EFT recipe including the 9 gamut and eye rolling. Sometimes I would rub the sore spot instead of the karate chop point, especially when I felt that I was tapping on issues that felt very deep rooted.

After a couple of days using the general statements, I thought about vision metaphorically and tapped on the following things:

Even though there are things ahead that I just don’t want to see....

Even though it is difficult for me to focus on a particular goal....

Even though it is hard for me to see something that is right in front of me....

These statements reflected the fact that I was coming to the completion of a large writing project and I was avoiding planning for the next stage in my career. While I was waiting until the end of the six weeks to test my vision, I was noticing that I started to see situations in my life more clearly and with more discernment. I was able to recognize more of those ‘coincidences’ that made life interesting.

After two weeks of tapping regularly, I sat down again for about an hour and thought about my eyes as entities separate from me. I had this huge realization that my eyes had been operating in a specific way for 75% of my life and they were in the habit of deteriorating – they didn’t know any better. Furthermore, I interfered with their deterioration by getting laser surgery so while I corrected the results of the deterioration; I had not corrected the Reasons for the deterioration of my vision. The following tapping phrases evolved during that hour.

Even though my eyes don’t know that it is ok to be able to see, I deeply and completely accept myself and give my eyes permission to see perfectly.

Even though my eyes are in the habit of getting worse and worse, I forgive my eyes and give them permission to get better and better.

Even though my sisters and I competed to see who had the worst eyesight, I forgive myself for playing this stupid game and I choose to have the best eyesight.

Even though everyone in my family has bad eyesight, I can still be a Wheeler and have perfect vision.

Even though I was taught to believe that nobody’s perfect, I deeply and completely accept myself and I choose to believe that I can have perfect vision.

While tapping on these phrases, there was a lot of yawning on my part and I knew that I was shifting something. When I felt inclined to do so, I included the 9-gamut and eye rolling.

Yet another thing occurred to me: I got my first pair of glasses just before my 10th birthday and got new, stronger lenses almost annually for the next 30 years. My laser surgery was a few weeks after my 43rd birthday. Following the intuition that I have come to rely on when using EFT for clients, and myself I tapped:

Even though my eyes always get worse for my birthday, I give my eyes permission to get better every year.

Even though one of the few things that I could always count on was that my eyes would get worse, I deeply and completely accept myself and forgive myself for being attached to deteriorating vision.

I tapped regularly for about 3= weeks and after that I tapped only when it occurred to me. At this point it no longer seemed very important to tap. A few days would go by and I realized that I had forgotten to tap. I was surprised to notice that the uncomfortable dryness that many people experience following laser surgery had subsided and despite the fact that I was still working on the computer for 8 hours a day, I was using eye drops twice a day instead of 5 or 6 times a day.

The six weeks finally passed and I had the infrared eye scan again to map the eye. The optometrist asked how my left eye vision seemed now. I told him that I thought that it was better about two weeks ago. He said that maybe I just got used to the lesser vision. He opened the eye chart to the last spot that I could read six weeks ago and with my left eye, I read the lines and kept reading, including the tiny letters at the side of the chart that said 20/20! He looked at the eye map and the shape of my cornea had changed slightly in six weeks. He had never seen that happen before.

In my six years of doing EFT, I have witnessed many remarkable shifts with clients, family, friends and myself. So, when I decided to do EFT for my vision, I did so with a sense of curiosity, hoping for the best. When I was told that my vision was 20/20 again, there was absolutely no doubt in my mind that it was because of my use of EFT. I had continued working on the computer and didn’t change anything else. As Gary says, “try it on everything”.

Chris

Christine Wheeler, MA is an EFT practitioner, writer, and researcher living and practicing in Vancouver, BC.

In Defence of Polygamy. Found on Beliefnet.

2006-03-16T11:38:00.000+08:00

excerpt

'I Would Never...Go Back to Being a Monogamous Wife'
Polygamous women speak out in defense of their lifestyle.
By Mary Batchelor, Marianne Watson, and Anne Wilde

In April 2000, the authors contacted more than 700 plural wives, asking them about their experience. They were promised anonymity because it is against the law and currently being prosecuted in Utah. Within six weeks, they received more than 100 responses. The comments were reprinted, organized according to the age of the respondent. Here is one from RS, a woman between 41 and 50 years old.

"I would never ever, worlds without end, even if I could control all events, willingly go back to being a monogamous wife. Even if I were to discount the possibility of eternal blessings, the blessings I enjoy here in this sphere are enough to cause me to become a she-bear when someone threatens them.

"As the only wife of a good man, I had a good marriage. We got along well, and our children were emotionally healthy. But at times I felt an unspoken demand to be all things to my husband: a great cook, an organized housekeeper, an inspired home-schooler and an individual who kept up with current events, pursued her talents, never fatigued, always remembered details, kept the family social calendar, emptied the mending and ironing baskets daily, never overspent, looked appealing at all times and looked forward anxiously for the moment he walked in the door. I tried to be all things, and my husband told me constantly that I was loved and appreciated. But I worried privately that my lapses stood out more vividly than my achievements.

"After a second wife entered the family, I saw my husband’s eyes full of new respect and approval as he looked at me. This approval came NOT from my willingness to let him have another wife, but from his deepened comprehension of who I was as a woman, what strengths and gifts I had that were not an automatic part of simply being female genetically but were uniquely mine. Suddenly, I was seen as I had always wanted to be seen.

"Our relationship improved in other ways. Simultaneously with the second marriage, we had to revamp the way we spent our time together. I couldn't be more cheerful tomorrow after a good night’s sleep because tomorrow he’d be elsewhere. He could’t vegetate in front of the TV tonight and spend time with the kids tomorrow because tomorrow there would be different kids. We couldn’t make tomorrow special as we were too busy today, since tomorrow wouldn’t be there for us. So we instantly found ourselves putting aside less important things to make time for the more important.

"Then there were the nights he was gone. At first I felt socially embarrassed trying to make new friends and having a "single’s" social life; but as I did, I found myself feeling more connected to all of God’s people on this earth than I ever had. I found that I hadn’t become a part-time wife, I had become a full-time human being.

"For years I prayed to know true joy, to have my marriage become the one I had dreamed of in my youth, and to understand myself and my place here among humanity. I would never have believed, had someone told me, that all my answered prayers would be wrapped up in one gift called plural marriage, but indeed they were. When I hear threats of our way of life being driven out of existence, the grief twists inside me. Please, please, don’t try to take away the thing that has made my life whole!

"I have no confidence that were I to be my husband’s only wife again, that the lessons learned here in plural marriage could successfully be applied in a monogamous relationship. I have the marriage of my dreams (No, that’s not true because I have never dreamed it would be this good) and two sweetheart sister wives who are my best friends and who sacrifice so that I might have happiness. So, my friend, this is no pretense. This principle is my happiness."

Excerpted by permission from 'Voices in Harmony: Contemporary Women Celebrate Plural Marriage,' written and compiled by Mary Batchelor, Marianne Watson, and Anne Wilde.

Religious lies - an exposure

2006-03-15T08:15:00.000+08:00

This a review (written by an Amazon.com customer) of the book "The Laughing Jesus: Religious Lies and Gnostic Wisdom", By Timothy Freke and Peter Gandy.

Timely, Compelling Read: Put On Your Seatbelt, July 26, 2005
Reviewer: Frank MacEowen "Gnostic Druid" (Nomadic) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)
This is one of the most compelling books I've ever read.

MOST mainstream Christians will attack this book. MOST mainstream Jews probably will too. And, I predict the authors will be probably be denounced by Islamic clerics at some point for their treatment of the religious personality Muhammad (which is very illuminating).

Freke and Gandy, working on the premise that Christianity, Judaism, and Islam were all originally Gnostic (deep wisdom) traditions, completely pick apart the Literalist streams of each tradition, and their scholarship totally slams the self-serving ego-driven political shenanigans of each of the faiths as well--again, specifically in their Literalist forms.

The Jewish Fantasy Factory:

The section on the Jews is absolutely fascinating and asserts from the historical record how a monism of Jewish identity as a people is a problematic idea; the authors suggest multiple sources for the Jewish ethnic roots, and go on to suggest -- again from archaeological evidence and the historical record -- that their mythic odyssey out of Egypt, and the Israeli claim to Jerusalem, is a complete fabrication, driven, in essence, by a religious and cultural identity crisis of sorts that still fuels the conflicts of today and is driven by Literalist interpretations of what was originally a myth-line.

A number of the formative myths in the Jewish tradition, the authors assert, are actually derived and inspired from exposure to Greek tradition, while they go through the Tanakh/Torah (the Old Testament) with something of a fine-tooth comb and, in a truly riveting manner, show how its authors were essentially attempting to synthesize a number of competing desert Pagan traditions in the region.

The Most Famous Man Who Never Lived:

The premise of the section on Christianity I was already familiar with, having read one of their other equally powerful and controversial books, Jesus and the Lost Goddess: The Secret Teachings of the Original Christians. But, again, I found myself truly fascinated to learn that certain books that comprise the "universally agreed upon" Christian canon (Matthew, Mark, Luke, John, Acts--renditions of Peter and Paul) were almost single handedly emphasized (Bishop Irenaeus), whose word-sculpting was, quite intentionally, attempting to suppress and debunk the Gnostic stream of Christianity (which relates to the Jesus myth more as a personal initiatory, archetypal, and transformative process rather than a literal historical set of events involving a quasi-divine/human person).

Freke and Gandy articulate with a real shine how Irenaeus was simply attempting to compete for followers in Rome at a time when it had become a spiritual marketplace of sorts. Irenaeus sought to establish a viable tradition in Rome, and in time, thanks to Constantine, it worked, for the Literalist version of Christianity was offered political support by the state of Rome and all other versions were declared as heresy (funny, isn't it; heretics declaring those following the path closer to the original essence as heretics?)

Almost with the same deftness of a detective story one finds in such fictional works as The Da Vinci Code (only this book is real), The Laughing Jesus unveils how the theme, archetype, and imagery of: 1) the virgin birth, 2) the idea of the Son of God, 3) the murder/crucifixion of the "godman", and 4) the resurrection, are all connected to a number of Pagan myth lines (worked with symbolically in various Mediterranean mystery schools for thousands of years) that actually pre-date Christianity (and its myth formation) by 1,000 years.

Going through each tradition and their version of "Godman" -- Egypt (Osiris), Greece (Dionysus), Asia Minor (Attis), Syria (Adonis), Persia (Mithras), and Alexandria (Serapis), to name only a few -- Freke and Gandy articulate how the myth-formers of Christianity, in essence, borrowed (plagiarized) from these earlier compelling themes. They also clearly assert that such myth-forming and myth-following is not a threat in the Gnostic Christian context, whereas in the Literalist vein everything is, well, taken quite literally -- and therefore poses a real threat to the authority upon which the Church bases itself.

Muhammad: From Mystic to Mobster:

Pardon my French, so to speak, but Muhammad [The Religious Figure] in the book gets a serious ass-whipping. One senses the disappointment in the authors that such a beautiful tradition as Islam could fall prey to the clutches of the individual ego of Muhammad later on in his life (as he turned military war-lord), and then --really by example-- be hijacked by Literalists within the Islamic tradition to assert their own political goals, but the authors also reiterate that it was predictable; that it happened with the Christians and Jews as well.

They describe Muhammad as someone who was profoundly influenced by both Jewish and Christian thought (and culture), and -- as a response -- initially began a powerful process of bringing forth a mystical path of Gnosis for the Arab world. However, they then describe, again drawing straight from the historical record of battles, and from lines within the Qu'ran, how, after having been snubbed by both Jews and Christians (not acknowledged as a prophet), Muhammad began to interpret his divine mission as one of imposing Islam on the world (not at all different in tone from the early Christian Church's Inquisition, or the evangelizing, missionizing, and proselytizing of a great many Literalist Christians today).

The chapter on Muhammad, which does give a nod to the Gnostic Sufis within the cultural milieu of Islam, is a compelling read that requires that we look at the personality and full psychological range of Muhammad. I also found it personally very interesting that such Islamic customs as ordering women to wear veils actually was derived from early Byzantine Christian practices.

The first half of The Laughing Jesus is a radical debunking of all Literalist interpretations of each of these traditions. The second half of the book is dedicated to exploring Gnosis in the present day, as educated people, what the authors suggest certain Christians, Jews, and Muslims *knew* and *know* was the truly transformative core of the traditions but which were hijacked by political agendas.

The fact that the real spiritual essence of each of these traditions was overcome by Literalist propaganda shouldn't cause a person to lose sleep at night. The fact that the holders and followers of each of these Literalist traditions hold the seats of power in global politics, however, is disturbing. This book touches on how this reality is a phenomenon that is dictating decisions that determine what is happening to our economy, foreign policy, and the environment (note: Armageddon-minded Christian Literalists don't really care about global warming or the financial viability of future generations if they believe it's all going to end up in a fire ball in the end anyway; why concern ourselves with sustainability, environmentally or financially?).

On the one hand, I find such a book promising. It can potentially shock some people out of religious apathy and/or cultural sleepwalking, or out of the absurd cultural monism and religious conditioning that leads toward the huge barriers to interfaith dialogue.

On the other hand, I find some of my own personal conclusions that I derived from the book to be troublesome; that given the particular ideologies that are running this country (Christian Literalists), and the particular ideologies that are *required* to oppose the West (Islamic Literalists), we could be barreling full steam ahead toward a much more prolific global clash than the likes of 9/11 or the Iraq war.

Hopefully not.

But, that is probably one of the clearest articulations in the book of all -- that the environmental crisis, as well as the conflict in the Middle East is all tied to Literalist propaganda, not just by Islamic Literalist/Fundamentalists, but also by Jewish Literalists and Christian Literalists/Fundamentalists alike.

The conclusion of Part One of the book (called The Bathwater), which I completely agree with, is that all of this is a formula for disaster if the leaders of these faiths, the practitioners of these paths, and the larger society as a whole does not find its own authentic Gnosis. This is where Part Two of the book (called The Baby) comes into play...which I won't comment on because it would be like telling you the end of a really good movie.

Summary and Conclusion:

Practicing Christians, Jews, and Muslims definitely need to read this book. Everybody else probably should too, because much of what it describes assists greatly in understanding what is both truly redeeming in each of these wisdom traditions, while also helping to paint a clear picture why each of these traditions are also being hijacked by a narrow-but-widening band of religious psychopaths who could end up making Armageddon a self-fulfilling prophecy.
--Frank MacEowen, M.A., (...)

How to deal with a very big threat

2006-03-14T13:06:00.000+08:00

True Story of Courage and Love - by Dave Kuzminski.

Walking down a path through some woods in Georgia in 1977, 1 saw a water puddle ahead on the path. I angled my direction to go around it on the part of the path that wasn’t covered by water and mud. As I reached the puddle, I was suddenly attacked!

Yet I did nothing for the attack was so unpredictable and from a source so totally unexpected. I was startled as well as unhurt, despite having been struck four or five times already. I backed up a foot and my attacker stopped attacking me. Instead of attacking more, he hovered in the air on graceful butterfly wings in front of me. Had I been hurt I wouldn’t have found it amusing, but I was unhurt, it was funny, and I was laughing. After all, I was being attacked by a butterfly!

Having stopped laughing, I took a step forward. My attacker rushed me again. He rammed me in the chest with his head and body, striking me over and over again with all his might, still to no avail. For a second time, I retreated a step while my attacker relented in his attack.

Yet again, I tried moving forward. My attacker charged me again. I was rammed in the chest over and over again. I wasn’t sure what to do, other than to retreat a third time, after all, it’s just not everyday that one is attacked by a butterfly. This time, though, I stepped back several paces to look the situation over. My attacker moved back as well to land on the ground. That’s when I discovered why my attacker was charging me only moments earlier.

He had a mate and she was dying. She was beside the puddle where he landed. Sitting close beside her, he opened and closed his wings as if to fan her. I could only admire the love and courage of that butterfly in his concern for his mate. He had taken it upon himself to attack me for his mate’s sake, even though she was clearly dying and I was so large. He did so just to give her those extra few precious moments of life, should I have been careless enough to step on her.

Now I knew why and what he was fighting for. There was really only one option left for me. I carefully made my way around the puddle to the other side of the path, though it was only inches wide and extremely muddy. His courage in attacking something thousands of times larger and heavier than himself just for his mate’s safety justified it. I couldn’t do anything other than reward him by walking on the more difficult side of the puddle. He had truly earned those moments to be with her, undisturbed. I left them in peace for those last few moments, cleaning the mud from my boots when I later reached my car.

Since then, I’ve always tried to remember the courage of that butterfly whenever I see huge obstacles facing me. I use that butterfly’s courage as an inspiration and to remind myself that good things are worth fighting for.

Copyright 1997 Dave Kuzminski

This story courtesy of http://www.homeholidaysfamilyandfun.com

A voice of reason that deserves support. From New York Times

2006-03-11T19:21:00.000+08:00

March 11, 2006
The Saturday Profile
For Muslim Who Says Violence Destroys Islam, Violent Threats
By JOHN M. BRODER

LOS ANGELES, March 10 — Three weeks ago, Dr. Wafa Sultan was a largely unknown Syrian-American psychiatrist living outside Los Angeles, nursing a deep anger and despair about her fellow Muslims.

Today, thanks to an unusually blunt and provocative interview on Al Jazeera television on Feb. 21, she is an international sensation, hailed as a fresh voice of reason by some, and by others as a heretic and infidel who deserves to die.

In the interview, which has been viewed on the Internet more than a million times and has reached the e-mail of hundreds of thousands around the world, Dr. Sultan bitterly criticized the Muslim clerics, holy warriors and political leaders who she believes have distorted the teachings of Muhammad and the Koran for 14 centuries.

She said the world's Muslims, whom she compares unfavorably with the Jews, have descended into a vortex of self-pity and violence.

Dr. Sultan said the world was not witnessing a clash of religions or cultures, but a battle between modernity and barbarism, a battle that the forces of violent, reactionary Islam are destined to lose.

In response, clerics throughout the Muslim world have condemned her, and her telephone answering machine has filled with dark threats. But Islamic reformers have praised her for saying out loud, in Arabic and on the most widely seen television network in the Arab world, what few Muslims dare to say even in private.

"I believe our people are hostages to our own beliefs and teachings," she said in an interview this week in her home in a Los Angeles suburb.

Dr. Sultan, who is 47, wears a prim sweater and skirt, with fleece-lined slippers and heavy stockings. Her eyes and hair are jet black and her modest manner belies her intense words: "Knowledge has released me from this backward thinking. Somebody has to help free the Muslim people from these wrong beliefs."

Perhaps her most provocative words on Al Jazeera were those comparing how the Jews and Muslims have reacted to adversity. Speaking of the Holocaust, she said, "The Jews have come from the tragedy and forced the world to respect them, with their knowledge, not with their terror; with their work, not with their crying and yelling."

She went on, "We have not seen a single Jew blow himself up in a German restaurant. We have not seen a single Jew destroy a church. We have not seen a single Jew protest by killing people."

She concluded, "Only the Muslims defend their beliefs by burning down churches, killing people and destroying embassies. This path will not yield any results. The Muslims must ask themselves what they can do for humankind, before they demand that humankind respect them."

Her views caught the ear of the American Jewish Congress, which has invited her to speak in May at a conference in Israel. "We have been discussing with her the importance of her message and trying to devise the right venue for her to address Jewish leaders," said Neil B. Goldstein, executive director of the organization.

She is probably more welcome in Tel Aviv than she would be in Damascus. Shortly after the broadcast, clerics in Syria denounced her as an infidel. One said she had done Islam more damage than the Danish cartoons mocking the Prophet Muhammad, a wire service reported.

DR. SULTAN is "working on a book that — if it is published — it's going to turn the Islamic world upside down."

"I have reached the point that doesn't allow any U-turn. I have no choice. I am questioning every single teaching of our holy book."

The working title is, "The Escaped Prisoner: When God Is a Monster."

Dr. Sultan grew up in a large traditional Muslim family in Banias, Syria, a small city on the Mediterranean about a two-hour drive north of Beirut. Her father was a grain trader and a devout Muslim, and she followed the faith's strictures into adulthood.

But, she said, her life changed in 1979 when she was a medical student at the University of Aleppo, in northern Syria. At that time, the radical Muslim Brotherhood was using terrorism to try to undermine the government of President Hafez al-Assad. Gunmen of the Muslim Brotherhood burst into a classroom at the university and killed her professor as she watched, she said.

"They shot hundreds of bullets into him, shouting, 'God is great!' " she said. "At that point, I lost my trust in their god and began to question all our teachings. It was the turning point of my life, and it has led me to this present point. I had to leave. I had to look for another god."

She and her husband, who now goes by the Americanized name of David, laid plans to leave for the United States. Their visas finally came in 1989, and the Sultans and their two children (they have since had a third) settled in with friends in Cerritos, Calif., a prosperous bedroom community on the edge of Los Angeles County.

After a succession of jobs and struggles with language, Dr. Sultan has completed her American medical licensing, with the exception of a hospital residency program, which she hopes to do within a year. David operates an automotive-smog-check station. They bought a home in the Los Angeles area and put their children through local public schools. All are now American citizens.

BUT even as she settled into a comfortable middle-class American life, Dr. Sultan's anger burned within. She took to writing, first for herself, then for an Islamic reform Web site called Annaqed (The Critic), run by a Syrian expatriate in Phoenix.

An angry essay on that site by Dr. Sultan about the Muslim Brotherhood caught the attention of Al Jazeera, which invited her to debate an Algerian cleric on the air last July.

In the debate, she questioned the religious teachings that prompt young people to commit suicide in the name of God. "Why does a young Muslim man, in the prime of life, with a full life ahead, go and blow himself up?" she asked. "In our countries, religion is the sole source of education and is the only spring from which that terrorist drank until his thirst was quenched."

Her remarks set off debates around the globe and her name began appearing in Arabic newspapers and Web sites. But her fame grew exponentially when she appeared on Al Jazeera again on Feb. 21, an appearance that was translated and widely distributed by the Middle East Media Research Institute, known as Memri.

Memri said the clip of her February appearance had been viewed more than a million times.

"The clash we are witnessing around the world is not a clash of religions or a clash of civilizations," Dr. Sultan said. "It is a clash between two opposites, between two eras. It is a clash between a mentality that belongs to the Middle Ages and another mentality that belongs to the 21st century. It is a clash between civilization and backwardness, between the civilized and the primitive, between barbarity and rationality."

She said she no longer practiced Islam. "I am a secular human being," she said.

The other guest on the program, identified as an Egyptian professor of religious studies, Dr. Ibrahim al-Khouli, asked, "Are you a heretic?" He then said there was no point in rebuking or debating her, because she had blasphemed against Islam, the Prophet Muhammad and the Koran.

Dr. Sultan said she took those words as a formal fatwa, a religious condemnation. Since then, she said, she has received numerous death threats on her answering machine and by e-mail.

One message said: "Oh, you are still alive? Wait and see." She received an e-mail message the other day, in Arabic, that said, "If someone were to kill you, it would be me."

Dr. Sultan said her mother, who still lives in Syria, is afraid to contact her directly, speaking only through a sister who lives in Qatar. She said she worried more about the safety of family members here and in Syria than she did for her own.

"I have no fear," she said. "I believe in my message. It is like a million-mile journey, and I believe I have walked the first and hardest 10 miles."

A very good idea in support of human rights

2006-03-10T08:46:00.000+08:00

From David Pogue's column in New York Times

I wanted to share some of what I learned in this e-column, but I'm aware that some of this column's readers get cranky when the topic strays from consumer technology. But one memorable talk involved BOTH consumer tech AND doing good in the world, which I thought I'd share with you. (I'll be back with gadget reviews next week.)

It was a talk by Peter Gabriel, the pop star. He didn't play or even mention music; instead, he described the progress of an outfit called Witness (www.witness.org), which he co-founded in 1992 for the purposes of what he calls "video advocacy."

What he means is helping native citizens film human-rights violations as they happen, so that the world can see what's really going on. It's much harder for wealthy countries to ignore the violence and oppression, Gabriel said, when they're watching a video of it.

So Witness sprouted up to supply camcorders and training to, so far, 200 human-rights groups ("partners") in 60 countries. It sounded like such a cool and important project that I decided to interview Gillian Caldwell, the group's executive director, for today's e-column.

DP: Strikes me that lots of the human-rights violations are in, well, hot, humid places that would be the enemy of camcorders. How have the cameras and tapes fared?

GC: Our team definitely has to keep climate in mind when they select the equipment packages, since some fare better in humid climates than others. As for the tapes, we try to get them shipped relatively quickly to our archivists, where they're catalogued, duplicated and stored in climate-controlled vaults for the production work.

DP: Isn't this technology new to, say, impoverished Africans? How do they know how to operate the camcorder, ship the tapes back, etc.?

GC: Most of the people we're training have never held a video camera before, so the relationship begins with an intensive, onsite training program that teaches them how to shoot, as well as what to shoot and why.

DP: Does every camcorder "seeding" bear fruit? Do you actually capture violence and stuff on film?

GC: Well, unlike, say, the Rodney King incident, our primary intention is not to capture human rights abuses in action, although that has on occasion happened. Instead, most of our footage highlights the aftermath.

For example, a reluctant Philippine government is now prosecuting the murderers of activists who were legally pursuing ancestral land claims--after footage taken of the attacks was broadcast nationwide in the Philippines and delivered to the Philippine president at the World Economic Forum. While Witness's partner did not actually capture the attack on tape (it took place early in the morning while everyone was sleeping), they were first on the scene of the attack, and captured irrefutable evidence.

DP: How do the people you supply with camcorders keep them from getting stolen, broken, lost, and so on?

GC: With the exception of some problems with theft in Nigeria, we've actually been pretty lucky. Our partners manage to maintain their equipment very well, and when the time comes for an upgrade, we provide it.

Power is a challenge; we generally provide extra battery packs. Some partners even have solar chargers for their equipment.

DP: At TED, Peter Gabriel mentioned a shift from camcorders to cameraphones?

GC: Staying ahead of the technology curve is a major challenge for us. Communications media have changed dramatically in the 14 years since Witness was founded.

In the coming months, we will launch an initiative called the Witness Video Hub (www.witness.org/technology). Our hope is to let people around the world use cellphones and computers to upload media to a central Web site built to promote human rights.

We're facing an unprecedented frontier, with digital technology and the "participatory culture" it has inspired poised to explode. Witness needs to be at the forefront of this transition.

DP: Once the hub site goes up, how can you be sure that the filmed events are genuine?

GC: We're still thinking this through. Currently, we're committed to an open and participatory environment, allowing anyone anywhere to contribute footage. There may be a limited amount of material that we will be able to authenticate, but our goal is to not play a big role in this area. We don't want to serve as gatekeepers ourselves, but to allow for peer review to foster a sense of community responsibility and accountability.

A very thoughtful piece from NY Times with many good points raised about the position of American hegemony now and in the future.

2006-03-02T15:26:00.000+08:00

February 19, 2006

After Neoconservatism

By FRANCIS FUKUYAMA

As we approach the third anniversary of the onset of the Iraq war, it seems very unlikely that history will judge either the intervention itself or the ideas animating it kindly. By invading Iraq, the Bush administration created a self-fulfilling prophecy: Iraq has now replaced Afghanistan as a magnet, a training ground and an operational base for jihadist terrorists, with plenty of American targets to shoot at. The United States still has a chance of creating a Shiite-dominated democratic Iraq, but the new government will be very weak for years to come; the resulting power vacuum will invite outside influence from all of Iraq's neighbors, including Iran. There are clear benefits to the Iraqi people from the removal of Saddam Hussein's dictatorship, and perhaps some positive spillover effects in Lebanon and Syria. But it is very hard to see how these developments in themselves justify the blood and treasure that the United States has spent on the project to this point.

The so-called Bush Doctrine that set the framework for the administration's first term is now in shambles. The doctrine (elaborated, among other places, in the 2002 National Security Strategy of the United States) argued that, in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, America would have to launch periodic preventive wars to defend itself against rogue states and terrorists with weapons of mass destruction; that it would do this alone, if necessary; and that it would work to democratize the greater Middle East as a long-term solution to the terrorist problem. But successful pre-emption depends on the ability to predict the future accurately and on good intelligence, which was not forthcoming, while America's perceived unilateralism has isolated it as never before. It is not surprising that in its second term, the administration has been distancing itself from these policies and is in the process of rewriting the National Security Strategy document.

But it is the idealistic effort to use American power to promote democracy and human rights abroad that may suffer the greatest setback. Perceived failure in Iraq has restored the authority of foreign policy "realists" in the tradition of Henry Kissinger. Already there is a host of books and articles decrying America's naïve Wilsonianism and attacking the notion of trying to democratize the world. The administration's second-term efforts to push for greater Middle Eastern democracy, introduced with the soaring rhetoric of Bush's second Inaugural Address, have borne very problematic fruits. The Islamist Muslim Brotherhood made a strong showing in Egypt's parliamentary elections in November and December. While the holding of elections in Iraq this past December was an achievement in itself, the vote led to the ascendance of a Shiite bloc with close ties to Iran (following on the election of the conservative Mahmoud Ahmadinejad as president of Iran in June). But the clincher was the decisive Hamas victory in the Palestinian election last month, which brought to power a movement overtly dedicated to the destruction of Israel. In his second inaugural, Bush said that "America's vital interests and our deepest beliefs are now one," but the charge will be made with increasing frequency that the Bush administration made a big mistake when it stirred the pot, and that the United States would have done better to stick by its traditional authoritarian friends in the Middle East. Indeed, the effort to promote democracy around the world has been attacked as an illegitimate activity both by people on the left like Jeffrey Sachs and by traditional conservatives like Pat Buchanan.

The reaction against democracy promotion and an activist foreign policy may not end there. Those whom Walter Russell Mead labels Jacksonian conservatives — red-state Americans whose sons and daughters are fighting and dying in the Middle East — supported the Iraq war because they believed that their children were fighting to defend the United States against nuclear terrorism, not to promote democracy. They don't want to abandon the president in the middle of a vicious war, but down the road the perceived failure of the Iraq intervention may push them to favor a more isolationist foreign policy, which is a more natural political position for them. A recent Pew poll indicates a swing in public opinion toward isolationism; the percentage of Americans saying that the United States "should mind its own business" has never been higher since the end of the Vietnam War.

More than any other group, it was the neoconservatives both inside and outside the Bush administration who pushed for democratizing Iraq and the broader Middle East. They are widely credited (or blamed) for being the decisive voices promoting regime change in Iraq, and yet it is their idealistic agenda that in the coming months and years will be the most directly threatened. Were the United States to retreat from the world stage, following a drawdown in Iraq, it would in my view be a huge tragedy, because American power and influence have been critical to the maintenance of an open and increasingly democratic order around the world. The problem with neoconservatism's agenda lies not in its ends, which are as American as apple pie, but rather in the overmilitarized means by which it has sought to accomplish them. What American foreign policy needs is not a return to a narrow and cynical realism, but rather the formulation of a "realistic Wilsonianism" that better matches means to ends.

The Neoconservative Legacy

How did the neoconservatives end up overreaching to such an extent that they risk undermining their own goals? The Bush administration's first-term foreign policy did not flow ineluctably from the views of earlier generations of people who considered themselves neoconservatives, since those views were themselves complex and subject to differing interpretations. Four common principles or threads ran through much of this thought up through the end of the cold war: a concern with democracy, human rights and, more generally, the internal politics of states; a belief that American power can be used for moral purposes; a skepticism about the ability of international law and institutions to solve serious security problems; and finally, a view that ambitious social engineering often leads to unexpected consequences and thereby undermines its own ends.

The problem was that two of these principles were in potential collision. The skeptical stance toward ambitious social engineering — which in earlier years had been applied mostly to domestic policies like affirmative action, busing and welfare — suggested a cautious approach toward remaking the world and an awareness that ambitious initiatives always have unanticipated consequences. The belief in the potential moral uses of American power, on the other hand, implied that American activism could reshape the structure of global politics. By the time of the Iraq war, the belief in the transformational uses of power had prevailed over the doubts about social engineering.

In retrospect, things did not have to develop this way. The roots of neoconservatism lie in a remarkable group of largely Jewish intellectuals who attended City College of New York (C.C.N.Y.) in the mid- to late 1930's and early 1940's, a group that included Irving Kristol, Daniel Bell, Irving Howe, Nathan Glazer and, a bit later, Daniel Patrick Moynihan. The story of this group has been told in a number of places, most notably in a documentary film by Joseph Dorman called "Arguing the World." The most important inheritance from the C.C.N.Y. group was an idealistic belief in social progress and the universality of rights, coupled with intense anti-Communism.

It is not an accident that many in the C.C.N.Y. group started out as Trotskyites. Leon Trotsky was, of course, himself a Communist, but his supporters came to understand better than most people the utter cynicism and brutality of the Stalinist regime. The anti-Communist left, in contrast to the traditional American right, sympathized with the social and economic aims of Communism, but in the course of the 1930's and 1940's came to realize that "real existing socialism" had become a monstrosity of unintended consequences that completely undermined the idealistic goals it espoused. While not all of the C.C.N.Y. thinkers became neoconservatives, the danger of good intentions carried to extremes was a theme that would underlie the life work of many members of this group.

If there was a single overarching theme to the domestic social policy critiques issued by those who wrote for the neoconservative journal The Public Interest, founded by Irving Kristol, Nathan Glazer and Daniel Bell in 1965, it was the limits of social engineering. Writers like Glazer, Moynihan and, later, Glenn Loury argued that ambitious efforts to seek social justice often left societies worse off than before because they either required massive state intervention that disrupted pre-existing social relations (for example, forced busing) or else produced unanticipated consequences (like an increase in single-parent families as a result of welfare). A major theme running through James Q. Wilson's extensive writings on crime was the idea that you could not lower crime rates by trying to solve deep underlying problems like poverty and racism; effective policies needed to focus on shorter-term measures that went after symptoms of social distress (like subway graffiti or panhandling) rather than root causes.

How, then, did a group with such a pedigree come to decide that the "root cause" of terrorism lay in the Middle East's lack of democracy, that the United States had both the wisdom and the ability to fix this problem and that democracy would come quickly and painlessly to Iraq? Neoconservatives would not have taken this turn but for the peculiar way that the cold war ended.

Ronald Reagan was ridiculed by sophisticated people on the American left and in Europe for labeling the Soviet Union and its allies an "evil empire" and for challenging Mikhail Gorbachev not just to reform his system but also to "tear down this wall." His assistant secretary of defense for international security policy, Richard Perle, was denounced as the "prince of darkness" for this uncompromising, hard-line position; his proposal for a double-zero in the intermediate-range nuclear arms negotiations (that is, the complete elimination of medium-range missiles) was attacked as hopelessly out of touch by the bien-pensant centrist foreign-policy experts at places like the Council on Foreign Relations and the State Department. That community felt that the Reaganites were dangerously utopian in their hopes for actually winning, as opposed to managing, the cold war.

And yet total victory in the cold war is exactly what happened in 1989-91. Gorbachev accepted not only the double zero but also deep cuts in conventional forces, and then failed to stop the Polish, Hungarian and East German defections from the empire. Communism collapsed within a couple of years because of its internal moral weaknesses and contradictions, and with regime change in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union, the Warsaw Pact threat to the West evaporated.

The way the cold war ended shaped the thinking of supporters of the Iraq war, including younger neoconservatives like William Kristol and Robert Kagan, in two ways. First, it seems to have created an expectation that all totalitarian regimes were hollow at the core and would crumble with a small push from outside. The model for this was Romania under the Ceausescus: once the wicked witch was dead, the munchkins would rise up and start singing joyously about their liberation. As Kristol and Kagan put it in their 2000 book "Present Dangers": "To many the idea of America using its power to promote changes of regime in nations ruled by dictators rings of utopianism. But in fact, it is eminently realistic. There is something perverse in declaring the impossibility of promoting democratic change abroad in light of the record of the past three decades."

This overoptimism about postwar transitions to democracy helps explain the Bush administration's incomprehensible failure to plan adequately for the insurgency that subsequently emerged in Iraq. The war's supporters seemed to think that democracy was a kind of default condition to which societies reverted once the heavy lifting of coercive regime change occurred, rather than a long-term process of institution-building and reform. While they now assert that they knew all along that the democratic transformation of Iraq would be long and hard, they were clearly taken by surprise. According to George Packer's recent book on Iraq, "The Assassins' Gate," the Pentagon planned a drawdown of American forces to some 25,000 troops by the end of the summer following the invasion.

By the 1990's, neoconservatism had been fed by several other intellectual streams. One came from the students of the German Jewish political theorist Leo Strauss, who, contrary to much of the nonsense written about him by people like Anne Norton and Shadia Drury, was a serious reader of philosophical texts who did not express opinions on contemporary politics or policy issues. Rather, he was concerned with the "crisis of modernity" brought on by the relativism of Nietzsche and Heidegger, as well as the fact that neither the claims of religion nor deeply-held opinions about the nature of the good life could be banished from politics, as the thinkers of the European Enlightenment had hoped. Another stream came from Albert Wohlstetter, a Rand Corporation strategist who was the teacher of Richard Perle, Zalmay Khalilzad (the current American ambassador to Iraq) and Paul Wolfowitz (the former deputy secretary of defense), among other people. Wohlstetter was intensely concerned with the problem of nuclear proliferation and the way that the 1968 Nonproliferation Treaty left loopholes, in its support for "peaceful" nuclear energy, large enough for countries like Iraq and Iran to walk through.

I have numerous affiliations with the different strands of the neoconservative movement. I was a student of Strauss's protégé Allan Bloom, who wrote the bestseller "The Closing of the American Mind"; worked at Rand and with Wohlstetter on Persian Gulf issues; and worked also on two occasions for Wolfowitz. Many people have also interpreted my book "The End of History and the Last Man" (1992) as a neoconservative tract, one that argued in favor of the view that there is a universal hunger for liberty in all people that will inevitably lead them to liberal democracy, and that we are living in the midst of an accelerating, transnational movement in favor of that liberal democracy. This is a misreading of the argument. "The End of History" is in the end an argument about modernization. What is initially universal is not the desire for liberal democracy but rather the desire to live in a modern — that is, technologically advanced and prosperous — society, which, if satisfied, tends to drive demands for political participation. Liberal democracy is one of the byproducts of this modernization process, something that becomes a universal aspiration only in the course of historical time.

"The End of History," in other words, presented a kind of Marxist argument for the existence of a long-term process of social evolution, but one that terminates in liberal democracy rather than communism. In the formulation of the scholar Ken Jowitt, the neoconservative position articulated by people like Kristol and Kagan was, by contrast, Leninist; they believed that history can be pushed along with the right application of power and will. Leninism was a tragedy in its Bolshevik version, and it has returned as farce when practiced by the United States. Neoconservatism, as both a political symbol and a body of thought, has evolved into something I can no longer support.

The Failure of Benevolent Hegemony

The Bush administration and its neoconservative supporters did not simply underestimate the difficulty of bringing about congenial political outcomes in places like Iraq; they also misunderstood the way the world would react to the use of American power. Of course, the cold war was replete with instances of what the foreign policy analyst Stephen Sestanovich calls American maximalism, wherein Washington acted first and sought legitimacy and support from its allies only after the fact. But in the post-cold-war period, the structural situation of world politics changed in ways that made this kind of exercise of power much more problematic in the eyes of even close allies. After the fall of the Soviet Union, various neoconservative authors like Charles Krauthammer, William Kristol and Robert Kagan suggested that the United States would use its margin of power to exert a kind of "benevolent hegemony" over the rest of the world, fixing problems like rogue states with W.M.D., human rights abuses and terrorist threats as they came up. Writing before the Iraq war, Kristol and Kagan considered whether this posture would provoke resistance from the rest of the world, and concluded, "It is precisely because American foreign policy is infused with an unusually high degree of morality that other nations find they have less to fear from its otherwise daunting power." (Italics added.)

It is hard to read these lines without irony in the wake of the global reaction to the Iraq war, which succeeded in uniting much of the world in a frenzy of anti-Americanism. The idea that the United States is a hegemon more benevolent than most is not an absurd one, but there were warning signs that things had changed in America's relationship to the world long before the start of the Iraq war. The structural imbalance in global power had grown enormous. America surpassed the rest of the world in every dimension of power by an unprecedented margin, with its defense spending nearly equal to that of the rest of the world combined. Already during the Clinton years, American economic hegemony had generated enormous hostility to an American-dominated process of globalization, frequently on the part of close democratic allies who thought the United States was seeking to impose its antistatist social model on them.

There were other reasons as well why the world did not accept American benevolent hegemony. In the first place, it was premised on American exceptionalism, the idea that America could use its power in instances where others could not because it was more virtuous than other countries. The doctrine of pre-emption against terrorist threats contained in the 2002 National Security Strategy was one that could not safely be generalized through the international system; America would be the first country to object if Russia, China, India or France declared a similar right of unilateral action. The United States was seeking to pass judgment on others while being unwilling to have its own conduct questioned in places like the International Criminal Court.

Another problem with benevolent hegemony was domestic. There are sharp limits to the American people's attention to foreign affairs and willingness to finance projects overseas that do not have clear benefits to American interests. Sept. 11 changed that calculus in many ways, providing popular support for two wars in the Middle East and large increases in defense spending. But the durability of the support is uncertain: although most Americans want to do what is necessary to make the project of rebuilding Iraq succeed, the aftermath of the invasion did not increase the public appetite for further costly interventions. Americans are not, at heart, an imperial people. Even benevolent hegemons sometimes have to act ruthlessly, and they need a staying power that does not come easily to people who are reasonably content with their own lives and society.

Finally, benevolent hegemony presumed that the hegemon was not only well intentioned but competent as well. Much of the criticism of the Iraq intervention from Europeans and others was not based on a normative case that the United States was not getting authorization from the United Nations Security Council, but rather on the belief that it had not made an adequate case for invading Iraq in the first place and didn't know what it was doing in trying to democratize Iraq. In this, the critics were unfortunately quite prescient.

The most basic misjudgment was an overestimation of the threat facing the United States from radical Islamism. Although the new and ominous possibility of undeterrable terrorists armed with weapons of mass destruction did indeed present itself, advocates of the war wrongly conflated this with the threat presented by Iraq and with the rogue state/proliferation problem more generally. The misjudgment was based in part on the massive failure of the American intelligence community to correctly assess the state of Iraq's W.M.D. programs before the war. But the intelligence community never took nearly as alarmist a view of the terrorist/W.M.D. threat as the war's supporters did. Overestimation of this threat was then used to justify the elevation of preventive war to the centerpiece of a new security strategy, as well as a whole series of measures that infringed on civil liberties, from detention policy to domestic eavesdropping.

What to Do

Now that the neoconservative moment appears to have passed, the United States needs to reconceptualize its foreign policy in several fundamental ways. In the first instance, we need to demilitarize what we have been calling the global war on terrorism and shift to other types of policy instruments. We are fighting hot counterinsurgency wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and against the international jihadist movement, wars in which we need to prevail. But "war" is the wrong metaphor for the broader struggle, since wars are fought at full intensity and have clear beginnings and endings. Meeting the jihadist challenge is more of a "long, twilight struggle" whose core is not a military campaign but a political contest for the hearts and minds of ordinary Muslims around the world. As recent events in France and Denmark suggest, Europe will be a central battleground in this fight.

The United States needs to come up with something better than "coalitions of the willing" to legitimate its dealings with other countries. The world today lacks effective international institutions that can confer legitimacy on collective action; creating new organizations that will better balance the dual requirements of legitimacy and effectiveness will be the primary task for the coming generation. As a result of more than 200 years of political evolution, we have a relatively good understanding of how to create institutions that are rulebound, accountable and reasonably effective in the vertical silos we call states. What we do not have are adequate mechanisms of horizontal accountability among states.

The conservative critique of the United Nations is all too cogent: while useful for certain peacekeeping and nation-building operations, the United Nations lacks both democratic legitimacy and effectiveness in dealing with serious security issues. The solution is not to strengthen a single global body, but rather to promote what has been emerging in any event, a "multi-multilateral world" of overlapping and occasionally competing international institutions that are organized on regional or functional lines. Kosovo in 1999 was a model: when the Russian veto prevented the Security Council from acting, the United States and its NATO allies simply shifted the venue to NATO, where the Russians could not block action.

The final area that needs rethinking, and the one that will be the most contested in the coming months and years, is the place of democracy promotion in American foreign policy. The worst legacy that could come from the Iraq war would be an anti-neoconservative backlash that coupled a sharp turn toward isolation with a cynical realist policy aligning the United States with friendly authoritarians. Good governance, which involves not just democracy but also the rule of law and economic development, is critical to a host of outcomes we desire, from alleviating poverty to dealing with pandemics to controlling violent conflicts. A Wilsonian policy that pays attention to how rulers treat their citizens is therefore right, but it needs to be informed by a certain realism that was missing from the thinking of the Bush administration in its first term and of its neoconservative allies.

We need in the first instance to understand that promoting democracy and modernization in the Middle East is not a solution to the problem of jihadist terrorism; in all likelihood it will make the short-term problem worse, as we have seen in the case of the Palestinian election bringing Hamas to power. Radical Islamism is a byproduct of modernization itself, arising from the loss of identity that accompanies the transition to a modern, pluralist society. It is no accident that so many recent terrorists, from Sept. 11's Mohamed Atta to the murderer of the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh to the London subway bombers, were radicalized in democratic Europe and intimately familiar with all of democracy's blessings. More democracy will mean more alienation, radicalization and — yes, unfortunately — terrorism.

But greater political participation by Islamist groups is very likely to occur whatever we do, and it will be the only way that the poison of radical Islamism can ultimately work its way through the body politic of Muslim communities around the world. The age is long since gone when friendly authoritarians could rule over passive populations and produce stability indefinitely. New social actors are mobilizing everywhere, from Bolivia and Venezuela to South Africa and the Persian Gulf. A durable Israeli-Palestinian peace could not be built upon a corrupt, illegitimate Fatah that constantly had to worry about Hamas challenging its authority. Peace might emerge, sometime down the road, from a Palestine run by a formerly radical terrorist group that had been forced to deal with the realities of governing.

If we are serious about the good governance agenda, we have to shift our focus to the reform, reorganization and proper financing of those institutions of the United States government that actually promote democracy, development and the rule of law around the world, organizations like the State Department, U.S.A.I.D., the National Endowment for Democracy and the like. The United States has played an often decisive role in helping along many recent democratic transitions, including in the Philippines in 1986; South Korea and Taiwan in 1987; Chile in 1988; Poland and Hungary in 1989; Serbia in 2000; Georgia in 2003; and Ukraine in 2004-5. But the overarching lesson that emerges from these cases is that the United States does not get to decide when and where democracy comes about. By definition, outsiders can't "impose" democracy on a country that doesn't want it; demand for democracy and reform must be domestic. Democracy promotion is therefore a long-term and opportunistic process that has to await the gradual ripening of political and economic conditions to be effective.

The Bush administration has been walking — indeed, sprinting — away from the legacy of its first term, as evidenced by the cautious multilateral approach it has taken toward the nuclear programs of Iran and North Korea. Condoleezza Rice gave a serious speech in January about "transformational diplomacy" and has begun an effort to reorganize the nonmilitary side of the foreign-policy establishment, and the National Security Strategy document is being rewritten. All of these are welcome changes, but the legacy of the Bush first-term foreign policy and its neoconservative supporters has been so polarizing that it is going to be hard to have a reasoned debate about how to appropriately balance American ideals and interests in the coming years. The reaction against a flawed policy can be as damaging as the policy itself, and such a reaction is an indulgence we cannot afford, given the critical moment we have arrived at in global politics.

Neoconservatism, whatever its complex roots, has become indelibly associated with concepts like coercive regime change, unilateralism and American hegemony. What is needed now are new ideas, neither neoconservative nor realist, for how America is to relate to the rest of the world — ideas that retain the neoconservative belief in the universality of human rights, but without its illusions about the efficacy of American power and hegemony to bring these ends about.

Francis Fukuyama teaches at the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University. This essay is adapted from his book "America at the Crossroads," which will be published this month by Yale University Press.

Interesting piece on (once again) the cartoons and religion; from the New York Times

2006-02-20T18:23:00.000+08:00

I like this. I must try to buy Dennett's book , I sure I shall enjoy it.

February 20, 2006

Connections

History Illuminates the Rage of Muslims

By EDWARD ROTHSTEIN

An ant climbs a blade of grass, over and over, seemingly without purpose, seeking neither nourishment nor home. It persists in its futile climb, explains Daniel C. Dennett at the opening of his new book, "Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon" (Viking), because its brain has been taken over by a parasite, a lancet fluke, which, over the course of evolution, has found this to be a particularly efficient way to get into the stomach of a grazing sheep or cow where it can flourish and reproduce. The ant is controlled by the worm, which, equally unconscious of purpose, maneuvers the ant into place.

Mr. Dennett, anticipating the outrage his comparison will make, suggests that this how religion works. People will sacrifice their interests, their health, their reason, their family, all in service to an idea "that has lodged in their brains." That idea, he argues, is like a virus or a worm, and it inspires bizarre forms of behavior in order to propagate itself. Islam, he points out, means "submission," and submission is what religious believers practice. In Mr. Dennett's view, they do so despite all evidence, and in thrall to biological and social forces they barely comprehend.

Now that is iconoclasm — a wholehearted attempt to destroy a respected icon. "I believe that it is very important to break this spell," Mr. Dennett writes, as he tries to undermine the claims and authority of religious belief. Attacks on religion, of course, have been a staple of Western secular society since the Enlightenment, though often carried out with far less finesse (and far less emphasis on biology) than Mr. Dennett does; he refers to "the widespread presumption by social scientists that religion is some kind of lunacy."

Mr. Dennett understands, too, that iconoclasm, with its lack of deference, can also give offense. But not even he could have imagined the response to the now notorious Danish cartoons that have so offended Muslims around the world, leading to riots, death and destruction. It was as if the problem of religious belief in the modern world had been highlighted in garish colors. If Mr. Dennett's attack is a premeditated spur to debate, the Muslim riots shock with their primordial force. Together, they leave us with a tough set of intertwining questions: Can religion — with its absolute and sweeping assertions — make any claim on a society whose doctrines require it to defer, in part, to all, even to blasphemers? Can religion be as dramatically shunted aside as Mr. Dennett desires? If not, what sort of accommodation is needed?

Mr. Dennett would like the coolness of reason to replace the commands of faith. The riots, though, show that at the very least, reason alone is insufficient. They are not just metaphorically iconoclastic in their challenge. They are literally iconoclastic: attempts to destroy any trace of forbidden images or inspire fear in any who might object. They are the latest manifestations of battles that once took place within the West, particularly during the eighth century, when iconoclasm got its name. At that time leaders of the Eastern Church, perhaps inspired by Islamic and Judaic prohibitions against images, objected to religious icons as a form of idolatry.

Iconoclasm (from the Greek, meaning the "breaking of images") was adopted as doctrine by Emperor Leo III (680-741) and his successors, and, for a century, led to the destruction of art, massacres, torture of monks and attacks on shrines, decisively widening the schism in the Church between Constantinople and the papacy.

The Iconoclasts of the eighth century and their successors during the Reformation were like the Taliban or rioting Muslims of the 21st. Except that that older violence occurred within a religion, inspired by theology. Today's Iconoclasts want to oppose all attempts to display forbidden images, whatever their provenance. And for a variety of reasons, many in the West readily defer. Last fall, for example, Burger King withdrew its ice cream from restaurants in Britain after receiving complaints from Muslims that the swirling illustration on the package resembled the name of Allah.

Of course, to a certain extent, the recent riots also reflect a struggle for internal power. Rage was deliberately churned up with supplementary drawings reportedly created by some radical Muslim leaders and presented along with the original group of 12. One, crudely offensive even to this infidel's eyes, replaced the political cartoonist's gibes with the preoccupations of a pornographer, showing a dog mounting the Prophet. The militants who created and distributed these cartoons displayed a willingness to violate any principle, to increase their earthly power — a sentiment that some original Iconoclasts must have shared.

What response is possible to such attacks? Many commentators have been surprising deferent, describing the original 12 images, almost apologetically, as insensitive. But look more closely: the subject of many is not really Muhammad himself, but the act of drawing Muhammad and the responses it might inspire. A cartoonist is shown anxiously leaning over his sketch of Muhammad, sweating profusely, looking over his shoulder in fear. In another, two Muslim avengers, their scimitars drawn in fury, are about to seek retribution for an offensive drawing when their superior, looking at it closely, advises them to "relax," it's just a sketch made by a Dane.

Some of these cartoons are not iconoclastic offenses against religious belief at all. Instead, they are about iconoclasm and anticipated confrontations with it. The fear and drawn swords the cartoons portray turn out to be depictions of the very reaction they inspired. They are expressions that is, of anxiety. In the West, Mr. Dennett's iconoclasm is absorbed, but Muslim iconoclasm cannot be.

What other possibilities are there? At a recent conference at Columbia University, "Religion and Liberalism," organized by Andrew Delbanco and the American Studies Program, there were some fascinating attempts to try to imagine something other than iconoclasm in the relationship between secular politics and religion once eighth-century tactics are left behind. Speakers, including E. J. Dionne Jr., Mark Lilla, Alan Wolfe, Todd Gitlin, Mary Gordon, Susannah Heschel and Elisabeth Sifton, distanced themselves from the kind of attack on religion that Mr. Dennett proposes, while trying, too, to pry religion away from its contemporary association with conservative politics and fundamentalism. For some it seemed an attempt to "save" religion for liberalism, while still keeping a safe distance.

The issues, though, remain intractable and unrelenting. But it may be that the United States has already offered one kind of an answer, creating a society in which faith and reason continually cohabit in uneasy proximity, and iconoclasm is as commonplace as belief.

Connections, a critic's perspectives on arts and ideas, appears every other Monday.

Self-righteous barbarism

2006-02-18T10:05:00.001+08:00

I post here the text of an article received today from the Ayn Rand institute.

The Ayn Rand Institute is releasing this 1989 editorial--originally published as an advertisement in the New York Times--because the same essential issues underlie the Rushdie debacle and the current uproar over cartoons of Mohammad. In both cases, the ultimate target is not “blasphemy” but man’s faculty of reason and the principle of free speech--values our leaders are too gutless to defend as absolutes. In both cases, Islamic leaders have incited violence and issued death threats against Westerners--but have met with a pathetically appeasing response (Khomeini’s fatwa against Rushdie still stands, and has just been reaffirmed). And today as in 1989, the West’s craven response is motivated by the same fundamental cause. Failure to combat such self-righteous barbarism invites further aggression--a lesson history continually teaches, but which Western leaders refuse to learn.

Religious Terrorism vs. Free Speech

Muslim death threats against Danish cartoonists echo Khomeini's 1989 fatwa on Salman Rushdie--a death threat renewed this month by Iran’s mullahs. Combating such religious terrorism is a moral necessity.

By Leonard Peikoff

Ayatollah Khomeni's attack on Salman Rushdie and his publishers represents religious terrorism. Americans oppose the Ayatollah's death-decree, but our government is doing nothing to combat it.

President George H.W. Bush has issued a limp condemnation coupled with the vague statement that Iran would be held "accountable" if American interests are harmed. But two California bookstores have already been bombed, a New York weekly newspaper has been demolished by firebombing, at least 178 threats of death or destruction have been received by booksellers nationwide, major American publishers (primarily Viking) are barricaded at ruinous cost behind an army of private security guards--and every American author, speaker, and reader must wonder if and when he will become a target of armed Islamic fundamentalists with orders to kill heretics.

Has Bush become the new Jimmy Carter? Carter wrung his hands and did nothing while Iran held Americans hostage. This time Iran is attempting to hold our minds hostage.

A religious motive does not excuse murder, it makes the crime more dangerous. It took the West centuries to move from medieval mysticism to the Enlightenment, and thereby discover the only safeguard against endless, bloody, religious warfare: the recognition of man's inalienable right to think and speak as he chooses. Civilization depends on reason; freedom means the freedom to think, then act accordingly; the rights of free speech and a free press implement the sovereignty of reason over brute force. If civilized existence is to be possible, the right of the individual to exercise his rational faculty must be inviolable.

The ultimate target of the Ayatollah, as of all mystics, is not a particular "blasphemy," but reason itself, along with its cultural and political expressions: science, the Industrial Revolution, the American Revolution. If the assault succeeds, the result will be an Age of Unreason -- a new Dark Ages. As Ayn Rand wrote in Philosophy: Who Needs It, in her prescient 1960 essay "Faith and Force: The Destroyers of the Modern World":

"The conflict of reason versus mysticism is the issue of life or death--or freedom or slavery--or progress or stagnant brutality. . . . Reason is the only objective means of communication and of understanding among men; when men deal with one another by means of reason, reality is their objective standard and frame of reference. But when men claim to possess supernatural means of knowledge, no persuasion, communication or understanding is possible."

Many people have denounced the Ayatollah's threats, but have then undercut their own stand by offering apologies to those whose "sensibilities" the book has "offended." No apology is necessary. No creed, Islamic or otherwise, which leads to "holy terror" can demand respect from civilized men.

Whether Rushdie's book in particular is good or evil, noble or depraved, is now irrelevant. Once death is threatened, there is only one issue to discuss and defend: an individual's right to speak, whether anyone or everyone likes what he says or not. "Blasphemy" violates no one's rights. Those who feel insulted do not have to listen to or read the insults. In defending religious liberty, Jefferson observed that "the operations of the mind" must not be made "subject to the coercion of the laws," adding:

"The legitimate powers of government extend to such acts only as are injurious to others. But it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no God. It neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg."

If blasphemy is the issue, we submit that a religious dictator inciting murder is blasphemy against the sanctity of human life. It is said that Rushdie's book impugns the faith of believers. So does science. It is said that the book is offensive to the values of the Ayatollah's followers. So is the United States of America.

Why has the outrage felt by the American public not been translated into a call for action against Iran? The protests from both the Right and the Left in this country ring hollow because both groups have betrayed the philosophic ideas necessary to act.

Conservatives have become dominated by religionists, who openly base their views on mystical dogma and want the government to impose their dogmas by force which is just what the Ayatollah is doing. Homegrown fundamentalists are in no position to lead a crusade for free thought. Can these groups maintain that it is wrong to ban Rushdie, but right to ban Darwin?

All of us owe a debt of gratitude to liberal groups like PEN and the Author's Guild for their courageous condemnation of the Ayatollah's threats. But these groups do not offer principled opposition, either--because of their philosophic commitment to collectivism and cultural relativism. Liberals characteristically hold that individual rights must be sacrificed to the "public good," and that Western civilization is no better than the "culture" of tribal savages. Those who counsel appeasement as a principle of foreign policy will not and cannot demand action against the Ayatollah.

The response of many commentators has been to place the blame, incredibly, on American businessmen: in particular, on the booksellers, such as Waldenbooks, who are damned for trying to protect the safety of their employees and customers. It is not the responsibility of private citizens to risk their lives in defying a foreign power when our government, whose duty it is to protect our lives, turns a blind eye on an historic crime.

Terrorism unpunished is terrorism emboldened. The Ayatollah has already broadened his attacks; he is now threatening death to anyone who criticizes Islam. If he is not stopped, who can predict where the next threat to our publishers and bookstores will come from? From Palestinian terrorists offended by a pro-Israeli book? From the kind of anti-abortion or animal-rights groups that now bomb clinics or trash research laboratories? Do we want a country in which people are afraid to walk into bookstores, because raids on such stores have become an uncontested form of protest?

The clear and present danger is that writers and publishers will begin, as a desperate measure of self-defense, to practice self-censorship--to speak, write, and publish with the implicit thought in mind: "What group will this offend and to what acts of aggression will I then be vulnerable?" The result would be the death of the First Amendment and the gradual Finlandization of America. Is the land of the free and the home of the brave to become the land of the bland and the home of the fearful?

In contrast to both the religious right and the relativist left, [we] uphold the necessity for government action in the present crisis--government action to protect the rights of Americans to their lives, safety, and freedom. A nation that allows the agents of a foreign power to terrorize its citizens with impunity on their own soil has lost the will to survive.

We call for three specific actions:

(1) Police and other government security protection must be given on request to any publisher, bookstore, or other victim who has received a demonstrable threat in connection with the Rushdie affair. It is a monstrous injustice for such victims to be bled dry by security costs while the government neglects its proper duty.

(2) In light of the Ayatollah's decree and the record of his followers, their incitement to murder constitutes a criminal act, which must be punished. If the inciters are foreign nationals, they should be deported.

(3) The United States government (alone or with allies) should take military action against Iran, until the Iranian government rescinds the Ayatollah's death decree. The Ayatollah's threat against American lives is an act of war. It calls for reprisals. Targets should include the known training camps where Iranian terrorists are being schooled and bred.

Force used in self-defense, retaliatory force striking back at those who initiate violence, is a moral necessity. To adopt a pacifist stance--or to engage in infinite behind-the-scenes "negotiations" that lead nowhere--is to surrender the world to brutality. Timid half-measures are worse than none; one does not respond to murder merely by withdrawing ambassadors or cutting back on trade. One cannot appeal to reason in dealing with those who reject it. Force is the only language intelligible to those who live by force.

The only life the Ayatollah has a right to declare forfeit is his own.

Leonard Peikoff is the founder of the Ayn Rand Institute in Irvine, California. The Institute promotes the philosophy of Ayn Rand, author of Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead.

John Spong attacks atonement theology

2006-02-16T08:32:00.000+08:00

I agree with Spong on many, but not all, matters of religion. I think he is too materialistic, and discounts the mysterious. However, in this "Q and A" piece he hits the nail on the head

The Rev. Dr. Kathleen from Michigan writes:
"Overcoming the widespread Christian belief that "Jesus died for my sins" seems an insurmountable challenge! Preachers, liturgical rites, hymns and religious education curricula continue to reinforce "atonement theology/theories." Would you do a series on "atonement theology/theories" - their origins, rationale, continued justification, etc.? Personally and pastorally, "atonement" thinking creates a mire of destructive results and I, for one, would well appreciate your cogent analysis of how we might best approach this. "

Dear Kathleen,
Thank you for your letter and its challenge. There is no doubt that atonement/sacrifice theology constitutes a deep burden that weighs down the Christian faith today. I work on this subject constantly. It is a major theme in two of my books, Why Christianity Must Change or Die and A New Christianity for a New World. I am still engaged in this study as I begin to work on a new book scheduled for publication in 2007 and tentatively entitled, Jesus for the Non-Religious.

Atonement theology, however, involves far more than a salvation doctrine. It brings into question the theistic understanding of God and even the morality of God. This theology assumes that God is an external Being who invades the world to heal the fallen creation. It also assumes that this God enters this fallen world in the person of the Son to pay the price of human evil on the cross. It was the central theme in Mel Gibson's motion picture; "The Passion of the Christ" which might have been dramatically compelling but it represented a barbaric, sado-masochistic, badly dated and terribly distorted biblical and theological perspective.

All atonement theories root in a sense of human alienation and with it a sense of human powerlessness. "Without Thee we can do nothing good!" So we develop legends about the God who does for us what we cannot do for ourselves. For Christianity, I am convinced that our basic atonement theology finds its taproot not in the story of the cross but in the liturgy of the synagogue, especially Yom Kippur, the Jewish Day of Atonement. In the Yom Kippur liturgy an innocent lamb was slain and the people were symbolically cleansed by the saving blood of this sacrificed Lamb of God. Jesus was similarly portrayed as the new Lamb of God. As we Christians tell the story of Jesus' dying for our sins in doctrine, hymns and liturgy, we quite unknowingly turn God into an ogre, a deity who practices child sacrifice and a guilt-producing figure, who tells us that our sinfulness is the cause of the death of Jesus. God did it to him instead of to us who deserved it. Somehow that is supposed to make it both antiseptic and worthwhile. It doesn't. I think we can and must break the power of these images. Just the fact that you are sensitive to it and offended by it is a start.

Consciousness is rising on this issue all over the Church, and as it does, Christianity will either change or die. There is no alternative. I vote for change, obviously you do too.

-- John Shelby Spong

An entertaining read from Chalcedon, a Christian Fundamentalist group

2006-02-16T06:33:00.000+08:00

A Review of "Women Who Make the World Worse:
And How Their Radical Feminist Assault Is Ruining Our Schools, Family, Military, and Sports" , by Kate O’Beirne (Sentinel, New York: 2006)
Reviewed by Lee Duigon
February 13, 2006

If you’re reading Chalcedon, you probably already know that feminism is a very bad idea that has done real harm to civilization.

Attorney Kate O’Beirne, Washington editor of National Review and a regular on CNN’s The Capital Gang, does a thorough job of trying and convicting feminism for crimes against common sense and sanity. If you have any doubts about that, her book will remove them.

What are feminism’s crimes? O’Beirne devotes a chapter to each count of the indictment: undermining the family; weakening the parent-child bond and putting children at risk; creating dishonest legal theories that ruin people’s lives and hurt the body politic; wrecking our educational system; demolishing college sports; weakening our armed forces; poisoning our political system; and establishing abortion as a kind of feminist sacrament, to the tune of more than 40 million unborn babies killed.

“All these women who make the world worse by waging a destructive war between the sexes are at war with Mother Nature,” she concludes (p. 199).
The Role of the Federal Government

The most revealing insight of the book, not necessarily what the author intended, has to do with the role of the federal government, which empowers and enables feminism by feeding it with uncounted billions of tax dollars. Without your tax dollars, doled out to them by bureaucrats in Washington, feminists would be just another gaggle of loopy malcontents.

What does feminism cost America, just in terms of tax dollars paid out to subsidize it? On every other page of this book, the government steps in to enact new laws, set up new bureaucracies, fund new studies, empanel new commissions — on and on, no end to it, hemorrhaging millions of dollars with every fitful twitch.

Has anyone counted this money? Just from the information given in this book, the total must run into the tens of billions.

And what do we, the people, get out of this? Not much, says O’Beirne. Mostly the money funds programs that function as feminist job banks.

But the money does enable feminists to be powerful, and they’ve wreaked havoc with their power. O’Beirne cites dozens of examples. The whole enterprise, she says, is “an agenda that demands radical social engineering to eliminate any differences between the sexes” (p. xviiii).

As for concrete results:

* Parents today spend 50% less time with their children than they did 40 years ago (p. xx).
* The American Psychological Association holds that fathers are not necessary for the successful upbringing of children (p. 10).
* One third of all American children are born out of wedlock, up from 9% in 1960 (p. 14).
* Our basic civil rights have been abridged. Says UCLA Law Professor Eugene Volokh, “Without much fanfare, the law of ‘workplace harassment’ has turned into a national speech code” (p. 61).
* In our public schools, thousands of boys have been medicated with Ritalin to make them as tractable as girls (p. 74).
* More than 700 “women’s studies” programs have been set up in our universities, where they do little more than turn students into “relentless grievance collectors … too suspicious to function in the workaday world” (p. 86).
* To placate feminists, we have weakened our military — even to the point of putting into harm’s way female soldiers who are too small to use war-fighting equipment safely or efficiently (pp. 130–131).
* Abortion has become the preferred method of birth control, defended by political geniuses like Congresswoman Maxine Waters (D-CA), who once said, “I have to march [in a pro-abortion demonstration] because my mother could not have an abortion” (p. 176).

Every jot and tittle of this — and so much more — has been subsidized by the federal government. Given the harm wrought by feminism, we are tempted to accuse the government of funding the slow destruction of America.

If there ever was an argument for drastically reducing the size and scope of government and hamstringing its power to take and waste our money, this is it.
Down with Mom!

If you still think feminism is about “equal pay for equal work,” read O’Beirne’s book. What it’s really about is having a badly deranged vision of reality.

Feminism displays its true colors in its never-ending quest to denigrate and someday abolish motherhood.

This is not a passing fad, but something that has been with modern feminism from the beginning and still animates it today. We go from feminist icon Betty Friedan in 1963, “It was easier for me to start the women’s movement … than to change my own personal life” (p. 1), to Kate Millet in 1969, “[D]estroy marriage” (p. 2), to Barbara Ehrenreich in 1981 describing the family as “a nest of pathology and a cradle of gruesome violence” (p. 4). Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg said in 2003, “Motherly love … [is] a myth that men have created” to keep women down (p. 24).

Joan Peters in 1997 declared it’s a bad thing for mothers to be home with their children (p. 26) and was echoed by Professor Gretchen Ritter of the University of Texas in 2004: “Full-time mothering is bad for children” (p. 32). Finally, feminist psychologist Dr. Sandra Scarr has inspired many fellow feminists by describing the mother-child bond as a disease! “New treatments will be developed for children in exclusive maternal attachments (EMA),” she predicted (p. 40). Dr. Scarr is a past president of the American Psychological Association.

Here we leave loopiness behind and enter into the realm of abomination. Godlessness has warped these women’s minds, and government funding has given them the power to influence law and policy. Without the money, they’d just be funny. With the money, the joke is on us.
O’Beirne Off Target

If you want to read hundreds of bizarre feminist quotes and gnash your teeth every time the state lays another boxcar-load of money on them, read O’Beirne’s book. For the time being, let’s jump ahead to her concluding chapter, entitled, “Mother Nature Is a Bitch.”

“Feminists have squared off against Mother Nature, and she’s no feminist,” O’Beirne says (p. 180). Whether they’re railing against “compulsory heterosexuality” (p. 181) or trying to stop scientific research into the differences between the sexes (p. 182), they are always, in the author’s view, kicking against the goads of nature.

But by nature she means just that: blind, insensate nature, governed by laws of natural selection. Mrs. O’Beirne — who has successfully maintained her long-term marriage, and raised two sons, and had the courage and the integrity to yank them out of public school early on and educate them in Catholic schools — disappoints us in the end by opting for a naturalistic explanation of why feminism is wrong.

“The drive for reproductive success dictated the sexes’ behavior,” she writes (p. 184). “If a feminist cave-dweller subscribed to Ms. magazine and bought into being sexually liberated, evolution would have seen to it that her feminist genes would have perished along with her abandoned offspring” (p. 185). Mothering skills, she concludes, are the “result of natural selection” (p. 190), while “Men needed spatial skills to hit moving targets and to make tools” (p. 194), and so on, for a whole chapter.

Well, what’s wrong with making that argument?

First, it simply isn’t true. The Bible tells us that men and women are different because that’s how God created them: “male and female created he them” (Gen. 1:27). God also created the family as our basic social institution, pre-dating tribes, cities, nations, states, etc. All of these more complicated institutions rest on the foundation of the family, and have so rested for the entirety of human history.

By arguing from a standpoint of evolution, O’Beirne puts herself in the same presuppositional ballpark as the feminists. Feminists are naturalists; they believe fervently in evolution. And upon this framework may be erected any just-so story that meets the rhetorical needs of the moment. So we find alleged scientists publishing scientific papers about the evolution of homosexuality as a boon to human survival during some vague, totally conjectural interlude in prehistory.

Evolution is a harlot who’ll go to bed with anyone who pays her. Feminists can certainly find any number of naturalistic, “evolutionary” arguments to justify their program.

We got into this socio-political mess in the first place by turning our backs on God, disregarding His Word, and substituting our own inventions for it. Feminism is one of those inventions. We will not escape from our predicament by coming up with more inventions. Godlessness is the bus that brought us here, and it’s a one-way trip. Mrs. O’Beirne would be well advised to get off.

Only when we stand on God’s Word do we have any firm place to stand at all. Otherwise, moral issues fall into perpetual debate — a debate whose outcome is influenced by outside factors like money, access to the media, political maneuvering, demagoguery, intimidation, and sometimes even violence.

So although O’Beirne has given feminism a black eye, she has by no means won the fight. For that we must put on the full armor of God and wage spiritual warfare.

Lee Duigon is a Christian free-lance writer and contributing editor for the Chalcedon Report. He has been a newspaper editor and reporter and a published novelist.

A 3-D fractal image. Produced with ChaosPro software, there are many more beautiful possibilities.

2006-02-14T18:36:00.000+08:00

I may post some more images of fractal images.

A well expressed argument about the cartoons

2006-02-11T07:42:00.000+08:00

I personally cannot understand why folk should be "offended" at cartoons of their religion. I incline towards Buddhism myself, but it doesn't concern me if anyone pours scorn upon Buddha, so long as they leave me free to follow the tenets if I wish, and if those tenets do not make life difficult for others. The problem as I see it is that Muslims are, as it were, doctrinally compelled to try to make everyone else a Muslim, and this doesn't suit most people because they find Islam a backward culture. So long as Islam insists on everyone being a Muslim, they will be acting in an uncivilized way and proving it to everyone that they are a backward culture. The same argument applies to Christianity: in medieval times people were prosecuted for not going to church because power-seekers wished to use Christianity to exert power over people; now Muslims wish to arrogate to themselves the right to kill people because their prophet has been "insulted". How does it matter if a prophet is insulted, for goodness sake? What's the big deal?

The Cartoon Jihad: Free Speech in the Balance
We must uncompromisingly defend the right to freedom of speech.

By Christian Beenfeldt and Onkar Ghate

A battle for Western freedom is being fought overseas. The specific object of the battle is merely a handful of cartoons. The outcome of the struggle, however, will reverberate for years.

The conflict began when the leading Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten printed twelve cartoons of Mohammed to expose and challenge the country's existing climate of fear of criticizing Islam. Confirming the newspaper's nightmares, the response was the deluge of Islamic rage, death threats and violence now sweeping the world.

The issue at stake is the right to speak one's mind.

Recognizing this, many European newspapers reprinted the cartoons. Echoing the story of the defiant slaves, who, when the Romans came for Spartacus, the leader of their rebellion, each proclaimed "I am Spartacus"--this was a clear show of support for the Danish paper and a symbolic affirmation of the right to free speech.

In the United States, however, fear of Muslim anger has suppressed a similar show of support. Indeed, the Bush administration and the mainstream media have generally sided with the raging religionists; while dutifully paying lip service to the First Amendment, their main concern has been for the "hurt feelings" of Muslims. Bush cautioned that we have "a responsibility to be thoughtful about others." Offering similar reasons, major U.S. newspapers like the New York Times refuse to print the cartoons. UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan told the world that "of course freedom of speech is never absolute."

Well, is freedom of speech absolute?

Absolutely.

The right to free speech means the right to express one's ideas without danger of coercion, of physical suppression or interference, by anyone. This freedom includes the right to make movies, write books, draw pictures, voice political opinions--and satirize religion. This right flows from the right to think: the right to observe, to follow the evidence, to reach the conclusions you judge the facts warrant--and then to convey your thoughts to others.

To demand special status for any idea or ideology--to declare Judaism or Christianity or Marxism or Islam off-limits, above public criticism--is to negate these rights. No rational mind can function under the order: Follow the evidence wherever you think it leads, but don't you dare come to a negative conclusion about the philosophy of Marxism or the religion of Islam.

The consequence of making submission to authority and not thought--faith, not reason--the sacred value of a society can be observed throughout the Middle East, where censorship, state propaganda, intellectual stagnation, forced compliance with religious edicts and medieval punishments for religious offences are part of everyday life.

Unlike the Muslims now raging across the world, however, many Americans do cherish free speech--yet may be wondering, when so many other Muslims appear to be offended, is this really the issue on which to make an intransigent stand? The answer to this question is unequivocally yes.

Even if it were true that many Muslims are angered by the specific nature of the cartoons, not by the mere fact that Islam was criticized, their anger is irrelevant. Is a Jew to be silenced because Christians find it offensive that he refuses to accept the divinity of Jesus? Or are the Christians to be silenced, because the Jew finds the Trinity offensive? Is the atheist to be silenced, because Jew, Christian and Muslim alike find his ideas offensive? Maybe all the scientific heirs to Galileo should be silenced, as Galileo himself was by the Church, since those who take the Bible literally are angered by the claim that the earth moves?

If we allow anyone's feelings to reign, we destroy freedom of thought and speech.

In a free society, anyone angered by someone else's ideas has a simple and powerful recourse: don't buy his books, watch his movies, read his newspapers. If one judges his ideas dangerous, argue against them. The purveyor of evil ideas is no threat to those who remain free to counter them with rational ones.

(Note that many European nations have laws limiting free speech, all of which should be repealed; to protest these, however, one does not demand "equal censorship.")

The moment someone decides to answer those he finds offensive with a gun, not an argument--as many Muslims have by demanding that European governments censor the newspapers or by issuing calls for beheadings and other violence against Europeans--he removes himself from civilized society and any rational consideration.

And against this kind of threat to free speech, every free man must stand up. We must vociferously condemn the attempt by religionists to impose censorship in the West. We must extol--without apology or qualifications--the indispensable pillar of a free society: freedom of thought and speech.

The U.S. press should do so by immediately publishing the cartoons, declaring that "I, too, am Spartacus."

Dr. Onkar Ghate, PhD in philosophy, is a senior fellow at the Ayn Rand Institute in Irvine, CA. Christian Beenfeldt, MA in philosophy, lives in Denmark and is a guest writer for the Ayn Rand Institute (www.aynrand.org/).

A tribute to my wife

2006-02-05T12:58:00.000+08:00

MY LITTLE FAT SLUT

I love my little fat slut ...

when she laughs deliciously and shows that she likes it when I call her “my little fat slut”
when she is feeding the fishes in the pond, squatting down with her flimsy shorts stretched tight, looking carefully, observing closely, making comments

when she is lying on the bed reading, supporting herself on her elbows, legs slightly apart ... looks up and smiles ...
when she is asleep, breathing softly
when she is sweeping the floor
when she is cooking and singing to herself
when she is riding in the tricycle and smiling
when she is sitting beside me in a public tricycle (they are small and there is not enough space for two really) and I feel her body touching mine, and she puts her hand on my thigh
when she runs past me to open the gate for me so I don't have to get off my bicycle.
when she is dressed up in her flashy blouse decorated with big sequins, close-fitting pants, dangly ear-rings and necklace
when she is lying naked on her back, throwing her head back, lifting her cunt with muscular surges while I finger it, and rolling her widely parted legs spasmodically from side to side
when she is lying on her front, lifting her fat little arse and twitching her legs and feet, while I ...etc
when she is reading a book, sitting in a small chair and leaning back a little, holding the book rather far away
when she is kneeling on the bedroom floor with books and papers all around, sorting out the accounts in the many savings bank books she keeps for other people who trust her to look after their money
when she willingly and without demur lies over the table to receive a whipping, and gasps at each stroke
and then afterwards is loving and caressing
when she thinks of important things I have forgotten to take into consideration
when she is vainly trying (at my behest) to get into her college uniform skirt which is four inches too small round the waist
when she comes up behind me suddenly and puts her arms around me, her face touching my cheek and says “Thank you for ...” (a trivial thing I have done; or something I made for the evening meal.)
when she runs to me suddenly and puts her arms around me for no known reason
when she rests her leg over mine while we are sitting outside by the fish pond with drinks, watching the fish and talking desultorily
when neither of us can control the impulse to giggle while playing the game of Evil Headmaster and Naughty Student, thus deflating the drama
when she fills the buckets for flushing the toilet from the pump before going to bed, going out naked into the back porch in the darkness, disregarding the possibility of being seen by passers-by, themselves unseen
when she gets up at 5:30 to cook the rice for our son's school lunch
when she reports that other men have expressed a desire for her favours
when she takes all her clothes off to get into bed with me
when she is dressed in a thong and close-fitting pants of soft cloth that follow her sweet curves
when she walks with that slightly awkward twitch that's not graceful
when she stands beside me and puts her hands on me down there, one in front and one behind
when she rubs her arse against me and titters if I come up close behind her and press my body against hers
when she devotedly visits her old father across the town, most days
when she moves my hand to the place she likes it to be
when she calls me handsome just because I have tucked my shirt into my shorts and put on a belt.
when she treats her friends and family with EFT (tapping), usually successfully, when they have ailments and accidents
when she comes up to me and asks me how I would like the fish cooked
when she spends the greater part of a day at the washing machine getting the clothes very clean
when she walks about the house with no clothes on
when she tends her hundreds of plants
when she is gabbling nineteen to the dozen into the telephone without stopping for ten minutes on end and I don't understand a single word of it
when she takes notice of my wishes about how she should dress
when she listens carefully to me while I am recounting some event or situation and makes herself interested in it, even though others might – probably would – think it was boring or irrelevant
when she acts considerately and helpfully towards her family and friends, while all the time she supports me, finds joy in fulfilling all my desires and wishes and helps me to feel good.

A misbegotten decision

2006-02-04T07:23:00.000+08:00

This blog is becoming very political! But this article does raise a very difficult problem: Afghanistan's economy depends largely on opium production. Attempts to destroy poppy fields in Afghanistan will not be economically productive, and will also be very unpopular with the farmers for whom it is the only possible source of a decent income.

My solution? Leet them grow poppies; de-criminalise drugs, of any kind, worldwide. Let those who will, kill themselves with heroin. What do you think?

South Asia Features
Kabul`s Mission Impossible
By Martin Walker
Feb 3, 2006, 19:00 GMT

WASHINGTON, DC, United States (UPI) -- The vote in the Dutch parliament Friday to send up to 1,400 of their troops to the NATO mission in Afghanistan may help save the battered credibility of the alliance, but it faces something dreadfully close to Mission Impossible.

The United States wants to withdraw some 4,000 troops from the Afghan mission. NATO, or at least its energetic new Dutch secretary-general Jaap de Hoop Scheffer, wants to be seen as militarily useful so it has deployed its first mission outside the traditional European theater of operations.

For the past two years, NATO has deployed some 9,000 troops in and around Kabul. The force includes some 2,000 Germans, about a thousand Turks, the same number of Canadians and just over 500 from Italy, Belgium, Spain and Britain, which is about to send some 3,200 more.

The Canadians are being reinforced to about 2,200, and the overall NATO contingent should soon amount to over 15,000 troops, and moving into some of the dangerous regions that have hitherto be mainly manned by U.S. forces. The British are being deployed to Helmand province, a dangerous zone where the Taliban remains powerful, and which has seen 100 U.S. troops killed over the past 6 months -- an ominous figure, given that the 100th British soldier has just been killed in Iraq.

In order to reinforce this NATO mission, the Dutch went through an agonizing public debate and a political row that brought up all the old European resentments about the Bush administration and the Iraq war, and for a while it threatened to sink the government. The government had to make all sorts of promises, like an insistence that no detained Afghan would be allowed to end up in the U.S. detention center at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, to win the vote. And they pledged that the Dutch troops would be under strict Rules of Engagement that would let them fight back, but not initiate hostilities, nor fight alongside the U.S. forces on aggressive patrol missions.

The Dutch troops, like their NATO allies, are doubtless all brave, decently armed and trained. They have been assured by their commanders and their politicians that theirs is an important mission, bringing peace to a war-battered land. They will be helping guard the engineers and aid workers who are trying to rebuild, and facing the same extremist Islamist enemy that exploded bombs in Madrid and London.

Oh yes, and they are meant to help fight the war on drugs by supporting the Afghan government`s efforts to eradicate the opium trade and crop, which fuels the heroin that ends addicting and killing young Europeans.

And as part of the Alice-in-Wonderland Rules of Engagement under which NATO operates, the mandate does not allow the troops deliberately to damage civilian property, which means that cannot burn the poppy fields directly, only provide support to the Afghan government employees who will strike the matches.

This is the baffling part of the mission. Outside of drugs, and the money challenged in by aid workers and troops, there is almost no Afghan economy worthy of the name. One in four of the 25 million population is dependent on food aid.

According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, Afghanistan is by far the world`s largest producer of opium. The U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime says the country accounts for more than two-thirds of global opium production, and each of the last three years has seen record crops, despite the 2002 ban on illicit opium poppy cultivation and the trafficking and consumption of opiates. This should come as no surprise, since the poppies that produce opium are estimated to earn approximately eight times more income per acre than wheat, using less water and fewer inputs.

'The livelihoods of about 1.7 million rural people -- around 7 percent of Afghanistan`s population -- are directly dependent on poppy cultivation,' says the FAO.

'And poppy production has spread to more remote, less accessible parts of the country due to increasing political and physical pressure on the main growing areas. For poor rural farmers struggling to survive amid the chaos resulting from more than 20 years of conflict and, more recently, four years of drought, the cultivation of opium poppy has provided relatively secure cash income and the means by which poor farmers and the landless could get access to land. It has also offered the only source of credits and agricultural inputs, with traders often offering advances against future production.'

But the drugs trade is the only bit of the Afghan economy that works. By destroying it, we undermine the chances of President Hamid Karzai`s government to bring order, prosperity or very much else, except more of the $10 billions in Western aid that was promised at this week`s London conference.

Moreover, by destroying the drugs trade, we act as the Taliban`s recruiting sergeants, giving them the opportunity to pose as the defenders of Afghan peasants against the NATO troops and the hirelings of the Karzai government of Kabul. An impoverished Afghan peasant who finally gets some money from his opium crop is not going to welcome the arrival of NATO troops standing guard as the crop is destroyed. He might even join the Taliban in order to protect it.

The United States has been fighting the war on drugs for the past 34 years, with little visible success. Cocaine and heroin remain widely available despite draconian prison sentences. The U.S. Justice Department`s own figures show that 55 percent of federal prison inmates are behind bars for drug offences, and so are 21 percent of adults in state prisons -- a total of some 300,000 people.

In short, the demand for drugs from the West resists strenuous efforts to control it. The Afghan peasants, in the absence of anything else, feed that demand. Understandably, the governments of the West would like to curtail the Afghan supply, in conditions that will make such an effort not only dangerous for the troops, but liable to undermine the very mission of stabilizing the Afghan government they have been sent to fulfill.

This looks like Mission Impossible.

And this is the real danger to NATO. It was the Dutch Army, remember, that under their strict Rules of Engagement as peacekeepers in Bosnia in 1995, were unable to prevent the Serb forces from massacring some 5,000 Bosnians at Srebrenica, which had been declared a `safe zone.` The morale of the Dutch army has barely recovered from this humiliation.

Now they are on another peacekeeping mission in Afghanistan, and a great deal of NATO`s political capital has been expended to get them there. NATO embarked on this operation to show the Americans that they remained serious and important allies. But with this misbegotten decision to join the war on drugs as well as the war on terrorism, they now risk losing more public support at home than any approval they may gain in the Pentagon

Yet more on cartoons of Mohammed

2006-02-03T09:03:00.000+08:00

The Prophet and the limits of the freedom of expression

Facsimile of the Danish daily 'Jyllands-Posten' from September 2005

afrol News editorials, 2 February - The publication of cartoons of the Prophet Mohammed in Danish and Norwegian newspapers has caused outrage, boycott calls and violence in the Middle East and North Africa. Several Muslim countries demand an apology from Denmark and Norway. afrol News, published from Norway, questions the motives behind the original publication, but defends the right of media in secular states to publish cartoons of the Prophet.

Mohammed has become an important personality in the life of all citizens in the world, whether they are Muslims or not. The words and deeds of the deceased Prophet have an impact on local, national and international politics far beyond the Muslim world.

In secular societies with a free press, Mohammed thus has figured in many cartoons over the years, for example as the incarnation of Islam. Despite the strict religious ban on drawing or painting the Prophet or God in Islam, these "guest star" appearances of Mohammed in the Western press so far have not caused protests by Muslims.

When the Danish daily 'Jyllands-Posten' on 30 September last year printed twelve cartoons of the Prophet, things however changed. The editor of the conservative daily had asked Danish cartoonist to draw Mohammed with the intention of "testing" what kind of reactions this would provoke. He wanted to find out whether the rather large number of Muslim immigrants to Denmark were influencing the limits of freedom of expression in the Nordic kingdom.

This "test" caused immediate reactions, with Danish Muslims demonstrating in front of the daily. The editor even received several death threats. 'Jyllands-Posten had achieved what it seemingly wanted - to demonstrate that there exists a conflict between liberal Danish cultural values and the values of the immigrant society. 'Jyllands-Posten' already previously had supported this view, propagated by Denmark's right-wing government.

During the Nordic winter, most Danish Muslims forgot about the provocation, except for a group of activists that went to the Middle East to spread the news about the blasphemy committed in Denmark. As protests against Denmark started to get organised by radical groups in Palestine, the tiny Christian fundamentalist weekly 'Magazinet' of Norway decided to publish the same cartoons "in support of" 'Jyllands-Posten'.

In January, protests in Palestine and Iraq against Denmark and Norway started to turn more violent. Death threats against all Danish and Norwegian citizens in the region were issued by radical groups. A boycott of Nordic products has been implemented in large parts of the Middle East, already costing hundreds of Danes their jobs. Several Muslim countries in the Middle East and North Africa have withdrawn their ambassadors from Copenhagen, awaiting an official Danish government apology. Libya has even closed its embassy in Copenhagen.

In Denmark, the action of 'Jyllands-Posten' found the support of the government and of most Danes. Prime Minister Anders Fogh Rasmussen refused to meet 11 Arab ambassadors to discuss the case and has ruled out giving any apology. At 'Jyllands-Posten', however, pressure was too high and the daily earlier this week decided to apologise for having "provoked" fellow Muslim citizens, but not for publishing the cartoons. The editor resigned from his post.

In Norway, on the other hand, the editor of 'Magazinet' has been heavily criticised by other media and by several politicians, including former Prime Minister Kjell Magne Bondevik of the Christian Party. Most observers hold that the printing of the cartoons was an unnecessary "provocation" by the insignificant weekly, only aiming at causing conflict. Oslo diplomats are trying to tranquilise Muslim leaders but the Norwegian government is not in a position to apologise, given the strong institution of press freedom in the kingdom.

As protests have also been directed towards the European Union (EU), of which Denmark is a member, the case this week caught the attention of the European press. As the cartoons now are "of public interest" due to the conflict and the debate surrounding the limits of the freedom of expression, several leading European media have decided to reprint them. These include 'France Soir' - whose editor was fired for that reason - Germany's 'Die Welt', Italy's 'La Stampa', Spain's 'El Periodico and 'Volkskrant' in the Netherlands. Many more, including afrol News, have carried facsimiles of 'Jyllands-Posten' and the cartoons.

As a Norwegian media that reaches out to many Muslims, afrol News feels obliged to have an opinion on this issue. afrol News is a strict defender of press freedom and is based on a belief that total freedom of expression is a must for development on all levels.

But as with any freedom, the freedom of expression carries responsibilities with it. When you call someone an idiot, you must be able defend your conclusion or face reactions. An expression can be as destructive as a gun. And especially the influential press - which has driven many persons into suicide due to irresponsible reporting - needs to be aware of its responsibilities. For that reason, we operate by ethical guidelines.

Basic press ethics tell us that we shall not seek to create conflict. More in particular, the Norwegian code of press ethics, by which afrol News operates, instructs us to respect other persons' belief and to be thoughtful when making a presentation.

In the view of afrol News, 'Jyllands-Posten' and 'Magazinet' acted in an unethical way when first printing the Mohammed cartoons. They were in their legal right to do so, but statements from the editors of the two publications indicate that the motive was to provoke a religious minority or to demonstrate this minority's tolerance limits. Especially in our times, where Christian and Muslim fundamentalists are trying to provoke a "clash of civilisations" against the will of the moderate majority, such provocations are at best thoughtless.

On the other hand, the death threats against the two editors and against Danish and Norwegian citizens at large by Muslim fundamentalist groups - even if willingly provoked - cannot be accepted. Also the fundamental lack of understanding of press freedom and secular values in Europe as demonstrated by several Arab governments is disappointing.

As the Mohammed cartoons now have turned into a public debate regarding freedom of expression versus religious taboos in all of Europe and in the Muslim world, their reprinting by other European newspapers is obvious. They now have public interest, being the seed of a diplomatic row. The press is even obliged by its own ethics to publish them at this point.

The press "cannot yield to any pressure from anybody who might want to prevent open debates, the free flow of information, free access to sources, and open debate on any matter of importance to society as a whole," our ethical guidelines say. Therefore, some European media have bought the cartoons for republishing while others, including afrol News, print a facsimile of the 'Jyllands-Posten' page in question. The sacking of the editor of 'France Soir' for having published the cartoons at this stage of the debate is incomprehensible.

This debate is of great importance to societies all around the world. Several questions must be discussed: Are some of us abusing the freedom of expression to publish statements that are meant to provoke conflicts? Are some of us abusing this freedom to get cheap publicity? Is a relatively new religious minority in its right when demanding limits to freedom in its new host country? Can Muslims dictate others on their religious taboos? Can non-Muslims dictate Muslims on religious taboos? Do we want to let religious fundamentalists dictate our political agenda?

By Rainer Chr. Hennig

This article was found at the online version of afrol News: www.afrol.com

More on cartoons of Mohammed

2006-02-02T09:28:00.000+08:00

I was very sorry to see that the Danish paper that published cartoons of Mohammed apologised for doing so. Then I was pleased to read that other newpapers in Europe had published the cartoons as well, one affirming the "right to blasphemy".

Muslims must have very little faith in their religion if they feel it will be damaged by a cartoon. If it will, in fact, be damaged by a cartoon then it deserves to be damaged. The whole idea of blasphemy is primitive, anyway. I hope more cartoons ridiculing religious leaders are published, not because I disapprove of those leaders, but because it is important that anyone may poke fun at anyone else without incurring penalties.

Cartoons of Mohamed rouse the faithful

2006-01-30T07:28:00.000+08:00

I have not seen the cartoons which are said to ridicule the prophet Mohamed, but I have no sympathy for those who are complaining. If Islam is so weak in its adherents' minds that it cannot stand up to some lampooning, it cannot be worth much to them. The reaction shows that the complainants value Islam only for the emotional security it gives, and not for any truth it may purvey. This can be said about any religion.

Caricature is but one method of attacking pomposity and falsity. It seems to be the most effective, for it draws more fire from Muslims than even the most vitriolic direct attacks, which can easily be ignored.

An excellent comment on the Palestinian election, from The Guardian,27 Jan 2006

2006-01-27T12:00:00.000+08:00

The Palestinians' democratic choice must be respected

The excuses given for refusing to deal with Hamas will not wash. This is a chance for Europe to have an independent role

Jonathan Steele
Friday January 27, 2006

Guardian

Hamas's triumph in Wednesday's Palestinian elections is the best news from the Middle East for a long time. The poll was a more impressive display of democracy than any other in the region, outstripping last year's votes in Lebanon and Iraq both in turnout and the range of views that candidates represented.

Whereas in Iraq parties that opposed the occupation had to downplay or even obscure their views, Palestinian supporters of armed resistance to Israel's expansionist strategies were able to run openly. It is true that Hamas candidates did not make relations with Israel the centrepiece of their campaign. They focused on reform in the Palestinian Authority. But few voters were unaware of Hamas's uncompromising hostility to occupation and its record in fighting it.

Wednesday's election was remarkable also in owing nothing to Washington's (selective) efforts to promote democracy in the Arab world. Instead, it was further proof that civil society in Palestine is more vibrant than anywhere else in the region and that Palestinian politics has its own dynamics, dictated not by outside pressure but the social and economic demands of ordinary people in appalling conditions. Providing a forum to freely express hopes and fears, debate policy and seek agreed solutions is, after all, what democracy is about.

In Israel and Washington reaction to Hamas's victory has been predictably negative. European governments should take a more sensitive view. The first watchword is caution. Applaud the process but don't take issue with the result. While the dust settles and Hamas works out its own priorities for government, Europeans should calmly analyse why Hamas got so much support.

Among several Hamas leaders I met in Gaza last summer, Mahmoud Zahar, one of its last surviving founders, exuded the clearest sense of inner steel. Trained as a medical doctor in Cairo, and now a short middle-aged figure with combed-over grey hair, he left several impressions. This is no mosque-driven revolutionary or wealthy jihadi of the Osama bin Laden type, motivated by ideology or a desire for adventure. Like other Gazans, he has felt the occupation on his skin. His wife was paralysed and his eldest son killed by an Israeli F-16 attack on his house in 2003. Zahar was in the garden and lucky to survive. In spite of that, he took the lead last year in persuading colleagues that Hamas should declare a truce or period of "calm" with Israel. For 11 months no Hamas member has gone on a suicide bombing mission. That is no mean achievement, which foreign diplomats rarely credit.

Zahar's reasons were not just tactical - a desire to deny Sharon a pretext for abandoning his retreat from Gaza. His strategy is to de-escalate the confrontation with Israel for a long period so that Palestinian society can build a new sense of unity, revive its inner moral strength and clean up its institutions. He feels western governments give aid and use the issue of negotiations with Israel only as a device for conditionality and pressure, not in the interests of justice.

So he wants Palestinians to have a broad-based coalition government that will look to the Arab and Islamic worlds for economic partners and diplomatic support. It's a kind of "parallel unilateralism", matching the mood in Israel where the peace camp clearly has lost all real purchase. "Israeli attitudes show they don't intend to make any agreement. They're going to take many unilateral steps," Zahar told me. "In this bad unbalanced situation and with the interference of the west in the affairs of every Arab country, especially Syria and Lebanon, we can live without any agreement and have a 'calm' for a long time. We're in favour of a long-term truce without recognition of Israel, provided Sharon is also looking for a truce. Everything will change in 10 or 20 years."

Zahar also left me with no sense of embarrassment about the imminence of power. He pointed out that Mahmoud Abbas would remain president for three more years, as though implying he could be a convenient front for inevitably unproductive talks with Washington and Israel while Hamas acted as a watchdog on the main issues. "There will be no contradiction between the Palestine legislative council and the president," he said. "We will be the safeguard, and the safety valve, against any betrayal."

Along with caution in reacting to the Hamas victory, Europe's second priority should be to maintain continuity. Any cut-off in EU aid would only be a gift to Israel's hardliners. The EU is the largest international donor to the Palestinian Authority, and Javier Solana, the EU foreign policy chief, blundered last month when he told a Gaza press conference that "it would be very difficult for the help and the money that goes to the Palestinian Authority to continue to flow" if Hamas were in government.

Yesterday's EU statements were more measured. If Europe, weak though its power may currently be, wants to have an independent role in the Middle East, clearly different from the manipulative US approach, it is vital to go on funding the PA regardless of the Hamas presence in government. Nor should the EU fall back on the cynical hope that Hamas will be as corrupt as Fatah, and so lose support. You cannot use European taxpayers' money to strengthen Palestinian institutions while privately wanting reforms to fail. Hamas should be encouraged in aiming to be more honest than its predecessors.

Above all, Europe should not get hung up on the wrong issues, like armed resistance and the "war on terror". Murdering a Palestinian politician by a long-range attack that is bound also to kill innocent civilians is morally and legally no better than a suicide bomb on a bus. Hamas's refusal to give formal recognition of Israel's right to exist should also not be seen by Europe as an urgent problem. History and international politics do not march in tidy simultaneous steps. For decades Israel refused even to recognise the existence of the Palestinian people, just as Turkey did not recognise the Kurds. Until 15 years ago Palestinians had to be smuggled to international summits as part of Jordan's delegation. It is less than that since the Israeli government accepted the goal of a Palestinian state.

Hamas may eventually disarm itself and recognise Israel. That will be the end of the process of establishing a just modus vivendi for Israelis and Palestinians in the Middle East. It cannot be the first step. Today's priority is to accept that Palestinians have spoken freely. They deserve respect and support.

j.steele@guardian.co.uk

A trip into the past - with updates. A large part of this information, except of course the photos, I have got from public records via the internet.

2006-01-02T11:23:00.000+08:00

Augustus Kirk 1838-1923

I've been delving into the lives of some of my ancestors recently. My grandfather Augustus Kirk was born in 1838 and he had a milliner's shop in Leicester, a fair sized city in the English midlands. His shop was in the High Street, employing ten assistants and an apprentice. He also employed a general servant and a nursemaid.

Augustus married Clara Weston,

Clara Kirke (nee Weston) 1844-77

a pretty woman six years younger than him, in September 1874 and had two children – my father and his younger sister Iva. I have no photo of Iva, but here is my father:

Cecil Kirke about 1876

Dad was born in June 1875 and his sister Iva in May 1877.

Sadly, Augustus' young wife Clara died less than a month after giving birth to Iva – perhaps from puerperal fever, a common thing in those days. Augustus was left with the task of bringing up two very small children with the assistance of their nursemaid Eliza Adams.

Fortunately for him and for the children, Augustus' sister Olivia,

Olivia Kirke, 1837-1909 (later Olivia Gilson).

a year or two older than him at age 40, lived with them, and she took over the mothering. Olivia was unmarried, although a good looking woman, and the family grew up over the shop in Leicester High Street until my father was thirteen, when Olivia then aged almost 52, received a proposal of marriage from a well-to-do farmer in Twyford, a village a few miles out of Leicester. His name was John Doughty Gilson, a widower then aged about 67, whose first wife, Catherine (known as "Kate") had died the year before aged 64, having given him five children.

John Doughty Gilson about 1870-80

and he farmed 170 acres of land with the assistance of five labourers and a boy.

Olivia and John were married in early 1889, and my father and his sister Iva moved out of Leicester to live in the farm house at Twyford with Olivia and her husband.

Here it becomes complicated. It is possible that John D. Gilson was a cousin of Augustus, as his great-grandmother was Mary Doughty and Augustus' great-aunt Catherine Kirk, daughter of Mary Doughty, born 1788, married one William Gilson, born 1780. John may well have been the son of William Gilson (the evidence for this is purely circumstantial, but the name "Doughty" supports this). John would then have been Olivia's first cousin once removed, or “niece in cousinhood” as they say in some parts of the world, and John's sons would be Olivia's second cousins.

To back up this speculation, Catherine died in Twyford on 9 April 1865. Olivia's great-aunt may have become her mother-in-law!

Olivia's marriage did not last long. Tragedy again overtook the family and John Gilson died after less than a year of marriage, leaving his sons Arthur, Alfred and Herbert (young men in their twenties) and, possibly, a daughter, of who I have a photo captioned, tantalisingly, “S. Gilson”. That this young woman is John Gilson's daughter is guesswork on my part.

Selina Gilson

In this photo she is a pretty young woman (difficult to guess her age), and I can find no other information about her. I am guessing that her first name was probably Sarah, as there were many Sarah Gilsons around that neighbourhood at that time.

Note: Since I wrote that last sentence, I have found out that John D. Gilson had two daughters; one, Selina, born in 1858. this would make her about 20 when the photos were taken, and fits exactly with them, so I am sure she is John's daughter - Olivia's stepdaughter and Dad's step-cousin.

Selina married twice, but so far as I can find out had no children. Her first husband was a lace maker from Nottingham, John Steere Hardy, and she lived with him in Nottingham for fourteen years. After he died in late 1891, she married again two years later to James Neville Tompson, a commercial traveller in timber, also living in Nottingham, and she lived there with him. Less than six years later she died aged just 42 and was buried in Wollaton Road Cemetery. She was my second cousin twice removed.

I also found out that John was described in the 1851 census as a "farmer of 83 acres employing 2 labourers", and in the1871 British census as a "grazier, 80 acres". So he had expanded his farming business by 90 acres and several men in the ten years between 1871 and 1881.

Here is another photo of Selina:

Selina Gilson about 1870-80

After her husband's death Olivia and the two children returned to Leicester and in 1891 they were living with Augustus at 19 St. Nicholas Street, Leicester. I guess the two sons had been bequeathed the farm, and probably John had left Olivia some money. Augustus had evidently sold his millinery business and was "living on independent means" according to the 1891 Census report. He does not seem to be employing any live-in servants, but a niece of his wife, Florence Mastyn or Mastin, aged 23, is living with them as housekeeper

Some time between 1891 and 1901 Augustus, Olivia and Iva moved to 39, Nightingale Lane, Streatham (then a suburb of London), where Olivia died on 19 October, 1909, aged 72.

Dad's sister Iva married a clergyman, John Anthony Sturton, and he obtained the position of Vicar at Market Lavington in Wiltshire (his father was a clergyman, too.) I still have a pocket Bible he gave me as a christening gift. They lived in the big Vicarage house in the village, and Augustus moved there (I don't know the exact date) and the Vicarage became home for my father's children by his first marriage - though they did visit him in China on occasion. Augustus died there in 1923 and was buried in St. Mary's churchyard there. I still remember that big old house in its large garden: in about 1978 it appeared much as it had been in my childhood forty years earlier; but the Vicar's residence is now elsewhere.

Dad went on to join the China Consular Service in 1898, first as an interpreter, later appointed vice-consul and in due course posted to many different towns in the course of the years 1906-1932 finishing his career as Consul-General for the provinces of Yunnan and Kweichow. from 1927-1932.
He married first Mabel Wilson from Alnwick, Northumberland: she died at sea in 1927 after giving him two sons and two daughters; two years after her death he married my mother, Sybil Sandys, a missionary working for the Church Missionary Society and a descendant of the seafaring families of Hood and Nelson. I was born in China and left that country at the age of two.

Sybil Kirke (nee Sandys) 1900 - 1989

Cecil Kirke about 1938

Dad retired in 1932, and died in 1959. His beloved sister Iva, with whom he had a closer and more durable relationship than with either of his wives, died a year before him and he told my mother shortly before his death that he was not afraid to die, as his sister Iva had appeared to him and she had told him she was waiting for him. He was buried in the churchyard at Market Lavington near his father's grave.

To finish off, here is a photo of my great-grandfather William Henry Kirk, Augustus' father:

William Henry Kirk 1809-1872

There is also some more information that has come to hand about my great-grandfather William Henry Kirk. In the 1861 census he is described as "Artist and Woolsorter", living at 20, Friar Lane, Leicester. Wool production was a substantial industry in Leicestershire at that time. Probably John D. Gilson had many sheep.His two children and his "niece" (probably 2nd cousin once removed) Ellen (or Eleanor) lived there with him.

2005-12-27T12:42:00.001+08:00

(email me if you want info on how to use EFT, where to tap etc.)

Using EFT for Money, Abundance & Success

from Gary Craig's web site

Dr. Carol Look provides us with a remarkable foundational article on using EFT to help create financial abundance in our lives. It is rich in concepts and specific language to use.

By Dr. Carol Look, Cht

I have read more than 20 books on the subject of attracting abundance, trying to figure out the trick to having (“manifesting”) more of what I want in my life. What I learned was that money is just another form of energy, and that there is a particular VIBRATION associated with abundance. While I understood the concepts, nothing ever changed when I “applied” what I had learned. It was not until I combined the book knowledge with EFT and the energy of love and gratitude that I was able to change my limiting beliefs, expand my comfort zones, neutralize my deserving issues , direct my feelings and expand my prosperity consciousness---all of which had been driving the results in my life. Using EFT, I was able to change my VIBRATION in my daily life around money, worry, and the future, which in turn opened the door for success and abundance.

Over the past few years, I have conducted seminars and some teleclass series covering the topic “EFT for Success and Abundance.” The blocks and themes keep recurring, as do the progress reports of people that persistently use tapping for abundance in their lives. Below are some of the themes that need to be addressed.

COMFORT ZONES: When I first started using EFT for success in my own life, I didn’t “believe” in comfort zones---what Gary refers to as ceilings on your progress based on the “writing on your walls.” When I noticed my income for two years running was exactly the same, I realized this was evidence of a comfort zone operating in my financial life.

This may not seem strange unless you are a private practitioner in the mental health field. There are so many variables---holidays that fall on different days of the week, my own vacation time, clients’ vacation time, illness, referrals, the economic situation etc--- that it is virtually impossible to predict your annual income. Two years in a row, despite all these variables, I made the exact (within $1000) same income working as a full time private practitioner. Once I used EFT to break through these comfort zones (after some resistance of course) my income shot up over 20% the next year. I had not raised my fee, had not done any advertising, and the country’s economic situation had in fact worsened. I used phrases such as:

“Even though I don’t dare raise my income, I deeply and completely accept myself…

“Even though I obviously have a block to earning more than $ XXX, I deeply and completely love and accept this conflict.”

“Even though I have trouble seeing myself earning more than $ XXX, I deeply and completely accept myself.”

“Even though I don’t feel safe making more than $ XXX because they’ll be jealous, I deeply and completely accept and love who I am.”

LIMITING BELIEFS: Dozens of clients in my abundance classes have told me that they had siblings who were seen as either “slow learners” or having some form of “difficulty” in school. Some of these siblings turned out to be brilliant while some are still struggling to this day. The point is that my clients learned from their families “I’m not supposed to shine” and that if they did shine, they were taking attention away from their struggling sibling. It didn’t seem to matter if the sibling was older, younger, the same sex or not. What mattered was that the parents compared the two, and scolded the “fast learner” for looking good, or “showing off.” The message was “don’t succeed or you’ll hurt someone else.”

“Even though I’m not supposed to shine because it will hurt my sister, I deeply and completely accept my brilliance.”

“Even though I will lose their approval if I do well, I deeply and completely accept my talents.”

“Even though it’s not safe to succeed, I choose to feel safe when I am doing what I love.”

“Even though they don’t feel comfortable when I succeed, I deeply and completely accept myself anyway.”

“Even though I’ll never forget his scolding me when I succeeded, I deeply and completely forgive myself be being so fast.”

“Even though I’m afraid I’ll be rejected if I succeed…”

Other common limiting beliefs that block financial wealth are prejudices against wealthy people. “Fran” told me she thought rich people were “shallow and mean.” Apparently her mother had taught her this concept, based on feelings of jealousy and a scarring incident with a neighbor when growing up. Fran adopted this belief, but was unaware that she could therefore never BETHOSE PEOPLE) for if she became one, she would not only be seen as shallow and mean (her assumption), more importantly, she would risk the deep disapproval of her mother (her deepest fear). These prejudices about wealthy people come in all shapes and sizes. They must be uncovered and treated with EFT if you want to improve your financial situation. rich, (one of

“Even though I’m convinced ALL rich people are mean and shallow…”

“Even though she’ll judge me if I make more money…”

“Even though I’m afraid to be successful because my mother will reject me…”

“Even though I’ll be envied too much if I’m rich…”

DESERVING ISSUES: I have many individual clients who feel guilty when they have desires to do well financially. When I asked “Jeff” why, he said that he already “had it good” because his father worked hard to educate him and he was a superb athlete… “why should I take more away from other people?” (1) The belief that his success would hurt someone else is a mistake. (2) The belief that there is a limited supply of abundance is also, in my opinion, off base. (3) As long as he thinks he has had “his share” he will sabotage progress or inadvertently reject opportunities. Jeff didn’t feel deserving of financial success, and was finally able to see a pattern of rejecting terrific opportunities for advancement in his job. He realized he was working hard to tread water, just making ends meet, much like friends of his who struggled with comfort zone issues in sports.

“Even though I don’t deserve any more, I’ve had enough, I deeply and completely accept myself anyway.”

“Even though my mother said we were lucky to have what we had, I deeply…

“Even though I don’t want to be selfish and take more than my share, I accept and love myself for having desires.”

“Even though my father scolded me for wanting more, I deeply and completely…”

PROSPERITY CONSCIOUSNESS: Whether you believe you don’t have enough time, money, love or success, the consciousness behind your belief will block you from receiving financial abundance. Your level of belief exudes a particular vibration. In energetic terms, the theory states that your consciousness about abundance has a certain capacity; you will receive exactly what your consciousness is capable of handling. The good news is that your consciousness can be expanded to believe there is enough to go around.

“Even though there was never enough money when I was a kid, I deeply and completely accept my fears.”

“Even though I remember the fight my parents had about money, and I think money is bad, I deeply…”

“Even though I’m afraid there won’t be enough, so I need to hold on tight, I deeply and completely accept who I am.

“Even though she told me there wasn’t enough, I choose to believe there is enough now.”

FEELINGS: Do you feel rich? If not in your bank account, do you at least feel rich in love or compassion or some other way? My point is you can’t get rich if you feel poor. So you will need to find some way of FEELING rich in your life. Notice the abundance in nature, or notice how many clients you do have, or how many good friends are in your life. However you do it, you must change the vibration you have and feel wealthy on an emotional level.

“Even though my father said we would always be poor, I choose to remember how much love I feel.”

“Even though I feel poor and anxious about money, I deeply and completely accept these fears.

“Even though my mother taught me it was better to be poor, I love and accept her anyway.”

Combining EFT with the energy of love and gratitude has contributed to huge payoffs in my life and the lives of my clients. EFT was the missing piece all along. Believe in PLENTY… THERE IS ENOUGH!

Carol Look

How absurd can the RC Church get?

2005-12-26T19:14:00.000+08:00

December 26, 2005

Backers Join Ousted Priest in 'Illicit' Mass

By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

ST. LOUIS - At least 1,500 people attended Christmas Eve Mass with an excommunicated Roman Catholic priest presiding, despite warnings from the archbishop that participating would be a mortal sin.

The Rev. Marek Bozek left his previous parish without his bishop's permission and was hired by St. Stanislaus Kostka Church this month. As a result, Father Bozek and the parish's six-member lay board were excommunicated last week by Archbishop Raymond Burke for committing an act of schism.

Archbishop Burke said it would be a mortal sin for anyone to participate in a Mass celebrated by a priest who was excommunicated.

The archbishop, who could not stop the Mass, said it would be "valid" but "illicit."

Despite the warning, Catholics and others from as far as Oregon and Washington, D.C., filled the church. An overflow crowd viewed the Mass by closed-circuit television in an adjoining parish center.

"I'm not worried about mortal sin," said Matt Morrison, 50, a worshiper.

"I'll take a stand for what I believe is right," Mr. Morrison said.

Many wore large red buttons reading "Save St. Stanislaus" and said they wanted to offer solidarity to a parish that they believed had been wronged.

When Father Bozek entered from the rear of the church, the congregation rose and greeted him with thunderous applause.

"It was magic," said JoAnne La Sala of St. Louis, who described herself as a lapsed Catholic. "You could feel the spirit of the people."

The penalty of excommunication was the latest wrinkle in a long dispute over control of the parish's $9.5 million in assets.

The parish's property and finances have been managed by a lay board of directors for more than a century. Archbishop Burke has sought to make the parish conform to the same legal structure as other parishes in the diocese. As a result, he removed both the parish's priests in 2004.

Father Bozek, a Pole who came to the United States five years ago, said he agonized about leaving his previous parish but wanted to help a church that had been deprived of the sacraments for 17 months.

This is one of my favourite photos of Rose. Click on the picture to enlarge it

2005-12-19T19:45:00.000+08:00

Young love

2005-12-18T11:26:00.000+08:00

The secret love life of Laura-Anne, aged 9¾

Channel 4 faces fresh controversy over fly-on-the-wall film of pre-teen romance (Channel 4 is a British TV channel)
Lorna Martin and Nell Card

Sunday December 18, 2005

Observer (newspaper)

Laura-Anne Hanrahan is sitting on her doorstep, playing with a pumpkin as she describes how she felt when her boyfriend kissed her.

'Tingly,' she says, dreamily. 'He used to come over and cuddle me and put his hands up my top. It used to feel cosy. I feel desperate to go up to him and say "Ben, why don't we kiss any more". It hurts so much that we don't kiss that I want to rip my heart out and throw it away.'

Laura-Anne, from Siddick, a two-street village near Workington in Cumbria, is nine years old.

Next year she will become a star as the main character in a fly-on-the-wall documentary about the sexual awakening of Britain's pre-teens, with her every thought pored over by television critics and sociologists. The makers of How To Fall In Love, due for broadcast by Channel 4 in the new year, spent two years following the primary school pupil and her friends as they discovered the opposite sex.

The Observer has seen the film. To some it will be a sweet and tender portrayal of childhood love, while others will rage against the increasingly sexualised world in which children grow up.

Laura-Anne is shown massaging 11-year-old Steven Hilland while he watches TV and eats crisps. Asked later about the scene, she tilts her head coquettishly and says: 'Sometimes I dig my nails in and scratch him hard.'

'I love it when you do that,' Steven replies with a grin.

In another scene, a heartbroken Laura-Anne shakes her head in disbelief as she reads a 'Dear John' letter penned by her 'first love'. 'It is hard for me to write this letter,' states Ben Challenger, aged 10. 'But I think we should have some time apart, because Steven is forcing me to go out with you and it doesn't feel right.'

In one of the most contentious scenes, two 10-year-olds are seen energetically participating in the kind of kissing normally undertaken behind the school bike shed. It has prompted a debate about the ethics of using potentially vulnerable children as documentary subjects, with one parent saying he felt that his son had been 'exploited and manipulated'.

'I'm not suggesting he was made to do anything he didn't want to do,' Steven Hilland said about his son, also Steven. 'But he was definitely encouraged by promises of burgers, go-karting and ice-skating. He didn't want to have a full-on snog with his girlfriend in front of the cameras, but he said he was persuaded to, and now he is embarrassed about everyone seeing it.'

Marc Isaacs, the acclaimed director of the film, admitted that some of the scenes, including the one Hilland mentioned, involved 'set up' shots, but insisted it was an accurate portrayal of what he witnessed during the two years he spent following the children. 'At first they were very excited, but then quickly got bored of the filming,' said Isaacs, who won the Grierson directorial award for best newcomer in 2002.

'We spent two years with them, because I didn't want this to be a surface portrait - so of course we took them to the pictures and bought them lunch and gave them Christmas and birthday presents. We did intervene and create scenes, but all the things that happened are completely true.'

Siddick, where the documentary was shot, is surrounded on one side by an enormous paper factory and on the other by a row of wind turbines. Visitors are welcomed by signs reading 'Please Die Carefully'. Once a busy mining area, it is now plagued with high unemployment. Despite this, there is a palpable sense of trust and community. Doors are left unlocked and children play outside until late in the evening. Now there is much talk about the impact the film, to be shown at a special screening in the local cinema on Tuesday, might have on the village and its residents.

Laura-Anne, who is now 11, Ben, 12, and Steven, 13, have mixed feelings. 'Most people my age think about boys and falling in love all the time,' said Laura-Anne. 'It is good to make a film about it rather than pretend it doesn't happen.'

'You have to have a girlfriend,' said Ben. 'Otherwise you just get wound up and people think you're not attractive.'

Although the programme is not sexually explicit, Steven told The Observer he first had full sex when he was 11, and had been several times to the family planning clinic. All the children said they had their first 'proper kiss with tongues' when they were six or seven.

This month The Observer revealed plans to introduce compulsory sex lessons for primary school children as young as five. Although the government later distanced itself from the report, which sparked fury among some church groups, there is growing support for sex education to begin much earlier.

Janice Hanrahan, Laura-Anne's mother, said: 'It can be very uncomfortable to see your nine-year-old on TV talking about being in love but it actually reminded me of having those feelings at a similar age. You simply forget as you grow up.

'People who say they want to keep children safe and innocent for as long as they can are fooling themselves. If children are not given sex education at home or in school, they will gather their impressions anywhere and everywhere: from explicit prime-time television jokes, soaps, magazines and the net.'

While many parents will be horrified at the thought of their pre-pubescent children engaging in any kind of sexual activity, some experts argue that we are all sexual beings, that children learn about touch and loving relationships from day one and that parents need to be comfortable talking about sexuality with their children early on.

Others expressed concern about a film showing nine-year-olds as sexually curious. 'There is already so much pressure on children to grow up,' said Mallory Hensen, a senior educational psychologist with Milton Keynes council.

'We hear about young girls wearing Playboy T-shirts and G-strings. We are already sexualising children far too much and treating them as young adults.'

An invition to gratitude

2005-12-17T12:19:00.000+08:00

From Michael Winn, at www.HealingTaoUSA.com ,
or
www.HealingDao.com

A Soul-stice Blessing and Meditation on Gratitude:

If you have food in the refrigerator, clothes on your back, a roof overhead and a place to sleep...
you are richer than 75% of this world.

If you have money in the bank, in your wallet, and spare change in a dish someplace...
you are among the top 8% of the world's wealthy.

If you woke up this morning with more health than illness...
you are more blessed than the million who will not survive this week.

If you have never experienced the danger of battle, the loneliness of imprisonment, the agony of torture, or the pangs of starvation...you are ahead of 500 million people in the world.

If you can attend a church or other gathering without fear of harassment, arrest, torture, or death...you are more blessed than three billion people in the world.

If your parents are still alive and still married... you are blessed with a family that is very rare.

If you hold your head up with a smile on your face and are truly thankful...you are blessed because the majority can, but most do not.

If today, you can hold someone's hand, hug them or even touch them on the shoulder ...
you are blessed because you have made contact with another human being.

If you can read this message, you are more blessed than over two billion people in the world who cannot read at all.

Count your blessings, and pass this message along to remind others how blessed we all are. Gratitude to the Life Force that manifests everything is a powerful way to come into intimate relationship with the Tao. The Life Force is the life blood of the Tao, our only means of communicating with the Great Mystery of the Unknown (wuji).

After contemplating this feeling of gratitude, I recommend sitting in the stillness of the Deep Cosmic Yin Inner Smile that is naturally happening at this time. Silence, but with an open heart.

Bless you and those you love this Solstice time, in whatever form you celebrate it!

May the Inner Light of the Tao Shine in Us,

Michael Winn

Boriska - an Indigo child?

2005-12-15T12:35:00.000+08:00

From Pravda June 2004

Boriska-boy from Mars
03/12/2004 19:38

Sometimes, some children are born with quite fascinating talents, unusual abilities.

I was told the story of an unusual boy named Boriska from members of an expedition to the anomaly zone located in the north of the Volgograd region, most commonly referred to as "Medvedetskaya gryada".

"Can you imagine, while everyone was sitting around the campfire at night, some little boy (about 7 years of age) suddenly asked everyone's attention. Turned out, he wanted to tell them all about life on Mars, about its inhabitants and their flights to earth," shares one of the witnesses. Silence followed. It was incredible! The little boy with gigantic lively eyes was about to tell a magnificent story about the Martian civilization, about megalithic cities, their spaceships and flights to various planets, about a wonderful country Lemuria, life of which he knew in details since he happened to descend there from Mars, had friends there.

Logs were cracking, night's fog enveloped the area and the immense dark sky with myriads of brightly lit stars seemed to conceal some sort of a mystery. His story lasted for about an hour and a half. One guy was smart enough to tape the entire narration.

Many were stunned by the two distinctive factors. First of all, the boy possessed exceptionally profound knowledge. His intellect was obviously far from that of a typical 7-year-old. Not every professor is capable of narrating the entire history of Lemuria and Lemurians and its inhabitants in such details. You will be unable to find any mentioning of this country in school textbooks. Modern science has not yet proved existence of other civilizations.

Second of all, we were all amazed by the actual speech of this young boy. It was far from the kind kids his age usually use. His knowledge of specific terminology, details and facts from Mars' and Earth's past fascinated everyone.

"Why did he start the conversation in the first place," said my interlocutor. "Perhaps, he was simply touched by the overall atmosphere of our camp with many knowledgeable and open-minded people," continued he.

"Could he make this all up?"

"Doubtful", objected my friend". "To me this looks more like the boy was sharing his personal memories from past births. It is virtually impossible to make up such stories; one really had to know them."

Today, after meeting with Boris' parents and getting to know the boy better, I begin to carefully sort out all the information obtained around that campfire. He was born in Volzhskii town in a suburban hospital, even though officially, based on the paperwork, his birthplace is the town of Zhirnovsk of Volgograd region. His birthday is January 11th, 1996. (Perhaps it will be helpful for astrologers).

His parents seem to be wonderful people. Nadezhda, Boriska's mother, is a dermatologist in a public clinic. She graduated from Volgograd medical institute not so long ago in 1991. The boy"s father is a retired officer. Both of them would be happy if someone could shed the light onto the mystery behind their child. In the meantime, they simply observe him and watch him grow.

-After Boriska was born, I noticed he was able to hold his head [up] in 15 days, recalls Nadezhda. His first word "baba" he uttered when he was 4 months old and very soon afterward started talking. At age 7 [months], he constructed his first sentence, "I want a nail." He said this particular phrase after noticing a nail stuck in the wall. Most notably, his intellectual abilities surpassed his physical ones.

-How did those abilities manifest themselves?

-When Boris was just one year old, I started giving him letters (based on the Nikitin's system) and guess what, at 1,5 he was able to read large newspaper print. It didn"t take long for him to get acquainted with colors and their shades. He began to paint at 2.

Then, soon after he turned 2, we took him to the children day care center. Teachers were all stunned by his talents and his unusual way of thinking. The boy possesses exceptional memory and an unbelievable ability to grasp new information. However, his parents soon noticed that their child had been acquiring information in his own unique way, from some place else.

-No one has ever taught him that, recalls Nadya. But sometimes, he would sit in a lotus position and start all these talks. He would talk about Mars, about planetary systems, distant civilizations.we couldn"t believe our own ears. How can a kid know all this? Cosmos, never-ending stories of other worlds and the immense skies, are like daily mantras for him since he was 2.

It was then that Boriska told us about his previous life on Mars, about the fact that the planet was in fact inhabited, but as a result of the most powerful and destructive catastrophe had lost its atmosphere and that nowadays all its inhabitants have to live in underground cities. Back then, he used to fly to earth quite often for trade and other research purposes. It seems that Boriska piloted his spaceship himself. This was during the times of the Lemurian civilizations. He had a Lemurian friend who had been killed right before his own eyes.

-A major catastrophe took place on earth. A gigantic continent was consumed by stormy waters. Then suddenly, a massive rock fell on a construction. My friend was there, tells Boriska. I could not safe him. We are destined to meet some time in this life.

The boy envisions the entire picture of the fall of Lemuria as though it happened yesterday. He grieves the death of his best friend as though it was his fault.

One day, he noticed a book in his mother's bag entitled "Where do we come from?" by Ernst Muldashev. One should have seen the kind of happiness and fascination this discovery triggered in the little boy. He's been flipping through pages for hours, looking at sketches of Lemurians, photos of Tibet. He then started talking about high intellect of the Lemurians.

-But Lemuria ceased to exist minimum 800 000 years ago., I uttered in response to his statements. Lemurians were 9 meters tall! Is that so? How can you remember all this?

-I do remember, replied the boy.

Later, he began recalling another book by Muldashev entitled "In Search of the City of Gods." The book is mainly devoted to ancient tombs and pyramids. Boriska firmly stated that people will find knowledge under one of the pyramids (not the pyramid of Heops). It hasn't been discovered yet. "Life will change once the Sphinx will be opened," said he and added that the great Sphinx has an opening mechanism somewhere behind his ear (but he does not remember where exactly). The boy also talks with great passion and enthusiasm about the Mayan civilization. According to him, we know very little about this great civilization and its people.

Most interestingly, Boriska thinks that nowadays the time has finally come for the "special ones" to be born on earth. Planet's rebirth is approaching. New knowledge will be in great demand, a different mentality of earthlings.

-How do you know about these gifted kids and why this is happening? Are you aware that they are called "indigo" kids?

-I know that they are being born. However, I haven't met anyone in my town yet. Perhaps may be this one girl named Yulia Petrova. She is the only one who believes me. Others simply laugh at my stories. Something is going to happen on earth; that is why these kids are of importance. They will be able to help people. The Poles will shift. The first major catastrophe with one of the continents will happen in 2009. Next one will take place in 2013; it will be even more devastating.

-Aren't you scared that your life may also going to end as a result of that catastrophe?

-No. I'm not afraid. I have lived through one catastrophe on Mars already. There still live people like us out there. But after the nuclear war, everything has burnt down. Some of those people managed to survive. They built shelters, new weaponry. There was also a shift of continents there, although the continent was not as large. Martians breathe gas. In case they arrived to our planet, they would have been all standing next to pipes and breathing in fumes.

-Do you prefer breathing oxygen?

-Once you are in this body, you have to breathe oxygen. However, Martians dislike this air, earth's air, because it causes aging. Martians are all relatively young, about 30-35 years old. The amount of such Martian children will increase annually.

-Boris, why do our space stations crash before they reach Mars?

-Mars transmits special signals aimed at destroying them. Those stations contain harmful radiation.

I was amazed by his knowledge of this sort of radiation "Fabos". This is absolutely true. Back in 1988 resident of Volzhsky Yuri Lushnichenko, a man with extrasensory powers attempted to warn Soviet leaders about the inevitable crash of the first Soviet space stations "Fobos 1" and "Fobos-2". He also mentioned this sort of an "unfamiliar" and harmful for the planet radiation. Obviously, no one believed him then.

-What do you know about multiple dimensions? Do you know that one must fly not on straight trajectories, but maneuvering through the multi-dimensional space?

Boriska immediately rose to his feet and started to pour all the facts about UFOs. "We took off and landed on Earth almost momentarily! [instantaneously?]" The boy takes a chalk and begins drawing an oval object on a blackboard. "It consists of six layers," he says. 25%--outer layer, made of durable metal, 30%--second layer made of something similar to rubber, the third layer comprises 30%--once again metal. The final 4% is composed of a special magnetic layer. "If we are to charge this magnetic layer with energy, those machines will be able to fly anywhere in the Universe."

-Does Boriska have a special mission to fulfill? Is he aware of it?- I pose these questions to his parents and the boy himself.

-He says he can guess,- says his mother. He says he knows something about the future of Earth. He says information will play the most significant role in the future.

-Boris, how do you know all this?

-It is inside of me.

-Boris, tell us why do people get sick?

-Sickness comes from people's inability to live properly and be happy. You must wait for you cosmic half. One should never get involve and mess up other peoples' destinies. People should not suffer because of their past mistakes, but get in touch with what's been predestined for them and try to reach those heights and move on to conquer their dreams. (These are the exact words he was using).

You have to be more sympathetic and warmhearted. In case someone strikes you, hug your enemy, apologize yourself and kneel before him. In case someone hates you, love him with all your love and devotion and ask for forgiveness. These are the rules of love and humbleness. Do you know why the Lemurians died? I am also partially at blame. They did not wish to develop spiritually any more. They went astray from the predestined path thus destructing the overall wholeness of the planet. The Magic's Path leads to dead end. Love is a True Magic!

-How do you know all this???

-I know.Kailis.

-What did you say?

-I said "hello!" This is the language of my planet.

Gennady Belimov "NGN"

Read the original in Russian: http://science.pravda.ru/science/2004/6/79/308/16265_MARSIANIN.html (Translated by: Anna Ossipova)

A test for masculinity/femininity

2005-12-14T20:30:00.000+08:00

Androgynous

You scored 63 masculinity and 66 femininity!

You scored high on both masculinity and femininity. You have a strong
personality exhibiting characteristics of both traditional sex roles.

My test tracked 2 variables How you compared to other people your age and gender:

You scored higher than 99% on masculinity
You scored higher than 0% on femininity

Link: The Bem Sex Role Inventory Test written by weirdscience on Ok Cupid, home of the 32-Type Dating Test

You like paintings? How about a genuine fake?

2005-12-08T12:06:00.000+08:00

This must be saying something quite important about the value of art. From the Guardian, 8 Dec 2005:

The master forger

John Myatt was responsible for the biggest art con of the 20th century, and ended up going to jail for it. Now his story is being turned into a Hollywood movie - and a prestigious gallery is showing his 'genuine fakes'. He tells all to Mark Honigsbaum

Thursday December 8, 2005
The Guardian

John Myatt is showing me some of his recent creations. "That's a Giacometti," he says, pointing to an abstract in swirling whites and grays entitled Apples on a Stool, 1949. "I'm not sure it's quite finished yet." Next, Myatt walks me to another wall of The Air Gallery, in London's Mayfair, hung with a Modigliani, several Picassos and, in the centre, a large Ben Nicholson. "Now, this is actually a painting that failed," he says. "In the end I had to paint over it with primer and sand it back to the canvas.

For a painter who is celebrating his first London opening, Myatt is disarmingly honest about both his working methods and his failings as an artist. But then, this is not the first time that Myatt's versions of works by Giacometti and Nicholson have found their way into the West End.

Between 1986 and 1994, Myatt churned out more than 200 new works by surrealists, cubists and impressionists, passing them off as originals with the help of an accomplice, John Drewe, an expert at generating false provenances. Despite the fact that many of Myatt's paintings were laughably amateurish (they were executed in emulsion, not oil), they fooled the experts and were auctioned for hundreds of thousands of pounds by Christie's and Sotheby's. It was, said Scotland Yard's art and antiques squad when they finally caught up with Myatt in 1995, bursting into his Staffordshire studio at the crack of dawn, "the biggest art fraud of the 20th century". Indeed, to this day, some 120 "Myatts" are still said to be in circulation.

Now, having served his time - Myatt was sentenced to 12 months in prison in 1999 but was released for good behaviour after four months - and with Michael Douglas poised to turn his exploits into a feature film (working title, Art Con), he feels he has nothing to apologise for.

"If someone came to me with one of my fakes now I wouldn't let on," says Myatt, who is 60. "I figure that the paintings aren't doing any harm. Besides, I'd be losing a perfectly innocent person money."

Instead, he is seeking to forge a new career, so to speak, as a purveyor of what he calls "genuine fakes". These are works by the very same artists he used to imitate when he was a criminal - not only Giacomettis and Nicholsons but Monets, Matisses and Renoirs. They even come with the artist's signature. The only difference is that on the back of the canvas is a computer chip and the legend "Genuine fake" written in indelible ink.

In an age when a broken-down hut can win the Turner prize and Damien Hirst can make millions flogging "spot" paintings produced by teams of assistants, Myatt is hoping that his venture will be seen as a refreshing take on the question of what constitutes art. "So many things today are invented," he says. "I think genuine fakes slot into that rather nicely. With a fake painting, you're free to ask, does it go with the curtains? You can't do that with a genuine Van Gogh because it's worth millions."

Myatt didn't set out to by a faker. As a young art student he had high hopes of establishing his own artistic style. But whenever he turned his hand to landscapes or portraiture, he says the result was invariably "academic" and "dull". Instead, he taught evening classes and began selling the odd fake to friends and colleagues. In 1983, he placed an ad in Private Eye that read: "Genuine fakes, 19th- and 20th-century paintings from £150." The ad ran four times before he received a call from Drewe. "He had a mohair coat, wore expensive hand-made shoes and drove a Bristol motor car," says Myatt. "He told me he was a professor of physics. I believed him."

Drewe began by commissioning a Matisse, followed by several Dutch-style portraits. Soon Myatt was visiting him at his home in Golders Green and was on first-name terms with his wife

The turning point came with the ninth commission. Drewe had run out of ideas, so Myatt suggested a painting by the German cubist Albert Gleizes. "It was based on a drawing I'd seen in a book. I called it Portrait of an Army Doctor. At first, John hung it on his stairway like all the others. It was only later that I think he got the idea to take it to Christie's."

The first thing Myatt knew about it was when he got a call from Drewe saying the auction house had offered him £25,000 and "how do you fancy £12,500 in a brown envelope?". "It did not take me any time at all to make the wrong decision," says Myatt. "It was as much money as I earned as a teacher in a year."

Although Myatt had recently separated from his wife and was having to bring up their young son and daughter alone, he does not wish to make excuses. The truth, he says, is that he also enjoyed it. He began by knocking off fake Giacomettis, driving to Liverpool to catch an exhibition of the Swiss surrealist's work, then rushing back to Staffordshire to make the first brush stroke.

"I try to get the artist's work to hypnotise me," says Myatt, who compares himself to an art-world Rory Bremner. "I also surround myself with lots of books. I like to know everything - where he was, what he was doing, what his relationship was like with his wife - when he was painting."

In retrospect, Myatt says it is incredible that any of his paintings fooled the experts (it was only by chance, for instance, that he used the same cotton duck canvas favoured by Giacometti). Gradually, however, Myatt learned to use the correct materials and water down his emulsion with KY jelly to give it an authentic-looking glaze. Meanwhile, Drewe devoted his energies to generating fake provenances, collecting old gallery receipts from places such as the Institute of Contemporary Arts and slipping new entries into the card indexes at the Tate and V&A.

The scam eventually unravelled in 1995 when Drewe's wife went to the police (they were going through a bitter separation) and Scotland Yard raided Myatt's house. At first he denied everything, but when the officers discovered an unposted letter to Drewe in his briefcase saying that he wanted out, Myatt realised that the game was up. "The letter more or less amounted to a signed confession. The police were very nice about it. We ended up sitting round the kitchen table discussing art."

Myatt survived Brixton prison by doing portraits of his fellow inmates in exchange for phone cards, earning himself the soubriquet "Picasso". But when he was released, he says, the last thing he wanted to do was pick up a paint brush. Then he got a phone call from the officer who had arrested him, asking for a portrait of his family. This was followed by a commission of a Giacometti from a member of the prosecution team at his trial and a version of Dufy's Casino at Nice for the Bar Council. Another convert is the TV presenter Anne Robinson, whom Myatt got to know while painting her portrait for a BBC2 documentary, Art Crime.

By 2002 Myatt was back to painting fakes in earnest - the difference being that he now found he could sell them under his own name for substantial sums of money (genuine Myatt fakes go for anywhere from £850 to £4,700). But while his prominent disclaimers are designed to keep him out of jail, he says he cannot vouch for what others in the art world may do.

"I went to a fraud conference in the summer and met a lady from the Giacometti foundation," he says. "She said it's no good putting 'Genuine fake' on the back; all they'll do is re-line the canvas.

"As long as you're selling in good faith, I'm told that you're not committing a crime. What happens to the paintings in 70 or 80 years' time is out of my control".

· Genuine Fakes, an exhibition of paintings by John Myatt, is at The Air Gallery, 32 Dover Street, London W1 until Saturday

icw cream is good for the soul

2005-11-29T15:12:00.000+08:00

I found this in Gary Craig's EFT newsletter.

Cross My Heart

Last week I took my children to a restaurant. My six-year-old son asked if he could say grace. As we bowed our heads he said, "God is good. God is great. Thank you for the food, and I would even thank you more if mom gets us ice cream for dessert. And liberty and justice for all! Amen!"

Along with the laughter from the other customers nearby I heard a woman remark, "That's what's wrong with this country. Kids today don't even know how to pray. Asking God for ice-cream! Why, I never!"

Hearing this, my son burst into tears and asked me, "Did I do it wrong? Is God mad at me?"

As I held him and assured him that he had done a terrific job and God was certainly not mad at him, an elderly gentleman approached the table. He winked at my son and said, "I happen to know that God thought that was a great prayer."

Really?" my son asked.
"Cross my heart." Then in theatrical whisper he added (indicating the woman whose remark had started this whole thing), "Too bad she never asks God for ice cream. A little ice cream is good for the soul sometimes."

Naturally, I bought my kids ice cream at the end of the meal. My son stared at his for a moment and then did something I will remember the rest of my life. He picked up his sundae and without a word walked over and placed it in front of the woman. With a big smile he told her, "Here, this is for you. Ice cream is good for the soul sometimes and my soul is good already."

This story courtesy of http://www.homeholidaysfamilyandfun.com

(I would have liked to hear about the woman's reaction, too.)

If you don't think reality is an illusion, read this:

2005-11-26T05:37:00.001+08:00

The Holographic Universe

Michael Talbot

In 1982 a remarkable event took place. At the University of Paris a research team led by physicist Alain Aspect performed what may turn out to be one of the most important experiments of the 20th century. You did not hear about it on the evening news. In fact, unless you are in the habit of reading scientific journals you probably have never even heard Aspect's name, though there are some who believe his discovery may change the face of science.

Aspect and his team discovered that under certain circumstances subatomic particles such as electrons are able to instantaneously communicate with each other regardless of the distance separating them. It doesn't matter whether they are 10 feet or 10 billion miles apart.

Somehow each particle always seems to know what the other is doing. The problem with this feat is that it violates Einstein's long-held tenet that no communication can travel faster than the speed of light. Since traveling faster than the speed of light is tantamount to breaking the time barrier, this daunting prospect has caused some physicists to try to come up with elaborate ways to explain away Aspect's findings. But it has inspired others to offer even more radical explanations.

University of London physicist David Bohm, for example, believes Aspect's findings imply that objective reality does not exist, that despite its apparent solidity the universe is at heart a phantasm, a gigantic and splendidly detailed hologram.

To understand why Bohm makes this startling assertion, one must first understand a little about holograms. A hologram is a three- dimensional photograph made with the aid of a laser.

To make a hologram, the object to be photographed is first bathed in the light of a laser beam. Then a second laser beam is bounced off the reflected light of the first and the resulting interference pattern (the area where the two laser beams commingle) is captured on film.

When the film is developed, it looks like a meaningless swirl of light and dark lines. But as soon as the developed film is illuminated by another laser beam, a three-dimensional image of the original object appears.

The three-dimensionality of such images is not the only remarkable characteristic of holograms. If a hologram of a rose is cut in half and then illuminated by a laser, each half will still be found to contain the entire image of the rose.

Indeed, even if the halves are divided again, each snippet of film will always be found to contain a smaller but intact version of the original image. Unlike normal photographs, every part of a hologram contains all the information possessed by the whole.

The "whole in every part" nature of a hologram provides us with an entirely new way of understanding organization and order. For most of its history, Western science has labored under the bias that the best way to understand a physical phenomenon, whether a frog or an atom, is to dissect it and study its respective parts.

A hologram teaches us that some things in the universe may not lend themselves to this approach. If we try to take apart something constructed holographically, we will not get the pieces of which it is made, we will only get smaller wholes.

This insight suggested to Bohm another way of understanding Aspect's discovery. Bohm believes the reason subatomic particles are able to remain in contact with one another regardless of the distance separating them is not because they are sending some sort of mysterious signal back and forth, but because their separateness is an illusion. He argues that at some deeper level of reality such particles are not individual entities, but are actually extensions of the same fundamental something.

To enable people to better visualize what he means, Bohm offers the following illustration.

Imagine an aquarium containing a fish. Imagine also that you are unable to see the aquarium directly and your knowledge about it and what it contains comes from two television cameras, one directed at the aquarium's front and the other directed at its side.

As you stare at the two television monitors, you might assume that the fish on each of the screens are separate entities. After all, because the cameras are set at different angles, each of the images will be slightly different. But as you continue to watch the two fish, you will eventually become aware that there is a certain relationship between them.

When one turns, the other also makes a slightly different but corresponding turn; when one faces the front, the other always faces toward the side. If you remain unaware of the full scope of the situation, you might even conclude that the fish must be instantaneously communicating with one another, but this is clearly not the case.

This, says Bohm, is precisely what is going on between the subatomic particles in Aspect's experiment.

According to Bohm, the apparent faster-than-light connection between subatomic particles is really telling us that there is a deeper level of reality we are not privy to, a more complex dimension beyond our own that is analogous to the aquarium. And, he adds, we view objects such as subatomic particles as separate from one another because we are seeing only a portion of their reality.

Such particles are not separate "parts", but facets of a deeper and more underlying unity that is ultimately as holographic and indivisible as the previously mentioned rose. And since everything in physical reality is comprised of these "eidolons", the universe is itself a projection, a hologram.

In addition to its phantomlike nature, such a universe would possess other rather startling features. If the apparent separateness of subatomic particles is illusory, it means that at a deeper level of reality all things in the universe are infinitely interconnected.

The electrons in a carbon atom in the human brain are connected to the subatomic particles that comprise every salmon that swims, every heart that beats, and every star that shimmers in the sky.

Everything interpenetrates everything, and although human nature may seek to categorize and pigeonhole and subdivide, the various phenomena of the universe, all apportionments are of necessity artificial and all of nature is ultimately a seamless web.

In a holographic universe, even time and space could no longer be viewed as fundamentals. Because concepts such as location break down in a universe in which nothing is truly separate from anything else, time and three-dimensional space, like the images of the fish on the TV monitors, would also have to be viewed as projections of this deeper order.

At its deeper level reality is a sort of superhologram in which the past, present, and future all exist simultaneously. This suggests that given the proper tools it might even be possible to someday reach into the superholographic level of reality and pluck out scenes from the long-forgotten past.

What else the superhologram contains is an open-ended question. Allowing, for the sake of argument, that the superhologram is the matrix that has given birth to everything in our universe, at the very least it contains every subatomic particle that has been or will be -- every configuration of matter and energy that is possible, from snowflakes to quasars, from bluü whales to gamma rays. It must be seen as a sort of cosmic storehouse of "All That Is."

Although Bohm concedes that we have no way of knowing what else might lie hidden in the superhologram, he does venture to say that we have no reason to assume it does not contain more. Or as he puts it, perhaps the superholographic level of reality is a "mere stage" beyond which lies "an infinity of further development".

Bohm is not the only researcher who has found evidence that the universe is a hologram. Working independently in the field of brain research, Standford neurophysiologist Karl Pribram has also become persuaded of the holographic nature of reality.

Pribram was drawn to the holographic model by the puzzle of how and where memories are stored in the brain. For decades numerous studies have shown that rather than being confined to a specific location, memories are dispersed throughout the brain.

In a series of landmark experiments in the 1920s, brain scientist Karl Lashley found that no matter what portion of a rat's brain he removed he was unable to eradicate its memory of how to perform complex tasks it had learned prior to surgery. The only problem was that no one was able to come up with a mechanism that might explain this curious "whole in every part" nature of memory storage.

Then in the 1960s Pribram encountered the concept of holography and realized he had found the explanation brain scientists had been looking for. Pribram believes memories are encoded not in neurons, or small groupings of neurons, but in patterns of nerve impulses that crisscross the entire brain in the same way that patterns of laser light interference crisscross the entire area of a piece of film containing a holographic image. In other words, Pribram believes the brain is itself a hologram.

Pribram's theory also explains how the human brain can store so many memories in so little space. It has been estimated that the human brain has the capacity to memorize something on the order of 10 billion bits of information during the average human lifetime (or roughly the same amount of information contained in five sets of the Encyclopaedia Britannica).

Similarly, it has been discovered that in addition to their other capabilities, holograms possess an astounding capacity for information storage--simply by changing the angle at which the two lasers strike a piece of photographic film, it is possible to record many different images on the same surface. It has been demonstrated that one cubic centimeter of film can hold as many as 10 billion bits of information.

Our uncanny ability to quickly retrieve whatever information we need from the enormous store of our memories becomes more understandable if the brain functions according to holographic principles. If a friend asks you to tell him what comes to mind when he says the word "zebra", you do not have to clumsily sort back through ome gigantic and cerebral alphabetic file to arrive at an answer. Instead, associations like "striped", "horselike", and "animal native to Africa" all pop into your head instantly.

Indeed, one of the most amazing things about the human thinking process is that every piece of information seems instantly cross- correlated with every other piece of information--another feature intrinsic to the hologram. Because every portion of a hologram is infinitely interconnected with ever other portion, it is perhaps nature's supreme example of a cross-correlated system.

The storage of memory is not the only neurophysiological puzzle that becomes more tractable in light of Pribram's holographic model of the brain. Another is how the brain is able to translate the avalanche of frequencies it receives via the senses (light frequencies, sound frequencies, and so on) into the concrete world of our perceptions. Encoding and decoding frequencies is precisely what a hologram does best. Just as a hologram functions as a sort of lens, a translating device able to convert an apparently meaningless blur of frequencies into a coherent image, Pribram believes the brain also comprises a lens and uses holographic principles to mathematically convert the frequencies it receives through he senses into the inner world of our perceptions.

An impressive body of evidence suggests that the brain uses holographic principles to perform its operations. Pribram's theory, in fact, has gained increasing support among neurophysiologists.

Argentinian-Italian researcher Hugo Zucarelli recently extended the holographic model into the world of acoustic phenomena. Puzzled by the fact that humans can locate the source of sounds without moving their heads, even if they only possess hearing in one ear, Zucarelli discovered that holographic principles can explain this ability.

Zucarelli has also developed the technology of holophonic sound, a recording technique able to reproduce acoustic situations with an almost uncanny realism.

Pribram's belief that our brains mathematically construct "hard" reality by relying on input from a frequency domain has also received a good deal of experimental support.

It has been found that each of our senses is sensitive to a much broader range of frequencies than was previously suspected.

Researchers have discovered, for instance, that our visual systems are sensitive to sound frequencies, that our sense of smell is in part dependent on what are now called "osmic frequencies", and that even the cells in our bodies are sensitive to a broad range of frequencies. Such findings suggest that it is only in the holographic domain of consciousness that such frequencies are sorted out and divided up into conventional perceptions.

But the most mind-boggling aspect of Pribram's holographic model of the brain is what happens when it is put together with Bohm's theory. For if the concreteness of the world is but a secondary reality and what is "there" is actually a holographic blur of frequencies, and if the brain is also a hologram and only selects some of the frequencies out of this blur and mathematically transforms them into sensory perceptions, what becomes of objective reality?

Put quite simply, it ceases to exist. As the religions of the East have long upheld, the material world is Maya, an illusion, and although we may think we are physical beings moving through a physical world, this too is an illusion.

We are really "receivers" floating through a kaleidoscopic sea of frequency, and what we extract from this sea and transmogrify into physical reality is but one channel from many extracted out of the superhologram.

This striking new picture of reality, the synthesis of Bohm and Pribram's views, has come to be called the holographic paradigm, and although many scientists have greeted it with skepticism, it has galvanized others. A small but growing group of researchers believe it may be the most accurate model of reality science has arrived at thus far. More than that, some believe it may solve some mysteries that have never before been explainable by science and even establish the paranormal as a part of nature.

Numerous researchers, including Bohm and Pribram, have noted that many para-psychological phenomena become much more understandable in terms of the holographic paradigm.

In a universe in which individual brains are actually indivisible portions of the greater hologram and everything is infinitely interconnected, telepathy may merely be the accessing of the holographic level.

It is obviously much easier to understand how information can travel from the mind of individual 'A' to that of individual 'B' at a far distance point and helps to understand a number of unsolved puzzles in psychology. In particular, Grof feels the holographic paradigm offers a model for understanding many of the baffling phenomena experienced by individuals during altered states of consciousness.

(There's more here)

Goodbye, dear pup

2005-11-20T20:17:00.000+08:00

Our bitch had two pups about nine weeks ago. Today one of them went to another home - some folks we vaguely know who live up the hill a way.

I'd grown to love these little creatures. I was sad to say good bye to this little, vibrant, trusting piece of doggy life. Even though I don't want to keep them - we have already too many dogs.

Everything Produces in Kind

2005-11-12T05:36:00.000+08:00

This article arrived in my mail box this morning. It's worth reading.

"Everything Produces in Kind

Today we would like to notice a very simple, universal yet hardly noticed principle of life. Noticing this will dramatically improve your life in all areas and situations - relationships, health, career, business, politics, sports - all areas of your life. Sometimes the simplest of things are the most powerful yet least understood. Let us look at one such simplicity. Here it is:

Everything produces in kind.

An orange seed produces orange trees, which produce oranges. This you can count on.

A frog gives birth to frogs. This you can count on.

Water evaporates into steam. This you can count on.

So what can you not count on? The impossible. You cannot count on the impossible. The impossible is this:

You cannot count on an orange seed growing into a banana plant, for that is impossible.

You cannot count on a frog giving birth to a gorilla, for that is impossible.

You cannot count on water evaporating into steel, for that is impossible.

In other words, everything produces in kind, and trying to go against this is impossible and at best a pure waste of energy resulting in pain and no result. Try it if you don't believe it.

Here is a bigger insight into this: Everything gives rise to that which is like it, only in a different form. So the orange seed, tree and fruit are one and the same thing, only appearing in different form. The frog, egg and tadpole are one and the same thing, only appearing in different form. The water, steam, clouds, ocean, and ice are one and the same thing, only appearing in different form. Now to expand: If you did not know what a frog was or a tadpole and saw them both at the same time, you would think they are two different creatures completely! If you have never seen water or ice and saw them both at the same time, you would think they are two different materials!

Ok, fair enough. It is easy to see how this is so with the physical world around you, but what does that have to do with your life and life affairs?

Simple. Everything gives rise to that which is like it, only in a different form. Sometimes, if you are not aware of the big picture, your mind may get tricked into thinking there is no relationship between things that are obviously related. And this is what happens all the time. It is the norm rather than the exception. Watch.

We all know that our lives arise out of our thoughts. You are reading this now because, by a chain of choices you have previously made, including the choice to read to this point, you have thought of reading such material before. In other words, if it was not in your mental interest or field of attention, you would never have read this article you are reading now. Sometimes in your life you have seen a clear connection between your thoughts and the world arising around you. at most other times you have not seen this connection and thought even that you were a victim of circumstances. Now is the time to see that, truly, everything gives rise to its own kind. And this is how you do that:

Your thoughts give rise to like thoughts, words and actions. If you think a thought A, it will and must, under all circumstances, result in an experience in your world that is exactly like thought A, only appearing in different form. In practice, this means that you worry about things because you worry about things. It means that the very act of worrying, which by definition is the consistent and excessive thinking of the worst case scenario, is that which gives rise to conditions that make you worry even more.

Again, every thought you have gives rise to experiences and results of its own kind. This is sealed and unbreakable. To simplify, w happy thought results in happy conditions and experiences, and a destructive thought results in its own kind, and these can never be interchanged.

To simplify even further, worry results in conditions to worry about, and anxiety results in conditions to be anxious about. That is how your world arises out of yourself.

Now, we need your attention here for the next statements. So please pay full attention now. There is no point to worrying about anything. You worry because you think that worrying is doing something about it and hence by worrying you believe that you will help prevent disaster. You worry because you believe it works for you. And when the events you were worried about finally come about, you feel justified, that you were correct in worrying about them because, look, here they are now! The truth is, the worrisome conditions came because you worried about them. Everything gives rise to its own kind. You worry, and sooner or later you are faced with the circumstances you worried about, or something similar in context and essence but different in form and appearance.

Worry, or any negative thought, will under all circumstances give rise to negative external outcomes. Never, under any circumstances, will it give rise to positive outcomes because by definition worry is the envisioning of the worst case scenario. Remember, the connections between the causing thought and the resultant effect may not be obvious to you, but be assured that even if separated by space, form and time, a thought always gives rise to a matching result.

It is interesting to note that Jesus is quoted in the New Testament as having said "be anxious over nothing". Worry is useless, because at best it can only disrupt the desired positive outcome, and at worst bring about a negative outcome. There is not a single instance where worry can work positively. So why bother do it any more?

Now let us look at the grand daddy of this universal law that guarantees that everything produces of its own kind. Where is it most clearly given to us? In just about all the worlds major religions, no matter where they come from or how they started, they say one thing: you were created in the image and likeness of the Original Creator. The Creator, by extension of Itself, creates that which is like It in essence, though not necessarily in form. Form changes all the time, but essence is eternal. The only reason you do not experience yourself with the magnificence you would imaging the Creator possessing is because (and again this law comes in) you have put forth and held a thought that your not that which you are, and hence you experience that as well. And that is why all spiritual streams emphasize on going within, waking up, remembering, recognizing your unity with Oneness. And this is how deep this law goes, that like produces in kind. Whatever thought you hold in mind, whatever belief, you will experience it in your reality, even when it is contrary to truth, in which case you would be experiencing illusion, but you will, under all circumstances, experience that which is like the thought held.

Where else have you seen this law talked about? You have seen it in more places than you may remember. Here are some examples: birds of a feather flock together, you reap what you sow, you shall know them by their fruits, karma, what goes around comes around, do unto your brother... You know the rest.

Now back to your life. Life can be dramatically simplified if you just always remember this simple law. You need not fight against anything, cause fighting against results in conflict, for resistance is born of conflict and thus births conflict. If you find there is something in your life you do not like, simply choose another. If you don't like having little money, simply stop worrying about money, stop thinking of situations where you may lack money, stop speaking and thinking from the position of poverty. A poor thought gives rise to poverty, a rich thought gives rise to wealth. It is very simple. And this applies to all areas of life, even in relationships and health.

Let us look at what works and what doesn't:

Flowing from a mental and emotional position of abundance results in wealth, but struggling and working hard from a mental and emotional position of lack results in tiredness and little wealth, no matter how long you do it for.

Flowing from a mental and emotional position of peace results in peace, but protesting and fighting against war from a mental and emotional position of conflict results in conflict and polarity, no matter how long you do it for. Don't believe this? Well, ask yourself this: If everyone in the world fought against a cause they believed to be worth fighting for, all 6 billion people each with a justifiable cause to fight against, what would happen? Now, what if all 6 billion people held peace in their mind, regardless of what everyone else does, what would happen then? Impractical, you say? You haven't tried it yet. I guarantee you that holding your own peace is the most effective way to peace. No matter how big this planet gets, it still comes down to what each person does, and hence the sovereignty and power of an individual is guaranteed high and capable. Every invention, revolution or leap started with one person, spreading to more. But that is another topic all together. For now, remember this simple law and live by it, and your life will simplify and multiply under a new clear direction. If you wish to know more, see http://www.imagesofone.com . Remember, everything gives rise to its own kind, so direct your thoughts deliberately, and under all circumstances, be anxious over nothing.

Article written by David Cameron, CEO ImagesOfOne.com, author of Raising Humans and A Happy Pocket Full of Money, and developer of the Prova LifeGoals Effortless Achiever+ and Prova LifeMap Numerology software. These and titles such as Think and Grow Rich, As A Man Thinketh, and more are available for download and free trial at http://www.ImagesOfOne.com.

Which of you is lying?

2005-11-05T05:29:00.000+08:00

Look at this, you girls: (From N.Y. Times , quoted by Maureen Dowd)

By the time you swear you're his,
Shivering and sighing,
And he vows his passion is
Infinite, undying -
Lady, make a note of this:
One of you is lying.

Dorothy Parker

200th anniversary of the Battle of Trafalgar

2005-10-23T22:18:00.000+08:00

Oct 21 was the 200th anniversary of the battle of Trafalgar, at which my illustrious almost-ancestor, Admiral Horatio Lord Nelson, defeated a superior force of French and Spanish ships off Cape Trafalgar, at the western end of the Straits of Gibraltar. He died at the height of the battle, from a bullet fired from the mizzen top of the "Redoubtable", which lodged in his spine. The Redoubtable was entangled by the rigging with the Victory, Nelson's ship.

He is my almost-ancestor because his brother, Reverend Willam Nelson, First Earl Nelson, was my great-great-great-great-grandfather. Here is a link to a relevant web site with a portrait bearing a striking resemblance to my mother and her mother.