Big A Little C part 3.1 ver 6.1

So! Through incorporating the NATURAL LEARNING RHYTHMS foods and sustenance we can embrace the following educational mission statement for our communities:

together, we find our whole and true selves, empowering our community to keep a healthy, harmonious balance within which all future generations may endure.

I have been asked quite often recently to provide a quick overview of NATURAL LEARNING RHYTHMS for educators and interested bystanders. I neither claim to know, nor feel qualified to render a reductionary critique of the life work of two people i greatly admire. I can engage in a dialogue with those interested, hoping that they may discover within themselves the seeds of the OTHER THAN HUMAN WISDOM from which the revelation of a quick overview may become manifest. And this dialogue will turn on a few points from the NATURAL LEARNING RHYTHMS natural relations.

There has never been a child development theory and a subsequently developed pedagogy, that claims that there is not a natural pattern of development. It is in the naming of the components of the developmental theory that various egos are enmeshed with various techniques and technologies and critical evaluations and diagnostics. Kohlberg and Maslow and Bloom and all the others lay claim to a territory that is defined by them and their Mandarin Order as being a special arena for definition and assignation. The Luvmour’s seem to have skirted this philosophical trap through focusing on the behavior of humans freed from the confines of expectations predicated on experimental data confirming what some mind claims to be true. Josette and Sambhava merely claim that between certain ages children appear to develop certain needs as expressed solely in their behavior towards other children, their parents and other adults.

Observing these behaviors and connecting with the children in sufficient harmonic relationships that enable the observer to clearly understand the need expressed and the appropriate food to satisfy the need--the Luvmours, and those others who have utilized their patterns of awareness and matrices of determination, have codified four stages of childhood to adulthood during which specific sets of needs are required and asked for continuously. These stages are called: the BODY BEING--from birth to the age of seven/eight; the EMOTIONAL BEING--from seven/eight to twelve/thirteen; the WILL BEING--from twelve/thirteen to mid-sixteen; and the REALITY BEING--from mid-sixteen to twenty something.

As i have been blessed with having children who at one point were scattered in age through all of these beings, i can attest that the matrix provided by the Luvmour criteria was/is highly accurate. The foods--those emotional and consciousness connecting activities that form the foundation of NATURAL LEARNING RHYTHMS --become tools for self-awareness and development as an adult relating to both the child without and child within. At the very core of the philosophy is the steadfast belief that as human beings we already know at birth all we need to know to be human beings. This is the OTHER THAN HUMAN WISDOM that requires nothing more than mere and simple recognition. It is the systematic institutionalization of human behavior for the purpose of creating a consumer puppet personality that alters and destroys the magnitude and creativity of children. In other words, if all we were required to learn was in what way we related to the culture in which we were born, the culture and language would necessarily reflect the OTHER THAN HUMAN WISDOM and not principle dictates of the LORDS OF CAPITAL. The naturally selected human genome knows how to be human. It requires emotional content and dynamic creative interconnections with other humans. It does not need systems of money and energy and institutions and coercion and torture and ignorance and ignoring. All of these activities kill the OTHER THAN HUMAN WISDOM and eventually kill GAIA.

Therefore i advocate the program of NATURAL LEARNING RHYTHMS as a necessary part of all 21st Century educational processes. If all parents could be given the time and opportunity to engage their own children as natural beings needing specific and natural relations then the whole of the planet would be blessed with joy and harmony and good tidings.

Finally, i would like to say in conclusion that i have actually enjoyed the role of public school teacher for these last few years. I strongly advocate the destruction of all schools as we know them, but i do also recognize that while the schools exist they are the cities of refuge for the children who have been abandoned by the LORDS OF CAPITAL. It is only in the schools where the children have hope and social relations as natural human beings. In spite of the overwhelming destructive influence that schools must exert on children, the power of the OTHER THAN HUMAN WISDOM is most awesome. The intrinsic rewards of being the representative of the culture who becomes the provider of the foods actually is the reason teachers teach and parents want schools. If we could only accept that reality and dismantle the institution that inhibits the process we and all of GAIA would be well served.

What, in essence, is this transformational process? Well, it is essentially a change in the very language we use to reflect our awareness and perception of the reality(s) we phenomenologically experience. The significant alteration of the whole of being’s consciousness is not much more complicated than rearranging a few syntactical constructs, or deconstructing previously arranged culturally dependent/manifesting matrices, into a form which puts the ego/self totally in dependent relationship with GAIA. An example might be Mueller’s description:...

Dakota, like almost all Indian idioms, is essentially a language of verbs. But while European linguistic feeling associates the verb with the idea of energetic activity, the majority of Dakota verbs are neutral; there are very few active verb stems. Precisely these unique passive forms constitute the core of the language. The preponderance of these so-called neutrals shapes the structure of the language. With the appearance of these many verb roots as words that express a condition, the attitudes of suffering, of enduring, and of passive acceptance dominate the character of the entire language...The Dakota language seems to employ, in every conceivable and possible instance, neutral and passive forms. The activeness which is so familiar to us is thus excluded. With itst pathocentricity, the Dakota language reveals one primordial fact, the fact of our being an object--regardless of whether at a certain moment the telluric realities intrude on us or whether vital processes, feelings, and passions overwhelm us.

Another type of transformational representative grammar may be identified as a “spiritual change in context.” By this i mean, that as long as the prevalent underlying philosophical /religious framework of Judeo-Christian-Islamic world views dominate the spread of Western corporate capitalism, then the self-referential-revelatory-recognition of the bio-diversity of GAIA will remain unattainable. Therefore, we as a species need to restructure our syntax and grammar so that our self-referential contexts are created only within frameworks of relationship with all other GAIAN species. The following, by John Seed, a rainforest biologist and activist in Australia, examples the kind of change for which i am advocating...

“I try to remember that it’s not me, John Seed, trying to protect the rainforest. Rather I’m part of the rainforest protecting myself. I am that part of the rainforest recently emerged into human thinking.” This is what I mean by the greening of self. It involves a combining of the mystical with the practical, transcending separateness, alienation, and fragmentation.

Another example of self-referential-revelatory-relativity was expressed some one hundred years ago by Lakota elders who were asked to offer guidance and wisdom to their diminishing tribes and clans. They spoke great words:

The Lakota consciousness knows only an all-embracing duration which is neither measured nor measurable. The perspective of the American civilization may be termed historical and that of we Lakota mythical. The eternal present of the myths regulates and motivates the behavior of every being in the Universe. We live in eternity; we live in close harmony with nature. In contrast, the efforts of Western men were directed to the conquest of nature. In the mythical value system nature is regarded as part of the eternal order and thus can not be challenged nor altered.

In Lakota religious thought, the universe is conceived as a living unified community in which all living things, plants as well as animals and men, from the lowest and most humble to the highest and proudest, the spirit beings, and all the elements and powers of the earth and heaven, have their proper and useful places. Man, as one of the forms of living beings in this universal community, is in vital relations with all the others.

It is this first person relationship with the diversity of the species of the planet that can only come from culturally diverse peoples who are free from the burden of the mono-culture of corporate capitalism. An Arikara elder spoke in council to the Missionary Board of Iowa:

You, you white persons are unable to comprehend the grief and pain experienced by we indian peoples when we see the native forms of life ruthlessly and wantonly destroyed. It was not primarily the realization of economic loss, the loss of valuable sources of food, which caused distress to us when, for instance, we witnessed the destruction of wild rice fields and lotus beds, but it was the sense of a fearful void in nature ensuing upon the extinction of a given species where it had formerly flourished.

Big A Little C part 2.2-3 vers 6.2

We have a long and sobering historical record that describes the attempts of governments and rulers to restrict, abolish, and even murder the dance. We have a history of proscriptions for the dance. In spite of the history and the recognition that all attempts have been futile we continue to find, especially in public educational environments, prohibitions regarding the dance. We have come to know these constraints as economic, or ‘extra-curricular’, or ‘diversions from the basics.’ By whatever name is used, our children and our children’s children need to dance, need to become ecstatic, need to find their spiritual selves merging beyond the constraints of mundane and profane reality into communities of sacred interrelated beings.

The process of forming coherent, communal, sustainable, and GAIAN protecting societies requires the initiation of all members into the shared ritual community of vision and multi- generationally focused goals. As we have said, the dance is absolutely mandatory. And the dance must be ecstatic, and fully conscious.

How powerful is this idea and experience of the dance and the sacred. We are in service to one another through our participation in education and community. Service is a sacred act, uniting and relating community through power. Van der Leeuw writes in RELIGION IN ESSENCE AND MANIFESTATION:
The sacred act is therefore service. But in service man is active; the body receives a rhythmic swing; whoever is celebrating, dances. “All over the world, in the magico-religious stage, primitive man dances where we would pray or praise,” as Miss J.E. Harrison has pointed out. Thus the dance is not merely an esthetic pursuit existing side by side with other more practical activities. It is the service of the creator, and generates power: the rhythm of movement has a compelling force; and this still holds good for us too in the case of erotic dancing...But it is not restricted to the power of love alone; and to primitive peoples it was simultaneously work and pleasure, sport and cult. In the dance, life is ordered to some powerful rhythm and reverts to its potent primeval motion, and thus it is possible to attain all manner of things “by dancing,” from one’s daily bread to heavenly bliss...But movement in celebration has a dual character. In the first place power is concentrated, restricted, established and elevated by the rhythmic arrangement, and in the second superfluous power is released, cast away in recurrent movement. Powerfulness is either attained by dancing, or else superfluous power is danced away. The second type of motion occurs in the ecstatic dance, or rather in the dance so far as it is ecstatic(and it is almost always so to a certain extent)...Dancing and mystical losing of self, dancing and ecstatic reeling, are so closely connected that the dance may even become a symbol of mystical unity with Creation.

The formation of community consciousness within the bonds of educational groupings can be most easily facilitated through the ritual of dance. Indeed most indigenous groupings, be they bands, clans, tribes, etc., used dance to center the societies and organize communal relations. The dance embraces the ecstatic, forging bonds beyond the contemporaneous space/time between spirits and other than human beings.

Joachim Wach, one of the first professors of the History of Religion in the USA, wrote, in his brilliant synthesis of theological, anthropological and sociological studies on the interrelation of religion and society SOCIOLOGY OF RELIGION:
Special mythological concepts explain and justify acts of worship, the use of instruments, the choice of sacred spaces, the ceremonials, qualification, and duties of the society...For the functionaries and even for the members, capacity for ecstatic experience is often required. Extraordinary experiences inaccessible to the uninitiated are thus made available to the members. Ecstasy plays a vital role,...;and both here and elsewhere prayer, sacrifice, and lustration are supplemented by dramatic performances and sacred dances, especially masked dances. In so far as these activities involve the rudiments of education and instruction, they possess a considerable cultural significance and are likely to become determining factors in the economic and political life of the group. Their effect, both good and bad, on law and custom is no less important...The cultivation of genuine experience of the holy, the fostering of awe and reverence, the stress upon proper preparation, the discipline of mind and body through asceticism, meditation and solitude are of great value in the development from cruder beginnings to higher forms of religious and social life.

Gabrielle Roth, an artist, dancer, educator, and author of the book MAPS TO ECSTASY has created a training methodology for accessing the mystical unions of ecstasy through dance. She explores and communicates the ecstatic experience through ritual theater, movement, and music. She use shamanistic sources to free spirits from cultural assumptions and constructs, enabling her students to discover the true power of their bodies and souls. She has created a form she calls the wave which opens gateways into altered states of consciousness. her techniques combine dance, and body movements with relaxation, breath work, and visualization of the sacred community. She has created several musical recordings designed to stimulate through the wave other than ordinary realities within which individuals may find community. A community centered on dance and rhythm and the experience of ecstatic power will be a community which cares for GAIA and which demonstrates through daily practice the requisite compassion for life.

Way back in 1969 Jerry Garcia remarked upon the importance of this.
To get really high is to forget yourself. And to forget yourself is to see everything else. And to see everything else is to become an understanding molecule in evolution, a conscious tool of the universe. And I think every human being should be a conscious tool of the universe. That’s why I think its important to get high.
Within the state of mystical union with the universe the body and spirits may come to know their own center of enlightened wisdom. It is all too obvious that given the last fifty thousand years of human beingness, much of the educational process has been predicated on the inherent wisdom of the GAIAN genome. We human beings have encoded upon our information bearing material---DNA---sufficient knowledge and indeed wisdom to provide all necessary paths towards survival and evolvability. If this were not the case we would not be here. And it is all too easily conceivable that within a relatively short time-frame (for humans that is) human beings will no longer be a tolerated species. We will have exceeded GAIAN tolerances, for death of the body is the GAIAN mechanism for expressing limits of tolerance and acceptance.

Therefore, if as Mr. Garcia so adroitly pointed out, we are here to fulfill our role as conscious tools of the universe in expressing itself to itself, then we need to be addressing the wisdom of the GAIAN genome rather than the mind virus MEME of corporate capital culture and language. Why do we need to access this OTHER THAN HUMAN WISDOM ? I believe that our very beings at the genetic and molecular level already demand that we pay attention and that we service OTHER THAN HUMAN WISDOM through care, compassion, and as Josette and Sambhava Luvmour describe, properfeeding.

Jacob Needleman, a wonderful professor of philosophy and communicator of sound ideas about living a wise life, addressed these principles in his book THE HEART OF PHILOSOPHY, a series of journal essays based on some classes he “taught” in California over the 1979-1980 school year. One of these courses was an Introduction to Philosophy for a special advanced placement high school program in San Francisco. It was during this period that he came to the awareness of the process of OTHER THAN HUMAN WISDOM seeking knowledge. He is working through a troublesome interview with one of the students when he discovers the nature of education.
I am amazed by two things: the emptiness and artificiality of Wendy’s personal world and my own prior ignorance of this fact...I look into her eyes and there is a person there. What is a person? Something raw, unformed, and tremendous; something intensely loving and intelligent lies behind that smooth, rounded face. it has nothing whatever to do with her “experiences.” In that moment I understand something about education. Or rather, I let go of something I have long believed in. I have always liked to think that, ideally, education means to bring something out that is already in the person, as opposed to stuffing something into the person, such as information, automatic manners, etc. What was to be led out ( e ducere) was knowledge or understanding that is contained as a seed in every human being. (Historically, the derivation of the term is not so positive. In the Middle Ages, education was the drawing out of the devils, false beliefs.)
Whether good things or bad things, education had to do with what is in the student to begin with. This view I have shared with many people, professional educators and others, who draw a sharp distinction between teaching necessary skills and information and this other more profound meaning of education. After speaking to Wendy, I can no longer accept this distinction so simply. A teenager, she still wears her artificiality and lies like she wears her blue dress and lipstick--awkwardly, uncomfortably, transparently...She will become “interesting,” that is, a good liar. She will begin to “find her identity,” that formation which captures all her own psychic energy and which draws all the attention of those who meet her. Now I can still see the light of a person behind her face and I know she vaguely senses this light in herself as well. this division of attention in her and in my perception of her makes us both uncomfortable. this discomfort is the last, natural call in man of the Question “Who Am I?” just before it becomes completely covered over by the Problem of “establishing one’s identity.”
I do not know very much about childhood. But i know now one undoubted fact about adolescence. It is a time when the Question of myself is a natural companion, a light that soon flickers and goes out. Often, it is simply degraded under the term “self consciousness,” in its negative sense. No wonder the legends of adolescence are so strange to us: the power to see the mythic unicorn that vanishes when innocence is lost. the unicorn is the person, the single one, the holy individual. To see the unicorn is to experience the Question by sensing the person in myself alongside the social self in all its perfect unreality...No, I cannot accept that the education of young people involves bringing out what is already in them. On the contrary, something has to be put in! But what? And How? What is the food of that young light, that unformed light within them? How to speak to the personality so that the person also hears?

Needleman goes on to describe the interview as a series of questions and answers whose intent and purpose is not about knowledge or information but essentially about connecting to the person and personality. He has discovered that the food is connection between persons’ spirits and beings.

Connecting with people means listening to them from the heart and spirit as well as the mind. In each and every being there is essential OTHER THAN HUMAN WISDOM. In each and every human there exists the genetic codes revelation of development free from any socialization of indoctrination of cultural behaviors. Some scholars are beginning to codify and even quantify this, as they call it, primordial wisdom. To free up this knowing, teachers need to learn to connect with the developing, evolving human being, offering nurturing sustenance --food --to the OTHW.

We need visions and funding mechanisms for schools that will enable future generations of children to create lives imbued with: clean air, water, soil, and food; sustainable yields of crops and resources; reduced wastes through improved recycling technologies; elimination of polluting fossils fuels for energy, and the end of the suffering of millions upon millions of beings enslaved to lives of destitution, despair, and increasing anxiety, by the greed and carelessness of a very few.

New schools must address the positive social implications of a healthy and harmonious planet. New schools must invoke the communication with all aspects of OTHER THAN HUMAN WISDOM. Only through disciplined, participatory, cooperative, communal labors can our society create powerful paths upon which to guide our children and their children unto the Seventh Generations.

One of the most innovative of these visions for New schools is the concept of NATURAL LEARNING RHYTHMS, a comprehensive educational program created, researched, and fully implemented by Sambhava and Josette Luvmour of North San Juan, CA. The philosophical and theoretical bases are well documented in such diverse writings as those of the great western religious and metaphysical philosophers, eastern religious thinkers and philosophers, neuro-psychologists, Jungian therapists and mythic consciousness analysts, etc.. But, the essence of the curriculum and pedagogy, from birth to death of all human learners, is quite simply, CONNECTION!!!!!

The power that the State and culture gives teachers to tell other beings they are "wrong" is awesome and quite irresponsible. It gives us the permission to ignore connecting by empowering us to "know best what is for your own good!" Rather than focus on connecting we try desperately to produce product which conforms to the norms established by people we don't know, for reasons we are not privy to.

A good way to look at this is when we are stopped by some element of government authority who has the audacity to try to tell us that the decisions they make (law enforcement, tax audit, health and safety inspections, and any other regulation) are really for our own good. Our immediate thought asks if this element would, "Just please listen to us;" we want some human connection. BUT NOOOOOOOO! We get an in-our-face rejection of our beingness and a response to our apparent lack of conformity. Can't we just imagine for a moment how all children feel? “Sit still, turn around, stop talking, you can’t go out until you finish the work, raise your hand, answer all the questions as directed!” No wonder the proverbial response of today’s adolescence is “Whatever.”

Wínyeya nanka he?

This story can only mean one thing!!
Women in the military would be barred from serving in direct ground combat roles, under a House bill that sets Defense Department policy and spending plans for the upcoming budget year. The House Armed Services Committee approved the overall measure early Thursday on a 61-1 vote. The same committee in the Senate passed a different version last week. The House and Senate are to vote on their respective bills next week.

Once this legislation is in place, it opens the door for the draft. Without such language the draft could be challenged under the 14th Amendment as denying equal protection to half the population. Taking women out of combat selectively defines the need for troops for combat, and allows the acquisition and recruitment of a male only reserve--i/e the draft. If people miss this important distinction, they are not prepared. There was a rider last week attached to the Iraq appropriations bill that expanded the age of reservists and those that could be called up. This would apply as well to the draft. What we will see in the coming months are plans to launch a new conscription that will include men between the ages of 18 and 42. The details of the deferments will be the cause celebre, as to whom within the rank and class of the society will receive the get out of the draft free status. Aren't we a great nation, eh??

--Sona si doubleSpeak loqueris--

The U.S. Air Force has asked President Bush to issue a directive that would allow the military to place defensive and offensive weapons in space. A source described as a senior administration official but unnamed told The New York Times that such a directive is in the draft stages and could come from the White House in the matter of weeks. Such a move would supplant a 1996 order from President Clinton that sought a more peaceful role for space. The Times reported Air Force officials claim the directive won`t seek the militarization of space. Air Force spokeswoman Maj. Karen Finn told the newspaper: "The focus of the process is not putting weapons in space. The focus is having free access in space." The Pentagon has already spent billions of dollars in planning and weapons development or space, the Times said. Those plans would include new weapons and satellites that could serve either defensive or offensive roles.

Process is the operative term here. The USAF isn't asking to put weapons in space, they are asking for a process to create a directive that allows them free access to put weapons in space. Yes, indeed. And the fascists are jumping on the bandwagon for sure with this. Billions and billions of dollars to build space based weapons systems to not put them in space?? Of course they are going to put them up there. They already illegally have them up there and have had them there for a very long time. Nothing is new about intercontinental ballistic missles which of course move through the layers of the ionosphere. Nor is anything new about defensive laser based satellites, so really all they want is a piece of paper that says that they can do this publicly and openly and let the world know that we control it all. The US fascist constituency is shouting from the rooftops, in love with the premise of domination of the last arena open to us at the moment without competition. Of course in order to do this we would have to sacrifice millions of our own citizens to disease and pollution related syndromes, as we redirected healthcare dollars to space weapons. We would have to subjegate millions upon millions of US citizens of color and poverty onto reservations and let them cannibalize one another to provide the financial and energy resources to engage in such a program. But so what? That is what fascism is isn't it?? Selecting those that shall have and receive, and removing those that don't.

Scott McClellan could be the most hypocritical..

faggot(pile of kindling sticks) to preach from the white house bully pulpit ever; well, with the exception of his namesake during the Civil War. In a week of the bizarre being more bizarre, he has chastized a news magazine for not retracting a story based on a single faux report, while of course refusing completely to acknowledge that a memo written by the British attorney general clearly destroys the entire WH story on the build up to the war in Iraq. He supported the pull out of Russian bases from Georgia while suggesting that the US needs to build permanent bases in Iraq. He publically supported the US funding and support of Uzbekistan, failing of course to mention that the CIA and NSA send "enemy combatants" there to be tortured by the most heinous of all totalitarian regimes--can you say democracy and freedom in the same sentence with Uzbekistan?? He goes on to suggest that his boss is completely left out of any operational plans that are implemented in threat scenarios in D.C., but can't say how and why that is the case. And it goes on and on and on.

Big A Little C part 2.1 version 6.1--éyapaha

There are moments when the people experiencing the perfect expression of some other being’s creative process, become involved in the expression, and the combination of their power, creates an event that is in itself, the perfect expression of unity and oneness, thereby generating a moment of ecstasy for all. This feeling, the coming together of power, can occur at any time and any place, if the totality of the people involved can be made fully and completely aware and conscious. Through consciousness, they can contribute the power of their pure vision and its revealed truth. This generated power, in oneness with the spirits and in harmony with all things, creates the ecstatic experience. From this experience, all of the people can find the perfect expression of their experiences and be truly one on the peaceful warrior path. The Lakota call the culminating tribal experience the Red Path, the true Medicine Way. Only through fully conscious ecstatic harmonization can order be found in chaos.

I propose that 21st Century education be little if anything more than the ritualization of the creative ecstatic experience. It is only in the maelstrom of the ecstasy that the individual being discovers the perfection of the relationships that the one has with the many. The pure Anarchy of Self dissolving into the chaotic consciousness of the community defines the only lesson that needs to be facilitated among the children. The ritualization of the initiation of individual beings into the community of beings has always been at the center of all human social processes. All forms of education have tried to stop this process, have tried to freeze the human spirit, and imprint the meme virus of corporate, capitalistic, selfishness.

How do we intend to initiate the teaching ? Gerardus van der Leeuw, one of the founders of the academic discipline known today as the History of Religions , who spent most of his life utilizing the methodology of Husserl’s Phenomenology to bring forth the human experience of religiosity, wrote in one of his books, SACRED AND PROFANE BEAUTY:
All action, not merely the wonderful and inexplicable, takes place through ‘power.’ The concept of power can also be translated into ‘truth,’ in a way, however, which has more of a practical, rather than ethical meaning...The concept of power is also a ‘vox media’ between a sacred being or substance and deities...Through the understanding of natural phenomena, and the ways of life, we can learn to control and utilize power. In so doing, we are rewarded by new energies and strengths we receive. Music helps to control and utilize power. Just as music binds power, so it also assists in its release.
Here not only rhythm but, above all, melody and timbre, have an important function. Drums put the shamans into ecstasy, the flute speaks with the voice of a spirit; others believe the drum is filled with spirits. The more the instrument is filled with power, the more violently the player or listener becomes ‘beside himself.’ Wild, stimulating music grips the spirits of man everywhere in the world...Rhythm constrains the gods; it can only be strengthened by the effect of melody.

The players of music are expressing their experience through the
music, and the listeners merely experience the expressions. To reach beyond the profane and to commune in the sacred as individual anarchists merged in communal bands, the ecstatic experience needs to be attained. For this reason, among all peoples, the percussion instruments are most important, everything depends on rhythm.

In the beginning of humanity there was the recognition of rhythm as a source of information about the world. From rhythm came the rudiments of language as symbolic beats and vocalizations representing being. Language then became the descriptive force of reality; an orientation to perceptions of being. It was language that set humans apart from other species;- the ability to organize the constant collection of seemingly useless information into bases and constructs of knowledge which provided a necessary advantage for survival of the species within the realm of the surface of the planet. Later this linguistic ability enabled humans to live not only on the surface, but also above and below as well. Humans were constructing realities from consensual conversations amongst themselves to fit the visions of the orienting revelations as expressed through rhythm. As a species we are now about to embark onward into a new orientation to a reality that seems not to be shared by any other of the earth's species, the realm of cyberspaces and virtual realities. We are literally moving forward in all directions, and new rhythms, which express and manifest visions of these movements, are being formed to enable us to transcend beyond and orient to the separate realities.

Rhythm’s fundamental and primary role in planetary communication is the most basic of all OTHER THAN HUMAN WISDOM . The human dependence on observing rhythms as information bearing constructs has over the millennia, produced the freezing of the Begging Way. As our goal is to set free the Medicine Wheel, we must use the path which most directly intervenes in the minds, and brains, of the developing humans. To interfere with the MEME viruses upon which 21st century neo-feudal capitalism is predicted, we need the one stimulator of the ecstatic experience which is based solely on rhythm.

For the listeners and the players the ecstatic experience occurs when they are bonded together, through the dance. Music is needed by the dance only for its rhythm. The importance of the dance cannot be underestimated. Moliere said:
“Man needs nothing so much as the dance...a man who does not dance is good for nothing...All human unhappiness, all blows of fortunes, which history reports to us, all mistakes of politics, all defeats of the great commanders result solely from the fact that the dance is not understood.
G.K. Chesterton, the eminent religious philosopher wrote rather convincingly i think;
“That we would not wonder or be annoyed if the dance formed a part of our education. In a word, we have lost the unity of life without the rhythm of dance.”
The great Roman thinker Cicero wrote in a letter to the Emperor about the lack of ritual movement in the Roman Senate, “nemo fere saltet sobrius, nisi forte insanit,” (No one dances soberly, unless he has lost his senses). Chesterton and Moliere recalled this as a “hostile formulation of an indisputable truth.”

Marcel Dansei recently authored a very unique volume of essays on the study of adolescence and the meaning of “cool.” His book, COOL: The Signs and Meanings of Adolescence, iterates the importance of dance to teenagers. He writes:
The fact that teens show a strong desire to learn dancing styles and fads should not come as a surprise. Dancing is common to all peoples and cultures. As such, it constitutes a signifying bodily text whose construction can range all the way from spontaneous movements in response to natural rhythms to ‘high art’ dancing, as in classical ballet. It can be said that the dance texts which cultures commonly create and employ for various social reasons are culture-specific transformations of bodily tendencies and needs...It is virtually impossible to remain motionless for any protracted period of time. Indeed, when we are ‘forced’ to do so, our bodies react against it...
At the level of biology, therefore, bodily movements once enhanced our survivability. It is when we organized them, at some point in time, into patterned ones at the cultural level that dance emerged as a signifying text, re-enacting at this new level of mind and culture our basic bodily tendencies and needs. Dance makes meaning in ways that only humans can. It can therefore be devised as art, work, ceremony, ritual, entertainment, or a combination of any of these.

To understand dance, van der Leeuw wrote,
The dance is the most universal of the arts...It is half ritual half work and both together. Movement is ordered firmly and ceremonially in a dance, but for a useful purpose... That the dance has religious meaning does not mean that it can express only religious feelings. All feelings, from the most solemn to the most frivolous, find their expression in the dance. The religious is not a particular sensation alongside other sensations, but the summation of them all...Culture is the movement of man through nature. In the process, three main possibilities are realized: man overcomes the world and masters it, succeeding with the help of his magic and science, which are related to one another and coincide to a degree with each other; or he controls his dependence on the powers of this world, either by subjecting himself to them or allowing himself to be ruled, doing this in a state of enthusiasm or ecstasy; or he seeks for himself a place outside the course of the world, which allows him to observe, and this he does in art, in science, and in contemplation..Let us further complete this picture of the movement of man through nature. Man tries to stride, heavily or emphatically; to hover, light and high; or to move along calmly and more or less conscious of responsibility. Obviously he fulfills all three functions in every hour of his life, and none of the three is completely lacking in a single one of his actions.

Why then do we not encourage the dance, the transcending activity programmed by the immutable process of genetic evolution to create the opening of the doors of perception? It is indeed this very rhythmic bodily motion which stimulates the passion in the soul of beings. Witness the numerous sanctions against dance found in many religious orientations; Banning dancing because it represents the sacred body acting profanely.

As R.R. Marett wrote in his bookTHE THRESHOLD OF RELIGION (1909)
Savage religion is not something so much as thought out as danced out...Like the other animals born in the mud, only man refused to remain stuck in it. So he dances through life as though he wanted to dance until he collapsed, and thereby discovers that he is able, through his rhythmic dancing, to develop at the same time a second spirit.
It is the powerful spiritual experience that can be induced during the dance. Awakening and reawakening the spirits of the souls within us is essential for dharmic action which protects and honors GAIA. We can most easily awaken two of the three soul spirits through dance. Children already pulsate with rhythms awaiting the supplication to move and express their experience of the world. Dance provides the venue for communal ritual action within which individual beings can ecstatically embrace their spiritual consciousness.

BigA Little C part 1.2 ver 6

It is with a Declaration of Devolution establishing independence from the Neo-Feudal Lords of Capital, that a community of 21st Century humans begins the process of building a social and political order which provides for all future generations a sustainable bio-diverse GAIA in complete harmonic relationships. I believe that such a world is possible and indeed probable. There are two central components that would be necessary for the development of communities within which this guiding ethos could blossom and flourish. First and foremost, each bio-region must be recognized as the source of life and creation upon which communities are structured. And second, the communities in each bio-region must become self-sustaining in and of themselves, losing the impetus to provide sustenance for a lifestyle requiring trade and economic exchanges.

In essence, the bridges across bio-regional boundaries must be destroyed in order that the communities that intend to continue to survive, within a specific region, can embrace the overwhelming task of downscaling lifestyles to a sustainable level within a bio-region. Desert regions for example, require sophisticated awareness’ of sharing precious life-sustaining resources between communities of biomes. It would not so much be an abandonment of technologies developed by and for the sole use of humans, as much as it would be a reprioritization of those technologies that would be empowered through long term use of local bio-regional resources, as in a desert without great water supplies. Desert based self-sustaining communities, scattered across GAIAN landscapes that are bereft of sufficient water supplies due to Global Warming, could provide tremendous opportunity for surprising large human populations.

Combining the technological applications created around the globe for living sustainably and appropriately in deserts--applications such as: solar energy, underground housing, short season crops, elaborate agricultural forms employing dew/fog moisture collection and distribution systems, wind power, protein enriched foods from insect species, etc.--opens incredible opportunities for future generations to augment and develop ever more sophisticated patterns. Educational environments within these communities would become, through necessity, creative dynamic laboratories for cultural enhancement and harmonious developments.

Likewise, riparian bio-regions would form logically delineated boundaries for communities who in most ways would be dependent upon the riparian habitats for sustainable life sources. I can easily foresee a 21st Century which embraces the secrets of the Mississippian and Tennessean Mound Builders as models for sustainable communities that relate to specific river bio-regions. Large social groupings living on raised mounds, surrounded by copious bottom lands allowed to be resilted seasonally when the up-river dam projects are removed, would recreate a river based sustainable culture. Flood plains would of course provide excellent resource enhancement opportunities, but would manifestly be clear of residential and other important structures and vocations.

As bio-regional sustainable communities developed along the riparian realms, more and more efforts would be made to share the responsibility of maintaining the integrity and purity of the water. In exchange for downstream based commodities such as larger species of both fish and grain, up-stream communities would work diligently to insure maximum water quality standards. This would of course restrict the common practices of mining and logging, and other damaging activities that have required all of us to redirect our visions of the future.

The interesting thing about this view is that no matter what happens between now and then, the same results will occur. The eventual development of bio-regionally oriented sustainable communities will come to fruition out of both wise and harmonious intent as well as from the impending collapse and chaos of neo-feudal capitalism . Whether it is global warming that dramatically alters human survivability; or if it is the horrendous economic programs designed to selectively enhance a very few lives at the expense of the millions; or if it is the stupidity of war and toxification of the planet;--it doesn’t really much matter. The only viable behavior for continued posterity of human generations will be within the formation of sustainable downscaled communities intellectually engineered to utilize the bio-region in its most efficient and cooperative form. My desire, my goal is for this transformation of the human being to occur through education that specifically encourages the children to make the change without the impending necessity.

In some ways this is tautological, in that since the change will occur anyway, it would be detrimental to reverse the expansion of standards of living and free expression of the maximum potential of human freedom from tyrannical possession. I find this position indefensible. Although it reeks of Ayn Rand’s Gingrichian formulas for government’s limited action, even the conservative Christian must admit that they already possess an agenda which is in many ways advocating the very same process for their own people.

But here i must reiterate that the children are the decision makers, not we the old and in the way. We will never have to live within these devoluted environments. We can only encourage the children to connect to one another in the most intense and real of ways, in order that they may find the common bonds that are manifest through tribal affiliations and clan relations. While Christianity may seem to ascribe some tribal relation for groups of individual families, it has only in its most mystical form been successful. Monastic, Shaker, Mormon, Amish, Moravian--these communities, sustaining and sustainable are the role models for Christians. Likewise, differing tribal affiliations have been modeled over GAIAN history--sects, clans, associations, of Buddhists, Moslems, Hindus, Jews, etc.,--all these and thousands more carry the bio-germ/mind-virus/meme of harmonic relations among members of intentional communities. Human history is literally overflowing with right and judicious actions that combine the best of technologies with the most reverent of sustainable, bio-diverse, bio-regional behaviors. It is within these communities that the tools, the visceral ideas of creative reconstruction, of our desire to find GAIA once again filled with vibrant complex lifeforms in plenitude, are resting. The names of these tools are rituals and litanies and dances and arts. It is here that we must start our journey towards reeducating our children.

yushínya?? yes they are best at covering up

The following stories from today's Google news share one explicit common thread. Each and everyone of them involve a coverup at the highest levels of the US government. It is ludicrous to think that the MSN is so complicitous that they are unwilling to engage a single one of these incidents in a forthright and investigative way. We are screwed.

NY Marine: Prober
New York Daily News - 6 hours ago
By BRIAN KATES. A New York Marine officer who killed two Iraqi prisoners should be cleared of dereliction of duty and murder charges that carried a possible death sentence, a formal military probe concluded yesterday. Investigating officer Lt. Col. ...

Campaign of propaganda, lies, cover-up can’t be ignored
Collective Bellaciao - 42 minutes ago
What do an Army Pfc., a well-known volunteer Army Ranger and a National Guard Brigadier General have in common? All three are victims of the Bush administration’s campaign of propaganda, lies and cover-up ...

How Could a Pilot Stumble Into White House Airspace?
ABC News - 19 hours ago
The White House and the US Capitol were evacuated when a small plane violated restricted airspace. Here, people leave the Dirksen Senate Office Building. (AP Graphics). May 11, 2005 — How on earth could the ...

Huge victory' as county to keep all major bases
San Diego Union Tribune - 4 hours ago
By Rick Rogers. Two years of intense lobbying and countless hours spent extolling San Diego County's value to the military seem to have paid off. Yesterday, the Pentagon recommended that 33 major bases in 22 ...

Extradition of exile asked
Miami Herald - 7 hours ago
Venezuela formally asked the United States to arrest and extradite Luis Posada Carriles for his alleged role in the 1976 bombing of a Cuban passenger jet that killed 73 people. BY PABLO BACHELET, ALFONSO CHARDY AND OSCAR CORRAL. ...

Call for US apology over Quran
CNN - 7 hours ago
KABUL, Afghanistan (Reuters) -- The United States should apologize to Muslims for the senseless desecration of the Quran which has only strengthened the hands of fanatics and undermined efforts to build democracy, an Afghan newspaper said on Saturday. ...

Boxer's hold another hitch in Bolton vote
San Francisco Chronicle - 4 hours ago
Washington -- Sen. Barbara Boxer of California has erected a roadblock against John Bolton, President Bush's embattled nominee for UN ambassador, in a fight with the administration over access to documents. ...

Crude oil futures rise as speculators buy back contracts
Xinhua - 14 hours ago
NEW YORK, May 13 (Xinhuanet) -- Crude oil futures on Friday rose from a 12-week low, as speculators who had sold contracts now rushed to buy them back. On the New York Mercantile Exchange, crude oil futures ...

How embarassing this must be.

Steve Abrams, the president of the Kansas School Board, who had been instrumental in putting together the faux hearings on ID/Creationism science, sent a letter to the Wichita Eagle complaining about how they covered the affair. In his criticism he wrote:

<>The point of the science hearings is to show that, indeed, among scientists with many degrees, having received many research grants, having published many peer-reviewed papers and books and having accomplishments great and small, there is great controversy about biological evolution being taught as dogma. They presented testimony that there is controversy about the “factual” nature of biological evolution. They also presented testimony that there is controversy about the very definition of science as used in the majority draft. These hearings were not about my religious views; they were about what is good science. There was a huge amount of science testimony over three days last week. But to read the editorial and the article “Anti-evolution hearings end” (May 8 Local & State), a person would be hard-pressed to know that science was the main topic of discussion.

Yes they would! In point of fact, the "scientists" to whom Steve refers were in fact not ones who published in peer-reviewed papers, nor held positions at important institutions, nor for that matter were actually scientists. They were for the most part pseudo-scientists and self-described scientists, whose contribution to science is relegated to the footnotes of various studies on the input of divine intervention into the natural world. To prove the point read further.

One had to read the editorial and article closely to find that 23 people testified, but one might get the opinion that indeed there weren’t many scientists that testified. In point of fact, of the 20-plus witnesses, only two were not actively involved in science research or teaching science. Of course, the article quoted both of those who were not active in science research or science teaching.

We invited evolutionary scientists from all across Kansas and the United States to testify. But they have all decided to boycott. Now, a thinking person would ask: Is it because the hearings are rigged? Is it because of arrogance of the majority scientists? Or is it because what the majority proposes is actually full of holes?

Really, they invited real scientists, admitting not only that they did, but that the real ones didn't show up. How can Steve suggest that since the real ones didn't participate, the fake ones thus become real??? This is all too harsh a critique, but hey he wrote this. And to create the straw man argument so that the reader might not catch his own admission of failure, is the crowning jewel.
<>

and Sensenbrenner says: Recedite, plebes! Gero rem imperialem!

HR 1528 is a piece of legislation proposed by Representative Sensenbrenner that is essentially designed to threaten the mass of the public to comply and conform with his personal view of the world. Ostensibly drafted as revisions to the Drug Enforcement regulations under the Controlled Substances Act--his proposed law would in essence make it criminal conduct, punishable by no less than two years, for a person over the age of 18 to not report to law enforcement any activity involving an entire host of new provisions to the CSA. This is fascism at its worst, making failure to report your own children's behaviors and those of their friends, and those of their acquaintences, a crime with mandatory minimums. Indeed if it is your own children the minimum increases.

Such legislation will in fact force all school teachers to be law enforcement agents. It will force concert, music and art festival, arena producers and promoters to insure that they either never ever allow children to attend, or to remind every single patron of their potential criminal activity of failing to report. The Gestapo wasn't this intrusive and we know what their behavior created. How, in this nation, can we possibly accept such a monumental change to our judicial system? This man is a threat to the very core of this constitutional democratic republic. He is removing all of the safeguards and protections of the bill of rights. He is insane.

Deconstruct This! and then MF&BD

T. O'Connor is a libertarian environmentalist who blogs for the NRDC on issues of tempering environmental action against the greater good of economic prosperity and the well being of the rankist classes of elite property holders against the masses of ignorant bystanders. He is in essence a pseudo-enviro who poses faux dichotomies against straw men to sustain the view that any environmental activism that is other than his own is radical and wrong headed. The following post of his just begs deconstruction:

As I see it, the challenge and dilemma for what is rapidly and dangerously becoming our strident and unwelcoming little sub-culture is to navigate a more compelling course, by avoiding on the one hand to appear as being hostile towards economic well-being, and by resisting on the other our facile habit of demonizing anyone and everyone who can be dismissed as strictly "feeding their self-regarding needs." Where does the latter line of thinking end, really? And who will reign in this reflex of ours which stands to dilute the most important stories we have to report about the worst offenders?

There are certainly those abusers of Nature who merit our strong censure and worse. But what also worries me is that the "environmental community" is increasingly seen as lacking any ability or willingness to make those finer sorts of distinctions that most Americans rightly see themselves as capable of settling through a "common sense".

I start with two glaring phrases that project his elitism: "worst offenders" and "abusers.. who merit .. strong censor and worse." At no time in any of his posts has O'Connor supported environmental activism that sustains or supports protections of forests and watersheds prior to their destruction. His entire thematic context is to target only those profiteers whose actions are so vile, and without doubt, personally affecting himself, that they must be made the story. Does O'Connon support Bhopal based efforts to protect future environments from potential disasters? NO! Would he argue that the manipulation and bending of laws in Applachia that destroy the entire environmental habitat is a worst offender case? Probably not! Why? Because he must at all costs put property rights of the private and wealthy elite above and beyond the interests of the poor upon whom most rapacious environmental degradation occurs. He only wants to take down the worst because they are the ones that make the liberatrians look bad, they are the ones that make the "common sense: of the citizens want to act to make laws to stop them. He has no interest in keeping roads out of forests or off BLM land. He has no interest in restricting and regulating clearcutting, mining and drilling behaviors of the extraction industries especially if they are conducted on private lands, even if the runoff pollutes and toxifies all down stream and down wind.

That "strident and unwelcome sub-culture" he keeps referring to is his way of saying that only his brand of environmentalism is right and all others wrong. He is the worst of the abusers of rank. His pronouncements are nothing more than carefully crafted statements supportive of his corporate investments and propertied classes against any and all who would insist for a plethora of necessary and fundamental reasons to regulate and restrict their behaviors. How dare those in the environmental community suggest that citizens of the US are trained and educated to consume the earth without even the slightest cognitive awareness that these behaviors destroy their own lives--is how he really would rather put it. His consistent attacks on what is essentially the "left" within the environmental movement is his faux straw man argument. He is painting a broad canvas that portrays anyone who doesn't think as himself, and other libertarians, as members of the groups who think and behave like Greenpeace, EarthFirst! Ruckus, and ELF. He insists on this in constant subtextual frames, hoping it seems to denigrate the whole of the environmental movement, sufficiently attacking the core constituency's tendency to place the earth at the top of the pyramid of sustainable life rather than his, and his supporters/audience prefered scales of balancing the economy with some degree of environmental protection.

His rejection of GAIA centric principles for guiding environmental movements is nothing more or less than someone pretending to be an environmentalist as long as it supports his own NIMBY attitudes. He will always put economics first, he must do so in order to sustain his own livelihood and well being for himself and family and friends. He is quite simply the very core reason that environmentalism is DEAD.

chanté shicé wakinyan agli

Oil pricing is the most rigged of gamesmanship. See if any of the following makes any sense:
Oil prices sagged on Wednesday as the International Energy Agency said weakening economic growth and higher fuel costs slowed oil demand growth in the first quarter of this year. Expectations that a weekly government report later on Wednesday would show a further rise in U.S. crude stocks, already near six-year highs, also weighed on prices.

HEY weren't we told just five months ago that US crude stocks were dangerously low?? Now they say they are at six year highs, because the price is so high nobody is buying. Can they make up their minds? NO! This isn't about the truth. There is no reliable data because then they would have to reveal that the pricing of crude and gasoline is a scam to extract enormous profits from the people. Here is another duplicitous treat:
<>Prices fell as the International Energy Agency's monthly Oil Market Report said incremental demand in China, Europe and the United States was less than expected for the quarter. China's demand, an explosive 19.3 percent in the first quarter last year, slowed to 4.5 percent in the same period of 2005. The slowdown in growth means the outlook for fourth quarter world demand does not appear as likely to stretch producer countries as in the same period last year, the IEA said.

But that very data is not accurate, if you take China's own reports as more reliable and verifiable. Picture this: Let's say we start in January 2004 with 100bpd. for China. By March it needs 119 bpd and by June it needs 132. September sees a need for 144 and in December the growth now requires 157bpd. The "slowdown" suggests that by the end of 2005 Chinas demand would stretch the production??? What kind of shit is that? By the end of March 2005 China needed 4.5% more oil, not than 100 bpd, but of 157 bpd. or 164bpd. Where is all this new associated production growth. It doesn't exist. These are numbers that are being strung out to forecast a curve of growth for China's demands but they intentionally are not graphing them along curves for production. Why? Because the actual production drops in relation to the ever increasing growth around the world. It doesn't matter that China will need say, by then end of 2005, a very conservative 190bpd--more like over 200bpd. What really matters is that China will need 100% more oil beginning in 2006 than it needed at the beginning of 2004!!! There is no possible way that total world oil production increase so much more than 100% in the last two years so that China could have its needs met while the rest of the world's growth also rose. Thus this is all bullshit.

mitakiye oyasin raptus regaliter

Ain't poker the best metaphoric symbol for our culture?? We have this fascination with gambling and always focussing on who's number one. Poker epitomizes the process of selecting number one's from out of the hordes in ways so quick to identify and so easy to embrace. We bet on our capacity to beat the other guy/girl down in the immediate time frames using nothing but our ingenuity and capital assets. Hundreds, and sometimes thousands, of people invest their life resources, their childrens' children's stake in the future, in a gamble to come out number one now. In essence poker players bet their lives in this culture against all possible odds, that just this once one of them will get to be at the top of the hierarchical pyramid.

This is important to consider. Only one person can be number one. Only a dozen or so people can receive any payback at all, out of the thousands who coughed up amounts that would feed them for a year, or buy a new car or appliances for the family, or provide health care, and so forth. This is the US in a nutshell; the willingness to sell out our children to get something now, and not something that is lasting or sustaining--but something transient and temporal. The viciousness of the game is in every possible way indicative of the viciousness of our consumer culture. The craveness of actually playing with money, nearly always someone elses when you have broken through the first few layers, a symbolic form of meaningless actual value, is quite revealing. Poker is the hucksterism of the revival meeting the carny's call to step right this way.

Why is this so appropriate as a cultural meme? Well, think about our relationship with the finite resources of the earth, and our addiction to energy that forces us to gamble away our childrens' children's future. Think COAL. There is only so much coal on the earth; it will take another quarter of a billion years to make more. And yet we are willing here and now to dig it all up and use it at any cost in order to get that last bit of life out of our capital investments in playing the game. The irony is hysterical in that it takes so much coal to power up the production of poker playing. And like the players at the table, who are only living in the immediacy of each and every hand, forgetting about their children, their families, their lives, we are constantly choosing to forget the future. In 2003, thanks in large part to coal burning, climatologists found record-high levels of climate altering carbon dioxide in the atmosphere of the planet. A forest, by contract, can store twenty time more carbon than grasslands or croplands or pastures. Its leaf litter slows erosion and adds organic matter to the soil. Its dense vegetation stops flooding. Its headwater streams purify the creeks and rivlets below. A contiguous forest ensures species diversity that assures the future of necessary decomposers, nutrient transference, initial protein provisioning, and so forth. A forest, in short, does all the things that the mining and burning of coal cannot do. A forest is for the future.

Peak oil is past, and the need for energy resources is ever greater. Coal is becoming the cheap oil of the now. But unlike oil, coal is a solid mineral form of carbon and requires the removal of the earth to make it accessible. To do this destroys the surface of the planet. All the forests, and grasses, and species are removed and what is left is waste and toxicity. The water that runs off through this landscape is hazardous and toxic to all live. It is carrying silts and metals and debris that choke streams, kill lakes, and fill up river bottoms. The more we take our energy now, the less we will have in the future. We are playing a game of poker with the planet. And we are forgetting that the planet is the house. The house never ever plays with its own money. The house always wins, no matter who comes out on top in a tournament. The house doesn't care who number one is, since the house will stand, while all others die. The house does however require a steady flow of life and people who are willing to gamble with their future. When the people stop coming the house cannot survive. When we finally use up the coal and the last few number one winners are left, they will realize that the house can no longer sustain itself. The Earth will be bust, it will be bankrupt of its sustainability for living beings. We will have lost the big bet, and our future generations will simply cease to be.

Letan khigla yo

A little bit louder and a whole lot worse...
<>Scientists who accept evolution say the evidence for the theory is as solid as that for electricity and plate tectonics. They say intelligent design, the idea that the world's complexity is best explained as being the work of a creator, is a 21st-century version of creationism. But the ID community says they simply want all sides of the debate to be taught in the classroom. Teaching only intelligent design “is as bad as teaching only evolution. We're looking for an objective approach that looks at both sides.”
Really, an objective approach to the two sides of the "debate" between religion and science. What the hell does that mean? Maybe the question really needs to be asked of the ID community, just how much of their underlying philosophical theories are they willing to expose to a deep objective scientific inquiry?? Are they willing to propose a set of theological constructs regarding this "creator" of theirs to a wide ranging critical inquiry beginning with the validation of one creation story over several others. Why is the judeo-christian-islam story more valid than the hindu, or buddhist, or afro-brazillian voodun?? Are they willing to make their material available to the methods of science and an objective, historically factual investigation and evaluation? They will not, they cannot, they are unable to do this. There spew is all one big lie. Incapable as they are of articulating their own stupid scientific claims regarding something as "too complex" they certainly are never going to broaden their "other side" to the same rigid rules of science that are used to evaluate say the Mars rover experiments. What a bunch of crap.

na `ce `ce

Florida's new law reads in part: 

However, a  person is  justified in the use of deadly force 
and does not have a duty to retreat  if:
(a)  He or she reasonably believes that such force is necessary
to prevent imminent death or great bodily harm to
himself or herself or another or to prevent the
imminent commission of a forcible felony;


how this all works will be very interesting...
you get to kill someone who you "reasonably believe" is
intending to cause you great harm, an imminent threat. 
Yep that makes sense.  Now just suppose
that the teaching of evolution become illegal, as it will in Kansas. 
Then if i was a deeply passionate
fascio-christo who felt that my children were in grave
and imminent danger of going to hell if they
heard the very words spoken by someone suggesting
 that evolution might be the most accurate way
to describe biological processes in reality,
 i would have to kill that person.  I would get away with it too
because i was reasonable in my belief, based on
my fundamentalist evangelical religion that the danger
of going to hell far outweighed any concerns
i might have had about public safety.

Tókhiyatanhan yau he? Hiya, hécetu sni ye.

More people are talking about the following story, willing to be interviewed by local media, making the effort to send in emails, calling media, than there are doing the same for all the stories about road building, destruction of the environment, lies about iraq war, etc. combined. This is exactly what is wrong with the US. We are suffering in a nation filled with fools.

Approximately 13.8 million viewers watched Clark's exclusive appearance on Wednesday night's broadcast of ABC's "Primetime Live," according to a report by the Associated Press, based on preliminary Nielsen Media Research ratings.

Kimmel said Clark has nothing to complain about.

"That kid would have been one of the happiest kids in the world," Kimmel said. "Not only did he get on 'American Idol' but he slept with Paula Abdul. What is he complaining about?"

Betty Wass, 74, of Leominster, said she heard about it on the radio Thursday morning.

"People have been calling, saying it's a horrible thing to do," Wass said referring to the alleged affair.

Casey Laycox, 19, of Winchendon, said she was shocked when she found out.

"I am a little distraught," Laycox said. "And wasn't' he (Clark) a minor? It's supposed to be American Idol. It just shows what people do to get ahead."

Clark was 22, and Abdul, 40, at the time.

Clark, a finalist in the show's second season, had to eventually leave the show after getting arrested for a domestic dispute with his sister, and failing to inform the show's producers about it.

Laycox said the scandal will ruin the reputation of the show and tarnish the credibility of the judges.

"That show is definitely not going to be as big because you will never know if someone slept with someone on the show," Laycox said.

Megan Richardson, 17, of Leominster, said the scandal will only boost the show's ratings.

"People will watch the show to see what happens next," Richardson said. "And people who watch the show for the singing would not care much about the whole thing."

Richardson said she watches the show only occasionally, and is not a big fan. Yet she is commenting in the media about it?? Gee fifteen minutes of fame discussing american idol must be all of her life..

Alyssa Vinton, 17, of Lancaster, said she rarely misses an episode of the show, and hopes Abdul will continue to be one of the judges.

"I love Paula," Vinton said. "I think she is one of the best judges ever." This girl is seventeen, how could she possibly evaluate a "best judge"---irony here, given that this is a case of judicial activism.

Vinton said she does not believe Abdul had an affair with one of the show's former contestants, but does not condemn the action, if true.

"If I were her, I would do the same," Vinton said. "If I were a contestant, I'd do it."

Vinton said she likes the show because she wants to see who will be the next big star.

Joyce Reyna, 16, of Lancaster, said she believes Abdul had an affair with Clark.

"I can see that happening," Reyna said. "She's hot for her age ... Why are people making such a big deal out of it. It's her life."

Kelly Sanches, 16, of Fitchburg, said she doesn't find Clark's claims plausible.

"She (Abdul) doesn't seem like that type of a person," Sanches said. "People would do anything for five minutes of fame."

Carl Holmgren, 58, of Orange, said Clark's story is not convincing because he waited two years before disclosing it. Then why in the fuck is he talking about it at all. Irony abounds--"he is taking it to the media."--and so is Carl.

"It's just a guy trying to make some bucks," Holmgren said. "His timing is interesting. He is not taking it to court or anything; he is taking it to the media."

this is the end, beautiful friend, the end...

of our dear beloved planet, the end:

The Bush administration's action to open nearly a third of the nation's remote national forests to road building, logging and other commercial activity is being criticized by environmental groups and most Western states governors. Bryan Bird of Forest Guardians says it's a classic example of the Bush administration trashing democracy and trashing forests. The 58.4 million acres involved -- mainly in 12 western states -- had been put off limits to development by former President Clinton eight days before he left office in January 2001. Under existing management plans, some 34 million acres of these pristine woodlands could be open for road construction.

Yes it is the end. When the vast majority of untapped forest land in the US is suddenly opened to the extraction industries at a time when regulation and enforcement of their activities is at an all time low, we are on the verge of remaking the planet into the true hell of Max Headroom and Blade Runner. Alaskan coastlines, salmon streams, bear habitats, last vestiges of severely endangered species are all openned to the whims of developers craving the opportunities to sink exploratory explosives, strip away all topsoils and overlayers to expose possible minerals that then need to be blown out of the surface of the earth, we have signaled as a species that we are ready to give up on the planet, on feeding the people, on supporting any healthy sustainability of the oceans.

This behavior is rape, a vicious evil perpetrated in the name of dollars and euros and yuang. There is no intelligent use, wise use here. We may as well look at one another and see the blessings of liberty go by by with the forests as well.

Chéye shni yo ye. Léchi u wo we.

On this 35th anniversary of the massacre at Kent State, we need to notice that over the course of the last five years, things have gotten far worse than they were even then. For example:
On April 28, Americans United for the Separation of Church and State released a report on Religious Coercion and Endorsement of Religion at the United States Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs. The organization investigated complaints from a variety of sources from people of different religious backgrounds and concluded that the USAF Academy was involved in coerced religious practice, discrimination against non-Christians and non-religious cadets, and failing to adequately handle complaints of religious intolerance. The report concludes that the abuses come down from the top of the military hierarchy at the Academy.

Among the abuses:

• Academy chaplains Major Warren "Chappy" Watties instructed cadets who attended his protestant worship service to return to their tents and proselytize to cadets who hadn't attended; failure to accept this proselytizing would cause cadets to "burn in the fires of hell."
• Cadets who did not attend a chapel service after dinner were forced to march in a "Heathen Flight" back to their dorms.
• Head-football-coach Fisher DeBerry informed his team he expected to see them in church on Easter. He also hung a banner in the locker room proclaiming "I am a Christian first and last * * * I am a member of Team Jesus Christ"
• Many mandatory events (meals, awards ceremonies, training) were opened with Christian prayer.
• Instructors introduced themselves as born-again Christians and encouraged students to also become born-again during the course of the term.
• One instructor told his students to pray before taking a history exam.
• Signs were placed on every dining plate announcing a Christian-themed program related to the movie The Passion of the Christ. Flyers of a similar nature bore the message, "This is an officially sponsored USAFA event please do not take this flyer down."
• Non-Christian, lower-class cadets have been subjected to religious harassment and proselytizing by more senior cadets and are not punished for their inappropriate conduct. (Senior cadets hold authority over more junior cadets amounting to virtually complete control.)
• Commander of Cadets General Johnny Weida emailed cadets endorsing National Prayer Week and saying "[a]sk the Lord to give us the wisdom to discover the right, the courage to choose it, and the strength to make it endure." In an official "Commander's Guidance" document, General Weida instructed cadets that they "are accountable first to your God."
• Christian students wishing to leave campus to attend religious worship services are issued "non-chargeable passes" which don't count against leave. Those who practice other religions are not able to obtain these passes.

Tin soldiers and Nixon's coming, we're finally on our own.
This summer I hear the drumming, four dead in Ohio.
Gotta get down to it, soldiers are cutting us down. Should have been done long ago.
What if you knew her and found her dead on the ground?
How can you run when you know?

Gotta get down to it, soldiers are cutting us down. Should have been done long ago.
What if you knew her and found her dead on the ground?
How can you run when you know?

Tin soldiers and Nixon's coming, we're finally on our own.
This summer I hear the drumming, four dead in Ohio,
four dead in Ohio, four dead in Ohio, four dead in Ohio, how many more?
Four dead in Ohio, four dead in Ohio, four dead in Ohio, home many more?

Now we have grey cadets and Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld coming.. killing thousands and destroy the lives of hundreds of thousands. Where is the outrage, where is the anger?? So successful has the TV campaign been to distance the US population from reality, that even when presented with the clearest of all possible evidence, the citizens shrug their shoulders and kiss their own asses good bye. Well i hope they discover before too long how seriously misguided and wrong they have been.

chanupa pejuta

The voice or sound or whatever mechanism was utilized to invoke symbols in my being, told me the story of what had happened to this island of GAIAN crust, crushed between the great oceans, called by its conquering heros, the United States. The symbols told of the Indian, who was in harmony with this land and with all the things that lived in this land. Visitors came to the Indians and made the Indians unconscious of their relationships with all things and the order and peace they once had. These visitors then took the land from the Indians and left the Indians to suffer for their unconsciousness. These visitors did not know the land nor did they know the proper relationship between men and all the things of this land. They ignored their ignorance of this and proceeded to fight against all things. They destroyed the relationships like they destroyed the Indian. They created for themselves a universe and an environment that did not relate at all to any natural reality. They have now gone so far as to control the powers of the Thunder Beings, the Wakinyan, and the white gift of purity. These visitors, who were welcomed as brothers by all things, now kill all things, because they have created new non-living, non-spirit things that walk the Black path. This new reality is backward and frozen, and it will eventually lead to the end of both the Red and the Black Paths.
The symbols showed the end of the relationship between the animal beings and the plant beings. To end this relationship is to kill everything; it is done everyday by the visitors, not only on the land they claim to possess, but also in the spaces they want to control and dominate. All plants and animals share a fundamental gift that must always be. The plants give to the animals what they need and the animals give to the plants what they need most. This giving away brings new freshness to the Whole Earth. Without this giving the air would become stale and die.
The visitors forget this. They take from the plants and they take from the animals, but they never give back life. They only give poison, and that is given not as a gift but as a result of discarding waste, the byproduct of their behaviors. These visitors have days that they are to give to one another. These days are special to them, but even then, the gifts they give are perceived only as trading for what they receive in return. The Indian does not know this way, nor do all the living sentient beings.

The red spirit path is a giving path. The Indian lives this giving path, sharing everything with everything, never owning or possessing anything. Above all, the Indian never possesses the land. The earth and all the living things are the greatest gift ever given, and in the spirit of this gift, the Indian gives it all back and shares it with all. The visitors do not understand this. To them the land, like the plants, is there to do with whatever they want. They own it, fight over it, rape it, kill it, pollute it, but they never know it, nor share with it, nor find harmony with it or all of the relations living through it.

These visitors do not even understand the need to communicate with all nature, rocks, trees, birds, insects, animals, fish. If a visitor is seen communicating with any of these, outside the privacy of his own little environmental shell, the visitor is considered crazy. The more the visitor attempts to find harmony and oneness with all things, the crazier he/she is called. If the controllers of the visitors, those visitors that have the power to keep the new reality in order and to assure its continuation, deem a visitor crazy, they lock him away and use him for play. To all nature and the Indian, there is no craziness; there is only the harmony of all living beings. Behavior that may have been seen as eccentric by visitors is seen by the natives as merely another relationship of the whole circle. The natives understand that each being and spirit has a center, and that each must find that center. When it is found, order will be had, and harmony and peace will reign.

The visitors believe that harmony and peace can only be maintained as a by-product of conformity, competition and gamesmanship. It is rather amusing to know that the shamen, the holy men of the natives, undergo life experiences that the visitors would call very sick and very crazy. These men must pass through this phase because they have great power, and it is a a great ordeal to center oneself with so much power. But when they are centered and know the Truth, these men can perform healing and can make rain and are one with the great powers of the universe, the Wakinyan, the Thunder Beings, the healing plants, the calming waters, and Wakantanka, the Great Mystery. If visitors show signs of this experience, they are removed from the rest of the masses of citizens and are dealt with as misfits and wrong, sick, crazy, people.

As all of these symbols danced in my being my spirit beheld the urgency of the message. It is becoming too late to teach the visitors the ways of the land that they are visiting. They merely ignore these attempts anyway. They even play games at it. Muir believed in preservation of natural lands and environments, yet the followers of his teachings, the Sierra Club, confess faith only in conservation. To most Americans the notions of setting aside large bio-regions as laboratories for observing the raw processes of the natural world are unthinkable and obscene. Conservation is merely a delaying technique to give special interests first chance at special ripoffs. Ecology is a game to play, simply to understand what health foods and homeopathic techniques will apply to individuals, while still retaining the overwhelming economic benefits for the greedy ‘hippies.’

I cursed my own involvement in the visitors’ games and swore to fight against the destructive systems. The cloud and its voice bade me to calm down and showed me patience and serenity. I was carried to a creek and my anxiety was washed out of me. My temper, cooled by the chattering stream, flew away on the wings of a blowing leaf. The cloud then carried me above the stream and showed me some beautiful cottonwood trees. The cloud touched the trees and they lived through their seasons before my eyes. From deadness in winter to rebirth in spring, from adolescence and young adult in summer to middle and old age in fall, and back to death and rebirth.

The cloud said to me that a human is like the cottonwood tree. He/she is born from a small seed and grows over years, dying and being reborn as the seasons go round and round. We grow until we get too old to grow anymore, then we degenerate and return to the elemental form from which we aroze. During this life-time, encompassing many rebirths, humans have a multitude of experiences. Our experiences are like the branches and twigs and leaves of the sacred cottonwood; blooming in climax, they fall off, to only have been. Each new branch and new twig symbolize a new experience connected to the previous experiences as a twig proceeds from a branch, supporting the next seasons growth of foilage and experience. The experiences are only connected together by the roots. But the roots are at the center; the trunk, as the core which holds, supports, and ‘establishes’ the tree, serves as the medium of communication between the leaves and the roots. The tree grows from the roots, spreading into other experiences and to other relationships with the earth. Roots also signal the tree to grow up from the ground, reaching into the sky spreading into other experiences and to other relationships with the earth. The leaves, like the roots, contact between the wholeness of the air, the wholeness of the earth, and the breathing of all life on the GAIAN planet. The tree is the same either up or down--lifeflowing, spirit breathing. This is the way of the indigenous peoples too. Their experiences connect at the roots in the center. Life flows through the peoples from the sky, to the earth, and back again.

As the cottonwood stands by itself, it reaches in many directions above and below the ground. These are the many experiences of the tree. The tree is flowing with life. If we were to live alone in the diverse natural realm, we too would be whole beings flowing with life. If we put the tree in a very crowded forest it cannot reach out and experience so much. It must live in a smaller space, occupying and experiencing only a little in comparison to being allowed to grow in a freer, more spacious place. Likewise humans, if crowded by other people, can only live a little and not as fully. The tree, though, will still be in harmony with the whole while the man will only regret his smallness and not allow himself to live his whole and complete being.

This is what the visitors have done to themselves and America. They have made themselves too dense and have found that they do not know wholeness do not know wholeness. It is not that life of the forest tree is simpler; no, in fact, it is much more complex and difficult, but it knows the whole circle and relates in harmony with the nature around it. Thus it lives in the spirit way. The visitors do not know the spirit way nor the whole circle--they do not live in harmony with their neighbors because they resent existence.

The cloud also explained to me the connection of all things. The visitor's scientists have revealed that everything in the universe is comprised of energy and matter. These are arranged atomically. A being is merely a particular arrangement of atoms, as is all the matter which is apparent. These atoms have rhythmic pulses and movement as part of their existence. The electrons flow around them, and in certain elements these electrons move about the atoms at great distances. These electrons come into contact with electrons from all over the universe, yet they retain their connection to their original atom. In this way, we, as masses of atoms, are always in contact with all things atomically. Every movement, every electron shell change, every breath, is felt by all the atoms in the universe. It is our limits of perception that keep us from seeing these relationships. The energy that powers us comes from the operations of our atoms and is guided by our spirits. Our spirits are also in relation to all spirits and are one with all. The Great Mystery Spirit, Wakantanka, is the oneness of all spirits. Our brother spirits, the wakan beings, are those arrangements of atoms and energy and spirit that complement us and maintain our continuation in the universe. The shamans know the keys to these relationships and can transcend these boundaries and merge into different configurations. This is the ultimate revelation of Truth, and is accessible to those beings that are truly centered in their grace-filled existence.

The visitors must ask themselves what they are doing here, before they continue doing. Their scientists must understand their gifts and the powers of these gifts, before they allow the leaders to use them. In this way, these gifts will not become bent things to have. The visitors must seek the wisdom of the natives to know how to live in this land in peace and harmony. The visitors seem to show some concern about peace and harmony in the world, but they don't even know what it is all about.

They must stop playing games and realize that they have lost their visions. They must be made to quest for new visions as the native indigenous people have done for centuries. They must be made to see the way to the Red Path and unfreeze their own Medicine Wheel. If they do not do this, then they will die, but not alone. They will kill Maka, they will kill the skies, they will kill all of their space. To not see this is blind ignorance. To assume that everything will be alright, that the leaders know what they are doing, or to feel that it doesn't really matter anyway, that we are all going to die eventually so let us play happily with out care --these are all the Begging Way, the frozen path of tradition and dying visions. They are poisons in the minds and death to the hearts, as are money and the whole economics game. These visitors have brought disease with them, and they have infected the American land with their mind virus of "use and destroy." The natives are dying from this, and soon all living things will die too. When they are gone, there will only be the virus and the Void.

"fighting for our lives"--ho ka heye

We dropped out of school, got divorced, broke with our families and ourselves and everything we’d known.We quit our jobs, violated our leases, threw all our furniture out on the sidewalk, and hit the road.We sat on the swings of children’s playgrounds until our toes were frostbitten, admiring the moonlight on the dewy grass, writing poetry on the wind for each other.We went to bed early and lay awake until well past dawn recounting all the awful things we’d done to others and they to us—and laughing, blessing and absolving each other and this crazy cosmos.We stole into museums showing reruns of old Guy Debord films to write fight foul and faster, my friend, the old world is behind you on the backs of theater seats.The scent of gasoline still fresh on our hands, we watched the new sun rise, and spoke in hushed voices about what we should do next, thrilling in the budding consciousness of our own limitless power.We used stolen calling card numbers to talk our teenage lovers through phone sex from telephones in the lobbies of police stations.We broke into the private pools and saunas of the rich to enjoy them as their owners never had.We slipped into the offices where our browbeaten friends shuffled papers for petty despots, to draft anti-imperialist manifestos on their computers—or just sleep under their desks. They were shocked that morning they finally walked in on us, half-naked, brushing our teeth at the water cooler.We lived through harrowing, exhilarating moments when we did things we had always thought impossible, spitting in the face of all our apprehensions to kiss unapproachable beauties, drop banners from the tops of national monuments, drop out of colleges . . . and then gritted our teeth, expecting the world to end—but it didn’t!We stood or knelt in emptying concert halls, on rooftops under lightning storms, on the dead grass of graveyards, and swore with tears in our eyes never to go back again.We communicated with each other through initials carved into boarding school desks, designs spray-painted through stencils onto alley walls, holes kicked in corporate windows televised on the five o’clock news, letters posted with counterfeit stamps or carried across oceans in friends’ packs, secret instructions coded into anonymous emails, clandestine meetings in coffee shops, love poetry carved into the planks of prison bunks.We sheltered illegal immigrants, political refugees, fugitives from justice, adolescent runaways in our modest homes and beds, as they too sheltered us.We improvised recipes to bake each other cookies, cakes, breakfasts in bed, weekly free meals in the park, great feasts celebrating our courage and kinship so we might taste their sweetness on our very tongues.We wreaked havoc upon their gender norms and ethnic stereotypes and cultural expectations, showing with our bodies and our relationships
and our desires just how arbitrary their laws of nature were.We wrote our own music and performed it for each other, so when we hummed to ourselves we could celebrate our companions’ creativity rather than repeat the radio’s dull drone.In borrowed attic rooms, we tended ailing foreign lovers and struggled to write the lines that could ignite
the fires dormant in the multitudes around us.