Saturday, July 31, 2010
Friday, July 30, 2010
Anthony Peake, Rodney Collin, and the molecular and electronic realms
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Rodney Collin (1909-1955) begins his famous work with a quote from Nietzsche's - and my own - favorite philosopher of antiquity, Heraclites.
It is a quote which beautifully synopsizes Anthony Peake's eidolon/daemon dyad, and his "Cheating the Ferryman" thesis: so much so, that its beautiful prose seems etched into his sober countenance above:
Life is a lyre
for its tune is death
one living the other's death
and dead the other's life
. . . living and dead are the same, and so
with wake and sleep. . . the former become the latter, and so...
I perish! Give then that draught, of Memory. . .
~Heraclitus, On the Universe
Anthony Peake, who happens to be my favorite binary mind/afterlife theorist from Great Britain, and whom I have the high honor of knowing personally, is embarking on the research and writing of books #3 and 4 now.
I know that he is planning to engage in a study of OBE (out of body experience) and lucid dreaming.
It would seem to me that Rodney Collin, and his Theory of Eternal Life, would very much bolster and reinforce Peake's Cheating the Ferryman theory, while tying those two subjects together into a meaningful and coherent whole, a platform upon which Peake's theory could stand firm (although it stands firm enough as it is).
Collin delves into the molecular and electronic worlds, of which the Tibetan Book of the Dead makes reference. Time dilation, hugely important in Peake's Cheating the Ferryman theory, is gone into in tandem with the ideas of OBE and lucid dreaming being mechanisms of the after death state.
A treatise of death, of human life and consciousness, and an epistemology of the experience of the landscape of transitory realms experienced by the soul's consciousness in the months after death, weaves itself into a phenomenology in Collin's work, echoing Hamlet's own intuition:
and by a sleep to say we end
The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks
That flesh is heir to, 'tis a consummation
Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;
To sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;
For in that sleep of death what dreams may come
When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,
Must give us pause: there's the respect
That makes calamity of so long life;
As within the movie Inception, the "dream within a dream" which comprises human existence - and which if one loves Peake may become one more Peakian landscape filled with Peakian characters - the ongoing investigation into the realm of dreams and the meaning for human consciousness continues unabated, and the film is yet another timely cultural sign that eternal life has hit its social stride; has become psychologically and scientifically sophisticated, as it were.
In any case, I hope Tony Peake refers to Collin in his new work!
Thursday, July 29, 2010
McDonald's: Gays Lovin' It: NOT
A couple weeks ago, McDonald's, France, released a gay-friendly commercial that encouraged patrons to "come as you are." The ad, which created a lot of buzz (mostly in America, where it wasn't -- and as we learn below, won't be -- aired), got a reception from McDonald's execs in America that was colder than day-old fries.
From HuffPost
Gay Liberation Network to Protest LaBarbera, AFTAH's Truth Academy
Image via Wikipedia
Inside the Culture Wars: If AFTAH is now in the closet, it should be asked, what happens after a group is in the closet?
The Gay Liberation Network is planning a protest against Peter LaBarbera and his AFTAH (Americans for Truth about Homosexuality) "Truth Academy".
The organization Americans For Truth About Homosexuality ( AFTAH ) has canceled an Aug. 4 banquet/lecture that would have launched an "academy, according to a press release from the Gay Liberation Network ( GLN ) .
All references to the banquet, originally scheduled at the AFTAH headquarters in Carol Stream, have been removed from AFTAH's website.
The anti-gay "academy," scheduled to begin Thursday, Aug. 5, will now be the target of a protest by pro-gay groups. A new pro-gay counter-protest is scheduled to take place at 7:30 p.m. on Aug. 5 in front of the Christian Liberty Academy, 502 W. Euclid, Arlington Heights, to coincide with the "Special Thursday evening presentation" that AFTAH is holding.
AFTAH says the aim of its "academy" is to "train young people ( as well as older pro-family advocates ) how to answer 'gay' activist misinformation and fight the homosexual-bisexual-transsexual agenda." Advocates for legal equality for lesbians, gays, bisexuals and transgender people ( LGBTs ) counter that the gathering is aimed at promoting continued legal and social discrimination against gays, and that it aims to promote this bigotry among young people.
"AFTAH has a long history of telling lies about LGBT people and recently was designated a 'hate group' by the Southern Poverty Law Center," said GLN's Bob Schwartz. DuPage NOW, Woodstock/McHenry County PFLAG and La Voz de los de Abajo are joining GLN's counterprotest.
Wednesday, July 28, 2010
Ruben shows his beef; Fight Back NY to give him a grilling - Good As You:: Gay and Lesbian Activism With a Sense of Humor
Ruben's shown his beef; Fight Back NY to give him a grilling - Good As You:: Gay and Lesbian Activism With a Sense of Humor
Senator Ruben Diaz takes on Fight Back New York:
Ruben Diaz for State Senate Committee
July 28, 2010
Dear Brothers and Sisters:
On Tuesday, September 14, 2010 primary elections will take place in the Democratic and Republican parties to re-elect or elect people to represent our community in the New York State legislature.
These election results will be vital to us as Christians and God-fearing people to keep our family, moral and traditional values that our ancestors left us and that the Bible teaches us.
Senators Shirley Huntley, Frank Padavan and Hiram Monserrate were instrumental in joining me to defeat the gay marriage bill in the New York State Senate. Today the State of New York does not have legalized gay marriage and we have to praise God and thank Senators Shirley Huntley, Frank Padavan and Hiram Monserrate.
They all risked their chances of being elected in order to take this stand.
We in the Christian community – and all God-fearing people – owe them our support, our respect and our help.
The homosexual community has targeted the three of them and put candidates – funded with money from the homosexual community – so their candidate can vote for gay marriage next year.
Therefore, I am counting on all of you to not only pray for Senators Shirley Huntley, Frank Padavan and Hiram Monserrate, but to also offer them all of the support and help that you can give during their re-election efforts or elections to another position.
As a State Senator, a Pastor, and a Christian, I need Senators Shirley Huntley, Frank Padavan and Hiram Monserrate back in the New York State legislature for next year when the gay marriage issue will take top priority in New York State. We do not have the luxury of losing these three legislators who have fought so hard for our family, moral and traditional values in the State legislature.
Respectfully,
Senator Reverend Ruben Diaz
July 28, 2010
Dear Brothers and Sisters:
On Tuesday, September 14, 2010 primary elections will take place in the Democratic and Republican parties to re-elect or elect people to represent our community in the New York State legislature.
These election results will be vital to us as Christians and God-fearing people to keep our family, moral and traditional values that our ancestors left us and that the Bible teaches us.
Senators Shirley Huntley, Frank Padavan and Hiram Monserrate were instrumental in joining me to defeat the gay marriage bill in the New York State Senate. Today the State of New York does not have legalized gay marriage and we have to praise God and thank Senators Shirley Huntley, Frank Padavan and Hiram Monserrate.
They all risked their chances of being elected in order to take this stand.
We in the Christian community – and all God-fearing people – owe them our support, our respect and our help.
The homosexual community has targeted the three of them and put candidates – funded with money from the homosexual community – so their candidate can vote for gay marriage next year.
Therefore, I am counting on all of you to not only pray for Senators Shirley Huntley, Frank Padavan and Hiram Monserrate, but to also offer them all of the support and help that you can give during their re-election efforts or elections to another position.
As a State Senator, a Pastor, and a Christian, I need Senators Shirley Huntley, Frank Padavan and Hiram Monserrate back in the New York State legislature for next year when the gay marriage issue will take top priority in New York State. We do not have the luxury of losing these three legislators who have fought so hard for our family, moral and traditional values in the State legislature.
Respectfully,
Senator Reverend Ruben Diaz
From Salon.com: Top GOP calls Kagan "dangerous" nominee for SCOTUS
The top Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee is calling Elena Kagan "a dangerous, progressive, political" nominee for the Supreme Court.
Sen. Jeff Sessions of Alabama is warning fellow senators to "be careful" about backing President Barack Obama's nominee, who's expected to be confirmed easily next week.
He says Americans won't forgive senators who vote to "impose a legal progressive activist legislator from the bench upon them."
Sessions' latest and strongest speech denouncing Kagan comes shortly after Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine became the fourth Republican to announce she'd break with her party to support Obama's nominee.
American Public Discourse and the Sherrod/Breitbart fiasco
The Shirley Sherrod affair, the case of the black US Department of Agriculture (USDA) official fired July 20 because of an allegedly racist remark, is profoundly discrediting to every wing of the American establishment.
What happened last week is indisputable: the extreme right media organized a provocation and a spineless White House fell for it hook, line and sinker.
The attempt by sections of the liberal media to turn this now into a new chapter of “the national discourse on race” or an additional “teachable moment”—phrases that should be put out of commission forthwith—is simply a hypocritical diversion.
On July 19, Andrew Breitbart, an ultra-right commentator, posted a deliberately misleading excerpt from a speech Sherrod delivered this past March. She appeared to be explaining how, 24 years earlier, while working at a non-profit organization, she had not exerted herself on behalf of a white farmer because of her own racial preconceptions. Sherrod’s father was murdered by a white man in 1965 and his killer was never punished, despite the testimony of witnesses, because of endemic racism in rural Georgia.
Breitbart’s posting, and the threat that other right-wing media outlets, especially Fox News, would take up Sherrod’s remarks, threw the Obama administration into a panic. An official from the USDA harassed Sherrod as she was driving back to her office with several phone calls, finally insisting that she pull over to the side of the road and send in her resignation on the spot, “because you’re going to be on Glenn Beck tonight.”
Beck hosts a right-wing program on Fox, where he regales his audience nightly with his unhinged, anti-communist conspiracy theories.
Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, former Democratic Party governor of Iowa and a candidate for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination, immediately accepted Sherrod’s resignation, denouncing her remarks and citing a “zero tolerance” policy against discrimination. The NAACP chimed in, adding its own excoriation of Sherrod, rushing a press release out late at night.
A reading of the full transcript of Sherrod’s remarks March 27, along with the well-publicized comments of the white farm family involved in the incident two-and-a-half decades ago, makes clear the absurdity of the accusations. Sherrod used the occasion of the speech to advance her view that racism was deliberately fomented by the American elite to divide blacks and whites, and to explain how she had devoted her life to helping poor people of every color.
Everyone had egg on his or her face. The Department of Agriculture apologized and offered Sherrod a new job. Robert Gibbs, the White House spokesman, acknowledged July 21 that “everybody involved made determinations without knowing all the facts and all the events.” The following day, President Barack Obama telephoned Sherrod.
What do these facts demonstrate?
The Obama administration and its hangers-on rushed to judgment on the basis of a two-minute video clip posted by a thoroughly disreputable source.
Breitbart functions in the foul world of ultra-right blogs and web sites. This is a disoriented and deranged petty-bourgeois layer, which identifies any criticism of American free-market capitalism with Bolshevism. They will say and do anything, no matter how unprincipled or violent, to achieve their ends.
Fox News, owned and operated by billionaire Rupert Murdoch, is a source of never-ending political provocation. Lying and distortion is a way of life for its stable of slick reactionaries, engaged primarily in whipping up the basest and most backward sentiments. Racism and anti-Semitism simmer just beneath the surface.
Breitbart, his attempted set-up of Shirley Sherrod exposed as a fraud, was entirely unapologetic. These bullying, neo-fascistic elements are not held back by any of the internal constraints that once operated within the American political system and the mainstream media. They have been set in motion by the immense social and economic crisis, and nurtured within an official environment in the US over the past several decades pervaded by ideological reaction.
This extreme-right element represents the views of a small portion of the American population, yet it dominates at Fox News, major newspapers and has important representatives at virtually every media outlet.
The Obama administration closely monitors the right-wing web sites and cable television programs and reacts more sensitively to their thrusts than to any other single source of political criticism. The watchword of this administration is that it will not be outflanked on the right. Meanwhile, it is impervious to mounting popular economic distress and opposition to the Wall Street pay bonanza, government inaction over the Gulf oil disaster, and the war in Afghanistan.
In effect, the right-wing media, bankrolled by Murdoch and others, largely sets the agenda for the Obama White House. Their programs may not formally coincide, but they may as well. The initiative remains, for reasons bound up with the decline of American capitalism and the collapse of liberalism, with these aggressive reactionary types.
In this incident, as in every other one, the pundits reveal their own bewilderment. Maureen Dowd in the New York Times makes the point that “Obama lacks advisers who are descended from the central African-American experience,” and proceeds to cite the comments of a series of black Democratic Party politicians as privileged and as distant from American social reality as she is.
The Times’ Frank Rich argues, “This country was rightly elated when it elected its first African-American president more than 20 months ago. That high was destined to abate, but we reached a new low last week. What does it say about America now, and where it is heading, that a racial provocateur, wielding a deceptively edited video, could not only smear an innocent woman but make every national institution that touched the story look bad? The White House, the NAACP and the news media were all soiled by this episode.”
Well, what does it say?
Speaking of Vilsack, Rich comments, “an executive so easily bullied by Fox News has no more business running a government department than Ken Salazar, the secretary of interior who let oil companies run wild on deepwater drilling until disaster struck. That the White House sat back while Vilsack capitulated to a mob is a disgraceful commentary on both its guts and competence.”
Relatively strong words, but Rich draws no conclusions except that “While America’s progress on race has been epic since the days when Sherrod’s father could be murdered with impunity, we have been going backward since Election Day 2008.”
Implicitly at least, Rich identifies the fake populist demagogues on the right with popular opinion. What evidence can he muster to make such an assertion?
The Washington Post’s E.J. Dionne Jr. insists that “The mainstream media and the Obama administration must stop cowering before a right wing that has persistently forced its propaganda to be accepted as news by convincing traditional journalists that ‘fairness’ requires treating extremist rants as ‘one side of the story.’”
But why do they cower?
None of the liberal columnists can answer that question, because it goes to the heart of America’s social reality. In the end, the human trash on Fox and the right-wing blogs are merely the most naked and brutal face of a crisis-ridden, predatory and essentially criminal American capitalism. The Obama administration and the Democrats serve the same social interests, but in an unconvincingly and half-heartedly liberal guise.
There is a division of labor. Fox News and company proceed to stir up whatever filth they can, while the White House and the pundits assert piously that the country must rise above its alleged preoccupation with race.
But the real story here says something very different. It speaks to the fact that there are two Americas, divided sharply along class lines. The political and media establishment could so seriously misread the Sherrod case in part because it is insulated by a hundred layers of wealth and privilege from the reality of the working class and the poor, and the sentiments of millions of working people about American life, even if they are not yet fully articulated.
Sherrod, married to a prominent figure in the civil rights movement, explained in March that working with Roger Spooner, the white farmer, “made me see that it’s really about those who have versus those who don’t, you know. And they could be black; they could be white; they could be Hispanic.”
She further attributed racism to the desire of “the people with money, the elite” to divide whites and blacks. “There is no difference between us. The only difference is that the folks with money want to stay in power,” she said.
Sherrod spoke about the experience of black and white indentured servants in colonial America, apparently referring to events in Maryland and Virginia in the late 1600s. She noted that the indentured servants “didn’t see any difference in each other. Nobody worried about skin color. They married each other, you know. These were poor whites and poor blacks in the same boat, except they were slaves. But they were both slaves and both had their opportunity to work out on the slavery.”
Then, she commented, the black and white servants began to organize and protest against their conditions. “Well, the people with money, the elite, decided, ‘Hey, we need to do something here to divide them.’… That’s when they put laws in place forbidding them to marry each other. That’s when they created the racism that we know of today. They did it to keep us divided.”
The history lesson is over-simplified, but it contains an element of profound truth. Racism is deliberately incited in America for the purpose of dividing the working class and tying each race or ethnicity helplessly to “its” fraction of the ruling elite. Of course, the lesson remains hollow unless it is translated into political action—the independent mobilization of the working class breaking free from both big business parties. This is something carefully censored and banned in public discourse.
Tuesday, July 27, 2010
CEO of Target Defends contribution to anti gay Minnesota Forward
Image via WikipediaMinneapolis, MN — Target's CEO is today defended the company's $150,000 political donation to fund anti-gay politics. Chief Executive Gregg Steinhafel is telling employees of the Minnesota-based retailer that the company's support of the gay community remains "unwavering."
Target has come under fire from LGBT groups, including the Human Rights Campaign, for giving $150,000 to a right-wing political action committee (PAC) known as Minnesota Forward, which in turn bought television ads for Minnesota Republican gubernatorial candidate Tom Emmer.
"I believe marriage is the union between one man and one woman," Emmer says on his website. "As a legislator, I have consistently supported the constitutional marriage amendment that protects traditional marriage."
Gay rights groups say it's unwise for Target to back the anti-gay Emmer, because his conservative views on abortion, gay marriage, immigration and the minimum wage could upset some Target shoppers.
Emmer has also been criticized for his association with a Christian rock band, which according to the Minnesota Independent has made statements concerning the morality of killing gays and lesbians.
"We rarely endorse all advocated positions of the organizations or candidates we support, and we do not have a political or social agenda," Steinhafel said in an e-mail published by the Associated Press. "Let me be very clear, Target's support of the GLBT community is unwavering, and inclusiveness remains a core value of our company."
The AP also reports that Best Buy, another Minnesota-based retailer, contributed $100,000 to the conservative PAC.
Target opened its new Chicago location in the Uptown neighborhood on July 20. Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley, Ald. Helen Shiller (46th) and openly-gay state Rep. Greg Harris (D-Chicago) were at the opening.
Rep. Harris told ChicagoPride.com on Monday that he was surprised by the news.
"This shows how important effective campaign disclosure laws are, so that we can follow the money that supports candidates who actively work against our community or who fund anti-gay ballot initiatives," said Harris. "Companies like Target need to understand that they can't have it both ways when it comes to issues of our basic rights, and that the facts will eventually come out. I hope that they will rethink this contribution and find a way to make it right."
A Facebook group dedicated to boycotting Target continues to gain momentum.
Target has come under fire from LGBT groups, including the Human Rights Campaign, for giving $150,000 to a right-wing political action committee (PAC) known as Minnesota Forward, which in turn bought television ads for Minnesota Republican gubernatorial candidate Tom Emmer.
"I believe marriage is the union between one man and one woman," Emmer says on his website. "As a legislator, I have consistently supported the constitutional marriage amendment that protects traditional marriage."
Gay rights groups say it's unwise for Target to back the anti-gay Emmer, because his conservative views on abortion, gay marriage, immigration and the minimum wage could upset some Target shoppers.
Emmer has also been criticized for his association with a Christian rock band, which according to the Minnesota Independent has made statements concerning the morality of killing gays and lesbians.
"We rarely endorse all advocated positions of the organizations or candidates we support, and we do not have a political or social agenda," Steinhafel said in an e-mail published by the Associated Press. "Let me be very clear, Target's support of the GLBT community is unwavering, and inclusiveness remains a core value of our company."
The AP also reports that Best Buy, another Minnesota-based retailer, contributed $100,000 to the conservative PAC.
Target opened its new Chicago location in the Uptown neighborhood on July 20. Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley, Ald. Helen Shiller (46th) and openly-gay state Rep. Greg Harris (D-Chicago) were at the opening.
Rep. Harris told ChicagoPride.com on Monday that he was surprised by the news.
"This shows how important effective campaign disclosure laws are, so that we can follow the money that supports candidates who actively work against our community or who fund anti-gay ballot initiatives," said Harris. "Companies like Target need to understand that they can't have it both ways when it comes to issues of our basic rights, and that the facts will eventually come out. I hope that they will rethink this contribution and find a way to make it right."
A Facebook group dedicated to boycotting Target continues to gain momentum.
Source: Chicago Pride dot com
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