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 20 Mar 2008 @ 10:13, by jazzolog. Shared Purpose
Chen-Lang approached Shih-Tou and asked: "What is the idea of Bodhidharma's coming from the West?"
"Ask the post over there," Shih-Tou said.
"I don't understand," said Chen-Lang.
"Neither do I," said Shih-Tou.
Suddenly Chen-Lang saw the truth.
---Zen saying
There ain't no answer. There ain't gonna be any answer. There never has been an answer. There's the answer.
---Gertrude Stein
Let Him be only that He is and as He is, and make Him no otherwise. Seek no further in Him but subtlety of wit.
---The Cloud Of Unknowing
The photo shows the soundboard and interior of the Trinity United Church of Christ on the south side of Chicago. It appears at a blog entry by audio engineer Matt Satorius from last September. [link] More about the church can be found at its website [link] .
The response to Barack Obama's speech on Race In America has been all over the place. I thought the response would be almost as interesting and profound about us as the oration was about him. I needed some time to observe it and feel things settle inside my own being.
Nothing really confused me about the speech. I loved it. Some people know my own personal background with integration goes back to childhood---and I don't know why. My family didn't promote it particularly...and my mother discouraged relationships even with people who didn't have blue eyes, for Christ's sake! (I know some people from various races have blue eyes, but she didn't.) Once jazz entered my picture in the form of Benny Goodman's Sextet Session in 1947 or so, I knew integrated music was magnificent in every way---and represented democracy too.
I hadn't rushed right out to investigate Rev. Jeremiah Wright's sermons. I didn't need to. The man's name is Jeremiah, and I've read that book in the Bible. I grew into manhood hearing Malcolm X and Stokely Carmichael. I lived on Chicago's South Side during the summer of 1961, and trained for Freedom Rides. I knew there were streets there that, if I crossed over and walked on the other side, I could encounter Black Muslims who might insist I get back where I "belong." I'm not shocked by black rage and understand where it comes from. I understand white rage too, and resentment from any group that senses preference granted to another. But I like integration better, and celebration of differences.
My own experience of Chicago clouded my impression of what Mr. Obama's church might be like. I pictured something old and dark and maybe run down. I had heard yesterday that many professional African-Americans are members, but I figured even if the congregation was upscale it still probably was a humble facility. This morning I finally visited the website. The joke's on me.
Americans know what black worship is like. Everybody's at least seen The Blues Brothers I hope. It's a jumpin' joyous business! A preacher in there is a jazz solo to me. The guy takes off and goes. If he honks on that tenor, falls down on his back, still blowin' with his feet kicking in the air, that's the way it's done sometimes. And if you're into that way of expression, you know white players and red players and yellow players all do it too. And when it's done, everybody's let off steam---and hopefully nobody got hurt. More >
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 2 Feb 2008 @ 08:19, by raypows. Shared Purpose
Recently I have become a founding Angel of HUB. Together we are creating a breakthrough economic engine that will drive a comprehensive global sustainability plan in the places it is most needed. This organization is in pre-launch and there is a huge opportunity to become involved. Contact me, 805.715.0050, and I can share more about this amazing vision.
HUB's mission is to move all people of the world from survival to self-sustainability. HUB-In AID is a product our Angels can gift. This movement is committed to returning dignity back to nations. "We don't just give a man a bag of grain, we teach him how to grow the grain himself in the future."
HUB co-creates sustainment programs with field agents in chosen communities around the world. Currently we are focusing on three key areas in need: Kenya, Zimbabwe and Mozambique. We call the recipients in each community "Hub-Powerees" because they receive more than just survival-aid (like food and water). Through HUB's empowerment programs, they are also supported with village build-outs, schools for 200 children each, and micro-loans for the caregivers of the children.
FOOD + WATER + EDUCATION + MICROCREDIT = SUSTAINABILITY
What is a one HUBie's immediate Impact?
That depends on your level of involvement in HUB.
If you are an individual giver, your giving helps feed 3 people, educate 3 people, provide clean water for 10 and provide environmental sustainability training to 16. This means you personally impact 32 lives as a HUBbie.
If you are an exponential giver, you give and inspire others to do the same. If you inspire three others, who in turn each inspire 3 others, we now have a group of 13 (1+3+9) which means 416 people are impacted as a result of your exponential giving.
A "HUB-Poweree" Example
Who are you impacting as you give to empower
Meet "Elizabeth" a mother of 9 and a care-giver to a family of 10. Her son "John" was selected to enter a HUB scholarship school. Elizabeth is then given a trade – banana silk weaving.
As Elizabeth's husband Joseph, a subsistence farmer, produces bananas, they are purchased from expert trainers in a co-operative of subsistence farmers. Around the same time, one of our HUBbies decides he has a passion to sell clothing made from natural fibers in the US Market. His Circle of Brilliance group encourages him to tap into John's production. This HUBbie buys product from Elizabeth at a discount and launches the successful clothing line "Threads for Life".
This example shows the multiple benefits of HUB's connections. A child was educated and trained, the family started a profitable, self-sustaining business, and one of our HUBbies realized his dream to impact the world in a positive way.
HUB-In Aid – A "Full Package" Product
FOOD + WATER + EDUCATION + MICROCREDIT
When giving aid, HUB works to combine at least four critical components (also known as a "full package") that delivers powerful results and moves entire families from survival to sustainability
HUB works with the finest products and partners to develop, manufacture and distribute the needed elements for HUB-In AID
HUB "full package" product partners include:
Food:
Feed The Children the worlds finest distributor and provider of food, which in 2007 totaled $1 Billion of aid, goods and services. Larry Jones has worked closely with the HUB founders for the last few years in Africa.
Nourish the Children, manufacturers of over 100 million Vitameal since 2002 and supporters of the founders African programs since 2006.
Water:
Raincatcher.org. Founder by Jack Rose raincatchers position is that there is enough water on the planet. It rains. We just need to catch it and purify it. The raincatcher is one of the most effective, economic and easy to maintain water initiative with raincatchers being installed on all HUB school roofs.
Kenya Water Wells Trust. One of the most established well diggers in Africa with over a 95% success record in drilling
Education:
HUB has various education partners in different multi native language countries yet we are embracing Healing Bridges, formed by an African, Zebiba who after suffering genocide, traveled to the United States, empowered herself and then modeled her plan in her home country of Eritrea with education for the children and micro loans for the care givers
Micro Loan:
Guided by counsel from The Micro Credit Summit, micro credit field agents also vary from country to country. HUB is developing a program in association with Healing Bridges, The Green Children and the 2006 Nobel recipient, Grameen Bank. More >
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20 Oct 2007 @ 19:44, by a-d. Shared Purpose
India’s Agrarian Suicides
The Indian peasantry, the largest surviving body of small farmers in the world, is currently facing an epidemic of suicide. For thousands of years farmers have depended on the Earth to sustain their families. Now, in the twenty-first century, their livelihood, prosperity, and the well-being of their families for generations to come are being threatened by globalisation and the shift in the linkage of agriculture from the Earth to a few profit-driven multinational corporations.
Read the rest here: [link]
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The Assault on Iraqi Agriculture --- U.S. Agribusiness Targets the Fertile Crescent
* By Daniel Stone
Coastal Post, August 2006
Straight to the Source
Blessed with abundant fertile land and water, Iraq, the cradle of civilization, the center of the Fertile Crescent of ancient Mesopotamia, the birthplace of agriculture 13 millenia ago, has, in the past, not only been able to feed itself, but to supply other areas of the world with its bountiful harvest of grains, pulses, dates and vegetables. How unfortunate that now these proud people are receiving most of their food as "aid." Over the past 20 years, due to the Iraq-Iran war, the two U.S. Gulf "wars," and the brutal, illegal, U.S.-driven sanctions over 13 years, during both Republican and Democratic administrations, Iraq's agricultural sector has been devastated."]
Read the rest here: [link]
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Monsanto, Cereal Killer GM and Agrarian Suicides in India
by Alejandro Nadal; La Jornada; January 06, 2007
The Green Revolution is dead. Its hybrids and high-yield varieties allowed for significant increases in the production of crops like wheat. But its negative side effects have intensified rather than gone away.
The technological package of the Green Revolution caused severe salination of the soil, indiscriminate exploitation and choking of aquifers and intense pollution with all types of pesticides. More seriously, it sowed an economic, social and environmental crisis in the life of poor farmers that takes more lives every year. One example is that of Anil Khondwa Shinde, a small farmer of Vidarbha district in Maharashtra state (in mid-western India). He killed himself two months ago consuming a powerful insecticide. He was 31 years old and died within minutes. The difference between the production costs and the retail price did not allow him to pay back to the providers the credit extended to him for the inputs.
An isolated incident? Not at all. The Indian Ministry of Agriculture admits to the following figures: there were 100,000 suicides by farmers between 1993 and 2003. And between 2003 and October 2006, there have been some 16,000 suicides by farmers each year. In total, between 1993 and 2006, there were around 150,000 suicide by farmers, 30 a day for 13 years!
The Maharashtra government itself accepts the figure of 1,920 farmers’ suicides in Vidarbha between January 2001 and August 2006. Farmers’ organisations of the district state that there were 782 suicides by agricultural producers. Data for the past three months indicate that on average there was a suicide every eight hours.
What conditions give rise to a suicide rate of about 30 farmers a day? It is said that the reason for this is indebtedness, but the ultimate reason is the imposition of a completely unsuitable agricultural technology, as much from the economic as from the environmental viewpoint.
Read the rest here: [link]
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"WTO Kills Farmers": India Free Market Reforms Trigger Farmers' Suicides
By Jessica Long
Global Research, August 12, 2007
Many of us remember the crucial failure of the WTO's Fifth Ministerial Conference in Cancun, Mexico in 2003. It was on this day that Lee Kyung Hae, leader of the Korean Federation of Advanced Farmers, discovered that his loudest voice was in death.
Wearing a sandwich board that read, "The WTO kills farmers!"- Lee took a knife and stabbed himself in the chest. His death was ignored by the WTO and the mainstream media. Given the lack of attention, many argue that his violent end was in vain. Sadly, his dishonored death is one of thousands being ignored by corporate mainstream media.
In 2003, 17,107 farmers committed suicide. In the last few years, the number of documented suicides in India's rural areas has skyrocketed. These suicides have become so commonplace that they are mystifying a nation and polarizing the debate over biotechnology.
On the surface, the massive numbers of farmer suicides lack the social unity and revolutionary opposition other revolutions employ. In fact, the local Indian government refuses to address the correlation between agrarian suicides and economic exploitation, making it difficult for the international public to apply real social forces to these farmers’ actions.
However, research shows the massive numbers of farmer suicides are linked not only with economic disparity, but with corporate exploitation by multinational agribusinesses.
Whether addressed as "agrarian martyrs" or merely desperate peasantry, exploited Indian farmers, like Lee Kyung Hae, have found that their loudest voice is in death.
In a religiously and ethnically segmented nation, their actions have founded a cultural unity that confronts the evils of globalization. Thus, the insanely high volume of farmer suicides serves as a shockingly unique medium of proletarian outcry.
The Republic of India is one of the top twelve nations in the world in terms of biodiversity. Featuring nearly 8% of all recorded species on Earth, this subcontinent is home to 47,000 plant species and 81,000 animal species. Simultaneously, India is home to the largest network of indigenous farmers in the world. Yet biotechnology has led to extreme environmental degradation in the region, threatening to replace its diverse ecology with corporate hybrid monoculture. The original Green Revolution was supposed to save 58 million Indian hectares. Today, 120 million of the 142 million cultivable hectares is degraded- over twice the magnitude that the Green Revolution attempted to save! In the Indian state of Punjab, 84 of the 138 developmental blocks are recorded as having 98% ground water exploitation. The critical limit is 80%. The result has had devastating impacts on the agricultural community, leaving exploited farmers with little choice of action. In the past six years, more than three thousand farmers have committed suicide in Andrha Pradesh, that is six to ten farmers everyday! When did this start? Why is this occurring?
And why have such little media attention been given to this crisis?
There are three potential causes for the onset of these self-inflicted massacres:
1) exploitation by multinational agribusinesses
2) severe economic disparity and
3) a means of resistance by exposing the abuse of the agrarian sphere.Read the rest here: [link] More >
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 21 Jul 2006 @ 01:52, by delphinius. Shared Purpose
One of my pet symbols: The solid bronze lion statue in front of the MGM Grand Casino, Sin City - Las Vegas, Nevada. Our modern day Sphinx in the desert.
I've been reading in the news logs about the recent propositions for the mining of gold to establish a NCN Community. I have the following comment on the implications of gold, and our course into the future as I see it. More >
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 2 Jun 2006 @ 13:25, by petavie. Shared Purpose
Well, it happened again !!! Allright everybody, nobody moves, what is going on ? It seems some of us are meeting all over the planet.
Manifestation, virtual world becoming reality, time to rally the troops, whatever you want to call it, it is great !
Scotty is in Paris, no not Texas, France, gay Paris, grey Paris.
We had a lovely lunch and talk nonstop all afternoon, both of us feeling like we knew each other forever, not just from the net, I think it is more like a soul connection, definitely one from the heart one.
A lovely lady, a beautifull soul, Merci Chris.
A bientot.... Until we meet again More >
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 30 May 2006 @ 15:47, by hgoodgame. Shared Purpose
First Contact: I meet up with my first NCN'er in real life -
I was going to write about the difficulties of traveling with MCS, but decided not to bore you with a sob story that’s (thankfully) over with! So I’m going to jump ahead to a very happy part of my trip.
Originally this journey was for my inner child, it’s all her fault, she’s the one who wanted to ‘see everything’. And I thought the grown-up in me could handle giving her a grand tour. By taking the ‘wrong’ road in Tupelo,for instance, I ended up in a little town called West Point, Mississippi, and in order to correct my mistake, I had to cross the Tombigbee River. It brought back a song from elementary school, much to her delight! One never knows about those wrong turns, they could be just what we were looking for. More >
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 17 Apr 2006 @ 13:03, by sprtskr. Shared Purpose
[link]
NOTED PROFESSOR RONALD MALLET ECHOES JOHN TITOR'S PHYSICS AND PREDICTION FOR TIME TRAVEL THIS CENTURY!!
FIrst John TItor said it and now Ronald Mallett, noted scientist and professor agrees! TIme travel may be possible and there is no paradox when traveling in time.
JOHN - NOV 4, 2000: "It has always surprised me why that concept is so hard for people to imagine and accept. Nothing would happen. The universe would not end and there are no paradox problems that threaten existence. Temporal space-time is made up of every possible quantum state. The Everett Wheeler model is correct. "
JOHN - FEB 2, 2001: "The grandfather paradox is impossible. In fact, all paradox is impossible. The Everett-Wheeler-Graham or multiple world theory is correct. All possible quantum states, events, possibilities and outcomes are real, eventual and occurring. The chances of everything happening someplace at sometime in the superverse is 100%. (For all you scientists out there, if Schrödinger's cat had a time machine, he might not be in the box at all.)
PROFESSOR PREDICTS HUMAN TIME TRAVEL THIS CENTURY
With a brilliant idea and equations based on Einstein’s relativity theories, Ronald Mallett from the University of Connecticut has devised an experiment to observe a time traveling neutron in a circulating light beam. While his team still needs funding for the project, Mallett calculates that the possibility of time travel using this method could be verified within a decade.
“The Grandfather Paradox [where you go back in time and kill your grandfather] is not an issue,” said Mallett. “In a sense, time travel means that you’re traveling both in time and into other universes. If you go back into the past, you’ll go into another universe. As soon as you arrive at the past, you’re making a choice and there’ll be a split. Our universe will not be affected by what you do in your visit to the past.”
More >
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 25 Feb 2006 @ 14:14, by sprtskr. Shared Purpose
Do you know what is in your food?
Is it genetically engineered?
You don't know --
because they won't tell you...
Click Here to Take Action Now! [link]
Stay informed on the latest news. Click here to read The Campaign Reporter.
Frequently Asked Questions
Question: Why don't the food manufacturers and the biotech companies want you to know if your foods have been genetically engineered?
Answer: Because if they are labeled, you will start asking questions such as "Have these genetically engineered foods been safety tested on humans?" The answer to that question is NO!
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Question: Doesn't the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) require genetically engineered foods to be safety tested like they do for new drugs and food additives before they are sold to the public for consumption?
Answer: NO! With limited exceptions, under current FDA regulations, companies are not even required to notify the agency they are bringing new genetically engineered products to the market.
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Question: How much of the food I buy in the grocery stores contain genetically engineered ingredients?
Answer: Since genetically engineered soy and corn are used in many processed foods, it is estimated that over 70 percent of the foods in grocery stores in the U.S. and Canada contain genetically engineered ingredients.
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Question: Are people all over the world eating genetically engineered foods?
Answer: No, all of the European Union nations, Japan, China, Australia, New Zealand and many other countries require the mandatory labeling of foods that contain genetically engineered ingredients. As a result, food manufacturers in all those countries choose to use non-genetically engineered ingredients.
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Question: Are you telling me that people in the United States and Canada are eating a lot more genetically engineered foods than in many other countries in the world?
Answer: Yes, citizens in the United States and Canada are engaged in the largest feeding experiment in human history and most people are not even aware of the fact.
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Question: What countries are growing genetically engineered crops?
Answer: There were only five countries that grew about 98 percent of the $44 billion of commercial genetically engineered crops in 2003-2004. Those five countries were: the United States ($27.5 billion), Argentina ($8.9 billion), China ($3.9 billion), Canada ($2.0 billion) and Brazil ($1.6 billion).
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Question: What can I do to help properly regulate genetically engineered foods so that I can rest assure that these experimental crops will not harm human health or the environment?
Answer: The single most important step you can take is to mail three letters using the U.S. Postal Service. One letter goes to your Congressional Representative in the U.S. House of Representatives and the other two to your state's two Senators serving in the U.S. Senate. The letters request that they support legislation to label genetically engineered foods. We have form letters on this web site for this purpose. Click here for more information.
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Copyright © The Campaign .
[link] More >
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 6 Nov 2005 @ 16:15, by judih. Shared Purpose
The word 'leave' is a loaded emotion. Loved ones leave. Friends who need to move on leave. Those who give up on a mutual path, leave.
Children leave.
Grandparents leave.
Leave, if you leave......
How threatened am I if another leaves?
How insecure am I if my social circle gasps a gap?
We are all related. We are all entangled as Ming brought up in a blog a while ago [link]
We are in this together.
Cecil Lee,[link] a painter and phar lepht zennist said:
"No man is an island nor should he attempt to live like one. We must connect. We must complete our journey."
We who are now together in this time and space intersect for this moment. Yet, sure as the eye blinks and the sound of a song fades away, we all must continue on our paths.
Our paths may grow distant, but our connection will never die away. Even as we each follow our individual destinies, as we travel the road that makes up our journey, we will always be joined at the heart. More >
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3 Jul 2005 @ 19:17, by raypows. Shared Purpose
Long Day's Journey Into Night
An interview with Long Emergency author James Howard Kunstler The end of cheap oil will lead to the collapse of modern agriculture, crumbling infrastructure, radical economic contraction, and -- after an extended period of political upheaval and violence -- the rebirth of a local, agrarian way of life. So says James Howard Kunstler in his controversial new book, The Long Emergency. He sat down with Grist's Amanda Griscom Little for a chat, after which she went to Costco and bought 200 pounds of canned food and a rifle. new in Main Dish: Long Day's Journey Into Night An interview with Doomsaying author James Howard Kunstler By Amanda Griscom Little 25 May 2005
"Check all of your assumptions at the door," James Howard Kunstler advises reporters before he commences an interview. "Don't assume that anything you think about the way we live today is going to be the same 10, five, even three years from now."
The author of the new book The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the 21st Century, recently excerpted in Rolling Stone, Kunstler is an emphatic petro-pessimist who argues that civilization is about to enter a sustained period of economic, social, and environmental decrepitude triggered by the end of the cheap-oil era. He summarily rejects the possibility that renewable energy could forestall disaster, and predicts that spiking fossil-fuel prices will precipitate the collapse of the airline industry, the electricity grid, highway infrastructure, agribusiness, big-box retail stores, and suburbia itself. The majority of Americans, he says, will likely suffer bouts of violent upheaval and be forced to return to agrarian, small-town lifestyles. Understandably, his prognostications have raised some eyebrows.
A former journalist and sometime novelist, Kunstler in 1993 published The Geography of Nowhere, a much-praised jeremiad about the car-dependent suburbanization of America. Grist's Amanda Griscom Little sat down with him over lunch in New York City to get a first-hand account of his latest dark vision for the nation's future.
Tell us about the evolution of The Long Emergency. Where did these mind-boggling ideas originate?
The Long Emergency, by James Howard Kunstler, Atlantic Monthly Press, 307
pgs., 2005.
I really got into this when I was a newspaper reporter 30 years ago in Albany covering the OPEC oil embargo. I was living in the middle of it -- going through the gas lines and interviewing the people who were ticked off, motoring around a suburban metroplex where all the accessories of contemporary life were new. My office at the Hearst newspaper building was at the termination of a brand-new, heroic eight-lane boulevard of commerce with malls on either side and suburban sprawl in every direction. You couldn't fail to notice that this was a catastrophe -- a living arrangement that really had no future.
I've since been investigating suburban sprawl through works like The Geography of Nowhere. The Long Emergency is the logical sequel -- addressing the question of what will happen to this way of life when we get in trouble with energy.
Elaborate on how sprawl is inextricably connected to oil concerns.
Ever since the end of World War II, we've embarked on this project to build ourselves a drive-in utopia -- an economy based on suburban land development, eight-lane freeways lined with fry pits and hamburger shacks and a national big-box chain retail system. It has flourished because of two things: extraordinarily cheap energy and reliable supplies of it, and relative world peace. That has enabled big-box stores to develop 12,000-mile manufacturing and supply chains with the cheap labor overseas. Wal-Mart can move 4,000 TV sets from China to Wilkinsburg, Penn., and keep this tremendous stream of products going around the country with truckers who operate their warehouses on wheels. The system works only because it's cheap to transport stuff.
You also point out that the mainstream American diet is essentially predicated on "eating oil."
Yeah, industrial agriculture is another extremely problematical thing.
We've now consolidated all of our food production into a very small fraction of the population and our agribusinesses rely on pouring oil byproducts -- pesticides, fertilizers, herbicides -- on the soil. We've got this cheese-doodle and Pepsi-Cola form of agriculture where large companies like Archer Daniels Midland and ConAgra are producing huge amounts of corn and byproducts like corn syrup to create junk food. It's generally understood that most of the food we eat travels [about] 1,500 miles. So we've got all these 1,500-mile Caesar salads winging or wheeling around America to get to our dinner plates. That won't be able to continue when the cheap-oil era ends.
Click to READ More >
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