| more >>Begin each day by telling yourself: Today I shall be meeting with interference, ingratitude, insolence, disloyalty, ill-will, and selfishness — all of them due to the offenders’ ignorance of what is good or evil.
— Marcus Aurelius
The State of the Union is perhaps the perfect opportunity for a sitting president to wax eloquent on the progress made by our great nation under his faithful leadership — all the moreso in an election year. So President Obama clearly deserved to take some poetic license with tonight’s address. To be fair, there were even parts of his speech that I agree strongly with.
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As the court martial of U.S. Army Pfc. Bradley Manning continues, and President Obama disingenuously capitalizes on the withdrawal from Iraq as the timely fulfillment of a long-forgotten campaign promise, I cannot help but draw attention to the fact that the United States would not have withdrawn from Iraq if not for WikiLeaks and cablegate. If Manning is truly behind the cablegate leaks, history will remember him as a hero, for ending a brutal occupation that has led to over a hundred thousand civilian deaths.
Busily taking credit for an outcome he didn’t intend, President Obama skillfully neglects to mention the inconvenient truth behind the U.S. troop withdrawal: the administration negotiated desperately to keep troops in Iraq, and failed.
Negotiations with the Iraq government failed due to documented human rights abuses perpetrated by American soldiers against Iraqi civilians, which were confirmed by the diplomatic cables that Manning is implicated in providing to WikiLeaks.
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Nova Spivack has written a thought-provoking article, in which he advocates for a Constitutional amendment guaranteeing separation of corporation and state.
I agree wholeheartedly that an explicit separation between corporations and government should be part of our foundational documents. It might surprise Mr. Spivack, however, that Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, among other founders, also thought so.
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My reentry from Burning Man this year has reminded me of interesting research I read awhile back. Apparently, there’s some evidence that the very act of recalling a memory alters the memory itself, causing it to change and fade slightly with each recollection.
The basic premise is that the human mind is susceptible to the same type of transcription errors that DNA replication and most other kinds of copying suffer.
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Never mind that I recently heard this in an ad for jeans. It’s timely nonetheless:
| more >>your life is your life
don’t let it be clubbed into dank submission.
be on the watch.
| more >>But some people just grow more twisted with each blow. They partially assume the shape of their disasters. They get faces with “Character.” They become the “Wild Ones” in their community of friends … or … “The Brave Ones.” These Survivors become the People who are reaching beyond where their friends and families can see … into spaces invisible to everyone else … simply because the others do not come to Black Rock City … To The Edge of Now.
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