Monthly Archive for April, 2007
[What follows are the foreword and excerpts from a pioneering new book about trans-faith spirituality.]
I am the voice of a generation starving for an adequate myth. Myths are the carriers and conduits of a vision – the metaphors and narratives around which we organize and accrete our understanding. Every generation has come together within a mythology, and used it to push forward into its fruition. In a way, we are nourished by our myths in return for fulfilling them.
It must be said that my generation has more mythology from which to choose than any before it. We stand before a global buffet of stories, food of all flavors, information crashing in from all sides, an unprecedented panoply of cultural richness. What we lack is an organizing directive, some way to handle all of this humanity without shrinking from its light or dissolving into incoherence at the spectacular diversity of it all. Imagine everyone in the café trying to force-feed you simultaneously, and you’ll get the idea. In spite of our wealth of culture, we hunger for genuine, hopeful, reconstructive narratives – that is, integral myths. Almost no one is telling my generation, or those to come, what to do with this orgiastic diversity of experience. Our myth has been one of dissipation, of dissolution – the end of oil, the end of modernity, the end of the biosphere, the end of western hegemony, the end of science, the end of childhood. We are born into a world that has come together just in time to discover it is breaking apart.
But Paul Lonely is changing all of that, with his new book, Suicide Dictionary. What Paul doing for us – the generation growing up alongside the academic reconstruction of integral theory – is offering us a new mode of experiencing these truths. And, I would like to note, Paul is a name with quite a pedigree for getting the word out.
The active ingredient in marijuana cuts tumor growth in common lung cancer in half and significantly reduces the ability of the cancer to spread, say researchers at Harvard University who tested the chemical in both lab and mouse studies.
They say this is the first set of experiments to show that the compound, Delta-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC), inhibits EGF-induced growth and migration in epidermal growth factor receptor (EGFR) expressing non-small cell lung cancer cell lines. Lung cancers that over-express EGFR are usually highly aggressive and resistant to chemotherapy.
The U.N. Security Council held a groundbreaking debate Tuesday on the impact of climate change on conflicts, brushing aside objections from developing countries that global warming is not an issue of international peace and security.
Britain holds the council presidency this month and organized an open meeting to highlight what its foreign secretary, Margaret Beckett, said was the “security imperative” to tackle climate change because it can exacerbate problems that cause conflicts and threatens the entire planet.
The Bush administration is shocked, shocked, that the firing of a few U.S. attorneys has caused such a stir in Washington. After all, the Oval Office says, the President can choose whomever he wants to prosecute federal cases. But the Supreme Court declared in Berger v. United States that a prosecutor’s job is to see that justice is done, not to politicize justice. The mass ouster of the top prosecutors had more to do with keeping a grip on power—by manipulating voting rights—than with doing justice. And like the Watergate scandal, the evidence points to a cover-up.
This cover-up revolves around efforts by the Bush administration to disenfranchise African-American voters in communities where the vote would likely be close. George W. Bush came to power in 2000 by a razor- thin margin awarded him by the Supreme Court. During the 2004 election, there were allegations of attempts to disenfranchise African-American voters, especially in Ohio. Yet no voting discrimination cases were brought on behalf of African-American or Native American voters from 2001 to 2006.
Instead, the administration instigated efforts that would further disenfranchise these voters. U.S. attorneys were instructed to prosecute “voter fraud” cases. “Voter fraud” has “become almost synonymous with ‘voting while black,’” the New York Times’ Paul Krugman observed. Also, Republican lawmakers enacted voter ID laws which established new hurdles for voters to jump.
People taking part in a game designed to explore egalitarian impulses in human nature consistently robbed the rich players and gave money to the poor, scientists say.
Associate Professor James Fowler, from the University of California at San Diego, and his fellow researchers detected what they saw as a ‘Robin Hood impulse’ in people who took part in the experiment
“That’s the classic story we all know, where someone’s taking from the rich and giving to the poor, which is exactly what we’re seeing in this experiment,” Fowler says in a reference to the medieval English folk legend.
“In essence, what we found is that our taste for equality is one of the important reasons why we cooperate with each other, much more so than, say, other species of primates,” Fowler says.
The experiment, described today in the journal Nature, was carried out last year using 120 paid student volunteers at a computer lab on the campus of the University of California at Davis.
For fans of the literary con, it’s been a great few years. Currently, we have Richard Gere starring as Clifford Irving in “The Hoax,” a film about the ‘70s novelist who penned a faux autobiography of Howard Hughes. We’ve had the unmasking of James Frey, JT LeRoy/Laura Albert and Harvard’s Kaavya Viswanathan, who plagiarized large chunks of her debut novel, forcing her publisher, Little, Brown and Co., to recall the book. Much has been written about the slippery boundaries between fiction and nonfiction, the publishing industry’s responsibility for distinguishing between the two, and the potential damage to readers. There’s been, however, hardly a mention of the 20th century’s most successful literary trickster: Carlos Castaneda.
If this name draws a blank for readers under 30, all they have to do is ask their parents. Deemed by Time magazine the “Godfather of the New Age,” Castaneda was the literary embodiment of the Woodstock era. His 12 books, supposedly based on meetings with a mysterious Indian shaman, don Juan, made the author, a graduate student in anthropology, a worldwide celebrity. Admirers included John Lennon, William Burroughs, Federico Fellini and Jim Morrison.
Under don Juan’s tutelage, Castaneda took peyote, talked to coyotes, turned into a crow, and learned how to fly. All this took place in what don Juan called “a separate reality.” Castaneda, who died in 1998, was, from 1971 to 1982, one of the best-selling nonfiction authors in the country. During his lifetime, his books sold at least 10 million copies.
Castaneda was viewed by many as a compelling writer, and his early books received overwhelmingly positive reviews. Time called them “beautifully lucid” and remarked on a “narrative power unmatched in other anthropological studies.” They were widely accepted as factual, and this contributed to their success. Richard Jennings, an attorney who became closely involved with Castaneda in the ‘90s, was studying at Stanford in the early ‘70s when he read the first two don Juan books. “I was a searcher,” he recently told Salon. “I was looking for a real path to other worlds. I wasn’t looking for metaphors.”
Information chips implanted in the brain. Electromagnetic pulse weapons. The middle classes becoming revolutionary, taking on the role of Marx’s proletariat. The population of countries in the Middle East increasing by 132%, while Europe’s drops as fertility falls. “Flashmobs” – groups rapidly mobilised by criminal gangs or terrorists groups.
This is the world in 30 years’ time envisaged by a Ministry of Defence team responsible for painting a picture of the “future strategic context” likely to face Britain’s armed forces. It includes an “analysis of the key risks and shocks”. Rear Admiral Chris Parry, head of the MoD’s Development, Concepts & Doctrine Centre which drew up the report, describes the assessments as “probability-based, rather than predictive”.
Power generation: If people object to wind farms cluttering up the countryside, one answer might be to put them in the air.
If it ever seems windy where you live, be thankful you do not live 10km up in the air. At that height, the jet-stream winds blow stronger and more constantly than ground level winds, carrying up to a hundred times more energy.
So, just as oil companies are drilling deeper and in more remote locations in search of new reserves, pioneer wind-power engineers are looking higher in the sky for new sources of energy. Conventional turbines will not take them there—the highest to date is just over 200 meters tall. So they are trying to invent a whole new technology for harvesting wind: electricity generators that fly.
The ethanol craze is putting the squeeze on corn supplies and causing food prices to rise. Mexicans took to the streets last year to protest increased tortilla prices. The cost of chicken and beef in the United States ticked up because feed is more expensive.
That’s where biotechnology comes in.
Scientists are engineering microscopic bugs to extract fuel from a variety of non-corn sources, including the human urinary tract, a Russian fungus and the plant responsible for tequila.
Monica Goodling, a previously unknown Justice Department official who served as liaison to the White House, has become a key figure in the Attorneygate scandal. When newly released emails revealed the prominent role Goodling played in engineering the firing of seven US Attorneys, Goodling pled the Fifth Amendment, refusing to testify under oath.
Josh Marshall writes that Goodling may be “afraid of indictment for perjury because she has to go up to Congress and testify under oath before the White House has decided what its story is.”
Goodling’s involvement in Attorneygate is not the only aspect of her role in the Bush administration that bears examination. Her membership in a cadre of 150 graduates of Pat Robertson’s Regent University currently serving in the administration is another, equally revealing component of the White House’s political program.
Goodling earned her law degree from Regent, an institution founded by Robertson “to produce Christian leaders who will make a difference, who will change the world.” Helping to purge politically disloyal federal prosecutors is just one way Goodling has helped fulfill Robertson’s revolutionary goals.
‘Many big ideas have struggled over the centuries to dominate the planet,’ begins the argument by Jonathon Porritt, government adviser and all-round environmental guru.
‘Fascism. Communism. Democracy. Religion. But only one has achieved total supremacy. Its compulsive attractions rob its followers of reason and good sense. It has created unsustainable inequalities and threatened to tear apart the very fabric of our society. More powerful than any cause or even religion, it has reached into every corner of the globe. It is consumerism.’
According to Porritt, the most senior adviser to the government on sustainability, we have become a generation of shopaholics. We are bombarded by advertising from every medium which persuades us that the more we consume, the better our lives will be. Shopping is equated with fun, fulfilment and self-identity. It is also, Porritt warns, killing the planet. He argues, in an interview with The Observer, that merely switching to ‘ethical’ shopping is not enough. We must shop less.
From pictures of Coleen McLoughlin weighed down with designer bags to branding endorsements by the likes of David Beckham, the image of consumerism as a universal aspiration is ubiquitous. Last week 3,000 people stormed Primark’s new flagship store on London’s Oxford Street before the official opening time, putting two staff in hospital and earning the description by BBC2’s Newsnight of ‘a plague of locusts’. There are, however, a growing number of dissenting voices such as the so-called ‘Froogles’, individuals who use the internet to seek a simpler lifestyle, and organisations and websites which urge people to kick the retail habit.
Porritt, chairman of the government’s Sustainable Development Commission, has concluded that consumerism is central to the threat facing the planet, cannibalising its natural resources and producing the carbon dioxide emissions which result in climate change.
Los Angeles wants to turn wastewater sludge into energy using a process that would cut greenhouse emissions and reduce truck traffic.
The city says the renewable energy project, which is expected to cost $3 million to $4 million, and begin running by next spring, is a first-of-its-kind in the United States, The Los Angeles Times said.
The project, unveiled Thursday at the Terminal Island Water Reclamation Plant, would use sludge to produce electricity for about 3,000 homes, the newspaper said.
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