Cultures, Environment, Politics, Uncategorized, Women & Gender
Last Sunday, May 14, 2022, crowds in more than 380 U.S. cities were in the streets protesting the intention of four and possibly five justices on a less-than-supreme court to support the anti-abortionists’ forced pregnancy agenda. Two of those justices have no business being there at all. They’re are there illegitimately due to Hard Cold Right wing political machinations by Mitch McConnell and Humpty Trumpty, but you know that story already.
Approximately three fourths of the people of this country support every woman’s right to decide whether she wishes to be pregnant or not. That’s not surprising since that right to self-determination was recognized by Argentina in 2020 and Mexico in 2021. But travel to Mexico or Argentina is too pricey for some of the women who would be hit by a U.S. ban.
The leak” of the draft opinion to jettison Roe vs. Wade has been the subject of great hand-wringing by right-wingers who decry the “loss of trust” in the Supreme Court as a result — especially by Justice Clarence Thomas whose wife is a rabid ultra-rightist partisan and whose own record on the court makes it clear that he should never have been appointed to it. I think that’s backwards. Keeping a potential ruling secret until it’s mposed on a nation bitterly imposed to it is one more anti-democratic act in which a few impose their personal will upon the nation. That’s oligarchy! Leaking had the effect of making possible nationwide debate by all concerned and affected citizens. Isn’t that what democracy is supposed to do? Indeed, shouldn’t any policy this huge and consequential be floated for public deliberation before any draft opinion is even written? That’s democratic. Decisions by a small cabal on a court that has been packed by the actions of an ultra right-wing Senator and President are not.
Thomas worries about the reputation of the Court due to the leak. The Court’s reputation already smells like a broken cessool. In 2000 it chose to ignore the will of the people and installed someone as president who was decisively defeated. Thomas’ own reputation is at the bottom of the cesspool (along with Alito’s.) The powerful reality is that the reputation of the court would be damaged many times more by abandoning Roe than by any leak. Jettisoning democracy is a much worse error than leaking an opinion.
Unfortunately the Hard Cold Right Republican establishment doesn’t give a wooden defecation about democracy despite all rhetoric to the contrary. They want control. In this case it’s men controlling women. It’s the old story of “keep them barefoot, pregnant, and in the kitchen.” Yes, there are some women fellow travellers who support that — apparently including Justice Amy Conan-Barrett —although she still has a brief window of time in which to redeem herself, to vote to keep Roe and escape the fate of being a traitor to her sex— but as the Texas vote legislature’s vote to pay a $10,000 bounty to people who rat on friends and neighbors who have orperform abortions shows clearly, just a few. The Texas legislation was supported by 59 men and 10 women (all Republicans.)
Women are every bit as entitled to be in charge of their own bodies and lives as men. And the people of the U.S. ought to be entitled to have a Supreme Court that is not empowered to legislate
from the bench by imposing its own minority views on the nation. If this Court does not come to its senses and leave the Roe vs. Wade ruling intact, the nation should rethink the Court’s structure and process—and include recusal measures in which someone outside the court can challenge conflicts of interest and require recusal by any justice so implicated. Kow-towing to a political ideology which says the few can impose their will on the many ought to be one ground for such a requirement of recusal.
In the meantime, I hope people all across the country will throw out of office and replace every elected official who supports any and every forced pregnancy agenda. Or it’s another nail in the coffin of democracy. As past Justice Salia put it, a democracy in which the people’s will is repeatedly ignored by a committee of unelected lawyers is not a democracy at all.
From the consciousnessandculture.com blog.
Cultures, Politics, Spirit, Uncategorized
STABBING DEMOCRACY TO DEATH
In an authoritarian nation like Russia a question is how close to totalitarianism, as under Stalin and under Hitler’s Germany, the authorities will go. Putin has taken steps to make it more so with his ever-greater censorship and moves to control everything in the media that does not follow his party line.
The United States has long paid at least lip service to democracy and viewed itself as a defender of “freedom.” Rather limited freedom for many of the people. It’s obvious in the patently antidemocratic “electoral college” for Presidential elections, with the result that two of the four presidents “elected” since the turn of the millennium had millions of votes fewer than their opponents. One political party has steadfastly and successfully opposed all attempts to eliminate the electoral college.
But in the years 2021 and 2022 the project of defeating democracy has taken a great leap forward. One political party U.S. is intentionally, systematically and methodically moving forward with a project to eliminate democracy and take authoritarian power for itself. This was visible to the entire world when the January 6 rioting mob stormed the Capital and tried to put the loser of even the electoral college vote into power.
That was just the visible tip of the iceberg. The greater damage, which may ultimately result in turning the U.S. into a fully authoritarian state with nothing but a fig-leaf of deceptive words that imply that it is a so-called democracy is the Republican project to 1) throw as many people as possible who look like they won’t vote Republican off the voter registration rolls, and 2) create electoral districts that assure them of victory at every level from state legislatures to the presidency regardless of what most voters want. While many people who are not Republicans realize this is happening, few have recognized it as the powerful threat to democracy that it is.
Computer databases and algorithms now make it possible to create electoral districts that are so bizarrely constructed to favor one party that no sane person would look at them and deny it. The “redistricting” or construction of new electoral districts that occurs every ten years after the census was never meant to be a political tool. It was meant to readjust districts to accord with population changes. But it’s a political tool now, wielded mainly by the Republican Party.
“Hey,” the Republicans say, “the Democrats are doing it too.” Yes—in the few states where they control the state office that does the redistricting—in retaliation for what the Republicans are doing in most of the country. But even in some of the states where the Democrats have control they have pushed successfully to set up nonpartisan commissions to carry out redistricting—such as in California. The results are radically different from the crazy-quilt districts of politically partisan redistricting. Those districts are typically constructed with a few simple lines. Any unprejudiced person looking at them would conclude that they are sensible. Any unprejudiced person looking at 2022 politically motivated districts would conclude that they’re just plain nuts.
The probable result is electoral victories for Republicans that reflect the will of a minority of the people and that disenfranchise many citizens. In other words, less democracy. Add that to the less democracy that comes from the systematic attempt to “cleanse” the voter rolls of as many probable non-Republican voters as possible. In other words, less democracy yet. That’s on top of the already anti-democratic electoral college.
Oh, and there’s also the matter of stacking the Supreme Court with political partisans instead of justices who have a history of impartial interpretation of the laws—partisans who are all too willing to “legislate from the bench.” Republican party legislators accuse the Democrats of that, but the evidence that they’re projecting their own dishonesty and hypocrisy is overwhelming.
Is all that the country we want? It’s what we’re moving toward.
I don’t love Democrats. I think many, and the party, are misguided in significant ways. I’d like to see other parties have a chance. I’d like to have electoral procedures that make that more possible, such as instant runoff voting. If I could set up my own party, it would be neither Democrat nor Republican. Beyond that, I might prefer no parties altogether. George Washington did, speaking again about how the “spirit of party” was a tragically negative influence that deterred democracy.
But as a minimum, there are four basic steps that could set the country back on a path toward more democracy rather than less. They are,
1. Nonpartisan drawing of electoral districts everywhere. Congress could require this.
2. Automatic registration to vote of every person at birth or naturalization. Denmark does this effectively.
3. Adopt Costa Rica’s Supreme Court procedure of having a rotating pool of justices with the requirement that any sitting justice, upon challenge (not upon his or her own volition), must be recused from any case where there is any conflict of interest and be replaced for that case with another justice from the pool.
4. Eliminate the electoral college in presidential elections—or at a minimum, require all states to apportion electors proportionally, as a few do now, rather than on a winner-take-all basis.
That’s a start. Unless we minimally do those four things, our nation is only a pretense of a democracy.
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Cultures, Politics, Uncategorized
Never before has a war been so thoroughly photographed and documented as Putin’s invasion of Ukraine—the largest war in Europe since the end of World War II. As a result real events there can’t be papered over or denied as they often are by one side or both sides in most wars.
Seldom has an invasion been so obviously and clearly the doing of one person. History records Genghis Khan, Napolean, Hitler, and Stalin. Now we can add Putin. The past week heard President Joe Biden finger Putin by name, calling him a “butcher” and saying he should not remain in power.
Poor little verbally abused Vladimir acted grievously injured. How dare that nasty Mr. Biden call bombing hospitals, schools, kindergartens, apartment buildings and refugees trying to avoid getting killed the actions of a “butcher”? Even some of Biden’s European allies said that it was not nice for Mr. Biden to talk that way.
Really? At the very moment when Russian airplanes, cruise missiles, tanks and artillery are blasting away at Ukrainian cities and reducing Maruipol, to rubble, it is not nice to use the word butcher, or to suggest that the dictator who ordered the war and each day orders it to continue should be removed? (Especially since he called for the government of Ukraine to be replaced.)
Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think that Biden’s words did not physically injure or kill even one person. If we had an observer recording the invasion and bombing we could probably identify at least a handful of people who were murdered by Russian military forces during the brief time it took Biden to utter those sentences. The only harm done by Biden’s words was to Putin’s ego.
Putin has called for “an end to the war.” Perhaps it has slipped his memory that it is his troops that have invaded another country. Perhaps he has somehow not noticed that Ukraine has not fired a single shot into Russia, and that the war is entirely and totally a matter of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Perhaps he has forgotten that there was no war until he ordered the Russian army and air force to invade and bomb Ukraine. Perhaps it has not occurred to him that the war could easily end instantly if he does no more than order Russia’s armed forces to cease fire immediately – stop shooting and bombing – and withdraw from Ukrainian territory. He can do that all by himself. After all, he’s a big boy—isn’t he?
Perhaps also, despite his deluge of words about the dangers posed to Russia by the big bad European military alliance (NATO), he may have conveniently overlooked the fact that the primary reason it exists at all is fear by most European nations that Russia may attack them—a fear well founded in history, and that he has now made terribly obvious is 100% valid today.
The Butcher of Moscow has accused Ukraine’s government of being controlled by “neo-fascists.” Maybe he’s misplaced his mirror—the mirror that would show him that his accusations are projections. Let’s see what the dictionary says. “Fascism: Authoritarianism, totalitarianism, dictatorship, rightism, nationalism. . .” Ah, I think we have almost a definition of the qualities Putin values in his government. One can reasonably suggest that HE IS THE NEO-NAZI in all this. But of course he does not care to look in the mirror.
Little Vladimir apparently wants respect. (Don’t we all?) To be thought of as a Great Man. Really? It’s too late. There is too much video footage and too many photographs which show that he deserves none at all. He may continue to bamboozle the Russian people long enough to keep his grip on power until he dies, but most of the world can see that the Emperor has no clothes. Historians from everywhere but Russia will speak of Putin’s war. Perhaps even of the Butcher of Moscow. He has said that he wishes to be like Peter the Great and Catherine the Great. Indeed—doesn’t he deserve a title too? How about “Vladimir the Small?”
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Cultures, Economics, Featured, Politics, Psychology, Uncategorized, Women & Gender
You’ve probably watched TV news that shows police car chases, murders, muggings, armed robberies, police shootings, and —well, you name the violent crime. At first glance they may seem quite different, but they have one thing in common: The perpetrators in all those categories are almost all male. In fact, pretty near the only category of violent crime in which women show up at all is those that take place in families or with close acquaintances, and even in those the numbers are far smaller for female than for male perpetrators.
If you raise your eyes from those details of the exciting 24/7 news coverage to look at violence in the broader sweep of history, you immediately see that the initiators and leaders of all of history’s great episodes of violence are male. To name just a few: Gengis Khan, many of the Roman Caesers, the Moghul invaders of India, Napolean, Hitler, Mussolini, Stalin—all men, every last one of them. And the generals of their armies? Again, all men. Most women don’t want to send their kids off to die in wars.
The big time financial whitecollar criminals and the legislators who write laws that give the rich brutal economic control over the poor are also mostly male. Looking at economic injustice, most people tend to fixate on the differences between the wealthy and the non-wealthy and blame the former—or if you’re one of the wealthy you probably blame the “agitators” among the workers and the poor. But there too, the primary architects of the injustices are mostly male.
Even the “sociobiologists” who look at gender differences and conclude that “human beings are inherently aggressive” are themselves mostly male. It took me some time to look carefully enough at their research to see that most such investigators included only males in their research study samples. Ah, so! Suddenly the light shines brightly on a fatal flaw in those research designs that scientists call “sampling error.” If a research study which finds that so-called “people” are inherently aggressive has only men as its subjects, then the only “people” it tells us about are men. Although women sometimes take a forceful or even brutal role, on the average men tend not only to be more aggressive, but also to have a stronger drive to dominate, to “be on top.” (This tells us nothing about any particular man or woman.)
It’s not for nothing that the Native American Iroquois Confederacy in Eastern North America gave women’s councils the final power over any decision about whether a tribe would go to war. It saved the lives of a great many young braves, and of the people in other tribes who might have been their victims.
When we apply all this to an analysis of the grave problems that male dominance creates, the clear implication is that if women and men had equal power in making the policies decisions about war and peace, criminal law, and the allocation and distribution of economic benefits, many things would be better. Less violent crime. Less selfish greed enshrined in law. Less war. Less production of weapons of personal destruction and mass destruction. Less of the environmental destruction and pollution that goes along with building and maintainng a huge military machine.
Requiring a feminine as well as masculine perspective in all major decisions would make far more money and resources availble for a whole spectrum of socially and environmentally beneficial purposes instead of building more and more nuclear missiles and bombers and aircraft carriers and submarines and tanks and. . . and . . . and. . .
Can you see it yet? We are so used to the oppression of a society whose every aspect is built on a blueprint of male dominance that most of us don’t see much of it. It’s like a fish swimming in the water. Ask the fish what “water” is and the answer you’d probably get is, “What are you talking about?” Since I’m male it took quite a long time for me to come around to realizing all that. But it’s obvious in many ways, almost everywhere I look.
Some feminist sci-fi and fantasy writing, like The Handmaid’s Tale and other related works, is meant to dramatize male dominance and oppression so well that it can’t be overlooked. But it can also have the effect of causing the reader to think, “Thank heavens things are so much better than that here,” and overlook the many subtle yet powerful forms of sexism that are embedded in numerous ways throughout society. As a blatant example, that we’re still swimming blindly through the dark waters of patriarchy that have led to so much of the cruelty and suffering of the past three thousand years of civilization, you might note the 2021 Texas Republicans’ legislation that offered people ten thousand dollars to sue someone who has an abortion. The legislators who passed that bill were 59 males and 10 females. That’s the naked hand of masculine oppression right there.
“But,” you might object, “what about the 10 females? There are some women who are anti-abortion, and who support other measures that give men power over women too.”
Indeed. There’s even an identified psychological pattern called variously “Identification with the aggressor” and “identification with the oppressor,” in which someone who is beaten down or oppressed feels a little power by identifying with those in control. And just as there are some men who display qualities we tend to call “feminine,” there are also women who have adopted “masculine” qualities—especially in the business world, where they are strongly encouraged and reinforced.
The sleeping giant of female power is beginning to awake. But slowly. Too slowly to stave off disaster on an apocalyptic scale—probably before the end of this century. Some places have realized that and have taken active steps to equalize male and female power in making the big decisions that govern the structure and process of society. Such as, for instance, in Costa Rica where the Constitution requires that an equal number of male and female candidate be put forward for most kinds of electoral seats. I believe that we need to take parallel steps everywhere, all over the world. Rapidy. Waiting for that to happen through a gradual rise in consciousness is just too slow.
I encourage you to look around with alertness to all the potential ways in which a more equal balance of masculine and feminine consciousness, and male and female power and control in our institutions, can lead to a lighter and brighter reality in your personal life, the lives of those around you, and ultimately our world.
Concentrative, Meditation, Mindfulness, Spirit, Uncategorized
MUDRAS AND MOVING MUDRAS
This is small yet useful way to help maintain focus of your attention while you meditate. It can help you keep your mind from rambling around when that’s not what you want to do. It’s an alternative to the “visual splitting” described in another blog. Actually this is simpler and more basic.
A mudra is a hand position of a kind used by both Budhist and Hindu meditators. The position of palms together and fingers pointing upward used in Christian prayers and also those of many other spiritual traditions is a mudra. Its meaning is a communication with the divine (which might or might not actually happen, depending on your state of consciousness.) This prayer mudra is called the atmanjali. In some cultures it’s also used as a sign of respect or gratitude —especially Japan and India.
Another popular mudra is the jnana mudra that symbolizes opening the heart to the wisdom of heaven. You’ve probably seen a statue of the Buddha sitting cross-legged with his palms turned skyward on his legs and the thumb and index finger of each hand touching. Or you can use the thumb and middle finger.
If you’re in public and you want to meditate without looking obvious you can turn the jnana mudra upside down as shown in the third of the three pictures with this blog. Long ago I started sometimes doing that after I was using the jnana mudra while sitting against a pillar meditating as I waited for a train in a crowded railway station waiting room in which all the seats were gone. I didn’t want to move until my meditation was finished.Some people thought I was begging and dropped coins into my hand. After that I started turning the jnana mudra upside down in public. I call that the invisible mudra. All others can see is your knuckles.
There are many mudras. You can find entire books about them. These three are enough for me.
Maintaining a mudra can help keep a clear centered mental state. In the Zen tradition if your thumbs droops instead of keeping your mudra almost circular it’s a sure sign that your mind has wandered.
For me with my typically busy mind a mudra wasn’t enough. I could maintain one while my mind wandered. Eventually I realized that I could pair a slight movement of my mudra with my breathing. That is, move my thumb and finger apart slightly (or in the Zen mudra my two thumbs apart) as I breathed in and then let them touch again as I breathed out. And so on over and over.
What’s happening there? With more of my mind anchored in paying attention to my meditative practice, less of my attention is available to go wandering. It works for me.
But it might not work for you. Try it and see. If it does, great! If not, if you find the slight separation and touching in rhythm with your breathing distracting rather than helpful after you’ve tried it for a couple of weeks, you can use a mudra with no movement instead. I suggest at least that.
Unless you don’t need it at all. Some people (but not many) can fairly easily keep their mind focused in present awareness of just one thing, such as their breathing. Pure mindfulness.
If that’s not you, then a basic nonmoving mudra may serve you well. If you try that and your mind still jumps around a bit, then a moving mudra may be just right for you.
If even that isn’t enough — if you’re one of those people with a mind that tends to dance around everywhere (like me) then you can try using both a moving mudra and visual splitting together. Doing that is a complex enough task that it leaves less of your attention available to go wandering. It anchors more of it in the here-and-now. Or in closely focused contemplation, if that’s what you want to do.
(photo with this blog is from Matrix Meditations by Victor and Kooch N. Daniels, available as both an e-book and hardcopy.)
© 2021 by Victor Daniels.
You are welcome to share this with whomever you wish so long as no charge or profit is made from doing so. Inclusion in any electronic or hardcopy post or document for which a charge is made requires consent of the author.
Uncategorized
Not many people realize that the very name of the so-called “Tea Party” of today’s radical right-wing political attitudes is based on a distortion that turns the meaning of the original 1773 Boston tea party inside out and upside down.
Samuel Adams and other participants in the 1773 event were protesting not against the British government itself (although Patrick Henry, Thomas Paine, and others would soon take up that banner. But that’s another matter). Rather, Sam Adams and others were protesting but against its alliance with the era’s largest corporation, the East India Tea Company, and against the monopoly that the English Parliament granted to it for importing tea to the colonies, enforced by the ships and guns of the Royal Navy. All other merchants who owned ships, and even the shopkeepers who bought and sold their tea, were labeled “smugglers,” subject to attack by the British Navy or British soldiers or other agents on shore. It was as if today the U.S. government were to grant Wal-Mart an exclusive right to sell coffee in the United States and shut down any other business that dared to do so.
In late November of 1773 the East India Tea Company ship Dartmouth arrived in Boston Harbor, and soon was joined by two more tea ships, the Eleanor and the Beaver. On December 16, about 7,000 people gathered around the Old south Meeting House to protest the tea monopoly and a tax that Parliament had passed on tea. That evening a group variously estimated at between 30 and 130 men, some disguised as Mohawk Indians, boarded the three vessels and dumped 342 chests of tea into the water. Sailors on board three three British Man-O-Wars that were anchored in Boston Harbor lounged around and looked on nonchalantly as the tea party members chopped open and threw overboard the crates of tea on the East India Company ships.
Samuel Adams argue that the Tea Party action was instead a principled protest and a defense of the people’s rights. Its essence was a protest against the corporate lobbying and influence on government policy by the East India Tea Company that was jacking up prices and putting hundreds of small enterprises (independent ship-owners and mom and pop tea importers) out of business. Its action in the harbor was against the company whose payoffs were buying the government’s backing, and against the British government’s support of the company’s monopoly, which bears a suspicious resemblance to todays’ corporate political donations to Congress.
If the present “Tea Party” succeeds in its declared goal of “shrinking government” (except that it shows no interest at all in shrinking the most gigantic and expensive element of big government, the Department of Defense, which until the mid-Twentieth Century was more accurately named the Department of War), then even greater corporate influence in Washington than exists today would be the likely result.
Many of today’s “Tea Party” members have been taken seduced by the stories and symbols produced by lavishly funded right-wing think tanks and a few media-savvy elitist leaders. These leaders include such figures as Dick Armey, who was previously a lobbyist for the People’s Moudjahidin Organization of Iran. Armey even tried to push through legislation that would provide U.S. taxpayer support for that organization –“MEK”—which was branded a terrorist group by the State Department. (Great role modeling for your “Tea Party” members, Dick!)
The tragedy is that many of the ordinary citizens who make up the cadres of “Tea Party” members have been duped by Big Money and Big Business oligarchs into acting against their own interests as well as those of the nation. The original 1773 tea party patriots would probably soil their undergarments if they could see how their name is being used today.
The “Tea Party” has claimed to be populist, standing up for ordinary people against big government. I call that baloney—real populists don’t look down on working people or poor people. Historically, populists are for the people and against abuse, tyranny, lying and cheating from any source, whether government, business, political parties, or anyone else. But most of the “Tea Party” congresspersons who swept into office in 2010 raced faster than hungry pigs to the big business cash troughs to rake in corporate donations, violating every principle the original Boston tea party stood for. In response to the antidemocratic 2010 “Citizens United” ruling (i.e. “Corporate Moneybags United” vs. We the People), the “Tea Party’s” utter silence was utterly deafening. Whoever chose the “Tea Party” name was either incompetent at reading and understanding history, or a very clever manipulator who liked the name and intentionally spread a grotesquely distorted version of the original tea party’s motives.
What actions can you take now? Well, at the very least, you can work to keep the wrong people out of positions of power–especially those who appear to be morally and ethically challenged. And be well aware that in order to promote their hyper-partisan program they are well organized and focused on specific goals, and that to defeat them we will have to do likewise, and be more creative too.
There is an interesting true story about how ordinary people can turn politics around when they act with compassion and integrity. Kathryn Watterson tells of a Jewish couple that received repeated threats from the Grand Dragon of Nebraska’s Ku Klux Klan, Larry Trapp. They contacted him on a human level in a way that no one else had done, suspecting that he was “a destructive but vulnerable, messed-up person who needed a new perspective on the world.” They listened to his life story, shared theirs and how he was affecting them, and stayed with him emotionally as he left the Klan and the American Nazi Party. Larry went on to apologize to people and groups he had hurt or harassed. At one point he said, “They’re confused people, the Klan and the Nazi Party. They really hate themselves is what their problem is. They don’t want to punish themselves, so they want to try to punish someone else.“ Ultimately the couple, Michael and Julie Weisser, took care of the wheelchair-bound Trapp for the last year of his life.
If Michael and Julie could find a way to make their peace with a Ku Klux Klansman who had threatened them personally, then just about anyone ought to be able to find some kind of an opening to discover common ground with those whom they have seen as their opponents. By contrast if you have been committed to an extreme right-wing view, you face a different question. Are you willing to let go of an erroneous ideology that you’ve been advocating and take a step toward something that incorporates its best ideas and lets go of its worst ones?
Ironically, in 2012 the “Tea Party” vowed to do its best to run out of office all elected representatives who did not vote exactly as it told them to. That stance directly opposes the liberty of encouraging their members to follows their own consciences and best judgment That stance directly violates Article 10 of their own platform. There is no individualism there. It is The Political Organization making itself into Big Brother: “Act as we tell you to. Think our thoughts, not your own.” George Washington disliked hyper-partisanship. The so-called “Tea Party” is a good example of why.
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Portions of the above comments are drawn from The author’s recent book The Radical Wrong: Lies Our Founding Fathers Never Told – Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln & Others Refute Right-Wing Extremists. Available as an e-book and in paperback from amazon.com, your local bookstore, or other online retailers.
