thebalilama's Blog

thebalilama Commented on Conservative Vision Ascendant In Latest TX History Textbooks Draft; Gingrich, Schlafly Back In by Justin Elliott

2010-01-19T12:26:11Z

For those of you who think this is just Texas's problem, it is not. The state of Texas mandates that every school district use the same textbooks so the any publisher who gets a contract with Texas gets a huge chunk of business. So the textbook publishers publish textbooks for Texas and the rest of the country gets to choose from textbooks published to capture the Texas market. This has been going on for years. The religious right got into the school board business a long time ago and have been responsible for a major amount of the dumbing down of the American school system.
You can lobby your own school system to buy books not written for Texas. I think it might be hard to find many.
I think "A People's History of the United States" by Howard Zinn should be the one used everywhere.

thebalilama recommended Shorter Palin: Real Winners Quit by David Kurtz

2009-07-03T22:44:19Z

thebalilama Commented on THE TRULY ANCIENT ONES by dickday

2009-06-28T01:51:43Z

Joseph Campbell had some very interesting things to say about human sacrifice. He says in his interviews with Bill Moyers, that in the Gospel of Thomas the last supper is a singing and dancing celebratory event. Joyous not sad.
There is a group in Indonesia where a young virgin man and virgin woman have sex in a lean-to built of giant tree trunks. At consummation, the lean-to is collapsed on the couple, killing them. In that society it is considered a great honor to be chosen.
What hubris we have to judge other cultures by our own lights. The white man's burden lives on.

thebalilama Commented on THE TRULY ANCIENT ONES by dickday

2009-06-27T20:42:31Z

As a professional artist, I am not so sure that art is learned. I think art is remembered. Picasso said it took him his whole life to learn to paint like a child.
We are born fully expressing. Life starts to restrict and restrain that self expression and we learn to go outside the lines at our peril.
For me, art and self expression are inseparable.
I think technique and craft is learned.
My folks gave me some watercolors I did when I was in kindergarten. They are brilliant expressions of color and excitement. They were clearly done without thought or plan. I don't know that I could recreate that energy today. I might be too technically adept and it gets in the way.

thebalilama Commented on THE TRULY ANCIENT ONES by dickday

2009-06-27T20:31:25Z

Horrobin's book sounds very interesting. My library doesn't have it. I checked Amazon and they do have 2 copies [used] for only $205.72 hardbound and $99 for paperback! It must be a marvelous book. I will keep looking.
Hartmann also references the Sng'oi people in Malaysia. Psychologist Robert Wolff wrote a book called Original Wisdom about them. They sound as close to the Truly Ancient Ones as we may have had in our lifetimes. Unfortunately they have disappeared as their habitat disappeared. We are poorer for their passing.
I just ordered that book from Amazon.

thebalilama Commented on THE TRULY ANCIENT ONES by dickday

2009-06-27T19:04:10Z

Great as usual DD.
I just finished a tremendous book by Thom Hartmann called The Edison Gene, ADHD and the Gift of the Hunter Child.
Evidence shows that 40,000 years ago a great ice age killed off most of humankind. A gene [DRD4 7R] showed up that is identified with creativity and adaptivity. It still exists today in about 10% of the population.
Hartmann calls it the Edison Gene. Thomas Edison, Ben Franklin, Thomas Jefferson evidently had it.
Unfortunately, today kids with it are far to often diagnosed as ADHD in our Prussian based - educate the working class enough to work but not well enough question authority educational system. Those kids thrive in Waldorf or Montessori schools.
I used to joke that if ADHD were around in the 50s I would have been full of Ritalin. After reading that book, it wasn't a joke. There are 14 characteristics for the Edison gene, I scored 14 out of 14. Had I not had parents who encouraged me and my explorations, I might be some Prozaked neo-con by now.
It is sad that what made the Truly Ancient Ones the innovators and survivors that they were is considered an aberration worthy of drugging into submissiveness today.
My sense is that gene is very well represented in this community.

thebalilama recommended THE TRULY ANCIENT ONES by dickday

2009-06-26T22:44:36Z

thebalilama Commented on Turning Point by TheraP

2009-06-27T01:04:08Z

Thera, if there is anything I can offer, I'm sure you can figure out how to get in touch,
Your Servant,
B

thebalilama recommended Turning Point by TheraP

2009-06-24T15:07:26Z

thebalilama Commented on Turning Point by TheraP

2009-06-25T13:07:23Z

XXOOXXOOXXOOXXOO
Peace, Love and Light
and as we used to say, Later.

thebalilama Commented on I HATE THOSE MEESES TO PIECES by dickday

2009-06-22T01:19:48Z

It sure as hell does! I can see us all out there waving signs and finally our walkers. Let them try and keep the Boomers from questioning authority!
It does speak to a question I have. In the Viet Nam and civil rights days, people could get enrolled in a "struggle" or a "fight". I don't think that meme is enrolling enough to get people into the streets today. We have the internet instead of mimeograph machines and staple guns for getting the message out, but what gets people into the streets demonstrating for something, like FOR peace, justice, Universal Health care, etc.
The teabaggers [who seemed to be against all of the above] appeared to operate on anger- anger at people who they were told are the reason their lives don't work. Basically authoritarian followers who obey their leaders.
What conversation/question would fan the fires of righteous outrage and indignation about the injustice and inequity that is prevalent in our land? [there's a pompous sounding mouthful] What will get us off of our resigned asses and into the streets? We sit in our recliners and admire the Iranians protesting in the streets of Tehran and don't get that we need to express ourselves with that kind of courage.

thebalilama Commented on I HATE THOSE MEESES TO PIECES by dickday

2009-06-20T12:28:01Z

DD,
They are the tide, rust and entropy, they never sleep. I fear we will never win per se, but we can keep them at bay and push them back. We must be ever on the wall, spears and pitchforks at hand.

thebalilama Commented on Did the Repubs say government public option is more efficient that private health insurance companies? by thebalilama

2009-06-16T23:17:13Z

I don't recall details the Clinton plan. I do remember it had some good ideas.
I do know the way the private outfits use pooling ends up driving the policy premiums to an unaffordable amount for the ever-shrinking pool of users who are actually using their policies. I don't know how many people know how the pools work.
Those of us who are self employed are at the effect of this pool thing. If you get insurance through your job, it is somewhat different, but as more companies don't provide health care, more of us will deal with the pools.

thebalilama Commented on Did the Repubs say government public option is more efficient that private health insurance companies? by thebalilama

2009-06-16T18:42:28Z

Thanks, the Dalai Lama and I share the same birthday [as do G W Bush and Nancy Reagan, although I think the D L more than balances things out] and I spent a lot of time in Bali.

thebalilama Commented on Did the Repubs say government public option is more efficient that private health insurance companies? by thebalilama

2009-06-16T18:23:29Z

Obey,
I think that is a straw man argument.
My wife and I pay $6600 a year for $10,000 deductible insurance [BCBS] with exclusions. I would love to buy into Medicare for the same money. Given the overhead in private insurance, we could get gold plated insurance for the same premiums.
If we are offered that option it could even get Medicare into better shape and not raise taxes. We are already paying out the money.
That way there is no subsidizing, just an incentive for the private companies to cut expenses. It is hard to justify "Dollar Bill" McGuire of United Health Group getting as much as $100,000,000 a year and he is sitting on 1.6 billion in stock options and say that a public option would be unfair at the same time.
There could be one national insurance pool to share the risk instead of the way the private companies game their "pool" system.
Now if we can get the drug benefit handled and get private insurance out of it all together, we'll be in great shape.
The Swiss system is better than what we have now but not as good as in that socialist hellhole country, France.
I think it comes down to whether or not one feels that health care is a right or a privilege. I am one who thinks that health care, education, libraries, police and fire protection etc. AKA "the commons" are a right and in the long run are less expensive for society that the privatization movement that is rampant here today.

thebalilama Commented on The Terrible Intimacy of Torture by TheraP

2009-04-27T13:47:26Z

TheraP,

Oh, the gift you are.

You are an access for the cure of the empathy deficit we are experiencing now. You embody the true Empath. I feel that the true Empath is contagious. Access to the One for others.

Until we can experience the real impact of anything, we have no power to transform either the "thing" or our relationship to it. The capacity to presence that impact in and for others is rare indeed.

Thank you

thebalilama Commented on Breaking News About Hannity's Waterboarding, From PNS.com by thebalilama

2009-04-26T04:01:45Z

Maybe a list of diseases and symptoms is in order. Testicular Lackadosus is marvelous. Both Testicular Lackadosus and Fortitudinus Abandonalus appear to be highly virulent and even ontologically fatal in some populations and some populations seem to have developed an immunity.

thebalilama recommended A "Capital" Idea: Lessons from the Movement by Jade7243

2009-04-21T01:54:15Z

thebalilama Commented on The post I didn't write by TheraP

2009-04-26T02:17:44Z

As usual TheraP, brilliant. I am getting in here a bit late.

I so agree that there is a dearth of good questions. "The Google" has all the answers anyone could ever want, but very few good questions. I think perhaps, to paraphrase an old canard, "A good question is worth a thousand facts"

I heard another question that can't be asked on the radio a couple days ago. "If life-threatening medical research experiments on a severely retarded, bedridden person could save lives, would it be okay?"

I see a real deficit of empathy in our national conversation. A criterion for "shocking the conscience" might be "If this [waterboarding, etc] were done to your child, would your conscience be shocked?"

I am one [silly old beatnik] who doesn't believe we are all equal, I believe we are all one. I think the biblical quote, "Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me." is less about Jesus and more about all of us and how we interact with each other. This is the way I hear it, "Verily I say unto you, Inasmuch as I have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, I have done it unto myself."

Peace

thebalilama Commented on News From the Future: China Completes Great Fan by ☠enghis

2009-04-26T01:18:53Z

Very funny, I LOVE the bunghole in the blogosphere.

thebalilama Commented on Don't Mess With The Prez by steve katz

2009-04-26T01:13:40Z

Great post Steve, thanks.

I think Obama is a 10th degree black belt in political ju jitsu. He earned his bones and learned his chops in Chicago politics. If there is a more knife fighting, eye gouging, crotch kicking place to grow up in politics, I don't know where it is.

I love watching a wingnut attacker bullrush him and end up flat on his ass with an unruffled and bemused Obama looking on.

On another level it occurs to me as though the right is trying to block Obama on some checkers move and Obama is playing 3 dimensional chess.

GObama, he's got this.