Americans have become such celebutantes that we believe that only charismatic leaders can save us from ourselves. The simple story of MLK Jr. is seen while the interlocking pieces of the entire movement are ignored.

The suffrage, civil rights, gay rights, and eventually the health rights movements are part of the overall ethics movement... humanity slowly becoming aware of the truth and value of the golden rule...

The axial sages developed the golden rule over 3000 years ago (the start of the Mayan calendar), and we are still growing into it.

The discussion of ideal justics in Plato's Republic involved talking in circles with sophists for over 300 pages of dialogue before any of them would admit to the fundamental truth of the golden rule. Multiply that by several billion... especially for the wealthy who are detached from direct moral consequence for their actions.

It is hard to be optimistic under those circumstances.

Yet most of us insist on our rationality and reason and (further) insist on the rationality and reason of our culture. We think that because our fields of science and medicine are so advanced that we are intrinsically more evolved as a species. It isn't true.

Therefore, the first step towards a solution is for more and more of us to recognize that we are still primitive. We still have barely an inkling of what constitutes mind and we still have little control over our desires. Then we have to understand that our politics and economics are spiritual constructs when they need to be ethical constructs. Ethics needs to be reintroduced into finance and government. Not merely through regulation or revolution, but at the ground level from childhood education forward.

Humanity has gotten lost in a kind of premature logical positivism. The world is as yet too subjective (i.e., we don't know or understand nearly as much as we think we do), and we still behave in a arational and amoral matter, especially in the upper echelons of privilege and class.

The best solution isn't a new framework, it is a reculturation. Begin teaching critical thinking and ethics in a socratic manner from the age of 6 all the way to graduate degrees. We the people are still mired in cliched and emotional value judgments disguised as "reason."

In the work Meditations On The Tarot, the anonymous author describes the Devil card in the context of the reversed pentagram. The author described it as the triumph of the material over the spiritual... the black mass whereby the miracle of transubstantiation is mirrored. He went on to say that both Capitalism and Communism were by that definition satanic.

That web site is freaking awesome.

Allow me to retory:

www.transparencynow.com

To believe in the value of derivatives is to believe in magic beans. Deep down I believe most people didn't believe in them directly, but chose to believe in them indirectly, i.e., they believed in the result of perceived value over the truth of nil value. Blind faith rewarded and doubt discouraged.

I know that many of us want to apply a healthy skepticism to paranormal, occult, or mystical phenomenon... but what of the absurd in our daily lives?

Speaking of Babylon.

That is the dumbest thing you have written in a long line of dumb things.

Taxes aren't a punishment. If you think taxes are a punishment, then schools punish children, roads punish cars, and troops punish our freedoms.

Taxes should be progressive in nature so that everyone pays their fair share for the collective burden of society. Instead, the poorer in this nation have subsidized the risk and cost of every major boneheaded venture over the last thirty years. For example, that is what Bush's TARP was all about. It was a 700 billion dollar check for services rendered paid for by you and me. You want to talk punishment? That's punishment. That is Goldman Sachs pointing a gun at all of our heads and asking for a bailout.

"Obama even said he would support raising cap gains taxes even if it resulted in less revenue, because he thought it would be more 'fair'."

The concept that lower taxes on the wealthy generates more tax revenue is a myth. An urban legend. I dare you to prove it.

Reagan is the GOP's safe word.

Yes, history shows that Kennedy was reluctant to go "all in" due to his lack of confidence in the Diem regime and concerns over a broadening conflict conflagrating SE Asia. But... the papers show that he was going to decide on one of several possible reccomendations, and all of them called for US ground forces in Vietnam.

A lot of the younger generations are disllusioned with old style activism. Between the anti-war movement for Iraq and Afghanistan and the WTO/Gpickanumber protests, there has been little to no traction gained.

I theorize that part of it is that the governments have learned how to infiltrate, undermine and ridicule these movements. The United States has been practicing far more oppressive techniques in South America for a few decades.

The anger against Big Business has been there the whole time. Look at Seattle.

I spend a lot of my spare time thinking about how we the people can win. I don't have an answer yet... That doesn't mean there is a lack of trying.

But the power structure we're up against is as powerful as the Vatican during the first and secons inquisition. I mean, seriously, this is as bad as it has ever been in world history in terms of economic and military disparities. And this disparity is enforced by the most sophisticated bread and circuses ever beheld.

We are Babylon, Wendy. Even the most liberal of us are in it up to our eyeballs. And, frankly, Babylon must be struck down by God before the people can rise.

We just need to figure out what this God is and how exactly we can pray to get its attention.

But remember, this transcends our two-party system. Our war machine has grown along with our nation. It has now outgrown our borders and girds the globe. Now, war is the province of international business with sovereign pools of anonymous wealth.

Every corporation's name is Moloch and we are to a man burning in their bellies.

The Israel/Palestine situation is unique and has almost no bearing on Nazi Germany. The closest comparison I could come to is apartheid era South Africa, except the Dutch had absolutely no prior historical, religious, or moral claim to the land they occupied.

The discussion over Israel and American policy vis a vis Israel is never helped by kneejerk claims of Nazism.

Umm... dude, she chose to pose for those pics in a national magazine. It isn't as if they were candids or private family photos.

So, it's nice to hear that you consider them degrading. Ironically, she degraded herself by consenting to their publication.

Ummm... no. I will grant that leaders do not necessarily follow their scriptures. The needs of Ceasar rarely coincide with the needs of spirit, and one invariably becomes the servant of the other to the detriment of all.

But there isn't anything particularly imperial or supreme about Islam relative to other world religions. Open up a random page in the Old Testament and there is a good chance you will find YHVH railing against Israelites for transgressions or supporting them to military conquest. The Mahabarata is full of explicit and gory warfighting that deals with the right of conquest.

Part of the problem is that the doctrine of "one true faith" creates fanatics. Therefore, it isn't particular faiths that are the problem, it is the fanatics who, if they gain power of the political and religious authority, will resort to repression, violence, and ignorance.

I mean, hell, didn't Conrad already mine this territory in "Heart of Darkness"? This problem, one that marks all atrocity, is one of human nature, of which belief is an extensio--not an attribute. What colors the atrocity is culture, but the atrocity remains an atrocity.

What is a greater atrocity:

1. The shootings at Ft. Hood

2. The suicide bombings and rockets that kill innocents in Tel Aviv

3. The targeted missile attacks on civilian populations in Gaza

4. The invasion and occupation of Iraq

5. The systematic starvation of the third world.

6. The manufacture and sale of conventional weapons by the hundreds of billion per annum.

In my opinion, the practices that lead to numbers 5 and 6 are directly responsible for the first four. That is the real atrocity, and it is one whose ideology is recent, and is a perversion of its founder Adam Smith.

That is just the tip, as you are aware Ruta. And it is this racketeering that is responsible for our sorry state of affairs. The military and oil junta are ground zero of our national sickness.