There's an economic crisis but is capitalism itself in crisis? A roundtable on global capitalism with Naomi Klein, Jeff Madrick, and Bhairavi Desai. In this clip our guests respond to Bush's comment that it's the US consumer who can save the economy.
Exposing Bush's historic abuse of power
Salon has uncovered new evidence of post-9/11 spying on Americans. Obtained documents point to a potential investigation of the White House that could rival Watergate.
Editor's note: This article is part of a Salon investigative series on spying inside the United States by the Bush administration. Research support for the article was provided by the Nation Institute Investigative Fund.
By Tim Shorrock
July 23, 2008 | WASHINGTON -- The last several years have brought a parade of dark revelations about the George W. Bush administration, from the manipulation of intelligence to torture to extrajudicial spying inside the United States. But there are growing indications that these known abuses of power may only be the tip of the iceberg. Now, in the twilight of the Bush presidency, a movement is stirring in Washington for a sweeping new inquiry into White House malfeasance that would be modeled after the famous Church Committee congressional investigation of the 1970s.
While reporting on domestic surveillance under Bush, Salon obtained a detailed memo proposing such an inquiry, and spoke with several sources involved in recent discussions around it on Capitol Hill. The memo was written by a former senior member of the original Church Committee; the discussions have included aides to top House Democrats, including Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Judiciary Committee chairman John Conyers, and until now have not been disclosed publicly.
Salon has also uncovered further indications of far-reaching and possibly illegal surveillance conducted by the National Security Agency inside the United States under President Bush. That includes the alleged use of a top-secret, sophisticated database system for monitoring people considered to be a threat to national security. It also includes signs of the NSA's working closely with other U.S. government agencies to track financial transactions domestically as well as globally.
The proposal for a Church Committee-style investigation emerged from talks between civil liberties advocates and aides to Democratic leaders in Congress, according to sources involved. (Pelosi's and Conyers' offices both declined to comment.) Looking forward to 2009, when both Congress and the White House may well be controlled by Democrats, the idea is to have Congress appoint an investigative body to discover the full extent of what the Bush White House did in the war on terror to undermine the Constitution and U.S. and international laws. The goal would be to implement government reforms aimed at preventing future abuses -- and perhaps to bring accountability for wrongdoing by Bush officials.
"If we know this much about torture, rendition, secret prisons and warrantless wiretapping despite the administration's attempts to stonewall, then imagine what we don't know," says a senior Democratic congressional aide who is familiar with the proposal and has been involved in several high-profile congressional investigations.
"You have to go back to the McCarthy era to find this level of abuse," says Barry Steinhardt, the director of the Program on Technology and Liberty for the American Civil Liberties Union. "Because the Bush administration has been so opaque, we don't know [the extent of] what laws have been violated."
The parameters for an investigation were outlined in a seven-page memo, written after the former member of the Church Committee met for discussions with the ACLU, the Center for Democracy and Technology, Common Cause and other watchdog groups. Key issues to investigate, those involved say, would include the National Security Agency's domestic surveillance activities; the Central Intelligence Agency's use of extraordinary rendition and torture against terrorist suspects; and the U.S. government's extensive use of military assets -- including satellites, Pentagon intelligence agencies and U2 surveillance planes -- for a vast spying apparatus that could be used against the American people.
Specifically, the ACLU and other groups want to know how the NSA's use of databases and data mining may have meshed with other domestic intelligence activities, such as the U.S. government's extensive use of no-fly lists and the Treasury Department's list of "specially designated global terrorists" to identify potential suspects. As of mid-July, says Steinhardt, the no-fly list includes more than 1 million records corresponding to more than 400,000 names. If those people really represent terrorist threats, he says, "our cities would be ablaze." A deeper investigation into intelligence abuses should focus on how these lists feed on each other, Steinhardt says, as well as the government's "inexorable trend towards treating everyone as a suspect."
"It's not just the 'Terrorist Surveillance Program,'" agrees Gregory T. Nojeim from the Center for Democracy and Technology, referring to the Bush administration's misleading name for the NSA's warrantless wiretapping program. "We need a broad investigation on the way all the moving parts fit together. It seems like we're always looking at little chunks and missing the big picture."
A prime area of inquiry for a sweeping new investigation would be the Bush administration's alleged use of a top-secret database to guide its domestic surveillance. Dating back to the 1980s and known to government insiders as "Main Core," the database reportedly collects and stores -- without warrants or court orders -- the names and detailed data of Americans considered to be threats to national security.
According to several former U.S. government officials with extensive knowledge of intelligence operations, Main Core in its current incarnation apparently contains a vast amount of personal data on Americans, including NSA intercepts of bank and credit card transactions and the results of surveillance efforts by the FBI, the CIA and other agencies. One former intelligence official described Main Core as "an emergency internal security database system" designed for use by the military in the event of a national catastrophe, a suspension of the Constitution or the imposition of martial law. Its name, he says, is derived from the fact that it contains "copies of the 'main core' or essence of each item of intelligence information on Americans produced by the FBI and the other agencies of the U.S. intelligence community."
Some of the former U.S. officials interviewed, although they have no direct knowledge of the issue, said they believe that Main Core may have been used by the NSA to determine who to spy on in the immediate aftermath of 9/11. Moreover, the NSA's use of the database, they say, may have triggered the now-famous March 2004 confrontation between the White House and the Justice Department that nearly led Attorney General John Ashcroft, FBI director William Mueller and other top Justice officials to resign en masse.
Read the rest of this article.
List: The Most Spiritually Affecting Buddhist MoviesHere are the honorable mentions:
July 21, 2008 - 2:00pm — underdogBy Simon Augustine
"A wise man, recognizing that the world is but an illusion, does not act as if it is real, so he escapes suffering. " - The Buddha
"The highest problem of any art is to cause by appearance the illusion of a higher reality." - Goethe
"The secret to film is that it's an illusion. " - George Lucas
The dramatic portrayal of Buddhist lifestyles and spiritual truths is perhaps more
difficult to accomplish in an exciting way than depictions of Western religious practices and stories, because the Dharma is geared to inner transformation. And while enlightenment may be one of the most profound experiences a human being can undergo, it doesn't exactly translate easily into compelling cinema.
Christianity, on the other hand, with its bloody and wrenching crucifixion story, its miracles, and a traditionally greater emphasis on social action, lends itself more directly to the external world and the sensationalism upon which cinema thrives - witness the extensive pantheon of superb films about Christ and his message from Passolini's The Gospel According to Saint Matthew to The Mission. The stuff of cinema is often about what is excessive in human nature: big emotions, big explosions, blood, passion, and lots of fighting and screwing (it could be argued that Christology is in some ways about excess, too.)
Yet much of Buddhist practice is about the refrain from excess - it is, after all, called "the Middle Path" - that is, it consists of stepping back from the entanglements of emotional attachment and aggressive desire, and understanding how to free oneself from these things by being more mindful and aware of them. Its teachings attempt to make us more human by questioning our usual human reactions.
Does this mean there cannot be a viable and entertaining Buddhist cinema?
Fortunately, the answer is "no," because the struggle of disciplining the mind away from excess can make for a fascinating struggle in itself. There are many examples in which filmmakers have made the purposes and consequences of relatively "passive" activities like meditation and non-violence into powerful narratives, featuring a more internalized struggle -- let's call them "inner explosions."
And as Buddhism becomes more pronounced and practiced in America, and even evolves into new movements such as "engaged Buddhism," which expands more directly into the social action typical of Christianity, filmmakers from the West have more opportunities to explore the Dharma from fresh perspectives.
The following is a list of films, from both the East and the West, that comment in some way upon the teachings of the Buddha, and that are both explicitly about Buddhist subjects, or more subtly so. (Alas, the first two listed are not yet on DVD, but hope springs eternal that at least one of them shall be soon.)
The post goes into the explanation for each of the top eight, so you'll have to go check it out at their site, but here are the "winners.'Honorable Mention:
Samsara (for showing the difficult relationship between romantic love and the search for enlightenment; n/a on DVD);
Siddhartha (for its cinematography);
How to Cook Your Life for Zen in the kitchen;
Kundun (for its loving portrait of the Dalai Lama from a man usually obsessed with Christian hypocrisy and violence);
The Matrix (for its extended metaphor that addresses parallels between the concept of samsara, the internet, and "virtual reality");
I Heart Huckabees (for its comedic take on identity and the unforgettable line "What happens in the meadow at dusk?!");
American Beauty (for it's questioning of consumer culture, its "bag floating on the wind" scene, and the last lines by Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey): "...there's so much beauty in the world. Sometimes I feel like I'm seeing it all at once, and it's too much, my heart fills up like a balloon that's about to burst... And then I remember to relax, and stop trying to hold on to it, and then it flows through me like rain and I can't feel anything but gratitude for every single moment of my stupid little life... You have no idea what I'm talking about, I'm sure. But don't worry... you will someday.");
Tommy (for its somewhat muddled but powerful commentary on the nature of sensory information and its relationship to spiritual insight through the story of a "deaf, dumb, and blind boy");
and Fight Club (for illuminating the strange and complicated parallels between Buddhism, nihilism, and fascism that arise in the project of deconstructing the Self).
Yeah, I don't know. I've seen Numbers 1, 3, 5,6, and 8 (Peaceful Warrior is vaguely entertaining, but not very Buddhist). Numbers 1 & 3 are among my favorite films, and The Cup was a lot of fun.
Read the rest of this article.The Evils of Fruit
by Cassandra Forsythe, PhD(c), CSCS, CISSNAre you looking for that nutritional edge to get your body composition to the next level?
Have you been eating your "five-a-day" like a good boy should, but just can't shake that last bit of icing off your jelly belly?
Well, take close note: if you reduce the fructose in your diet, you will lose that stubborn body fat!
Fructose Metabolism 101, the simplified version
Fructose is a type of simple sugar (a carbohydrate in its simplest form) that is much different than its sister sugar, namely glucose. When you eat fructose, it's absorbed more slowly in the intestine, and its absorption is slightly limited.
Some people—like those with diabetes, see fructose as a superior simple sugar because it doesn't get used as quickly or as efficiently. What they don't realize, is that fructose is normally consumed at the same time as glucose, which speeds up the absorptive process.
Once fructose passes through the intestine, it's quickly taken to the liver for processing. Here, it has two fates: it's either turned into glucose and then stored as liver glycogen; or it's used for energy by liver cells.
Unlike glucose, fructose can only be metabolized in the liver, whereas glucose can be passed to other body tissues, like your muscles.
Why fructose is a problem for dieters:
If you have a lot of fructose in your diet, it only has one place to go: your liver. If your liver glycogen levels are full, which is the case all times of the day except before you eat breakfast, then that fructose is turned into fat!
Since your liver doesn't want to store this new fat, it ships it to other parts of your body; places you don't want it, like your abdomen or lower back.
Do you now see why too much fructose in your diet can be one of the biggest reasons you can't shrink those last few fat cells?
How do I avoid eating fructose?
When people hear the word fructose, they usually think fruit. Ready for a shocker? Fruit is actually not the major source of fructose in your diet!
Yes, it does have fructose, but only certain fruits are high in it, while others are relatively low. Not all fruits are bad for your body composition; vegetables are the same way.
The major contributors of fructose in your diet, in descending order, are as follows:
• High Fructose Corn Syrup (HFCS)
• Table Sugar, which is a 50:50 combination of glucose and fructose
• Brown Sugar
• Maple Sugar
• Cane Sugar
• Molasses
• Honey
• Concentrated Fruit Juice
• Fruits
• VegetablesAvoid the top eight in this list at all costs!
Read labels carefully, because HFCS is hiding in almost every food you eat nowadays. And, just because honey is natural, doesn't mean you should use it in abundance.
Good news for those interested in the origins of the New Testament -- the oldest known version, from the 4th century has been pieced together online.Oldest Bible Pieced Together
Raphael G. Satter, Associated PressJuly 22, 2008 -- The oldest surviving copy of the New Testament, a 4th century version that had its Gospels and epistles spread across the world, is being made whole again -- online.The British Library says the full text of the Codex Sinaiticus will be available to Web users by next July, digitally reconnecting parts that are held in Britain, Russia, Germany and a monastery in Egypt's Sinai Desert.
A preview of the Codex, which also has some parts of the Old Testament, will hit the Web on Thursday -- the Book of Psalms and the Gospel of Mark.
"Only a few people have ever had the opportunity to see more than a couple of pages of the (Codex)," said Scot McKendrick, the British Library's head of Western manuscripts. The Web site will give everyone access to a "unique treasure," he said.
Discovered at the Monastery of Saint Catherine at Mount Sinai by German Bible scholar Constantine Tischendorf in the mid-19th century, much of the Codex eventually wound up in Russia -- just how exactly the British Library won't say, citing lingering sensitivity over the circumstances surrounding its removal from the monastery.
The British Library bought 347 pages from Soviet authorities in 1933. Forty-three pages are at the University Library in Leipzig, Germany, and six fragments are at the National Library of Russia in St. Petersburg. And in 1975, monks stumbled on 12 more pages and 40 fragments stashed in a hidden room at the monastery.
Biblical scholars are thrilled at the news that the Codex Sinaiticus -- divided since Tischendorf's trip to the monastery in 1844 -- is finally being put back together, albeit virtually.
In the past, anyone wishing to examine the document first hand would have had to approach the British Library "on bended knee," said Christopher Tuckett, a professor of New Testament studies at Oxford University."To have it available just at the click of a button is fantastic," he said. "You could do in two seconds what would take hours and hours of flicking through the leaves."
Handwritten in Greek more than 1,600 years ago -- it isn't exactly clear where -- the surviving 400 or so pages carry a version of the New Testament that has a few interesting differences from the Bible used by Christians today.
The Gospel of Mark ends abruptly after Jesus' disciples discover his empty tomb, for example. Mark's last line has them leaving in fear.
"It cuts out the post--resurrection stories," said Juan Garces, curator of the Codex Sinaiticus Project. "That's a very odd way of ending a Gospel."
James Davila, a professor of early Jewish studies at St. Andrews University in Scotland, said the Codex also includes religious works foreign to the Roman Catholic and Protestant canons -- such as the "Epistle of Barnabas" and the "Shepherd of Hermas," a book packed with visions and parables.
Davila stressed that did not mean the works were necessarily considered Scripture by early Christians: They could have been bound with the Bible to save money.
The Codex itself is a fascinating artifact, representing the best of Western bookmaking, Garces said. The parchment was arranged in little multipage booklets called quires, which were then numbered in sequence.
"It was the cutting edge of technology in the 4th century," he said.
The British Library bound its quires into two volumes after their purchase from the Soviets, one of which is kept on show in a climate--controlled, bulletproof display case. Visitors can peer at the ancient book, but only see two pages at a time.
By next July, the entire Codex will be available for free -- along with transcription, translation and search functions -- on the Internet.
Vanity Fair Covers The New Yorker
We here at Vanity Fair maintain a kind of affectionate rivalry with our downstairs neighbors at The New Yorker. We play softball every year, compete for some of the same stories, and share an elevator bank. (You can tell the ones who are headed to the 20th floor by their Brooklyn pallor and dog-eared paperbacks.)
And heaven knows we’ve published our share of scandalous images, on the cover and otherwise. So we’ve been watching the kerfuffle over last week’s New Yorker cover with a mixture of empathy and better-you-than-us relief.
We had our own presidential campaign cover in the works, which explored a different facet of the Politics of Fear, but we shelved it when The New Yorker’s became the “It Girl” of the blogosphere. Now, however, in a selfless act of solidarity with our downstairs neighbors here at the Condé Nast building, we’d like to share it with you. Confidentially, of course.
Illustration by Tim Bower.
Remembering the Moment
Enjoying Life
Life, in all of its fullness, is happening right now. While our thoughts are sometimes elsewhere, beautiful opportunities and moments are being passed over and lost to the flow of time. And though we cannot possibly fully experience each leaf that falls to the ground, sometimes we get so attached to reaching our goals that we don’t pay attention to the wonder all around us. When we do that, we live in a world that exists only in our heads, while we miss life itself. There is so much to be enjoyed and appreciated that we need to remember to pay attention to the present moment, because it is the only space in which we can experience being alive.
We learn from our past, but dwelling on it keeps us from being fully present to life in the moment. We create our lives with our thoughts, but focusing so firmly on our imagined future keeps us from co-creating with the universe, so we might never allow ourselves to live our dreams as they manifest. It’s possible to be so happy and comfortable in our inner worlds that we lose touch with the business of life. We may enjoy spending large portions of time in meditation, or focused on our thoughts.
Life must be attended to, and if we are wise, we can enjoy it at the same time. We can awaken ourselves to the moment we are living right now by taking a deep breath and simply looking around. In doing so, we refocus our attention to our location in the real world. Then we can learn to appreciate the process of working toward our goals as much as their attainment. Balancing ourselves between the present moment and eternity, we can experience and enjoy the full range of reality available to us as spiritual beings living on earth.
Chris Abani tells stories of people: People standing up to soldiers. People being compassionate. People being human and reclaiming their humanity. It's "ubuntu," he says: the only way for me to be human is for you to reflect my humanity back at me.Chris Abani's first novel, published when he was 16, was Masters of the Board, a political thriller about a foiled Nigerian coup. The story was convincing enough that the Nigerian government threw him in jail for inciting a coincidentally timed real-life coup. Imprisoned and tortured twice more, he channeled the experience into searing poetry.
Abani's best-selling 2004 novel GraceLand is a searing and funny tale of a young Nigerian boy, an Elvis impersonator who moves through the wide, wild world of Lagos, slipping between pop and traditional cultures, art and crime. It's a perennial book-club pick, a story that brings the postcolonial African experience to vivid life.
Now based in Los Angeles, Abani published The Virgin of Flames in 2007. He is also a publisher, running the poetry imprint Black Goat Press.
Oliver Sacks: Rage For Order from the Mind Traveler series, 48mins, Year: 1996.
By Oliver Sacks, author of 'Awakenings' (also made into a film) and 'The man who mistook his wife for a hat'. This particular part looks at autism through the life of Jessie. In particular it looks at how people with autism can be interested in control and categorization on one hand, whilst being fascinated with the unpredictable and chaotic on the other. By extension Jessie has a lot to say about human beings in general just as her paintings and life inform us about autism.
Free verseRead the rest of this interesting review.
Counter-Revolution of the Word:The Conservative Attack on Modern Poetry, 1945–1960, by Alan FilreisAlan Filreis’s Counter-Revolution of the Word is less a work of literary interpretation than a penetrating historical and sociological study. It is comparable to now-classic books like Jed Rasula’s The American Poetry Wax Museum: Reality Effects, Alan Golding’s From Outlaw to Classic: Canons in American Poetry, Robert Von Hallberg’s American Poetry and Culture, 1945-1980, and Cary Nelson’s Repression and Recovery: Modern American Poetry and the Politics of Cultural Memory.
Against the grain of received history, Filreis, a colleague of mine at the University of Pennsylvania, reveals the deep engagement of many politically progressive poets of the 1930s with modernist poetic innovation. (The converse is also true: in an earlier book Filreis reads the putatively conservative Wallace Stevens within the socio-cultural context of the ’30s.) He also tracks a number of ’30s poets, showing the dire effect of McCarthyite redbaiting on their careers. However, his principal focus is on the conflation of anticommunism with antimodernism in the immediate postwar period. Such a conflation might seem counterintuitive, since the left is often associated with populist styles that reject modernist difficulty, while radical modernism is often associated with an aesthetic at odds with explicit left political content. But the toxic mix of what Filreis calls “anticommunist antimodernism” is not only pervasive in the 1950s, but also provides an ideological foundation for the official verse culture of the 1970s onward.
Filreis’s book is filled with telling examples of how the aesthetic and political right denounced non-conventional poetry as if it were a part of the Communist menace. Such poetry was smeared as unnatural and corrupting, as an affront to moral values as expressed in proper grammar, and, moreover, as foreign and therefore un-American. “The vocabulary of thirties-bashing was cast in the idiom of incurability; tropes of cancer and mass death abounded. Leftist writing of the 1930s was dismissed ‘in a phrase: it was an alien growth’ . . . ‘poison,’” while, by extension, modernist poetry was denounced as “barbarous dissonance” fomenting “death and decay.” Writing in The New York Times in 1949, influential art critic Howard Devree was already warning of the anxious conflation of Communism and modernism, noting both were feared to be “possessed of the devil and . . . dangerous to American culture and realism”:
Another curious, disconcerting and, in fact, frightening part of the new attack has been the tendency of the attackers to refer to modern art in practically the same terms used by Hitler and the Communist hierarchy. It is called ‘degenerate art,’ and there are thinly veiled accompanying demands for its suppression and for censorship.Filreis is not alone in relating these images of the alien and nonhuman to the imagery of Don Siegel’s 1956 movie, The Invasion of the Body Snatchers. In the charged postwar environment, the lyric became a symbol for anti-modernist resistance, clearly “identified with the postideological moment,” a bulwark against what Colonel Cullen Jones, in a 1951 article, “Abnormal Poets and Abnormal Poetry,” derided as modernist effeminacy and its “sexual abnormalities.” Jones may seem, in retrospect, a marginal figure, but according to the headnote in A. Stanton Coblentz’s 1945 collection The Music Makers: An Anthology of Recent American Poetry, he published thirty-five poems in 1944 in such widely circulated publications as The New York Times and the Atlantic Monthly and would certainly qualify as representative of the official verse culture of his time.
One thing the anticommunist antimodernists had right was that the poetic form of radical modernism was political; Filreis calls this the “cold war politics of poetic form.” A 1953 article by Donald Davidson targets parataxis in poetry—the juxtaposition of two images or units of sense that lack any immediately apparent connection—for its “treacherous political irresponsibility in the act of eschewing relations of cause and effect while the related elements [are] left to stand in unordered, unsubordinated lists.” Just a few years earlier, Robert Hillyer, in the widely circulated Saturday Review of Literature, assailed modernism in poetry as an “illusion of independent thought” and a “propaganda” machine of “the powers of darkness.” Writing in the Bulletin of the Poetry Society of America, Hillyer accused modernists of “a cold conformity of intellectualism” that eliminated “diversity” and insisted on “a critical censorship, in its effects like that of the Kremlin.”
Modernist poets were smeared as perpetuators of the “Big Lie” (that their work is really poetry), who, if they were to capture the free world, would enforce their worldview by means of “secret police, concentration camps, and execution squads,” in the words of Coblentz in 1950. Coblentz, a central figure in Filreis’s study, had been featured in The New York Times Magazine in 1946 with his article called “What Are They?—Poems or Puzzles?” In a later essay he cast modernism in the role of a “mosquito that sucks your blood,” a “parasite in the grain.” Images of purity versus degeneration abound. Consider Ben Lucien Burman’s “The Cult of Unintelligibility,” published in the November 1, 1952 issue of the Saturday Review. The influences of Gertrude Stein, Berman says, are “still to be found in many strategic strongholds, like the lurking germs of a yellow fever, they must be constantly fought and sprayed with violent chemicals lest the microbes develop again and start a new infection.”
