"To Know": Fosters &
Multiplies Community
Introductory
words by Eduard
Many of these articles are quite substantial in
depth and length. Regarding some, I have selectively pulled
out specific phrases which I found to be either key to the
material or a novel way to make the point. These notes
simply highlight some of the content I found of interest.
Gospel of Work vs.
Gospel of Wealth
"If we look at the United States in the 19th
century, we see a popular culture that was, in a word,
anti-capitalist," Doukas said. "And this was reflected very
much in the political scene of the time. You had to be in favor of the
working man. You had to support and praise the common man.
Pat Robertson
Acts Like Christianity's Ayatollah Khomeini & words on Gun
Control
Pat Robertson has every right to express an
opinion about current political situations. Pat Robertson has
every right to base that opinion on his interpretation of someone
else's opinion, written some 2500 years earlier, about a different
political situation.
GMOs Are
Unconstitutional
December 9, 2005, is a historic date: it's the
political birthday for the Charter of the Environment which was entered
into the Constitution in February of the same year. GMOs became
literally unconstitutional.
Hope
(yet while) in the Dark - Rebecca Solnit
Her new piece, "Hope at Midnight,"
suggests ways in which a widening of the lenses through which we've been
taking in our post-election world might free us briefly from the
confines of The Last Empire, and remind us that elsewhere on this modest
planet people are at work on futures imagined quite differently from the
grim ones the Bush administration offers us all.
A
Fascist America, How close are we? by Justin Raimondo
The idea that America is turning fascist has been popular on the Left
for as long as I can remember: in the 1960s, when antiwar radicals raged
against the Machine, this kind of hyperbole dominated campus political
discourse and even made its way into the mainstream.
Liberation
Conspiracies By Rebecca Solnit
Mark Lombardi's art consists of colossal drawings of networks of power,
connecting politicians, capitalists, and corporations into intricate
maps, like medieval cosmology or kabbalah diagrams, whose huge arcs and
circles linking the small handwritten names are as visually beautiful as
they are politically daunting.
WTO:
In an era of economic lunacy by Devinder Sharma (India)
Just before the failed Cancun WTO Ministerial in September 2003, there
was a flurry of activity in the economic circles. Studies came out
concluding that any drastic reduction in agricultural subsidies in the
rich and developed countries would not make any appreciable impact on
the global commodity prices. The timing of the reports was crucial.
Globalize
Liberation, Rachel's Environment & Health News
Many of us are impatient in our desire for change, and
those of us from privileged backgrounds are oftentimes unschooled in the
realities of long-term struggle. I often recall the Buddhist
saying, "The task before us is very urgent, so we must slow
down."
Embracing
Canadian values goes way beyond resenting our neighbours
George W. Bush and his gang of neo-cons have inadvertently prompted
Canadians to more closely examine their own very different take on the
world. And they like what they see.
Justice
Thomas Berger to Citizens for Social Justice
When I was in high school, the leading Canadian novelist was a man named
Hugh MacLennan. He was an Anglophone who taught at McGill and lived in
Montreal. He wrote Barometer Rising and Two Solitudes. But I still
remember him being interviewed about a then recent controversy between
Quebec and the federal government, and he was asked, "What about
the Quebec problem?" And he said, "What do you mean what about
the Quebec problem? That's not a problem, that's like saying life is a
problem."
Affirmative
Action, Cuban Style
I received the following as an email, a story which in
my view transcends its secular source and advances a form of jubilee
that is not only noble and worthwhile, but despite severe US imposed
constraints is nevertheless still attainable, thereby providing a
working model of how much can be accomplished with relatively so little,
being even in a position to provide aid to one very rich nation.
US
issues of church & state surrounding Supreme court on 10
commandments
Whether the Ten Commandments, graven in stone, sit on a lawn by a
government building or in a courthouse, isn't for me exactly a
life-and-death issue -- and I think I'm not alone on this, which is why
the Ten Commandments cases at the Supreme Court right now are so
dangerous.
What
the Rest of the World Watched on (Bush's) Inauguration Day
Dublin, on U.S. Inauguration Day, didn't seem to notice. Oh, they played
a few clips that night of the American president saying, "The
survival of liberty in our land increasingly depends on the success of
liberty in other lands."
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