Wednesday, July 31, 2013

Arundhati Roy: To Never Look Away

I love Arundhati Roy. I love Alice Walker. I love the courageous ones, the rebels, the truth-tellers, the wise ones, those whose actions are rooted in fierce compassion and caring and a higher good, those who do not look away - who truly Know and See - and yet who still continue to Love. May they inspire us all.... Molly

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To love. To be loved. 
To never forget your own insignificance. 
To never get used to the unspeakable violence 
and the vulgar disparity of life around you. 
To seek joy in the saddest places. 
To pursue beauty to its lair. 
To never simplify what is complicated 
or complicate what is simple. 
To respect strength, never power. 
Above all, to watch. To try and understand. 
To never look away. 
And never, never, to forget.

- Arundhati Roy

Obama 'Disappointed' with Release of Celebrated War Reporter

Another powerful and deeply disturbing article and "Democracy Now!" video about the extreme consequences to whistle-blowers by the American government. When Ron and I saw Jeremy Scahill a few weeks ago and first learned about Obama's role in the continued imprisonment of Yemeni Journalist Abdulelah Haider Shaye, I felt physically sick. You can watch Jeremy Scahill here and see and learn exactly what Ron and I recently did. We need to know what our government is doing, how those who attempt to reveal war crimes and the deaths children and women and innocent civilians are crucified while those who cause these deaths and atrocities go free. Bless Abdulelah Haider Shaye, Jeremy Scahill, and all the fiercely courageous ones who risk everything to tell us the truth. May they inspire us all. Another world is possible. Tag, we are all it! ~ Molly

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Published on Thursday, July 25, 2013 by Common Dreams

Abdulelah Haider Shaye 'put in prison because he had the audacity to expose' deadly US drone strike

- Jacob Chamberlain, staff writer
Yemeni journalist Abdelela Shayie appearing at the state security court in the capital Sanaa, Yemen. (Associated Press)The White House is "concerned and disappointed" over the news that Yemeni Journalist Abdulelah Haider Shaye, who was kept in a Yemeni jail for three years per the request of the Obama administration after he exposed a deadly U.S. drone strike, was released Tuesday.
Following news of Shaye's release, journalist Jeremy Scahill, who has written extensively about Shaye's story, contacted the White House for a comment.
The White House's response was brief and alarming:
We are concerned and disappointed by the early release of Abd-Ilah al-Shai, who was sentenced by a Yemeni court to five years in prison for his involvement with Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula.
According to Scahill and numerous other journalists who have followed the story, Shaye's only involvement with Al Qaeda was conducting interviews with their members for major news outlets that included the Washington Post, ABC News and the New York Times.
Shaye's legal troubles only arose after he uncovered the deadly U.S. strike that killed dozens of innocent Yemeni civilians, after which he was thrown in prison. At one point Shaye was slated for early release, but a phone call from president Obama urged Yemeni officials to keep him behind bars.
"We should let that statement set in," Scahill said of the White House's response. "The White House is saying that they are disappointed and concerned that a Yemeni journalist has been released from a Yemeni prison."
"This is a man who was put in prison because he had the audacity to expose a U.S. cruise missile attack that killed three dozen women and children."
Watch Scahill in an interview with Democracy Now!, which aired Thursday morning, and read the full article here: http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2013/07/25-8
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What people don't know about the broader force, the Joint Special Operations Command, is that they've been involved with repeated incidents where civilians have been killed, where actions have been taken that quite possibly will result in blowback against the United States. That's almost totally undiscussed... If they kill innocent children and call them al-Qaeda, then we are all al-Qaeda... This war, like all wars, must end. That's what history advises. It's what our democracy demands ... A perpetual war - through drones or special forces or troop deployments - will prove self-defeating, and alter our country in troubling ways... 
- Jeremy Scahill

Tuesday, July 30, 2013

The Dalai Lama: What Today's World Requires Us to Accept


Today’s world requires us to accept the oneness of humanity. 
Many of the world’s problems, conflicts and fears arise because 
we have lost sight of the common experience that 
binds us all together as a human family.
 
- HH the Dalai Lama

CCR Condemns Manning Verdict, Questions Future of First Amendment


July 30, 2013, New York – Today, the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) released the following statement in response to the verdict in the trial of Bradley Manning:

While the "aiding the enemy" charges (on which Manning was rightly acquitted) received the most attention from the mainstream media, the Espionage Act itself is a discredited relic of the WWI era, created as a tool to suppress political dissent and antiwar activism, and it is outrageous that the government chose to invoke it in the first place against Manning. Government employees who blow the whistle on war crimes, other abuses and government incompetence should be protected under the First Amendment.
We now live in a country where someone who exposes war crimes can be sentenced to life even if not found guilty of aiding the enemy, while those responsible for the war crimes remain free. If the government equates being a whistleblower with espionage or aiding the enemy, what is the future of journalism in this country?  What is the future of the First Amendment?
Manning’s treatment, prosecution, and sentencing have one purpose: to silence potential whistleblowers and the media as well. One of the main targets has been our clients, WikiLeaks and Julian Assange, for publishing the leaks. Given the U.S. government’s treatment of Manning, Assange should be granted asylum in his home country of Australia and given the protections all journalists and publishers deserve.
We stand in solidarity with Bradley Manning and call for the government to take heed and end its assault on the First Amendment.

The Center for Constitutional Rights represents WikiLeaks and Julian Assange in the U.S. and filed a case challenging the lack of transparency around the Manning trial on behalf of itself and a diverse group of media figures: Glenn Greenwald, Amy Goodman ofDemocracy Now!, The Nation and its national security correspondent Jeremy Scahill, and Wikileaks and its publisher, Julian Assange. Also included are Kevin Gosztola, co-author ofTruth and Consequences: The U.S. vs. Bradley Manning and a civil liberties blogger covering the Manning court martial, and Chase Madar, author of The Passion of Bradley Manning and a contributing editor to The American Conservative. Jonathan Hafetz of Seton Hall Law School is co-counsel with CCR in that case, along with Bill Murphy and John J. Connolly of Zuckerman Spaeder LLP’s Baltimore office.

To read the judge's verdict, click here. The court has not provided transcripts at any point in the trial: what transcripts there are have been privately organized by the Freedom of the Press Foundation and others with crowd-sourced funding.

The Center for Constitutional Rights is dedicated to advancing and protecting the rights guaranteed by the United States Constitution and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Founded in 1966 by attorneys who represented civil rights movements in the South, CCR is a non-profit legal and educational organization committed to the creative use of law as a positive force for social change.
For the full article, please go here:  http://www.ccrjustice.org/newsroom/press-releases/ccr-condemns-manning-verdict,-questions-future-of-first-amendment

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One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious. ~ Carl Jung

America will never be destroyed from the outside. If we falter and loose our freedoms, it will be because we destroyed ourselves. ~ Abraham Lincoln

During times of universal deceit, telling the truth is revolutionary. ~ George Orwell

The Dalai Lama: All the Joy the World Contains


All the joy the world contains  
has come through wishing the happiness of others. 
If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. 
If you want to be happy, practice compassion.
 
~ HH the Dalai Lama
 

The Beautiful Being We Truly Are

I am so profoundly grateful for all of the support I have received over the past 30 years to open my heart. This has meant stopping the endless and unconscious running and instead consciously choose to move toward whatever it is that has been asking for my attention. For many years I had been too terrified, too split off from myself and others - from the Divine that is within us all - and lacking in awareness of how to begin the journey of coming home to myself. I had no sense of the need to embrace waking up because I did not know I was asleep. It is also true that many of us cannot do this work alone and isolated; it is most often true that we will only go as deep as the support we perceive is available to us. And yet often as small children, and within our families or schools or churches or culture, we can unknowingly be taught that there is something wrong with us... and we lose our connection with the consciousness of the beauty of our true nature and our deep connection with the Sacred within all life. Today I am grateful for it all - my gratitude and my grief - all of which has served as a doorway into awakening. May we all increasingly root into our paths, whatever that is for each of us. May we embrace and recognize the beautiful being we truly are. ♥ 
Namaste ~ Molly


"My dears, a little something this morning on finding 
a space for happiness amongst our fears...
Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror.
Just keep going. No feeling is final.”
 
 - Tara Lemieux

 

Monday, July 29, 2013

Wendell Berry: The Peace of Wild Things


The Peace of Wild Things

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children’s lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds.
I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.
 
- Wendell Berry

Mary Oliver: The Summer Day


The Summer Day

 

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean—
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down—
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
 
- Mary Oliver

Saturday, July 27, 2013

Why Do Protesters Against Egregious Environmental and Financial Misconduct Get Arrested, But Not Corporate Perpetrators?

By MARK KARLIN, EDITOR OF BUZZFLASH AT TRUTHOUT
police8 26It's sadly what we've come to expect: advocates for saving the planet -- and present and future lives with it -- and those who protest financial crimes and improprieties get arrested, charged, and often serve jail time, but those responsible among the corporate and financial elite go free.
In this case, the headline on mlive.com (as in Michigan) that came to our attention reads, "Four protesters arrested at Enbridge pipeline construction site charged with felony." 
Enbridge is a massive intertnational oil and gas pipeline company (based in Canada) that, as noted in a study by the Polaris Institute, fesses upto large scale environmental damage:
Thousands of litres of dangerous fluids are released from the company ’s pipelines and holding tanks into the environment each year.
According to Enbridge’s own data, between 1999 and 2010 , across all of the company’s operations there were 804 spills that released 161,475 barrels of hydrocarbons into the environment.
This amounts to approximately half of the oil that spilled from the oil tanker the Exxon Valdez after it struck a rock in Prince William Sound, Alaska in 1988.
Enbridge's most infamous spill in the US occurred along a pristine stretch of the Kalamazoo River in July of 2020. InsideClimateNews.com won a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the first major tar sands oil spill in America:
It was near Marshall [Michigan] that an aging oil pipeline burst on July 25, 2010 and spilled more than one million gallons of heavy Canadian crude oil into the Kalamazoo River. It was the largest inland oil pipeline spill in U.S. history, and its effects can still be seen today in the river and in the lives of the people who live near it. The Environmental Protection Agency estimates as much as 180,000 gallons of oil still lie on the river bottom and some of it is moving toward a Superfund site....
The Kalamazoo accident was the first major pipeline spill involving diluted bitumen, or dilbit, the same type of oil that will be carried by the Keystone XL pipeline if the Obama administration approves the project.
Bitumen is a tar-like substance that must be diluted with liquid chemicals before it can flow through pipelines. When the Michigan pipeline split open, the chemicals slowly evaporated and the bitumen began sinking to the river bottom.
From accusations of abuse of eminent domain, to toxic leakages, to facilitating excessive carbon production, to even charges of tacit condoning of paramilitary executions of opponents of pipeline work in Colombia, Enbridge is a big target for protestors when looking at corporations that, it appears, triumphantly bulldoze environmental interests and human rights out of their way.
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The current vogue for poisons has failed utterly to take into account these most fundamental considerations. As crude a weapon as the cave man's club, the chemical barrage has been hurled against the fabric of life a fabric on the one hand delicate and destructible, on the other miraculously tough and resilient, and capable of striking back in unexpected ways. These extraordinary capacities of life have been ignored by the practitioners of chemical control who have brought to their task no high-minded orientation, no humility before the vast forces with which they tamper.... We stand now where two roads diverge. But unlike the roads in Robert Frost's familiar poem, they are not equally fair. The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster. The other fork of the road -- the one less traveled by -- offers our last, our only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of the earth. - Rachel Carson

Patricia Lynn Reilly: Imagine A Woman

As women we often need special support, encouragement, and role models to celebrate, honor, and respect our accumulation of years. We live in a culture which too often denigrates or ignores us rather than illuminating the need and value for us as women to truly embrace and claim our wisdom and strength, our beauty and radiance, the ways we can contribute and continue to grow and expand, and the gifts of the many lessons we have learned on our life journeys. May we all - women and men alike - grow into Elders, not simply "olders" as we age. We are deeply needed. Namaste ~ Molly

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Imagine a woman who accepts her aging with grace. 
A woman who doesn’t hide the changes in her body. 
Who celebrates the accumulation of her years.  
Imagine yourself as this woman.


- Patricia Lynn Reilly