wisdom of adi da

In this dream I saw Da sitting with his back to a room full of his followers. There was a television camera pointing at him and he was facing a big TV set on which his image was projected.The next strange part was this: He had placed an ornate Japanese stone carving of a phallus between his legs, so it looked as if it was his own penis. He (and the devotees) were pleased with how he looked on the TV screen, with this well-proportioned stone phallus...Now the next strange part: As Da admired his television image, a horned lizard darted suddenly out from under his robes, ran along the stone phallus, and leapt into the television screen, disappearing into the image.

Words of Wisdom from "Wayne's World"

Was it Kierkegaard or Dick Van Patten who said, "If you label me, you negate me?"

The Rise of Walm-Art - Should We Be Concerned?

Last year more than four and a half million people visited the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. That gave nine million eyeballs a likely last look at Kindred Spirits, a transcendentalist Hudson River School masterpiece by Asher Durand. It will be years, maybe decades, before as many viewers see it again. From summer 2005 through this March, it enjoyed prominent place in a great museum in the nation's capital; as of 2009, Kindred Spirits will debut in its new permanent home: Bentonville, Arkansas.
That's the site of Crystal Bridges, a museum of American art founded by Alice Walton - Wal-Mart heiress, self-minted Medici, and new owner of Kindred Spirits. More than a plot in development, Bentonville is the birthplace of Wal-Mart; in fact, Crystal Bridges will share a campus - and by the sounds of things, equal booking - with the Walton 5&10 Museum, a house of tchochkes that commemorates the myth of the megaloretailer.
Bentonville (population: 29,538) is not a place in which many people live, much less visit. Needless to say, flyover states deserve a look at America's art historical tradition, too. But metropolitan areas like Forth Worth, Texas, and St. Louis, Missouri - places people will visit - are more natural and deserving destinations for art. In the end, however, Crystal Bridges's backwater backdrop is the least of reasons to grumble over the rapid rise of the Wal-Mart collection. Walton will no doubt drape these works in the flag and march them to an American theme - one that will be, at best, superficial, and at worst, jingoistic. Either way, the museum stands to do a disservice to the works: Walton collects art with the same disregard for fair practices and competition that Wal-Mart shows in the retail sector.
There's almost no problem that the Wal-Mart fortune can't overcome. When the New York Public Library, home to the Durand landscape since 1904 (an appropriate, native, New England vista for the piece), put the painting up for sale in 2005 to relieve financial strains, Walton edged out both the National Gallery and the Met. (In a curious turn, she relied on the veteran advice of John Wilmerding, a National Gallery of Art trustee, to seal the deal. The National Gallery has never answered about that conflict of interest.) The sale price? Approximately $35m - on which Walton won't pay state sales tax, thanks to an act passed by the Arkansas state legislature that exempts state museums within the highest financial bracket. Which is to say, Crystal Bridges alone: the legislation was so narrowly tailored as to benefit only Walton.
(If there's anyone the state of Arkansas owes zero favors, it's Walton. After all, as the AFL-CIO notes, the $35m Walton paid for Kindred Spirits equals more than two years' worth of outlays the state pays for Wal-Mart employees living on public assistance.)
Whereas the Wal-Mart heiress benefits from sweetheart deals with Arkansas, groups that try to keep their native works close to home are faced with bitter decisions. These are hardly mom-and-pop outfits, either. Last year, it took the combined efforts of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts to prevent Walton from acquiring Thomas Eakins's The Gross Clinic, another painting widely acknowledged as an American masterpiece. The Gross Clinic is as Philly as the cheesesteak: The 1875 painting shows Samuel Gross, a renowned Philadelphia surgeon, lecturing to students as he operates on a patient under chloroform. Thomas Jefferson University's medical college purchased the painting just three years after its completion, parting with it 129 years later, also citing financial distress.
In December 2006, at the eleventh hour of a frantic six-week fundraising effort , the Philadelphia museums acting in tandem were able to ante up the coin: $68m. Half of this came in the form of a late offer by Wachovia to finance the shortfall. It wasn't known at the time, though, that the museums had also robbed Peter to pay Paul: the Academy announced in February that it had sold Eakins's The Cello Player for an undisclosed price to a secret buyer. "In essence, the academy decided to surrender the best Eakins picture it owned for a half-interest in an even better one," wrote Edward Sozanski, art critic for the Philadelphia Inquirer.
In a telling revelation, Philadelphia Museum of Art director Anne d'Harnoncourt bragged at one point that the campaign had attracted donations from every state in the nation. It takes a village when art prices across genres and eras soar to eight- and nine-figure record highs, and one of the wealthiest individuals in the world is prowling the market. For Philadelphia's sake, the village had better rally again, and quickly: Thomas Jefferson University just announced that it plans to hock two more Eakins.
Assuming Walton scoops up both, it will be a blow to Philadelphia, one struck in the name of American art. Consider it a fait accompli: It's unlikely that all 50 states, a major bank, two museums, and millions in private donations will come together to stymie Walton again.
Jeffrey Goldberg writes in the New Yorker that Wal-Mart has hired professional PR progressives to boost its reputation on labor practices. Whatever Crystal Bridges is, it can't be counted with that effort; Walton risks angering everyday Americans by making bids for the objects that give their cities and regions status and soul. Nor is the big-box museum a Wal-Mart invention: Crystal Bridges fits the proud tradition built by tycoons who enjoyed the uniquely self-aggrandizing philanthropy that is collecting and showing art. Yet Walton's models - the Carnegies and Mellons of art history - built art collections first; the big-box showrooms to house them came later.
There are far worse fates for American art than to be hung in a public museum - especially one designed by starchitect Moshe Safdie. But nothing is worse for American art history than Wal-Mart. The corporate bully is using its incredible market wedge - heavily subsidized by public dollars - to buy out proud local traditions. Sound familiar?

"The Cooling World" from Newsweek, April 28, 1975

There are ominous signs that the Earth’s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production – with serious political implications for just about every nation on Earth. The drop in food output could begin quite soon, perhaps only 10 years from now. The regions destined to feel its impact are the great wheat-producing lands of Canada and the U.S.S.R. in the North, along with a number of marginally self-sufficient tropical areas – parts of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indochina and Indonesia – where the growing season is dependent upon the rains brought by the monsoon.
The evidence in support of these predictions has now begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up with it. In England, farmers have seen their growing season decline by about two weeks since 1950, with a resultant overall loss in grain production estimated at up to 100,000 tons annually. During the same time, the average temperature around the equator has risen by a fraction of a degree – a fraction that in some areas can mean drought and desolation. Last April, in the most devastating outbreak of tornadoes ever recorded, 148 twisters killed more than 300 people and caused half a billion dollars’ worth of damage in 13 U.S. states.
To scientists, these seemingly disparate incidents represent the advance signs of fundamental changes in the world’s weather. The central fact is that after three quarters of a century of extraordinarily mild conditions, the earth’s climate seems to be cooling down. Meteorologists disagree about the cause and extent of the cooling trend, as well as over its specific impact on local weather conditions. But they are almost unanimous in the view that the trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century. If the climatic change is as profound as some of the pessimists fear, the resulting famines could be catastrophic. “A major climatic change would force economic and social adjustments on a worldwide scale,” warns a recent report by the National Academy of Sciences, “because the global patterns of food production and population that have evolved are implicitly dependent on the climate of the present century.”
A survey completed last year by Dr. Murray Mitchell of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reveals a drop of half a degree in average ground temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere between 1945 and 1968. According to George Kukla of Columbia University, satellite photos indicated a sudden, large increase in Northern Hemisphere snow cover in the winter of 1971-72. And a study released last month by two NOAA scientists notes that the amount of sunshine reaching the ground in the continental U.S. diminished by 1.3% between 1964 and 1972.
To the layman, the relatively small changes in temperature and sunshine can be highly misleading. Reid Bryson of the University of Wisconsin points out that the Earth’s average temperature during the great Ice Ages was only about seven degrees lower than during its warmest eras – and that the present decline has taken the planet about a sixth of the way toward the Ice Age average. Others regard the cooling as a reversion to the “little ice age” conditions that brought bitter winters to much of Europe and northern America between 1600 and 1900 – years when the Thames used to freeze so solidly that Londoners roasted oxen on the ice and when iceboats sailed the Hudson River almost as far south as New York City.
Just what causes the onset of major and minor ice ages remains a mystery. “Our knowledge of the mechanisms of climatic change is at least as fragmentary as our data,” concedes the National Academy of Sciences report. “Not only are the basic scientific questions largely unanswered, but in many cases we do not yet know enough to pose the key questions.”
Meteorologists think that they can forecast the short-term results of the return to the norm of the last century. They begin by noting the slight drop in overall temperature that produces large numbers of pressure centers in the upper atmosphere. These break up the smooth flow of westerly winds over temperate areas. The stagnant air produced in this way causes an increase in extremes of local weather such as droughts, floods, extended dry spells, long freezes, delayed monsoons and even local temperature increases – all of which have a direct impact on food supplies.
“The world’s food-producing system,” warns Dr. James D. McQuigg of NOAA’s Center for Climatic and Environmental Assessment, “is much more sensitive to the weather variable than it was even five years ago.” Furthermore, the growth of world population and creation of new national boundaries make it impossible for starving peoples to migrate from their devastated fields, as they did during past famines.
Climatologists are pessimistic that political leaders will take any positive action to compensate for the climatic change, or even to allay its effects. They concede that some of the more spectacular solutions proposed, such as melting the Arctic ice cap by covering it with black soot or diverting arctic rivers, might create problems far greater than those they solve. But the scientists see few signs that government leaders anywhere are even prepared to take the simple measures of stockpiling food or of introducing the variables of climatic uncertainty into economic projections of future food supplies. The longer the planners delay, the more difficult will they find it to cope with climatic change once the results become grim reality.

Alien technology the best hope to 'save our planet:' ex-defence boss

A former Canadian defence minister says be believes advanced technology from extraterrestrial civilizations offers the best hope to "save our planet" from the perils of climate change.
Paul Hellyer, 83, is calling for a public disclosure of alien technology obtained during alleged UFO crashes -- such as the mysterious 1947 incident in Roswell, New Mexico -- because he believes alien species can provide humanity with a viable alternative to fossil fuels.
Mr. Hellyer has been a public UFO advocate since September 2005 when he spoke at a symposium in Toronto. But with concern over global warming at an all-time high, and Canadian political parties struggling to out-green one another, Mr. Hellyer said governments and the military have a responsibility to "come clean on what they know" now more than ever.
"Climate change is the No. 1 problem facing the world today," he said. "I'm not discouraging anyone from being green conscious, but I would like to see what (alien) technology there might be that could eliminate the burning of fossil fuels within a generation ... that could be a way to save our planet."
Mr. Hellyer will be discussing his views at the upcoming screening of a new UFO documentary called Fastwalkers, in Toronto's De La Salle College Theatre on March 7.
Mr. Hellyer, a former Liberal cabinet minister, political turncoat and one-time leadership candidate for the Liberal and Conservative parties, said UFO researchers have amassed undeniable evidence that aliens have visited our planet. Due to the distance such spacecrafts would have to travel, UFOs must be equipped with some kind of advanced fuel source or propulsion system, he said.
"We need to persuade governments to come clean on what they know," he said. "Some of us suspect they know quite a lot, and it might be enough to save our planet if applied quickly enough."
Michael De Robertis, an astronomer at York University and and member of the Ontario Skeptics Society for Critical Inquiry, said there is "little or no compelling evidence" that we have been visited by beings from another planet.
"If (Mr. Hellyer) wants to broker some kind of communication, that would be great," he said. "But I think the probability that there is someone out there for him to make contact with is highly improbable."
But if aliens have indeed visited Earth, there is no doubt their technical knowledge could benefit humanity, Mr. De Robertis added.
"To have travelled hundreds of trillions of kilometres, interstellar visitors would, at a minimum, require a civilization that is thousands -- if not millions -- of years ahead of our own. One would imagine they went through their own fossil fuel era, and that they solved it and didn't go through some kind of pollution holocaust.
"There is no doubt they would have different solutions, different fuels and different energy sources."
Fastwalkers claims to feature more than 30 witnesses testifying to the reality of alien visitations, including former military and government intelligence personnel.

Boulder, Colorado and New Age Fundamentalism

Boulder has many good points, but partly because of this, it has developed a rather severe collective ego problem, particularly as it regards the wholistic-healing/metaphysical/psychological sphere of culture. Many people involved in these areas seem to feel that evolution can be measured in concentric rings radiating from the Pearl Street Mall (or The Naropa Institute---the exact center of the universe is still under dispute in this emergent cosmology).
It is an attractive town, with a very pleasant climate, widely available healthy food, a cosmopolitan cultural scene, and a progressive attitude, but the "liberalism" found here often seems to be restricted to that which is "politically correct," and in itself, seem to be quite "fascist," in its own way. Spiritual Materialism is rampant and Animal Farm Syndrome is epidemic. Enlightenment is generally thought to be measurable in bits of metaphysical esoterica, the number of buzzwords and cliches one can pack into a paragraph, or longevity-in-service to a given clique.
The pressure to seem perfect, on the part of individuals, tends to manifest as a lot of hyper-competitive, hypocritical, one-upsmanship, as well as the selfish exploitation of often, but not always, very good ideas and spiritual processes, consequentially lost in the lust for financial and egotistical gratification. While being a self-righteous, proselytizing, Christian hypocrite is extremely gauche here, being a self-righteous, proselytizing, New Age hypocrite is entirely chic. Everybody seems to get so busy trying to become everyone else's counselor that they kind of fail to get around to working on themselves. Overall, there seems to be far more preaching than practicing.
I am not at all against anyone's religion, but the age-old pitfall of all religion is becoming so certain that one "knows" the unknowable Absolute Truth, that one becomes overly aggressive in promoting that particular semantic model or ritual, thus infringing on the rights and free thought of others. This seems to be due to basic human nature, which apparently feels very insecure with the simple admission that there is much we do not know.
The New Age movement, I might describe as a contemporary synthesis of all traditional religious perspectives, and is quite prevalent in Boulder. This, in itself, is not disturbing---I might describe myself as kind of a practitioner of "fusion theology." What I'm decrying are the delusions of grandeur that this seems to generate. Rather than quietly putting into practice one's new insights, the tendency is to want to set oneself up as everone else's guru (or minister), under the erroneous assumptions that: a.) no one else could possibly know as much as you, and that b.) whatever works for you will work for everyone. While the Christian fundamentalist insists that one must accept Jesus as one's personal Savior, the New Age fundamentalist seems to suggest that we must accept Them as our personal Saviors. Anyone with a big enough ego problem declares oneself the Messiah, and the rest of us are expected to genuflect.
My point, as it regards Boulder and the New Age movement, is that it is falling into the same familiar pitfalls, and the only known antidote for this is a heightened consciousness of the trap, and an eternally vigilant sense of humility about one's own viewpoint.

First Transgender Soap Opera Star on "All My Children" - Transgender Issues Will Decide 2008 Election

When it comes to transgender issues, the media does not fail to disappoint.
On the daytime soap opera, "All My Children," a "flamboyant rock star" character by the name of Zarf will be undergoing gender transition, becoming a woman named Zoe. The introduction of this storyline has met with much hype from the network's PR machine, citing Zoe as being "the first transgender character to make a transition from one gender to another during a U.S. television drama." It doesn't seem like that big a deal when you have to point out that such things have been seen outside of dramas, outside of U.S. television and involving characters who may have already transitioned.
I want to tell you this is a great story line, and that everything about it will benefit transgender people as a whole - but like I said above, the media never fails to disappoint me. It may well do a fair job, but in the end this is not about telling an honest tale: it is about ratings.
"All My Children" is not exactly a ratings powerhouse, and this is a desperate attempt to at least get someone to watch the show: even if it is just those of us who are transgender, and who are hungry to hear our stories be told.
Writers for "All My Children" have made no commitment to the character, as far as the long-term goes. There is no decision if they'll follow Zoe all that way to the operating table - assuming, of course, that Zoe opts for genital reassignment - and little to keep them behind the character if any of the so-called "pro family" groups decide to make an example of this.
More than this, the soap opera's own press release tips the hand on how they really feel about their character. Zoe is referred to as "Zarf" and "he," with any idea that this character is already - on one level or another - a woman left far, far away from things.
To me, there's a couple ways this will likely go, and we can look at plenty of examples in the media past to see where Zoe might be in the next year or so. Let's begin with the days of Jodie Dallas on "Soap." While "Soap" was a humorous jab at soap operas, one could likely look at the Jodie character as a good template for Zoe: some strong, honest story lines about transgender issues, followed eventually by the straightening out of the character. Jodie started as a gay male who was intending to become a woman, yet by the shows end was happily male, and happily married.
Or Zoe could go the way of Erica Bettis, the transsexual character on the ill-fated "The Education of Max Bickford." She was a strong starter, a postoperative transsexual who served as foil for the curmudgeon in the title role. She did not last long, becoming window dressing before vanishing completely from the show before it finally shuttered. As I alluded to above, it's probably most likely that Zoe will fade away if they interest isn't there, or if the show feels she is more a liability than asset.
There is a third possibility, and that is that Zoe becomes a character to rival Hayley Cropper on the long-standing British soap-opera, Coronation Street. Like Erica Bettis, Hayley is a post-operative transsexual, but unlike Erica, Hayley has been the center of many deep plot lines in which the character ended up a hit. This would be preferred - but highly unlikely.
In the end, Zoe will be what the writers and the people who are writing the paychecks of those writers wish. For now, while striving for a few extra rating points, it is easy to try and create a story line that might capitalize on a perceived success of transgender story lines in Hollywood. Call it "transploitation," if you will, because it is little more than that: an attempt to use the trans story to sell a few more ad spaces and get the stagelights lit. By now, we're used to that, because the media never fails to disappoint.