IDF's YouTube channel

What YouTube Doesn’t Want You to See
By Noah Pollak

Yesterday, the IDF (Israeli Defense Force) did something innovative: it opened a channel on YouTube and posted videos to it that help explain why Israel is fighting Hamas. The site hosted about a dozen videos showing things like Israeli humanitarian aid deliveries to Gaza and airstrikes that prevented terrorists from firing rockets at Israeli civilians.

This was apparently too much for YouTube, which moments ago removed several videos from the IDF’s channel, including the most-watched video, which showed a group of Hamas goons being blown up in an air strike as they loaded Katyusha missiles onto a truck. The point of such footage, as if it needed to be said, is not to revel in violence — it is to show the legitimacy of Israeli self-defense.

The rank double-standard that YouTube has applied to Israel is disturbing. YouTube hosts all manner of similar footage — much of it far more gory than the grainy infrared images posted by the IDF — of U.S. air strikes. Why is YouTube capitulating to those who do not wish for Israel to be able to tell its side of the story?

Should the Military Be Called in for Natural Disasters?

Should the Military Be Called in for Natural Disasters?
By Siobhan Morrisey for Time Magazine

Theoretically, even pacificists would probably admit that no one can respond as quickly and efficiently to a major U.S. disaster as the military. But the news that active duty soldiers fresh from a combat tour of Iraq will be gearing up to assist civilian agencies charged with responding to anything from accidental chemical spills to terrorist attacks has sparked mixed reactions from experts in emergency management and civil liberties advocates....

Facebook's War on Nipples

Facebook's War on Nipples By Ada Calhoun

A clash of culture wars....when did breast feeding become obscene? and why is it ok to show a fully naked guy on facebook but not a boob? It's Janet Jackson's Superbowl fiasco all over again...

Energy and the Family Tree

Energy and the Family Tree
By Jonathan Phillips for Reality Sandwich

For those on the healing path, going home for the holidays can be a true challenge of heart and spirit as old energy patterns kick up dust from the floorboards of our childhood. In this podcast, I discuss how the energy field of our families is stronger than we might imagine and how family constellation work can help us heal and forgive electromagnetic blocks within our own ancestral lines.

I also share a recent experience of transcending familial patterns this Christmas during a surprising ecstatic moment at the Comfort Inn in Branson, Missouri. And I encourage RS participants to share their own moments of family healing, realization, and transformation in the comments section below.

To listen to the podcast follow the above link through the article...

Magnetic Breach

Magnetic Breach
By Erin Shaw for Reality Sandwich

NASA's latest exploration reveals "a breach in Earth's magnetic field ten times larger than anything previously thought to exist." Five space probes from the THEMIS mission (time history of events and macroscale interactions during substorms) flew through the opening and recorded "a torrent of solar wind particles streaming into the magnetosphere, signaling an event of unexpected size and importance." The opening was created by magnetic reconnection, when terrestrial and solar magnetic fields press against each other and crack open the magnetosphere. In this case, the conduits of solar wind from Earth's North and South Poles overlapped at the equator to create this unprecedented breach.

While the solar winds don't necessarily trigger geomagnetic storms themselves, they do load the magnetic field with plasma, which is linked to the auroras, power outages, and satellite disturbances that directly affect us. The Solar Storm Watch could become more important as we enter Solar Cycle 24, during which it is more likely that solar winds will load the magnetosphere with plasma just before a geomagnetic storm. According to space physicists, this increase in solar winds and plasma levels could create "the perfect sequence for a really big event," possibly stronger storms that are more disruptive of satellite activity and power supply.

If An Asteroid Hit Earth

Based on NASA projections, there is 1 in 2,518,072
chance that a total destruction type asteroid will impact Earth in the next year.


...extraordinary video

"Lets Move the Center"

A nice piece on Naomi Klein, author of the Shock Doctrine, the article goes into her political upbringing and her hopes for the Left's future.

Outside Agitator
by Larissa MacFarquhar for The New Yorker

Klein argues that the only circumstance in which a population would accept Friedman-style reforms is when it is in a state of shock, following a crisis of some sort—a natural disaster, a terrorist attack, a war. A person in shock regresses to a childlike state in which he longs for a parental figure to take control; similarly, a population in a state of shock will hand exceptional powers to its leaders, permitting them to destroy the regulatory functions of government.

Quote of the Week

And Still I Rise

The Death of My Beautiful Arches

Redrock Redemption
from Reality Sandwich by Adam Elenbaas

The auction of Utah's beautiful Redrock lands is taking place on December 19th. Over 300,000 acres of wilderness are being sold to the highest bidder (including oil and gas speculators).

The Redrock area includes vistas like Canyonlands, Arches National Parks, and Dinosaur National Monument. The plan to sell off leases for the land was advanced on election day this year.

Click here to take action against the Redrock giveaway.

FDA Admits Mercury Fillings May Be Dangerous to Children

The FDA has finally caved to pressure this month and admitted, for the first time, that mercury contained in silver dental fillings may be dangerous to children and pregnant women. The FDA's website now reads: "Dental amalgams contain mercury, which may have neurotoxic effects on the nervous systems of developing children and fetuses..."

*Update 12/18/08
FDA Stuns Scientists, Declares Mercury in Fish to be Safe for Infants, Children, Expectant Mothers!

In a truly astonishing betrayal of public safety (even for the FDA), the U.S. Food and Drug Administration today revoked its warning about mercury in fish, saying that eating mercury-contaminated fish no longer poses any health threat to children, pregnant women, nursing mothers and infants.

Is anyone really surprised? The FDA is a drug-pushing, people-betraying, scientifically illiterate criminal organization that, time and time again, seeks only to protect the profits of powerful corporations whose products poison the people. This statement is no longer a mere opinion. It is an observable fact based on the FDA's own pattern of behavior and its outlandish decisions that predictably betray the American public.

The real reason this is happening
You want to know the REAL reason the FDA is easing up on its warning about mercury in fish? It's because the agency is being relentlessly pounded over two related issues: Mercury in dental fillings and mercury preservatives in vaccines. And the FDA can't keep up its lie about the "safety" of vaccines and mercury fillings if it has already declared mercury to be dangerous in fish, right?

To the criminal minds running the FDA, the clever solution is to revoke the warning about mercury in fish. Thus, the FDA takes the position that all mercury is safe, and suddenly they're off the hook on mercury fillings and thimerosal in vaccines.

21 page lawsuit filed against the FDA by Consumers for Dental Choice.
http://www.fdaweb.com/source/MercuryComplaint.pdf

The CDC Fact Sheet on Mercury
http://www.cdc.gov/exposurereport/pdf/factsheet_mercury.pdf

The War Between Church and Science

Motivating video, where Richard Dawkins urges all atheists to openly state their position and to fight the incursion of the church into politics and science.

Predictions

Predictions for the next five years on Boing Boing...some interesting stuff

The Athens Riots: Fallout from the Financial Crisis?

The Athens Riots: Fallout from the Financial Crisis?
By Jeff Israely for Time

One important target stands out in the riots and street clashes engulfing Greece as the damage totals are tallied. In addition to the scores of cars burned and shops ransacked by radical youths, the damage in Athens extends to banks. Since the violence ignited Saturday night, when a policeman fatally shot an Athens teenager, rioters have damaged at least 38 banks in the capital, with more than 150 targeted across all of Greece, as the rioting has spread to such cities as Thessaloniki, Larissa and Patras. (See pictures of the unrest in Athens.)

Of course, attacking the arteries of capitalism has long been a favorite symbolic act of hooded anarchists and hard-left protesters, including the dozens of ATMs smashed and banks set ablaze during the antiglobalization uprisings in Seattle in 1999 and Genoa in 2001. But Athens 2008 comes as the very words damaged banks have taken on a whole new connotation. Indeed, in the weeks before the violence began, many Greeks had expressed outrage at the government's $35 billion in aid to the nation's lenders at a time when one out of five citizens lives below the poverty line. And so, nearly a week after they began, the Greek riots offer the first tangible sign since the West's financial meltdown of the potential social unrest percolating just below the surface...

Quote of the Week

"I never saw a wild thing sorry for itself. A bird will fall frozen dead from a bough without ever having felt sorry for itself".

-Master Chief John Urgayle quoting "Self-Pity" by D.H. Lawrence in the film GI Jane

Mysterious Acorn Shortage

Scientists baffled by mysterious acorn shortage

Hard to Find Seeds

It's never too early to start planning that garden. And towards that goal, Mother Earth News has created a nice custom Google search engine that scours over 600 seed suppliers. It's the perfect way to find those obscure plants and varieties not at the local nursery. You can test out this new tool here on the Mother Earth website

Book Burning....Computer Style

by George Ure for Urban Survival

Don't know if you have seen the story yet, but "Google Earth accused of aiding Terrorists" says a Times Online report.

In court papers, seems Indian authorities are saying that Google Earth was used for mapping out some of the terror events.

Don't know about you, but I have a problem with this 'ban Google Earth' move. What if (as seems likely) the terrorists used other readily available tools? Would the Indian court system be considering whether to "Ban Microsoft Streets and Trips"? "Banish Garmin from the Indian subcontinent"?

Hell, ban printed roadmaps while we're at it , too!

Better lock up the pens, pencils, and paper, too while we're at it - those could become terrorist tools as well.

This gets to the ugly heart of the 'terror' mindset that has infected world governments. If people had surety of a place, regular meals, and meaningful work, plus a chance to work hard and get ahead (instead of work hard for 40-years then get eff'ed-over by inflation, financial fraud, and whathaveyou) then gee, where would terrorism find root?

I know, don't be asking those obvious questions ("Where does it stop, though?"). Common sense is the kind based on the near-certain knowledge that someone who means you harm is going to get you with a .308 round, or a knife in your back. With or without Google, Streets & Trips, LandSat data which is all over the place, or a trip to key targets with a video recorder - maybe we should ban them, too?

Where does it stop? With the banning of everything! The end game is in a police state where we're all employed watching each other. And then everyone will join whatever revolution against oppression comes along.

Book burning always ends badly and this is just the same thing...with a few more chips and maybe a lithium battery.

Climbing the World's Biggest Trees

Science writer Richard Preston talks about some of the most enormous living beings on the planet, the giant trees of the US Pacific Northwest. Growing from a tiny seed, they support vast ecosystems -- and are still, largely, a mystery.

REDD - Paying Countries to Keep Their Trees

Green Banks: Paying Countries to Keep their Trees
By Bryan Walsh for Time

In 1997 TNC, U.S. utility companies American Electric Power (AEP) and PacifiCorp, and oil major BP Amoco paid Bolivia $10.8 million for the credits represented by all the carbon and potential greenhouse gas that is locked inside trees. In return, the government simply has to ensure that the forest remains standing and healthy for the next 30 years. It's called avoided deforestation, and projects like this may represent one of the most promising ways to simultaneously slow the destruction of tropical forests and the pace of climate change — if we can get it right.

[The] promise of avoided deforestation, in which rich countries pay to keep rain forests standing and receive carbon credits in return is also known by the acronym REDD, for Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation. Currently, the international carbon cap-and-trade system organized by the Kyoto Protocol only recognizes industrial projects — such as a rich country paying to improve energy efficiency at a power plant — or programs to actively reforest land already cleared. It doesn't recognize avoided deforestation. Supporters are confident that when the world meets for the annual U.N. summit on climate change in Poznan, Poland, this month, avoided deforestation will be one of the main topics of discussion. "This is too important not to be front and center on everyone's minds," says Jake Schmidt, head of international climate policy for the New York City-based Natural Resources Defense Council. "It will be a major focus."..

An estimated 50,000 sq. mi. (129,500 sq km) of forest are lost to the logger's ax or to fire every year, and that hurts the planet in two very important ways. Rare plants and animals, many still undiscovered, depend on the forests — especially the rich rain forests that encircle the earth either side of the equator. When the forests disappear, all that wildlife disappears as well. But trees also contain carbon, and while they live, they absorb CO2 from the atmosphere, compensating in part for the greenhouse gases spewed into the air from cars, power plants and factories. When trees are cut down or burned, that carbon is put back into the atmosphere, accelerating climate change. At least 20% of annual global carbon emissions come from deforestation. If we can't stop forest loss, we'll struggle to stop climate change...

Obama's Economic Recovery Plan

The Exaltation of Exhaustion

Rendell, Napolitano, and the Exaltation of Exhaustion
by Arriana Huffington

Ed Rendell's off-mic assessment that Janet Napolitano is a "perfect" choice for Homeland Security Secretary because she has "no life," "no family" and "can devote, literally, 19-20 hours a day" to the job is emblematic of a pervasive misperception in America: the idea that to be a success you have to make work the be-all of your life. The truth is the exact opposite. It turns out people are not only happier - they are also much more productive if they are able to get away from work, and renew their passion and focus. More than ever, judgment and wisdom are what's most urgently needed in our leaders, and round-the-clock stress and exhaustion are conducive to neither.

"Prop 8 - The Musical"

Starring Jack Black, John C. Reilly, and many more...
No more picking and choosing what you want to take from the bible...So let's promote love.

See more Jack Black videos at Funny or Die

Feinstein's Statement on Interrogations

So it looks like we are having some favorable movement in the government toward a renewed policy of anti-torture.

Incoming Senate Intelligence Committee chair Dianne Feinstein, a California Democrat, released a statement yesterday, clarifying her position on what standards the Obama Administration should use to govern interrogations. ....

Here is the new Feinstein statement:

I strongly believe there should be a single, clear standard for interrogation across the federal government, and that this standard should comply with the Geneva Convention, the United Nations Convention Against Torture, and U.S. law. I plan to introduce legislation in January that would close Guantanamo, make the Army Field Manual the single standard for interrogations, prohibit contractors from being used to carry out interrogations and provide the International Committee of the Red Cross with access to detainees. If the incoming administration decides to propose an alternative to this legislation, I am willing to hear its views. But I believe we must put an end to coercive interrogations by the CIA.

Bravo..

Foodies Make a Pitch to Obama

Foodies Make a Pitch to Obama
By Kim Severson for The New York Times

The fact that a Secretary of Agriculture has yet to be named has some chefs, farmers and animal welfare advocates wondering whether food and farming have been shoved to the Obama D team.

To help move the process along, nearly 90 notable figures in the world of sustainable agriculture and food sent a letter to the Obama transition team earlier this week offering their six top picks for what they called “the sustainable choice for the next U.S. Secretary of Agriculture.”

The hope is that the new secretary will be less aligned with industrial agribusiness and commodity farming than secretaries past. And if he or she embraces the connection between food, health and the environment, well, that’s all the better.

The letter lays out a tall order:

“From rising childhood and adult obesity to issues of food safety, global warming and air and water pollution, we believe our next Secretary of Agriculture must have a vision that calls for: recreating regional food systems, supporting the growth of humane, natural and organic farms, and protecting the environment, biodiversity and the health of our children while implementing policies that place conservation, soil health, animal welfare and worker’s rights as well as sustainable renewable energy near the top of their agenda.”

It was signed by 88 people, among them: Michael Pollan, Judy Wicks, Alice Waters, Rick Bayless, Wendell Berry, Eric Schlosser, Anna Lappe, Frances Moore Lappe, Paul Willis, Dan Barber, Michel Nischan, Ann Cooper, Marion Nestle, Peter Hoffman, Winona LaDuke, and Michael Dimock.

For those playing along at home, here’s their list of the six top picks for Secretary of Agriculture. Keep in mind that yesterday, Rep. John Salazar, Democrat of Colorado, a potato farmer, said he was being considered. (And no, the effort to nominate Michael Pollan never got off the ground):

Gus Schumacher, former Under Secretary of Agriculture for Farm and Foreign Agricultural Services and former Massachusetts Commissioner of Agriculture.

Chuck Hassebrook, executive director, Center for Rural Affairs, Lyons, Neb.
Sarah Vogel, former Commissioner of Agriculture for North Dakota, lawyer, Bismarck, N.D.

Fred Kirschenmann, organic farmer, distinguished fellow at the Leopold Center for Sustainable Agriculture in Ames, Iowa, and president of the Stone Barns Center for Food and Agriculture, Pocantico Hills, NY.

Mark Ritchie, Minnesota Secretary of State, former policy analyst in Minnesota’s Department of Agriculture under Governor Rudy Perpich, co-founder of the Institute for Agriculture and Trade Policy.

Neil Hamilton, Dwight D. Opperman Chair of Law and director of the Agricultural Law Center, Drake University, Des Moines, Iowa.

No More College Educations

A scary trend....

College May Become Unaffordable for Most in U.S.
By Tamar Lewin for The New York Times

The report found that college tuition and fees increased 439 percent from 1982 to 2007, adjusted for inflation, while median family income rose 147 percent. Student borrowing has more than doubled in the last decade, and students from lower-income families, on average, get smaller grants from the colleges they attend than students from more affluent families.

Quote of the Week

"Abandon your fears or be abandoned because of them"
-Caroline Myss

Deepak Chopra on Terrorism and our Government

This is a long article....I had wanted to cut it down before I posted it but as I kept reading it, it just kept getting more insightful so inturn I decided to posted the entire thing. This is one of the most thought provoking interviews on Terroism I've ever read. Please make time to read....

My Uncensored Interview with Deepak Chopra
by Michelle Haimoff for Huffington Post

I recently wrote an article entitled "Deepak Chopra on Mumbai: Too Controversial for CNN?" about Chopra's November 26th interview on CNN, which CNN had possibly edited. Within a week of the interview, Dorothy Rabinowitz of the Wall Street Journal wrote an article entitled "Deepak Blames America," and Elisabeth Hasselbeck of The View called him "Glitter glasses whatshisface" and mumbled "Go light a bowl of incense." On December 2nd, I interviewed Chopra by phone and gave him the opportunity to speak candidly about censorship in the media, the new patriotism, and latent anti-Muslim racism in the United States. The unedited podcast of the interview will soon be posted on MichelleHaimoff.com/Interviews.

Chopra started off by clarifying what happened in the CNN interview. "The interview actually went on for another ten minutes when I was doing it but it was a tape...I talk about a lot of things which were not there on the transcript."

As far as what was cut, he says, "I spoke about how we are funding both sides of the conflict through our military industrial complex, which is a huge industry and we fund it through our petrol dollars, through the Saudis who then buy weapons from all over the world, but including from us. And these weapons end up in the hands of terrorists as well, so willy-nilly we are participating in the funding on both sides."...

"It's a very complex situation." He says. "What I've discovered is that, if you start to tell the truth in that atmosphere that -- are you recording this?"

"Yes." I say.

"If you start to tell the truth or even want to know the truth, the atmosphere that has been created in the last eight years in the Bush administration and also with the patriot act and so on... if you start to even look in that direction in the last eight years it has become extremely dangerous because you, first of all, are accused of not being patriotic. You probably want to see the US government overthrown and you are a traitor. I've got some really good friends at CNN and other places... The good people are scared. They've been scared. It's very different to snap out of that mindset."

Chopra hopes that the Obama presidency will encourage freedom of speech, honesty and integrity, and that the media will no longer view critical citizenry as treasonous.

"I have lived more years in this country than I have lived in India. My children are born here. They're citizens of this country as much as Obama is. And I get hate mail from tons of people, hundreds of people everyday saying, 'You should go back to India. You're a traitor. You're this or that.' It's an atmosphere that has been created for eight years. It does a great disservice in the United States to have that atmosphere. And I'm just feeling right now that opportunity to really test if we can speak our truth and not be afraid. Otherwise we might as well live in the former USSR or in China or something. Even in India you can speak your truth and not have to be afraid of being accused of these things by the government or by special interest groups."

But why would a network like CNN censor itself for fear of seeming unpatriotic? What are they afraid of?

"Michelle, we have to be very careful that we don't assume that," he said. "That CNN is afraid. Then we'd be doing the same thing that other people do -- just making assumptions. My perception is that journalists at large are not comfortable by raising sensitive issues... News is sold as a commodity these days and the more sensational it is, the better it is."

He later continued: "I just want to clarify one thing. I don't want to imply that the reason that the interview was cut off suddenly was because of some policy decision. If anything, CNN is more open than anybody else." For example, he says, it could have been a segment time issue.

Does he really think that CNN is more open than anyone else?

"I think CNN definitely. FOX and the Wall Street Journal are cheerleaders for the old paradigm. They're cheerleaders for right wing extremism and right wing fundamentalism... in a sense two institutions that do more disservice to our country than anybody else."

Chopra's understanding of Islamic extremists provides a much-needed glimpse at where these fundamentalists are coming from, but does the violence stem from a culture war or are terrorists settling the score for a perceived crime?

"Here is my analysis of it." He said. "There are 1.8 billion Muslims in the world. That's about 25% of the world's population. By no means are the majority of these people violent or fundamentalists either."

Chopra, who is a senior scientist at Gallup, was part of a team that conducted a poll of 600 million Muslims (about half of the Muslim population of the world). Countries polled included Pakistan, Morocco, Egypt, Jordan, Syria, Iraq, Iran and Saudi Arabia. What he concluded in the poll is that the vast majority (92-95%) of Muslims are moderates, and they admire the West for their entrepreneurship, business and modernism. A small minority (<5%) are extremists, and of that we don't know how many are actual terrorists. His guess is very few.

Based on the survey, the cause of terrorism is "a rage that comes from humiliation, lack of respect, and also from factors that we are unaware of, generally uneducated about."

He cites Wikipedia estimates of the number of people that have died in Iraq since the war, ranging from 400,000 to over a million. "When we initiated the war on Iraq we forget to remind ourselves that the Iraqis had nothing to do with 9/11. Nothing to do with 9/11. We also know that the Iraqis had no weapons of mass destruction. We now say that Saddam Hussein was a mass murderer. That he used torture and that he needed to be out. We should remind ourselves that we knew this a long time ago and we have used him as our ally for a long time. He was in the senior Bush administration before the first war. You know, much before that... And then we decided to make him our enemy. Nothing changed. He was definitely a mass murderer. He was a torturer. When we did the 'Shock and Awe' campaign. The 'Shock and Awe.' Listen to the words. We're bombing Baghdad and many parts of the country we're calling it the 'Shock and Awe' campaign."

"FOX News actually produced the Shock and Awe campaign as a theatrical production. They hired a musical director. They had symphonic music. And when you saw it on TV it was a glorious, glorious attempt to liberate the people of Iraq. It's easy for a person sitting in a plane 32,000 feet above sea level to press a button. When he looks at the map he presses a button. And you know, we're seeing it on screens. We're calling it 'Shock and Awe' and we hear this beautiful music - sounds almost like Mozart - while this is happening, while on the ground there are grizzly scenes which we don't see in the media, of people being mutilated. People in the throes of death. Bodies all over the place. And gruesome scenes the American public is totally unaware of, but people in the Muslim world are very aware of... We are very self-absorbed."

The deaths that appear in our papers are Western deaths. The women, children and non-Jihadis that die are not part of our conversation.

"I think this kind of mentality that demeans the life of somebody who is perhaps brown, Muslim, inferior, is not that important, but it enlists huge amounts of rage. It takes some of the moderates and certainly makes them fundamentalists. It takes some of the fundamentalists and certainly makes them terrorists."

"Imagine you're on the streets of Baghdad you see planes going up in the sky. You hear in the news this is shock and awe and bombs are falling your relatives are killed. Your brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, parents are killed and it's called shock and awe. Would you not call that terrorism? Just because the person is in uniform and pressing a button and is calling it shock and awe and doing it to music, is that any worse than a beheading? It's worse because you're not aware of the damage that's being done."

Chopra and his son, Gotham, are involved in Shasta Planet, an organization that encouraged dialogue between New York-based American children and Iraqi children before the Iraq War about ways to prevent the war from taking place. After the US bombed Iraq, the Chopras couldn't find many of the kids who were involved in the project because some had died, while others had lost a parent, brother or sister. "This is the kind of thing that enlists rage in that world," Chopra said.

"Despite that, there are millions of Muslims that admire the US, that would love to have economic partnerships with the US. Would love to learn business leadership skills. Would love to know what makes an entrepreneur. You know, the vast majority of people in the world of any religion want a decent life want to send their kids to school and want to be at peace. And the terrorists are as much a threat to these people as to anyone else."

Chopra's deeper understanding of the reasons for terrorism has been misconstrued of late, most notably in the Wall Street Journal's "Deepak Blames America" article.

"I didn't blame America," Chopra says and then elaborates that placing blame is complex and that Pakistan is suffering because of the people that don't want Pakistan to have a relationship with a nuclear-armed India. "The worst thing India could have done is to have a nuclear deal and to be part of a nuclear club... Why are we selectively choosing to have nuclear deals and making the rest of the world feel unsafe?"

"We have a very self-righteous attitude towards the rest of the world. We have no understanding of how these violent ideologies are born. We want to just go to war and kill the terrorists. Well, the bad news is you can kill as many terrorists as you want, but you cannot kill terrorism. In order to kill terrorism it's gonna have to be a 50-year Marshall Plan to not build war torn cities, but to build ideas. To rebuild violence torn minds. To educate them, to help them, to cooperate with them, to create economic partnerships so that the rage disappears, and to understand them. There are very simple rules for having a dialogue. You respect your enemy. You talk to them with the attitude, 'Yes. We understand that you also have injustice and we also feel injustice. Can we have a room here for forgiveness on both sides? Can we refrain from belligerence?' The more belligerent we get, the more belligerent the radicals get."

Chopra says that, according to Rabinowitz, "I'm a purveyor of aromatherapy, enemas, I say happy thoughts make people happy." He touches on Elisabeth Hasselbeck's comment that he should "go light some incense." He takes personally when the media dismisses thousands of years of wisdom and traditions, and is patient in explaining that aromatherapy and incense work through neuro-associative conditioning. If anyone bothered to ask, he would mention that he is a neuro-endocrinologist and that everything he studies has a medical basis. "If you really examine this, this is racism. This is bigotry. This is hatred. This is prejudice. And this is total lack of knowledge of another person's culture." You can almost hear him rolling his eyes when he says, "The only time I've prescribed enemas is when somebody has constipation."

So what is the nature of his expertise?

"What's an expert? Who's an expert?" he asks. "I have not been indoctrinated by the US government to a particular point of view." But he has the unique perspective of someone with emotional ties to the East and the West. His inner circle includes a CIA agent, his son, Gotham, a former a war correspondent in war torn regions ("He sat across the table with Taliban leaders and had mangoes with them"), and the Muslims that comprise his world ("I come from a culture where Hindus and Muslims for the most part live peacefully").

Chopra wants us to understand about Muslims that which we don't yet understand -- that they have a value system but that it's different than ours. In the Gallup Poll Chopra helped design, Muslims talk about taking care of the elderly and the poor. Despite the terrorism, the crime rate of Saudi Arabia and most Arab countries is much lower than that of LA or DC. Perhaps taking care of the elderly and the poor helps keep crime rates so low.

After Rabinowitz's scathing Journal piece, he received a number of invitations from the conservative talk show circuit, but when he appeared on Hannity and Colmes, Hannity shot him down for comparing a recent Scientific American article about cancer to terrorism. Evidently, when we treat cancer too aggressively, cancer cells hijack normal cells and make them co-conspirators in spreading the cancer. "Do you see an analogy there?" he said. To him, the collateral damage of the war on terror has caused some people to get hijacked by terrorists to become co-conspirators in spreading the terrorism.

Bill O'Reilly asked him to come on The O'Reilly Factor too. "I will appear on your show on two conditions," he emailed O'Reilly. "Number one: You will not raise the volume of your voice. And number two: You will not interrupt me. And I will not raise the volume of my voice and I will not interrupt you." O'Reilly has yet to reply.

"A terrorist has an ideology." He says. "That ideology is savage. It's brutal. It's primitive. It is the worst ideology you can imagine because it's ancient. It's not relevant to our normal times. When you kill a terrorist you do not kill the ideology."

He repeats twice that on Hannity the other night, former Secretary of Defense William Cohen quoted Donald Rumsfeld as saying, "Are we creating more terrorists than we are killing?"

The US has the best weapons and intelligence in the world and yet we can't seem to eliminate terrorism. According to Chopra, this is because we have yet to understand it in its historical, economic and psychological contexts. Economically, the conditions in Pakistan are so abysmal that the poor flock to the Mujahid simply so they can eat. Psychologically, young boys in ghettos in Europe turn to terrorism because they have been marginalized by racism. When one has no sense of identity one may seek identity by joining a radical group.

"Marginalized people get radicalized." Chopra says. "When you have marginalized people living in ghettos who feel humiliated and enraged, when you have poor people living in third world countries and you have people who have no sense of identity, these marginalized people get radicalized by special interest groups which happen to be the terrorists. You cannot get rid of these terrorists without getting the help of the majority of the Muslims in the world who are peaceful people. They're like anybody else. We know that from our own surveys. You can't say that a quarter of the world's population is insane and Jihadist. The terrorists are insane and Jihadist. You can not get rid of an idea... The only way ideas can be given up is if you educate people, if you help people, if you have a conversation with people and if you recognize that other people have a sense of perceived injustice. We don't recognize even that there is a sense of injustice in these people. We also have an ally like Saudi Arabia, and we fund money to Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia is controlled by very few people who live a very opulent lifestyle. It is to their advantage to channel money to these terrorists and to divert it from the gross inequities that exist in their own countries. Spend a little money and divert and other people are killed and you're getting money from the US anyway, who's your ally. And they will be your ally as long as it is to the US's advantage."

"Why don't we remember? We have such short memories that Saddam Hussein was a CIA sponsored thug that our CIA brought out of exile, put into power after a coup in Iraq. Then George Bush Sr. flooded billions of dollars into Iraq in his support, all the while knowing full well about his torture chambers and rape rooms. It didn't bother us because the US policymakers thought they could use him to their advantage. When they found out not, now he suddenly becomes this evil person which he was all along."

"A state official was once asked, 'How do you abandon your friends so easily?' And he answered, 'We don't have friends. We have interests.'"

So where are all the Islamic moderates? They don't seem to be getting much airtime these days. Perhaps that's because their voices are too quiet, but perhaps it's because we don't want to hear them.

"One of the things we have to do now is ask the moderates to speak out," Chopra says. "I think one of the reasons the moderates don't speak too much is that they're defensive. They're defensive of things they did not do but they're being at least perceived as having participated in it. This is the attitude of people that feel attacked and judged against. And we do nothing to prevent that from happening. If we were actually to reach out to the moderates and say, 'You have nothing to be defensive about. You don't have anything to be guilty about. We are not judging or humiliating you. Or demeaning you.' When is the last time we said to the moderate Islamic world? 'We want your help?' We said it belligerently when we said, 'Either you're with us or you're against us.'"

One of the comments on "Deepak Chopra on Mumbai: Too Controversial for CNN?" was the suggestion that, just as we wear red ribbons to support AIDS awareness and pink ribbons for breast cancer awareness, we should wear a ribbon to show condemnation for acts of terrorism and see Muslims wear it openly. Would something like this be an effective way for Muslims to demonstrate their stance against terrorism?

"I think something like this would be symbolic for sure." Chopra said, but then quickly adds, "It would not get to the root cause that's contextual and relational. You're not gonna solve this the day after tomorrow. If you really want to solve this we have to work at it for 50 years."

Obama's Tool Belt

REPAIRING BUSH’S REGULATORY WRECKAGE
from Jim Hightower's Common-Sense Commentaries

You don’t hear it outside the Beltway, but there’s a constant roar inside Washington these days.

With time running out on the Bush presidency, wrecking balls are swinging and bulldozers are growling at full throttle as George W and crew rip through federal agencies to knock down as many regulations as they can. At the behest of their corporate cronies, the Bushites have targeted more than 90 regulations that protect consumers, workers, and our environment from corporate greed and carelessness.

One example is a last-minute change in the Clean Air Act to benefit pollution-spewing utilities, allowing utilities to pump an additional 74-million tons of CO2 into our atmosphere. That's the equivalent amount of pollutants that 14 additional coal-fired power plants would emit.

To help rush through such industry-friendly changes, agency heads are arbitrarily curtailing public participation in the process and trying to circumvent requirements for scientific review. For example, in rigging the Clean Air Act for utilities, the scientific analysis justifying the change was so weak that the analysis was simply not put out for public comment.

But, wait – what’s that other sound coming out of Washington? Why it’s the welcome hum of presidential transition!

While the Bushites have been frantically wrecking the regulatory structure to enhance corporate interests, President-elect Barack Obama has quietly been laying plans to restore the regulatory balance to enhance the public interest. He has pulled together a transition team of four dozen experts, and they've been studying the regulatory favors that Bush has done for his political backers. Already, the team has identified some 200 of these overtly-political regs that Obama can quickly reverse after his inauguration.

It looks like Obama and his team are going to come into office wearing tool belts and ready to get right to work repairing the wreckage.

Shrinking Products

STEALTH PRICE INCREASES ON CONSUMER PRODUCTS
from Jim Hightower's Common-Sense Commentaries

Good grief! Whole industries are downsizing, paychecks are shrinking, home values are dwindling, and our 401Ks are deflating to 1Ks. It can’t get any worse, can it?

Well, don’t look now, but they shrunk the toilet paper. Scott Paper is pleased to announce that its "new" toilet product has fully 1,000 sheets of tissue on each roll. Actually, so did the old rolls. What's really new and what the company didn’t announce is that each sheet has been shorted. The old version gave us 4 inches of tissue, but the new and “improved” Scotts has quietly been cut to 3.7 inches in length. That’s a decline of 300 square inches per roll! Yet the price remains the same.

All sorts of corporations are instituting stealth price increases these days by shrinking product content while holding up prices. Skippy peanut butter, for example, ought to change its name to Skimpy. The company is now providing two ounces less in each jar, but it did not lower what it charges us. Worse, Skippy is intentionally trying to hide its consumer heist by playing eye tricks on us. The new jar is the same size as the old one was, so it looks like you’re getting the same amount – unless you turn the jar upside down. Instead of a flat bottom, the jar has an inward dimple that reduces the volume inside.

Likewise, cereal makers are cutting content while maintaining prices, and also using package deception to keep consumers from knowing what’s up – and what’s down. The new cereal boxes have the same height and width, thus looking the same as the old ones on the shelf. But cereal makers cleverly reduced the depth of the packages, leaving you paying more per ounce without knowing it.

One outraged consumer has launched a website chronicling these sneak attacks on our pocketbooks. Check it out: www.mouseprint.org.