3Ts

"Hello, I'm a Mac, and I'm a PC -- Here's How I Help Fuel the World's Deadliest Conflict"

Google is the New Corpo-Nation

Wow..didn't think anyone had pushing power against China. I'm glad someone has the chutzpah to stand up to them.

"The United States has become a holding company -- owning big chunks of banks and car companies, naming board members -- while Google is speaking out about human rights and censorship."

Crop Mobbed

More fantastic ideas on how to create a sustainable farm...This one is spreading around North Carolina called Crop Mob, were a community of people volunteer their manpower to help small farms get tons of work done in one day

Willie Smits Restores a Rainforest

This is such an inspiring story...permaculture at its finest. I can only imagine the possibilities when we accomplish restoration like this in other countries.

Move Your Money

A wonderful new website that has been created called Move Your Money that promotes the idea of supporting local economies and community banks. No more giant banks that are "too big to fail". This website provides a list of banks in your community that are worth investing your money in.

The Commercialization of Childhood

Madness, Civilization and Media

A powerful article by Antonio Lopez, Madness, Civilization and Media discussing our collective abduction from being bonded to mother earth.

Excerpt from article, "Yet western civilization is itself a removal and displacement machine. To quote Andy Warhol, 'Being born is like being kidnapped. And then sold into slavery.' This is the story of the past 5,000 years. We have been kidnapped from Earth, but fail to recognize the aberration. Is it fair to say that as hostages to abstract principles, we suffer from collective Stockholm Syndrome -- that we have bonded with an abusing overlord?"

Quantum Communication

A new documentary explaining the world's consciousness through quantum physics....below is the trailer

Mos Def Keepin it Real on Bill Maher

Terrorists, Religion, Racism, etc....

Hope Over Fear

10 Ways the World Could End

Stephen Petranek lays out the challenges that face us in the drive to preserve the human race. These aren't just your run-of-the-mill fantasy apocalyptic disasters....These are real threats. And Petranek gives succinct solutions to all of them.

(Filmed Feb 2002)

Reuniting the Self: Autoimmunity, Obesity, and the Ecology of Health

Reuniting the Self: Autoimmunity, Obesity, and the Ecology of Health
By Charles Eisenstein for Reality Sandwich

This article is Part 2 of a two-part series. Read Part 1 here.

What is a human being? A human being is a nexus of relationships: the sum total of the connections among his or her cells, organs, and inner ecosystem; connections to other human beings that define the psyche; connections to the rest of nature and this living planet that allow life to exist. Modern thought, recognizing only a small subset of these as intrinsic to our beingness, offers us a much smaller self: the separate self of the selfish gene and the economic man, the skin-encapsulated ego and the Cartesian mote of consciousness. Rendered small, we are rendered sick.

We are relationship. The connected self that is the true human being has been reduced at the hands of civilization, leaving an isolated remnant that is not whole. Innumerable configurations of this unwholeness, or lack of health, afflict the members of our culture, each in a unique way. Depending on the vagaries of nurture and genetics, we each adapt differently to the onslaught of Separation. As Part 1 of this essay describes, some of us embody our culture's self-other confusion on a literal, somatic level as an autoimmune disease, in which the immune system attacks part of the very organism it is meant to defend and on which it depends, much as we do to planet Earth.

The loss of self that lies at the heart of our civilization manifests in many less literal ways as well, physical and social. Consider cancer: cells that have forgotten their proper function, and instead devote all their resources toward an endless growth that eventually kills the host, and themselves as well. Modern humanity appears to be behaving exactly so in relationship to the earth. It is by no coincidence that the toxic byproducts of our collective iniquity are precisely what cause cancer in the individual.

As is the case with self-rejection and autoimmunity, a psychological level mediates between the collective and the somatic. In fact, in economically developed countries (i.e., those in which the conversion of nature, community, and culture into money has proceeded the furthest), the primary manifestation of the wound of separation is psychological: feelings of loneliness, alienation, anxiety, depression, anomie, and muted rage. They are the interior image of the starvation, physical desperation, torture, military violence, imprisonment, and genocide that go hand in hand with our power, waste, and empty wealth. These primary psychological conditions, in turn, engender physical and social conditions that draw the suffering outward into a tangible form.

To put it more simply, the things we do to hurt the world hurt our own souls, and hurt souls create sick bodies and a sick society. I will illustrate how this happens via the example of obesity.

It is not surprising that the lonely, diminished self of modern civilization should crave to restore something of its lost being. We have been shorn of the connections that make us whole. Your ancestors in a hunter-gatherer tribe or agrarian village lived in a matrix of connections that we can barely imagine today. At least I can barely imagine it, and not without weeping. In those times, every face you saw day-to-day was a familiar face. The relationships that sustained life were personal relationships. You knew the person who grew your food and cooked your food, you knew the person who built your house and made your clothes, you knew the person who sang your songs and performed your entertainment. Most likely, you knew them intimately, as they knew you. You knew each other's histories, who your first love was, your narrow escape from death at age four, that embarrassing incident at age 12, your pranks and your personality; you knew the stories of each other's parents and grandparents as well. You were woven together in a rich social tapestry that defined who you were. Being intimately known by others, you knew yourself as well. Furthermore, any action reverberated in a very tangible way out into the community, and back again to you. It was obvious that what you do to others, you in fact do to yourself. The Golden Rule was not originally a rule at all, but a description.

Today these relationships still exist in some sense: as before, we more or less depend on other people to grow our food, cook our food, make our clothes, build our houses, and provide our entertainment. But today, these people are strangers, and the relationships are no longer love relationships, but money relationships. Today, as some 60% of all meals are prepared outside the home, even the person who cooks our food is often a stranger. Outside a very narrow realm, our relationships become superficial: if all our needs are provided by strangers, what indeed is there to do together? Friendship becomes a matter of getting together to consume something: food, drink, a movie. Joint consumption brings out nothing of our real selves. We cannot know or be known. Yet this is an essential human need; it is essential to our very identity. If we are not intimately involved in each other's life stories, we suffer a deficit of being. We are not whole.

We are similarly bereft of intimate connection to the land, to nature and to place. Our ancestors knew their place in the web of life, knew each animal and plant species as a distinct individual, each hill and stream, and the relationships among all of them. This web of relationships defined who they were. Today we live in a machine world of deliberate uniformity, a world of standardized products and identical right angles, words and numbers and dollar signs. Inevitably we too feel like a cog in the machine, a standardized component with a standardized education, job description, degrees, credentials, and technical skills, and suffer a consequent loss of identity. Who am I and what makes me different? In a generic, uniform world, we cannot know.

Tormented by the alienation and loneliness of a diminished, isolated self, we do our best to add on to that self. There are several ways to do this. The most literal way is to enlarge the body. We become fat, literally expanding our physical selves. But of course, no amount of added corpulence can compensate for the grievous loss of being that comes from cutting ourselves off from the social and natural universe.

If you are not fat, maybe your attempt to compensate for the cutoff of your larger self takes another form. Another way to extend the small self is through money and possessions. Why are people so greedy for these things, far beyond their objective utility? Greedy for the things we call "mine"? It is yet another futile attempt to remedy our deficit of being. The separate self grows and grows, assuming bloated proportions, but this hypertrophied agglomeration of flesh or possessions still falls infinitely short of the connected self, whose being partakes in that of the whole universe.

In the last five decades, the average size of a new American home has more than doubled. Beyond the body, the home is the most immediate extension of the self. It has grown in tandem with the decline of community, civic participation, and public space. As the social dimensions of the self have atrophied, the home has grown in fake compensation, and life has moved indoors. Unfortunately, this expanded private realm is all the more lonely, driving further acquisitiveness. We gape at the super-rich, wondering, aghast, how they could have so much and still want more, wondering how much will be enough. In fact, no amount is enough. No amount of house or money or possessions or status or prestige or power or fame can ever meet the need to reestablish intimate relationships with human community and nature.

As is well-known, obesity is correlated with low social class. The usual explanation is either that poor people are ignorant ("less well-educated"), or that they can only afford crappy, fattening food. I disagree. I think a deeper explanation is that the rich person's means of expanding the separate self -- large house, money, possessions -- are unavailable, so the poor person can only expand the body.

All of this, of course, is unconscious. All the individual is aware of is a hunger, a need for something more. The fact that obese people often eat when they are not physically hungry offers a clue to what is going on. Indeed, they are hungry -- they just aren't hungry for food. They are hungry for connection. Food is the most tangible, direct confirmation of our connection to a living universe that loves us. On a primal biological level, the act of eating tells us, "I exist" and "I am loved." Indeed, food is the most basic expression of love, a token of intimacy, of bringing an outsider into the realm of self. That is why it is customary in most countries to offer food to a guest, and why it is rude to refuse it. To feed another is, in this sense, an intimate act, an opening of the sacred boundaries of self. When, as today, this intimate act has become a subject of commerce, and food a commodity, the entire food system reeks of obscenity. Ha ha, now it seems that I am likening restaurants to brothels and chefs to prostitutes! I don't want to demean either of these ancient professions, so let me just say that to offer either sex or food casually and carelessly is an affront to the divine Giver of these sacred gifts. Speaking now only of chefs, and leaving the reader to draw whatever other conclusions he or she likes, I will observe that to offer this sacred gift without love -- that is, without care, attention, and artistry -- feels sordid and emptying. That is why I steer away from, ahem, restaurants that seem motivated primarily by profit, that want to merely gain off my deep biological and emotional needs. Some things are too sacred to sell, whether for money or for some intangible emotional currency. One feels used. That is not to say a restaurant should not charge money, nor that we should not gain emotional highs or self-esteem from sex -- it is just that these should be secondary. The same is true of anything we give to the world. When it becomes "for the money" we cease being artists.

The need for connection is intertwined with the need for love, since it is love that opens the boundaries of the separate self to let in a bit more of the world. When I love someone, his or her self-interest becomes my own. That is why the environmental movement signifies such a profound shift in human consciousness. Separate too long in the world of the Machine, we are falling back in love with the world.

Consigned by modern civilization to a tiny, isolated self, we suffer from a powerful unmet need for love and connection. To meet this need is more important than life itself. People will do almost anything to meet it. It is time to release our condemnation of the people with bloated bodies, or bloated bank accounts, houses, egos, or other enlargements of the separate self. They are merely trying to meet their most beautiful needs. They are trying to connect and find love, in whatever tiny way is available at the end of the Age of the Machine. As I described in the Miracle of Self-creation essays, it is foolish and futile to try to fight the expression of these needs, whether in ourselves or others. If food is the only way someone has to show herself love, would you impose a diet on her and take away even that scrap of self-love? No, it is much better to do what you can to meet the need directly. The same is true for all those greedy people in SUVs, or whoever else happens to be the favorite target of our derogation. Meet the need -- the need for love and connection -- directly. It is easy if you see the true source of the behavior. It is easy to see people with eyes of love, if you know that they are simply trying to meet their beautiful needs.

Specifically, this might mean encouraging and validating the very behavior that appears to be the cause of the trouble. To do what you already do (and cannot stop doing) without guilt magnifies its effect as self-love, and breaks the pattern of indulgence followed by self-blame followed by more indulgence to comfort the blamed self. I describe these dynamics and how to undo them in more depth in my short book, Transformational Weight Loss (still in beta edition). Essentially, conventional restrictive approaches to dieting (which fail 98% of the time) are based on the idea that the problem is too much: too much food, too much greed, too selfish, too indulgent, too lazy, too weak. In fact, the problem is one of lack. A diet imposes more lack, and ultimately intensifies the driving unmet needs.

Obesity is usually taken as a symptom of excess, but in fact the reverse is true. Obesity, and the other enlargements I have mentioned, are actually symptoms of the most profound destitution ever to visit the human race. The bloated lifestyles of the American rich harbor an inner poverty exactly equal to the Third World poverty that enables those lifestyles. Half the world cannot get enough to eat, and the other half cannot get enough no matter how much they eat. It is a complete tapestry, perfect and horrifying.

Thankfully, this tapestry is unraveling today. The world built upon the separate self is collapsing around us, as we see in the converging crises of money, energy, health, education, politics, and environment. Each crisis contains the rest. For example, it is no accident that the cutoff of our true selves is a great business opportunity: we must buy the substitutes for the missing parts of the connected self. The same Separation that is at the root of obesity is also at the root of global economic exploitation, as it as at the root of the current wave of thinly-disguised fascism. Here is a passage from The Ascent of Humanity:

People who are firmly ensconced in a local, kinship-based community are less susceptible to consumerism and fascism alike, because both base their appeal on a need for self-identity. Therefore, to introduce consumerism to a previously isolated culture it is first necessary to destroy its sense of identity. Here's how: Disrupt its networks of reciprocity by introducing consumer items from the outside. Erode its self-esteem with glamorous images of the West. Demean its mythologies through missionary work and scientific education. Dismantle its traditional ways of transmitting local knowledge by introducing schooling with outside curricula. Destroy its language by providing that schooling in English or another national or world language. Truncate its ties to the land by importing cheap food to make local agriculture uneconomic. Then you will have created a people hungry for the right sneaker.

I hope it is clear now how obesity and its consumerist equivalents are a symptom of poverty, not wealth. In essence, we have been robbed of something so fundamental to our humanness that we are left ever hungry. We live with an ache than can never be assuaged, a hole that can never be filled. So of course we eat and we buy, spending the proceeds from the sale of our very being. We have lost our selves, and received mere money in return, if even that. And the robbery continues apace, and, driven by the relentless engine of an interest-based money system, must proceed until there is nothing left to sell. This is the point of utter destitution we are fast approaching today. As with nature's goodness and beauty, as with our cultural heritage, as with our human relationships, our health too we have pawned away. The epidemics of our time show the extent of our pauperdom.

The point of utter destitution is also the point of turning, the turning of the age. We can no longer endure the pain of separation. We are beginning to experience the softening and expansion of the separate self. Many readers I am sure have been through this process themselves, probably more than once: trying to hold everything together with increasing control, and eventually giving up, letting the world in, softening and expanding, reclaiming lost connections through the medium of love. Is it too much to say, as multiple crises reach their fulfillment and plunge masses of people through this process all at once, that we are entering an Age of Love?

Necessarily, I have written of the obesity epidemic in a very general way, but of course each person is separate in a unique way. Each of us is missing different parts of our true connected selves. Therefore, the path to healing is unique as well. The overeater is hungry for something that food can never satisfy, but what? The answer is individual, but healing will usual involve loving yourself (and therefore something outside yourself) in a way you have not before. The true self must expand for the separate self to shrink. The same is true whether your inflation is corporeal or via some other type of consumption. Forceful attempts to conquer the ego are therefore no more successful than going on a diet. I do not want my description of the plunder of the self to evoke more fear, more control, more desire to "fight evil". The horror of our circumstances is very real, but its end is nigh. Please do not misunderstand me to be advocating inaction. There is action that is not fighting. That time is nearly over. The action to take now comes from remembering and reminding; from that, powerful, courageous actions spring unstoppably. The love that comes with the crumbling of the separate self is not a mere sentiment.

A paradise on earth is available right now, easily, closer than close. It is a shift of perception away. The epidemics of our time show us that, too. A prodigious energy will be freed when we end the War against the Self encoded in autoimmunity. A magnificent abundance will become available when we stop consuming things we don't need in compensation for the things we do. And these shifts together come as a result of the pain of the diseases themselves, and of the other ills of our age. The illness is the medicine. The true nature of the connected self, love, is beckoning in every realm. It is your true nature and it is mine. Let us relax into it.

Obama Isn't the Only One Being Inaugurated on Jan. 20th

Obama Isn't the Only One Being Inaugurated on Jan. 20th
By Arianna Huffington

Barack Obama is not the only one being inaugurated on January 20th. We all are.

And that's not just because Obama has promised to make a call to service "a central cause" of his presidency. It's because this moment in history demands that we stop waiting on others -- especially others living in Washington D.C. -- to solve the problems and right the wrongs of our times. Now, more than ever, we must mine the most underutilized resource available to us: ourselves.

The night before Obama is sworn in, HuffPost is co-hosting a pre-Inaugural ball at the Newseum in Washington. Just before midnight we are going to have a Countdown to a New Era. It's a new era not just because the Bush Years will officially be over, and not just because Barack Obama will be president, but because taking on the challenges America is facing will require a new era of citizen responsibility and engagement.

To illustrate this we are putting together a video that will symbolize that we are all stakeholders -- all being inaugurated on January 20th -- by having people from across America send us video of themselves taking the presidential oath of office: "I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will faithfully execute the office of President of the United States, and will to the best of my ability, preserve, protect and defend the Constitution of the United States."

The preamble of the Constitution starts with We the People. And it has never been clearer than it is now that we can't "form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity" without the active participation of millions of us. It is not just the Bush Years that should be over on January 20th, but also the expectation that a knight in shining armor will ride into town and save us while we cheer from the sidelines. Even if the knight is brilliant, charismatic, and inspiring. It's up to us -- We the People.

And Obama himself has said as much many times throughout the campaign. He asked Americans "to step into the strong currents of history, and to shape your country's future. Because your own story and the American story are not separate, they are shared. And they will both be enriched if together, we answer a new call to service to meet the challenges of our new century...."

Arianna Huffington is asking us to make and send our own Oath Videos (more info in article) and then sign the service pledge

Panetta Is Chosen as C.I.A. Chief, in a Surprise Step

Seems that there were very few choices for CIA Chief that didn't have their hands involved in all the recent torture interrogations...But I'm glad Obama chose one that didn't (even if he was Clinton's choice years ago)

Panetta Is Chosen as C.I.A. Chief, in a Surprise Step
By MARK MAZZETTI and CARL HULSE for The NY Times


*Update 1/7/09
Just read Panetta's comment in the 2008 Washigton Monthly....And all I can say is Huzzah!!

"Those who support torture may believe that we can abuse captives in certain select circumstances and still be true to our values. But that is a false compromise. We either believe in the dignity of the individual, the rule of law, and the prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment, or we don't. There is no middle ground. We cannot and we must not use torture under any circumstances. We are better than that."- Panetta

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?

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...

"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.

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...

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