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I.
I just got an email from the president of the USA. Here's a copy:

Joel --

Tomorrow, Thanksgiving Day, Americans across the country will sit down together, count our blessings, and give thanks for our families and our loved ones.

American families reflect the diversity of this great nation. No two are exactly alike, but there is a common thread they each share.

Our families are bound together through times of joy and times of grief. They shape us, support us, instill the values that guide us as individuals, and make possible all that we achieve.

So tomorrow, I'll be giving thanks for my family -- for all the wisdom, support, and love they have brought into my life.

But tomorrow is also a day to remember those who cannot sit down to break bread with those they love.

The soldier overseas holding down a lonely post and missing his kids. The sailor who left her home to serve a higher calling. The folks who must spend tomorrow apart from their families to work a second job, so they can keep food on the table or send a child to school.

We are grateful beyond words for the service and hard work of so many Americans who make our country great through their sacrifice. And this year, we know that far too many face a daily struggle that puts the comfort and security we all deserve painfully out of reach.

So when we gather tomorrow, let us also use the occasion to renew our commitment to building a more peaceful and prosperous future that every American family can enjoy.

It seems like a lifetime ago that a crowd met on a frigid February morning in Springfield, Illinois to set out on an improbable course to change our nation.

In the years since, Michelle and I have been blessed with the support and friendship of the millions of Americans who have come together to form this ongoing movement for change.

You have been there through victories and setbacks. You have given of yourselves beyond measure. You have enabled all that we have accomplished -- and you have had the courage to dream yet bigger dreams for what we can still achieve.

So in this season of thanks giving, I want to take a moment to express my gratitude to you, and my anticipation of the brighter future we are creating together.

With warmest wishes for a happy holiday season from my family to yours,

President Barack Obama

pax hominibus,
agape to all,
joel

Labels: anti-oppression, interconnected web, paradigm shift, politics, USA

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Thank you!

For reasons that I am not even fully aware of, and from the bottom of my heart, I am compelled to repeat, "Thank you!"

To each of you here sitting in this space, most of whom I have yet to fully meet and get to know, to an indefinite number of people who have come before and left traces of beauty in this life for me to enjoy, and to all of the plants and animals, this Earth, the Sun, Moon and stars, and to all of the energy and matter in the universe that has come together to make this moment and every other moment, I just want to say, "Thank you!"

My list of blessings in this life has been long. The gift of life from our parents is something each of us were granted through no doing of our own, as far as we know or could attempt to prove. We just arrived here into life. I don't even know who all to be grateful to for this life. My parents were most directly responsible, but for all I know I might want to thank my father's employers for giving him a raise, or my older sisters for both being girls, or perhaps the quality control person at the condom factory for being lax in their duties because it was a Friday.

It's not just the simple gift of life to be grateful for, but to be born into this time and this place. To have the privileges of a family with enough money, that values education; to be born into this world by chance male and white and "straight" in a time and place where those attributes often carry benefits.

And I'm grateful not just for the gift of life, but the gifts that have sustained life. To be born on a planet with the right molecular mix in the air, soil and water--where plants grow easily from seeds, with water and a little care, and to be born into a time with domesticated livestock and to be raised to find them tasty.

I'm grateful to those who have created social systems and technologies that have helped to boost up the quality of life for me, even when those social systems and technologies have caused harm to our environment and to the quality of life of others. And I am grateful to the environment and to those people who have been oppressed for suffering through the damage caused by the inherent evils (or evil byproducts) of those same social systems and technologies.

So many blessings have come to me, and to many of us here, and I think it's of utmost importance that we acknowledge those blessings in all their fullness, even if that stings sometimes. Because by being in life, whatever lot we've received, we are each blessed in fundamental ways just to be alive and aware in the universe--as the universe experiencing itself!

That acknowledgment is critical. The gratitude that we can put forth is critical, because it changes our state of being. The existence of gratitude changes our attitude.

----
In Boy Scouts, in order to use a knife or saw or axe--anything with a blade, it was important to have your "Totin' Chip" card, which meant you'd passed basic safety training. One of the critical piece of knowledge I recall learning was how to safely pass a sharp item from one person to another. When the person receiving the bladed tool had safely gotten a grip on the item, they said "Thank you," as a sign to the giver that the transaction had taken place.
----

The person who does not say "thank you" in this case is dangerous, because the acknowledgement of an exchange is rather unclear. In a similar way, when we fail to acknowledge the benefits we have (or the detriments we avoid), our danger becomes one of ingratitude, of entitlement. Without changing our attitude to one of gratitude, we may continue to expect that more benefits should be heaped upon us.

Incidentally, how many over the course of the last decade have noticed the patriotic phrase "God Bless America" in speeches or on bumper stickers? Has America not already been richly blessed in so many ways? "Astoundingly so!" a reflective person might say. And yet the prevailing attitude of our country has been one of expectations of greater wealth and economic growth, with little acknowledgment of the blessings thus far received.

As a nation--and equally as important, as individuals--our change to a state of gratitude has the potential to work miracles. When we realize what we have been given, our modus operandi changes. The recognition of our wealth turns us away from habits of acquiring and consuming, and away from resistive re-gifting, and toward generosity. The fundamental gift of life calls us to give and to pass it on. Not simply by giving life to new human babies, but by spreading greater life, energy, and love to all the people and beings with which we come into contact.

By acknowledging the privileges obtained by virtue of having a certain gender, race, class, sexual orientation, ability, or nationality, we become aware of clear paths for re-gifting gifts that never ought to have been bestowed unjustly in the first place. Our privileges can be powerful tools for creating equality. Whenever greater equality is achieved and recognized, the gratitude becomes a chain and the world becomes richer.

We each are given the gift of one life, and we each have whatever time, ability, and energy left to do what we will in the world. Some people have become great leaders and turned their lives into amazing works of justice--people like Jesus, Gandhi, Mother Teresa, MLK, Cesar Chavez, and Dorothy Day. But for every one of those well-known saints, there are thousands of people playing supporting roles in those movements. And for every preeminent social movement, there are thousands of unrecognized or anonymous movements that support the lives of smaller communities, families and individuals.

So...you may be blessed with the skills and opportunities to be a great leader. Or you may be blessed with money, energy or time to re-gift toward important projects. Or you may be blessed with a mind, a heart, a voice, hands, and a body, each of which you can create new gifts.

Whatever gifts you have been given, receive them and acknowledge them.

And then let your life be a Thank You!



lyrics: "If the Sun refused to shine, I would still be loving you."
from Thank You, by Led Zeppelin

colors: Green and gold. (A lush grass-green, and real gold, not Green Bay Packer green-and-gold.)

mood: grateful

chant/prayer/mantra: thanks.


pax hominibus,
agape to all,
joel

Labels: interconnected web, paradigm shift, Process Thought, restorative justice, sermons, theology

Today's service at First UU San Francisco was dedicated to the Unitarian Universalist United Nations Office. Here is a picture of the preamble to the UN Charter, drafted 60+ years ago,written as a response to the end of WWII, "the war to end all wars." This picture was taken down on UN Plaza, by where Hyde St. meets Market. St.



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chant/prayer/mantra: Put an end to the war machine, and devote all those lost resources to peacetime prosperity efforts.


pax hominibus,
agape to all,
joel

Labels: economics, equal rights, globalism, multiculturalism, paradigm shift, parousia, pax hominibus/bright shiny future, theological sources, universal health care

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Plastic is problematic for many reasons.

First, it's made from oil, which might well be usable in other ways in the future that we haven't even thought of yet, but we're running through at a breakneck pace.
Second, it doesn't biodegrade.
Third, it's polluting our oceans and killing them. Here is some important recent information about the garbage patches in the Pacific Ocean, along with their effects.

In short, we need to:

• Discontinue using nonbiodegradable plastic, and switch to other materials for our bags, our products, and our drinking/storage vessels.
• Gather up all of the plastic on land and store it safely, or put it to good use where it won't go missing in the ocean, killing untolled wildlife populations.
• Design some type of swimming robots that can identify and capture plastic in our oceans, and return it back to land.
• Educate everybody about plastics, and find new ways of living where plastic plays a dramatically different role in our lives.

lyrics:
"Tried to save the trees
Bought a plastic bag
The bottom fell out
It was a piece of crap"
From Piece of Crap, by Neil Young

colors: color of clear plastic 6-pack can ring containers. (I always cut them up so they don't get caught on the birds' necks if they get into the wild, but really that's nowhere near enough.)


pax hominibus,
agape to all,
joel

Labels: economics, environment, indifferent corporations, interconnected web, paradigm shift

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I just came across this story about a developer in India who is building and selling condominium apartments for between $7800 and $13,400 each. That's not annual rent. That is the price it costs to purchase and own these units. Here's the simple floorplans, ranging in size from 283 to 465 square feet. This is the same guy who developed and marketed the $2000 car.

According to a study two years ago, there were 744,000 homeless people in the United States. The average price of one of these condominiums is $10,000.

Okay, let's do the math. But first, let's say that apartments like this actually cost a little more to build in the United States. Say it costs twice that, so it's $20,000 per condominium. And let's assume that the number of homeless in the U.S. has tripled with this economic recession/depression, so we have an estimate of roughly 2.5 million homeless now.
And let's assume that not every homeless person is single, and that these apartments are going to be suitable for two people each. That means we divide by two.

DOING THE MATH:

2,500,000 x 20,000 / 2 = ?

25 billion dollars!

For only 25 billion dollars, the United States could have addresses for every homeless person, and a place to lay their head down and call their own. Without home addresses, it's really difficult to get a job, because where will potential employers contact you? This would only help the economy. We spent 700 billion dollars (and much much more) to try and bail out the bankers (who by and large still have homes after screwing us, thank you very much). That is 28 times as much as it would cost to give all of our homeless people homes.

I've already done this math before. This is the second time I've specifically mentioned this here. My thinking this time agrees with my thinking then.

The United States is a sad, sad place if we can't do this. No, it's not that we can't do it. It's that those who control where resources go refuse (or do not have the will) to do it. Guilt and shame, to the highest order of magnitude, rides upon the heads of all those who have the capacity to make this happen but do not. HERE IS A CASE OF THE GOOD SAMARITAN WRIT LARGE, and being "good Sam" in this case doesn't even require these people to spend their own money to make it happen -- only to dedicate a portion of the budget from our commonwealth. Honor and true pride can swell within those who dedicate resources to making this happen, and see it through.

And I realize that I was here talking about the United States, because that is presently the primary domain of my jurisdiction, but this simple mathematics can be extended to everywhere on the planet. If there are 500 million people without homes across this planet, the math works out to 2.5 trillion dollars. A seemingly large sum, but not when you think about it over the long haul, and of the benefits it would provide.


lyrics:
"Feed the babies
Who don't have enough to eat
Shoe the children
With no shoes on their feet
House the people
Livin' in the street
Oh, oh, theres a solution."
From Fly Like an Eagle, by Steve Miller

colors: Brown, as in the new mud huts for everyone. BTW, I hope that these apartments are eco-friendly. For this to be a real solution, they should be as eco-friendly and sustainable as possible.

mood: Hopeful.

chant/prayer/mantra: A place for everybody.


pax hominibus,
agape to all,
joel

PS- Here's an even more affordable housing design, perhaps preferable, and from a company with a true eco-friendly, people-friendly mission statement.

Labels: anti-oppression, changing the prison paradigm, economics, homelessness, interconnected web, paradigm shift, restorative justice, USA

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A friend recently sent an email to me about how his 19 year old daughter is going to abduct herself, and ask Barack Obama to come save her, in order to call attention to an ongoing atrocity in Northern Uganda, in which a man named Joseph Kony has been kidnapping kids and forcing them to become brutal soldiers.

Several hundred youths have put up videos on YouTube.com to get the attention of celebrities, and include this text in the Information box to the right of the videos:

We want YOU to come to The Rescue! April 25th, 2009! Watch the movie about the situation in Uganda and The Congo at therescue.invisiblechildren.com And contact us (publicists, assistants, offices, moms) if you are willing to come or have questions at therescue@invisiblechildren.com

I wish them well in their effort, and it will be interesting to see how this form of information activism changes the world. Would it necessarily be a bad thing if more and more causes started to saturate the new airwaves, to direct us toward the things that really need attention?


pax hominibus,
agape to all,
joel

Labels: globalism, interconnected web, paradigm shift

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About a month ago, I went shopping at the local Grocery Outlet, and saw some sugar frosted flakes in a box on one of the aisles. It caught my attention because it had an interesting looking guy (a la Buzz Lightyear) on the front of the box. I turned the box around, and on the other side, it had the same picture, but with all Arabic writing on it, probably saying something like "Sugar Frosted Flakes."



So I bought it, and I just finished eating it (Yes, I still sometimes indulge in sugar cereal), and I took pictures of it, and then I went to visit their website, nmc.ae (beware the loud cheesy music that accompanies the intro video).

Labels: art, Capitalism, indifferent corporations, inter-faith, Islam, paradigm shift, theological sources, UAE

OK, I'm really not much of an organizer, but I just had an idea, and I hope an organizer picks up on this one. I have been reflecting on the nature of labor, investment, and reward in the U.S. culture, and have come up with this. The people who do the work get the least reward. The people who own the resources upon/with which the workers work get first dibs on the reward.

That is nothing new, and it takes a fool not to notice that. That is not the idea I am speaking of.

The idea I am speaking of is the direct application of the above when it comes to today's situation. It comes from seeing what happened with Enron, and seeing what happened with that Madoff guy recently and his execution of the latest Ponzi/pyramid scheme. With the U.S. government pouring tons of borrowed/taxed dollars into banks and such, where it is not fully accountable and being siphoned off, the government is looking to be the greater fool.

And ultimately, that leaves the people holding the bag. The taxes we paid, and the money borrowed that we will have to pay to God knows who, are being invested in the pockets of pillagers. These pillagers include those at the top/inside/beginning of the stock market game, and the CEO's still receiving exorbitant sums, after their companies received a part of the $700 billion bank bailout.

In short, any government money that is being borrowed from the future, and not being invested in our future -- in the infrastructures of:

• good mass transit (trains, ferries, and electric busses)
• clean and renewable electricity (solar (both centralized and decentralized), wind, tidal, etc)
• a system of refueling stations for electric cars
• r & d for clean battery technologies
• an intelligent and extensible educational system, using both democratically-influenced mass media and community involvement in local schools and recreation centers
  
• desalinization and fresh water control systems
• sustainable agricultural systems and a return to healthy environmental practices and a re-empowered EPA system of oversight
  
• overhauling failed systems such as the abhorrently wastrel military budget and the prison complex
  
• healthy families, living at or above poverty
• i'm sure i missed a few, but the above are all very important and should be near the top of the list...
  

Any money being invested elsewhere, further afield than that related to our real well-being, and the people who are putting it there are criminal. We the common citizens of the U.S. will be left holding the bag, without real investment in our country's future, while the folks in the Senate with a country club sensibility and nary a clue of what it's like to be out in the cold, and those with the tightest connections -- they will be (are) the first to cash in on the economy as the true value of this U.S. company becomes more clear. With our tax dollars ending up in somebody's pockets, it will be really difficult to get it back.

We the people had our money invested over the last eight years (and many prior) by "mutual fund managers" who did not have our interests in mind, or had the singular interest of maximizing money, not in responsible investment. When their investments failed because of unsane monetary policies such as the outrageous overextended ratio allowed (or unregulated) for fractional-reserve banking newly-constructed credit default swap market, the investment (put into things that had low value anyway) has gone sour.

One REAL rule for investors: Put your money in things that you want to see saved/thrive. It's not difficult. It's only difficult if you treat investments as if it's gambling. Put your money in what needs to thrive, and you will see it pay you back in ways well beyond those seen in dividends, stock options and monetary ROI's.



lyrics: No his mind is not for rent to any god or government.
-Tom Sawyer, by Rush

colors: green, as in money. and green, as in environment.


pax hominibus,
agape to all,
joel

Labels: Capitalism, changing the prison paradigm, desalinization, economics, environment, paradigm shift, politics, USA

The site is designed to detail all the intended changes during the transition period from Bush to Obama. Pretty impressive that they're already ready to go with this. They must've been working on it for a long time prior to the election.

lyrics: "Long time coming, but I know that change is gonna come." Otis Redding

colors: What is the color of change?

chant/prayer/mantra: may it be smooth.


pax hominibus,
agape to all,
joel

Labels: paradigm shift, pax hominibus/bright shiny future, politics

Oh my. This article on the demise of our monetary system by visionary writer Charles Eisenstein is a goldmine of cogent sanity. It tells the story so clearly, it is almost unethical to provide a link to it. But according to whose ethic?

I hope all my friends get a chance to read it. I'll comment more on this article later.

"In the face of the impending crisis, people often ask what they can do to protect themselves. "Buy gold? Stockpile canned goods? Build a fortified compound in a remote area? What should I do?" I would like to suggest a different kind of question: "What is the most beautiful thing I can do?" You see, the gathering crisis presents a tremendous opportunity. Deflation, the destruction of money, is only a categorical evil if the creation of money is a categorical good."

"In the meantime, anything we do to protect some natural or social resource from conversion into money will both hasten the collapse and mitigate its severity. Any forest you save from development, any road you stop, any cooperative playgroup you establish; anyone you teach to heal themselves, or to build their own house, cook their own food, make their own clothes; any wealth you create or add to the public domain; anything you render off-limits to the world-devouring machine, will help shorten the Machine's lifespan. Think of it this way: if you already do not depend on money for some portion of life's necessities and pleasures, then the collapse of money will pose much less of a harsh transition for you. The same applies to the social level. Any network or community or social institution that is not a vehicle for the conversion of life into money will sustain and enrich life after money."

Here's another good article from realitysandwich.com, talking about the end of our current global economic system. This is some serious stuff.

lyrics: My dog is running in her dreams. I know, 'cause she's kicking her feet. I've been having dreams about earthquakes, and doves, and things.

colors: the color of war is the color of blood is the color of money. money, money, money, money. oink, oink, oink, oink. -god bullies, off of some song from the album war on everybody.

mood: stressed out and procrastinating

chant/prayer/mantra: a deep prayer for a transition through the coming crisis.


pax hominibus,
agape to all,
joel

Labels: Capitalism, environment, paradigm shift, pax hominibus/bright shiny future

Labels: art, Book of Romans, Capitalism, Christianity, equal rights, heaven on earth, oppression, paradigm shift, parousia, pax hominibus/bright shiny future, tarot