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Greetings All,
There are some fascinating things happening! One of which is on June 16, 2008, astronomers at the European Science Observatory (ESO) in La Silla, Chile, announced another solar system had been discovered, and it’s only 42 light years away.
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The system has three planets kind of like Earth, but not Earth-like; the earths wouldn’t be nice places to visit, and we couldn’t live on one of them, either.
One thing we obviously must live with is poligion. One night last week, I got ruffled about typing the words politics and religion over and over. A few seconds after feeling that way for the umpteenth time, I blended the two words. Patting myself on the back for my wordmastery, I googled the word poligion, then the word poligious, and what to my wondering eyes appeared but those two words. Someone had already done the two blends. So much for my linguistic episode! Along the way, you might read someone’s ideas for poligiosity.
Long time readers will remember the early days when Staying Awake ezine was a feel good digest with stories that went down like cookies with a warm cup of tea. That was before I uncovered the world of opinions cut up and laid down like sliced, fresh zesty onions. If we wish for reprieve from worlds of brazen cockiness of poligious mongers, we’re on the wrong planet. Like a zillion ezines, blogs, and web sites, Staying Awake will remain a mix of research and opinion, a cosmological antidote to poligiosity and scientific naïveté.
Although knaves win in every political struggle, although society seems to be delivered over from the hands of one set of criminals into the hands of another set of criminals, as fast as the government is changed, and the march of civilization is a train of felonies, yet, general ends are somehow answered. We see, now, events forced on which seem to retard or retrograde the civility of ages. But the world-spirit is a good swimmer, and storms and waves cannot drown him. He snaps his finger at laws: and so, throughout history, heaven seems to affect low and poor means. Through the years and the centuries, through evil agents, through toys and atoms, a great and beneficent tendency irresistibly streams.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson (b 1803), excerpt from his essay Representative Men: Montaigne; or, the Skeptic (1850)
Humor Irregularity
One favorite weekly read comes from Rabbi Michael Lerner in San Francisco, California USA. He knows histories of Israel, Palestine, the whole Middle East, and I gawk at his expansive analyses of culture, politics, social theory, and religion as well as various contemporary messes the West has catalyzed in the Middle East and elsewhere.
Recently, Lerner added hilarious narratives from the creative mind of Swami Beyondananda, whose satire and irony are passed on in Lerner’s magazine Tikkun. Here are paraphrases from Lerner’s recently emailed memo.
Do you suffer from irregular hilarity, or painful humorrhoids? Yes? The truth is shocking—but not surprising. Four out of five Americans don’t laugh enough. Even sadder, one in five suffer from painful humorrhoids: an enlargement of the onus which causes so much seriousness that the only things they are able to pass are heavy judgments!
All so unnecessary, when all that is needed is a gentle laughsitive to release jestive blockages and restore regular hilarity. Scientific studies show a funny one liner can heal a mega-hurt of emotional distress.
The contemporary guru, Swami Beyondananda, won’t hug you to enlightenment, but he’ll help overcome the Bush-Cheney blues, and even help you overcome depression generated by Obama’s capitulation to AIPAC (Swami calls it pandermonium), and to the “boycott Cuba” crowd in Florida.
In the Tikkun May/June issue, Beyondananda commented that USA was in an uproar about Elliot Spitzer’s prostitutes but not George Bush’s prostitution of the Constitution.
There’s a new affliction to add to the panoply of diseases our poor [USA] body politic is suffering from. Along with Mad Cowboy Disease, Deficit Inattention Disorder, Irony Deficiency, and Truth Decay, we now have Spitzerphrenia. This is where you can be nailed for screwing a prostitute, but if you screw the entire world, you get off scot free.
~ Swami Beyondananda
To add to Swami’s satire, here’s a creative, upbeat resource that exposes men’s clubs of mega-maniacal media moguls, whose unethical decisions and actions could lead to corroborated evidence of shameless extortion. Refer video: Free Press dot net
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Revisiting Communication
When I began this newsletter, I didn’t think so much of it would slice through media’s perception management of our imaginations. While the rest of this ezine was inspired by Free Press National Conference for Media Reform, think of the following sections as exercises for revisiting communication, from which a stinging critique sticks in the faces of moguls who threaten obsequious journalists, and solicit naïve listeners and readers.
Since WORLD WAR TWO, corporate media has gradually quickened their allowance for just the right amount of information, for any given time, for a specific purpose, for any given populace, to sustain psychological enslavements of imaginations. Through subtle campaigns in marketing, advertising, and realty escalations, dispersals of information by distributors of wealth have kept hirelings soft-witted slaves of irredeemable indebtedness to the central banking system.
On the weekend of June 6, 2008, National Conference for Media Reform in Minneapolis, Minnesota USA, began revisiting communication indulgences of the main stream media, which have been Free Press’s passion to reform.
During the weekend, Executive Director of Free Press, Josh Silver, gave a keynote along with speakers Bill Moyers, Dan Rather, Amy Goodman, Naomi Klein, Arianna Huffington, Bob McChesney, and more speakers whom you might already know. Networking together, they coerce media lobbyists to end failures of communicating relevant information.
Should we find ourselves not quite awake to all that reformists are accomplishing, then here’s a good wake up for remembering a man who also confronted a leviathan on our behalf: you’ll remember the final two paragraphs of Mark Klein’s public statement given to The New York Times. ¹
“Given the public debate about the constitutionality of the Bush administration’s spying on U.S. citizens without obtaining a FISA [Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act] warrant, I think it is critical that this information be brought out into the open, and that the American people be told the truth about the extent of the administration’s warrantless surveillance practices, particularly as it relates to the internet.
“Despite what we are hearing, and considering the public track record of this administration, I simply do not believe their claims that the NSA’s [National Security Agency] spying program is really limited to foreign communications or is otherwise consistent with the NSA’s charter or with FISA. And unlike the controversy over targeted wiretaps of individuals’ phone calls, this potential spying appears to be applied wholesale to all sorts of internet communications of countless citizens.”
On Our Behalf
Corporate capitalistic media is not a watch dog protecting citizens from pandemonium, it’s a lapdog begging for scraps. During the most recent sixty years, and on our behalf, USA with other nations have been wronged by scandalous, plutocratic laws and behaviors. But knowing that is no consolation in the face of bad faith that yokes media to the insolent Bronze Age White House: corporatocracies’ propaganda has laid waste journalism’s vigor.
However, in May, 2008, Free Press pressured the Senate to reject Federal Communication Commission’s [FCC] latest attempt to abolish net neutrality; meaning, Free Press stopped—on our behalf—the White House and Congress from turning Internet into a private thiefdom for cable and phone conglomerates.
Free Press is working with USA Congress to award thousands of new, low-power FM radio licenses to cities and towns that desperately need independent voices. Free Press challenges unfair postal rate hikes that threaten shutting down independent publications, the lifeblood of communications. ²
We Now Know
We now know the Pentagon poured millions of dollars into a covert campaign to sell the IRAQ war to USA citizenry, who sacrificed lives and goodwill of other nations. And media handed over a megaphone allowing the Pentagon to invade airwaves and newspaper stands with an army of retired generals, those so-called message-force multipliers, who appeared or were cited more than 4,500 times on all major television networks, even National Public Radio (NPR).
We now know media rolled over for the White House administration, not just about the IRAQ war, but for nearly every major decision facing USA—from message multipliers to prepackaged, undisclosed propaganda presented on local nightly news.
We now know USA leaders, partying with media moguls, preyed on imaginations with a cynical public relations campaign, upgrading security warnings to Orwellian orange and red, distracting from the Administration’s latest embarrassing or illegal acts.
The USA citizens have been made afraid; we’ve been abandoned not only by USA government, but by media proclivity to superfluous public relations.
Walter Lippman said some eighty years ago that all of which the sharpest critics of democracy have alleged is true: if there is no steady supply of trustworthy and relevant news, incompetence and aimlessness; corruption and disloyalty; panic and ultimate disaster must come to any people, which is denied an assured access to the facts. ³
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