In the European scientist the steeling of the mind to the interpretation of nature has often been accompanied by a withering of the feeling for beauty.

[Charles] Darwin bitterly lamented the fact that his research in biology had completely atrophied his appreciation of poetry. With [Jagadis Chandra] Bose it is otherwise.

—Romain Rolland

I recently read an inspiring chapter about turn-of-the-century Indian botanist/scientist Sir Jagadis Chandra Bose, in a book called The Secret Life of Plants, which was written in 1973 by Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird.

If you can get hold of the book, for the sheer fun of its ideas and its lyricism, I recommend it with gusto.

ON YOUR WAVELENGTH

To begin, here’s a little known addendum to the invention of the short wave:

While Marconi in Bologna was still trying to transmit electric signals through space without wires, a race he was to win officially against Lodge in England, Muirhead in the United States, and Popov in Russia, Bose had already succeeded.

In 1895, the year before Marconi’s patent was issued, at a meeting in the Calcutta town hall, presided over by Sir Alexander Mackenzie, the lieutenant-governor of Bengal, Bose transmitted electric waves from the lecture hall through three intervening walls—and Mackenzie’s portly body—to a room seventy-five feet away, where they tripped a relay which through a heavy iron ball, fired off a pistol, and blew up a small mine.

For more about this, with great photographs, and for those who understand a little of the experimental technical stuff (pas moi), press here.

And to think we turn on our car radio without giving it another thought (not to mention our lights).

IMAGINATION IS MORE IMPORTANT THAN KNOWLEDGE

Refusing to patent his findings, Bose would say in a speech at the opening of his own Institute for Research, on his 59th birthday:

Not in matter, but in thought, not in possessions, but in ideas, are to be found the seeds of immortality.

Not through material acquisitions, but in generous diffusion of ideas can the true empire of humanity be established. Thus, the spirit of our national culture demands that we should forever be free from the desire of utilizing knowledge for personal gain.

Thought-provoking to say the least, given today’s climate of ownership and profit maximization at the expense of countless sisters and brothers (particularly where conditions are under-regulated).

HAVE YOU HUGGED YOUR PLANTS TODAY?

Bose went on to study in remarkable detail and with incredible precision the nature of plants, and the incredible “connection”, let’s say, between living and non-living matter. Two more excerpts you might enjoy.

In retirement, summing up his scientific philosophy, Bose writes:

In my investigation on the action of forces on matter, I was amazed to find boundary lines vanishing and to discover points of contact emerging between the Living [things] and the non-Living.

My first work in the region of invisible lights made me realize how in the midst of luminous ocean we stood almost blind. Just as in following light from visible to invisible our range of investigation transcends our physical sight, so also the problem of the great mystery of Life and Death is brought a little nearer solution, when, in the realm of the Living, we pass from the Voiced to the Unvoiced.

In his wonderful The Demon-Haunted World, Carl Sagan asks (pg 331):

In a 3.8 billion-year-old rock, you find a ratio of carbon isotopes typical of living things today, and different from inorganic sediments. Do you deduce abundant life on Earth 3.8 billion years ago? Or could the chemical remains of more modern organisms have infiltrated into the rock? Or is there a way for isotopes to separate in the rock apart from biological processes?

And two great lines from Sagan:

“Science is never finished” and “We make our world significant by the courage of our questions and the depths of our answers.”

No true yogi would disagree.

About his studies with plants, Bose writes:

Is there any possible relation between our own life and that of the plant world? The question is not one of speculation but of actual demonstration by some method that is unimpeachable.

This means that we should abandon all our preconceptions, most of which are afterward found to be absolutely groundless and contrary to the facts.

The final appeal must be made to the plant itself and no evidence should be accepted unless it bears the plant’s own signature.

Having great faith in the utterly evident universal wisdom, and its collective genius (to say the least!), I just adore that last line.

The Scientific Method is incredible, but who can or even tries to understand, say, love or beauty, by prodding, cutting, disecting and poking? (except perhaps your standard Nazi—using Nazi as metaphor).

At the end of the day, dare I say (and I say it with a smile), it will be, if anything, intimacy of the sweetest, most humble, devoted, reverential and listening kind that ultimately leads humans to some of the deepest secrets that actually serve the journey of all sentient beings, sisters and brothers.

THE GREAT FLOW OF BEING

And here’s one more quote from Bose—for a dear friend of mine, and a remarkable teacher of Vedic philosophy, Jeffrey Armstrong—after Bose had done countless experiments on both metals and muscles, and found similar responses.

I have shown you this evening [before the Royal Society, May 10, 1901] autographic records of the history of stress and strain in the living and non-living. How similar are the writings! So similar indeed that you cannot tell one apart from the other.

Among such phenomena, how can we draw a demarcation and say, here the physical ends, and there the physiological begins? Such absolute barriers do not exist.

It was when I came upon the mute witness of these self-made records, and perceived in them one phase of pervading beauty that bears within it all things—the mote that quivers in ripples of light, the teeming life upon the earth, and the radiant suns that shine above us—it was then that I understood for the first time a little of that message proclaimed by my ancestors on the banks of the Ganges thirty centuries ago:

“They who see but one, in all the changing manifoldness of this universe, unto them belongs Eternal Truth!—unto none else, none else!”

In the meantime, a non-Scientific Method experiment for all of us: try to see and relax into that unstoppable beauty, both diverse and unified, in yourself and all the sisters and brothers around you—for we may just be infinite in potential, mystery and love, if we keep asking and keep looking towards its unfathomable source…

Oh yeah, and love more.

Pete xox

To see a 25 minute film that I wrote and co-directed with my good friend Tim Hardy, produced by the unstoppable Alison Lawton, and narrated by the wonderfully generous Pierce Brosnan, go to Mindset Media.

The film is on flash, so when you get to Mind Set, go down near the bottom and click Tools For Change, and then press the the fourth box over called Hope in the Time of AIDS (watch clip). It’s actually the entire 25 minutes, which is so good to be out there.

If you put yourself in the shoes of those with HIV and AIDS who are willing to talk about it, their courage and honesty (and beauty) becomes even more astounding.

The film features the Head of UNICEF Canada, Nigel Fisher, Stephen Lewis and many other deeply committed people.

Pass it on, if you’re moved to do so. May all sentient beings be happier and healthier. Lots of love to you,

Pete xox

Press here to hear Be Brave Tonight. Press here to hear Wide Open.

The legendary Swedish director Ingmar Bergman has died—a man Woody Allen called “probably the greatest film artist…since the invention of the motion picture camera.”

Some have also said, in this modern world, Bergman’s films are just too existential and slow. Indeed, I have heard that Bergman himself has said he can’t watch some of his films anymore because they’re too depressing. That’s the line of a true comedian.

Either way, his influence on film, by all accounts, has been profound and wonderful and original.

The chess mention in the title, by the way, is from the opening of The Seventh Seal (1957), where Max von Sydow (as a Knight in a the plague-riddled Middle Ages) returns from a Crusade and challenges the personification of Death to a game of chess, to buy a little time to get a chance to get back home and see his family before, like all of us, getting check-mated.

Here’s an excerpt from a good link on NPR about Ingmar Bergman:

At the beginning of Ingmar Bergman’s 1957 film The Seventh Seal, the figure of Death stands on a rocky beach and presents himself to a knight just returned from the Crusades. Death is entirely cloaked and hooded in black, in stark contrast to his doughy white face. The image is still one of the most haunting pictures ever put on a movie screen.

Bergman, who died Monday at the age of 89, took on the biggest subjects — life, death, the existence and the silence of God.

The full article is here.

I heard a quote from Roger Ebert:

Films are no longer concerned with the silence of God but with the chattering of men. We are uneasy to find Bergman asking existential questions in an age of irony.

It is doubly ironic that, to take Ebert’s point even farther, I have read (I can’t remember where or in what scripture) that actually being bored with human stories – “the chattering of men” – and more interested in transcendental stories is a sign of deepening spiritual growth.

Wherever Ingmar is or isn’t, may the lighting be good.

And given that it is all so temporary, in an eternal sort of way, love more. Your move,

Pete xox

Before I repost an old blog, I just want to say I am offering free healthcare for life to all those who managed to get through the previous The Battle of Algiers blog/epic novel. Okay, not free healthcare, but how about…uh…free access to all my essays, poems and songs? Yeah. Oops, you already have that. Look, just…great work, because it wasn’t meant to be so long.

In the meantime, I just got a comment on an old blog, and the old blog is related to what some of the latest blogs have been about – health care, health, drugs, Sicko, etc. – so I thought I’d just repost this one.

Speaking of euphemism, let us consider the term two-tier in the Canadian Health Care system. When one hears about how the Health Care system needs to be abolished and replaced by private health care or at least two-tier medicine, the reason is immediate to all of us: because it’s too costly as it is.

An interesting question might then be: why is it that I respond so immediately and definitively—�It’s too costly!�—when I actually have no real knowledge of how the system works, who makes all the money that is being wasted, or if there are any alternative possibilities?

Full blog here.

Lots of love to you – and I know the title of this blog made no sense whatsoever…

Pete xo

I just watched Gillo Pontecorvo’s legendary film The Battle of Algiers (1966), about the war for independence fought by the Algerians against the French occupiers.

I then watched all the documentaries (several) on the accompanying 3 Disc Set, giving me a serious shot at being named “Nerd of the Week.”

Nonetheless, the two were a feast for both film and history buffs – and a grand reminder that this “new idea” of a War on Terror is perhaps the wonderful example of how history, for so many reasons, slips down the human memory hole (to quote Chomsky), leaving so many of us with a bonafide, diagnosable, collective dementia.

As for the film, all I can say is, if you have the time – given both its accomplishment and the zeitgeist of rhetoric and truth surrounding today’s War on Terror – rent it.

It’s hard to believe at least some of the grainy, black and white footage of the protests with the crowds and the police and the army etc. are not newsreel footage – but they are not.

The masses of “extras” are unflinching in their conviction, perhaps because the film was made a mere three years after Algerian independence, with the emotion and anger still palpable and accessible.

But raw style aside, Pontecorvo’s Battle For Algiers is remarkable because it is a political film that somehow, razor-like, walks so many lines as to be astounding: understandable if not likable characters from both sides, compassion and disdain for both sides, comprehension, somehow, of certain acts that are repugnant.

Legendary film critic Pauline Kael, supposedly after giving the film a strong review, said Director Pontecorvo is the most “dangerous kind of Marxist: a Marxist poet.”

Whether Pontecorvo was a Marxist, I don’t know, but he was a member of the Italian Communist Party until the Russians invaded Hungary in 1956.

Alan A Stone, Harvard Professor of Law and Psychiatry writes in an article called Reel Terrorism: Reconsidering the battle Of Algiers:

Pontecorvo claimed his filmmaking was ruled by the “Dictatorship of Truth� and his version of Truth certainly disturbed the French, who banned his film.

Certainly many critics saw in The Battle of Algiers the power of truth revealed.

Others—most prominently Pauline Kael—worried that the film took audiences by storm and gave them no chance to think.

Kael saw not truth but ultimate propaganda. The Battle of Algiers, she said, “ranks with� Triumph of the Will, Leni Riefenstal’s deification of Hitler. Whether revealed truth or ultimate propaganda, The Battle of Algiers is a text that might give Americans some perspective on our own situation after 9/11—both through its official message and through its unintended insights.

Pauline Kael was not wrong in describing Pontecorvo as a Marxist poet, but he meant his poetry as a celebration of humanity. He described himself as “someone who approached man and the human condition with a feeling of warmth and compassion.�

His film and his poetry were an attempt to connect himself and his Western audiences through their common humanity to Arabs of the Casbah.

He embraced what is different about the Arabs, including their Islamic traditions, and made them fully human for us.

Yes, revolutionary terror is a tragic necessity. But Pontecorvo’s inspiration is Utopian. Revolution, even in the style of Fanon, held for him the promise of community and comradeship in which Pontecorvo and perhaps many European Marxists imagined themselves sharing.

He made his audience share that feeling of community so that we might accept the possibility of justified terrorism.

Although I’m not exactly sure what Stone is saying in his criticism (pointing out a connection to Hitler’s Leni Reifenstal, through Kael, and saying “revolutionary terror is a tragic necessity”), the full article is here.

L’ENSEMBLE

All but one of the actors in the film, the French General played by Jean Martin, are non-professionals. Supposedly Martin got the job because he had been sympathetic to the Algerian cause in the first place.

Incredibly, the second Algerian lead in the film (after lead Ali La Pointe – played by Brahim Hadjadj) is actually one of the real leaders from the insurgency—Saadi Yacef.

The insurgency itself took place from the mid 1950s until independence in 1962 (but had many moments in France’s 132 year colonial rule).

I won’t say much more about it, but the comparisons, lessons, hatreds and problems seen in the film between the Algerians fighting for independence and the French colonialists, though necessarily simplified, and of course different than today in, say, Iraq, still profoundly remind the viewer of today’s tension and brutality.

The film is for that reason alone – and many others – instructive, thought-provoking, heart-breaking and infuriating, all depending on one’s ideology.

THAT’S NOT ALL, FOLKS: HIGH PRAISE

A grand bonus to the film are the many documentaries included on the 3 Disc Set.

Most of the documentaries are purely historical and deeply, sometimes shockingly, informative. One short piece, however, simply features world-renowned directors Spike Lee (Do the Right Thing), Julian Schnabel (Before Night Falls), Mira Nair (Monsoon Wedding—and married to African scholar Mahmood Mamdani, whom we interviewed for Uganda Rising), Steven Soderbergh (Traffic) and Oliver Stone (JFK), sharing the effect the film had on them.

Some of the bombings in the film – never pleasant – explode so startlingly close to people in the shot that, according to Steven Soderbergh (or maybe it was Spike Lee), they could almost certainly not, for reasons of safety, be shot the same way today.

Soderbergh said films like The Battle of Algiers and the French Connection were big inspirations for his film Traffic. The car chase in the French Connection was, by all accounts, also done in ways that could never be legally done today.

Anyway, here are an assortment of interviews and comments from the various documentaries in The Battle Of Algiers disc Set.

IMPRESSIONS

From a 1992 documentary narrated by Edward Said, film Producer David Puttnam (the Killing Fields) said, about making these kinds of political films – particularly in today’s climate:

There is always the danger that one way or another, you end up justifying the man with the bomb—or the man with the gun.

And I’m not sure we actually live in that world anymore. Gillo [Pontecorvo] made the Battle of Algiers during a period when post-colonial attitudes were quite specific and the world acknowledged that great wrongs had been done and great rights needed to be addressed.

I’m not sure we live quite in that world anymore. We now live in a world of infinitely more complexity and the film as made would have to tread a very fine line and be very, very sure that it didn’t end up accidentally justifying the unjustifiable.

Pontecorvo, who died recently, made very few films after The Battle of Algiers. Evidently, he was a perfectionist, always second-guessing himself in the pre-poduction, and also had several films he tried to make fall through.

About the political filmmaking process, Pontecorvo says:

All of us who made so-called political films find ourselves in difficulty. In part because there’s a marked decrease in the public’s interest in social, collective themes, in solidarity etc. Also because we’re less sure of ourselves after all that’s happened.

There are fewer certainties, and therefore less drive.

This causes many people to distance themselves from this type of cinema.

TORTURE

The French use of torture in the war is well known. From a documentary called Remembering History, Colonel Roger Trinquier , a charming enough man talking with a candor we rarely see anymore—for better or worse—described the situation this way:

Torture is a weapon used in all subversive wars. You must realize that.

For example, people in the OS were tortured. No one defended them. People involved in a subversive war know they’ll be tortured.

In WWII, members of the French Resistance violated the codes of war. They knew they’d be tortured but they did their jobs. Their glory lies in the fact that, knowing they’d be tortured, they still did what they had to.

When mounting an insurrection, you must do so fully aware that torture will be used. It’s not about being for or against it. You must realize that every prisoner who is arrested will talk. Unless he makes the sacrifice of suicide, we’ll always get his confession.

An insurgency must be based on this awareness so that a prisoner who talks won’t bring down the organization.

In a 2002 documentary (also on the Disc) by Patrick Rotman called L’Ennemi Intime (The Best of Enemies), Part III Etat D’Armes (State of Arms), an old interview with Trinquier again, has him paraphrasing very closely (and decades earlier) the argument that Alan Dershowitz has used to justify the use torture (the type of example that Richard Clarke later says, more or less, has nothing to do with reality):

The French Colonel Trinquier, again:

Suppose that one of our patrols arrested a bomber one afternoon. This bomber had one bomb and was going to plant five or six more.

By dismantling this one bomb, we’re able to learn that all the bombs are set to explode at 6:30 p.m. It’s 3 p.m. We know that each bomb kills at least 10 or 12 people and wounds about 40 others.

You have the terrorist. You can interrogate him or not.

In any case, at 6:30 p.m., you’ll have 40 dead and around 200 wounded. If you interrogate this individual, there’s a good chance he’ll reveal the bomb locations. If you don’t interrogate him, you’re responsible for 40 dead and 200 wounded.

Personally, I’m ready to interrogate him until he answers my questions…

He goes on to say:

In the Casbah of Algiers, there were 1,500 armed terrorists supported by a population of 5,000 that gave them information and help.

This is how we waged the battle: First, we wanted to know about their organization. To achieve this, this is what we did: You’ve read Mao Tse-Tung, who says terrorists are like a fish in water. That means all the residents know them.

One afternoon, in the beginning, we had around 30 young people, and individually we asked them, “Who collects funds from you?� They all told us. We released them the next day.

We arrested the fund collectors. We asked, “Who do you take the money to?�

And so on, up to the top of the pyramid.

SAADI YACEF

As mentioned earlier, Saadi Yacef was the military commander of the insurgent FLN (National Liberation Front (Algeria)) in the Casbah (the old Turkish area of Algiers, away from the Europeans) during the real battle for independence, and then played himself in the film.

In an interview many years later, he said:

They set off bombs. We set off bombs. That’s the price of war and violence.

It was a means to an end, and we achieved that end. It’s such a vicious cycle.

It’s not a personal evil. You’re immersed in hell and you have to be—I was fighting for a cause.

If I was able to hold on for two years, thinking every morning they’d come for my head, it was because I was convinced I was fighting for a just cause. Even if they cut off my head, it wouldn’t matter.

I was brave because I wasn’t a thief or common criminal.

I was fighting to free my country. Too bad [tant pis]. History will be my judge.

Later on, perhaps curiously, perhaps not, Saadi Yacef became a movie producer and in 1999 was appointed to the upper house of the Algerian parliament, the Council of the Nation.

GENERAL JACQUES MASSU

One of the main French leaders, General Jacques Massu (who later adopted two Algerian children and died in 2002 at the age of 94) was interviewed (I think during or just after the war), and like Trinquier, was incredibly candid:

Question:

Doesn’t the very idea of torture disgust you?

General Jacques Massu:

I don’t like it, but, once again, I’m a soldier.

The circumstances of the war forced me to resort to this procedure. I don’t consider this procedure, despite the awful word used to describe it, to be more inhuman than bombing civilian populations or causing terrible wounds with gunfire.

It was a new procedure, never used before.

Often, it doesn’t amount to much.

It causes much less damage than a bullet through the heart or the procedures used by our adversaries, the FLN, on their own brothers, their compatriots. If they smoked, or didn’t respect other FLN orders and restrictions, they cut off their noses, or worse. That’s what I call real torture! I never cut off anyone’s noses, and neither did my men.

From the Patrick Rotman documentary, L’Ennemi Intime (Best of Enemies), Part II Etat D’Armes (State of Arms), General Massu wrote a note to his troops that, according to Rotman, deserves credit for its honesty.

Massu wrote:

The sine qua non of our actions in Algeria is for these methods [torture] to be accepted in our hearts and minds as necessary and morally valid.

CAPTAIN ALLAIRE

A Captain Allaire of the French paratroopers, extremely forthcoming, said this:

I saw it [torture], I participated in it, I ordered it.

I don’t want to lay the blame on my subordinates. I ordered it because that was my role.

I’m a devout Catholic, and it was two years before I could enter a church again. Obviously, my conscience was extremely troubled.

Morally, it was very difficult.

Should I have resigned from the army…?

I don’t think I lost my honour in Algeria. I’d say I lost a bit of my soul.

Another high-ranked officer—either Allaire again or maybe it was General Paul Aussaresses—admitted that FLN leader Larbi Ben M’Hidi , upon being captured by the French and interrogated, had been shot and hanged by the French (he was said to have committed suicide in his cell):

[For our methods of interrogation/torture] We were not only supported, we were encouraged.

I remember a specific example: General Bigeard had a well-organized command center with maps, charts and diagrams showing the day-to-day progress in crushing the rebellion.

We were visited by Borges-Maunory, Max Lejeune, General Salan and Robert Lacoste and his chief of staff.

I remember when [FLN leader] Ben M’Hidi was captured—they were ecstatic over the effectiveness of the work carried out by the various paratrooper regiments. These politicians found the results convincing and the method good, and they encouraged us in that direction.

With Algiers in disarray, the police gave over power to the French Paratroopers, who were brought in to quell the flames of rebellion.

PAUL TEITGEN

Paul Teitgen, who was secetary general of the police in Algiers, refused to give up all civilian power to the military and recorded every arrest.

Teitgen, from a very old interview:

We confined 24,000 [suspects] with my signature. There are 4,000 missing. They didn’t give me back 4,000.

In September 1957, I tallied it up. There were too many missing.

Where were they? In the camps? At Paul-Cazelles [a camp]?

No, I went and they weren’t there. They disappeared.

The rivers and the sea carried them away, carried away the “Bigeard shrimp.� That’s what they called the men. They’d put their feet in a bucket of cement.

When it set, they’d throw them out of helicopters into the sea.

That’s unacceptable. That’s no way to wage war.

In his resignation letter to Le Secretaire General, Perfecture D’Alger (ALGER, le 29 mars 1957), Teitgen wrote:

I’ve been convinced for three months now that acting anonymously and without responsibility can only lead to war crimes.

I wouldn’t dare make such a statement were it not for a recent visit to the Paul-Cazelles and Beni-Messous camps, where I recognize, on certain prisoners, signs of abuse and torture like I personally suffered 14 years ago at the hands of the Gestapo in Nancy.

In another interview, Teitgen said:

I was tortured in 1943. Several times by the Gestapo. They know how to humiliate a man, how to deprive him of all respect, how to reduce him to nothing. Then there was the Dachau concentration camp.

That was enough for me. I couldn’t bear the French acting the same way.

In the epilogue from one of the documentaries:

According to the best estimates, the seven-and-a-half year war claimed 500,000 lives, mostly Algerians.

French casualties amounted to 12,000 killed and 25,000 wounded. The months after independence saw the massacre of tens of thousands of harkis, Algerians who fought on behalf of the French, while nearly a million pieds noirs [French in Algeria], fearing for their safety, fled the country.

As is so often the case, The FLN went on to become a one party-rule dictatorship that stayed in power for almost thirty years, beginning with good changes in education and so on, and eventually becoming corrupt and brutal.

One final dopcumentary on the disc was a 20 minute or so piece called The Battle of Algiers: A Case Study (2004), where Christopher Isham, Chief of Investigative Projects for ABC News has a conversation about the film, history and terrorism with George W Bush’s ex-adviser Richard A. Clarke, former national Coordinator For Security and Counterterrorism and Michael A. Sheehan, former State Department Coordinator for Counterterrorism.

It is remarkable to watch.

After having just watched the film, and then the several documentaries on the 3- Disc set, I heard it repeated time and time again by, I think, all of the historians (two British, I believe, one French and one Algerian), that it was the French authorities who planted the first bomb that indiscriminately blew up Algerian citizens, not the terrorist insurgents.

Ironically, as it was pointed out in one of the documentaries – at least from a civilian bombing point of view – counterterrorism proceeded terrorism, which just goes to show how absurd the use of the word terror can become—although brutal, cruel terror was undeniably a massive part of the Algerian War.

Anyway, somehow, Chris Isham from CBS, although having seen the film and the French bomb a building in the Casbah, killing many civilians, still asks without an ounce of confusion:

What else could the French of done? I mean, the precipitating event in the movie, you see three women being deployed into the general population [by the FLN], going across French lines.

They’re outfitted with bombs.

They place the bombs in cafes and other populated places. The bombs go off.

Obviously creates a huge shock among the French civilian population and that leads to the French crackdown. What else could the French have done when confronted with those kinds of facts on the ground?

Isham’s perception of the “precipitating moment� actually takes place over 40 minutes into the film, and is directly after the French have just blown up a civilian building in the densely packed Casbah, after curfew, in the middle of the night, killing countless Algerians, men, women and children.

Granted, it may have just been a strange, momentary lapse of sense from Isham—but it falls directly into the Chomsky/Herman model of internalizing one’s own propaganda system.

Worse, terrorism expert Michael Sheehan responds without correcting Isham:

Sheehan:

When these type of events take place, you have to take a deep breath and step back a little bit before you do anything overly heavy-handed that might come back to haunt you.

And Isham asks Richard Clarke earlier:

Isham:

Let’s just talk a little bit about the tactics of the insurgents themselves.What were they trying to accomplish? What did they represent? What tactics did theyuse that you consider being terrorist tactics? Why? And…what was the outcome of those activities?

Richard Clarke replies:

So much of it was bombing. Bombing in an urban environment and including multiple, simultaneous bombings around the city…By [the FLN] doing the attacks, it caused their own people to wake up. And then of course the attacks forced a reaction from the police and the army which made the Algerian people even more desirous of liberation.

Curious, to say the least.

Although this Isham-Clarke-Sheehan discussion was probably considered relevant because of what is going on in Iraq, it was mostly about how to have effective counterinsurgency.

Not once, specifically, was the position of America in Iraq, Vietnam in the 60s and 70s, or even, for the most part, the French in Algeria, directly questioned as to its moral legitimacy.

And it was debated with such cool, earnest almost rehearsed reason—a cool reason that, the older I get, the more I sometimes think stops a person from seeing or even feeling a bigger picture.

The following thought is hardly revolutionary – if you’ll excuse the pun – but it seems to me most of these heinous wars show, be they in Iraq after the tyrant Hussein and now, in Iran after the Shah, in Cambodia after the secret bombings from 1970ish-75, in Algeria and most of the countries of Africa after their independences, that it is virtually only brutal power that can overthrow (let alone survive) powerful brutality – and then the insurgent force ascends to power, and almost by definition maintains itself through brutality.

As Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl once said, generalizing, of course: The best “will not return.”

In Algeria, ultimately, its power and brutality got rid of the powerfully cruel French, and then power and cruelty (even if it begins well) ruled in Algeria for decades, only to be challenged by the FIS—the fundamentalist Islam—who became the next problem.

Even during the fighting for independence, there were grotesque massacres by the FLN of suspected French sympathizers.

As for the war to against the FLN nearly thrity years later, according to Wikipedia:

The Algerian Civil War was an armed conflict between the Algerian government and various Islamist rebel groups which began in 1991… when the government cancelled elections after the first round results had shown that the Islamic Salvation Front (FIS) party would win, citing fears that the FIS would end democracy.

After the FIS was banned and thousands of its members arrested, Islamist guerrillas rapidly emerged and began an armed campaign against the government and its supporters.

They formed themselves into several armed groups, principally the Islamic Armed Movement (MIA), based in the mountains, and the Armed Islamic Group (GIA), based in the towns.

The guerrillas initially targeted the army and police, but some groups soon started attacking civilians. In 1994, as negotiations between the government and the FIS’s imprisoned leadership reached their height, the GIA declared war on the FIS and its supporters, while the MIA and various smaller groups regrouped, becoming the FIS-loyalist Islamic Salvation Army (AIS).

It is estimated to have cost between 150,000 and 200,000 lives. More than 70 journalists were assassinated, either by security forces or by Islamists. The conflict effectively ended with a government victory, following the surrender of the Islamic Salvation Army and the 2002 defeat of the Armed Islamic Group.

In the end, details aside, what is the inherent difference between racism, colonialism, terrorism, fascism and fundamentalism? Having said that, these are words so misused to have lost compelling meaning, yet remain compelling for divisiveness and manipulation—while a certain truth, of course, remains within them.

To quote the insurgent terrorist/freedom fighter Saadi Yacef:

It’s such a vicious circle.

It’s also a long, spiraling circle of viciousness and beauty, begun who knows when.

How Iraq or Afghanistan can be any different, I don’t know.

Perhaps in, say, Vietnam today, after surviving the cruelty and barbarity of the Japanese, then the French, then the Americans, then their own Communist government, then the endless sanction and embargoes as punishment for being relentlessly bombed and not surrendering, the people are just too utterly worn out from history and violence, that they will do anything to not fight.

But who knows? – and of course my last statement is really just a statement of my unknowing. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

Love more, love everybody more—sisters and brothers—and hold on to your humour, joy, and compassion,

Pete xox

Like everybody, I every day read, see, and hear about countless places in the world lacking human rights, without freedom of speech, without opportunity to till soil or even eat and so on. This is, of course, a heinous outrage whose answer remains endlessly debated but profoundly elusive.

Ultimately, I do not believe there is a “cure” for the material world, per se, but humans can nonetheless shift the world – no matter how miniscule the increments, in either more oppressive or less oppressive directions – by individual and collective actions at any and every given moment.

In the West, with its remarkable freedoms comparably, most of us are free or privileged enough to keep fighting for freedoms of speech, human rights and even freedom of consumer choice, thank god.

My dear sisters and brothers everywhere – and in particular in the US – by so many accounts it seems we have nonetheless all become and are becoming endlessly barraged and controlled by myriad facets of elected government and stunningly unelected institutions.

By design, it almost feels, these quiet yet relentless changes seem to be systematically chipping away at citizens’ rights in ways that are repugnant and anathema to freedom and diversity – sick reflections of so much of the control-by-force-and-terror of current (and historical empirical) foreign policy.

CODEX and the HOMOGENIZATION and CONTROL of FOOD

I would be lying if I stated I really understood much about CODEX Alimentarius, but I have repeatedly heard outcries against it, from intelligent, passionate people. What seems certain is CODEX involves the crushing of certain freedoms, the strangling of bio-diversities, the involvement of major pharmaceuticals (etc) and it’s backed by the WTO – and hardly anyone knows about it. Any thoughtful comments and information are appreciated.

I cannot vouch for the precise accuracy of this video, either, but the woman, Rima Laibow MD, seems very well-versed, passionate and informed (she left her practice to publicize what she believes CODEX Alimentarius is doing).

For example, she states, hopefully alarmingly:

Under Codex, every dairy cow on the planet must be treated with Monsanto’s recombinant bovine growth hormone. Furthermore, under Codex, every animal used for food on the planet must be treated with sub-clinical antibiotics and must be treated with exogenous growth hormones…

I know how precious time is, but if you can, please watch the video to be more aware, to increase your knowledge, to make your own decisions, and even, if it fits, to get intelligently outraged.

Press here to watch the video, and if you feel it, press here to sign the petition.

Also check out, it seems, hopefully, one of the very few both astute and non-bought-out big politicians in the US, Representative Ron Paul, and his Health Freedom Protection Act.

Press here and here.

This is the WHO (in search of the WTO) CODEX Alimentarius official website.

Please pass this information on to those who might be interested, which will probably be anyone who eats (I wish I was more popular!)

We are sisters and brothers, and informed sisters and brothers together can generate tons of love, solidarity and power – and stand for the freedoms and dignities that make life profoundly rich.

And in approaching these issues, I strive to not let my own projections, my own finger-pointing, get in the way of beauty.

Love more, love deeply, love strong,

Pete xox

For a little about Monsanto’s unbelievable power, the tragic Percy Schmeiser story, the failure perhaps of the Canadian judicial system who voted against him, and the confusing topic of intellectual property rights, press here.

For an earlier blog on conservative libertarian Ron Paul, press here.

For those in the States who don’t know, actually for those in Canada, too – wait a second, this is the internet!

For those all over the world, from China to India, from Pole to Pole, from Haida Gwaii to Hyderabad, from Outer Mongolia to Inner Labia (is that tasteless and out of bounds, even in the name of humour?), from North America to South America, from Central America to the Central African Republic, there’s a great show on CBC Radio (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation) every Sunday called Tapestry.

The show constantly offers thought-provoking/heart-informing one hour downloadable, streamable podcast interviews of super quality with famous and not-so-famous spiritually-oriented people, also including atheists, agnostics and probably one or two charlatans (batteries not included).

It’s really worth checking out. The host and interviewer, Mary Hynes, is lovely and smart. Sam Harris was on last week, telling us why religion is utterly irrational and pointless and should not be allowed out of a small space under the stairs in more than one house per Nation.

I made that description up, but you know what I mean.

Other recent and not so recent guests include David Lynch, John Shelby Spong, Krshna Das, Andrew Harvey, Karen Armstrong, Elizabeth Gilbert, rabbis, bishops, mullahs, brahmins, priests, mystics, three faeries, a family of leprechauns (a form of faerie), bohemian angels, undercover devas, a tribe of myths, dreams and confessions and subjects like Rumi, interfaith marriage, remembering Oscar Romero, the Cathars, and God stuff all ’round.

You’ll love it – and it’s a great resource. Press here for the site (I think you need RealPlayer to hear stuff).

There’s also a recent piece there on the millions of brutally treated, disenfranchised sisters and brothers in India known as the Dalits, the untouchables (and mirrored in other societies, under different names and guises). Although there’s no podcast of the interview, here’s a link to a short film that is informative and heart-breaking.

For what it’s worth, here’s a little interview with me (not on Tapestry), but with CBC regular Kim Linekin, about my spiritual journey – at least a little over a year ago, and hopefully, gracefully, evolving. Press here to read.

And here, you can download a photo of me 28 seconds before becoming enlightened. It can also be purchased as wallpaper, when in stock. Press here, and scroll down, to have this “Photo of a Master” for your altar, absolutely free! That’s right, absolutely free!

And here’s a song about ten or fifteen years ago, live off the floor, on the journey, introduced by my gorgeous and ever-non-grumbling Nana, when she was 97 (she passed into the unknown at 101). Press here to hear Orangutan.

Lots of Divine, ecumenical, humanistic, sacred, warm, juicy, big, fat, sister and brother love, in a trillion ways. Vasudaiva Kutumbakam (We’re all family).

Pete xoxo

I put this article from Canadian Online Pharmacy on a blog a few days ago, and it pertains a lot to what my brother, a professor of pharmacy at UBC, teaches.

An excerpt:

“Adverse drug events (ADEs) are believed to be among the leading causes of mortality in the United States, with an estimated 100,000 deaths per year,” according to background information in the article.

To read it, press here.

As for my brother, James, his group, called Therapeutics Initiative, is interesting because although its views are not radical – they believe we as a population are overprescribed both in amount of drugs and in drugs that are useful – they are thought of by drug companies and often by administration as extreme. This is hilarious to me, because they are actually pro-pharmaceuticals, but vigilant in the belief that drugs need to be taken in the correct amounts and only when they work.

Garl darn anarchists!

For the record, my knowledge of Therapeutics Initiatives comes predominantly via my brother James McCormack and his partner-in-rhyme, Dr. Bob Rangno – a wonderful fella (like my brother) full of humour and insight.

Anyway, I plan to soon write about them in more depth. They do fantastically useful and informative work. If you want to know more about pharmaceuticals from people who are deeply well-versed and trained in the subject, check out their website, Therapeutics Initiative, here.

For the record, I consider myself unbiased for the simple reason that growing up, my brother would on occasion stuff me in a sleeping bag, closed at the top, until I would admit that the Chicago Black Hawks was the best team in the universe and Stan Mikita was the best player.

I like to believe I held steadfast to my belief in my beloved Montreal Canadiens and the unstoppable Yvan “The Roadrunner” Cournoyer, but perhaps I occasionally caved in.

See Understanding Ken, for a fictionalized version of the journey (or is it?). I’ll never tell.

A GREAT SOURCE OF INFORMATION

But back to the issue of pharmaceuticals and Therapeutics Initiative, this information is truly vital so please educate yourself and please, particularly if you have middle-aged to older-aged people in your life who may be taking medications or are believing they should be, direct them to the Therapeutics Initiative website to increase their awareness and knowledge.

There is a ton of useful information there, much of which is shocking and largely unknown. I consider Therapeutics Initiative a profound and vital advocate for the consumer/patient/citizen (even doctors), while still maintaining a down-the-line belief in evidence-based research (ie. hardly the Weather Underground).

I’m really proud of my brother’s work.

An example from the TI website, Evidence Based Drug Therapy – What Do the Numbers Mean?:

Imagine you just discovered that you have a risk factor for cardiovascular disease (e.g. High LDL cholesterol). A drug that will reduce this risk factor is available, and it has a low incidence of side effects. Consider the 3 following scenarios. Would you be willing to take this drug daily for the next 5 years if significant results from randomised placebo controlled trials showed that:

1) patients taking this drug for 5 years have 34% fewer heart attacks than patients taking placebo;

or 2) 2.7% of the patients taking this drug for 5 years had a heart attack, comparing to 4.1% taking a placebo, a difference of 1.4%

or 3) if 71 patients took this drug for five years the drug would prevent one from having a heart attack. There is no way of knowing in advance which person that might be.

Did you make the same decision for all three scenarios? If not, you were fooled by the numbers, because the three scenarios represent the same data from the same trial presented to you in three different ways.

To read the explanation, and the article (one of many), press here.

For a very funny recap of what happened to King Charles II (ironically, laterally, part of my genealogy as it pertains to an ancestor of ours known as Elias Ashmole Esq. (that’s Ashmole, which may or may not be an olde English variation of the modern term asshole).

He was once described as a “one of the great curiosos of his time.” What that means, I am not entirely sure.

Ashmole is also the founder and namesake of the intimate and lovely Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, possibly the oldest public museum in the UK.

Anyway, press here to watch my brother James’ and Bob’s description of poor King Charles II’s demise at the hands of his devoted doctors. And if you know how, stick it on youtube.

Love way more, be healthy! Speaking of which, obesity…oh heavens. Click here to read this disturbing article about lovely yet over-burdened (by food) sisters and brothers. What a world of plenty and not enough, spiritually, emotionally and materially.

The Buddha once said, desires unfilled create frustration which becomes anger; desires fulfilled create greed. Hmm. One must be careful, it seems, with desires.

At the same time, some sages say desire is our truest nature – the nature of the atma, or soul. The idea is, what matters is how we frame and direct our desires (either way, Eastern philosophies generally all agree our material senses are insatiable).

Once again, the big bums from Understanding Ken, press here.

Now love even more, and speeaking of non-Therapeutics Initiative terms, move your prana, your chi, you life force. We are miraculous beings.

To hear Wide Open, press here.

Pete xox

Quantum mechanics suggests nothing is as we see it. This suggests our eyesight, though incredible, sees very little of what is really going on. I hope that’s true.

This planet, existence, is inexplicably extraordinary. I like to think, believe, feel we are all, constantly, mostly unconsciously, deeply immersed in that beauty, even if we appear to more closely immersed and controlled by the evening news, and endless, egocentric, anthropomorphic debates, diatribes, and wars.

But the more I read and the more I write, the less I am sure I know (this is a good thing)—at least when I have the humility (and grace) to try and keep my heart open and my mind expansive.

All these debates on Iraq are so degrading in their essence, ultimately—similar to how the news tells us facts about the war, but do not show us the reality.

To quote Einstein:

We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.

And yet we all try—the richest and most powerful country and citizens in the world, simply because some can, no matter how involved those same people and ideologies are in increasing the turmoil as it continues through the ages, offer the answer.

It reminds me of how so many formerly colonized countries so often now use the religion and the institutions that colonized them as the answer to their freedom. I’m not sure if that is the paradox of the world, correct, absurd, an ongoing zen koan, a reason to burst into tears, or just grand evidence that the sages are right:

Trying to change the world is ego, trying to change yourself is spiritual practice.

or Ghandi, at least:

Be the change you wish to see in the world.

By the way (as if anybody didn’t know), people in less powerful countries, when they can, often do they same thing: impose their views, by threat or worse. Why? I suppose one reason would be because power is relative to the situation one is in, whether commanding a nation or a household.

But in the end, I’m afraid, we own nothing—we just can’t grasp that truth: the temporary nature of all things, including ourselves (at least as the body we arrive in).

Perhaps, of course, these endless debates and rants are somehow, mysteriously, actually what keeps ongoing brutalities from becoming even more pervasive. I just don’t feel that to be true.

But who has the depth, the strength, the compassion to expand wide enough to grasp truths amidst this explosion of endless, infinite events leading us to who knows where—everyday, let alone in the future?

TAKE FIVE

Almost nobody in positions of power ever asks or cries out to their listeners for inward thinking and reflection, in any serious sense; they never demand the most compassionate, solidarity-inducing methods of individual growth, stretching towards personal or world-wide reconciliation and forgiveness and action.

Hardly anybody believes in inward thinking as an ongoing, non-naval gazing, ritual of essential importance and beauty. Then again, I guess it depends upon what one thinks of inwardly.

Perhaps inward thinking is useless against such relentless outward forces in a violent world. Inward thinking, self-reflection, non-projection, create very few headlines, little fame, no ego-serving adrenalin, no accolades. Nothing. And it sure won’t help the GNP.

In some ways, perhaps, inward thinking has been colonized by this relentless outward expansion, and the belief that both full salvation is possible (be it through religion, free markets or environmentalism or whatever), and that the end of the world is imminent.

Okay, I know I’m getting uselessly lofty, but I sure wonder if the endless din of ideas, plans and theories actually make the world sweeter, kinder, more compassionate, overall, if one could measure quality of life worldwide.

And I know going inward more than outward (whatever that may mean) is not, essentially, the human way.

Or at least, that is to say, whatever we’re all doing, collectively, individually, whether towards beauty and non-beauty, is the human way, by defintion, because it’s what we’re doing.

YELL LOUDER

But how much information and noise and screeching headlines and pedantic pundits must be exploded into the ether of the universe and our brains before the pointlessness of it is observed? How does one even know what’s pointless or useful? How does one not be who they are, which leaves my entire point pointless in itself, for humans will do what they do.

Okay then: what ideas, institutions etc, make life more kind, more free, more beautiful, for more people?

How can this be answered wisely? How can they be instituted fairly?

I think we should stop calling other countries by their names, insteading calling them: “All those people just like us.”

Even if they’re not all exactly like you or I (or you and I are not exactly alike), surely a lot are. And they certainly bleed and yearn and desire like you and I.

THE ZEN OF WAR

Maybe the inward path as an answer is an illusion in a world that must unfold as it does. Maybe it’s not even possible, or else perhaps we would be doing it. Perhaps this world is evolution unfolding. Or religious determinism.

One could argue: there’s no time for inward thinking! But is it not outward thinking that continues to push forth “objectives”, economic, military, ideological, that lead to environmental disaster (or are these things an apsect of our survival).

If we are simply an evolving species, is extinction imminent, and are we on the downside as a species, and we don’t even know it? Or are we evolving individually and collectively, consciously, and we don’t even knkow it?

And even more than that, while some are going inwards (as opposed to insular), outward folks may sneak up and slaughter the inward thinkers with those darn outward shooting weapons. For there are always plenty of action-oriented, outward strategists and weapons (both making big money and holding much power—it’s funny, for the record, how force provides both power and paranoia—this being the tyrants dilemma).

I know, I know, my terms are vast and vague. I told you, the more I read the less I know.

Anyway, if we can’t go inwards long enough to stop shouting our outrage and opinions, so often for our own objectives, our own moral righteousness, our own belief yelling out loud enough to convince ourselves surely we know something about why there is war or how to find peace, the least we can do is listen to some interviews with soldiers in Iraq. Here is a sobering piece from the Nation.

In the meantime, I maintain, there is no cure for the material world, but there are shifts towards greater compassion and/or greater competitiveness.

An excerpt from the Nation article:

The farm’s inhabitants were not insurgents but a family sleeping outside for relief from the stifling heat, and the man Sergeant Westphal had frightened awake was the patriarch.

“Sure enough, as we started to peel back the layers of all these people sleeping, I mean, it was him, maybe two guys…either his sons or nephews or whatever, and the rest were all women and children,” Sergeant Westphal said. “We didn’t find anything.

“I can tell you hundreds of stories about things like that and they would all pretty much be like the one I just told you. Just a different family, a different time, a different circumstance.”

For Sergeant Westphal, that night was a turning point. “I just remember thinking to myself, I just brought terror to someone else under the American flag, and that’s just not what I joined the Army to do,” he said.

And again:

The American forces, stymied by poor intelligence, invade neighborhoods where insurgents operate, bursting into homes in the hope of surprising fighters or finding weapons. But such catches, they said, are rare. Far more common were stories in which soldiers assaulted a home, destroyed property in their futile search and left terrorized civilians struggling to repair the damage and begin the long torment of trying to find family members who were hauled away as suspects.

Raids normally took place between midnight and 5 am, according to Sgt. John Bruhns, 29, of Philadelphia, who estimates that he took part in raids of nearly 1,000 Iraqi homes. He served in Baghdad and Abu Ghraib, a city infamous for its prison, located twenty miles west of the capital, with the Third Brigade, First Armor Division, First Battalion, for one year beginning in March 2003. His descriptions of raid procedures closely echoed those of eight other veterans who served in locations as diverse as Kirkuk, Samarra, Baghdad, Mosul and Tikrit.

“You want to catch them off guard,” Sergeant Bruhns explained. “You want to catch them in their sleep.” About ten troops were involved in each raid, he said, with five stationed outside and the rest searching the home.

Once they were in front of the home, troops, some wearing Kevlar helmets and flak vests with grenade launchers mounted on their weapons, kicked the door in, according to Sergeant Bruhns, who dispassionately described the procedure:

“You run in. And if there’s lights, you turn them on–if the lights are working. If not, you’ve got flashlights…. You leave one rifle team outside while one rifle team goes inside. Each rifle team leader has a headset on with an earpiece and a microphone where he can communicate with the other rifle team leader that’s outside.

“You go up the stairs. You grab the man of the house. You rip him out of bed in front of his wife. You put him up against the wall. You have junior-level troops, PFCs [privates first class], specialists will run into the other rooms and grab the family, and you’ll group them all together. Then you go into a room and you tear the room to shreds and you make sure there’s no weapons or anything that they can use to attack us.

“You get the interpreter and you get the man of the home, and you have him at gunpoint, and you’ll ask the interpreter to ask him: ‘Do you have any weapons? Do you have any anti-US propaganda, anything at all–anything–anything in here that would lead us to believe that you are somehow involved in insurgent activity or anti-coalition forces activity?’

“Normally they’ll say no, because that’s normally the truth,” Sergeant Bruhns said. “So what you’ll do is you’ll take his sofa cushions and you’ll dump them. If he has a couch, you’ll turn the couch upside down. You’ll go into the fridge, if he has a fridge, and you’ll throw everything on the floor, and you’ll take his drawers and you’ll dump them…. You’ll open up his closet and you’ll throw all the clothes on the floor and basically leave his house looking like a hurricane just hit it.

“And if you find something, then you’ll detain him. If not, you’ll say, ‘Sorry to disturb you. Have a nice evening.’ So you’ve just humiliated this man in front of his entire family and terrorized his entire family and you’ve destroyed his home. And then you go right next door and you do the same thing in a hundred homes.”

For the full piece (which I haven’t fully read), press here.

When I was in Africa, I heard similar stories from soldiers/”security specialists” who had been in Iraq (and one who was returning).

This is actually not only being paid for by civilians who can barely grasp what is being done (including me) or how to not be involved in supporting such brutal operations. Further, these operations are more and more deeply bankrupting the country, whilel a certain few get very rich.

It’s incredible, fascinating and terrifying how streamlined the unfolding system is, to allow some debate, some discourse—almost like a built in plausible denial—while the same conditions continue, not only year after year, but decade after decade, with different groups all over the world.

Here’s a piece from Tom Hayden discussing the War and the involvement of Ivy league intellectuals. It’s called Harvard’s Collaboration with Counter-Insurgency in Iraq.

An excerpt:

Led by Gen. David Petraeus, the so-called surge—an escalation of over 25,000 American troops—is resulting in hundreds of killings, mass roundups, door-to-door break-ins, and military offensives in Baghdad, al-Anbar and Diyala provinces, on the side of a deeply-sectarian Baghdad regime which, according to the White House benchmarks report, still compiles official lists of Sunni Arabs targeted for detention or death. The counter-insurgency campaign is explained as a military way to create “space” for Iraqis to reach a political solution without violent interference.

The new doctrine was jointly developed with academics at the Carr Center for Human Rights at Harvard. The Carr Center’s Sarah Sewell, a former Pentagon official, co-sponsored with Petraeus the official “doctrine revision workshop” that produced the new Army-Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual [U.S. Army Field Manual No. 3-24, Marine Corps Warfighting Publication No. 3-33.5, 2007].

For the full article (it’s short), press here.

From the Tao Te Ching, Chapter 81, 2500 years ago:

Truthful words are not beautiful; beautiful words are not truthful. Good words are not persuasive; persuasive words are not good.

He who knows has no wide learning; he who has wide learning does not know.

The sage does not hoard.

Having bestowed all he has on others, he has yet more;
Having given all he has to others, he is richer still.

The way of heaven benefits and does not harm; the way of the sage is bountiful and does not contend.

The way of heaven benefits and does not harm (no harm, ahimsa). No longer love your neighbour, love your enemy. Hm.

CONCENTRATED BEAUTY

Here’s an experiment nearly as challenging as stopping war. Try to spend a day ( a second, a minute, an hour) not being even slightly angered, flustered or disturbed by internal thoughts or external happenings, from rude service to bad drivers etc (let alone what so many sisters and brothers must endure daily).

Indeed, respond instead with a hmmm, or compassion, even love, for the other (stranger, friend, politician, lover, child, computer, boss, employee, car). If you can pull that off, my friend, write a beautiful book about it.

I’ll buy it for sure. Heck, I’ll blog about it.

The funny thing is, I can’t stick to that kind of concentrated beauty. I forget and then I respond. Alas, I remain too addicted to forming opinions. Breathe, sweet child, breathe.

It is a wonder to be alive, but it is not easy being human.

Love more and more,

Pete

For the record, I haven’t seen Sicko.

But this article at Canadian Online Pharmacy is worth a quick glance, press here.

An excerpt:

“Adverse drug events (ADEs) are believed to be among the leading causes of mortality in the United States, with an estimated 100,000 deaths per year,” according to background information in the article.

Help! Where do we go! Where do we turn! If this keeps up we’ll have to all start eating well and exercising. Harumph.

Oh yeah, and love more!

Pete xo

Nowadays, the American and Canadian spread is more similar, but in 1973, for a ten-year-old travelling across the border into America, it was a shock…(press here) for an Understanding Ken excerpt.

Truth is, I’ve always had a softs spot for big bums. What’s it to ya?