Politics & Society

Follow the Money – Who pays for cost for massive NSA phone/data mining?

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My husband and I own an independent bookstore and one of the things I’ve always prepared myself for is what I would do if I ever got handed one of those “National Security Letters,” demanding information about what products our customers bought. The PATRIOT Act allows the government to demand business records if their need for those records involves some kind of terrorist investigation and people receiving those letters not only have to obey them, but also have to remain silent about having received one. Now that the news has broken that Verizon has been turning over ALL U.S. and international phone call records for at least seven years, and that U.S. and British intelligence agencies have also been mining Internet data, one question that always niggled at me came up to the surface the other night at dinner. As is often the case, Derrick is the one who asked “Someone’s got to be making money off of this. Who pays for all the work involved in compiling, storing, turning over, and sifting through those records?”

Politics & Society

What Price Would You Accept for Your Sons? Two Afghan Boys Killed by NATO Troops

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With this weekend marking the ten years since the war in Iraq started, this terrible reminder of the ongoing tragedy in Afghanistan saddened me today. Two young Afghan boys were killed by NATO troops in a helicopter as the children walked behind their donkeys, gathering firewood. According to reports, Australia has accepted responsibility for accidentally killing the children and is planning to pay their families compensation. What price do you pay for the lives of two pre-teen children?

art

Getting Centered: A Musing by Jim Burklo

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I don’t understand the mathematics behind the gomboc. But my intuition suggests that its shape has some kind of eternal, universal quality about it, as does a sphere or a cube. In some way, it must be a shape that describes gravity itself. It’s a shape that represents, but also actually embodies, one of the fundamental relationships forming the cosmos.
Perhaps also it evokes the shape of the soul, tumbled about by this rough world but created to right itself in relationship to its divine Source. Had Bodhidharma lived long enough, and meditated deeply enough, perhaps his body would have melted further into the shape of the gomboc. Then the daruma doll would need no extra weight at the bottom to get it to return to “center”!

Politics & Society

A School by Any Other Name Still Stinks (SOA/WHINSEC)

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My lessons had finally come full circle. From 1989 when I thought it was ridiculous for anyone to claim that American soldiers would participate in torture and assassination, to 2003, when it was clear that we had, and soon thereafter the world would be horrified by the images of torture smuggled out of Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison, and today we sit and watch while unmanned drones assassinate people by the scores.

art

Wonder – A Book That Transforms the World

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Masterfully crafted and impossible to put down, this book should be required reading for anyone over the age of ten. Augie, like Alex Libby, is an amazing person with fascinating interests, incredible courage, a wicked sense of humor, loving compassion for others, a willingness to forgive other people’s weaknesses and bad behavior, and he can be a lot of fun to be around if you take the time to get past the surface. Augie, though, unlike Alex, has such severe deformities that it takes a lot more work to get past his surface.

Politics & Society

Time to End Indefinite Detention

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The idea that our government thinks it can lock an American up based on “suspicion” that he or she somehow “supported” an alleged “terrorist” organization just doesn’t seem very constitutional to me! Yet our current law allows just that. Senator Dianne Feinstein and others in the Senate are trying to do something about indefinite detention and I’m hoping they’ll get enough support from Americans across the political spectrum to remove this affront to freedom from the next Defense Authorization bill. Perhaps they could call it a Korematsu amendment.

Culture

Yes Mitt. People do die because they have no health insurance.

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On Wednesday October 10th, in a conversation with the editorial board of the Columbus Dispatch, Mitt Romney said “We don’t have people that become ill, who die in their apartment because they don’t have insurance.” Sit with that quote a minute and think. Really? Beyond knowing in your gut that we do, in fact, have people who die in their apartments, homes, backyards, on the streets, in shelters, at soup kitchens, and in all sorts of places, in part, because they don’t have access to adequate health care, Mitt Romney is missing other parts of the nightmare that is, for 50 million Americans, the reality of not having health insurance. I’ve written about my friend Anna before, and I will keep writing about her, until and maybe even after we get health care in this country right.

Culture

Conversations Across America: Flagstaff Arizona

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Our friend Julie McDonald is traveling across the country by Greyhound bus to talk to real people about their lives and how their life experiences and current situations are impacting how they feel about the upcoming election. She had conversations across America by scooter in 2008 and her storytelling from those conversations touched thousands of lives. Yesterday, Julie watched as mothers put their children onto buses heading to Nogales and then had a conversation about immigration policy with an amazing woman who works at that station every day. Here’s a link to that story, which includes an amazing audio interview. I hope once you hear this first interview you’ll decide to follow Julie as she continues her trek across the county, to bring us more stories.

Culture

Soulful Citizenship – A Musing by Jim Burklo

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As I was sitting here in our shop, stocking the shelves while Debate Bingo cards print in the background (yes – we’re going to play debate bingo tonight), I spotted a new email from Rev. Jim Burklo, his latest musing. This is one I simply had to share. He starts with the question “How can we put faith into how we vote?” Read on for his answer. Musings by Jim Burklo
www.tcpc.blogs.com/musingsfor current and previous articles
10-3-12
(This “musing” is excerpted from a speech I gave this past Sunday at First Congregational UCC Church of Palo Alto, CA.You can hear an audio recording of my talkhere.)
 
SOULFUL CITIZENSHIP

How can we put faith into the way we vote?

Culture

Common Sense: A Musing by Jim Burklo

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Mitt Romney’s 47% comments have really been on my mind the last few days. Two things prompted me to post something here today. One, I had a long conversation with a homeless man who came by our shop on Friday. Two, Rev. Jim Burklo shared a new “musing” somewhat inspired by Gov. Romney’s secretly videotaped musings. I’ll share a bit about my Friday conversation, share all of Jim’s musing, and then close with a bit about how it all fits together.