"Today the U.S. Supreme Court threw out six decades of established law by granting corporations the right to use their incredible wealth and power to influence elections--thereby diminishing the power of your vote...

Imagine ExxonMobil or AIG throwing huge sums of money directly into Congressional attack ads.

Such a scenario used to be illegal. But today, the Supreme Court ruled to lift a 60-year-old ban that kept corporations from contributing directly to campaigns and candidates.
Congress must act now to protect democracy: Call on your members of Congress to fix this mess.
The tortured legal argument is this: We're infringing on a corporation's rights by keeping it out of elections ... rights specifically granted to people.
A corporation is not a person with voting rights. Corporations are not your neighbors, cannot get married, cannot die, and are not a part of "We the People." Giving corporations the rights of people would fundamentally change our democracy.
Unless we stand up, the problem of corporate money in politics could go from bad to unimaginably worse. Already, moneyed institutions have too much power over government. I shudder to think of a situation in which Goldman Sachs, ExxonMobil and Big Pharma have even more control. In fact, if this had been the law of the land in 2008, ExxonMobil alone could have outspent both Barack Obama and John McCain forty (40) times over. [1]
Thankfully, some legislators are working to strengthen our campaign finance laws to prevent this. Rep. Chris Van Hollen (MD), Sen. Charles Schumer (NY), and the White House are working to pass a Legislative fix to the Supreme Court opinion.
But without more congressional support, we're dead in the water. We need Congress to prevent a flash flood of corporate money into elections. The alternative is an undemocratic system in which large corporations have even more power to drown out the voices of regular voters.
Tell your members of Congress to block corporate money in elections:"
http://www.OSPIRG.org/action/democracy/citizens-united?id4=es

 

The human body literally glows, emitting a visible light in extremely small quantities at levels that rise and fall with the day, scientists now reveal.

Past research has shown that the body emits visible light, 1,000 times less intense than the levels to which our naked eyes are sensitive. In fact, virtually all living creatures emit very weak light, which is thought to be a byproduct of biochemical reactions involving free radicals.

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No matter what your day's been like, even if people have been vile and unloving,  it is as nothing compared to what's happening in Haiti right now.

What will you do about this?  How will you respond?

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Hamlet may have been reaching for some certainty when he said this line, but it still can guide us. Everything we think in response to an event is a construction that we are placing on that event or feeling. And it might be wrong.

If I feel I will die if I don't buy a new car, then my thinking has made that so - not reality. If I feel my life is an empty failure then I'm presuming I can know the totality of effects that result from my life, which is arrogant, to say the least.

Yet, I can also choose to think happy, peaceful, or optimistic thoughts, even when faced with real disasters. Haiti is a disaster zone today; yet in that disaster we can see human caring, bravery, compassion, and love.  It's up to us where we focus.

There are many things worth remembering, and one of these is that love can only come into a place of stillness within us.  It cannot make itself felt in turmoil, because confusion is all we can feel at such times.

If you want love in your life you may have to practice stillness.

Today I thought I'd post a few comments on a rather abstruse subject - Joseph Conrad's story 'The Sisters'.  I choose it because it's fairly clear that Conrad was using his story to explore some rather murky personal territory.  

So murky was it that, in the end, he abandoned the tale.  It was published as a fragment two years after his death.
 
It's not much more than a fragment, really, but the edition that is prefaced by F. M. Ford is valuable because Ford was present when Conrad was first writing it, and has many important things to say about this posthumous Conrad volume.

The theme that might most interest Conrad fans is one that echoes through 'Nostromo' and 'The Arrow of Gold' - two sisters, and one man's attraction to the second sister when feeling something very different towards the first. Ford refers to this as 'incest' although it stretches further than this. This is what we see in Nostromo's struggle when he is engaged to the virtuous Linda but lusts after the less soulful Giselle. It is the same tension we see when Kurtz has his pure 'Intended' back in Brussels, and his native mistress in the Congo. To some extent Razumov feels an attraction for Natalie Haldin that is very similar, since it depends upon a betrayal of her brother - and he winds up with another woman anyway.

The theme of being attracted to one woman and finding oneself actually attached to another, very different, woman is one that echoes through Conrad's work. 'Victory' sees Heyst attracted to Lena but unable to believe in her, in a tragic echo of this prevailing idea.

When seen in this way 'The Sisters', for all its incomplete nature, works as an attempt by Conrad to explore his conflicted feelings about lust and idealism. For this reason one could say that it is central to our understanding of who Conrad was.

From my point of view it tells us several things about writing.  The first is that it can be used to work out our complicated feelings.  The second is this: if we abandon the attempt to work those feelings through they don't go away.  They stick around and haunt us. The artist's challenge is to turn those ghosts into  something that can bring understanding and peace.  Even if that's not entirely possible the attempt is a worthy one.

Writing about one's life is always an attempt to wrestle with ghosts.

 

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BY STEPHEN SIMON

 

     As always, my list includes my own personal favorites, not the films I consider best, a classification I find to be both impossible and absurd. I have no idea what the “best film” is. I only know the films I enjoyed the most. Happy 2010!

 

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Will it change Obama?

AVATAR, the 3-D fusion camera system film by Canadian Oscar winning director and writer James Cameron now nominated for 4 Golden Globe awards, is a virtual experience of extraterrestrial disclosure and the harsh exopolitical reality of Earth’s military-industrial complex and permanent war economy ongoing secret colonization and exploitation of our solar system and beyond.

AVATAR is not only a future morality play about the destruction of a spiritually-advanced animist race of extraterrestrials for mining rights, corporate greed and the survival of a denuded Earth in a distant future. It is all of these, and more. AVATAR offers you the viewer a close-to-virtual experience of a case study of what may be occurring right now in our own solar system as the black budget war-mentality of Earth’s expands it dualistic, exploitative and militaristic policies into outer space behind a screen of official secrecy and constitutional rogue.

Continues at: examiner.com

 

Becoming an Oracle

Nicki Scully

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