My sources in Rangon tell me that the military has orders to stop and frisk civilians and anyone caught with a cell phone is being arrested. This is following a series of cell phone camera clips showing violence toward marchers in Burma; the clips were uploaded to YouTube. The government is attempting to stop all transmission of ‘unauthorized’ data regarding the current uprising led by Buddhist monks and the people of Burma. Seems it might be easier to try to drain the ocean with a thimble....

There is amongst Buddhists in Asia the story of Kwan Yin, sometimes called Kwannon and other spellings of the name… it is said, Kwan Yin had become a Bodhi-sattva… an Enlightened Being, who thereby was allowed to step off the Wheel of Life and Death, to bypass all future suffering in earthly incarnation, and instead to ascend to Nirvana; to the place of perfected All. As Kwan Yin began to ascend the golden staircase into the heavenly realm of Nirvana, she heard a sound, and saw a motion...

Can you imagine 20,000 Rabbi’s taking to the streets of Manhattan to protest the treatment of the poor? How about 20,000 Bishops and Cardinals marching in the streets of say, Venice, holding hands? Could you imagine 20,000 Imams marching in Baghdad protesting the deaths of innocents? It would be awe-striking. Such a searing statement. But we don’t need to imagine holy men marching in Burma. This week, 20,000 monks gathered at the Shwe-dagon Pagoda, one of the holiest religious sites...

I’ve looked at several films of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad speaking. The one below is the one I’ll focus on here. In all the films, he uses repetitive gestures; holding up and pointing with his index finger… unremarkable in itself, but he then …employs poking motions with that finger, gestures while holding his finger laterally sometimes, upright others, other times approaching the curved open and closed finger gesticulations of flamenco and eastern dance… a set of gestures...

Wasn’t television supposed to be The Universal Storyteller? Back in the 50s when televisions were the sizes of refrigerators and Univacs were the size of three room houses… television…. It was so promising wasn’t it?… education for everyone, the egalitarian programming of television would become ‘the electric storyteller’… a set of endless wisdom books inside the box. Like a book, the many leaves of Television would magically flutter open, coming...

Maybe your grandmother is like mine; they see the world with ‘other eyes.’ My grandmother would sometimes say upon seeing the glee in her little dog’s eyes when she returned home: Dogs are heart medicine for humans. Other times when her butter yellow canaries would sing and sing just because the sun rose, she would say, Birds are heart medicine for humans. But then, when her kitties would adorn various kitchen cupboards to help her cook by waving their tails like pendulums, she’d...

It looks like we’re in for another season of campaign ads that accidentally entertain, and some that rise to fine and memorable art… and some that are the equivalent of ongoing intravenous poison that causes deafness. I’m hoping some and even most of the ads we’re about to see will actually tell the story of each candidate’s serious heroic quest not as Sisyphus rolling the same old rock up the impossible hill, not their Charlie McCarthy tired limp old litmus test blather,...

Larry Craig has apparently gotten his court date in Minnesota. His case is scheduled four days before his first proffered resignation date, September 30th. He’s going to apply to wind the world-clock backward, to take back time. It’ll be interesting to see how the judge will rule… Senator Craig’s new plea before the court may inadvertently help the cases of the other 41 men arrested for soliciting sex in men’s rooms in the Minneapolis airport police operation that day....

Where would you intervene in this process of a cult figure deforming a boy child into a person who will kill innocents on command in order to honor ‘the father’ of the cult? Cult is a highly unusual word because its Latin root holds a group of meanings that almost exactly define the way a cult operates: colere: to court to plant to cultivate to foster to worship First, court the depressed, the obsessive compulsive, those ostracized from their own culture, the drifters, the ones whose...

“Mawkish” “Maudlin” “Mushy” “Move On” These are words I’ve heard various and sundry persons spit, utter, snap, disgorge today, with regard to various and sundry other comments, displays and utterances by those who are sincerely mourning their losses in the 184 lives lost at the Pentagon, lives that can hardly be accused of having ‘too much publicity’ as one person put it… as well as the 2,975 souls lost in the Trade Towers,...

Have you ever noticed that some brilliant souls seem to come to earth close together in time, eddy near one another in genius, and then also leave the earth within a few short months of one another? … as though they arrive in pods, like creatures of the sea and together swim away at a signal only they know. The most recent: Antonioni, and Bergman. Now Sills, now Pavarotti. Luciano Pavarotti, who passed away yesterday at age 71, made Puccini’s aria, Nessun dorma more famous yet: In the...

Today, September 4, 2007, the Federal Election Commission, ‘the FEC” reaffirmed ” Media Exemption” is to be granted to political blogs. This means the political blogs may operate under all usual laws, but are NOT under the regulatory thumb of the FEC and are exempt from campaign finance laws… and therefore, from any additional prying government interference. At least without verifying so by running a bug sensor over the entire lunchroom. John C.A. Bambenek (no relation...

It isn’t what it may look like. It’s blueberries. Blueberries! The little 600 person rural village I grew up in continues to be a Brigadoonish reminder for any of us who grew up in or near small towns. Not only are the garbage truck, the one police car and the John Deeres in every Labor Day parade… Hunters hunt for food this time of year, just as they always have; right now is dove hunting season. This time of year too, there are at least two other contests of strength and endurance...

I wrote an article a couple days ago entitled, Senator Larry Craig’s “Intent to Resign:” When An Apology Isn’t An Apology. I saw the ‘fudging’ phrase “intent to resign” and copied it out in the post, because it seemed to follow his previous yes/no-yes/no patterns in conduct. Now it appears I should have also given the post a sub-sub title: “When a Resignation Isn’t A Resignation.” “Intent to Resign” is code in many...

The underlying conservati/liberati philosophies of various professors has been given some sharp sunshine lately. Inquiries have surfaced about which profs/schools are too much of one and not the other. This has apparently led to a new genre of publishing for parents and students who wish to even more precisely target Universities which carry their own affiliations/ affinities and exclude their opposites. One of the first forays into a new kind of ‘choice’ in university education, curriculum,...

There’s been a retelling of a huge sex scandal in Idaho 52 years ago. The two op ed writers, Seth Randal and Alan Virta, detail how in Boise on Halloween night in 1955, several men were rounded up who were accused of having sex with teenage boys. But then the dragnet harrowed out of control, far, far further, arresting ‘hidden’ gay men, citizen businessmen of Boise, who were seemingly having consensual sex with adults. The writers note that this enormous scandal as recently as...

Did your mother teach you how to make a proper apology when you were a little kid, otherwise you were grounded to your left ear for life? Me too. Did your mother or father tell you if you tried to weasel out, rather than telling the truth, it would go harder with you? Mine too. In Western culture, an adequate apology, even for immigrants who have other ways of making recompense in their own cultures, is supposed to cover the entire ‘mea culpa’ territory and be direct, showing humility...

Rumored that he will be Senator Larry Craig’s replacement… On Lieutenant-Governor James E Risch’s page at the Governor’s website are the four or five Initiatives he stands for. http://lgo.idaho.gov/ One is on helping Idahoan businesses verify that new employees are properly papered to work in the USA. Alien Verification Initiative The State of Idaho has made the decision to work as a partner with the federal government to fight illegal immigration. The tool that makes this...

Between this afternoon and evening, the article “Alberto Gonzales Resigns from The Carriage of Death, Carreta del Muerto” has been on TMV in three different lengths and versions, including all chopped up. I am so sorry. I feel like the commedian trying to unfold a new-fangled folding chair meaning to sit in it, but I got all tangled up in it and its sort of sitting on me now, instead. WordPress. I am still learning it. And I am not good at being able to understand WordPress instructions...

Some say there was a memorable line in Alberto Gonzales’ public resignation speech at his press conference today. But, as an analyst of documents for lawyers and judges, to me, that same line in Mr. Gonzales’ speech was one of those “circle what doesn’t belong in tone or topic” kind of lines. One particular line was a “slide-over-baby turn” which is an abrupt right-angle turn in a moving vehicle. It was as though line after line of his speech was about...

Alberto Gonzales has learned the hard way. Like many rag-to-riches people learn. When the gilded carriage stops for you, and the door creaks open, and you have never seen such heaven on earth… if only you will just ascend the steps….well, it’s best to pass it by. Entering the gilded carriage is a bargain with the dark man, an elite game where the bettor never wins. The now older but wiser Mr. Gonzales who danced so very hard to many other people’s music, perhaps wishes...

When key people resign ‘to spend more time with their families,’ this has become code, a euphemism to say: there’s trouble at Hamlet’s castle Capital T. Trouble. Something has gone very wrong. Coach McCartney of the CU Buffalos, abruptly quit coaching ‘to spend more time with my family.’ It turned out that his unmarried daughter was pregnant for the third time. The father to the coming child, and the fathers of her previous children were different football players...

Turn off the stove. Turn off the TV. Take a blanket. Go outdoors. Walk to the place you can see the sky with the least amount of city light. Lie on the ground. Look up into the darkest part of the sky. Tonight you will see as many as 60 meteors an hour flash through the night sky. The old people in my family, say this is the Sky Smithy hammering on the iron anvil. She is shaping raw silver buckles for the saddle straps of the Night Horses. They are the ones that pull the sun up from under the dark...

I wrote on TMV about Taslima, a poet and doctor, against whom a fatwa to behead her had been called ….for she dared to write poetry about “honor killings”; she was imprisoned for writing about women taken to the stadium and stoned to death while the mullahs present were laughing. Read on TMV May 18, 2007: Four Arrested In Honor Killing and a New Call for Beheading Taslima Nasrin http://themoderatevoice.com/?s=taslima Yesterday she was attacked at a book signing of her work. To me,...

Pastor Fred and his crew of self-styled Baptists who like to show up at funerals of gays, military and disaster victims, carrying signs saying God Hates You, and bellowing over bullhorns about how happy God is to murder human beings. He’s back. Again. They say decent Christians never speak out against others who hold themselves out to be ‘the one and only true Christians” whilst causing mayhem and murder of the soul left and right. They say Christians are silent, and do not speak...