http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/09/14/1421257

I caught you in an act of plagiarism! You stole lyrics from the group Walela!!

These words in your poetry a few posts ago on this thread are NOT YOUR WORDS:

“We have one more river to cross,

And when we get to the other side,

We are going to put on our wings and fly”.

They belong to the group Walela. And here is where it can be found: WALELA.COM

What a dirt-bag!!

Rolling Stone

The Great Iraq Swindle By Matt Taibbi

How Bush Allowed an Army of For-Profit Contractors to Invade the U.S. Treasury

[…] But getting there wasn’t easy. To travel to Iraq, would-be contractors needed permission from the Bush administration, which was far from blind in its appraisal of applicants. In a much-ballyhooed example of favoritism, the White House originally installed a clown named Jim O’Beirne at the relevant evaluation desk in the Department of Defense. O’Beirne proved to be a classic Bush villain, a moron’s moron who judged applicants not on their Arabic skills or their relevant expertise but on their Republican bona fides; he sent a twenty-four-year-old who had never worked in finance to manage the reopening of the Iraqi stock exchange, and appointed a recent graduate of an evangelical university for home-schooled kids who had no accounting experience to manage Iraq’s $13 billion budget. James K. Haveman, who had served as Michigan’s community-health director under a GOP governor, was put in charge of rehabilitating Iraq’s health-care system and decided that what this war-ravaged, malnourished, sanitation-deficient country most urgently needed was . . . an anti-smoking campaign. […]

In short, some $8.8 billion of the $12 billion proved impossible to find. “Who in their right mind would send 360 tons of cash into a war zone?” asked Rep. Henry Waxman, chairman of the House Oversight Committee. “But that’s exactly what our government did.”

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/16076312/the_great_iraq_swindle

How the neoliberals stitched up the wealth of nations for themselves

George Monbiot

Tuesday August 28, 2007

The Guardian

A cabal of intellectuals and elitists hijacked the economic debate, and now we are dealing with the catastrophic effects

For the first time the UK’s consumer debt exceeds the total of its gross national product: a new report shows that we owe £1.35 trillion. Inspectors in the United States have discovered that 77,000 road bridges are in the same perilous state as the one which collapsed into the Mississippi. Two years after Hurricane Katrina struck, 120,000 people from New Orleans are still living in trailer homes and temporary lodgings. As runaway climate change approaches, governments refuse to take the necessary action. Booming inequality threatens to create the most divided societies the world has seen since before the first world war. Now a financial crisis caused by unregulated lending could turf hundreds of thousands out of their homes and trigger a cascade of economic troubles.

These problems appear unrelated, but they all have something in common. They arise in large part from a meeting that took place 60 years ago in a Swiss spa resort.

http://business.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,2157199,00.html

Ignore the ESPN.COM link, sorry.

You have been caught in an act of plagiarism!

These words in your poetry above:

“We have one more river to cross,

And when we get to the other side,

We are going to put on our wings and fly” …

are not yours!!

They belong to the group Walela. And here is where it can be found: walela.com/LTwalela.html”

ESPN.COM

Please don’t say that you did not make any claims one way or the other. When you post something and you do not put it in quotes or provide a citation, that means you are telling reader that you wrote it. Except in this case you stole it! I thought I noticed something funny about your style way back, but I shrugged it off and didn’t look into it. Can’t say I’m surprised. What a low life!!

I had more to contribute to this “dialogue”, but it has just come to an end.

A shadow occupies the House of Light

And day seems as night.

Athens, why are you burning?

Oh, children of Jerusalem, must ye bicker like rabid dogs?

See ye not the night sky?

Mars, the mighty-armed, draws nigh.

Dear Mercury, take this, our entreaty,

And Move swiftly:

Have Mercy, We, the children of men,

Who suffer the pangs of fiery passions,

And are subsumed by internal combustion,

Have lost our way.

A shadow occupies of the House of Light

And day seems as night.

We have stumbled in pursuit of the golden calf,

And at the feasting table of the money-changer,

We are made fat.

Spare us, and we a swear a change of heart and mind.

Odin’s dogs bay for blood.

And Huracan sounds his mighty conch.

Hear this, a humble prayer,

A rhythm for a stitch in time,

If you need blood, take mine.

We have one more river to cross,

And when we get to the other side,

We are going to put on our wings and fly.

Daddy won’t you take me back to Muhlenberg County,

down by the Green River where paradise lay.

Well I’m sorry my son but you are too late in askin’

Mister Peabody’s coal train has hauled it away.

- John Prine

Empires in reality are the manifestation of energy regimes. They are composed of the socio-economic institutions implicit in the regimes. A careful reading of “history” shows that as “civilization” has evolved from one regime to the next, the attendant empire has morphed to reflect the new efficiencies. Since the time of Prometheus we have endured (for the infinitesimally small amount of time homo sapiens have wandered on this planet) a series carbon based regimes: wood, coal, steam, fossil fuels (and nuclear).

Each regime establishes a certain threshold of agriculture production and thus defines the structure and distribution of “civilization”. Some are inclined to regard history as a “steady-stream” of progress, others are inclined to conceive of it as a series of plateaus punctuated by a series of sudden and radical change. The first eyeball, the disappearance of dinosaurs or Neanderthals, the first view of earth from space to name but a few. I am of this latter camp. I am also convinced that what we are witness to the transition from a series of carbon-based regimes to a hydrogen-based regime. This marks a beguiling moment of currency in the supreme movement – a defining moment in the unfathomable and timeless struggle between the two titans: chaos and order.

If you look closely and follow the thread of imagination back in time past Virgil and Cicero and Plato and Socrates, past Pythagoras and Nebuchadnezzar and Lao tzu and Confucius to Hesiod and Homer and David and Solomon, you will arrive then at the “point in time” where history begins to emerge from mystery (i.e. order gets a leg up on chaos in human affairs). This movement is symbolized by the Star of David, where we see the two triangles combining, one ascending, one descending. Implicit in the duplicity of this movement has always been the promise: the singularity (Christ consciousness, Buddha consciousness, Krishna consciousness) .

If you behold the Star of David you will see clearly the six points. Note the correspondence with atomic number of carbon? The Seven Wise Men of Greece, of whom the poets spoke, instructed us to “know thyself”. Since that time there has not been one syllable of wisdom added to human understanding that elaborates what is required to “bring forth that which is inside you” (i.e. to extract the essence). Only recitations. To extract the essence is to remove the oil from the olive, with this oil you may be anointed. Perhaps you have heard of the poets and prophets of old speak of the anointed one? Failure to “know thyself” results in i-gnosis – ignorance – the source of suffering and the very thing that causes us to go against the tide, to move against the current, to struggle, to not see (consider the etymology of the word “devil”; to obstruct, to obscure to cast in our path).

At this moment an inspired, self-reliant child is working to extract energy from hydrogen, at precisely the right moment, she will meet with success, and a new energy regime will emerge, and all this fuss about “our empire” will be irrelevant. We will become as one. Note the correspondence with the atomic mass of hydrogen? Energy will be free. There will be no need to struggle and we will come to truly know our selves. This is the age old story, as pronounced by Sophia from her throne and inscribed on the great tome of life. It has always been known and I only recite it here. If we have eyes to see and ears to hear, may we open them. If not, hell hath no furry like a woman scorned. Let us sit back and relax as we await the next report from the world tree. Or better yet, let us imagine that we are already free from our dark history.

You said “Concerning my view, I’m interested in consciousness and its transformation through time”.

It is easy to get dizzy traversing the intersecting lines of imminence and transcendence with an undisciplined mind. It paints a beautiful panorama of synesthesia and self intoxication. You must be well read. But what purpose does it serve other than to see how many times you can bang your head against the wall without feeling any pain or making a fool of yourself? My opinion is that since you possess such a critical disability to interpret present and past tenses; facts and reality so poorly, that it is impossible for you to succeed at such a task.

There is a mountain. On one side we have someone who has climbed many mountains in the past and has all the latest equipment. On the other side of the mountain we have someone who is almost completely naked and has no equipment at all. What are the odds?

Thanks