Old words - still appropriate for this new setting . . .

Sometimes you stumble upon a writing from days in the past that you are amazed to find is still current in a present setting.  And such it is with this piece which at the time was voted my best non-published article of 1997 by my colleagues at Macmillian Publishing.  It's a Letter to the Editor, Minnesota Daily, in response to the “Eight Days in May 1972” Series that they published May 12 - 14, 1997.

It's been twenty-five years already since those heady days of manning (today I would say “personing”) the barricade on Washington Avenue, attending the anti-war teach-ins, and participating in the preparation of “dis-orientation week” (scheduled for the arrival of new students in the fall of 1972).  On the day after President Nixon announced the mining of Haiphong Harbor, I and a significant other donned black, monk-like, hooded robes with black veils over our faces and paraded up and down Nicollet Mall at lunch time as well as wearing them to our classes that week.  That summer we decided to take time off from school in order to figure out where we stood politically.  We moved up north to a friend's summer house (which we “winterized”) and lived off the land for fourteen months, reading about the background to the Vietnam War and the other wars the United States had been involved with and hammering out a political stance with which we and a majority of the world's people could live.  It was a rich and enriching experience which few could afford (timewise).

I was a Vietnam veteran and having been stationed for a time at G-3, CINCPACFLEET, Manila, Philippines handling CRITICOMM traffic to NSA (National Security Agency), DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency), etc., knew enough of the bullshit that our government was trying to foist upon the “silent majority” of Americans (the Pentagon Papers only added fuel to the fire).  So, I would agree with Officer Lee that we have become very cautious of the continuing daily doses of political double-speak.  We learned from these experiences to question authority.  Taking, as a standard, this quote attributed to John Pilger - “Official truths are often powerful illusions.”

Of course, Marv Davidov continues to be an inspiration ever since first hearing of him when my next youngest brother all of a sudden decided to go to Cuba back in the early '60s (the FBI was calling our house, sometimes more than once a week, to ask my mother if she knew where her son was).  And I readily agree with him that as part of the experience of the “eight days in May” we changed our way of doing “business as usual” even though we continue our participation “in the heart of the Beast” here at the University (with reference to President Eisenhower's mid-50s’ warning of the impact of the “military-industrial[-educational-{political}] complex”) - a rich and enriching experience which fewer and fewer can afford (moneywise).

So, what has our activism been like during the past twenty-five years?  Besides seeking alternatives in everything from birthing (we delivered our first child with the help of a mid-wife at University Hospitals twenty-three years ago, and delivered our second child at home with the aid of a mid-wife nineteen years ago) to raising our youth (home-schooling from day one with the emphasis, not surprisingly, on life-long education) and otherwise trying to choose ways to live and love that kill as few other human beings as possible, we began looking for small communities in which to participate ‐ North Country Co-op was a beginning.  And in 1973, we helped found what is today Hampden Park Co-op.  After living in a couple of house communities beginning in 1977 - one in Minneapolis, the other, Holly House, in Saint Paul - and participating in a house church (Agora Community Church, Saint Paul), in 1983, we moved to the land-trust Dorea Peace Community (northeast of Amery, WI).  The two years our family lived there were an experience of a lifetime.  We worked half-time procuring income to keep the community going and the other half protesting (in the sense of “testifying for”) life as opposed to the various death industries - Honeywell (Alliant Tech), the ELF Project, the Burlington Northern Project - and establishing a War Tax Alternative Fund in support of peace and justice activities (e. g., a home for battered women).  I had been working as an analyst / programmer in the Administrative Data Processing Department at the University of Minnesota's Twin Cities Campus, but after the IRS qarnered my University pension funds and the University would not pay me just $1.00 to work, I quit that job and went on to teach at Brown Institute and Globe College of Business.  More recently our work, besides the Hampden Park Co-op, has centered around financial support of Allies of the Lakota (helping to provide better health care and communications to the Lakota People on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation) and Sister Parish (connecting mainstream church people in the US with church people in the poverty stricken countries of the third [and fourth] world[s]).

I believe that the words that best express what the University as an institution needs to learn from the experiences of the “eight days in May” come from anthropologist Ernest Becker's, The Structure of Evil:  An Essay on the Unification of the Science of [Human Being].  (New York: The Free Press, 1968). Pp.  38 - 41.

• We are in a rare position today to savor the climate of opinion in Europe just after the French Revolution, and during the dilemmas of the Industrial one.  In two-thirds of our world we are re-experiencing the same dilemmas, the same hopes and fears.  What price order?  What price industrialization?  What should one keep of the beneficial order of traditional society while attempting to do away with its injustices and inequalities?  How can one keep what is good, and reject the bad?  Is industrialization an unmitigated good ‐ can its ill effects be foreseen and remedied?  What directions shall it take ‐ under what kind of government?  What exactly does the free vote contribute to this process ‐ what does it really mean in the hands of an ignorant peasant?  Is an uninformed vote a fetish ‐ or, perhaps worse, an active obstacle to intelligent change?  What kind of commodities are fetishes, and who is to proscribe them if people “really want” them?
• The questioning is anguished ‐ and it is often very well informed, informed by the lessons of our own failures and successes during these [200] years of our history in the West.  But the new elite of the two-thirds of the world who are asking these questions are often better informed about our own problems than we are ourselves.  Thus, they go back again and again to questions that we have stopped asking: “When hereditary class privilege and aristocracy ‐ the first pillar of feudalism ‐ are destroyed, is it enough?  Doesn't the second pillar of feudalism also have to be eliminated, namely, the private ownership of land?  If both pillars of traditional society are not removed, can one really make an effective transition to industrial democracy in the service of the common good?  Without this twofold change, isn't parliamentary democracy merely a new kind of spoils system ‐ with new owners and new classes redividing the old and the new privately owned wealth?  If this is true, then isn't industrial democracy merely a new kind of domination, a quick change of costume that leaves fundamental problems untouched?  If not ‐ if industrial democracy is really making more and more wealth available to more and more people ‐ is this enough?  Is it enough just to spread more and more goods, thoughtlessly, to turn [human beings] into . . . clever consumer ape[s], eyeing greedily the dangling things?”
• These are anguished and urgent questions.  We do not examine the French Revolution and its aftermath, the Industrial Revolution, in these terms today, in our schools and colleges.  Is it because, in the West, we have abdicated facing up to the problems which two-thirds of the world now has to face?  The answer is that we have . . . .

We learned from the political committee investigations and the managed news during this twenty-five year period that it is the questions that aren't asked that are the important ones.

PNAC historical documentation and even Democrats enamored with all things Russian . . .

. . . Not Admitting The Most Essential Lessons Of History

(I've recently been getting “rants and raves” emails from one of my United States senators [a Democrat {which in this era of endless war, with its attendant deceptions, dishonesty, untruths, hateful speech, alternative facts, and reductive curating, certainly doesn't mean much}] with regard to all things “Russian” [example].  In the few words allowed on her email WWW site, I noted that it's been 9,196 days since the publication [February 18, 1992] of the DOD “Defense Planning Guidance” for 1994-1999 and referred her to this blog which spells out in some detail [with thanks to Paul Craig Roberts for his reference on his Institute for Political Economy blog to the analysis of Thad Beversdorf and the documentation references of the “Nuclear Vault” of the National Security Archive at George Washington University] the unadmitted historical background.)

Ron Paul wrote an eye opening 2014 article about some legislation that had just been signed in Congress, namely House Resolution 758.  While not a new law, as seen in the discussion which follows, it does provide a foundation of facts that will be called upon in future actions.  Essentially the resolution suggests that Russia behaved badly in various ways and if congressmen signed on to the resolution, then they were agreeing to the "factuality" of its assertions.  Now just because a group of persons elected as representatives of the people stand around in a tax-revenue financed chamber and say “yeah” to several statements, those actions do not make those statements factual (except here in the United Orwellian States of America).  Those statements that were voted to be fact (similar to the First Council of Nicaea) will now be taught to our children as factual history - actually having happened that way (the idea of American manifest destiny was learned by all of us utilizing similar methodologies [now see, for example, F. William Engdahl's Manifest Destiny:  Democracy as Cognitive Dissonance {Wiesbaden, GDR:  mine.Books, 2018, 224 pp.}]).

While essentially a dishonest method (the ignorance it creates is reason enough not to sign on), as Dr. Paul clearly points out, the real purpose of the resolution is to legally build the foundation for a future war, the planning for which has been active for many years now.  The U. S. sponsored coup in Ukraine, sold to us as simply a necessary response to the Ukraine situation, was rather a flash in the pan to set off a much larger explosion.

OK, what is this? “Another conspiracy theory?  Why can't it ever just be that the U. S. government thinks what they are doing is best for Americans”?  Ideally, one would suppose that it could be.  Never, if ever, anymore.  Lies (with or without “false flag[s]”) are told and public opinion is manipulated.  As good as the strategy of war must be on the ground, it must be every bit as good theater in the presstitute presentations.  And, what makes war so ugly, is the pressitute theater.  Again, ideally, you would want to fight a war (as brutal and unfortunate as that plays out) in which one believes.  The ugliness?  Attempting to fight a war based on lies and deceit which only benefits those telling the lies - something incomprehensible.  Except for the “Beltway” sociopaths.

And,so, we offer up some facts (that many don't know about) as to how it came to be that we invaded Iraq and Syria — the truth is still very much hidden from common knowledge.

While the 9 / 11 event actually seemed to bring the world together, it very quickly turned into a launching pad for war.  One could think it reasonable, given the extent of the tragedy that took place in New York, that a mighty nation like America would want retribution from those responsible.   However, the United States abandoned the attack on those responsible and, instead, initiated a war ‐ the planning for which had been in the works for many years.

At this point, it is pretty common knowledge that the U. S. pulled out of Afghanistan to focus their forces and objectives toward Iraq.  Of course, to get the world onboard with this focus, incredible lies were promulgated about Iraq not only having some connection to 9 / 11 but that they were also building enormous stockpiles of ‘Weapons of Mass Destruction’ and that they were hell bent on using those against western nations.  Again, we now know that none of these assertions were true.  And we know our legislators were aware that no credible evidence existed to support such views.  And we know that despite knowing those assertions were false they still made the decision to lie not only to the American people but to the world.  The lies were told in an effort to build support so that parents around the world would see a righteous cause in sending their sons and daughters to their potential deaths or to be maimed in unimaginably horrifying circumstances.

Now, just think about that for a moment and don't just read over that and move on.  Because this is the essence of what our government has become in America today.  They knowingly lied to the world so that the world would be willing to sacrifice their children, believing it was a necessary and righteous cause to do so.  And in the end the truth came to light that there was no righteous cause.  That all these young men and women from around the world had been used as pawns to fulfill the ambitions of a few.  It is truly one of the ugliest atrocities to ever have been carried out by an elected government against its own citizens.  And yet today because of our state presstitute media, most will not acknowledge that such an atrocity took place.  The imperative to understanding is that it has to be made very clear that Iraq was not a consequence of poor intelligence or bad decisions in the wake of post 9 / 11 emotions.  The invasions of both Iraq and Syria were being planned and discussed for many years before 9 / 11.  It has been said that if you don't learn from history, then you are doomed to repeat it.  The antidote is that history can be used to change the future.

So, what are those historical events?

In 1996, Netanyahu, the Prime Minister of Israel, sponsored an ad hoc think tank named The Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies - Study Group on a New Israeli Strategy Toward 2000.  From this think tank came a report that was the beginning of a powerful lobby movement.  Here's a look at a few main points that come from that 1996 report:

Israel's quest for peace emerges from, and does not replace, the pursuit of its ideals.  The Jewish people's hunger for human rights — burned into their identity by a 2000-year old dream to live free in their own land — informs the concept of peace and reflects continuity of values with Western and Jewish tradition.

Israel can shape its strategic environment, in cooperation with Turkey and Jordan, by weakening, containing, and even rolling back Syria.  This effort can focus on removing Saddam Hussein from power in Iraq — an important Israeli strategic objective in its own right — as a means of foiling Syria's regional ambitions.

Syria challenges Israel on Lebanese soil.  An effective approach, and one with which America can sympathize, would be if Israel seized the strategic initiative along its northern borders by engaging Hizballah, Syria, and Iran, as the principal agents of aggression in Lebanon, including by:

• striking Syria's drug-money and counterfeiting infrastructure in Lebanon, all of which focuses on Razi Qanan.
• paralleling Syria's behavior by establishing the precedent that Syrian territory is not immune to attacks emanating from Lebanon by Israeli proxy forces.
• striking Syrian military targets in Lebanon, and should that prove insufficient, striking at select targets in Syria proper.

To anticipate U.S. reactions and plan ways to manage and constrain those reactions, Prime Minister Netanyahu can formulate the policies and stress themes he favors in language familiar to the Americans by tapping into themes of American administrations during the Cold War which apply well to Israel.  If Israel wants to test certain propositions that require a benign American reaction, then the best time to do so is before November, 1996.

Now, who would the authors of such a report have been?  A report that seems to promote the idea of constraining, manipulating and achieving a benign American reaction.  We'll have a look at the authors of this document below.  They should be familiar to most of you as they are U. S. policymakers rather than Israeli policymakers, which is odd because again this is an Israeli state sponsored project with objectives that are clearly focused on the well being of Israel, not the U. S. or the American people.

Richard Perle, American Enterprise Institute, Washington, D. C., Study Group Leader,

James Colbert, Jewish Institute for National Security Affairs, Washington, D. C.
Charles Fairbanks, Jr.,Johns Hopkins University / SAIS, Baltimore, MD
Douglas Feith, Feith and Zell Associates
Robert Loewenberg, President, Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies
Jonathan Torop, The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, Washington, D. C.
David Wurmser, Institute for Advanced Strategic and Political Studies
Meyrav Wurmser, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD

Then, subsequent to that 1996 report being released, there was a letter drafted and sent to President Clinton in January 1998 that provides us some additional clarity on the war policies of the new millennium.  Here's a look at that letter:

Archived from: http://www.newamericancentury.org/iraqclintonletter.htm PNAC letters sent to President Bill Clinton January 26, 1998 The Honorable William J. Clinton President of the United States Washington, DC Dear Mr. President: We are writing you because we are convinced that current American policy toward Iraq is not succeeding, and that we may soon face a threat in the Middle East more serious than any we have known since the end of the Cold War.  In your upcoming State of the Union Address, you have an opportunity to chart a clear and determined course for meeting this threat.  We urge you to seize that opportunity, and to enunciate a new strategy that would secure the interests of the U.S. and our friends and allies around the world.  That strategy should aim, above all, at the removal of Saddam Hussein's regime from power.  We stand ready to offer our full support in this difficult but necessary endeavor. The policy of “containment” of Saddam Hussein has been steadily eroding over the past several months.  As recent events have demonstrated, we can no longer depend on our partners in the Gulf War coalition to continue to uphold the sanctions or to punish Saddam when he blocks or evades UN inspections.  Our ability to ensure that Saddam Hussein is not producing weapons of mass destruction, therefore, has substantially diminished.  Even if full inspections were eventually to resume, which now seems highly unlikely, experience has shown that it is difficult if not impossible to monitor Iraq's chemical and biological weapons production.  The lengthy period during which the inspectors will have been unable to enter many Iraqi facilities has made it even less likely that they will be able to uncover all of Saddam's secrets.  As a result, in the not-too-distant future we will be unable to determine with any reasonable level of confidence whether Iraq does or does not possess such weapons. Such uncertainty will, by itself, have a seriously destabilizing effect on the entire Middle East.  It hardly needs to be added that if Saddam does acquire the capability to deliver weapons of mass destruction, as he is almost certain to do if we continue along the present course, the safety of American troops in the region, of our friends and allies like Israel and the moderate Arab states, and a significant portion of the world's supply of oil will all be put at hazard.  As you have rightly declared, Mr. President, the security of the world in the first part of the 21st century will be determined largely by how we handle this threat. Given the magnitude of the threat, the current policy, which depends for its success upon the steadfastness of our coalition partners and upon the cooperation of Saddam Hussein, is dangerously inadequate. The only acceptable strategy is one that eliminates the possibility that Iraq will be able to use or threaten to use weapons of mass destruction. In the near term, this means a willingness to undertake military action as diplomacy is clearly failing. In the long term, it means removing Saddam Hussein and his regime from power. That now needs to become the aim of American foreign policy. We urge you to articulate this aim, and to turn your Administration's attention to implementing a strategy for removing Saddam's regime from power.  This will require a full complement of diplomatic, political and military efforts.  Although we are fully aware of the dangers and difficulties in implementing this policy, we believe the dangers of failing to do so are far greater.  We believe the U.S. has the authority under existing UN resolutions to take the necessary steps, including military steps, to protect our vital interests in the Gulf.  In any case, American policy cannot continue to be crippled by a misguided insistence on unanimity in the UN Security Council. We urge you to act decisively.  If you act now to end the threat of weapons of mass destruction against the U.S. or its allies, you will be acting in the most fundamental national security interests of the country.  If we accept a course of weakness and drift, we put our interests and our future at risk. Sincerely, Elliott Abrams  Richard L. Armitage  William J. Bennett Jeffrey Bergner  John Bolton  Paula Dobriansky Francis Fukuyama  Robert Kagan  Zalmay Khalilzad William Kristol  Richard Perle  Peter W. Rodman Donald Rumsfeld  William Schneider, Jr.  Vin Weber Paul Wolfowitz  R. James Woolsey  Robert B. Zoellick Archived from: http://www.newamericancentury.org/iraqclintonletter.htm

Again we see a very explicit and aggressive lobby effort to persuade the U. S. to invade Iraq.  And aren't these authors even more interesting.  Many of the same authors of the 1996 recommendation are also authors of this lobby effort.  Only this time they are acting as benefactors of America.  Odd though that they are pushing the very same agenda that just 18 months earlier these same folks were pushing as benefactors to a foreign nation.  It almost seems as though the authors are indeed attempting to manage and constrain the American people's reaction, as discussed in the first report, to their desired recommendations that the U. S. use its military to engage various nations in war.

Let's think about this rationally for a moment.  In 1996 we had a foreign government sponsor a think tank staffed by very prominent U. S. policymakers with the objective benefiting that foreign sponsor nation.  And then two years later we see a follow on letter to the President of the United States from not only the same U. S. policymakers that authored the 1996 report but now additional prominent U. S. policymakers.  The recommendation of both the '96 report and '98 letter to the President were lobbying for the U. S. to invade and overthrow Iraq and Syria.  However the original recommendation was for the benefit of Israel and the latter recommendation was being sold as necessary for America.  And remember, 9 / 11 had not happened yet, but we already see these very powerful, very prominent policymakers pushing very hard to invade Iraq and Syria.

The problem is Americans didn't want another Iraqi war.  Times were good in the late 1990's.  People were happy.  The cold war was over, jobs were a plenty and the world felt safer than it had for decades.  And as such, there was no way Americans were going to go to war for the benefit of a foreign nation.  The U. S. had decided Hussein was actually a stabilizing force there in the Middle East and as such we wanted him there.  But then an election happened and the “little Texas Scrub” / “ol' Dubya” was chosen by the Supreme Court to be President of the United States.  Along with him came all those names we just saw authoring the two dossiers recommending that the U. S. invade Iraq and Syria.  The authors were given titles such as Chair of the Defense Policy Board (Richard Perle) and Secretary of Defense (Rumsfeld), etc.  And so all of a sudden the same group of people who were championing the invasion of Iraq and Syria back in the late 1990's were now in a position to make it happen by way of their own authority.  What luck!  Shortly thereafter the worst attack on U. S. soil took place in New York and the rest is, as they say, history.

To believe we went into Iraq because our fearless and integrity driven leaders truly and honestly believed it was the morally and justifiable thing to do based on the tragedy of 9 / 11 is just ignorance.  There was a small group of men, called Neocons, that had derived these military actions some 10 years prior to the operations themselves and some 5 years prior to the events that were used to sell these war efforts to the American people and the world.  We can't change any of that.  The ultimate point here is to learn from what happened with Syria and Iraq and see if it squares exactly with what is happening with Russia today.

More history . . . .

A letter written by Bill Kristol and Donald Kagan to the Heads of State and Government Of the European Union and NATO.  This 2004 letter does not mince its words.  It is very much pushing for European support of what would obviously be a U. S. military stand off with Russia.  The letter is sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), which is a neoconservative think tank.  In fact, one of the prestigious awards handed out by the AEI is called the Irving Kristol award.  Irving Kristol (father to Bill Kristol) is known as the godfather of the neocon movement in the U. S.  So, again, this is essentially the same crowd from '96 and '98, pushing for support of a U. S. military operation, this time with Russia.  This is back in 2004 mind you before the recent events in Ukraine had even been imagined.  The letter was signed by many but of particular interest is that many of the same names from the 1996 report and 1998 letter to President Clinton pushing for war against Iraq and Syria also signed this letter.

Again we see the aggressive recommendations to back a military operation many years before the catalyst event takes place.  That is the event that is being sold as the moral justification for a military operation.  But this letter tells us that this military objective against Russia has been promoted for many, many years now, far before Ukraine was an issue.  This is again, a push from the same folks that lied to us about Iraq and then trained, equipped, and funded ISIS in order to get into Syria and are now working hard to create a catalyst for an offensive with Russia.

For years before 9 / 11 it was determined by those warmongering policymakers that we would be invading Iraq and Syria.  All we needed was a catalyst.  9 / 11 provided that for Iraq.  ISIS provided that for Syria.  And, now, Ukraine has provided that for Russia.  9 / 11 was used as a catalyst to lie to the American people about the need to invade Iraq.  It has also been fully admitted by our government that we did in fact, train, equip, and fund ISIS, ‘mistakenly though’.  And finally we have recordings of senior U. S. diplomats discussing our involvement in the coup in Ukraine.

And so one can only conclude here that again Americans are being manipulated to accept the recommendations from a powerful group of warmongering policymakers to go to war with a nation that has posed absolutely no threat to the American people in more than 25 years.  And we are being led down this path by lies and propaganda.  Quite specifically things like H. Res. 758.  And if we do not make a stand against these policymakers we are most certainly headed for what could very well be the war to end all wars.

For the West is clearly looking to fortify its power hold over the world by destroying Russia economically and, thus, disable them militarily in an effort to prevent a Sino-Soviet alliance.  On January 11, 2010, former World Bank President, James Wolfensohn, made a presentation to a political science class at Stanford University.  Ironically, the moral to his story was to challenge them to figure out a way, in the face of a rising East soon to control a higher share of the worlds assets than the West, to retain the West's global control.  He stressed it was something his generation did not have to deal with but that today's Western up and coming political class must consider.  You see China is a powerful nation but without an alliance with Russia, China can be contained due to its lack of energy.  Because China is both a more difficult opponent and one that has much more trade with the U. S., Russia is the obvious target to prevent a fully formed Sino-Soviet alliance.

However, it is difficult to imagine a scenario where China does not clearly identify such a strategy being played out.  And so they will come to the defense of Russian energy, as we've already seen with the signings of the world's largest energy deals between those two nations.  If push comes to shove, the Chinese defense will not be limited just to economics.  And we will be put in the midst of the most powerful nations in the history of the world fighting for ultimate power.  This small group of horrible people are willing to put the world on the line so their lineage can continue to rule the world while the rest of us struggle to simply stop the financial bleeding that has become a 15 year epidemic.

This all sounds like the stuff of fiction novels but unfortunately the facts tell us this is all too real.  What is difficult to believe is that we so readily ignore and deny the most essential lessons of history.  Perhaps the foremost being that the political class will always be willing to sacrifice the working class in order to retain its power.  And so we find ourselves again on the precipice of being asked by our political class to offer our young men and women up to be sacrificed for the ‘greater good’.  However, while they try to convince us that the cause is one of morals and righteousness, in the end, it is the same cause it has been since post WWII (and some will argue the same cause it has always been), which is for their interests and their victories, not ours.

On beginning my 75th year

So, serendipitously this morning, I somehow clicked on a link in the bookmarks bar for the History of Information WWW site (whose “index” is set to “Religious Texts / Religion”) which has a photo from The Encyclopedia Britannica entitled “The Sorcerer”

(whose “link” tells not only the story of the painting from around 12,000 BCE, but also the fascinating story of therianthrope cave drawing; which when you read about it from our time and space, engenders many SNL skits (;-) . . . ).

One of the references in the “Sorcerer” article is to Mary E. Boyles' 1952 translation of Abbe Henri Brueil's Four Hundred Centuries of Cave Art which “trumps” my three-quarters of a century by a large margin.

Next time I'm down at the O. Meredith Wilson Library at the University of Minnesota, I'm going to have to look this one up (Folio 302.43 B757fE - unfortunately, they don't have the translated version but the photos of the cave art don't depend on the French language, do they?)

Update: I had occasion to go to the O. Meredith Wilson Library on my way to World Storytelling Day at the Landmark Center in Downtown St Paul yesterday (March 21, 2017 [close to the first day of Spring]) and was able to locate the volume mentioned above.  Much to my surprise it was the translated English version.  And what a wealth of material - in addition to the text descriptions, photos and drawings from the Big Six sites of cave art beginning from around 40,000 years ago!

"Unbound Convergence" and the "Distributed Mesh" . . . surprises along the way . . .

Aristotle (384 ‐ 322 BCE [approximately 2,370 years ago]) proposed “natural,” “violent,” and “local” modes of motion with the rule that “nothing moves unless it is moved by a mover” ¹  And for about 1,950 of those years, scholars attempted to improve on this philosophical viewpoint but without much success.  In fact, the Italian astronomer and physicist, Galileo Galilei (1564 ‐ 1642 CE), proposed the idea that since asking the "why?" of moving things had not been very productive, perhaps just simply describing "how" things move would be more productive.  And, thus, the “science” of physics was born ‐ with two new philosophical topics:  “matter” and “energy.”

But, it was up to the English physicist and mathematician (“natural philosopher”), Sir Isaac Newton (1642 ‐ 1726), to propose the three laws of motion ²  which hold sway in classical mechanics:

1. an object tends to continue in its motion at a constant velocity until and unless an outside force acts on it;
2. an outside force is any action that causes an object to change the speed or direction with which it is moving; ³  and
3. for every action there is an opposite and equal reaction.

Then, more recently, the German theoretical physicist, Albert Einstein (1879 ‐ 1955), proposed the theories of general and special relativity, which deal with the observed gravitational and electrical field effects between masses (that even Newton was struggling with) due to the “warping” of the space-time continuum.  His further work opened up the field of quantum mechanics.  And even now, a number of open questions remain, the most fundamental of which is how general relativity can be reconciled with the laws of quantum physics to produce a complete and self-consistent theory of quantum gravity.

Fast forward to a recent (April 21, 2015) MIT Technology Review (May / June 2015) article ‐ “Machine Dreams” ‐ which highlights the possible impact of a new kind of memory ‐ memristor (“memory resistor”) ⁴ ‐ on the "ancient" computer architecture still in use from the 1940s (75 years old).  That old architecture of two-tiers ‐ storage and memory ‐ stores its operating system, programs, and files on either a hard disk or flash drive.  And, in order to run a program or load a document, the data has to be retrieved from the drive over metal wiring and loaded into a form of random access memory (RAM) that is faster but can't store data very densely or hold on to it when the power to the machine is turned off.  The new architecture scraps the distinction between storage and memory, not only utilizing this new form of memory, which is faster than RAM, holds it data when the machine is powered down, and can store more data than comparable hard drives of today, ⁵ but also passing the data via photonics (light and fiber optics) to a group of specialized energy-efficient processors.

As stated in the MIT article, “Tests with the closest thing to a working version of the Machine ‐ a simulation running inside a cluster of powerful servers ‐ hint at what Carbon [the MACHINE's operating system {see below}] and the new computer might be able to deliver once up and running.  In one trial, the simulated Machine and a conventional computer raced to analyze a photo and search a database of 80 million other images to find the five that were most visually similar.  The off-the-shelf, high-powered [Hewlett-Packard {HP}] server completed the task in about two seconds.  The simulated Machine needed only 50 milliseconds.” ⁶  All of this while sipping only a little bit of energy.  And, at the “MACHINE” announcement presentation, HP CEO, Meg Whitman, compared that with the energy used by cloud computing today ‐ “[I]f cloud computing were a country, in terms of energy, it would rank fifth in the world.”

Of course, this “MACHINE” will require a new operating system, and HP is hoping for a June, 2015 release of a Linux version (Linux++) which will include simulated hardware for the memory and processor systems.  The real operating system for the “MACHINE” has been named “Carbon” and is slated for beta release in 2017.

If we take the beginning of the nanotechnology movement as the coining of the term by Professor Norio Taniguchi, formerly of Tokyo Science University, at the International Conference on Production Engineering in Tokyo in 1974, ⁷ then it is interesting to note that in 1995, HP hired UCLA chemistry professor, R. Stanley Willams, to establish HP's first fundamental research program, investigating whether organic molecules could be smaller replacements for silicon transistors.  The reasons: 

1. costs of fabrication plants for silicon ($30 billion not unheard of for 2010) were forcing silicon industry leaders out of the business; and
2. fundamental physics and materials limitations as things get smaller and smaller (not to mention the physics of traditional lithography).

Even in 1999, other research teams were working hard to make a single brick and hoping that once it was made there might be a way to connect it in a circuit or a system.  Williams' team approach was to look at the architectural drawing of the entire system and then look for the best methods and materials to make (or remake, if necessary) the system.  And the surprises?

From the MIT article, “After a few years, [Williams] could make devices with the right kind of switchlike behavior by sandwiching molecules called rotaxanes between platinum electrodes.  But their performance was maddeningly erratic.  It took years more work before Williams realized that the molecules were actually irrelevant and that he had stumbled into a major discovery.  The switching effect came from a layer of titanium, used like glue to stick the rotaxane layer to the electrodes.”  And even more surprising, versions of the devices built around that material fulfilled a prediction made in Professor Chua's 1970 paper of a completely new kind of basic electronic device ‐ the “memristor”.

Williams and his team announced their findings in Nature, May 1, 2008, and have been going strong ever since; especially since 2012, when Martin Fink, HP CTO, put memristors at the heart of the blueprint for the MACHINE.

Further Background:

HP Discover, 2014 - June 11th Announcement of The Machine - CEO Meg Whitman and EVP and CTO Martin Fink

UCSD Center for Networked System's Winter Research Review January, 2010 - R. Stanley Williams' keynote presentation on memristor technology

Updates:

June 12, 2015 - TechRadar reports “HP's ‘The Machine’ changes its spots”






















































1 In his Φυσικὴ ἀκρόασις (eight books of philosophical lectures on nature [or "The Physics"]), in response to which:

• Martin Heidegger once wrote:  “The Physics is a lecture in which [Aristotle] seeks to determine beings that arise on their own, τὰ φύσει ὄντα, with regard to their being.  Aristotelian "physics" is different from what we mean today by this word, not only to the extent that it belongs to antiquity whereas the modern physical sciences belong to modernity, rather above all it is different by virtue of the fact that Aristotle's "physics" is philosophy, whereas modern physics is a positive science that presupposes a philosophy . . . .  This book determines the warp and woof of the whole of Western thinking, even at that place where it, as modern thinking, appears to think at odds with ancient thinking.  But opposition is invariably comprised of a decisive, and often even perilous, dependence.  Without Aristotle's Physics there would have been no Galileo.” (The Principle of Reason, translated by Reginald Lilly, [Indiana University Press, 1991], pp. 62–63.)
and
• Bertrand Russell opined:  "“[The Physics was] . . . extremely influential, and dominated science until the time of Galileo ... The historian of philosophy, accordingly, must study [it], in spite of the fact that hardly a sentence in [it] can be accepted in the light of modern science.” (History of Western Philosophy:  and its Connection with Political and Social Circumstances from the Earliest Times to the Present Day, {George Allen & Unwin, 1946]. p. 226 [see the entire chapter "Aristotle's Physics," pp. 226-230.)

Mathematically, the force of an external mover acting on an object is equal to the mass of the object multiplied by its velocity of motion (or speed F = m * s - where speed is the force of the external mover divided by the resistance of the medium through or against which it is moving).

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2 In his Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica ("Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy"), first published in 1687; see also the more recent (1936) "chymistry" (and χρυσόποιεῖα) works);

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3 Mathematically, the force exerted on an object is equal to the mass of the object multiplied by the acceleration of the object (F = m * a - where acceleration is how fast the velocity of the object is changing and in what direction).

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4 First named and described in a September 15, 1970 technical report (TR-EE-70-39) for the School of Electrical Engineering at Purdue University (Lafayette, Ind.) by Professor Leon O. Chua.  Basically proposed as a fourth class of electrical circuit (along with the resistor, capacitor, and inductor) exhibiting its properties primarily at the nanoscale.  The surprise along the way was actually predicted by Professor Chua in his article when recognizing the impact of "reality tunnel / confirmation bias / consensus reality (or trance)" thinking on his colleagues - that electrical circuits could only be produced utilizing resistors, capacitors, and inductors - and the sway of the v (voltage) - i (current) curve (from those similar perspectives), he wrote in the paper's concluding remarks, "Although no physical memristor has yet been discovered in the form of a physical device without internal power supply, the analyses presented in . . . [this paper] . . . make plausible the notion that a memristor device . . . could be invented, if not discovered accidentally. . . .  Perhaps, our perennial habit of tracing the v-i curve of any new two-terminal device has already misled some of our device-oriented colleagues and prevented them from discovering the true essence of some new device, which could very well be the missing memristor."

The heading for the HP Lab team's May 1, 2008 article in Nature (453:80-83) announcing the discovery is "The Missing Memristor Found".

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5  On June 13, 2013, HP EVP and CTO, Martin Fink, gave a 20 minute presentation at HP Discover in Las Vegas, NV, covering HP's plans for “memristor”; view it here.

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6  See the following HP Labs YouTube link for a presentation on “Extreme Similarity Search”.

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7  Very close to the time of Professor Chua's report, Professor Taniguchi's use of the term was specifically in relation to precision machining - the processing of a material to nano scale precision utilizing primarily ultra-sonic machining.  Subsequently, Professor Taniguchi was deeply involved in the research and application of electron beam processes for nano-fabrication. See the nano-technology timeline and in that timeline compare that 1959 visionary lecture of Professor Richard Feynman entitled “There's plenty of room at the bottom” delivered to the American Physical Society.

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The Dinkytown Uprising

Al Milgrom at 92 has finished up a film ‐ The Dinkytown Uprising ‐ the pieces of which resided in his basement until 2003 when he decided to begin to put them together (with the help of editor Dan Geiger [Coen brothers' “Fargo” and Prince's “Graffiti Bridge”]). It's premiering this year at the Minneapolis ‐ St Paul International Film Festival on Sunday, April 12th with another showing on Monday, April 20th both at the St Anthony Main Theater in downtown Minneapolis.



Here's an updated comment piece I wrote to a Minnesota Daily article from last fall ‐ “Local legend documents Dinkytown” ‐ with regard to the film and some of its history:

I'll never forget the day, Wednesday, May 10, 1972, sitting in Al's Art of the Film class in the basement auditorium of Ford Hall at around 3:00 PM, and all of a sudden the room is filled with tear gas.  A Minneapolis police helicopter was spraying tear gas at students (University High and college) and other “hangers‐on” testifying over in Dinkytown for the end of the “illegal” war in Viet Nam, Cambodia, and Laos.  The police had to have used quite a bit of tear gas as the cloud worked its way all the way over to the University Hospitals.

And, even though I was on the GI Bill, that was the end of schooling for me.  We lived near campus in the old Harvard Apartments on the corner of Harvard Street and Washington Avenue.  So, it was an easy trip to walk over to the occupation of Washington Avenue (closing down the Washington Avenue bridge) carrying pillows and sleeping bags and staying there most of the night into the wee hours of the morning.  The National Guard was called in at around 1:00 AM.

So, we packed everything up and trekked up north to a summer home of a friend on the creek between Big Balsam and Little Balsam lakes northeast of Bovey, MN.  We were there for fourteen months trying to figure out what the right-wing politics of death for profits had to do with our nation.  “Think globally and act locally” was the mantra.  And we have yet to give up testifying for positive alternatives to all of the political illegalities since that time.

For a period of time during the 1980s, I returned to work at the University.  We were devoted war tax resisters.  So, when the IRS garnished my University pension funds, it was time for another move - to Dorea Peace Community, north of the unincorporated village of Range, WI, on Polk County Road D.  We have yet to give up testifying for positive alternatives to all of the political illegalities since that time.

Another thing that stood out during that time was an excerpt from Carl Sandburg's “The People, Yes” that graced every issue of The North Country Anvil (which we modified slightly) ‐ “This old anvil laughs at many broken hammers.  There are [ persons ] who can't be bought!”  We find that a strong place from which to stand against the right-wing politics of death for profits during this time of political illegality!!

The playful trailer for Al's documentary has disappeared, but here's a link to an interview done for the Minneapolis - Saint Paul International Film Festival in 2015 at which the documentary was to be presented for the first time Al Milgrom.

As always, ENJOY!

A Veteran's Response to the National Security Agency

Here is my citizen's disclaimer to the NSA ¹ and which I will be attaching to everything I write from now on!

My personal statement to the first sychophant (and hangers-on [aka police / military person{s} ² who might arrest me]) of the 0.1% is as follows:

“It is not an honorable action to torture those who are testifying for their Constitutionally guaranteed freedoms of assembly and speech. ³  Those taking such shameful actions can only be seen as enforcers - terrorsymps - for the terroristic 0.1%.  And as a Vietnam veteran, and then a person testifying for (the meaning of protest, after all) alternatives to the Vietnam (and succeeding Imperialistic) War(s), and now a supporter of Veterans for Peace, and a Third Order Lutheran Franciscan Associate, I take the suggestion of Stéphane Hessel - to return to the values of the 1948 United Nations Declaration of Human Rights (values for which so many veterans fought during WW II) as the foundation from which to become outraged as the financial war being waged by the terrorist 0.1% against the activist 99.9% continues to take its toll.  To proclaim again that:

1. ‘disregard and contempt for human rights [by the terrorist 0.1%] have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind’ and
2. the highest aspiration of the common people - the activist 99.9% - is ‘the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want’”!

I still see the best overall review of the situation we face as being expressed in this 22+ minute video:  “Let Your Life Be a Friction to Stop the Machine”!!  ⁴



























































1 Also known as Ministerium fur Staatssicherheit (MfS) oder Staatssicherheitdeinst (SSD) fur seine Strumabteilung (SA), Schutzstaffel (SS), Sicherheitzpolizei (SiPo [Gestapo und Kriminalpolizei {Kripo}]), und Ordnungspolizei (Orpo) Untergebenen - eine Art Nachkriegs ODESSA.  Cf. the covert counterintelligence branch of the United States Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) located in South America during World War II - the SIS - (Special Intelligence Service), and the documents from the Internet Archive.

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2 As David Graeber reminds us *, “Police represent the state; the state has a monopoly of the legitimate use of violence within its borders; therefore, within that territory, police are by definition incommensurable with anyone else.  This is essential to understanding what police actually are.  Many sociological studies have pointed out that maybe 6% of the average police officer’s time is spent on anything that can even remotely be considered ‘fighting crime’.  Police are a group of armed, lower-echelon government administrators, trained in the scientific application of physical force to aid in the resolution of administrative problems.  They are bureaucrats with guns, and whether they are guarding lost children, talking rowdy drunks out of bars, or supervising free concerts in the park, the one common feature of the kind of situation to which they’re assigned is the possibility of having to impose ‘non-negotiated solutions backed up by the potential use of force’. ** The key term here I think, is ‘non-negotiable’.  Police do not negotiate ‐ at least when it comes to anything important ‐ because that would imply equivalency.  When they are forced to negotiate, they pretty much invariably break their word.” ***

* David Graeber, ON THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF GIANT PUPPETS:  broken windows, imaginary jars of urine, and the cosmological role of the police in American culture, p.28.

** Egon Bittner's phrase from Aspects of Police Work.  See also Mark Neocleus, The Fabrication of Social Order:  A Critical Theory of Police Power.

*** Consider here the fact that “police negotiators” are generally employed in hostage situations; in other words, in order to actually get the police to negotiate, one has to literally be holding a gun to someone’s head.  And in such situations police can hardly be expected to honor their promises; in fact, they could well argue they are morally obliged not to.

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3 In spite of former President George W. Bush's statement that the Constitution is “just a God-dammed piece of paper.”

After his 8:30 PM (EDT) address to the nation from the Oval Office on September 11, 2001, President G. W. Bush, went immediately to the Emergency Operations Center (his first visit there), where he centered the discussion on the new war against the Taliban in Afghanistan.

Late in the discussion, Secretary of War, Donald Rumsfeld, noted that international law allowed use of force only to prevent future attacks and not for retribution.

The President nearly bit his head off, yelling in the conference room, "No . . . I don't care what the international lawyers say, we are going to kick some ass." (Richard Allen Clarke, Against All Enemies:  Inside America's War On Terror. [New York: Free Press, 2004], p.24).

Cf. the transcript of Leslie Stahl's (CBS News 60 Minutes) interview with Paul O'Neill (former Treasury Secretary under President George Bush) as the source for Ron Suskind's The Price of Loyalty:  George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neill which demonstrates (based on 19,000 internal documents) the impact of the PNAC "praetorian guard" on the "new American century."  That is to say, that plans were put in place, at least eight months before 9/11, for the invasion of Iraq.  Here's a YouTube link to the interview in case you're not a subscriber to 60 Minutes.

The comments of the person, Jon Gold, posting the above video are also quite instructive:  “What qualifies as suspicious behavior?  Bush telling his principals 10 days after his inauguration to "go find me a way" to go into Iraq?  Cheney meeting with nearly every oil executive in existence and discussing Iraq's oil fields months before 9/11, even though those executives denied meeting with him before Congress?  People in the Bush Administration discussing creating a "cassus belli" for war with Iraq prior to 9/11?  FBI Superiors blocking subordinates from doing their jobs?  The CIA seemingly protecting at least 2 of the hijackers?  The NSA lying about not knowing the location of two of the hijackers in San Diego?  NORAD lying about their air response that morning?  Multiple people in the Bush Administration denying that there were any warnings even though at least 14 countries warned us, and even though Bush received the August 6th, PDB [Presidential Daily Brief] and a multitude of PDBs that are supposedly worse than that one that we're not even allowed to see?  Cheney having a "back channel" to the different intelligence agencies prior to 9/11?  Bush fighting against having an investigation?  Bush refusing to cooperate fully with investigations?  A Bush lackey being put in charge of the so called "Independent" 9/11 Commission?  Money connected to 2 of the hijackers supposedly (and most likely) coming from a friend of the Bush family?  People like Donald Rumsfeld and Condoleezza Rice planning for war with Iraq within hours of the attacks?  Bush using 9/11 to go to war with Iraq?  Nobody being held accountable, and instead people that didn't deserve it being rewarded and promoted?  Does any of it?” Now, compare the 2017 film "War Machine"!

And, the rest, as they say, is ongoing history!

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4 Other references of interest:

• "Could this be part of the problem?"
• In a TEDx talk, Lawrence Lessig fleshes out the Anonymous Banker's presentation with his own fix - "Our democracy no longer represents the people . . . ."
• While, Noam Chomsky, puts much more of the big picture in context with his presentation - "Requiem for the American Dream"
• And recently, the Honorable Paul Craig Roberts (economist, and former United States Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy in the Reagan Administration [and noted as a co-founder of Reagonomics] and editor and columnist for the Wall Street Journal, Business Week, and the Scripps Howard News Service) was invited to address an important conference of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Moscow State Institute of International Relations in Moscow, in celebration of the 70th Anniversary of the Yalta Conference.  Dr. Roberts gave a two part address on “The Threat Posed to International Relations By The Neoconservative Ideology of American Hegemony” both of which are available for perusal on his Institute for Political Economy WWW site.

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Three Strikes and You're Out

THREE STRIKES AND YOU'RE OUT:  Toward a Legal Philosophy and Spiritual Approach for the Pro-life (i.e., anti-nuclear war) Movement

(Homily prepared to kick off the establishment of the Burlington Northern Project and delivered at the Burlington Northern Railroad Company's corporate headquarters [which used to be in downtown Saint Paul, MN] on Sunday afternoon, August 5, 1984 with the title “CONNECTIONS:  Past, Present, and Future”.  In memory of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings of World War II, we stayed up all night, taking turns reading through John Hersey's Hiroshima and folding hundreds of origami cranes (see the story of Sadako Sasaki) before passing them out to Burlington Northern employees as they entered the building for work on Monday morning.)

It was a little over a year ago that the seed for the Burlington Northern Project was planted by my reading an article on the “white death train” and seeing the picture of the big green Burlington Northern locomotive pulling it in the Fellowship of Reconciliation magazine.  But the events leading up to the formation of the Burlington Northern Project really began with our government's use of nuclear weapons beginning on August 6, 1945.  President Truman justified the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki with the claim that by forcing the Japanese to surrender without having to invade the home islands, he saved the lives of a million GIs (an invasion was planned for Nov. 1, 1945).

However, Japan had sued for peace fully six weeks before the dropping of the atomic bomb.  In mid-June they requested not only the USSR, but also Switzerland and Sweden to open negotiations for surrender.  U. S. officials, including the President, were well aware that Japan's surrender was at most a matter of months away, regardless of any invasion.  Yet the United States acted as if nothing was happening, and issued an ultimatum along with China and Britain to the Japanese on July 26, 1945.  The ultimatum was issued during the Potsdam conference and called upon the Japanese to surrender unconditionally or face “prompt and utter destruction”.

Japan was beaten and suing for peace.  No invasion of the Japanese home islands was scheduled until November.  Why, then, did the United States choose to obliterate the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

The answer is given in the diary of Admiral James Forrestal, who recorded a conversation with Secretary of State James Byrnes on July 28, two days after the ultimatum to Japan.  “Byrnes said that he was most anxious to get the Japanese affair over with before the Russians get in . . . . Once in there, he felt it would not be easy to get them out . . . .”  The U. S. was determined to force the surrender at once - without any prolonged negotiations.  This was to ensure that the Soviet Union would not be involved in the negotiations and would have no role in Japan following the war.  The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki represented the opening salvo of the cold war - an example of the fate that awaited any people or power that dared stand in the way of American domination of Asia.

As we continue our journey on the way of peace, we place ourselves in a position of psychological disadvantage by referring to “first strike” capabilities.  While this terminology may be useful in describing countries which have not yet gone insane and actually used these weapons, as we have seen, our government continues in its insane hope that their “third strike” will bring peace to the world.  No matter how you visualize it, more and more of the world's population is coming to see that that “third strike” means we are all out.

In fact, this is the same conclusion reached by the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal after World War II and reiterated in the whole series of treaties and conventions on the rules of war since that time - most notably the Geneva Protocols concluded in 1977.

In essence, planning, preparing, and initiating war is a crime against humanity and anyone who is aware that crimes of state are being committed has an obligation to take what action they can to prevent those crimes from occurring.

In response to the excesses of the Nazi regime, to the fact that the death trains went by - nobody looked, nobody saw - that there was a tremendous silence, and that the assembly line of death, destruction, and dehumanization in Nazi Germany was furthered by many and protested by few, the Nuremberg Tribunal placed responsibility upon individuals to refrain from committing an act which violated the principles of international law, even though commanded by their country to do it.  So, we have a principle adopted which says that you have to interpose your estimate of the conduct, and not simply obey.

Our constitution says that international law is the supreme law of the land.  This has been affirmed by the Supreme Court with regard not only to treaties, but also to so-called customary international law which includes the law of war.  If you take the consequences of the use of nuclear weapons and match them up against the prohibitions for their use, you will find that nuclear weapons are outlawed for a variety of reasons.

When it comes to its nuclear strategy, “third strike” weapons, and the war plans that have recently been published, it is a reasonable thing for reasonable people to believe that our government is in violation of international law in a Nuremberg sense.  In other words, that it is planning in some way to wage aggressive war.  If that is the case, then individuals who are aware of this situation, if anything, are not doing enough, given the gravity of the evil that is involved and the danger, and given the understanding at Nuremberg that everyone has a responsibility to the enforcement of international law.

In this situation, the churches and synagogues, because they are the repositories of long term values, have a particularly important role.  Unfortunately, that role for the most part has been abdicated.  As Americans with various religious tradition or belief systems, we find that we are part of a people who have been seduced into idolatry.  Our idol is a rebellious system, a legitimate governmental service to its citizens which has gathered its own momentum, gone out of control, and now demands sacrificial obedience and promises security and benevolence.  We are part of a nation that has come to worship power, especially as that power is manifested in nuclear weapons.

How can we give up our reliance on militarism? We first have to realize that if we give up our reliance upon militarism and begin instead to resist it, we will not only lose its protection, but will eventually become its victims - not in the relatively short and voluntary periods allowed by our current non-violent direct actions, but in more serious ways, ways which we will no longer control. 

In preparation for that time - a time of loving acceptance of the violence that will be necessary to bring about this fundamental change - we will need to look to our belief systems and develop out of them a disciplined non-violence rooted in that power of love that wells up from our hearts.  Only then will we be able to go beyond our own needs for security and our own fears and allow the power of love to work through us.

Beyond examining our lives for continuing reliance on the fruits of militarism, and taking as many steps as possible to reduce our complicity, Shelley Douglass from Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action suggests a modification of the Buddhist Karuna meditation to help us reach our goal:

We might sit in stillness and visualize the person whom we most love
in the world.  We surround that person with our love and care, praying
for them or holding them in our hearts.  Then we invite into that
caring the people next closest to us and surround them with the same
love and care.  We move out with our invitations, out to an ever-
widening circle of people, inviting them all into the same warmth
of love that enveloped the most beloved.  At the end of our medi-
tation we invite into our love the people from whom we feel most
estranged, those whom we dislike, fear, or hate.  We invite them
into our love and keep them there in prayer ....  [s]uch constant
practice in love can help us to become more deeply loving people.