Tibet - support the Dalai Lama

Take just 10 seconds to sign an online petition calling on the Chinese government to respect human rights in Tibet and dialogue with the Dalai Lama. Go here:

http://www.avaaz.org/en/tibet_end_the_violence/98.php/?cl_tf_sign=1

After nearly 50 years of Chinese rule, the Tibetans are sending out a global cry for change. Violence is spreading across Tibet and neighbouring regions, and the Chinese regime is right now making a crucial choice between tougher crackdown or dialogue.

President Hu Jintao needs to hear that "Made in China" exports and the upcoming Olympics in Beijing will have the support of the world's people only if he chooses dialogue. But it will take an avalanche of global people power to get his attention.

Do your part by signing the petition!

Barack Obama’s Speech on Race

March 18, 2008

The following are my favorite excerpts from Senator Barack Obama's speech on race in Philadelphia:

I chose to run for the presidency at this moment in history because I believe deeply that we cannot solve the challenges of our time unless we solve them together – unless we perfect our union by understanding that we may have different stories, but we hold common hopes; that we may not look the same and we may not have come from the same place, but we all want to move in the same direction – towards a better future for our children and our grandchildren.

This belief comes from my unyielding faith in the decency and generosity of the American people. But it also comes from my own American story.

I am the son of a black man from Kenya and a white woman from Kansas. I was raised with the help of a white grandfather who survived a Depression to serve in Patton's Army during World War II and a white grandmother who worked on a bomber assembly line at Fort Leavenworth while he was overseas. I've gone to some of the best schools in America and lived in one of the world's poorest nations. I am married to a black American who carries within her the blood of slaves and slaveowners – an inheritance we pass on to our two precious daughters. I have brothers, sisters, nieces, nephews, uncles and cousins, of every race and every hue, scattered across three continents, and for as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible.

It's a story that hasn't made me the most conventional candidate. But it is a story that has seared into my genetic makeup the idea that this nation is more than the sum of its parts – that out of many, we are truly one.

Throughout the first year of this campaign, against all predictions to the contrary, we saw how hungry the American people were for this message of unity.

[....]

In the end, then, what is called for is nothing more, and nothing less, than what all the world's great religions demand – that we do unto others as we would have them do unto us. Let us be our brother's keeper, Scripture tells us. Let us be our sister's keeper. Let us find that common stake we all have in one another, and let our politics reflect that spirit as well.

For we have a choice in this country. We can accept a politics that breeds division, and conflict, and cynicism. 

We can do that.

But if we do, I can tell you that in the next election, we'll be talking about some other distraction. And then another one. And then another one. And nothing will change.

That is one option. Or, at this moment, in this election, we can come together and say, "Not this time." This time we want to talk about the crumbling schools that are stealing the future of black children and white children and Asian children and Hispanic children and Native American children. This time we want to reject the cynicism that tells us that these kids can't learn; that those kids who don't look like us are somebody else's problem. The children of America are not those kids, they are our kids, and we will not let them fall behind in a 21st century economy. Not this time.

This time we want to talk about how the lines in the Emergency Room are filled with whites and blacks and Hispanics who do not have health care; who don't have the power on their own to overcome the special interests in Washington, but who can take them on if we do it together.

This time we want to talk about the shuttered mills that once provided a decent life for men and women of every race, and the homes for sale that once belonged to Americans from every religion, every region, every walk of life. This time we want to talk about the fact that the real problem is not that someone who doesn't look like you might take your job; it's that the corporation you work for will ship it overseas for nothing more than a profit.

This time we want to talk about the men and women of every color and creed who serve together, and fight together, and bleed together under the same proud flag. We want to talk about how to bring them home from a war that never should've been authorized and never should've been waged, and we want to talk about how we'll show our patriotism by caring for them, and their families, and giving them the benefits they have earned.

The situation hasn¹t been this grave since 1959

The situation in Tibet is growing ever worse.  Continued updates are being
posted at www.savetibet.org.  The reports we are getting from reliable
sources tell of continuing mass arrests, (600 on Friday, 300 on Saturday)
house to house searches, beatings, and to quote a well-informed source in
China who says:

³arrested Tibetans were paraded through the streets in military vehicles.
There were two vehicles driving through the streets and in the two vehicles
were 40 young Tibetan men and women with their hands tied behind their backs
and their heads forcibly bowed down, and each person was held from behind by
a soldier carry a rifle.²

Horrific photos of those killed at Kirti Monastery in Amdo can be found at
www.tchrd.org <http://www.tchrd.org> .  These photos are extremely
disturbing so please if you do look be prepared.

What can you do??

The two main actions are:
1. Urge President Bush to speak out publicly and ask China to show
restraint, as well as address the fundamental causes that have led to events
of the past week.  Please call the President at 202-456-1111 or contact him
by email at comments@whitehouse.gov.

2. It is urgent that reporters be allowed into Tibet to independently verify
what has happened. If you live in the U.S., please contact your member of
Congress and ask them to demand that Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao honor his
promise to open Tibet to journalists.

We are also encouraging Members of Congress to make statements on the
situation in Tibet. All three presidential candidates have now made
statements.

********************************************************
International Campaign for Tibet
1825 Jefferson Place, NW
Washington, D.C. 20036
www.savetibet.org 

Due process and transparency

- ICT urges the Chinese government to allow access to all Tibetan areas for
international observers and independent journalists;
- ICT urges the Chinese government to release all prisoners who have
protested peacefully and to grant due process to all others who have been
taken into custody; especially offer access to independent counsel and to
relatives;
- ICT urges the Chinese government to refrain from using violence at
peaceful protests of Tibetans;
- ICT urges the Chinese government to fair and open trials for those who
have been arrested;
- ICT urges the Chinese government to refrain from using torture or other
degrading treatment;

International community
- ICT urges the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Louise
Arbour, to travel to Tibet;
- ICT urges the international community to strongly appeal to the Chinese
government to refrain from using force and to refrain from using torture or
other maltreatment;
- ICT urges the Chinese government to enter into a substantive and
meaningful dialogue with the Dalai Lama and his envoys, in order to bring
about lasting change and peace in Tibet.               

Its a sin to pollute.....

Vatican Lists "New Sins," Including Pollution
    By Philip Pullella
    Reuters

    Monday 10 March 2008

    Vatican City - Thou shall not pollute the Earth. Thou shall beware genetic manipulation. Modern times bring with them modern sins. So the Vatican has told the faithful that they should be aware of "new" sins such as causing environmental blight.

    The guidance came at the weekend when Archbishop Gianfranco Girotti, the Vatican's number two man in the sometimes murky area of sins and penance, spoke of modern evils.

    Asked what he believed were today's "new sins," he told the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano that the greatest danger zone for the modern soul was the largely uncharted world of bioethics.

    "(Within bioethics) there are areas where we absolutely must denounce some violations of the fundamental rights of human nature through experiments and genetic manipulation whose outcome is difficult to predict and control," he said.

    The Vatican opposes stem cell research that involves destruction of embryos and has warned against the prospect of human cloning.

    Girotti, in an interview headlined "New Forms of Social Sin," also listed "ecological" offences as modern evils.

    In recent months, Pope Benedict has made several strong appeals for the protection of the environment, saying issues such as climate change had become gravely important for the entire human race.

    Under Benedict and his predecessor John Paul, the Vatican has become progressively "green."

    It has installed photovoltaic cells on buildings to produce electricity and hosted a scientific conference to discuss the ramifications of global warming and climate change, widely blamed on human use of fossil fuels.

    Girotti, who is number two in the Vatican "Apostolic Penitentiary," which deals with matter of conscience, also listed drug trafficking and social and economic injustices as modern sins.

    But Girotti also bemoaned that fewer and fewer Catholics go to confession at all.

    He pointed to a study by Milan's Catholic University that showed that up to 60 percent of Catholic faithful in Italy stopped going to confession.

    In the sacrament of Penance, Catholics confess their sins to a priest who absolves them in God's name.

    But the same study by the Catholic University showed that 30 percent of Italian Catholics believed that there was no need for a priest to be God's intermediary and 20 percent felt uncomfortable talking about their sins to another person.

The Deadly Cost of Inaction

The Deadly Cost of Inaction

Mar 5th 2008
From Economist.com

CONCERN over man's harmful effect on the environment has gone from being the preserve of sandal-wearing beardies to the top of the political agenda. As countries squabble about how best to tackle pollution of various sorts, a new OECD report suggests that delaying concerted action would be costly. If current policies prevail, by 2030 ozone pollution alone is likely to cause four times more premature deaths, per head of population, than it did in 2000 (when there were 42,000 such deaths around the world). Asia and North America would be likely to see the biggest rises. Deaths from particulate-matter pollution would double.

AP

Best Spiritual Movies of 2008: "What Would Jesus Buy?"

What Would Jesus Buy?

The white suit, bottle blonde hair, and booming voice echo the worst of televangelist excess. Reverend Billy has a cadence we've come to expect. His congregation sways and moves with his every word. But instead of passing the plate, Reverend Billy implores his followers to "Stop Shopping Now." He wants to cast out the demon of rampant consumerism.

"What Would Jesus Buy?" is a smart and savage satire. It keeps viewers off balance. Are we watching performance art that mocks religion? Or are we following the struggles of a nascent church? The answer is, "Yes." "What Would Jesus Buy?" challenges, disturbs, and energizes. It gets into our wallets and our heads.

Director Rob Alkemade uses his camera as a social scalpel, taking on our most sacred holiday traditions. Where would America be without day-after-Thanksgiving sales? How would our economy survive without our annual Christmas splurge? And most of all, who pays for our excess? "What Would Jesus Buy?" longs for an economic system that is fair, equitable and local.

Cries to turn back the clock may seem Pollyanna given the complexities of globalization. Not every garment is borne out of sweatshop labor. American companies can bring much-needed jobs to emerging countries. Yet, "What Would Jesus Buy?" does a great job of questioning our assumptions. How has a religious occasion morphed into a rush for Playstations and Wiis?

"What Would Jesus Buy?" offers audiences a rare opportunity to join the Stop Shopping choir, to sing a song of warning. The Shopacalyse is coming. Reverend Billy wants to break the chains that bind us to Starbucks. He wants to free us from 18 percent interest. We can only celebrate Christmas by Stop Shopping long enough to remember the original gift. Jesus' crib didn't come from Babies 'R Us. His swaddling clothes carried no label. And he turned out just fine.

Rev. Billy takes his message into the marketplace, getting arrested for disturbing the peace in malls and coffee shops across America. In a world of look-alike stores with identical inventories, "What Would Jesus Buy?" is an American original.

Dine Out, Fight AIDS

You're Invited to the City's Largest Dinner Party on Thursday, March 6th!

This Year, Supporting the Men, Women and Children who are Most in Need in Your Community has Never Been Easier! On Thursday, March 6th, more than 150 restaurants, in the Washington region, will donate 25-100% of their proceeds to Food & Friends. Simply by dining out, you will ensure that thousands of individuals facing HIV/AIDS, cancer and other life-challenging illnesses, will receive the daily, nutritious meals so vital to their care. Dining Out for Life is a true expression of how a community can join forces to save the lives of their neighbors. Choose a restaurant and invite your friends today!

I will be volunteer teaching yoga at VDAY!

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SUPERLOVE

April 11 - 12, 2008 Louisiana Superdome

{ Friday, April 11 }   { Saturday, April 12 }

Katrina exposed what was going on in New Orleans and the Gulf South: the lack of resources, the lack of care for its poor in general and its women in particular. There are so many reasons to have V to the 10th in New Orleans, from the vanishing wetlands to the man-made levee failures that flooded the city to the abandonment and complete neglect of human beings. Violence against women was committed physically, economically and environmentally. We need to celebrate New Orleans, cherish it, protect it, just as we do our vaginas, and make sure it goes on and on. We are showing up for the Katrina Warriors, the women of New Orleans and Gulf South who have kept their communities alive with devotion, hard work, sacrifice, humor and wit.

Join us for two days of revolutionary conversations, slam poets, singers, performers, storytelling, astounding art, and love (free massage, support groups, yoga, massage, meditation, makeovers and more!). We will reclaim the Superdome and transform it into SUPERLOVE!

Thoughts on politics by Deepak Chopra

I recently went to see Deepak Chopra at Politics & Prose. He was hot hot hot and gave an amazing talk about "waking up". I was recently introduced to him, his ideas, and books and am in love. Seeing him in person in DC at this time was particularly powerful because he made a lot of strong points about how "waking up" is essential for this presidential election - and how our entire paradigm in the American political process needs to radically change in order for us to make the changes this planet so desperately needs.

Anyway, he also blogged a bit about his ideas and I included some exerpts below:

The Audacity of Enlightenment 

Although Barack Obama's slogan is "the audacity of hope," the words have deeper connotations at this moment. One of the most powerful, I think, is the audacity to wake up. In order for the right wing to succeed in its reactionary agenda, the American public had to agree with it. On the surface it wouldn't seem that people could agree to freeze their incomes, give tax breaks to the least deserving, amass a huge national debt, ignore the rising cost of health care, and various other aspects of the right-wing agenda. To offer their agreement, the public had to vote against its own interest, and doing that required them to be asleep.

What keeps people asleep? Some ingredients are cultural. The dumbing down of America is a real phenomenon. One person out of five believes that the sun revolves around the Earth, and their ignorance is directly related to a failure of education. Half of high school graduates cannot tell you how many Supreme Court justices there are. Overall, pop culture has trumped political culture, so a glib, attractive candidate who makes a nice image on TV reassures more people than a thoughtful intellectual discussing real-life issues. Having drummed "compassionate conservatism" into the mass media, President Bush went on to pass the least compassionate, most right-wing agenda in history without negative consequences to himself for at least six years. He counted on the public remaining asleep.

Now that we are being asked to wake up again, the result could be revolutionary. Looming problems like the national debt, universal health care, and a troubled Social Security system do have real, workable solutions that can be implemented if we don't postpone them much longer. But the alternative has been ingrained for so long that the political machine hopes to return to runaway spending, social irresponsibility, and pro-war policies controlled by a white male elite. This, despite the fact, as Frank Rich pointed out in his NY Times column, that 40% of Americans born after 1982 come from a family with at least one non-white parent.

Waking up means seeing clearly who we are and what needs to be done. It means not blindly voting against your own interest. The audacity of enlightenment reaches much farther than the audacity of hope, and until we are willing to reassert our right to aspire, America will remain crippled spiritually, the very result the right-wing has sadly achieved.

Breathe in, breathe out. Then get crazy.

More than 2,100 practitioners came to the Fifth Annual San Francisco Yoga Journal San Francisco Conference to be inspired by yoga's top teachers - some rock stars in their own right - and bask in the glow of shared experience with like-minded souls. The sold-out event was the biggest yet, its popularity thanks, in no small part, to the participation of Michael Franti, front man for San Francisco band Spearhead as well as an activist and dedicated yogi.

In the spiritual activism workshop, which Franti co-taught with Jivamukti Yoga founders Sharon Gannon and David Life (Jivamukti is the largest yoga center in the nation), the musician walked his talk, bringing what he offers to people around the world to the gathered students. "The world needs yoga right now," he said.

Read the entire article HERE.

new syndrome in meatpacking?

A Medical Mystery Unfolds in Minnesota

By DENISE GRADY

Published: February 5, 2008

When some workers at the plant, which kills and butchers 19,000 hogs a day, developed neurological problems, health officials were called in.

"It is important to characterize this because it appears to be a new syndrome, and we don't truly know how many people may be affected throughout the U.S. or even the world," said Dr. Jennifer McQuiston, a veterinarian from the disease centers.

A survey of the workers confirmed what the plant's nurses had suspected: those who got sick were employed at or near the "head table," where workers cut the meat off severed hog heads.

Read entire article HERE.

Spreading Compassion 30 Seconds at a Time

COK on MTV 2008: Spreading Compassion 30 Seconds at a Time 

Starting tonight, COK's two most recently created pro-vegetarian commercials—"Exploring Your Food" and "A Side of Truth"—will hit the MTV airwaves in hundreds of cities from coast to coast with a message of compassion, just in time for Valentine's Day!

Support our MTV ad campaign today and your donation will be doubled! That's right—every dollar you donate from now until Feb. 14 will be matched, up to $10,000, by a generous COK supporter! You can even make your gift in honor of your sweetheart for Valentine's Day!

Watch our commercials & make a donation today!

Don't Buy It

A Message from The Simple Living Network:

The United States Government is planning to send out rebate
checks in the hope that American citizens will immediately
spend the money to stimulate the economy, thus avoiding a
recession.

At best, this is a band-aid solution for a broken
system that will not solve the larger economic problems
faced by our country. We believe a short-term fix will not
repair larger, long-term problems. In fact, the short-term
solution may only exacerbate the larger problems.

As such, we have started the "Don't Buy It!" campaign in an
effort to begin a far-reaching conversation that encourages
people everywhere to "Wake Up & Smell The Rebate."

Please visit our web site at www.simpleliving.net/rebate and
find out how you can participate by using your rebate in
ways that the government does not expect -- ways that might
actually make more impact than, as the government hopes,
spending the money to purchase more stuff and junk.

Video of workers abusing cows raises food safety questions

The Humane Society of the United States released a video Wednesday it says shows mistreatment of "downed" cows at a California slaughterhouse -- and one lawmaker said it raises questions about the safety of the nation's food supply.

"This must serve as a five-alarm call to action for Congress and the U.S. Department of Agriculture," said Wayne Pacelle, Humane Society president. "Our government simply must act quickly both to guarantee the most basic level of humane treatment for farm animals and to protect America's most vulnerable people -- our children, needy families and the elderly -- from the potentially dangerous food."

Read the article and watch the video here.

Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.

Now two new high-profile books probe our need to eat in search of deeper meaning.

Michael Pollan's view ("In Defense of Food: An Eater's Manifesto") is that industrial manipulation of food almost always makes it worse and that food can be a way to save the world..........Meanwhile, the the trash-talking ex-fashionistas Rory Freedman and Kim Barnouin ("Skinny Bitch in the Kitch") make veganism seem as glamorous as any cosmopolitan ever guzzled on "Sex and the City."

The issue nobody wants to talk about -- Human overpopulation

We have to consider how we will live tomorrow on a resource-depleted and climate-compromised planet.

At the end of the day, the most fundamental issue is growth. If we want to meet our goals for the development of human culture and the increase of well-being, the first prerequisite is that we change our attitude about the growth of human population. We live in a culture and an economic system that promotes growth as the ultimate and greatest good. On a finite planet, this amounts to suicide. Growth was good for a certain time. At the beginning of the Industrial Age, it was good to grow our capacity, but with oil - the prime mover of that Industrial Age - running out and also causing grave life-threatening, species-threatening, world-threatening problems of global warming and toxic pollution, growth is no longer good, especially growth in the quantity of goods and the quantity of people.

Population is projected to rise to nine billion by 2050, but as recently as 1929, when my parents were born, there were only about two billion people on the planet. That's exactly the number that our best scientists say we can support on this planet with a comfortable lifestyle, not a poor scrabbling starvation lifestyle, living on a dollar a day - the way the majority of people on this planet live today - but a comfortable lifestyle. If we want to meet all the goals for development of human society, nine billion people are too many for that to happen. The ecological limits of the planet say that, and there's really nothing we can do about it.

That doesn't mean that we have to do anything violent or drastic or genocidal or inhumane, but we do need to think about a social and economic system that will move us to that point as quickly as possible.

Read the full article:

    Abortion and the Earth
    By Kelpie Wilson
    t r u t h o u t | Environment Editor

    Tuesday 29 January 2008

The Power of Unreasonable People

There is a theory that what social entrepreneurs have in common is that they are "unreasonable people" - and this meant as a compliment! The idea is inspired by playwright George Bernard Shaw, who once said,

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world, the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man."

This week's special report in The Economist explores the growing impact of these social entrepreneurs. Who are they? Some examples:

• a French woman who runs a company that provides childcare to parents with unusual working hours
• a Czech woman who set up a helpline for victims of domestic violence and then campaigned to change the law so that perpetrators rather than victims have to leave the family home
• a Chilean founder of an organisation that provides coaching for at-risk families
• a Mexican who has built a for-profit company that provides free movies to poor people on inflatable screens, funded by advertisements from big companies.

Check out the article HERE.
Check out the new book "The Power of Unreasonable People: How Social Entrepreneurs Create Markets and Change the World."

Check out GOOD magazine

Welcome to GOOD, media for people who give a damn

We see a growing number of people tied together not by age, career, background, or circumstance, but by a shared interest. This revolves around a passion for potential mixed with fierce pragmatism and creative engagement. We sum all this up as the sensibility of giving a damn. But to shorten it, let's call it GOOD. We're here to push this movement and cover its realization.

While so much of today's media is taking up our space, dumbing us down, and impeding our productivity, GOOD exists to add value. Through a print magazine, feature and documentary films, original multimedia content and local events, GOOD is providing a platform for the ideas, people, and businesses that are driving change in the world.

Buy a TEE, make an impact

check out this great company.........and get a fabulous TEE in the process!

 

We are: A company that asks, "What if?" As in, "What if capitalism and social good can co-exist?" New, Fresh, Different We hand over a big chunk of our revenue, 40% on average, to the people who need it most. The good news is that we're not in competition for dollars you donate to other worthy non-profits. We just sell you stylish stuff and support meaningful causes along the way. Buy a t-shirt and help build schools in India. Or send bed nets to prevent malaria in Africa. Or plant trees in our forests. See the difference you can make exercising your purchasing power. A catalyst for change TONIC partners with secular non-profits working around the globe who make huge differences in four key areas – the environment, education, social welfare and poverty. All of our cause partners have proven track records in what they do best, are committed to action now, and ensure that support reaches its destination quickly and efficiently. A driving force for the greatest amount of good in the shortest amount of time. TONIC is run by a team of professionals who all care about social change. By harnessing market forces for social good, Tonic provides a refreshing way of accomplishing both. And we're having fun doing it. Are you in?