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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."