By Garrison Keillor
Nov. 12, 2008

Be happy, dear hearts, and allow yourselves a few more weeks of quiet exultation. It isn’t gloating; it’s satisfaction at a job well done. He was a superb candidate, serious, professorial but with a flashing grin and a buoyancy that comes from working out in the gym every morning. He spoke in a genuine voice, not senatorial at all. He relished campaigning. He accepted adulation gracefully. He brandished his sword against his opponents without mocking or belittling them. He was elegant, unaffected, utterly American, and now (Wow) suddenly America is cool. Chicago is cool. Chicago!!!

We threw the dice and we won the jackpot and elected a black guy with a Harvard degree, the middle name Hussein and a sense of humor — he said, “I’ve got relatives who look like Bernie Mac, and I’ve got relatives who look like Margaret Thatcher.” The French junior minister for human rights said, “On this morning, we all want to be American so we can take a bite of this dream unfolding before our eyes.” When was the last time you heard someone from France say they wanted to be American and take a bite of something of ours? Ponder that for a moment.

The world expects us to elect pompous yahoos and instead we have us a 47-year-old prince from the prairie who cheerfully ran the race, and when his opponents threw sand at him, he just smiled back. He’ll be the first president in history to look really good making a jump shot. He loves his classy wife and his sweet little daughters. He looks good in the kitchen. He can cook Indian or Chinese but for his girls he will do mac and cheese. At the same time, he knows pop music, American lit and constitutional law. I just can’t imagine anybody cooler. Look at a photo of the latest pooh-bah conference — the hausfrau Merkel, the big glum Scotsman, that goofball Berlusconi, Putin with his B-movie bad-boy scowl, and Sarkozy, who looks like a district manager for Avis –you put Barack in that bunch and he will shine.

It feels good to be cool and all of us can share in that, even sour old right-wingers and embittered blottoheads. Next time you fly to Heathrow and hand your passport to the man with the badge, he’s going to see “United States of America” and look up and grin. Even if you worship in the church of Fox, everyone you meet overseas is going to ask you about Obama and you may as well say you voted for him because, my friends, he is your line of credit over there. No need anymore to try to look Canadian.

And the coolest thing about him is the fact that back in the early ’90s, given a book contract after the hoo-ha about his becoming the First Black Editor of the Harvard Law Review (FBEHLR), instead of writing the basic exploitation book he could’ve written, he put his head down and worked hard for a few years and wrote a good book, an honest one, which, since his rise in politics, has earned the Obamas enough to buy a very nice house and put money in the bank. A successful American entrepreneur.

The last American president to write a book all by his lonesome self, I believe, was Theodore Roosevelt, who, on graduation from Harvard, wrote “The Naval War of 1812,” and in my humble opinion, Obama’s is the better book for the general reader, but you be the judge.

Our hero who galloped to victory has inherited a gigantic mess. The country is sunk in debt. The Treasury announced it must borrow $550 billion to get the government through the fourth quarter, more than the entire deficit for 2008, so he will have to raise taxes and not only on bankers and lumber barons. His promise never to raise the retirement age is not a good idea. Whatever he promised the Iowa farmers about subsidizing ethanol is best forgotten at this point. We may not be getting our National Health Service cards anytime soon. And so on and so on.

So enjoy the afterglow of the election a while longer. We all walk taller this fall. People in Copenhagen and Stockholm are sending congratulatory e-mails– imagine! We are being admired by Danes and Swedes! And Chicago becomes the First City. Step aside, San Francisco. Shut up, New York. The Midwest is cool now.
The mind reels. Have a good day.

Hear him on the web…

Found this drawing by the Naked Pastor at The Website of Unknowing.  I love it!!

The Lower Depths is supposedly one of Kurosawa’s least liked films as far as public opinion goes, but one of his artistic best.  Funny how that works!  It’s based on Maxim Gorky’s play by the same name.

I’ve never read Gorky’s play but supposedly Kurosawa stays very true to the play, so it is far darker than Jean Renoir’s version.  But it also has a sort of lightness about it - that perhaps we take life far too seriously, even when things are apparently serious? I’m not sure that is what Kurosawa meant to present but that’s what I got out of it.

It was most definitely disturbing and it has me thinking - why is it we are unable to manifest our desires?  Why do we allow ourselves to sink to the depths rather than rising to the heights?  I constantly feel that drag, that sort of inertia, the “oh well” - this is just the way things are.  Especially lately with all of the crazy financial stuff going on.

Donald Ritchie provided an interesting commentary on the Criterion Collection version.  He calls Gorky’s play a wretched comedy that attempts to show the problem of illusion and how illusion conflicts with reality.  This is a consistent theme throughout Kurasawa’s films which makes his films Buddhist, in a way.  Rather than evil being some sort of supernatural entitity that takes us over, it is a natural attribute of being alive at all.   Cruelty is a natural part of humanity as is our need for illusion.  The main sort of cruelty shown in this film is people making fun of each other - the sort of stuff that I grew up with that seems innocuous, but is actually extremely mean-spirited and hurtful.  It’s a form of viscious cruelty.

People make fun of each other and try to strip one another of their illusions even though we all have illusions about who it is we are.   There are two characters in the film who are aware of this need for illusion and the approach it very differently.  One is the Gambler who is very matter-of-fact about everything.  The other is the “old man” who is like a Buddhist monk.  (In Gorky’s play, the old man is a Christian priest.)    Both the gambler and the monk/priest are totally aware of the nature of illusion within humanity, but the gambler wants nothing to do with it while the monk recognizes its benefit.  Without illusion, there can be no hope.

Faith and hope are not based on reality.  Both are based on a disregard for reality.  Yet sometimes hope is the very thing we need - especially if we are living in the lower depths so maybe a little illusion now and then isn’t a bad thing.  Maybe we should allow one another our illusions.

For instance, the actor who is dying of alcohol poisoning, decides he’ll be able to cure himself of his disease by making the journey to a temple that is known to cure such things.   It gives him hope even though it is very unlikely he’ll make the journey.  The protistute holds on to the idea that she has experienced true love and this gives her hope.  The so-called samurai holds on to the idea that he comes from a grand family and this gives him hope.  But all the characters make fun of one another for holding onto these illusions even though they each have an illusion they hold about themselves.  The so-called samurai makes fun of the prostitute for believing she has experienced true love, the prostitute makes fun of the samurai for believing he comes from a grand family.  This is the stuff of viscious cruelty.

The monk clearly sees through the illusion and recognizes it for what it is - delusion.  But he maintains a compassion for it.  He doesn’t make fun of the others for maintaining their illusions, and unlike the gambler, does not insist that they strip themselves bare of their illusions.  Just the opposite, he asks each character to step inside the shoes of the other and try and feel what it is like to be the other and why that illusion might be important to them.

At the beginning of the film, there are two characters throwing leaves on what they call a heap.  That upper part of the screen is the world of reality.  What lies below is the world of illusion and we, the viewer of the film, are in the world of illusion right along with the characters that live in the heap.  We are searching for some sort of meaning and some sort of way to invent who we want to be.

Kurosawa wanted to do a very difficult thing - he wanted to show the full horror of life and make it amusing.  Ritchie says Kurosawa’s message is the same as Gorky’s - if we have our illusions, they may be wrong - but it’s necessary for us to have them.  The gambler is the only one who doesn’t believe we need our illusions.  And it is he, in the final scene, who ends our feeling of compassion for the characters by showing us he doesn’t have any at all.   When it is discovered the actor has killed himself, the gambler simply says, “We were having such a fine party and he had to go and ruin it, the Bastard.”  The end.

The monk, on the other hand, represents the gambler’s opposite.  The saintly monk and the cynical gambler are the same in that both know the worst - that illusion is delusion.   But what the monk realizes that the gambler does not is that there is no absolute truth in faith.   The gambler, on the other hand, operates from the belief that there is an absolute untruth in faith.  The problem is one of absolutes.  The monk can be compassionate because of his recognition that there are no absolutes while the gambler cannot because he still maintains a sort of absolute.

This brings us back to the problem of evil.  Evil is not something greater than ourselves, it comes out of our need to boost our understanding of ourselves through the belittling of the understanding others have of themselves.  This is where cruelty comes from.   Everybody turns against everybody else because they refuse to accept the illusions by which everyone else chooses to live.

Ritchie says Buddhism is to Kurosawa as Christianity is to Gorky.  It’s not about a particular faith, but about a system of faith.  Human beings, wisely or not, have the capacity to hope for something beyond their constricted and pitiful selves.   Religion fits well with this capacity because religion is based upon faith.  And again - faith is not based on reality.  it’s based on a disregard of reality.   It is this disregard that animates the gambler who sees through everything and doesn’t have a religious bone in his body.  And it is this disregard of reality that animates the Buddhist priest who realizes we cannot live with our own limitations without some kind of hope.  But this hope can only be based on the sort of illusion that goes with faith.  We have to agree to believe in something which is not realistic - something we cannot see, touch or smell.   Even when the delusion is exploded, faith is necessary because without it, there is no life that is possible to live.  And this is especially true of people who live at the bottom of the societal rung.  They need their illusions more than people who have money.

Ritchie says Kurosawa presents an interesting balance of optimism and pessimism.  On the one hand, Kurosawa fully believe everyone can get what they want if they want it badly enough.  On the other hand, he believes that most people don’t want badly enough to manifest what it is they want.

It’s kind of ironic that his audience didn’t particularly like this film because their dislike speaks to the need for illusion.   We want to see a happy ending (like Renoir put in his version) and we want some hope that things can get better for these people.  But Kurosawa won’t provide it for us.  As Ritchie put it, unlike his audience, Kurosawa prefers to see illusion as illusion.   If life isn’t something to cry about, perhaps we should be able to laugh about it.  But somewhere there exists a balance.  We have to be able to see through all illusions, including our own, in order to be able to laugh at life without becoming cruel and cynical.

Bill Ackman, CEO of Pershing Square Capital Management, was on Charlie Rose.   This interview explained a lot for me!  Here’s my rough summary…

Hedge funds didn’t become a real industry until about 7 years ago.  Right now, most are down 20-30% and Ackman contributes this to short selling being made illegal in September.     This was something that was perfectly legal for many years and it has caused hedge funds to lose tremendous amounts of money.

A hedge fund is an investment partnership.  The difference between a hedge fund and a mutual fund is that the manager of a hedge fund is compensated largely based on performance.  The manager gets 20% of the profits and usually has a very large investment alongside his investors.  Also, a fee of 1-2% is charged for assets managed. They are more expensive than mutual funds and they aren’t regulated because the number of investors are limited and have to be accredited (they have to meet a certain net worth standard).

“Going long” means making an investment - buying a stock on the exchange - you make money if the stock goes up.  “Going short” is borrowing a stock and selling it on the hope that you can buy it back at a lower price.  Investors make money if the stock goes down.

The problem with the government shutting down the short selling for a while was that the government changed the rules of the game with no warning.  If the government had said, “we are going to phase out short selling over a period of time” it wouldn’t have been so disastrous for an industry.  But if you have investors who are committed to their partners to stay balanced - they don’t want to be more than a certain amount long vs. the amount they are short - you lose the ability to insure yourself.  Short selling is a way to protect yourself from the market going down.  By taking away that very important tool, managers got imbalanced and were forced to sell their long positions.  Hedge fund investors are not large short sellers shorting stocks.  Most short selling is done through derivatives.   The rest is done through credit default swap.

You can short a stock and bet that a stock will decline in value.  Another way to make a similar bet is to buy an insurance policy on a company defaulting.  That insurance policy is called a credit default swap and it trades on the over-the-counter market.  You can call up Morgan Stanley and they will make you a price on the probability of GE, for instance, defaulting.  That probability has been perceived to be very low over a long period of time so the cost of the insurance is low.  But if you had the view that GE’s credit would deteriorate, you could buy that insurance policy and sell it at a later date.   Think about being able to sell the insurance policy on your home.  When you first buy it, the cost is low.  But if a brush fire occurred in your neighborhood, your insurance policy would become more valuable.  You’d be able to sell it for much more than what you bought it for.  Credit default swaps are a way to hedge, or make a bet, on a company’s credit worthiness - either to the positive or to the negative.

The Credit Swap Market can be a very profitable business because the major banks have not taken a side - they don’t bet against or in favor of a particular company’s credit but they acted as an intermediary.  It is an over-the-counter market rather than a market on an exchange, so the spread between the price to buy a contract and the price to sell a contract was quite wide.  Dealers made very wide profits by acting in the middle.  It’s a very efficient way to make a bet.

He first started noticing something fishy going on through MBIA, a bond insurer.   MBIA started out in a very low risk business.  But as markets become more competitive, bond insurers are forced to take on more risks to keep their share holders happy.  In the early ’90s, most of the bond markets went public.   They had demands from their share holders and management was compensated with options, so they started looking for other avenues for profit.  They had a AAA rating so Wall Street suggested they guarantee corporate risk, like mortgages, and so they entered a market they knew less well.  They are very leveraged companies.

What struck Ackman when he first opened the annual report of one of these companies was that it had a triple A rating but over 100 to 1 in leverage and that didn’t compute because 30 or 40 to 1 is high.

He says the criticism of the ratings agencies is deserved.   They perform what is almost a regulatory function.  They determine the credit worthiness of a bond and so they got an almost sovereign like status but they were for-profit entities.  The for-profit nature of what is a quasi-regulatory body pushed them for production.  Trying to meet next quarter’s earnings can cause someone to sign off on a rating that wasn’t deserved.    You say, “yes it’s triple A” even though there are a few bad mortgages thrown into the mix, you get paid a $600,000 fee.  You say no, you don’t make any money.

Regulators around the world deferred to the rating agencies.  This allowed for securities that shouldn’t have been sold to spread around the world.

The average mutual fund has done much worse than the average hedge fund.  People tend to demonize hedge funds because they managers are so well compensated.  The focus should be less on the manager than who they manage money for.  Investors are the Carenegie Hall’s of the world, the St. Luke’s Hospitals, the state pension funds, etc.   The SEC did a good job of destroying opportunistic capital by putting on a short selling ban without notice.  It caused a loss of confidence in the U.S. securities market.   The reason you invest in the U.S. markets rather than in foreign markets is because you have confidence that the rules won’t be changed, but they were changed.   People that would normally be jumping in to take advantage of what Buffett calls the best opportunity to invest in his life time is that they can’t - they are on the defense because they are getting redemptions.

Credit default swaps have historically been largely unregulated and Ackman thinks they should be regulated.  It’s a combination of the credit default swaps and the rating agencies that got us into trouble.   The institutions that have created the most systemic risk are AIG, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, MBIA, etc.  They all had triple A ratings.  Unlike the other participants in the market, they got a free pass.  They didn’t have to post collateral.  Now that they’ve been downgraded, they have to post collateral.  It’s like someone writing hurricane insurance and when the hurricane hits, they don’t have the money.

We have a system where it is not illegal to run out of money.  We can reorganize companies - the bankruptcy system.  In the case of Freddie and Fannie, it’s called conservativeship.  Paulson did the right thing by putting them into conservativeship, but he stopped there.  He didn’t reorganize them.   They became government run companies no longer traded on the exchange.  The equity holders and option plans for managers have been wiped out and they have too much debt.

What the government should have done was combine Fannie and Freddie, because they perform the same function, and make them as efficient as possible.   Take the 1.6 trillion of debt and convert 20% of it into equity so you have raised 320 billion dollars.  That way they could re-emerge as listed companies on the stock exchange and they could go back to writing business as strong, well-capitalized companies.   Frannie and Freddie have all the money they need.    The problem is too much is debt, too little is equity.  You just need to restore the balance.

Ackman put together a presentation for Paulson and his plan was seriously considered, but they ultimately opted to go with something else.

Ackman thinks the $700 billion dollars has so far been spent well.  $250 billion going into the banks is a very important first step.   Also, the cost of funding for businesses has come down which is a positive.  But he is concerned about GM.  The way to solve the problem is not to lend more money to GM.   GM should reorganize - they should do a pre-packaged bankruptcy.   The equity holders have been largely wiped out already.   You could buy all of GM at $2 billion and you would be over-paying.  The debt needs to be reduced to a level the company can support and the debt holders in exchange for giving up their debt claim will end up owning the business.   You want a GM that can compete.  You don’t want to lend government tax payer money to an insolvent company so that they can pay interest to the people who lent the money five years ago.  That’s not a solution to the problem.  The government money would be better spent to retrain employees for other jobs, infrastructure, etc.

The bankruptcy word scares people, but it’s simply another system.

Ackman thinks Lehman could have been saved but the management loved the institution too much to take the money on terms they thought was unfair and they had no idea what it would cost the institution.  There was a South Korean buyer who might have been in place for a while.  And Buffett made a proposal that was rejected.

Ackman agrees that investment banks as we have known them are gone forever.   They essentially became hedge funds because they were so highly leveraged.

He’s also optimistic about the new administration.   Having a leader who can inspire the people is huge because the markets are driven by confidence.  We have a solvent government and we borrow on our own currency.

Toni Morrison is one of my favorite novelists. I’ve read almost everything she’s written, so I was interested to find out her feelings on Obama’s election - especially since she had publicly endorsed him. I tried to Google the information the other day but didn’t find anything, so was  pleased to see her on the Charlie Rose Show, yesterday.

She says she is somewhat exhilarated. When Charlie Rose asked her why only somewhat, she replied that Obama is an exceptional man and what she calls wise, but he is only one man and the weight of the whole country should not be on one man. We, the people, need to take responsibility. And we may finally be ready to do that.

She said that we’d been beaten with fear - somebody’s going to get us, somebody is going to hurt us. We’ve been terrified and underneath that terror is cowardice.  Obama’s election shows that we are finally finished with being cowards.   That doesn’t mean nothing bad will happen, but perhaps we won’t feel compelled to shoot people in foreign lands because we are afraid.

She said it all far more eloquently than I have presented it, of course!  :)  Bottom line, she seems to be wary of adding to the weight Obama already has on his shoulders.

Her latest novel, A Mercy, sounds fascinating.  She wanted to explore what it was like for a black slave before race was an issue so she set it in North America just prior to the formation of the U.S. before racism had taken root.

I meditated for the first time today in I don’t know how long.   I had forgotten what a discipline meditation is!  My knees hurt, my mind strayed, and I was only able to sit for 10 minutes.   But even so, it put me in a different state of mind than I have been in for quite some time.  More open, perhaps?

I’ve been thinking about today’s lesson and the idea of “little prayers”.   When I finally gave up on the idea of God I had been brought up with, that was the most difficult thing to let go - the little prayers.  I used to talk to God throughout the day - it was a constant conversation.  Dear God, please make me a better person.  Dear God, please help me to handle this situation in the right way.  Dear God, please help me to get to bed at a decent hour…

If there is no God “out there” (and in fact, there is no “out there”), then who was I to ask for help?   I think that was the crux of the crisis of faith for me - that severed relationship.   I had first turned to God for help in my early teens because I was extremely suicidal.  The idea that God is Love (and Love is God) worked for me, but I didn’t really understand it.  All I knew was that I didn’t believe my parents (or anyone else) loved me and I was told that God did.

I recently watched all of Ingmar Bergman’s Silence of God Trilogy.   Bergman was raised by a Lutheran minister in a very harsh, cold religious atmosphere.   My religious upbringing was much more warm and less imposing so I can’t really relate to what it was he had to let go.   The God he had been taught to wait for was like a spider.  Something hideous and cold.  But he eventually came to the conclusion God is Love.    He tried to get this across in Through a Glass Darkly, the first of the trilogy, but it didn’t really come across as he had hoped.

Through a Glass Darkly is “conquered certainty/God defined”.  Winter Light is the second in the trilogy - “certainty unmasked/God exposed.”  It’s about a minister who is asked to tell a man why he should believe in God, but the minister finally professes his own disbelief.  He comes to realizes his life has been a lie.  It’s a harsh reality.   Supposedly, this was Bergman’s favorite film of all the films he has made.

Near the end of the film, a disabled man who has suffered physically all of his life and wonders why it is everyone focuses on Jesus’ suffering since it was a relatively short suffering.  Surely, the true suffering was created by the betrayal of his friends.   That’s the suffering we endure when we discover we’ve been betrayed by our ideas of God.  It’s harsh.  It’s cold.  It’s grey.

The third film is The Silence about two sisters who represent different aspects of one person.   Supposedly, Bergman wanted this film to be “a rendering of Hell on earth - my hell.”   It was a hugly controversial movie when it was released because it contained homosexuality, masturbation, and other controversial sex scenes. One of the women is dying.  She’s a translator - she translates books from one language to another so that others can understand them.   At the same time, she and her sister speak the same language but do not understand one another.

This is the crux of existential angst.  The dying sister represents our need to live up to certain ideals while the younger sister represents fleshly desire.  The two cannot be reconciled in current Western society because our value of abstraction based on reason is completely incompatible with individualism and individual desire.   The younger sister desperately wants to break away from the older, dying sister.  She says things like “I wish she was dead” to a man she’s had casual sex with but who doesn’t understand her because they don’t speak the same language.

Dreyfus said that it is this lack of compatibility that has created the lack of meaning we experience today.   Our reliance on abstract values has created in us a reluctance to accept or darker sides.  We want a perfect world where there is no crime, ugliness, baseness (Karamazov’s in Dostoevsky terms), but until we fully accept the darker aspects of our nature, we cannot transcend them.

Like the woman in Through a Glass Darkly who decides she can’t live in two worlds, we’ll opt for the world of illusion.  Or like the minister in Winter Light, we’ll opt for disconnectedness rather than love.

Lately I’ve sort of redefined the problem to myself in terms of prescriptive and descriptive knowledge.  We have a habit of understanding what is prescriptive as descriptive.   We desperately want the world to be how we want it to be so are incapable of accepting the world as it is.  We create Gods, systems, and institutions upon this desire and then become slaves to them.   We lose our freedom and innate ability to trust.  Bergman uses children and outcasts to represent our original innocence - the boy in The Silence remains able to enjoy himself despite the lonliness and starkness of his surroundings.

I didn’t grow up with a cold religion, but I totally understand the disconnect that Bergman points to.  It’s such a difficult thing to reconcile.  Atheists who turn to science, technology, etc. for salvation from the world as it is are no better than theists who turn to God for salvation.  It’s the same thing - the same disconnect.

God’s Name is holy, but no holier than yours. To call upon His Name is but to call upon your own. A father gives his son his name, and thus identifies the son with him. His brothers share his name, and thus are they united in a bond to which they turn for their identity. Your Father’s Name reminds you who you are, even within a world that does not know; even though you have not remembered it.

So what is this Name?  Clearly, the Name isn’t “God”. 

Repeat the Name of God, and little names have lost their meaning. No temptation but becomes a nameless and unwanted thing before God’s Name. Repeat His Name, and see how easily you will forget the names of all the gods you valued. They have lost the name of god you gave them. They become anonymous and valueless to you, although before you let the Name of God replace their little names, you stood before them worshipfully, naming them as gods.

We name our ideas “God”; profess belief in them and show our reverence to those ideas through worship.  It’s truly insane.  But still - what is this Name of God???   Is it Taoism or Buddhism, I forget, that talks about the pathless path and the nameless name?

Repeat the Name of God, and call upon your Self, Whose Name is His. Repeat His Name, and all the tiny, nameless things on earth slip into right perspective. Those who call upon the Name of God can not mistake the nameless for the Name, nor sin for grace, nor bodies for the holy Son of God. And should you join a brother as you sit with him in silence, and repeat God’s Name along with him within your quiet mind, you have established there an altar which reaches to God Himself and to His Son.

We call upon the name in silence, within our quiet mind.  The Ancient Hebrews said that God’s name was unutterable.  The moment the Name is spoken, it ceases to be God’s Name.  To think we can speak the name of God is to confuse God’s reality with our idea of God.

…Think not He hears the little prayers of those who call on Him with names of idols cherished by the world. They cannot reach Him thus. He cannot hear requests that He be not Himself, or that His Son receive another name than His.

The way I read this is that we remain in illusion when we call upon God to satisfy our desires.  I’m not sure that would be a popular interpretation among ACIM students, however.  Especially given the Unity Church’s propensity toward Master Mind and all of that crap that is really just a way to manipulate the universe to give you what you want.    Every Unity Church I have ever attended has been deeply involved in ACIM study and Master Mind prayer.  It is likely unfair to say this is true throughout all of Unity and I apologize if this offends anyone.  But I have to say, the  Master Mind prayer groups were especially disturbing to me because the focus was on “little prayers”.   Universe - please give me that red sports car I’ve been wanting.  OK, maybe not that bad, but close.  Sure, you can play withe the pychic plastic of the universe and manifest your desires.  What we think about expands.  But really, to place our focus upon our egoic desires is nothing more than means for the ego to distract us from the truth of who it is we truly are and who God is.

Turn to the Name of God for your release, and it is given you. No prayer but this is necessary, for it holds them all within it. Words are insignificant, and all requests unneeded when God’s Son calls on his Father’s Name. His Father’s Thoughts become his own. He makes his claim to all his Father gave, is giving still, and will forever give. He calls on Him to let all things he thought he made be nameless now, and in their place the holy Name of God becomes his judgment of their worthlessness.

Our release?  From our ego?  Illusion?  It’s about our release from fear!!

All little things are silent. Little sounds are soundless now. The little things of earth have disappeared. The universe consists of nothing but the Son of God, who calls upon his Father. And his Father’s Voice gives answer in his Father’s holy Name. In this eternal, still relationship, in which communication far transcends all words, and yet exceeds in depth and height whatever words could possibly convey, is peace eternal. In our Father’s Name, we would experience this peace today. And in His Name, it shall be given us.

I like this (from Pema Chodron via James at The Buddhist Blog):

Nontheism (a.k.a. non-theism) is defined as the Oxford English Dictionary as: “… not having or involving a belief in God, especially as a being who reveals himself to humanity.” The author Pema Chödrön, when writing about Buddhism, states:

The difference between theism and nontheism is not whether one does or does not believe in God. … Theism is a deep-seated conviction that there’s some hand to hold. … Non-theism is relaxing with the ambiguity and uncertainty of the present moment without reaching for anything to protect ourselves. … Nontheism is finally realizing there is no babysitter you can count on.”

Interesting article on healing the climate from Al Gore in The New York Times, today.  (Gore was vice president from 1993 to 2001; was the co-recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007; founded the Alliance for Climate Protection; created An Inconvenient Truth; and invests in alternative energy companies.)

Gore says that after 20 years of detailed study and four unanimous reports, the evidence for global warming is unequivocal.  Our children and grandchildren are relying on those who still dismiss the urgent alarms to wake up before it’s too late.

The good news is that the steps that are needed to solve the climate crisis are the exactly the same steps that are needed to solve the economic crisis.  Economics across the spectrum agree that the best way to revive our economy is large and rapid investments in jobs that help us decrease our dependence on oil.  To do this, we have to discard the fatally flawed definition of the problem we face.  Producing more oil domestically, or creating “clean coal” does not offer enough investment value.

We are faced with a new difficulty and need to discard the fatally flawed definition of the problem we face.   Producing more oil domestically will not solve the problem because there isn’t enough investment value in domestic production or in “clean coal”.  Neither will make a difference in protecting national security or the global climate.  We have to quit basing human survival strategies on a cynical, self-interested illusion.

Gore offers some ideas for what we can do - now:

We can make an immediate and large strategic investment to put people to work replacing 19th-century energy technologies that depend on dangerous and expensive carbon-based fuels with 21st-century technologies that use fuel that is free forever: the sun, the wind and the natural heat of the earth.

He offers a 5-part plan to repower America with 100 percent of our electricity coming from carbon-free sources within 10 years.  This plan would move us toward providing solution to the climate crisis and the economic crisis at the same time.  And it would create millions of jobs that can’t be outsourced.

First, the new president and the new Congress should offer large-scale investment in incentives for the construction of concentrated solar thermal plants in the Southwestern deserts, wind farms in the corridor stretching from Texas to the Dakotas and advanced plants in geothermal hot spots that could produce large amounts of electricity.

Second, we should begin the planning and construction of a unified national smart grid for the transport of renewable electricity from the rural places where it is mostly generated to the cities where it is mostly used. New high-voltage, low-loss underground lines can be designed with “smart” features that provide consumers with sophisticated information and easy-to-use tools for conserving electricity, eliminating inefficiency and reducing their energy bills. The cost of this modern grid — $400 billion over 10 years — pales in comparison with the annual loss to American business of $120 billion due to the cascading failures that are endemic to our current balkanized and antiquated electricity lines.

Third, we should help America’s automobile industry (not only the Big Three but the innovative new startup companies as well) to convert quickly to plug-in hybrids that can run on the renewable electricity that will be available as the rest of this plan matures. In combination with the unified grid, a nationwide fleet of plug-in hybrids would also help to solve the problem of electricity storage. Think about it: with this sort of grid, cars could be charged during off-peak energy-use hours; during peak hours, when fewer cars are on the road, they could contribute their electricity back into the national grid.

Fourth, we should embark on a nationwide effort to retrofit buildings with better insulation and energy-efficient windows and lighting. Approximately 40 percent of carbon dioxide emissions in the United States come from buildings — and stopping that pollution saves money for homeowners and businesses. This initiative should be coupled with the proposal in Congress to help Americans who are burdened by mortgages that exceed the value of their homes.

Fifth, the United States should lead the way by putting a price on carbon here at home, and by leading the world’s efforts to replace the Kyoto treaty next year in Copenhagen with a more effective treaty that caps global carbon dioxide emissions and encourages nations to invest together in efficient ways to reduce global warming pollution quickly, including by sharply reducing deforestation.

We must re-establish the U.S. as a country with the moral and political authority to lead the world to a solution.  That is the best way to secure a global agreement to safeguard our future.  Gore says we have the ability and the courage to to make the changes that will save our economy, our planet and ourselves.

This is from the October Al Smith Dinner so has been around awhile, but I managed to miss it.  My husband sent it to me today and I was laughing out loud. Especially at McCain’s speech. It’s hilarious.  I wonder who wrote the speeches? 

Both speeches are broken into two videos. I haven’t posted the second part here, but you should be prompted to go to the second part at the end of both.