Others' Writings

VARIOUS WRITINGS OF OTHERS' COLLECTED BY REZA GANJAVI A WHILE BACK (not updated actively)

TO THE STUDENT OF PHILOSOPHY

This is an extract from Dr. James Christians most excellent Philosophy text books: The Wisdom Seekers: Great Philosophers of the Western World.

The Greek Cynic Antisthenes once confessed "I needed wisdom, so I went to Socrates." In our Western tradition it is Socrates, more than any other, who has come to stand for wisdom and the search for wisdom. It is true that he once declared, with feeling, "Wisdom! What wisdom? I certainly have no knowledge of such wisdom!" But others kept returning to him because they sensed that what he did have, whatever its name, was rare and very precious. (1)

This book has been written from the perspective of a pearl diver. In the pages that follow, you will find that some philosophers like to argue, others like to analyze ideas or language, still others want to outline the universe as it exists or should exist; and some few dedicate themselves to saving the world or trying to move the masses. But a pearl diver seeks a special treasure in the form of a wisdom that comes from careful and honest thinking, well-founded facts, valid inferences, and clear understandings. Along the way he too may enjoy arguing, criticizing, and judging; but in the end what he seeks is a pearl of greater price. Under and behind and through a philosopher's ponderings one can always sense a questing spirit that, after the analyses and dialectics are over and clone with, would be happy to settle for a few pearls. As you read ahead and become acquainted with the lives and thoughts of some of the noblest thinkers ever, you might do well not to forget the simple prayer of Socrates:

Beloved Pan, and all ye other gods who haunt this place, make me beautiful within, and grant that what- ever happens outside of me will help my soul to grow. May I always be aware that true wealth lies in wisdom, and may my "gold" be so abundant that only a wise man can lift and carry it away. For me that is prayer enough. (2)

TO THE TEACHER

All textbooks have strengths and weaknesses of course, and we adopt them, don 't we, in terms of the first and despite the second? For some decades now teachers of philosophy and the history of philosophy have had not a few excellent textbooks to choose from, and it feels as though, during thirty-five years of teaching philosophy, l have used them all! During that tenure, four observations about the field and the textbooks we use to teach it have appeared increasingly clear to me:

(1) That the "classical" interpretation of Western philosophic thought (the "received tradition") is often biased and arbitrary, so that when one goes back to a philosopher's own writings (when possible) and interprets them in light of more recent scholarship and insight, his concepts re-emerge in a somewhat different light;

(2) That philosophic ideas are commonly couched in esoteric language that makes them unnecessarily difficult and renders many concepts virtually inaccessible to most readers or students of philosophy. Of course there is an obvious cause for this: the philosophers themselves often wrote in a turgid prose that even specialists have difficulty understanding;

(3) That many historical ideas and statements seem to modern eyes absurd-silly, ridiculous, stupid, choose your adjective-until seen in the context of the philosopher's life, at which time, for the first time, they begin to make good sense. The question, "How could he believe that?" is a reasonable question, and very often it gets answered only when we allow the philosopher to speak for himself out of the depths of his own existence;

(4) That dialectical criticism as traditionally practiced is commonly lacking in empathetic insight into the immediate living concerns of the thinker and therefore misses the most important fact of all: what his philosophy meant to him. These observations may imply only that teachers have different approaches to understanding and teaching the history of philosophy. In any case, the present text attempts to address these concerns.

Lastly, in these volumes the lives of the philosophers have been included along with their thought. The objective sciences can be severed from those who do them, but philosophy cannot. Of course, certain kinds of endeavors-in logic, mathematics, geometry, and physics-once they pass over from philosophy to science, can stand by themselves; but until they make that transition and are appropriately reclassified, they remain intimate representations of the man or woman who created them. For in truth our ideas are expressions of our deepest selves. Philosophy illuminates life, and life illuminates one's philosophy. This does not mean that, if a teacher or student so chooses, a thinker's creations cannot be studied in isolation from the creator; sometimes we must do this because of constraints of rime and strength. But to do so will always, to some extent, diminish our understanding and appreciation of the man and/or his thought. My fondest wish is that more thinkers of the other sex had chosen, or been allowed, to do philosophy. What few women philosophers did make contributions to Western thought and are known to us-Hipparchia, Arêtê, and Hypatia are perhaps most prominent-are here included. Someday, hopefully, a sensitive civilization will evolve that realizes what it has lost and set out to create a balance that recognizes its most valuable natural resource.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT AND APPRECIATION

Without special friends this book would not exist. Most are deceased: Diogenes, Aristode, Epicurus, Marcus, et al., through time and duration to Bergson, Camus, and Campbell. My deepest debt is to the living. Through eight years of joyous labor the following individuals have, in diverse ways, gifted me with their time, creativity, patience, and supportive silence. I am indebted to: ...

[He mentioned Reza Ganjavi in the acknowledgments of one of his editions of Art of Wondering Intro to Philosophy Textbook].

Shuka

A young son of a great sage, himself an evolved soul, Shuka ignored all the rituals and oblations. He did not salute the rising sun nor worship the setting sun. He did not utter the sacred incantations.

The elders of the community decided to speak to him. "Oh Shuka, if a young sage like you does not perform all the rituals and disciplines, it will be difficult for us to speak to other young people. Should you not do the rituals at dawn and dusk as our anscestors have done for centuries?"

The young sage answered thus. "As everyone knows, when there is a death or birth in the family, one has to suspend all religious rituals. I have had both a birth and a death in my home. My mother, whose name was ignorance, has died and a son has been born, a son named awareness. How am I to perform any rituals in this situation?

I also have another difficulty. The sun of awareness neither rises nor sets. There is never a dawn or a dusk. How am I to perform rituals at dawn or dusk?"

Shuka continued his life deeply, free, basking under the sun that never set nor rose.

Text by G. Gautama from his book: Raja Yoga Pranayama - page 7

On Being the Right Size - by J. B. S. Haldane - 1928

The most obvious differences between different animals are differences of size, but for some reason the zoologists have paid singularly little attention to them. In a large textbook of zoology before me I find no indication that the eagle is larger than the sparrow, or the hippopotamus bigger than the hare, though some grudging admissions are made in the case of the mouse and the whale. But yet it is easy to show that a hare could not be as large as a hippopotamus, or a whale as small as a herring. For every type of animal there is a most convenient size, and a large change in size inevitably carries with it a change of form.

Let us take the most obvious of possible cases, and consider a giant man sixty feet high—about the height of Giant Pope and Giant Pagan in the illustrated Pilgrim’s Progress of my childhood. These monsters were not only ten times as high as Christian, but ten times as wide and ten times as thick, so that their total weight was a thousand times his, or about eighty to ninety tons. Unfortunately the cross sections of their bones were only a hundred times those of Christian, so that every square inch of giant bone had to support ten times the weight borne by a square inch of human bone. As the human thigh-bone breaks under about ten times the human weight, Pope and Pagan would have broken their thighs every time they took a step. This was doubtless why they were sitting down in the picture I remember. But it lessens one’s respect for Christian and Jack the Giant Killer.

To turn to zoology, suppose that a gazelle, a graceful little creature with long thin legs, is to become large, it will break its bones unless it does one of two things. It may make its legs short and thick, like the rhinoceros, so that every pound of weight has still about the same area of bone to support it. Or it can compress its body and stretch out its these two beasts because they happen to belong to the same order as the gazelle, and both are quite successful mechanically, being remarkably fast runners.

Gravity, a mere nuisance to Christian, was a terror to Pope, Pagan, and Despair. To the mouse and any smaller animal it presents practically no dangers. You can drop a mouse down a thousand-yard mine shaft; and, on arriving at the bottom, it gets a slight shock and walks away, provided that the ground is fairly soft. A rat is killed, a man is broken, a horse splashes. For the resistance presented to movement by the air is proportional to the surface of the moving object. Divide an animal’s length, breadth, and height each by ten; its weight is reduced to a thousandth, but its surface only to a hundredth. So the resistance to falling in the case of the small animal is relatively ten times greater than the driving force.

An insect, therefore, is not afraid of gravity; it can fall without danger, and can cling to the ceiling with remarkably little trouble. It can go in for elegant and fantastic forms of support like that of the daddy-longlegs. But there is a force which is as formidable to an insect as gravitation to a mammal. This is surface tension. A man coming out of a bath carries with him a film of water of about one-fiftieth of an inch in thickness. This weighs roughly a pound. A wet mouse has to carry about its own weight of water. A wet fly has to lift many times its own weight and, as everyone knows, a fly once wetted by water or any other liquid is in a very serious position indeed. An insect going for a drink is in as great danger as a man leaning out over a precipice in search of food. If it once falls into the grip of the surface tension of the water—that is to say, gets wet—it is likely to remain so until it drowns. A few insects, such as water-beetles, contrive to be unwettable; the majority keep well away from their drink by means of a long proboscis.

Of course tall land animals have other difficulties. They have to pump their blood to greater heights than a man, and, therefore, require a larger blood pressure and tougher blood-vessels. A great many men die from burst arteries, greater for an elephant or a giraffe. But animals of all kinds find difficulties in size for the following reason. A typical small animal, say a microscopic worm or rotifer, has a smooth skin through which all the oxygen it requires can soak in, a straight gut with sufficient surface to absorb its food, and a single kidney. Increase its dimensions tenfold in every direction, and its weight is increased a thousand times, so that if it is to use its muscles as efficiently as its miniature counterpart, it will need a thousand times as much food and oxygen per day and will excrete a thousand times as much of waste products.

Now if its shape is unaltered its surface will be increased only a hundredfold, and ten times as much oxygen must enter per minute through each square millimetre of skin, ten times as much food through each square millimetre of intestine. When a limit is reached to their absorptive powers their surface has to be increased by some special device. For example, a part of the skin may be drawn out into tufts to make gills or pushed in to make lungs, thus increasing the oxygen-absorbing surface in proportion to the animal’s bulk. A man, for example, has a hundred square yards of lung. Similarly, the gut, instead of being smooth and straight, becomes coiled and develops a velvety surface, and other organs increase in complication. The higher animals are not larger than the lower because they are more complicated. They are more complicated because they are larger. Just the same is true of plants. The simplest plants, such as the green algae growing in stagnant water or on the bark of trees, are mere round cells. The higher plants increase their surface by putting out leaves and roots. Comparative anatomy is largely the story of the struggle to increase surface in proportion to volume. Some of the methods of increasing the surface are useful up to a point, but not capable of a very wide adaptation. For example, while vertebrates carry the oxygen from the gills or lungs all over the body in the blood, insects take air directly to every part of their body by tiny blind tubes called tracheae which open to the surface at many different points. Now, although by their breathing movements they can renew the air in the outer part of the tracheal system, the oxygen has to penetrate the finer branches by means of diffusion. Gases can diffuse easily through very small distances, not many times larger than the average length traveled by a gas molecule between collisions with other molecules. But when such vast journeys—from the point of view of a molecule—as a quarter of an inch have to be made, the process becomes slow. So the portions of an insect’s body more than a quarter of an inch from the air would always be short of oxygen. In consequence hardly any insects are much more than half an inch thick. Land crabs are built on the same general plan as insects, but are much clumsier. Yet like ourselves they carry oxygen around in their blood, and are therefore able to grow far larger than any insects. If the insects had hit on a plan for driving air through their tissues instead of letting it soak in, they might well have become as large as lobsters, though other considerations would have prevented them from becoming as large as man.

Exactly the same difficulties attach to flying. It is an elementary principle of aeronautics that the minimum speed needed to keep an aeroplane of a given shape in the air varies as the square root of its length. If its linear dimensions are increased four times, it must fly twice as fast. Now the power needed for the minimum speed increases more rapidly than the weight of the machine. So the larger aeroplane, which weighs sixty-four times as much as the smaller, needs one hundred and twenty-eight times its horsepower to keep up. Applying the same principle to the birds, we find that the limit to their size is soon reached. An angel whose muscles developed no more power weight for weight than those of an eagle or a pigeon would require a breast projecting for about four feet to house the muscles engaged in working its wings, while to economize in weight, its legs would have to be reduced to mere stilts. Actually a large bird such as an eagle or kite does not keep in the air mainly by moving its wings. It is generally to be seen soaring, that is to say balanced on a rising column of air. And even soaring becomes more and more difficult with increasing size. Were this not the case eagles might be as large as tigers and as formidable to man as hostile aeroplanes.

But it is time that we pass to some of the advantages of size. One of the most obvious is that it enables one to keep warm. All warmblooded animals at rest lose the same amount of heat from a unit area of skin, for which purpose they need a food-supply proportional to their surface and not to their weight. Five thousand mice weigh as much as a man. Their combined surface and food or oxygen consumption are about seventeen times a man’s. In fact a mouse eats about one quarter its own weight of food every day, which is mainly used in keeping it warm. For the same reason small animals cannot live in cold countries. In the arctic regions there are no reptiles or amphibians, and no small mammals. The smallest mammal in Spitzbergen is the fox. The small birds fly away in winter, while the insects die, though their eggs can survive six months or more of frost. The most successful mammals are bears, seals, and walruses.

Similarly, the eye is a rather inefficient organ until it reaches a large size. The back of the human eye on which an image of the outside world is thrown, and which corresponds to the film of a camera, is composed of a mosaic of “rods and cones” whose diameter is little more than a length of an average light wave. Each eye has about a half a million, and for two objects to be distinguishable their images must fall on separate rods or cones. It is obvious that with fewer but larger rods and cones we should see less distinctly. If they were twice as broad two points would have to be twice as far apart before we could distinguish them at a given distance. But if their size were diminished and their number increased we should see no better. For it is impossible to form a definite image smaller than a wave-length of light. Hence a mouse’s eye is not a small-scale model of a human eye. Its rods and cones are not much smaller than ours, and therefore there are far fewer of them. A mouse could not distinguish one human face from another six feet away. In order that they should be of any use at all the eyes of small animals have to be much larger in proportion to their bodies than our own. Large animals on the other hand only require relatively small eyes, and those of the whale and elephant are little larger than our own. For rather more recondite reasons the same general principle holds true of the brain. If we compare the brain-weights of a set of very similar animals such as the cat, cheetah, leopard, and tiger, we find that as we quadruple the body-weight the brain-weight is only doubled. The larger animal with proportionately larger bones can economize on brain, eyes, and certain other organs.

Such are a very few of the considerations which show that for every type of animal there is an optimum size. Yet although Galileo demonstrated the contrary more than three hundred years ago, people still believe that if a flea were as large as a man it could jump a thousand feet into the air. As a matter of fact the height to which an animal can jump is more nearly independent of its size than proportional to it. A flea can jump about two feet, a man about five. To jump a given height, if we neglect the resistance of air, requires an expenditure of energy proportional to the jumper’s weight. But if the jumping muscles form a constant fraction of the animal’s body, the energy developed per ounce of muscle is independent of the size, provided it can be developed quickly enough in the small animal. As a matter of fact an insect’s muscles, although they can contract more quickly than our own, appear to be less efficient; as otherwise a flea or grasshopper could rise six feet into the air.

And just as there is a best size for every animal, so the same is true for every human institution. In the Greek type of democracy all the citizens could listen to a series of orators and vote directly on questions of legislation. Hence their philosophers held that a small city was the largest possible democratic state. The English invention of representative government made a democratic nation possible, and the possibility was first realized in the United States, and later elsewhere. With the development of broadcasting it has once more become possible for every citizen to listen to the political views of representative orators, and the future may perhaps see the return of the national state to the Greek form of democracy. Even the referendum has been made possible only by the institution of daily newspapers.

To the biologist the problem of socialism appears largely as a problem of size. The extreme socialists desire to run every nation as a single business concern. I do not suppose that Henry Ford would find much difficulty in running Andorra or Luxembourg on a socialistic basis. He has already more men on his pay-roll than their population. It is conceivable that a syndicate of Fords, if we could find them, would make Belgium Ltd or Denmark Inc. pay their way. But while nationalization of certain industries is an obvious possibility in the largest of states, I find it no easier to picture a completely socialized British Empire or United States than an elephant turning somersaults or a hippopotamus jumping a hedge.

First IBM PC launch

August 12 1981 first IBM PC was launched.

"Several popular home computers existed before the 1981 IBM PC launch. But the regimented business world considered Apple, Commodore, and Radio Shack's Tandy products "toys."

The IBM stamp of approval on a personal computer changed that mentality for good.

"Almost overnight, with IBM introducing the PC, it became OK to use it for real business applications,"

"In 1981 I had an IBM PC, two-floppy system," Howle said.

"To give young people these days a comparison: It would take 10 of those floppy disks to be able to hold the music that is on one MP3 song," he said."

Dr. James L. Christian's Eulogy by Professor Myron Yeager

James L. Christian

1927-2012

In her email report sharing the news of Jim’s death, Lori wrote, “Jim was a philosopher first and always, that was his destiny and he tried very hard to find his way early on, but eventually had to succumb to the true self which led him down the path of so many journeys and discoveries.” We are here today to celebrate and share those journeys and discoveries, at least as they relate to our knowledge, respect, and love of Jim . . . and Lori . . . and the family.

I suspect all of us can readily agree with Lori when she says that “Jim was a philosopher first and always.” His teaching, his publishing, his reading, his conversation, his habit of living all characterized the life of the philosopher, someone whom Jim himself defined as “one who learns to ask and to research questions until a meaningful answer appears” (“What Do You Mean Philosophy?”). Or as Jim explains in his “Invitation,” what less adventuresome writers might have dismissed as a preface, to The Wisdom Seekers: Great Philosophers of the Western World:

This book has been written from the perspective of a pearl diver. . . . Some philosophers like to argue, others like to analyze ideas or language, still others want to outline the universe as it exists or should exist; and some few dedicate themselves to saving the world or trying to move the masses. But a pearl diver seeks a special treasure in the form of a wisdom that comes from careful and honest thinking, well-founded facts, valid inferences, and clear understandings. Along the way he too may enjoy arguing criticizing, and judging; but in the end what he seeks is a pearl of greater price. Under and behind and through a philosopher’s ponderings one can always sense a questioning spirit that, after the analyses and dialectics are over and done with, would be happy to settle for a few pearls.

Jim’s life was philosophy; he was that pearl diver—always looking for that greater gem (and yes, the pun is intended).

In The Wisdom Seekers, Jim summarized philosophy as “critical thinking about thinking” (v). His teaching career that spanned some four decades gave him the opportunity to introduce and challenge his students to critical thinking about thinking. But his approach would not leave them fragmented and alienated; Jim led his students to consider a synoptic vision of the world in which questioning leads to a comprehensive view of human experience. Such an approach took him to the process of thought, the lives of those who have shaped thought, and the works that have immortalized that thought. That assimilation can be seen not just in the philosophy courses he taught, but in such other courses as the one built on great books he conceived and taught which brought such writers as Ray Bradbury to his classroom. His approach led him to write his own monumental two volume text Philosophy: An Introduction to the Art of Wondering, a work that has gone through some eleven editions, the 2012 being the most recent, published by a leading college text publisher. Appropriately, it is used in philosophy classrooms across the United States and England. His Wisdom Seekers (2002), also in two volumes, uses the record of the lives of the great western thinkers to trace the process of thinking and belief and to consider where belief might lead us next. As a pearl diver, Jim shared the wealth of his discovery with his students and to other professors seeking to challenge their students to question thought and its consequences.

I met Jim through Lori; she was my student my first year teaching at Chapman University some 29 years ago. I recognized Lori as an unusual student from our first class together, a world literature survey in which she used as an illustration for her class presentation on Franz Kafka’s “Metamorphosis” an organic visual aid: a dead cockroach (this was the age before PowerPoint or Prezi). In the years to follow she brought me into her life: Sara, her brothers, their families, and of course, Jim. I remember meeting Jim at his home then in Santa Ana. Before I was introduced to him, I was appropriately introduced to his library; I recall vividly thinking when I saw the book filled living room that this is a man whose mind must be rich and deep. Over the years at meals with the two of them, at events with them, and at surprise meetings (I am convinced everyone in central Orange County can be found at Benji’s Deli at some time or another), Jim’s mind has continued to fill me with awe and wonder. Not a philosopher (I’m a student of literature), I have perhaps curiously always struggled to understand a philosopher’s mind, and Jim fed that wonder. His mind traveled broadly, referring to works we had both read, reminding me of books I should have read, and alluding to works obscure to me to illustrate or to challenge thoughts in casual conversation. Ten minutes with him was to prove Francis Bacon’s dictum: “Reading maketh a full man, conference a ready man; writing an exact man” (“Of Studies”). Jim and I loved to talk books; not just their merits but the richness they brought to our experience; their use as lenses through which we might see others and ourselves better. Our last conversation, when Jim was struggling with his cancer still at Town and Country, was a conversation on books. When I went into his room, he was reading; then he told me that not only did he read as he could but Lori continued to read to him daily, which brought tears to his eyes, perhaps because of the love behind the action, perhaps because of the opportunity to continue to read through his weakness, and perhaps because of the opportunity it gave him to continue to discover with her new pearls or revisit treasured ones with the one he loved. As I recall, he said that among the works they had been reading together had been some of the works of the Romantic poets. He seemed even to apologize to me for the novel most immediately on his bedside table, a current bestseller. In reality, I was struck by the stack of books left there and his passion to engage his mind in the process of discovery in his clearly weakened physical condition. Even then, he was diving for pearls.

Jim loved a quotation from Joseph Campbell: “Life is not a problem to be solved but a mystery to be lived.” In the preface to An Introduction to the Art of Wondering, Jim writes: “While my wife Lori and I were lunching at a restaurant one day, she said to me, ‘How can you not feel alive if you are creating?’” In creation, Jim found the path to his exploration of the mystery of life, the means to find the questions to ask if not the answers. Beside him on that path, sharing the adventure, and sometimes triggering it, Lori was his partner, encouraging him to explore new pearl diving waters. Jim readily acknowledged the inspiration Lori offered him in his writing, thinking, and most importantly, living. Any conversation with Jim would include in that peaceful voice of his an expression of the joy and warmth Lori brought to his life on a daily basis. As he wrote in his dedication for volume I of The Wisdom Seekers, Lori “said to me each morning after breakfast, ‘Go and write us a big book.’ My everlasting thanks for the support and for love, intellect, and sparkling smiles.” In the margin he penned “not smiles, SIMILES, damn copy editors.” But I think in reality, Jim appreciated both: her smiles and her similes, he spirit and creative mind that could see Kafka in a dead cockroach. If knowledge, study, and wisdom were pearls, no doubt Lori was his diamond. And while I only know his family indirectly, I know that they offered for him stimulation, pride, and emotional fulfillment, the jewels of family.

Jim quotes Socrates in Plato’s Meno as saying, “I am not sure of everything I say. However, there is one thing I would fight for in both word and deed, right to the end if I could: The belief that it is possible to find out what we don’t know, and that we will be better human beings, braver and more fulfilled, if we try with all our might to do so.” Such is the legacy Jim Christian leaves to us; he found those pearls and has shared them selflessly with each of us as he sought to find out what he—and we—don’t know. Quoting his friend Ray Bradbury, Jim wrote, “Philosophy must try, as best it can, to turn the sparrows to flights of angels, which, Shakespeare wrote, sing us to our rest.”

Myron Yeager

(Copyright, Dr. Yeager)

uiet guy, young, in the London docklands in the early sixties, working on checking cargo and shipments and quantities and allowances and imports and exports. I imagine it was pretty rough. Somewhere in London he met my mother who was studying physiotherapy in South London.

My older brother and I were born in north London, but we moved to the countryside before I was 2, so I grew up in Wiltshire, where my Dad continued to work as a civil servant. Now more involved in checking the production levels of the brewing industry.

His involvement with alcohol unfortunately extended beyond work, and as long as I can remember, booze was around, be it long, frequent visits to the pub, hom

To a Lady, with a Guitar - by P. B. Shelley

ARIEL to Miranda: Take

This slave of music, for the sake

Of him, who is the slave of thee;

And teach it all the harmony

In which thou canst, and only thou,

Make the delighted spirit glow,

Till joy denies itself again

And, too intense, is turn'd to pain.

For by permission and command

Of thine own Prince Ferdinand,

Poor Ariel sends this silent token

Of more than ever can be spoken;

Your guardian spirit, Ariel, who

From life to life must still pursue

Your happiness, for thus alone

Can Ariel ever find his own.

From Prospero's enchanted cell,

As the mighty verses tell,

To the throne of Naples he

Lit you o'er the trackless sea,

Flitting on, your prow before,

Like a living meteor.

When you die, the silent Moon

In her interlunar swoon

Is not sadder in her cell

Than deserted Ariel:

When you live again on earth,

Like an unseen Star of birth

Ariel guides you o'er the sea

Of life from your nativity:

Many changes have been run

Since Ferdinand and you begun

Your course of love, and Ariel still

Has track'd your steps and served your will.

Now in humbler, happier lot,

This is all remember'd not;

And now, alas, the poor Sprite is

Imprison'd for some fault of his

In a body like a grave;

From you he only dares to crave,

For his service and his sorrow

A smile to-day, a song to-morrow.

The artist who this viol wrought

To echo all harmonious thought,

Fell'd a tree, while on the steep

The woods were in their winter sleep,

Rock'd in that repose divine

On the wind-swept Apennine;

And dreaming, some of autumn past,

And some of spring approaching fast,

And some of April buds and showers,

And some of songs in July bowers,

And all of love; and so this tree,

Oh that such our death may be!

Died in sleep, and felt no pain,

To live in happier form again:

From which, beneath heaven's fairest star,

The artist wrought this loved guitar;

And taught it justly to reply

To all who question skilfully

In language gentle as thine own;

Whispering in enamour'd tone

Sweet oracles of woods and dells,

And summer winds in sylvan cells.

For it had learnt all harmonies

Of the plains and of the skies,

Of the forests and the mountains,

And the many-voicd fountains;

The clearest echoes of the hills,

The softest notes of falling rills,

The melodies of birds and bees,

The murmuring of summer seas,

And pattering rain, and breathing dew,

And airs of evening; and it knew

That seldom-heard mysterious sound

Which, driven on its diurnal round,

As it floats through boundless day,

Our world enkindles on its way:

All this it knows, but will not tell

To those who cannot question well

The spirit that inhabits it:

It talks according to the wit

Of its companions; and no more

Is heard than has been felt before

By those who tempt it to betray

These secrets of an elder day.

But, sweetly as its answers will

Flatter hands of perfect skill,

It keeps its highest holiest tone

For one beloved Friend alone.

LINUS PAULING - A Biography

Linus Pauling was born with twin legacies. Although his parents could give him very little in the way of material wealth, they did give him the better gift of great intelligence. His brilliant mind eventually provided him with financial security as well as his greatest happiness. It can also be argued that this gift of intelligence was responsible for the controversy that seemed to surround everything he did and everything he wrote. He made great intuitive leaps and was frequently criticized for the conclusions he drew from what some felt was too little experimentation, often outside of Pauling's area of expertise.

His father was part pharmacist and part "medicine man" and wasn't especially successful at either. At the time when Linus was born in 1901 the family was living in what is now the wealthiest suburb of Portland, Oregon. However, they lived a very precarious existence at the edges of poverty. In fact, when Linus was four, the family moved to his mother's home town of Condon to get financial aid from her family. Condon is a small town in north central Oregon and in many ways then (and now) was a stereotypical 'Western' town with one main street and false fronts on many of the business buildings. In Condon his father took over the town drug store and Linus began exploring the physical world around him. A small creek flows on the south edge of town. There he and a friend explored the rocky creek bed and collected some of the minerals for which Pauling would eventually establish structures at the California Institute of Technology . It was likely during this time in Condon that Pauling developed his antipathy to snow and very cold weather. Condon's altitude is about 4000 feet and during the winter the temperature may not go above -20 Fahrenheit for days at a time. The wind roars through town because the town sits on top of the Columbia Basalt plateau and for miles around there is nothing to deflect the winds.

The Pauling family moved back to Portland just after Linus began school. When he was nine, his father died, leaving Linus, his two younger sisters and their mother to make their own way in the world. This began a stretch of more than 15 years when Pauling tried to pursue his education, while his mother tried to get him to quit school and become the support of the family. He did not quit school. However, he did find many ingenious ways to make money and most of it went to help support his mother and sisters. By the time he was twelve he was a freshman at Washington High School in Portland. After four years of learning, with or without the help of his teachers, and of odd jobs (delivering milk, running film projectors, and even working in a shipyard, for example) he left high school. He did not graduate because the high school required their students to take a class in civics and Pauling saw no reason why he should since he could absorb any of that from his own reading. Later, after his Nobel Prize for Peace in 1962, the administration agreed that he had learned civics on his own by granting him his high school diploma. In the fall of 1917 Pauling enrolled in Oregon Agricultural College-now Oregon State University-in Corvallis, Oregon. He sailed through the freshman courses required of a chemical engineering major in spite of the fact that he was also working one hundred hours a month. He was not only supporting himself, but also providing the bulk of his family¹s support. This became more and more arduous after his mother became ill. In fact, he did not return to the college after his sophomore year because of the need for money. However, at the first of November of what would have been his junior year, he received an offer to become an instructor of quantitative analysis at Oregon Agricultural College, a course he had just taken as a sophomore! The offer included a salary of $100 a month and he gladly took it. He himself did not take any courses that year. He met his future wife, Ava Helen Miller, when she was a student in his quantitative analysis class.

When he had graduated with his degree in chemical engineering, his mother again began pressuring him to stop his education and make money, perhaps become a secondary school teacher. Pauling, however, had applied to graduate schools at Harvard, Berkeley and the fairly new California Institute of Technology. His first choice was Berkeley because G.N. Lewis himself was the chair of the chemistry department, but Berkeley was too slow in replying to his application. Harvard didn't really interest him much, so his decision was made in favor of Cal. Tech. One year after begining work at Cal. Tech. he married Ava Helen Miller.

At the California Institute of Technology his advisor was Roscoe Dickinson, whose area of expertise was X-ray crystallography. At this time Dickinson was investigating the crystal structure of various minerals. In his work with Dickinson, Pauling displayed what was to become his standard method of attacking a problem. According to Dr. Edward Hughes, "He would guess what the structure might be like, and then he would arrange it to fit into the other data. . . he could then calculate the intensities he would get from that structure and then compare it with the observed ones." For the rest of his career Pauling was criticized for using too large an amount of intuition in his work and not always having complete data to back up what he wrote. As well as doing his research work, Pauling was taking courses and serving as a teaching assistant in the freshman chemistry course. He received his Ph. D. in chemistry with high honors in the June of 1925. His dissertation comprized the various papers he had already published on the crystal structure of different minerals.

A year later, when he was 25, he received a Guggenheim fellowship to study at the University of Munich under Arnold Sommerfeld, a theoretical physicist. Here he began work with quantum mechanics. In January of 1927 he published "The Theoretical Prediction of the Physical Properties of Many Electron Atoms and Ions; Mole Refraction, Diamagnetic Susceptibility, and Extension in Space" in which he applied the concept of quantum mechanics to chemical bonding. In March, a heated exchange took place between Pauling and W.L. Bragg in London over this paper. Bragg believed that Pauling had used some of his ideas without giving him credit for them. According to Pauling, the ideas originated in a paper by Gregor Wentzel on quantum mechanical calculations for electrons in complex atoms. "Wentzel reported poor agreement between the calculated and experimental values, but I found that his calculation was incomplete and that when it was carried out correctly, it led to values... in good agreement with the experimental values." In 1928 he published six principles to decide the structure of complicated crystals. This bothered Bragg even more since they did not all originate with Pauling. Actually, according to Horach Judson, "Pauling clarified them, codified them, demonstrated their generality and power." However, Bragg was spreading stories in England about Pauling's "thievery" and lack of professional ethics.

At this time Pauling took an assistant professorship in chemistry at Cal. Tech. There was a discrepancy, however, in what he thought he was being offered and what he was actually given. He had thought he was taking an appointment as Assistant Professor of Theoretical Chemistry and Mathematical Physics. This misunderstanding seems to have been a thorn in his side. However, thorn or no thorn, he began a period of intense and productive work. In 1928 he published a paper on orbital hybridization and resonance. In 1931 he published the first paper, "The Nature of the Chemical Bond". At this time he was also teaching classes. One of his responsibilities was the freshman chemistry course. Richard Noyes, now professor emeritus of physical chemistry at the University of Oregon, remembers that Pauling was an exciting lecturer and had an unbelievable ability as a demonstrator. He would be explaining something and "suddenly his mind would go off in a new direction, frequently into areas where the freshmen couldn't follow him." Dr. Noyes remembers one redox titration when Pauling turned on the buret then stepped to the chalkboard and began to write the equation for the reaction. He was glancing at the flask in which the reaction was taking place and suddenly moved back to the buret and turned it off, then swirled the mixture in the flask. The color was perfect, a perfect endpoint!

In 1931 Pauling was awarded the Langmuir Prize of the American Chemical Society for "the most noteworthy work in pure science done by a man under 30 years of age." In the same year he was offered a joint full professorship in both chemistry and physics at the Massachusetts Institute Of Technology. He seriously considered the offer but he didn't want to have to brave the Massachusetts' winters. He ended up by accepting the position for one year only. In 1933 he was made a member of the National Academy of Sciences. He was 32, the youngest appointment to this body ever made.

Pauling was later to write, "By 1935, I had worked out most of the fundamental problems connected with the chemical bond." and "My serious interest in what is now called molecular biology began about 1935." He began with a look at hemoglobin. He discovered that the hemoglobin in arteries is repelled by a magnet while that in the veins is attracted to a magnet. His answer to this puzzle resulted in a paper on oxygen's binding to hemoglobin in 1936. The work on hemoglobin also lead to work on hydrogen-bonding between the polypeptide chains in proteins and another paper that same year on the denaturing of proteins. Also in 1936, he was made chairman of the Division of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering at Cal. Tech. In 1939 he published his most important book, The Nature of the Chemical Bond.

His work on hydrogen-bonding in proteins lead him to develop a theory of protein structure. It was generally accepted that proteins were made up of polypeptide chains which were, in turn, made up of long strings of amino acids, bonded end to end. He tried to demonstrate a way of coiling the polypeptide chain in the protein alpha keratin to match the x-rays that crystallographer W.T. Astbury had taken and interpreted, but was unable to fit a model to the data. Working with Corey, he did establish the structures of many small peptides and established that the peptide bond holding amino acids together is planar. In 1939 they formulated a small set of structural conditions for any model of a popypeptide chain.

Finally, in 1948, Pauling worked out the alpha helix structure of a polypeptide. He was in Oxford at this time, confined to bed with nephritis and bored with what he had to read. He says, "I took a sheet of paper and sketched the atoms with the bonds between them and then folded the paper to bend one bond at the right angle, what I thought it should be relative to the other, and kept doing this, making a helix, until I could form hydrogen bonds between one turn of the helix and the next turn of the helix, and it only took a few hours doing that to discover the alpha-helix." In 1954 Linus Pauling was given the Nobel Prize for Chemistry for his work on molecular structure, especially proteins.

During World War II Pauling worked on various "war" projects as did everyone at Cal. Tech. He chose not to work on the Manhattan Project, however. At the same time his wife was becoming more and more involved in socialist politics. They fought the internment of their Japanese-American gardener and, with the American Civil Liberties Union, the internment of all the Japanese-Americans. He was also becoming more and more worried about the atomic bomb and the radiation it produced. He became involved in the Scientists Movement, a more-or-less nation-wide group of scientists working for safe control of nuclear power. The Movement believed in ³the necessity for all nations to make every effort to cooperate now in setting up an international administration with police powers which can effectively control at least the means of nuclear warfare.² His wife was a member of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom. In fact, at this time, she was probably more outspoken on the issues of human rights, peace and the banning of nuclear testing than Pauling was. In 1947 President Truman awarded him the presidential Medal of Merit for his work on crystal structure, the nature of the chemical bond, and his efforts to bring about world peace.

In November of 1950, he was subpoenaed to appear before the Senate Investigating Committee on Education of the State of California. He testified for over two hours, "mainly about my reasons for objecting to special loyalty oaths involving inquiry into political beliefs." He wrote the next day, "My own political beliefs are well known. I am not a Communist. I have never been a Communist. I have never been involved with the Communist Party. I am a Rooseveltian Democrat." However, he also believed that no governmental body had the right to ask him to answer those same questions under oath. This was during the early days of the McCarthy "witch hunts", which were stronger at the time in California than at most other places. His position upset some of the trustees and some professors at Cal .Tech., who tried to oust him.

This was just after Pauling, working with Corey, had used the idea gained from his paper model to work out the structure of many different protein molecules, all of which contained his alpha-helix. His proposed structure was not immediately accepted by the scientific world, however, especially by scientists in England. Therefore, in January of 1952, Pauling requested a passport to attend a meeting in England, specifically to defend his ideas. The passport was denied because granting it "would not be in the best interest of the United States." He applied again and wrote President Eisenhower, asking him to arrange the issuance of the passport since, "I am a loyal citizen of the United States. I have never been guilty of any unpatriotic or criminal act." The answer came back asking him to provide the State Department with some evidence supporting his claims. He sent a statement, made under oath, stating that he was not a communist, never had been a communist, and had never been involved with the Communist Party. The state department replied that his "anti-communist statements were not sufficiently strong" and again denied the passport on the very day he was supposed to leave for the conference. This pattern of Pauling requesting a passport to attend various conferences and the state department denying the application continued for a little over two years. During this time Einstein wrote a letter to the state department supporting Pauling's right to have a passport. He also wrote Pauling telling him, "It is very meritorious of you to fight for the right to travel."

In 1953 Pauling published his book, No More War. Again in April of 1954, when he requested a passport, he was denied it. On November 3 of that year, while he was giving a "routine lecture" on hemoglobin at Cornell University, he was called to the telephone to learn that he had just been awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. His first worry was, would he be able to get a passport so he could accept the prize in person? He applied immediately and for weeks he heard nothing. In Washington there were strong voices opposing the granting of the passport. One senator asked, "Are you in the State Department allowing some group of people in some foreign country to determine which Americans get passports?" On November 27, however, barely two weeks before the ceremony in Sweden, his passport did arrive.

His years of being unable to get a passport did more than inconvenience him. In 1948 he was already working toward a description of the structure of DNA. By the early 1950's, Rosalind Franklin and others working at Kings College in London had taken some of the sharpest, most detailed photographs of DNA ever. These are what Watson and Crick used in their successful discovery of the DNA double helix. Had Pauling been able to attend the spring 1952 conference he would likely have seen these photographs and might have come to the same conclusion, before Watson and Crick. It is sure that his not seeing them contributed to his proposed structure which had the phosphate groups closely packed inside a single helix with the bases sticking out around the outside.

Pauling continued his political activism, particularly his protesting of atomic bomb testing. This culminated in a petition to the United Nations--signed by 11,021 scientists from around the world--calling for an immediate world-wide ban on nuclear testing. Because of this petition he was subpoenaed to appear before the U.S. Senate Internal Security Committee. The committee wanted him to give the names of the petitioning scientists. Under oath, he admitted that he, Barry Commoner, and Edward Condon had initiated the petition, but refused to give any more names. There was much applause from the gallery and, after a while, the committee backed down. Later, during the Kennedy Administration, after Kennedy had decided to go ahead with atmospheric nuclear testing, Pauling sent President Kennedy a telegram asking, ³Are you to give the orders that will cause you to go down in history as one of the most immoral men of all times and one of the greatest enemies of the human race?² Of course, this telegram raised quite a furor. However, the Kennedys still invited him to a White House dinner honoring Nobel Prize winners of the western hemisphere. On the day of the dinner, both Dr. and Mrs. Pauling took part in a demonstration in front of the White House, then left the picket line to go in to dinner. Later that evening, Pauling even danced with Mrs. Kennedy.

On October 10, 1962, it was announced that Linus Pauling had been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts on behalf of a nuclear test ban treaty. This award was not universally popular. Many newspapers and magazines printed editorials denouncing him, his activism,and his having been given the prize.

Since his second Nobel Prize, Dr. Pauling has researched the chemistry of the brain and its effect on mental illness, the cause of sickle-cell anemia and what is happening to the hemoglobin in the red blood cells of people with this disease, and the effects of large doses of vitamin C on both the common cold and some kinds of cancer. He recently published papers on high temperature super conductivity. He has worked at the University of California at San Diego, at Stanford and at the Linus Pauling Institute for Medical Research. He has won many awards in chemistry, including all the major ones. He remains, as he has been all his life, a brilliant man with brilliant ideas. He was once asked by a high school student , "How can I have great ideas?" Pauling's answer was, "The important thing is to have many ideas." He has certainly followed his own advice.

Something about my father -- by Duncan Toms

Dad grew up in a fishing town in south Cornwall. His family were butchers, with their own small abattoir and butchers shop. For sure my dad, Alfred Clive Toms was an artist and yet somehow he was encouraged to join HM Customs and Excise and head to London to work, rather than go to university. He had two brothers, one who was a prison officer and the other a woodwork teacher.

So there he was, a quiet guy, young, in the London docklands in the early sixties, working on checking cargo and shipments and quantities and allowances and imports and exports. I imagine it was pretty rough. Somewhere in London he met my mother who was studying physiotherapy in South London.

My older brother and I were born in north London, but we moved to the countryside before I was 2, so I grew up in Wiltshire, where my Dad continued to work as a civil servant. Now more involved in checking the production levels of the brewing industry.

His involvement with alcohol unfortunately extended beyond work, and as long as I can remember, booze was around, be it long, frequent visits to the pub, home brewing, or drinking with friends. And later, alone.

I remember his philosophical mind. Things were never straight forward. He said that he didn't get along with that many people. Things continued fairly normally into my teens. It was then I started feeling awkward around him and his convoluted explanations with touches on true wisdom, his launching into seemingly irrelevant descriptions of historical events. But also great humour at times. I didn't really understand him much. Once when mum was in hospital I wanted to cry. He told me not to because he would too.

The heavy drinking got more frequent and I would avoid him more and more, often hiding up in my room. Dinner at home became food in front of the tv instead of together at the table. Weird jealous notes written to my mum. And later bottles of spirits found around the house. He never got physically violent, at least not with me.

I left home when I was 18 for university. By then my mum had had enough and had moved out, and a divorce followed. When I got married at 22, I was too embarrassed of him to invite him to the wedding. I can't imagine how bad this must have made him feel, increasing his alienation from his family.

Jumping back a while... A keen amateur magician, a puppeteer, a choir member, a parish councilor, a nature lover, a film buff, highly intelligent. And jumping back some more, a loving father, reading bedtime stories, carrying us on shoulders, a keen walker, encouraging in us a love of the outdoors.

Away at university and beyond I had less and less to do with him. I felt estranged at a visit to our old family home before it was sold, him living alone, a stale smell in there, me and my two brothers sitting about, all awkward, him saying it felt like a forced visit to an aunt. It did to me too. I went out to take the dog, now so sad-looking, for a walk.

The house sold and I heard he was living with a drinking friend, in the nearby town. We would write sometimes and he'd often guiltily defend his drinking. 'What's wrong with the odd Guinness at lunchtime?' But it was way more than that, and had been for years.

Then I heard he'd been taken ill. Liver trouble. Big trouble. Released from hospital but unable really to look after himself he was in a low grade psychiatric hospital when I went to visit. Looking around 70, he was yellow from the liver damage. He didn't really know which of his sons I was, some amalgamation of us all. He wanted cigarettes from town and it was a relief to go get them. This was typical, me avoiding the issue by leaving. A sad scene in there, lost people looking up at the tv high on the wall; horse racing.

When he got better, a little bit better, he was out again but his weak body couldn't take any more. He died of complications from a stomach ulcer due to alcoholism soon after. Drinking on an empty stomach. He was under 50 years old.

A man who never found his place, who didn't fit in easily and used drink to help. A heavy drinking London culture started it off. When he quit his profession there were sorry attempts of self employment but he never worked again and he never found an outlet for his creativity and intelligence.

I didn't really know him in adult life. He's taught me the dangers of alcohol, a route all three of us have been in danger of in our time. He said that you can tell more about a person in their eyes rather than their words. Time and time again while watching tv he would tell us: this isn't real, you know. Kind of obvious but very true. Real life isn't mediated and if it is it isn't real life.

Many times I remember his illnesses, days in bed, shaking, sweating, that strange smell. Trying to quit. And when he was well, I remember, seems strange now, him doing yoga asanas on the bedroom floor.

About Raj Rathor -- a good friend and great musician

Raj was a master of jazz guitar -- he ate and breathed modes and everything Jazz which is so difficult. He always had a nice smile. He lived in Vegas with wife Diana. His mom was in Ojai - Gabriela - very lovely lady. Always signed her emails "In Love & Light". His dad was Indian.

Brandon Silverman...NOTES OF PASSION

Never before had I touched a musical instrument. I had never known my own creativity, never been in touch with it. In retrospect I had known little about myself before I met Raj Rathor. By sharing with me his genuine character, Raj transcended the position of guitar teacher. He instilled in me the most valuable lessons, applicable universally not only in music, but also in life itself. His inspiration aided the maturation of my character and led me to achieve greater success than I ever previously imagined. In the haze of great people I have met throughout my life, Raj undoubtedly shines through as the most scintillating and venerable gem.

Raj has an ardor, a faithful zeal in all he does. It is precisely this undying passion for life that distinguishes him from everyone else. From the very first moment he spoke to me regarding musical theory, I could sense his authentic love for the subject. His profound knowledge and mastery of music were astounding. I remember the first time he played for me; never before had I witnessed firsthand such a unique virtuoso in action. From then on, I had a new found respect for jazz music, his forte. He taught me to embrace a culture and a tradition to which I forever would have been shut off.

As my relationship with Raj grew, I began to recognize his dedication in all areas of life. In music, in his political views, in his spiritual beliefs, Raj knows what he believes and stands by it. Raj is a dedicated pacifist, exalting in life above all else. He believes music and peace work together to foster spiritual connectedness. Through his lessons, he truly demonstrated to me the virtue still present, yet oftentimes obscured in human nature.

My character further developed as a result of my growing closeness with Raj. I became more optimistic and found much greater personal connection with many aspects of life, such as abstract expression and individual spirituality. With music becoming a growing force in my life, I felt more complete; more successful. My life seemed tremendously balanced and much more significant as a result. I began to find peace and happiness in the creation of music and the performance thereof. Now, nothing is more meaningful to me than expressing myself musically and pleasing those around me.

Thereafter, my guitar teacher became my role model. I know that Raj, my mentor and guide, will forever be there for me, offering his blessed services without recompense. His passion awakened my own; my love for music and for life grew stronger with each passing day. Raj revealed to me an ideal world devoid of hatred and war – a world whose scales rise mightily as peaks, whose modes prove as diverse as Earth’s landscapes, whose arpeggios reign softly as clouds – a dynamic world pervaded by loving, passionate placidity.

Brandon Silverman

"Look up Hanna"

Final Speech of "The Great Dictator" by Charlie Chaplin - Compiled by Reza Ganjavi

Written and delivered by Sir Charles ChapliN

General Schulz: Speak - it is our only hope.

The Jewish Barber (Charlie Chaplin): I'm sorry but I don't want to be an emperor. That's not my business. I don't want to rule or conquer anyone. I should like to help everyone if possible; Jew, Gentile, black men, white. We all want to help one another. Human beings are like that. We want to live by each others' happiness, not by each other's misery. We don't want to hate and despise one another. In this world there is room for everyone. And the good earth is rich and can provide for everyone. The way of life can be free and beautiful, but we have lost the way.

Greed has poisoned men's souls; has barricaded the world with hate; has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed. We have developed speed, but we have shut ourselves in. Machinery that gives abundance has left us in want. Our knowledge as made us cynical; our cleverness, hard and unkind. We think too much and feel too little. More than machinery we need humanity. More than cleverness, we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost. The aeroplane and the radio have brought us closer together. The very nature of these inventions cries out for the goodness in man; cries out for universal brotherhood; for the unity of us all.

Even now my voice is reaching millions throughout the world, millions of despairing men, women, and little children, victims of a system that makes men torture and imprison innocent people. To those who can hear me, I say "Do not despair." The misery that is now upon us is but the passing of greed, the bitterness of men who fear the way of human progress. The hate of men will pass, and dictators die, and the power they took from the people will return to the people. And so long as men die, liberty will never perish.

Soldiers! Don't give yourselves to brutes, men who despise you and enslave you; who regiment your lives, tell you what to do, what to think and what to feel! Who drill you, diet you, treat you like cattle, use you as cannon fodder! Don't give yourselves to these unnatural men---machine men with machine minds and machine hearts! You are not machines! You are not cattle! You are men! You have a love of humanity in your hearts! You don't hate! Only the unloved hate; the unloved and the unnatural.

Soldiers! Don't fight for slavery! Fight for liberty! In the seventeenth chapter of St. Luke, it’s written “the kingdom of God is within man”, not one man nor a group of men, but in all men! In you! You, the people, have the power, the power to create machines, the power to create happiness! You, the people, have the power to make this life free and beautiful, to make this life a wonderful adventure. Then in the name of democracy, let us use that power.

Let us all unite. Let us fight for a new world, a decent world that will give men a chance to work, that will give youth a future and old age a security. By the promise of these things, brutes have risen to power. But they lie! They do not fulfill their promise. They never will! Dictators free themselves but they enslave the people! Now let us fight to fulfill that promise! Let us fight to free the world! To do away with national barriers! To do away with greed, with hate and intolerance! Let us fight for a world of reason, a world where science and progress will lead to all men’s happiness.

Soldiers, in the name of democracy, let us all unite!

[Huge hurray from the huge crowd – scene changes to Hanna (Paulette Goddard) a refugee on the floor with eyes still in tears from having been beaten down by the Dictator’s soldiers. Romantic string music in the background. Hanna’s beautiful face and eyes are in awe as to how her Jewish barber friend who was imprisoned by the Dictator’s troops is not speaking as the Great Dictator!]

Hanna, can you hear me? Wherever you are, look up Hanna! The clouds are lifting! The sun is breaking through! We are coming out of the darkness into the light! We are coming into a new world; a kind new world, where men will rise above their hate, their greed, and brutality. Look up, Hanna! The soul of man has been given wings and at last he is beginning to fly. He is flying into the rainbow. Into the light of hope! Into the future! The glorious future! That belongs to you, to me, and to all of us. Look up, Hanna! Look up!

Hanna's Father: Hanna! Did you hear that?

Hanna: Listen! [as her great acting and incredible cinematography turns her face into a goddess as the music takes the movie to conclusion.]

With appetite and search

With appetite and search

For other men to prey upon and such their childhood dry.

There are men to gentle for an accountant's world

Who dream instead of Easter eggs and fragrant grass

And search for beauty in the mystery of the sky.

There are men to gentle too live among wolves

Who toss them like a lost and wounded dove

Such gentle men are lonely in a merchant's world

Unless they have a gentle one to love.

There are Men Too Gentle to Live Among Wolves

by James Kavanaugh

There are men too gentle to live among wolves

Who prey upon them with IBM eyes

And sell their hearts and guts for martinis at noon.

There are men to gentle for a savage world

Who dream instead of snow and children and Halloween

And wonder if the leaves will change their color soon.

There are men to gentle to live among wolves

Who anoint them for burial with greedy claws

And murder them for a merchant's profit and gain.

There are men to gentle for a corporate world

Who dream instead of Easter eggs and fragrant grass

And pause to hear the distant whistle of a train.

There are men to gentle too live amount wolves

Who devour them

UNAFRAID TO BE FREE

by James Kavanaugh

Finally unafraid to be free,

Ready to surrender all the illusions of

recognition and external securities,

Living off the sky and earth like soaring

eagles and braying burros,

Trusting in a Power even beyond Dow Jones

and hoarded retirement.

Finally ready to live like the noble animal that I am-

Without masters or servants, with dignity dependent on no one,

Content to know that I am God's child, and

only good has been prepared for me.

When I am not afraid to release all that my life

and culture taught me to prize.

To abandon fears once and for all, to discard the

anxieties of a lifetime like a suit that no longer fits,

To be afraid of no one, beholden to no one,

dependent on no one

Save the few who know and love me as I am,

and the God Who alone gives meaning and joy

to the madness of my life.

Even if I die

Even if I die

I will be there for you,

make a table

Out of me.

Perhaps a door

or maybe a bed,

do what you feel

you can even carve a diety.

But, for now___

just listen to me,

I still breathe,

For you.

(by an ex-student of a K school)

Friendship

Hi Reza

This is a paragraph which expresses how i see relationship and friendship,

thought i will share it with you. I don't know where it's originally from,

heard it while traveling, this is my own version of it:

the world is full of butterflies, beautiful, colourful butterflies, they

fly around you and once in a while a really pretty one lands on your arm.

If you try to touch it, to hold it, to keep it with you, it will soon lose

it's ability to fly, it will lose it's colour, it's beauty will fade and

finally it will die.

But if you hold your arm very quiet(or still?), it might stay for a while,

and you can take a closer look at it, be happy that it's there, so close

to you, see it in all it's beauty. And then, one day, when it takes off and

flies away, you don't have to be sad or unhappy, it's just beautiful to see

it fly around freely again.

hope i got it right, it's not so easy for me in english.

Love is Dear Only to the Heart of the Lover - Nezami Ganjavi

Once there was a king who heard about the story of Leili and Majnun and knew that Majnun left his life in the city and strayed in the desert and field. He called his ministers and soldiers to bring Majnun to his palace. Soldiers went to the field and found Majnun and brought him to the palace of the king. The king asked Majnun, "Why did you leave the human society, leave your home and stay in the caves and deserts: Why did you not find social life pleasing?" Majnun replied, "I left my family and my friends because they were blaming me for my love for Laili. Oh, how I wish the day will come when they see that beauty and they will all fall in love with her and regret the blame they put on me." Majnun talked and talked about Leili's beauty so much that the king became eager to see Laili. So he asked his soldiers to bring her to his court.

Soldiers went to Laili's tribe and brought her to the presence of the king. To the king's astonishment, Laili was weak, dark skinned, and not pretty. "She is plain, so very plain and common. My servants are prettier than she is. She has no grace, she has no beauty," the king thought. Majnun sensing the king's thought said, "Oh, King, You should see the beauty and the grace of Leaili through my eyes. You have to have Majnun's eye for the mystery of her beauty to be revealed to you."

Two lovers sailed into the sea

A sudden storm wrecked their ship.

A fisherman came along to save the boy.

"My love is there, save her first,

Save her," he cried.

Before he drowned and died, he whispered:

Love is not what you hear

Love is to forget not the beloved

Even when the storm is to take your soul."

These selections were translated by Seyedeh Nahid Angha, Ph.D.

Bach's Wife

As usual, Sebastian created a remarkable fugue using the King's tune. It starts out as one voice coming in like a little stream. Then another voice joins in making harmony, yet carrying its own story. Then a third voice like a brook enters the sea of notes to carry its message. And miraculously the trinity of tones harmonize, yet each is a melody on its own, united in perfect form, creating poetry in music, to the end that the soul of man may be at peace and experience tranquility. As the notes fade into the air, none disappears, but together they ascend to the very throne of God in Heaven as praises too deep for utterance.

Anna Magdalena Bach

Guru Nanak's song

O God beautiful! O God beautiful!

In the forest, Thou art green,

In the mountain, Thou art high,

In the river, Thou art restless,

In the ocean, Thou art grave!

To the serviceful, Thou art service,

To the lover, Thou art love,

To the sorrowful, Thou art sympathy,

To the yogi, Thou art bliss!

O God beautiful! O God beautiful!

At Thy feet, O I do bow!

By Guru Nanak, Translated by Yogananda

MONEY

It can buy a house

But not a home

It can buy a bed

But not the sleep

It can buy a clock

But not the time

It can buy a book

But not the knowledge

It can buy a position

But not the respect

It can pay the physician

But not health.

It can buy blood

But not life

It can buy the sex

But not of the love

(A Chinese [not verified] poem about money)

[translated by software from French]

[thanks to Gianna Mestermann]

From Reza Ganjavi's College Communication Great Teacher

May there always be work for your hands to do.

May your purse always hold a coin or two.

May the sun always shine on your window pane.

May a rainbow be certain to follow each rain.

May the hand of a friend always be near you.

May god fill your heart with glaness to cheer you.

(An Irish Poem)

Keep well - and happy.

Love

Tish (Whitney)

From Randi

As for the poem, this is my award winning number. Though I forewarn: according to me, my

poems are more closely related to rubbish than to contest winners. I am

never happy with anything that I've written for longer than ten minutes.

That said, here it is...

It

(for it has become an

it, you know

an idea taking

life on its own

apart from me

you

or our vocalized chording)

is looking so

opaque

now that there's day

light proof

of its white

face turning blue

and I'm thinking we

should have left

it at flowers.

Randi Caryn Shapiro

From Robin

In surrendering oneself

to the impermanence and uncertainty of this life

there will be a stillness where knowing resides

beyond the answers of the mind.

No future, no past.

Just this moment, living what is here now

in total unison with the universe

and its beautifully ordered chaos.

Robin Seagrave

From Anu to Reza Ganjavi

twinkle twinkle mr.great smile

tell me now r u fine?

feeling better? do u feel to sit

tell me till now what u did???????

tell me did u take some medicine yet

or r u feeding the tablets to your pet????

tell me all this nd tell me soon

else i'll watch u from the moon !!!!!!!!!!!

Anu

Give It Up by Franz Kafka

It was very early in the morning, the streets clean and deserted, I was on my way to the railroad station. As I compared the tower clock with my watch I realized it was already much later than I had thought, I had to hurry, the shock of this discovery made me feel uncertain of the way, I was not very well acquainted with the town yet, fortunately there was a policeman nearby, I ran to him and breathlessly asked him the way. He smiled and said: 'from me you want to learn the way?' 'Yes,' I said, 'since I cannot find it myself.' 'Give it up, give it up,' said he, and turned away with a great sweep, like someone who wants to be alone with his laughter.

Persian Poetry

"Cho fardaah bar aayad boland aaftaab, man'o gorz'o meydaaneh Afraasiaab."

He draws the parallel from the "gorz" to the intellect, or the power of

the pen that helps one lay down/share what needs to be communicated. the

"meydaan" is what ever context you're in and the "afraasiab" -well- that's

anyone who's on the otherside. it's heavy on war analogy, but from my

dad's mouth, it sure has sounded good to me over the years.

_________________________________________

zendegi aatashgahi dirine-pa barjaast

gar biafroozish raghse sholehayash az har karan peidast

var na khamooshast va khamooshi gonahe mast.

_________________________________________

taa-at aan nist ke bar khaat nahi pishani

sedgh pish aar ke ekhlaas be pishani nist

_________________________________________

eshgh aamadani bood na aamookhtani

From Petra

I must confess, I don't have very often a look at my mailbox. Computers may

be very useful, but they don't always do what I want them to do. The

conversation with these machines is full of misunderstandings.

~~~

Sun and moon are part of the same universe. From different perspectives they

look at Earth, watching her, perhaps guarding her.

The sun is all burning. The moon has as well a warm and bright side as a

cold and dark one.

There's a bright and a dark side in all of us. As long as we follow the path

of light, we won't freeze.

Heaven begins just above Earth

Petra A.

~~~

Finally, Spring arrived, the beauty of the trees full of flowers seem origin of some

fairyland. The smell of life and growth has returned and chased Winters last

messangers away. I enjoy the eternal circle of life and to be a part of it.

The days are nice, the moonlit nights even more beautyful. In the silence

you understand the whispering of the trees, the silent sound of the wind and

nature sings softly her old, eternal melodies.

Petra A.

The Farewell of the Arab Hostess

Since nothing will keep you in this happy land,

neither the shade of the palm tree, nor the yello corn,

neither rest, nor abundance,

nor the sight, at your voice, ofthe young

beating hearts of our sisters who, at night,

in a whirling swarm

crown the hillside with therir dance,

farewell, handsome traveller! Alas, farewell!

Oh!if only you were one of those

whose lazy feet are bounded by

their roof of branches or canvas!

Who, idly dreaming, listen unmoved to tales,

and at eventide, sitting before their door,

wish to be off and away among the stars!

Alas! Farewell! Farewell, handsome traveller!

Had you wished it, one of us perhaps

o young man, would have liked to serve you

on bended knee

in our ever open huts;

while lulling your sleep with her song

she would have made,

to drive the tiresome gnats from your brow,

a fan of green leaves.

If you do not come back, dream a little

from time to time

of the daughters of the desert, sweet-voiced

sisters,

who dance barefoot on the sandhills,

o handsome white man, fine bird

of passage,

remember, remember, for perhaps,

o quickly passing stranger,

your memory remains with more tham one!

Alas! Farewell! Farewell, handsome stranger!

Alas! Farewell! Remember!

William Blake - Auguries of Innocence

To see a world in a grain of sand,

And a heaven in a wild flower,

Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,

And eternity in an hour.

A robin redbreast in a cage

Puts all heaven in a rage.

A dove-house fill'd with doves and pigeons

Shudders hell thro' all its regions.

A dog starv'd at his master's gate

Predicts the ruin of the state.

A horse misused upon the road

Calls to heaven for human blood.

Each outcry of the hunted hare

A fibre from the brain does tear.

A skylark wounded in the wing,

A cherubim does cease to sing.

The game-cock clipt and arm'd for fight

Does the rising sun affright.

Every wolf's and lion's howl

Raises from hell a human soul.

The wild deer, wand'ring here and there,

Keeps the human soul from care.

The lamb misus'd breeds public strife,

And yet forgives the butcher's knife.

The bat that flits at close of eve

Has left the brain that won't believe.

The owl that calls upon the night

Speaks the unbeliever's fright.

He who shall hurt the little wren

Shall never be belov'd by men.

He who the ox to wrath has mov'd

Shall never be by woman lov'd.

The wanton boy that kills the fly

Shall feel the spider's enmity.

He who torments the chafer's sprite

Weaves a bower in endless night.

The caterpillar on the leaf

Repeats to thee thy mother's grief.

Kill not the moth nor butterfly,

For the last judgement draweth nigh.

He who shall train the horse to war

Shall never pass the polar bar.

The beggar's dog and widow's cat,

Feed them and thou wilt grow fat.

The gnat that sings his summer's song

Poison gets from slander's tongue.

The poison of the snake and newt

Is the sweat of envy's foot.

The poison of the honey bee

Is the artist's jealousy.

The prince's robes and beggar's rags

Are toadstools on the miser's bags.

A truth that's told with bad intent

Beats all the lies you can invent.

It is right it should be so;

Man was made for joy and woe;

And when this we rightly know,

Thro' the world we safely go.

Joy and woe are woven fine,

A clothing for the soul divine.

Under every grief and pine

Runs a joy with silken twine.

The babe is more than swaddling bands;

Every farmer understands.

Every tear from every eye

Becomes a babe in eternity;

This is caught by females bright,

And return'd to its own delight.

The bleat, the bark, bellow, and roar,

Are waves that beat on heaven's shore.

The babe that weeps the rod beneath

Writes revenge in realms of death.

The beggar's rags, fluttering in air,

Does to rags the heavens tear.

The soldier, arm'd with sword and gun,

Palsied strikes the summer's sun.

The poor man's farthing is worth more

Than all the gold on Afric's shore.

One mite wrung from the lab'rer's hands

Shall buy and sell the miser's lands;

Or, if protected from on high,

Does that whole nation sell and buy.

He who mocks the infant's faith

Shall be mock'd in age and death.

He who shall teach the child to doubt

The rotting grave shall ne'er get out.

He who respects the infant's faith

Triumphs over hell and death.

The child's toys and the old man's reasons

Are the fruits of the two seasons.

The questioner, who sits so sly,

Shall never know how to reply.

He who replies to words of doubt

Doth put the light of knowledge out.

The strongest poison ever known

Came from Caesar's laurel crown.

Nought can deform the human race

Like to the armour's iron brace.

When gold and gems adorn the plow,

To peaceful arts shall envy bow.

A riddle, or the cricket's cry,

Is to doubt a fit reply.

The emmet's inch and eagle's mile

Make lame philosophy to smile.

He who doubts from what he sees

Will ne'er believe, do what you please.

If the sun and moon should doubt,

They'd immediately go out.

To be in a passion you good may do,

But no good if a passion is in you.

The whore and gambler, by the state

Licensed, build that nation's fate.

The harlot's cry from street to street

Shall weave old England's winding-sheet.

The winner's shout, the loser's curse,

Dance before dead England's hearse.

Every night and every morn

Some to misery are born,

Every morn and every night

Some are born to sweet delight.

Some are born to sweet delight,

Some are born to endless night.

We are led to believe a lie

When we see not thro' the eye,

Which was born in a night to perish in a night,

When the soul slept in beams of light.

God appears, and God is light,

To those poor souls who dwell in night;

But does a human form display

To those who dwell in realms of day

Young women are at high risk of depression...

Depression was also closely linked to academic pressures or troubled romantic relationships. ``Many of the depressed women

appeared to struggle to perform well in school,'' the investigators point out, ``or to manage work and school demands.''

Compared with nondepressed women, depressed women were also more likely to be in conflict with their romantic partner or

to have partners who ``used psychological or even physical means of coercion in dealing with relationship conflict.''

What I've Learned

I've learned - That you cannot make someone love you. All you can do is be someone who can be loved. The rest is up to them.

I've learned - that no matter how much I care, some people just don't care back.

I've learned - that it takes years to build up trust, and only seconds to destroy it.

I've learned - that it's not what you have in your life but who you have in your life that counts.

I've learned - that you can get by on charm for about fifteen minutes. After that, you'd better know something.

I've learned - that it's not what happens to people that's important. It's what they do about it.

I've learned - that you can do something in an instant that will give you heartache for life.

I've learned - that you should always leave loved ones with loving words. It may be the last time you see them.

I've learned - that either you control your attitude or it controls you.

I've learned - that regardless of how hot and steamy a relationship is at first, the passion fades and there had better be something else to take its place.

I've learned - that learning to forgive takes practice.

I've learned - that money is a lousy way of keeping score.

I've learned - that sometimes when I'm angry I have the right to be angry, but that doesn't give me the right to be cruel.

I've learned - that true friendship continues to grow, even over the longest distance. Same goes for true love.

I've learned - that maturity has more to do with what types of experiences you've had and what you've learned from them and less to do with how many years you've lived.

I've learned - that you should never tell a child their dreams are unlikely or outlandish. Few things are more humiliating, and what a tragedy it would be if they believed you.

I've learned - that no matter how good a friend is, they're going to hurt you every once in a while and you must forgive them for that.

I've learned - that it isn't always enough to be forgiven by others.

Sometimes you have to learn to forgive yourself.

I've learned - that no matter how bad your heart is broken the world doesn't stop for your grief.

l've learned - that just because two people argue, it doesn't mean they don't love each other and just because they don't argue, it doesn't mean they do.

I've learned - that sometimes you have to put the individual ahead of their actions.

I've learned - that you shouldn't be so eager to find out a secret. It could change your life forever.

I've learned - that no matter how you try to protect your children, they will eventually get hurt and you will hurt in the process.

I've learned - that there are many ways of falling and staying in love.

I've learned - that your life can be changed in a matter of hours by people who don't even know you.

I've learned - that even when you think you have no more to give, when a friend cries out to you, you will find the strength to help.

I've learned - that writing, as well as talking, can ease emotional pains.

I've learned - that credentials on the wall do not make you a decent human being.

I've learned - that the people you care most about in life are taken from you too soon.

Fear: Its Political Uses and Abuses

As Prepared for Delivery

Remarks By Al Gore February 5, 2004

Thank you for inviting me to speak at this timely conference on the Uses and Misuses of Fear in our political system in America.

It is an honor to be part of a program that includes so many distinguished scholars who, unlike me, have genuine expertise in these matters.

And I want to acknowledge that I have already learned a lot from them by reading some of what they have written and by calling some of them on the telephone before trying to organize my own thoughts on this topic.

It's also a personal pleasure to share a dais with my friend and former Senate colleague Bob Kerrey, who brings to this discussion not only his experience in political and academic leadership but also - it bears noting because of the subject of our discussions here - his extraordinary personal example of how to stare down the fear of death and lead with raw courage in circumstances that are hard for the rest of us to imagine.

We are meeting, moreover, in a city that has itself been forced to learn how to conquer terror. And because we are gathered very close to Ground Zero, we should of course begin our deliberations with a moment of respect and remembrance for those who died on September 11th and for those who have been bereaved.

Terrorism, after all, is the ultimate misuse of fear for political ends.

Indeed, its specific goal is to distort the political reality of a nation by creating fear in the general population that is hugely disproportionate to the actual danger the terrorists are capable of posing.

That is one of the reasons it was so troubling last week when the widely respected arms expert David Kay concluded a lengthy and extensive investigation in Iraq for the Bush Administration with these words:

"We were all wrong."

The real meaning of Kay's devastating verdict is that for more than two years, President Bush and his administration have been distorting America's political reality by force-feeding the American people a grossly exaggerated fear of Iraq that was hugely dis-proportionate to the actual danger posed by Iraq.

How could that happen?

Could it possibly have been intentional?

Well, there are some clues... the fear campaign aimed at Iraq was timed for the kickoff of the midterm election campaign of 2002 - you know, the one where Max Cleland, who lost three limbs fighting for America in Vietnam, was accused of being unpatriotic.

The curious timing was explained by the President's chief of staff as a marketing decision - timed for the post-labor day advertising period.

For everything there is a season - particularly the politics of fear.

And it did serve to distract attention from pesky domestic issues like the economy, which were, after all, beginning to worry the White House in the summer of 2002

And of course there is now voluminous evidence that the powerful clique inside the administration that had been agitating for war against Iraq since before the inauguration immediately seized upon the tragedy of 9-11 as a terrific opportunity to accomplish what they had not been able to do beforehand: invade a country that had not attacked us and didn't threaten us.

They were clever and they managed to get the job done.

But some deceitfulness took place somehow.

The so-called intelligence was stretched beyond recognition, distorted and mis-represented.

Some of it that the President personally presented to the American people on national television in his State of the Union address turned out to have been actually forged by someone - though we still don't know who, (and amazingly enough, the White House still doesn't seem to really care who forged the document.)

The CIA had warned his staff not to let him use that particular document, but there was some kind of regrettable communications foulup inside the National Security Council.

But now the President has expressed his determination to find out who is actually responsible for the intelligence being "all wrong".

Over the past 18 months, I have delivered a series of speeches addressing different aspects of President Bush's agenda, including his decision to go to war in Iraq under patently false pretenses, his dangerous assault on Civil Liberties here at home, his outrageously fraudulent economic policy, and his complete failure to protect the global environment.

Initially, my purposes were limited in each case to the subject matter of the speech.

However, as I tried to interpret what was driving these various policies, certain common features became obvious and a clear pattern emerged: in every case there was a determined disinterest in the facts; an inflexible insistence on carrying out preconceived policies regardless of the evidence concerning what might work and what clearly would not; a consistent bias favoring the wealthy and powerful at the expense of the broader public interest; and a marked tendency to develop policies in secret, avoid accountability to the public, the Congress or the Press; and a disturbing willingness to misrepresent the true nature of the policy involved.

And no matter what the issue, it is now clear that in every instance they have resorted to the language and politics of fear in order to short-circuit debate and drive the public agenda.

The Administration did not hesitate to heighten and distort public fear of terrorism after September 11th, to create a political case for attacking Iraq.

Iraq was said to be working hand in hand with Al Queda.

Iraq was said to be on the verge of a nuclear weapons capability.

Defeating Saddam Hussein was conflated into bringing war to the terrorists, even though what it really meant was diverting resources away from the pursuit of the people who attacked us, and causing us to lose focus on that task.

The administration also did not hesitate to use fear of terrorism to launch a broadside attack on measures that have been in place for a generation to prevent a repetition of gross abuses of authority by the FBI and by the intelligence community at the height of the Cold War.

I served on the House Select Committee on Intelligence immediately after the period when the revelations of these abuses led to major reforms.

Conservatives on that panel resisted those changes tooth and nail.

They have long memories, and now these same constraints have been targeted in the Patriot Act and have been sharply diminished or removed.

And the President wants the Patriot Act extended and made permanent.

Neither did the administration have any scruples about using fear of terrorists as a means to punch holes in the basic protections of the Constitution: to create a class of permanent prisoners; to make it possible to imprison Americans without due process; to totally sequester information not just from the people, but from the congress and the courts - all justified by recourse to fear.

Our nation has gone through other periods in our history when the misuse of fear resulted in abuses of civil liberties:

The Alien and Sedition Acts of 1798, the Palmer Raids and the Red Scare after World War I, the internment of Japanese-Americans in World War II, and the McCarthy abuses of the Cold War.

After each of these periods of excess we have felt ashamed and have tried to make up for the abuses.

And although we have not yet entered the period of regret and atonement this time around, it is already obvious that we are now in a period of regrettable excess.

The administration did not hesitate to use economic fear of recession as a means to put in place its tax cuts, massively benefiting the wealthiest while loading debt on the rest of the country for generations to come.

It used fear of energy shortage to build an energy policy made to order for the oil industry at the expense of the rest of us.

It used the fear that we would lose competitive-ness to block responsible action to deal with global warming, and has by that action mortgaged not only us but our children and their children to consequences unmitigated by any acts of foresight in this generation.

Meanwhile, even the Chinese have passed us in fuel economy standards for new automobiles.

It uses fear of the problems of old age to contrive an illusory drug bill that essential transfers billions from the people to the pockets of vast pharmaceutical interests.

It does not hesitate to use fear even of God not only to pronounce its views on marriage but to impose them on the nation as a constitutional amendment.

At the level of our relations with the rest of the world, the Administration has willingly traded in respect for the United States in favor of fear: that is the real meaning of "shock and awe."

It is this administration's theory that American "dominance" -- coupled with a doctrine of pre-emptive strikes (regardless of whether the threat is imminent or not; today George Tenet made it clear that the CIA never said Iraq was an imminent threat) will be sufficient to persuade our rivals and enemies to leave the field.

But there is another querstion that I believe urgently needs attention: how could our nation have become so vulnerable to such an effective use of fear to manipulate our politics?

After all, it is a serious indictment of our political discourse that almost three-quarters of all Americans were so easily led to believe that Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the attacks of September 11th-that nearly half of all Americans still believe that most of the hijackers were Iraqis - and that more than 40 percent were so easily convinced that Iraq did in fact have nuclear weapons.

A free press is supposed to function as our Democracy's immune system against such gross errors of fact and understanding.

What happened?

Well, for one thing, there has been a dramatic change in what the philosopher Jurgen Habermas describes as the structure of the public forum.

It is simply no longer as accessible to the free exchange of ideas, which flowed during the Enlightenment.

The Age of Print effectively ended in the 1960's when television overtook newspapers - and the gap has grown dramatically since then.

The ownership of the media companies has also changed.

The leadership of the Republican party is augmented by its links to the corporate ownership of the conglomerates that control most of our media: a process already so far advanced that it alarmed even conservative members of Congress and caused them to join to oppose the FCC's efforts to make the world of information safe for monopoly.

Though the President is still out-maneuvering them.

And this after all, includes a growing part of the media characterized by paranoia presented as entertainment - the part that allows drug-addled hypocrites, compulsive gamblers, and assorted religious bigots to mascarade as moral guides for the nation.

What are the consequences?

Fear drives out reason.

It suppresses the politics of discourse and opens the door to the politics of destruction.

It also requires us to pay more attention to the new discoveries about the way fear affects our brains...

The root word for democracy - "demos" - meant the masses of common people, who were an object of fear in the minds of many of our country's founders.

What they wanted was an orderly society in which property would be safe from arbitrary confiscation (remember the Revolutionary War was in significant measure about taxation).

What they believed was that a too pure democracy would expose that society to the ungoverned passions of what today we call "the street:" of people with little to lose, whose angers could be all too easily aroused by demagogues (note the root, again) and turned against those with wealth.

So the Constitution of which we are so proud is really an effort - based at least as much on fear as on hope -- to compromise and balance out the conflicting agendas of two kinds of Americans:

those who already have achieved material success, and those who aspire to it: those who are happy with the status quo, and those who can only accept the status quo if it is the jumping off place to something better for themselves.

That tension can never be fully resolved, and it is perfectly clear at the present moment in the profoundly differing agendas of our two major parties.

Neither has the fear that underlies these differences gone away, however well it may be camouflaged.

Somewhere along the line, the Republican Party became merely the name plate for the radical right in this country.

The radical right is, in fact,

a coalition of those who fear other Americans:

as agents of treason;

as agents of confiscatory government;

as agents of immorality.

This fear gives the modern Republican Party its well-noted cohesiveness and its equally well-noted practice of jugular politics.

Even in power, the modern Republican Party feels itself to be surrounded by hostility: beginning with government itself, which they present as an enemy; extending to those in the opposition party; and ultimately, on to that portion of the country whose views and hopes are represented by it - that is to say, to virtually, half the nation.

Under these circumstances, it is natural - perhaps tragic in the classical sense - but nonetheless natural - for the modern Republican Party to be especially proficient in the use of fear as a technique for obtaining and holding power.

This phenomenon was clear under both President's Reagan and Bush Sr., except softened to an extent by the personalities of both men.

Under our current President Bush, however, the machinery of fear is right out in the open, operating at full throttle.

Fear and anxiety have always been a part of life and always will be.

Fear is ubiquitous and universal, in every human society, a normal part of the human condition.

But we have always defined progress by our success in managing through our fears.

Christopher Columbus... Lewis and Clark... the Wright Brothers... and Neil Amstrong - all found success by challenging the unknown and overcoming fear with courage and a keen sense of proportion that helped them overcome real fears without being distracted by distorted and illusory fears.

As with individuals, nations succeed or fail - and define their essential character - by the way they challenge the unknown and cope with fear.

And much depends upon the quality of their leadership.

If their leaders exploit their fears and use them to herd people in directions they might not otherwise choose, then fear itself can quickly become a self- perpetuating and free-wheeling force that drains national will and weakens national character, diverting attention from real threats deserving of healthy and appropriate concern, and sowing confusion about the essential choices that every nation must constantly make about its future.

Leadership means inspiring us to manage through our fears.

Demagoguery means exploiting our fears for political gain.

50 years ago, when the nuclear arms race with the Soviet Union was raising tensions in the world and McCarthyism was threatening freedom at home, President Eisenhower said, "Any who act as if freedom's defenses are to be found in suppression and suspicion and fear confess a doctrine that is alien to America."

But only 15 years later, when Ike's V-P, Richard Nixon, finally became President, it marked the beginning of a big change in America's politics.

Nixon embodied the spirit of "suppression and suspicion and fear" that Eisenhower denounced.

And it first bcame apparent in the despicable midterm election campaign of 1970 waged by Nixon and Vice President Agnew.

I saw that campaign first hand: my father, the bravest politician I have ever known, was slandered as unpatriotic because he opposed the Vietnam War and accused of being an atheist because he opposed a Constitutional Amendment to allow government-sponsored prayer in the public schools.

I was in the Army at the time - on my way to Vietnam.

I had a leave the week of the election.

"Law and Order," and court-ordered "busing" for racial integration of the schools were the other big issues.

It was a sleazy campaign by Nixon - one that is now regarded as a watershed marking a sharp decline in the tone of our national discourse.

In many ways, George W. Bush reminds me more of Nixon than any other previous president.

Like Bush, Nixon subordinated virtually every principal to his hunger for reelection.

He instituted wage and price controls with as little regard for his "conservative" principals as Bush has shown in piling up trillions of dollars of debt.

After the oil embargo of 1973, Nixon threatened a military invasion of the oil fields of the Middle East. Now Bush has actually done it.

Both kept their true intentions secret.

Like Bush, Nixon understood the political uses and misuses of fear.

After he was driven from office in disgrace, one of Nixon's confidants quoted Nixon as having told him this:

"People react to fear, not love.

They don't teach that in Sunday School, but it's true."

The night before that election, 33 years and 3 months ago, Senator Ed Muskie of Maine spoke on national television for the Democrats and said,

"There are only two kinds of politics. They are not radical and reactionary, or conservative and liberal. Or even Democrat and Republican. There are only the politics of fear and the politics of trust.

"One says: You are encircled by monstrous dangers.

Give us power over your freedom so we may protect you.

"The other says: The world is a baffling and hazardous place, but it can be shaped to the will of men. ...(C)ast your vote for trust ...in the ancient traditions of this home for freedom...."

The next day my father was defeated. Defeated by the politics of fear.

But his courage in standing for principle made me so proud that I really felt he had won something more important than an election.

In his speech that night, he stood the old segregationist slogan on its head and defiantly promised:

"The truth shall rise again!"

I wasn't the only person who heard that promise. Nor the only one for whom that hope still rings loudly and true.

I hope and believe that this year the politics of fear will be defeated and the truth shall rise again.

Almost 3,000 years ago, Solomon warned that where there is no vision, the people perish.

But the converse is also surely true: where there is leadership with vision and moral courage, the people will flourish and redeem Lincoln's prophesy at Gettysberg: that government of the people: by the people and for the people shall not perish from the Earth.

The First Declaration of Human Rights

Source: Zoroastrianism and Biblical Connections

Author: Dr. Darius Jahanian

One of the significant events in ancient history is the conquest of Babylon by the Persian king, Cyrus the Great.

On October 4th, 539 BC, the Persian Army entered the city of Babylon, which was then the capital of the Babylonian state (in central Iraq). This was a bloodless campaign and no prisoners were taken. Later, on November 9th, King Cyrus of Persia visited the city. Babylonian history tells us that Cyrus was greeted by the people, who spread a pathway of green twigs before him as a sign of honor and peace (sulmu). Cyrus greeted all Babylonians in peace and brought peace to their city.

On this great event, Cyrus issued a declaration, inscribed on a clay barrel known as Cyrus's inscription cylinder. It was discovered in 1879 by Hormoz Rassam in Babylon and today is kept in the British Museum. Many historians have reviewed it as the first declaration of human rights.

The Babylonian annals, as well as the first section of the Cyrus' inscription, shed light on the religiopolitical plight that had angered the people of Babylon and why they invited Cyrus's military campaign. Evidently, the Babyloninan king, Nabonidus, eliminated the festival of the new year and Nebo (one of the gods) was not brought into the city, and Bel (another god) was not taken in the procession of the festival. Also, the worship of Marduk, the king of the gods, was changed to an abomination and Nabonidus tormented the inhabitants with unbelievable oppression and forced labor. The sanctuaries of all their settlements were in ruins and the inhabitants of Sumer and Akkad had become like the living dead. Marduk, the king of the gods, scanned and searched for a righteous ruler, finally coming upon Cyrus's good deeds and his upright mind and ordered him to march against the City of Babylon. The angry inhabitants of Akkad had revolted but were massacred by Nabonidus, who, upon his return to Babylon, was arrested, but nevertheless was treated with respect. When Nabonidus died in the year following, Cyrus participated in the national mourning time that was proclaimed for him. The gods of Akkad were then returned to their sacred cities. All the inhabitants of Sumer and Akkad, including princes and governors, greeted Cyrus as a master who brought them back from a living death. All who had been spared damage and disaster revered his very name.

Cyrus's Declaration:

I am Cyrus, the king of the world, great king, legitimate king (son of Cambyses) whose rule Bel and Nebo loved and whom they wanted as king to please their hearts.

When I entered Babylon as a friend and established the seat of government in the place of the ruler under jubilation and rejoicing, Marduk, the great lord (induced) the magnanimous inhabitants of Babylon (Din Tir) (to love me) and I daily endeavored to praise him. My numerous troops walked around in Babylon in peace, I did not allow anybody to terrorize (any of the people) of the country of Sumer and Akkad. I strove for peace in Babylon (Ka Dingir ra) and in all his (other) sacred cities. As to the inhabitants of Babylon (who) against the will of the gods (had/were I abolished) the corvee (yoke) which was against their (social standing). I brought relief to their dilapidated housing, putting an end to their main complaints. Marduk, the great lord, was well pleased with my deeds and sent friendly blessing to myself, Cyrus, the King, who reveres him, to Cambyses, my son, as well as to all my troops, and we all (praised) his great (name) joyously, standing before him in peace I returned to (these) sacred cities on the other side of the Tigris, the sanctuaries of which have been ruins for a long time, the images which (used) to live therein and established for them permanent sanctuaries. I (also) gathered all their (former) inhabitants and returned (to them) their habitations. Furthermore, I resettled upon the command of Marduk, the great lord, all the gods of Sumer and Akkad who Nabonidus has brought to Babylon (su sa na) to the anger of the lord of the gods unharmed in their chapels, the places which make them happy.

May all the gods whom I have resettled in their sacred cities ask Bel and Nebo daily for a long life (six lines destroyed) and always with good words remember my good deeds that Babylonians incessantly cherished me because I resettled them in comfortable habitations I endeavored to strengthen the fortification of Imgur-Enlil and the great fortification of the City of Babylon the side brick wall by the city's trench which the former king (had built and had not finished). This was finished around (the city), that none of the former kings, despite the labor of their yoked people, had not accomplished. I rebuilt and completed with tar and brick and installed large gates entrances were built by cedar wood covered with brass and copper pivot I strengthened all the gates I saw inscribed the name of my predecessor, King Ashurbanipal.

On this historical turning point, by order of Cyrus, all the captive nationalities held as slaves for generations in Babylon were freed and the return to their homeland was financed. Among the liberated captives were 50,000 Jews held in Babylon for three generations whose return toward the rebuilding of their temple in Palestine, a policy that was followed by Darius and his successors. Some of the liberated Jews were invited to and did settle in Persia. Because of such a generous act, Cyrus has been anointed in the Bible. He is the only gentile in the Bible, who has been titled Messiah, an is mentioned explicitly as the Lord's shepherd and his anointed (Messiah). Other references to Cyrus are attested in Isaiah 45:4 where Cyrus is called by name and given a title of honor; he is also called to rebuild the God's city and free His people (Is. 45:13) and is chosen, called and brought successful by God (Is. 48:14-15).

What took place after the victory in Babylon was contrary to the standard of the time. Based on the inscriptions of the neighboring countries (Assyrians, Babylonians), it was customary to destroy the vanquished cities, level houses and temples, massacre the people or enslave the population, replace them with snakes, wolves and even carry away the soil to make the land barren. But here, peace and liberty replaced the massacre and slavery, and construction substituted for destruction. After Cyrus, his son Cambyses ruled for eight years (530BC to 522 BC) and captured Egypt, and as a sign of respect toward their culture and religion, he prostrated himself before the goddess, Meith and paid homage to Apis, the Egyptian totem (Bull).

After Cambyses, Darius took over the throne and ruled form 522BC to 486BC. From 518BC to 515BC he established peace and tranquility in Egypt and also paid homage to their totem, Apis. Darius, in his inscriptions, expresses faith in the commands of Ahuramazda. He declares "Whoever worships Ahuramazda, shall receive happiness in life and after death." He calls Elamites faithless, and because they did not worship Ahuramazda, yet he does not pressure them to change faith. Darius exhorts his successors "thou shalt be king thereafter, protect yourself from the lies and punish the liar and deceitful."

He entreats God's grace for the protection of Persia against rancor, enemy, famine and the lie. At times he alludes to other gods that may either indicate the old Aryan gods who still had strong followings or the gods of other nations under his rule, for the display of reverence toward their religions.

References:

* A. Arfaee, The command of Cyrus the Great (in Persian), quoted the opinion of Sydney Smith.

* Grayson, Assyrian and Babylonian chronicles, p110, dates the fall of Babylon on Oct. 12th and Cyrus's entry on Oct 29th.

* J. B. Pritchard, The ancient Near East, Vol. 1, 1958, p203.

* A fragment in the Yale's Babylon collection was identified in 1970 by P.R.Berger, the professor of Munster, Germany, as part of Cyrus's cylinder that was transferred to the British Museum and added to the cylinder, who wrote in the journal of Assyrology (Zeiserrift fir Assiriologie), July 25, Vol. 64. The remainder of the text is quoted from A. Arafaee, which was the missing portion kept in Yale University. Bible, 2 Chronicles 36:15-23

* Bible, Ezra 1:1-11, Ezra 2:12-70

* Bible, Ezra 7:8

* Bible, Ezra 6:3-4-5

* Bible, Ezra 7:15-25

* Bible, Isaiah 44:28 and 45:1

KIM PALMER

Here's her "un-official" biography

Kim Palmer is a singer/songwriter/keyboardist originally hailing from Toronto, Canada. She is a

classically trained pianist and degreed piano teacher with an Honor's Diploma and Music

Scholarship Award.

Kim has been performing professionally since age 18, receiving her high-school diploma and Ontario

Sholarship by mail while already on the road with a well known Canadian recording act, Tranquillity

Bass. She has performed as a solo artist as well as in everything from duos and rock bands to sixteen

piece big bands.

Some of her notable private performances include playing for Vice President Bush's

inauguration and at many prestigious Hollywood gatherings.

Some of her notable public performances include opening for Emmylou Harris and

The Guess Who and appearing with recording artists Dan Hill and Tony Kosinec.

You can hear Kim on various commercials and on albums by The String Band,

Dave Essig, Tony Kosinec (with Paul Schaffer), Dan Hill and her own band Lila.

Kim has been first place winner of The Goldenwest Songwriting Competion in

California three times, second place winner of The International Music City Song

Festival in Nashville, first place winner of Pop in the Barebones Songwriting

Competition in Austin, won The Future Charters Contest in Philadelphia, and is

featured in the 4/99 issue of "Songwriter's Monthly".

Richard Carpenter has recorded one of Kim's songs, "What Kind Of Love?". Her

songs have been picked up many times by music industry people at The Los

Angeles Songwriter's Showcase, earning her Professional Membership there.

She has written with hit songwriters for The Doobie Brothers, Paula Abdul, Sheena

Easton and Natalie Cole as well as musicians for Peter Gabriel, Celine Dion, Sara

McLachlan, Tori Amos, Joni Mitchell, John Hiatt, Daniel Lanois, Robbie

Robertson, Toni Childs, Crowded House, Sam Phillips, Laura Brannigan, Sister

Sledge, Rick Springfield, and Tina Turner.

Kim has several albums worth of material and is a one woman band, producing

music from her specially made porcelain environment due to her chemical

hypersensitivities.

She wrote, sang, played the instruments on, programmed, arranged, recorded and

produced the songs you will hear.

Anyhow, I think you can put our address (Künstler mit MCS, P.O. Box 5063, 24062 Kiel) and e-mail-address

(mcsartists@yahoo.de ) on your page cause we burn Kim's CD's in germany and I do

promotion for her and am the president if her official german fanclub.

Happy Noruz!

Today is the spring equinox and also a day of

celebration for Iranians. In the Shahnameh (Book of

Kings), a book of persian mythology, this day is

treated as a wholesomely exciting day, wherein

everything is fully thawed and devoutly engaged in a

bright blooming launch: hence the spontaneity of

festive activities by hopefully all Iranians around

the world. Back in the pre-Aladdin times, the Noruz

was also the day when Jamshid, the great peaceful King

of Persia, announces the subjugation of the demons,

the subsequent inclusion of the demons in the

festivities of Noruz (literally New day), and heralds

the intoxicating arrival of Spring. The sagas of

internal strife are forfeited into moments of play and

peaceful springiness.

Noruz has also long been perceived as a perfect time

for reassessing ones direction in life and

establishing goals for the year, as the night and the

day are perfectly equal in length, and the generous

assaults of winter have subsided.

My blessings and great fortitude to you in the new

days to come.

Love,

Babak

Courtesy, Babak Cyrus Bakhtiari

Lost Wallet

I lost my wallet Friday night. My wallet had everything in it. Credit

Cards, ATM cards, undeposited checks and $121 in cash (yes, I shouldn't

have been carrying that much cash, but I had to pay for a Ski Trip).

Naturally, I was as freaked out as I can get, but since nothing was open

over President's Day weekend, I had to wait to get everything replaced.

This morning at about 11am, a person returned my wallet to Kevin

Wheeler, but my wallet was empty of cash.

At 11:45am, the person came back to our house as Dementhon was leaving

for class. He said that 'his conscience was bothering him' and gave

Dementhon $121.

The punchline of the story is that the man who returned my wallet is

homeless. A man with nothing returned everything to me -- me the

obviously spoiled stranger whom he'd never met.

Some may say that this proves there is a god, or shows all people are

good, or it was dumb luck. Draw your own lessons from this. This only

reminds me of something my mom told me a long time ago: "that a measure

of a man is by his generosity." Bill Gates has donated billions, taxi

drivers have returned boxes of diamond rings left by patrons, but I've

never heard of anything like this.

If you see a homeless guy with a PartyPoker hat, please give him $20 and

I will pay you back. It's the least I can do.

Peace,

Nima Veiseh

I Love You in 100 Languages !!!

English - I love you

Afrikaans - Ek het jou lief

Albanian - Te dua

Arabic - Ana behibak (to male)

Arabic - Ana behibek (to female)

Armenian - Yes kez sirumen

Bambara - M'bi fe

Bangla - Aamee tuma ke bhalo aashi

Belarusian - Ya tabe kahayu

Bisaya - Nahigugma ako kanimo

Bulgarian - Obicham te

Cambodian - Soro lahn nhee ah

Cantonese Chinese - Ngo oiy ney a

Catalan - T'estimo

Cheyenne - Ne mohotatse

Chichewa - Ndimakukonda

Corsican - Ti tengu caru (to male)

Creol - Mi aime jou

Croatian - Volim te

Czech - Miluji te

Danish - Jeg Elsker Dig

Dutch - Ik hou van jou

Esperanto - Mi amas vin

Estonian - Ma armastan sind

Ethiopian - Afgreki'

Faroese - Eg elski teg

Farsi - Doset daram

Filipino - Mahal kita

Finnish - Mina rakastan sinua

French - Je t'aime, Je t'adore

Gaelic - Ta gra agam ort

Georgian - Mikvarhar

German - Ich liebe dich

Greek - S'agapo

Gujarati - Hoo thunay prem karoo choo

Hiligaynon - Palangga ko ikaw

Hawaiian - Aloha wau ia oi

Hebrew - Ani ohev otah (to female)

Hebrew - Ani ohev et otha (to male)

Hiligaynon - Guina higugma ko ikaw

Hindi - Hum Tumhe Pyar Karte hae

Hmong - Kuv hlub koj

Hopi - Nu' umi unangwa'ta

Hungarian - Szeretlek

Icelandic - Eg elska tig

Ilonggo - Palangga ko ikaw

Indonesian - Saya cinta padamu

Inuit - Negligevapse

Irish - Taim i' ngra leat

Italian - Ti amo

Japanese - Aishiteru

Kannada - Naanu ninna preetisuttene

Kapampangan - Kaluguran daka

Kiswahili - Nakupenda

Konkani - Tu magel moga cho

Korean - Sarang Heyo

Latin - Te amo

Latvian - Es tevi miilu

Lebanese - Bahibak

Lithuanian - Tave myliu

Malay - Saya cintakan mu / Aku cinta padamu

Malayalam - Njan Ninne Premikunnu

Mandarin Chinese - Wo ai ni

Marathi - Me tula prem karto

Mohawk - Kanbhik

Moroccan - Ana moajaba bik

Nahuatl - Ni mits neki

Navaho - Ayor anosh'ni

Norwegian - Jeg Elsker Deg

Pandacan - Syota na kita!!

Pangasinan - Inaru Taka

Papiamento - Mi ta stimabo

Persian - Asheghetam

Pig Latin - Iay ovlay ouyay

Polish - Kocham Ciebie

Portuguese - Eu te amo

Romanian - Te ubesk

Russian - Ya tebya liubliu

Scot Gaelic - Tha gra\dh agam ort

Serbian - Volim te

Setswana - Ke a go rata

Sign Language - ,\,,/ (represents position of fingers when signing'I Love You')

Sindhi - Maa tokhe pyar kendo ahyan

Sioux - Techihhila

Slovak - Lu'bim ta

Slovenian - Ljubim te

Spanish - Te quiero / Te amo

Swahili - Ninapenda wewe

Swedish - Jag alskar dig

Swiss-German - Ich lieb Di

Tagalog - Mahal kita

Taiwanese - Wa ga ei li

Tahitian - Ua Here Vau Ia Oe

Tamil - Nan unnai kathalikaraen

Telugu - Nenu ninnu premistunnanu

Thai - Chan rak khun (to male)

Thai - Phom rak khun (to female)

Turkish - Seni Seviyorum

Ukrainian - Ya tebe kahayu

Urdu - mai aap say pyaar karta hoo

Vietnamese - Anh ye^u em (to female)

Vietnamese - Em ye^u anh (to male)

Welsh - 'Rwy'n dy garu

Yiddish - Ikh hob dikh

Yoruba - Mo ni fe

TRADING

"Craving the High That Risky Trading Can Bring . A small group of scientists, including some psychologists, say they are starting to discover what many Wall Street professionals have long suspected — that people are hard-wired for money. The human brain, these researchers say, responds to high-stakes trading just as it does to the lure of sex. And the riskier the trades get, the more the brain craves them... “The more you think you can gain from the risk, the more you take the risk and the more activation in the circuitry,” Mr. Knutson said.... When faced with losses, individuals may seek to take more risk rather than less, contrary to what traditional economic thought might suggest.“When you are threatened with extinction, you act like nothing matters,” said Andrew Lo, a professor at M.I.T. who has studied the role of emotions in trading. “The best traders are the ones who have controlled emotional responses,” Mr. Lo said. “Professional athletes have the same reaction — they use emotion to psych them up, but they don’t let those emotions take them over.” “It is more common for people to hold onto losers and see their investment go to zero, or shorts go to the sky, than it is for them to practice good risk management and get out,” Dr. Kiev said"

"It’s the Oil"

- by Jim Holt

Iraq is ‘unwinnable’, a ‘quagmire’, a ‘fiasco’: so goes the received opinion. But there is good reason to think that, from the Bush-Cheney perspective, it is none of these things. Indeed, the US may be ‘stuck’ precisely where Bush et al want it to be, which is why there is no ‘exit strategy’

Iraq has 115 billion barrels of known oil reserves. That is more than five times the total in the United States. And, because of its long isolation, it is the least explored of the world’s oil-rich nations. A mere two thousand wells have been drilled across the entire country; in Texas alone there are a million. It has been estimated, by the Council on Foreign Relations, that Iraq may have a further 220 billion barrels of undiscovered oil; another study puts the figure at 300 billion. If these estimates are anywhere close to the mark, US forces are now sitting on one quarter of the world’s oil resources. The value of Iraqi oil, largely light crude with low production costs, would be of the order of $30 trillion at today’s prices. For purposes of comparison, the projected total cost of the US invasion/occupation is around $1 trillion

Who will get Iraq’s oil? One of the Bush administration’s ‘benchmarks’ for the Iraqi government is the passage of a law to distribute oil revenues. The draft law that the US has written for the Iraqi congress would cede nearly all the oil to Western companies. The Iraq National Oil Company would retain control of 17 of Iraq’s 80 existing oilfields, leaving the rest – including all yet to be discovered oil – under foreign corporate control for 30 years. ‘The foreign companies would not have to invest their earnings in the Iraqi economy,’ the analyst Antonia Juhasz wrote in the New York Times in March, after the draft law was leaked. ‘They could even ride out Iraq’s current “instability” by signing contracts now, while the Iraqi government is at its weakest, and then wait at least two years before even setting foot in the country.’ As negotiations over the oil law stalled in September, the provincial government in Kurdistan simply signed a separate deal with the Dallas-based Hunt Oil Company, headed by a close political ally of President Bush.

How will the US maintain hegemony over Iraqi oil? By establishing permanent military bases in Iraq. Five self-sufficient ‘super-bases’ are in various stages of completion. All are well away from the urban areas where most casualties have occurred. There has been precious little reporting on these bases in the American press, whose dwindling corps of correspondents in Iraq cannot move around freely because of the dangerous conditions. (It takes a brave reporter to leave the Green Zone without a military escort.) In February last year, the Washington Post reporter Thomas Ricks described one such facility, the Balad Air Base, forty miles north of Baghdad. A piece of (well-fortified) American suburbia in the middle of the Iraqi desert, Balad has fast-food joints, a miniature golf course, a football field, a cinema and distinct neighbourhoods – among them, ‘KBR-land’, named after the Halliburton subsidiary that has done most of the construction work at the base. Although few of the 20,000 American troops stationed there have ever had any contact with an Iraqi, the runway at the base is one of the world’s busiest. ‘We are behind only Heathrow right now,’ an air force commander told Ricks.

The Defense Department was initially coy about these bases. In 2003, Donald Rumsfeld said: ‘I have never, that I can recall, heard the subject of a permanent base in Iraq discussed in any meeting.’ But this summer the Bush administration began to talk openly about stationing American troops in Iraq for years, even decades, to come. Several visitors to the White House have told the New York Times that the president himself has become fond of referring to the ‘Korea model’. When the House of Representatives voted to bar funding for ‘permanent bases’ in Iraq, the new term of choice became ‘enduring bases’, as if three or four decades wasn’t effectively an eternity.

But will the US be able to maintain an indefinite military presence in Iraq? It will plausibly claim a rationale to stay there for as long as civil conflict simmers, or until every groupuscule that conveniently brands itself as ‘al-Qaida’ is exterminated. The civil war may gradually lose intensity as Shias, Sunnis and Kurds withdraw into separate enclaves, reducing the surface area for sectarian friction, and as warlords consolidate local authority. De facto partition will be the result. But this partition can never become de jure. (An independent Kurdistan in the north might upset Turkey, an independent Shia region in the east might become a satellite of Iran, and an independent Sunni region in the west might harbour al-Qaida.) Presiding over this Balkanised Iraq will be a weak federal government in Baghdad, propped up and overseen by the Pentagon-scale US embassy that has just been constructed – a green zone within the Green Zone. As for the number of US troops permanently stationed in Iraq, the defence secretary, Robert Gates, told Congress at the end of September that ‘in his head’ he saw the long-term force as consisting of five combat brigades, a quarter of the current number, which, with support personnel, would mean 35,000 troops at the very minimum, probably accompanied by an equal number of mercenary contractors. (He may have been erring on the side of modesty, since the five super-bases can accommodate between ten and twenty thousand troops each.) These forces will occasionally leave their bases to tamp down civil skirmishes, at a declining cost in casualties. As a senior Bush administration official told the New York Times in June, the long-term bases ‘are all places we could fly in and out of without putting Americans on every street corner’. But their main day-to-day function will be to protect the oil infrastructure.

This is the ‘mess’ that Bush-Cheney is going to hand on to the next administration. What if that administration is a Democratic one? Will it dismantle the bases and withdraw US forces entirely? That seems unlikely, considering the many beneficiaries of the continued occupation of Iraq and the exploitation of its oil resources. The three principal Democratic candidates – Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards – have already hedged their bets, refusing to promise that, if elected, they would remove American forces from Iraq before 2013, the end of their first term.

Among the winners: oil-services companies like Halliburton; the oil companies themselves (the profits will be unimaginable, and even Democrats can be bought); US voters, who will be guaranteed price stability at the gas pump (which sometimes seems to be all they care about); Europe and Japan, which will both benefit from Western control of such a large part of the world’s oil reserves, and whose leaders will therefore wink at the permanent occupation; and, oddly enough, Osama bin Laden, who will never again have to worry about US troops profaning the holy places of Mecca and Medina, since the stability of the House of Saud will no longer be paramount among American concerns. Among the losers is Russia, which will no longer be able to lord its own energy resources over Europe. Another big loser is Opec, and especially Saudi Arabia, whose power to keep oil prices high by enforcing production quotas will be seriously compromised.

Then there is the case of Iran, which is more complicated. In the short term, Iran has done quite well out of the Iraq war. Iraq’s ruling Shia coalition is now dominated by a faction friendly to Tehran, and the US has willy-nilly armed and trained the most pro-Iranian elements in the Iraqi military. As for Iran’s nuclear programme, neither air strikes nor negotiations seem likely to derail it at the moment. But the Iranian regime is precarious. Unpopular mullahs hold onto power by financing internal security services and buying off elites with oil money, which accounts for 70 per cent of government revenues. If the price of oil were suddenly to drop to, say, $40 a barrel (from a current price just north of $80), the repressive regime in Tehran would lose its steady income. And that is an outcome the US could easily achieve by opening the Iraqi oil spigot for as long as necessary (perhaps taking down Venezuela’s oil-cocky Hugo Chávez into the bargain).

And think of the United States vis-à-vis China. As a consequence of our trade deficit, around a trillion dollars’ worth of US denominated debt (including $400 billion in US Treasury bonds) is held by China. This gives Beijing enormous leverage over Washington: by offloading big chunks of US debt, China could bring the American economy to its knees. China’s own economy is, according to official figures, expanding at something like 10 per cent a year. Even if the actual figure is closer to 4 or 5 per cent, as some believe, China’s increasing heft poses a threat to US interests. (One fact: China is acquiring new submarines five times faster than the US.) And the main constraint on China’s growth is its access to energy – which, with the US in control of the biggest share of world oil, would largely be at Washington’s sufferance. Thus is the Chinese threat neutralised.

Many people are still perplexed by exactly what moved Bush-Cheney to invade and occupy Iraq. In the 27 September issue of the New York Review of Books, Thomas Powers, one of the most astute watchers of the intelligence world, admitted to a degree of bafflement. ‘What’s particularly odd,’ he wrote, ‘is that there seems to be no sophisticated, professional, insiders’ version of the thinking that drove events.’ Alan Greenspan, in his just published memoir, is clearer on the matter. ‘I am saddened,’ he writes, ‘that it is politically inconvenient to acknowledge what everyone knows: the Iraq war is largely about oil.’

Was the strategy of invading Iraq to take control of its oil resources actually hammered out by Cheney’s 2001 energy task force? One can’t know for sure, since the deliberations of that task force, made up largely of oil and energy company executives, have been kept secret by the administration on the grounds of ‘executive privilege’. One can’t say for certain that oil supplied the prime motive. But the hypothesis is quite powerful when it comes to explaining what has actually happened in Iraq. The occupation may seem horribly botched on the face of it, but the Bush administration’s cavalier attitude towards ‘nation-building’ has all but ensured that Iraq will end up as an American protectorate for the next few decades – a necessary condition for the extraction of its oil wealth. If the US had managed to create a strong, democratic government in an Iraq effectively secured by its own army and police force, and had then departed, what would have stopped that government from taking control of its own oil, like every other regime in the Middle East? On the assumption that the Bush-Cheney strategy is oil-centred, the tactics – dissolving the army, de-Baathification, a final ‘surge’ that has hastened internal migration – could scarcely have been more effective. The costs – a few billion dollars a month plus a few dozen American fatalities (a figure which will probably diminish, and which is in any case comparable to the number of US motorcyclists killed because of repealed helmet laws) – are negligible compared to $30 trillion in oil wealth, assured American geopolitical supremacy and cheap gas for voters. In terms of realpolitik, the invasion of Iraq is not a fiasco; it is a resounding success.

Still, there is reason to be sceptical of the picture I have drawn: it implies that a secret and highly ambitious plan turned out just the way its devisers foresaw, and that almost never happens.

Judges Are for Sale -- and Special Interests Are Buying

"A blistering new report details how big business and corporate lobbyists are pouring money into state judicial elections across the country and packing the courts with judges who put special interests ahead of the public interest…

Why does all this matter? Because as money floods into judicial elections, we are getting courts that are filled with judges whose first loyalty is not to justice — or to the general public — but to insurance companies, big business and other special interests. It's not hard to guess what insurance companies want their judges to do. They want them to rule against people who have been injured — even when they deserve compensation, and they want damage awards to be slashed. Big business wants weak enforcement of laws against discrimination and pollution. On the other side of the political spectrum, trial lawyers want verdicts for plaintiffs — and large damage awards."

A Snippet of Central America

by Serra Benson

This fall semester I participated in a study abroad program to Central America with the Center for Global Education. Along with thirteen other students from all over the country, I traveled through Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua studying sustainable development and social change. I met many people who have suffered greatly from war, poverty, and discrimination. Getting to know and love these people who have built strong communities that work to change the systems that oppress them, was an experience that touched me deeply. It has given me an overwhelming feeling of responsibility to pass on their stories of triumph and defeat. Though I cannot share everything with you in this article, many of the communities I visited have a similar pattern so I will focus on just one, that of Nuevo San Jose.

In Guatemala we spent a week at the rural language school just outside a tiny community called Nuevo San Jose. The twenty-two families who live there used to work on a large coffee finca, or plantation. Nine years ago, the finca owner stopped paying his workers and they struggled for months to collect their back wages. When they finally got paid, they all left the finca and with their pooled wages bought the piece of land where they live now. This community traditionally grew coffee but with the current crisis in the coffee market, prices have fallen so low that many coffee fincas have gone out of business, creating a wave of layoffs and unemployment for campesino families.

The price of coffee in its crude form has plummeted to an all-time low, half of what it sold for last year. This sudden drop is due to the excess of coffee in the world market, in large part because of an IMF and World Bank loan to Vietnam to start producing coffee there. For the families of Nuevo San Jose, this economic situation makes it difficult to put food on the table. The father of the family I stayed with would leave each morning at five o’clock looking for work. Some days he would find a day job harvesting potatoes or corn on other people’s land and earn thirty-five quetzales for the day. After paying six quetzales for transportation too and from the fields, he was left with twenty-nine quetzales, approximately four dollars, to support his wife, parents, and four kids.

Their one year-old baby, Maria Roxana is severely malnourished and couldn’t even sit up yet. Her mother got an infection just after giving birth and couldn’t breast feed the baby while she was in hospital so they have to bottle-feel her with expensive powdered milk. What they can afford to buy weekly in milk for the baby is supposed to last only two or three days, so what they give her has to be overly watered down.

Despite their current economic reality, the people of Nuevo San Jose were incredibly inspiring. Even though they appear to have nothing, they are some of the most generous people I have met. Recently they allowed another tiny community, Nueva Vida, with a similar story to their own, to move onto the land right next to them. The original community realizes that these new people are even worse off than they are and have been very giving of what little they have.

While I was in Nuevo San Jose, I spent a lot of time in the two-classroom elementary school helping the kids read, teaching them songs and now to fold paper cranes. I think a lot about the future of those children. Will they have a chance to study passed the sixth grade? Will they stay in their community of leave to find work in the bigger towns and cities? What I really wish for Nuevo San Jose is some way to sustain them economically. Unfortunately, their government, like most, tends to support large corporate interests over small and medium producers. It is difficult for poor people to get access to land, credit and fair markets. I think that social change globally will have to come from the people ourselves, as we change our societal and consumer values.

One way that we can directly support sustainable development and social change in developing countries is by choosing fair trade alternatives over mainstream brands. Take coffee as an example: buying fair trade coffee means that you are supporting coffee cooperatives that are collectively owned and run by the workers instead of by a large landowner. These workers receive a much better wage for their labor one that they can actually live on – such as $1.25 per pound instead of 50 cents. Fair Trade often means that it is grown organically. This is not only better for the workers and the consumer but is also more sustainable environmentally. Organic shade grown coffee often means that forest is not destroyed in the process, as the natural canopy provides shade for the coffee plants and predator insects to control pests.

I visited textile, agricultural, and many other cooperatives in Central America. Cooperative provides a local support network economic, physical, and emotional well being. Poor people pool their resources to provide emergency health funds, create educational workshops to combat domestic violence, and meet together regularly to talk about how they want to develop. What I loved most about these cooperatives is that they are building strong communities that challenge hegemonic models of development as well as traditional class and gender relationships. With all odds against them, through natural disasters, neo-liberal economic policies, a history of US supported war and military intervention, they and living our ideals of democracy equality, and justice.

I feel lucky to have learned so much from the people of Central America. They have given me the great gift of friendship and the inspiration to maintain international solidarity with them. Though I miss being with there in the campo, sharing stories and making fresh tortillas, I am excited to share what I learned from about the importance of community, sustainable development, and social change.

DR. KING'S I HAVE A DREAM SPEECH

[added to rezamusic.com on 21 January 2007, on Dr. King's birthday holiday. Dr. King was born January 15, 1929, died on April 4, 1968]

This speech given in Washington, DC, on August 28, 1963 on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, prompted the 1964 Civil Rights Act.Dr. King was later awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.'s Famous Speech "I have a dream"

I am happy to join with you today in what will go down in history as the greatest demonstration for freedom in the history of our nation.

Five score years ago, a great American, in whose symbolic shadow we stand today, signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity.

But one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One hundred years later, the Negro is still languishing in the corners of American society and finds himself an exile in his own land. So we have come here today to dramatize a shameful condition.

In a sense we have come to our nation's capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men, yes, black men as well as white men, would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked "insufficient funds." But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. So we have come to cash this check — a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice. We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quick sands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time to make justice a reality for all of God's children.

It would be fatal for the nation to overlook the urgency of the moment. This sweltering summer of the Negro's legitimate discontent will not pass until there is an invigorating autumn of freedom and equality. Nineteen sixty-three is not an end, but a beginning. Those who hope that the Negro needed to blow off steam and will now be content will have a rude awakening if the nation returns to business as usual. There will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights. The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice emerges.

But there is something that I must say to my people who stand on the warm threshold which leads into the palace of justice. In the process of gaining our rightful place we must not be guilty of wrongful deeds. Let us not seek to satisfy our thirst for freedom by drinking from the cup of bitterness and hatred.

We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force. The marvelous new militancy which has engulfed the Negro community must not lead us to a distrust of all white people, for many of our white brothers, as evidenced by their presence here today, have come to realize that their destiny is tied up with our destiny. They have come to realize that their freedom is inextricably bound to our freedom. We cannot walk alone.

As we walk, we must make the pledge that we shall always march ahead. We cannot turn back. There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, "When will you be satisfied?" We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality. We can never be satisfied, as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities. We cannot be satisfied as long as the Negro's basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one. We can never be satisfied as long as our children are stripped of their selfhood and robbed of their dignity by signs stating "For Whites Only". We cannot be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote. No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream.

I am not unmindful that some of you have come here out of great trials and tribulations. Some of you have come fresh from narrow jail cells. Some of you have come from areas where your quest for freedom left you battered by the storms of persecution and staggered by the winds of police brutality. You have been the veterans of creative suffering. Continue to work with the faith that unearned suffering is redemptive.

Go back to Mississippi, go back to Alabama, go back to South Carolina, go back to Georgia, go back to Louisiana, go back to the slums and ghettos of our northern cities, knowing that somehow this situation can and will be changed. Let us not wallow in the valley of despair.

I say to you today, my friends, so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men are created equal."

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

I have a dream today.

I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification; one day right there in Alabama, little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.

I have a dream today.

I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.

This is our hope. This is the faith that I go back to the South with. With this faith we will be able to hew out of the mountain of despair a stone of hope. With this faith we will be able to transform the jangling discords of our nation into a beautiful symphony of brotherhood. With this faith we will be able to work together, to pray together, to struggle together, to go to jail together, to stand up for freedom together, knowing that we will be free one day.

This will be the day when all of God's children will be able to sing with a new meaning, "My country, 'tis of thee, sweet land of liberty, of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died, land of the pilgrim's pride, from every mountainside, let freedom ring."

And if America is to be a great nation this must become true. So let freedom ring from the prodigious hilltops of New Hampshire. Let freedom ring from the mighty mountains of New York. Let freedom ring from the heightening Alleghenies of Pennsylvania!

Let freedom ring from the snowcapped Rockies of Colorado!

Let freedom ring from the curvaceous slopes of California!

But not only that; let freedom ring from Stone Mountain of Georgia!

Let freedom ring from Lookout Mountain of Tennessee!

Let freedom ring from every hill and molehill of Mississippi. From every mountainside, let freedom ring.

And when this happens, when we allow freedom to ring, when we let it ring from every village and every hamlet, from every state and every city, we will be able to speed up that day when all of God's children, black men and white men, Jews and Gentiles, Protestants and Catholics, will be able to join hands and sing in the words of the old Negro spiritual, "Free at last! free at last! thank God Almighty, we are free at last!"

France's irresponsible nuclear tests should not be tolerated

by Gerald Falchook

Oh, and also, France conducted a nuclear bomb test in the South Pacific.

That Saturday's nuclear blast was France's sixth, last and most powerful nuclear test since President Jacques Chirac told the international community to bug off back in September.

A statement by the French Defense Ministry claimed that these tests were being carried out "in order to guarantee the safety and reliability of weapons in the future." I don't understand.

Do they dare use the word "safety" in the same sentence as "nuclear weapons?" The French Defense Ministry certainly doesn't make me feel very safe.

And now Chirac has the gall (pun intended) to transform himself overnight into a leading opponent of nuclear testing.

I wonder if the word "hypocrite" exists in Mr. Chirac's vocabulary.

Never mind that the Fangatoufa atoll is already so contaminated with radiation that spending even a small amount of time there will greatly increase your chances of producing offspring with two heads, five arms or multiple sexual appendages.

Never mind the fact that these tests have caused widespread contamination of fish and plankton in the region and are endangering a vital food source for the inhabitants of this region.

Never mind that strong ocean currents have the potential to bring radiation contamination to every shore that touches the Pacific Ocean.

Nah, never mind any of that stuff. You live in the United States. You don't care.

You are safe. Just don't make any plans to spend your vacations in New Zealand or Tahiti or anywhere in-between.

And don't forget to bring along a full-body, lead-plated, radiation-safe swimsuit next time you do a little swimming off the beaches of Hawaii or southern California.

Haven't we learned that nuclear weapons don't prevent conventional wars or enhance national security?

Or maybe good old-fashioned, thick-headed, irrational belligerence is coming back in style.

But who will stop the bad guys from destroying our planet? Our national leaders? Guess again....

Embarrassing Predictions

Some embarrassing quotes of the past from people who now know better:

• "Computers in the future may weigh no more than 1.5 tons." Popular Mechanics, forecasting the relentless march of science, 1949

• "I think there is a world market for maybe five computers." Thomas Watson, chairman of IBM, 1943

• "I have traveled the length and breadth of this country and talked with the best people, and I can assure you that data processing is a fad that won't last out the year." The editor in charge of business books for Prentice Hall, 1957

• "But what ... is it good for?" Engineer at the Advanced Computing Systems Division of IBM, 1968, commenting on the microchip.

• "There is no reason anyone would want a computer in their home." Ken Olson, president, chairman and founder of Digital Equipment Corp., 1977

• "This 'telephone' has too many shortcomings to be seriously considered as a means of communication. The device is inherently of no value to us." Western Union internal memo, 1876.

• "The wireless music box has no imaginable commercial value. Who would pay for a message sent to nobody in particular?" David Sarnoff's associates in response to his urgings for investment in the radio in the 1920s.

• "The concept is interesting and well-formed, but in order to earn better than a 'C,' the idea must be feasible." A Yale University management professor in response to Fred Smith's paper proposing reliable overnight delivery service. (Smith went on to found Federal Express Corp.)

• "Who the hell wants to hear actors talk?" H.M. Warner, Warner Brothers, 1927.

• "I'm just glad it'll be Clark Gable who's falling on his face and not Gary Cooper." Gary Cooper on his decision not to take the leading role in "Gone With The Wind."

• "A cookie store is a bad idea. Besides, the market research reports say America likes crispy cookies, not soft and chewy cookies like you make." Response to Debbi Fields' idea of starting Mrs. Fields' Cookies.

• "We don't like their sound, and guitar music is on the way out." Decca Recording Co. rejecting the Beatles, 1962.

• "Heavier-than-air flying machines are impossible." Lord Kelvin, president, Royal Society, 1895.

• "If I had thought about it, I wouldn't have done the experiment. The literature was full of examples that said you can't do this." Spencer Silver on the work that led to the unique adhesives for 3-M "Post-It" Notepads.

• "So we went to Atari and said, 'Hey, we've got this amazing thing, even built with some of your parts, and what do you think about funding us? Or we' ll give it to you. We just want to do it. Pay our salary, we'll come work for you.' And they said, 'No.' So then we went to Hewlett-Packard, and they said, 'Hey, we don't need you. You haven't got through college yet.'" Apple Computer Inc. founder Steve Jobs on attempts to get Atari and H-P interested in his and Steve Wozniak's personal computer.

• "Professor Goddard does not know the relation between action and reaction and the need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react. He seems to lack the basic knowledge ladled out daily in high schools." 1921 New York Times editorial about Robert Goddard's revolutionary rocket work.

• "You want to have consistent and uniform muscle development across all of your muscles? It can't be done. It's just a fact of life. You just have to accept inconsistent muscle development as an unalterable condition of weight training." Response to Arthur Jones, who solved the "unsolvable" problem by inventing Nautilus.

• "Drill for oil? You mean drill into the ground to try and find oil? You're crazy." Drillers who Edwin L. Drake tried to enlist to his project to drill for oil in 1859.

• "Stocks have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau." Irving Fisher, Professor of Economics, Yale University, 1929.

• "Airplanes are interesting toys but of no military value." Marechal Ferdinand Foch, Professor of Strategy, Ecole Superieure de Guerre.

• "Everything that can be invented has been invented." Charles H. Duell, Commissioner, U.S. Office of Patents, 1899.

• "Louis Pasteur's theory of germs is ridiculous fiction". Pierre Pachet, Professor of Physiology at Toulouse, 1872

• "The abdomen, the chest, and the brain will forever be shut from the intrusion of the wise and humane surgeon". Sir John Eric Ericksen, British surgeon, appointed Surgeon-Extraordinary to Queen Victoria 1873.

• "640K ought to be enough for anybody." Bill Gates, 1981

Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle -- by Dr. C. George Boeree

"The unexamined life is not worth living." -- Socrates

The Athenians

When we think of ancient Greece, we think right away of Athens. Several of the philosophers we have already discussed considered it the pinnacle of their careers to come and teach in this great city.

But Athens wasn’t always great. It began as a collection of villages in some of the poorest agricultural land in Greece. Only carefully tended grapes and olives provided early Athens with a livelihood, that and trade.

The distance between the haves -- the ruling aristocratic trading families -- and the have nots -- peasants working the land -- and the accompanying feudal oppression, grew so great that it looked like the city and its surrounding area would collapse under the weight.

In 594 bc, the leaders of the middle class recruited a merchant named Solon to accept leadership of the city and restore some peace and prosperity. He began by canceling all debts and freeing all who had been enslaved on account of debt. Then he proceeded to draft a constitution in which the population was divided into four classes based entirely on economic worth, with the highest retaining the greatest power, but the lowest being exempt from taxes.

After a difficult transition, the world’s first democracy was established under the leadership of Cleisthenes in 507 bc, when he decried that all free men would be permitted to vote. This, of course, falls short of a complete democracy, but don't judge them too harshly: Slavery would not outlawed until 1814, when Mexico would become the very first sovereign nation to permanently ban slavery. The US wouldn't free its slaves until 1865 with the 13th amendment. And women didn't get to vote until New Zealand gave them the vote in 1893. It would take the US until 1919 and the 19th amendment.

Unfortunately, at about the same time the democratic experiment began, the great Persian empire to the east decided to expand into, first, Ionia, and then Greece itself. But in 490, 20,000 Greeks defeated 100,000 Persian troops at Marathon, north of Athens. (A messenger named Pheidippides ran the 26 miles -- 42.195 km -- to Athens to give them the good news, hence the sport of marathon running!)

In 481, the Persian emperor Xerxes sent an army of over two million men, assisted by a fleet of 1200 ships, to attack Greece again. The army ravaged the north of Greece and prepared to attack Athens. They found the city deserted. The Persian navy, however, found the Greek fleet waiting for it in the Bay of Salamis. The Greeks won the day against enormous odds. By 479, the Persians were forced back into Asia Minor.

If this seems like just a little piece of history, consider: This victory allowed the Greek adventure to continue to produce the kind of thinking that would set the tone for the next two millennia in Europe and the Mediterranean.

During the time period we are looking at in this chapter, Athens had as many as 300,000 people, making it one of the largest cities in the world. About half were free, one third were slaves, and one sixth were foreigners (metics). The free adult males who could vote numbered about 50,000.

Socrates

Socrates (470-399) was the son of a sculptor and a midwife, and served with distinction in the Athenian army during Athens’ clash with Sparta. He married, but had a tendency to fall in love with handsome young men, in particular a young soldier named Alcibiades. He was, by all accounts, short and stout, not given to good grooming, and a lover of wine and conversation. His famous student, Plato, called him “the wisest, and justest, and best of all men whom I have ever known” (Phaedo).

He was irritated by the Sophists and their tendency to teach logic as a means of achieving self-centered ends, and even more their promotion of the idea that all things are relative. It was the truth that he loved, desired, and believed in.

Philosophy, the love of wisdom, was for Socrates itself a sacred path, a holy quest -- not a game to be taken lightly. He believed -- or at least said he did in the dialog Meno -- in the reincarnation of an eternal soul which contained all knowledge. We unfortunately lose touch with that knowledge at every birth, and so we need to be reminded of what we already know (rather than learning something new).

He said that he did not teach, but rather served, like his mother, as a midwife to truth that is already in us! Making use of questions and answers to remind his students of knowledge is called maieutics (midwifery), or the Socratic method.

One example of his effect on philosophy is found in the dialog Euthyphro. He suggests that what is to be considered a good act is not good because gods say it is, but is good because it is useful to us in our efforts to be better and happier people. This means that ethics is no longer a matter of surveying the gods or scripture for what is good or bad, but rather thinking about life. He even placed individual conscience above the law -- quite a dangerous position to take!

Socrates himself never wrote any of his ideas down, but rather engaged his students -- wealthy young men of Athens -- in endless conversations. In exchange for his teaching, they in turn made sure that he was taken care of. Since he claimed to have few needs, he took very little, much to his wife Xanthippe’s distress.

Plato reconstructed these discussions in a great set of writings known as the Dialogs. It is difficult to distinguish what is Socrates and what is Plato in these dialogs, so we will simply discuss them together.

Socrates wasn’t loved by everyone by any means. His unorthodox religious views (that there was only one god behind the variety of Greek gods) gave the leading citizens of Athens the excuse they needed to sentence him to death for corrupting the morals of the youth of the city. In 399, he was ordered to drink hemlock, which he did in the company of his students.

Plato

Plato (437-347) was Socrates’ prized student. From a wealthy and powerful family, his actual name was

Aristocles -- Plato was a nickname, referring to his broad physique. When he was about twenty, he came under Socrates’ spell and decided to devote himself to philosophy. Devastated by Socrates’ death, he wandered around Greece and the Mediterranean and was taken by pirates. His friends raised money to ransom him from slavery, but when he was released without it, they bought him a small property called Academus to start a school -- the Academy, founded in 386.

The Academy was more like Pythagorus’ community -- a sort of quasi-religious fraternity, where rich young men studied mathematics, astronomy, law, and, of course, philosophy. It was free, depending entirely on donations. True to his ideals, Plato also permitted women to attend! The Academy would become the center of Greek learning for almost a millennium

Plato can be understood as idealistic and rationalistic, much like Pythagorus but much less mystical. He divides reality into two: On the one hand we have ontos, idea or ideal. This is ultimate reality, permanent, eternal, spiritual. On the other hand, there’s phenomena, which is a manifestation of the ideal. Phenomena are appearances -- things as they seem to us -- and are associated with matter, time, and space.

Phenomena are illusions which decay and die. Ideals are unchanging, perfect. Phenomena are definitely inferior to Ideals! The idea of a triangle -- the defining mathematics of it, the form or essence of it -- is eternal. Any individual triangle, the triangles of the day-to-day experiential world, are never quite perfect: They may be a little crooked, or the lines a little thick, or the angles not quite right.... They only approximate that perfect triangle, the ideal triangle.

If it seems strange to talk about ideas or ideals as somehow more real than the world of our experiences, consider science. The law of gravity, 1+1=2, “magnets attract iron,” E=mc2, and so on -- these are universals, not true for one day in one small location, but true forever and everywhere! If you believe that there is order in the universe, that nature has laws, you believe in ideas!

Ideas are available to us through thought, while phenomena are available to us through our senses. So, naturally, thought is a vastly superior means to get to the truth. This is what makes Plato a rationalist, as opposed to an empiricist, in epistemology.

Senses can only give you information about the ever-changing and imperfect world of phenomena, and so can only provide you with implications about ultimate reality, not reality itself. Reason goes straight to the idea. You “remember,” or intuitively recognize the truth, as Socrates suggested in the dialog Meno.

According to Plato, the phenomenal world strives to become ideal, perfect, complete. Ideals are, in that sense, a motivating force. In fact, he identifies the ideal with God and perfect goodness. God creates the world out of materia (raw material, matter) and shapes it according to his “plan” or “blueprint” -- ideas or the ideal. If the world is not perfect, it is not because of God or the ideals, but because the raw materials were not perfect. I think you can see why the early Christian church made Plato an honorary Christian, even though he died three and a half centuries before Christ!

Plato applies the same dichotomy to human beings: There’s the body, which is material, mortal, and “moved” (a victim of causation). Then there’s the soul, which is ideal, immortal, and “unmoved” (enjoying free will).

The soul includes reason, of course, as well as self-awareness and moral sense. Plato says the soul will always choose to do good, if it recognizes what is good. This is a similar conception of good and bad as the Buddhists have: Rather than bad being sin, it is considered a matter of ignorance. So, someone who does something bad requires education, not punishment.

The soul is drawn to the good, the ideal, and so is drawn to God. We gradually move closer and closer to God through reincarnation as well as in our individual lives. Our ethical goal in life is resemblance to God, to come closer to the pure world of ideas and ideal, to liberate ourselves from matter, time, and space, and to become more real in this deeper sense. Our goal is, in other words, self-realization.

Plato talks about three levels of pleasure. First is sensual or physical pleasure, of which sex is a great example. A second level is sensuous or esthetic pleasure, such as admiring someone’s beauty, or enjoying one’s relationship in marriage. But the highest level is ideal pleasure, the pleasures of the mind. Here the example would be Platonic love, intellectual love for another person unsullied by physical involvement.

Paralleling these three levels of pleasure are three souls. We have one soul called appetite, which is mortal and comes from the gut. The second soul is called spirit or courage. It is also mortal, and lives in the heart. The third soul is reason. It is immortal and resides in the brain. The three are strung together by the cerebrospinal canal.

Plato is fond of analogies. Appetite, he says, is like a wild horse, very powerful, but likes to go its own way. Spirit is like a thoroughbred, refined, well trained, directed power. And reason is the charioteer, goal-directed, steering both horses according to his will.

Other analogies abound, especially in Plato’s greatest work, The Republic. In The Republic, he designs (through Socrates) a society in order to discover the meaning of justice. Along the way, he compares elements of his society (a utopia, Greek for “no place”) to the three souls: The peasants are the foundation of the society. They till the soil and produce goods, i.e. take care of society’s basic appetites. The warriors represent the spirit and courage of the society. And the philosopher kings guide the society, as reason guides our lives.

Before you assume that we are just looking at a Greek version of the Indian caste system, please note: Everyone’s children are raised together and membership in one of the three levels of society is based on talents, not on one’s birth parents! And Plato includes women as men’s equals in this system. I leave you with a few quotes:

"Wonder is the feeling of a philosopher, and philosophy begins in wonder."

"...(I)f you ask what is the good of education in general, the answer is easy; that education makes good men, and that good men act nobly."

"(I) do to others as I would they should do to me."

"Our object in the construction of the State is the greatest happiness of the whole, and not that of any one class."

Aristotle

Aristotle (384-322) was born in a small Greek colony in Thrace called Stagira. His father was a physician and served the grandfather of Alexander the Great. Presumably, it was his father who taught him to take an interest in the details of natural life.

He was Plato’s prize student, even though he disagreed with him on many points. When Plato died, Aristotle stayed for a while with another student of Plato, who had made himself a dictator in northern Asia Minor. He married the dictator’s daughter, Pythias. They moved to Lesbos, where Pythias died giving birth to their only child, a daughter. Although he married again, his love for Pythias never died, and he requested that they be buried side by side.

For four years, Aristotle served as the teacher of a thirteen year old Alexander, son of Philip of Macedon. In 334, he returned to Athens and established his school of philosophy in a set of buildings called the Lyceum (from a name for Apollo, “the shepherd”). The beautiful grounds and covered walkways were conducive to leisurely walking discussions, so the students were known as peripatoi (“covered walkways”).

First, we must point out that Aristotle was as much a scientist as a philosopher. He was endlessly fascinated with nature, and went a long way towards classifying the plants and animals of Greece. He was equally interested in studying the anatomies of animals and their behavior in the wild.

Aristotle also pretty much invented modern logic. Except for its symbolic form, it is essentially the same today.

Let’s begin with metaphysics: While Plato separates the ever-changing phenomenal world from the true and eternal ideal reality, Aristotle suggests that the ideal is found “inside” the phenomena, the universals “inside” the particulars.

What Plato called idea or ideal, Aristotle called essence, and its opposite, he referred to as matter. Matter is without shape or form or purpose. It is just “stuff.” pure potential, no actuality. Essence is what provides the shape or form or purpose to matter. Essence is “perfect,” “complete,” but it has no substance, no solidity. Essence and matter need each other!

Essence realizes (“makes real”) matter. This process, the movement from formless stuff to complete being, is called entelechy, which some translate as actualization.

There are four causes that contribute to the movement of entelechy. They are answers to the question “why?” or “what is the explanation of this?”

The material cause: what something is made of.

The efficient cause: the motion or energy that changes matter.

The formal cause: the thing’s shape, form, or essence; its definition.

The final cause: its reason, its purpose, the intention behind it.

The material cause: The thing’s matter or substance. Why a bronze statue? The metal it is made of. Today, we find an emphasis on material causation in reductionism, explaining, for example, thoughts in terms of neural activity, feelings in terms of hormones, etc. We often go down a “level” because we can’t explain something at the level it’s at.

The efficient cause: The motion or energy that changes matter. Why the statue? The forces necessary to work the bronze, the hammer, the heat, the energy.... This is what modern science focuses on, to the point where this is what cause now tends to mean, exclusively. Note that modern psychology usually relies on reductionism in order to find efficient causes. But it isn’t always so: Freud, for example, talked about psychosexual energy and Skinner talked about stimulus and response.

The formal cause: The thing’s shape, form, definition, or essence. Why the statue? Because of the plan the sculptor had for the bronze, it’s shape or form, the non-random ordering of it’s matter. In psychology, we see some theorists focus on structure -- Piaget and his schema, for example. Others talk about the structure inherent in the genetic code, or about cognitive scripts.

The final cause: The end, the purpose, the teleology of the thing. Why the statue? The purpose of it, the intention behind making it. This was popular with medieval scholars: They searched for the ultimate final cause, the ultimate purpose of all existence, which they of course labeled God! Note that, outside of the hard sciences, this is often the kind of cause we are most interested in: Why did he do it, what was his purpose or intention? E.g. in law, the bullet may have been the “efficient” cause of death, but the intent of the person pulling the trigger is what we are concerned with. When we talk about intentions, goals, values, and so on, we are talking about final causes.

Aristotle wrote the first book on psychology (as a separate topic from the rest of philosophy). It was called, appropriately, Para Psyche, Greek for “about the mind or soul.” It is better known in the Latin form, De Anima. In this book, we find the first mentions of many ideas that are basic to psychology today, such as the laws of association.

In it, he says the mind or soul is the “first entelechy” of the body, the “cause and principle” of the body, the realization of the body. We might put it like this: The mind is the purposeful functioning of the nervous system.

Like Plato, he postulates three kinds of souls, although slightly differently defined. There is a plant soul, the essence of which is nutrition. Then there is an animal soul, which contains the basic sensations, desire, pain and pleasure, and the ability to cause motion. Last, but not least, is the human soul. The essence of the human soul is, of course, reason. He suggests that, perhaps, this last soul is capable of existence apart from the body.

He foreshadowed many of the concepts that would become popular only two thousand years later. Libido, for example: “In all animals... it is the most natural function to beget another being similar to itself... in order that they attain as far as possible, the immortal and divine.... This is the final cause of every creatures natural life.”

And the struggle of the id and ego: “There are two powers in the soul which appear to be moving forces -- desire and reason. But desire prompts actions in violation of reason... desire... may be wrong.”

And the pleasure principle and reality principle: “Although desires arise which are opposed to each other, as is the case when reason and appetite are opposed, it happens only in creatures endowed with a sense of time. For reason, on account of the future, bids us resist, while desire regards the present; the momentarily pleasant appears to it as the absolutely pleasant and the absolutely good, because it does not see the future.”

And finally, self-actualization: We begin as unformed matter in the womb, and through years of development and learning, we become mature adults, always reaching for perfection. "So the good has been well explained as that at which all things aim.

Retirement Plan (Mexican Fisherman & Harvard MBA)

The American businessman (Harvard MBA) was at the pier of a small coastal Mexican village when a small boat with just one fisherman docked. Inside the small boat were several large yellow fin tuna. The American complimented the Mexican on the quality of his fish and asked how long it took to catch them. The Mexican replied "only a little while". The American then asked why didn't he stay out longer and catch more fish? The Mexican said he had enough to support his family's immediate needs. The American then asked, but what do you do with the rest of your time?

The Mexican fisherman said, "I sleep late, fish a little, play with my children, take siesta with my wife, Maria, stroll into the village each evening where I sip wine and play guitar with my amigos, I have a full and busy life, senor." The American scoffed, "I am a Harvard MBA and could help you. You should spend more time fishing and with the proceeds buy a bigger boat with the proceeds from the bigger boat you could buy several boats, eventually you would have a fleet of fishing boats. Instead of selling your catch to a middleman you would sell directly to the processor, eventually opening your own cannery. You would control the product, processing and distribution. You would need to leave this small coastal fishing village and move to Mexico City, then LA and eventually NYC where you will run your expanding enterprise."

The Mexican fisherman asked, "But senor, how long will this all take?" To which the American replied, "15-20 years." But what then, senor? The American laughed and said that's the best part. When the time is right you would announce an IPO and sell your company stock to the public and become very rich, you would make millions. Millions, senor? Then what? The American said, "Then you would retire. Move to a small coastal fishing village where you would sleep late, fish a little, play with your kids, take siesta with your wife, stroll to the village in the evenings where you could sip wine and play your guitar with your amigos."

DR. FLENER TRIP TO IRAN

BY Dr. Pierre Flener

Traffic

I have often ranted about traffic in Turkey (which is where I live),

but now that I have been to Iran, I have enormous respect for the

"discipline" of Turkish drivers. They are choirboys compared to their

Iranian brothers! I completely lack the words to describe the chaos

of an Iranian city, especially Tehran, where cars shoot around in gay

abandon, filling literally every millimeter of the road, disrespecting

every sign and light (many traffic lights are actually switched to a

permanently blinking yellow, and often lack the red and green lenses

altogether), honking ferociously, and committing many other horrors.

And there are bicycles and motorbikes on this battlefield, often even

driving up roads on opposing lanes, or invading the sidewalks and

covered bazaars, thus extending the jurisdiction of the Jungle Law.

Now, do you really want to know where and how pedestrians fit into all

this?! When I left the bus terminal and crossed a wide boulevard with

the Akbars, weaving lane by lane through dense traffic, and somehow

making it to the other side unscathed, I turned around with a proud

look on my face, fully expecting the pedestrian crowds to cheer "ole,

ole, ole" and make Mexican waves on the sidewalks! But no, there was

no reaction: I had just learned the first survival skill that every

infant in Iran seems to acquire (or not, judging from the limping

masses). Watching Latino toreros doesn't give me any thrills anymore,

as they only face _one_ bull. Crossing a Tehran street is the real

thing, for real men! Forget the traffic in Athens, Rome, Cairo, and

Istanbul, forget Russian roulette and bungee jumping: Tehran traffic

gives you the ultimate adrenaline rushes!

The bus south to the Silk Road city of Esfahan is a superfast brandnew

Volvo, rather than the usual slow old Mercedes, so we arrive at 3am,

instead of the 6am or so I was told. While everybody bustles away, I

open my guidebook for orientation, still rubbing my eyes from sleep.

Just as I am about to despair and settle in the park until sunrise,

help pops up in the friendly person of Hassan, a graduate student at a

local university. A taxi-ride to downtown soon confirms his suspicion

that hotels have no reception service at this time of the night; this

being Iran, Hassan simply invites me to his parents' home, somewhere

in the Armenian quarter! This nightly taxi ride through empty streets

raises my spirits, as Esfahan turns out to be at least as beautiful as

in all the travelers' reports I had read so far: I immediately feel

that I will resonate with this splendid city, so I fall asleep

happily.

Fruits and vegetables are very tasty, definitely some of the best I

ever had! And, as all over the Middle East, deserts give you a taste

of what angels eat in paradise.

While on the bus south to Shiraz, a man and his family in the front

row keep gesturing at me to join them there. So I eventually take a

seat vacated by a son, and the father starts the conversation in

halting English:

- We are very honored to have you aboard this bus, Sir. [...]

During the usual smalltalk enquiries about my opinions of Iran and the

Iranians, the other passengers stir in their seats and stare at us,

maybe eager to find out about me. Then:

- What is your name?

- Pierre.

Somebody tips on his shoulder and asks, in Farsi, what my name is.

After his reply, the word "Pierre" goes like a bushfire to the end of

the bus, so I turn around and gently bow forward, with a friendly

smile, now that I am officially introduced.

- What is your surname?

- Flener.

And a "Flener" sound soon ripples through the entire bus.

- Where are you from?

- I am from Luxemborg. (sic, Farsi pronunciation)

Now, the words "Luxemborg!", "Luxemborg?", and "Istanbul!" (sic)

resonate around.

- What is your job?

- I am a teacher.

- Are you an English language teacher?

- No, I teach Computer Science.

- Wow! At what level, high school perhaps?

- No, at a university.

- But you are very young... Are you a teaching assistant?

- No, I have a Ph.D. degree and am an assistant professor.

The eager man behind us tips on my neighbor's shoulder again to get

the summary of my latest answers. And the word "doktora" echoes

manifold through the bus, to be instantly followed by an almost

collective outcry:

- Mashallah! (a common Islamic phrase, used to avert the evil eye

when expressing admiration)

Their admiration seems limitless. (Later I found out that, with the

level of the economy, obtaining a Ph.D. in Iran is something very

difficult, and thus quite rare and noteworthy, especially for people

of my age.) Passengers send their children to bring me cakes, fruit,

vegetables, and tea. How natural Iranians thus are, in the sense that

they simply "adopt" me, making me one of theirs, with no regard to my

race, creed, or title! I like this!

The ruins are awesome, with their giant walls, columns, temples, statues, and so

on, especially the incredibly well-preserved 2,500-year-old reliefs,

such as the "Parade of Nations".

Once they have touched and kissed the tomb of Reza, some pilgrims become hysteric: adult men roll on

the floor, big tears flow down their cheeks, foam builds up on their mouths, they beat themselves senseless, and are dragged away by their

more sober friends, while still wailing "ya Reza, ya Ali"... Unforgettable sights, observed from within, not through long lenses or

on some documentary channel.

I spent a lot of time explaining to them that the mention of my salary is

meaningless unless they also know how much a loaf of bread costs back

home, that the "West" has huge unemployment rates so that they would

only be employed if they have quite unique qualifications, that the

"West" has huge crime rates (unlike Iran), that friendship and family

have decreasing roles in the "West" so that they most probably would

hate it there every minute, etc, but they were all oblivious to such

rhetoric: they just wanted to get out...

A few weeks later, once cozy at home, pouring over my photos,

telling my stories to my friends, receiving the first letters from

Iran, etc, I slowly fully realized what a fabulous trip it was, that I

already started missing Iran, that I actually wanted to go back!

Quietness - By Rumi

Inside this new love, die.

Your way begins on the other side.

Become the sky,

Take an axe to the prison wall.

Escape.

Walk out like someone suddenly born into color.

Do it now.

You're covered with thick cloud.

Slide out the side.

Die,

and be quiet.

Quietness is the surest sign that you've died.

Your old life was a frantic running

from silence.

The speechless full moon

comes out now.

Tagore

I hold her hands and press her to my breast.

I try to fill my arms with her loveliness,

to plunder her sweet smile with kisses,

to drink her dark glances with my eyes.

Ah, but where is it?

Who can strain the blue from the sky?

I try to grasp the beauty;

it eludes me, leaving only the body in my hands.

Baffled and weary I come back.

How can the body touch the flower which only the spirit may touch?

--Tagore

THE TOP 10 Miraculous BENEFITS of KEEPING a PERSONAL JOURNAL

• by Dr Philip Humbert

• In earlier generations it was common to keep a diary or personal journal. Today few people do it, and very few recognize the

• value and astonishing power of keeping a journal. If you can read and write, you have access to the most amazing source of

• personal power and magic! Try it for 30 days and watch it transform your life! Clients periodically tell me they couldn't possibly

• find the time. I ask them to try it for 30 days. Then clients often tell me they couldn't possibly live without the power of their

• journals. The following are my top ten reasons to keep a journal.

• A journal will clarify your goals. As you write a few thoughts each day, your ideas about what is important, what is worthy of your life and your time will become much clearer. You'll automatically discover what you really want in life.

• A journal will simplify your life. Spending as little as 10 minutes with pen and paper describing your values, noting your achievements and giving thanks for the joys of life, will make you less tolerant of life's distractions. Things become much simpler when you write them down.

• A journal will strengthen your relationships. It will give you time and the words to express your feelings, it will help you understand and be patient with your loved one's peccadilloes, and it will teach you to love more powerfully.

• A journal will make you more attractive. Socrates said, "Know thyself." Keeping a journal will help you know yourself and express yourself more clearly, and that is amazingly attractive!

• A journal will empower you. Thinking with pen and paper forces you to eliminate fuzzy or confusing images and "laser" in on precisely the right word, the most powerful image to express yourself. Keeping a journal will make you a better communicator, and that can make you rich!

• A journal will eliminate temptation. Some ideas sound great in our imagination, but when written on paper they just aren't the same! It's easy to blurt out "I hate my job!", but writing about what it means to quit, change careers and start over will quickly result in one of two things: The temptation will go away, or you'll start generating actual plans to make your life better. Either way, you win!

• A journal affirms the reality of your life. Writing about life adds meaning and power. Journal your child's first steps or first tooth, starting school, her first date and high school graduation adds substance to these things. A friend of mine just became a grandfather for the first time and gave his son, the proud father, a fat 3-ring binder of notes he'd written as he'd watched his baby boy grow 25 years ago. Together they cried and laughed at the reality that life is a sacred, wonderful thing.

• A journal helps you be quiet. Journaling has been called a form of meditation. It has a similar power to quiet the mind and focus your thoughts. It even has the power to turn off the TV! It can heal anxiety, change your breathing and make you smile. What more could you ask?

• A journal helps you speak out. Many of my articles, letters to the local paper, and letters to friends began as notes in my journal. A journal helps ideas become words, and it provides a nursery for words to grow into sentences and paragraphs, until finally they need a stage on which to express themselves. Sometimes that "stage" is a candle-lit dinner, other times it's a protest sign or a letter to an old friend. Whatever form it takes, many of those messages would never have been born without the safety of a journal in which to grow.

• Finally, a journal just feels good! Using quality paper and a fountain pen or other a beautiful instrument with just the right "heft" and feel is a wonderfully sensuous, delightful experience. It will cheer you up, reduce your stress, make you smile and add to your life. Who knows, itll, it could!)

About the Submitter:

Dr Philip Humbert is a writer and personal coach who can be reached at Coach@PhilipHumbert.com He writes a popular

FREE newsletter and you can subscribe to it and get lots of other FREE stuff (including a great motivational screensaver!) by

visiting his website at: http://www.philiphumbert.com

Keeping Diary May Help Breast Cancer Patients

NEW YORK (Reuters Health) - Keeping a diary of thoughts and feelings may not only help breast cancer (news - web sites) patients' emotional health, it could have an impact on physical health as well, according to recent study findings.

In a study in which patients were randomly assigned to write down their feelings or a simple list of facts, diary keepers were less likely to report treatment symptoms or have doctor's visits related to such symptoms than patients who simply documented their breast cancer experience.

It's not clear why the type of writing a patient does would effect her use of medical care. However, those engaged in "expressive writing" may make better use of their scheduled appointments or taken more actions to address medical concerns, according to Dr. Annette L. Stanton of the University of Kansas in Lawrence, Kansas and her colleagues.

Reza Ganjavi: Lot of things that are big in your head seem like nothing once emptied

The 10 Commandments of Logic

1. Thou shall not attack the person’s character, but the argument. (Ad hominem)

2. Thou shall not misrepresent or exaggerate a person’s argument in order to make them easier to attack. (Straw man fallacy)

3. Thou shall not use small numbers to represent the whole. (Hasty generalization)

4. Thou shall not argue thy position by assuming one of its premises is true. (Begging the question)

5. Thou shall not claim that because something occurred before, it must be the cause. (Post Hoc/False cause)

6. Thou shall not reduce the argument down to two possibilities. (False dichotomy)

7. Thou shall not argue that because of our ignorance, claim must be true or false. (Ad ignorantum)

8. Thou shall not lay the burden of proof onto him that is questioning the claim. (Burden of proof reversal)

9. Thou shall not assume “this” follows “that” when it has no logical connection. (Non sequitur)

10. Thou shall not claim that because a premise is popular, therefore it must be true. (Bandwagon fallacy)

10 Commandments of Rational Debate (with examples)

1. Though shall not attack the person’s character, but the argument itself. (“Ad hominem”)

Example: Dave listens to Marilyn Manson, therefore his arguments against certain parts of religion are worthless. After all, would you trust someone who listens to that devil worshiper?

2. Though shall not misrepresent or exaggerate a person’s argument in order to make them easier to attack. (“Straw Man Fallacy”)

Example: After Jimmy said that we should put more money into health and education, Steve responded by saying that he was surprised that Jimmy hates our country so much that he wants to leave it defenceless by cutting military spending.

3. Though shall not use small numbers to represent the whole. (“Hasty Generalization”)

Example: Climate Change Deniers take a small sample set of data to demonstrate that the Earth is cooling, not warming. They do this by zooming in on 10 years of data, ignoring the trend that is present in the entire data set which spans a century.

4. Though shall not argue thy position by assuming one of its premises is true. (“Begging the Question”)

Example:

Sheldon: “God must exist.”

Wilbert: “How do you know?”

Sheldon: “Because the Bible says so.”

Wilbert: “Why should I believe the Bible?”

Sheldon: “Because the Bible was written by God.”

Wilbert: “WTF?”

Here, Sheldon is making the assumption that the Bible is true, therefore his premise – that God exists – is also true.

5. Though shall not claim that because something occurred before, but must be the cause. (“Post Hoc/False Cause”).

This can also be read as “correlation does not imply causation”.

Example: There were 3 murders in Dallas this week and on each day, it was raining. Therefore, murders occur on rainy days.

6. Though shall not reduce the argument down to only two possibilities when there is a clear middle ground. (“False Dichotomy”).

Example: You’re either with me, or against me. Being neutral is not an option.

7. Though shall not argue that because of our ignorance, the claim must be true or false. (“Ad Ignorantiam”).

Example: 95% of unidentified flying objects have been explained. 5% have not. Therefore, the 5% that are unexplained prove that aliens exist.

8. Though shall not lay the burn of proof onto him that is questioning the claim. (“Burden of Proof Reversal”).

Example: Marcy claims she sees the ghosts of dead people, then challenges you to prove her wrong. The burden of proof is on Marcy, not you, since Marcy made the extraordinary claim.

9. Though shall not assume that “this” follows “that”, when “it” has no logical connection. (“Non Sequitur”).

Similar, but the difference between the post hoc and non sequitur fallacies is that, whereas the post hoc fallacy is due to lack of a causal connection, in the non sequitur fallacy, the error is due to lack of a logical connection.

Example: If you do not buy this Vitamin X supplements for your infant, you are neglecting your her.

10. Though shall not claim that because a premise is popular, therefore, it must be true. (“Bandwagon Fallacy”).

Example: Just because a celebrity like Dr. Oz endorses a product, it doesn’t make it any more legitimate.

Dalai Lama

[This was emailed to me by a friend]

This is what The Dalai Lama has to say on the millennium...

INSTRUCTIONS FOR LIFE

1.Take into account that great love and great achievements involve great risk.

2. When you lose, don't lose the lesson.

3. Follow the three Rs:

- Respect for self

- Respect for others and

- Responsibility for all your actions

4. Remember that not getting what you want is sometimes a wonderful stroke of luck.

5. Learn the rules so you know how to break them properly.

6. Don't let a little dispute injure a great friendship.

7. When you realise you've made a mistake, take immediate steps to correct it.

8. Spend some time alone every day.

9. Open your arms to change, but don't let go of your values.

10. Remember that silence is sometimes the best answer.

11. Live a good, honourable life. Then when you get older and think back, you'll be able to enjoy it a second time.

12. A loving atmosphere in your home is the foundation for your life.

13. In disagreements with loved ones, deal only with the current situation. Don't bring up the past.

14. Share your knowledge. It's a way to achieve immortality.

15. Be gentle with the earth.

16. Once a year, go someplace you've never been before.

17. Remember that the best relationship is one in which your love for each other exceeds your need for each other.

18. Judge your success by what you had to give up in order to get it.

19. Approach love and cooking with reckless abandon.

~~~

Subj: Message from the Dalai Lama [emailed by J.E.S.] - September 2001 - after World Trade Center tragedies

From the Dalai Lama

Dear friends around the world: The events of this day cause every

thinking person to stop their daily lives, whatever is going on in them,

and to ponder deeply the larger questions of life. We search again for

not only the meaning of life, but the purpose of our individual and

collective experience as we have created it--and we look earnestly for

ways in which we might recreate ourselves as a human species, so that we

will never treat each other this way again. The hour has come for us to

demonstrate at the highest level our most extraordinary thought about Who

We Really Are. There are two possible responses to what has occurred

today. The first comes from love, the second from fear.

If we come from fear we may panic and do things--as individuals and as

nations--that could only cause further damage. If we come from love we

will find refuge and strength, even as we provide it to others.This is

the moment of your ministry. This is the time of teaching. What you teach

at this time, through your every word and action right now, will remain

as indelible lessons in the hearts and minds of those whose lives you

touch, both now, and for years to come. We will set the course for

tomorrow, today. At this hour. In this moment. Let us seek not to

pinpoint blame, but to pinpoint cause. Unless we take this time to look

at the cause of our experience, we will never remove ourselves from the

experiences it creates. Instead, we will forever live in fear of

retribution from those within the human family who feel aggrieved, and,

likewise, seek retribution from them. To us [Buddhist thinkers] the

reasons are clear. We have not learned the most basic human lessons. We

have not remembered the most basic human truths. We have not understood

the most basic spiritual wisdom. In short, we have not been listening to

God, and because we have not, we watch ourselves do ungodly things. The

message we hear from all sources of truth is clear: We are all one. That

is a message the human race has largely ignored. Forgetting this truth is

the only cause

of hatred and war, and the way to remember is simple: Love, [in] this

and every moment.

If we could love even those who have attacked us, and seek to understand

why they have done so, what then would be our response? Yet if we meet

negativity with negativity, rage with rage, attack with attack, what then

will be the outcome?

These are the questions that are placed before the human race today. They

are questions that we have failed to answer for thousands of years.

Failure to answer them now could eliminate the need to answer them at

all. If we want the beauty of the world that we have co-created to be

experienced by our children and our children's children, we will have to

become spiritual activists right here, right now, and cause that to

happen. We must choose to be a cause in the matter. So, talk with God

today. Ask God for help, for counsel and

advice, for insight and for strength and for inner peace and for deep

wisdom.

Ask God on this day to show us how to show up in the world in a way that

will cause the world itself to change. And join all those people around

the world who are praying right now, adding your Light to the Light that

dispels all fear. That is the challenge that is placed before every

thinking person today. Today the human soul asks the question: What can

I do to preserve the beauty and the wonder of our world and to eliminate

the anger and hatred--and the disparity that inevitably causes it--in

that part of the world which I touch?

Please seek to answer that question today, with all the magnificence that

is You. What can you do TODAY...[at] this very moment? A central teaching

in most spiritual traditions is: What you wish to experience, provide for

another.

Look to see, now, what it is you wish to experience--in your own life,

and in the world. Then see if there is another for whom you may be the

source of that. If you wish to experience peace, provide peace for

another. If you wish to know that you are safe, cause [others] to know

that they are safe.

If you wish to better understand seemingly incomprehensible things, help another to better understand. If you wish to heal your own sadness or anger, seek to heal the sadness or anger of another.Those others are waiting for you now. They are looking to you for guidance, for help, for courage, for strength, for understanding, and for assurance at this hour. Most of all, they are looking to you for love.

My religion is very simple. My religion is kindness.

Dalai Lama

Farhad Varasteh

Mr. Farhad Varasteh founded the Karate Academy in Tehran where I studied for some years, I suppose in late-pre-teen and early-teen years. One of the most important contributions of Karate was bodily flexibility and strength. It also gave one a "confidence", a tool, to be able to protect the body against certain threats -- just yesterday I used a martial artsy kick to defend against a dog attack.

[ OFF-TOPIC: I put the word "confidence" in quotes because it is misused. Everybody and their mother talks about confidence / self confidence, but that is exactly what it is in most cases: a thing of the self, of the ego, this ficticious psychological entity made of memories -- so protection goes beyond the natural instinct to protect the organism -- it goes into protecting the psychological self -- and all sorts of problems arise out of this attempt -- and there are 1001 books that teach the self how to glorify itself and how to get what it wants and have self confidence and other such nonsense. A 4 year old child is very confident but that confidence has a totally differet color -- it is the confidence of innocense. A beautiful, perishable, pliable blade of grass is confident - it stands unworried, fearless, though the gentlest breeze can sway it an a shoe can crush it. ]

Mr. Varasteh was a very kind and humble man -- I was just a kid among many of his students but I do remember having personal interaction with him in forms of greetings, small talk, and maybe even a photo. I am glad I went to the Karate academy and would recommend it to any youngster - with proper philosophical guidance.

The flexibility the Karate class gave helped / reminded one in taking up yoga in first year of college which had huge benefits. A few years ago I started integrating the Karate kicks and punches I had learned years ago in my regular exercize program - good way of keeping fit. Continual study led to a Black Belt in Tae Kwon Do.

Martial Arts make the body into a weapon - and this can have its drawbacks - so one has to be very careful and cool specially in crazy situations.

Reza Ganjavi

Here's some excerpts from Mr. Varasteh's website http://www.kanzenkai.org/ -- He currently teaches in Canada.

LET NO MAN WRITE MY EPITAPH

A short history and an autobiography by

Shinan Farhad Varasteh 9th Dan Soke, Kanzen-ryu Karatedo

The founding of Karate in Iran was not an enviable task, for I went from the depths of despair to the very heights of glory only to be disillusioned once again. After finishing my studies in the U.S.A I returned to Iran in 1965 and while serving as a diplomat at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs I started teaching Karate with one person as my student. As the number of my students rapidly grew, so did the opposition to the teaching of Karate by all authorities who misunderstood the art of Karate as an "art for killing". The sport Organization of Iran took every measure to see that any teaching facilities were made unavailable, as a consequence I had no choice but to teach my students in basements, Tennis courts and un-heated military compounds. As time passed the number of students continued to rise, inevitably so did that of the opposition.

Despite the odds, I believed and still continue to believe that a fighter must fight, and I fought for with undying passion for the cause of Karate-Do.

In the process I continued to decline missions to go abroad concerning my position as a diplomat, as an alternative I stayed in Iran and continued to teach my beloved students whose passion and dedication for Karate gave me a deep sense of responsibility to not let them down.

Karate in Iran grew by leaps and bounds but still there were no signs of support, or a dojo to call my own however, I believed that I had a mission and I often found myself swimming against the currents of the river of life to achieve my goals.

In 1972 I received a letter from W.U.K.O stating that I could bring my team to compete at the World Championships in Paris, France provided I obtained a letter from the Iranian Olympic Committee stating that my team would officially be representing Iran. By what can only be described as a miracle I obtained the letter. My leading students and I were off to represent Iran at the world championships in Paris without the full support of our own country.

Relatively young and still unknown in the world of Karate I managed to catch the attention of the world congress in a heated discussion where utilized my linguistic skills and fluently spoke French, Spanish and English about the technical aspects of Karate-Do as well as suggestions on how the newly founded World Karate Federation should proceed in order to be successful. Delegates from various countries were so impressed with the man from Iran who spoke with passion and elegance that they voted me as the Vice-President of the World Karate Federation (W.U.K.O).

Upon my return to Iran having done the impossible, the first Iranian Karate Federation was formed with me as the president. Now that the title had been clinched time had come for proof. And prove we did, our first competitions were with the "Vikings" where in six competitions against Sweden and Norway we defeated them six times. At the 1975 World championships in Los Angles I was among a handful of individuals who qualified and licensed as World Judge and Referee. Our next competition was against the West German National Karate Team held in Tehran in 1976 where the Germans were defeated five times and equalled once.

That same year we went to Jakarta, Indonesian for Asian Pacific Union of Karate-Do championships where Iran took third place after Japan and Indonesia, and prior to the championships I was elected as the director of A.P.U.K.O.

1976 proved to be an eventful year, where against all precedent because of my unique relations with the European Karate leaders in the congress, I convinced them to accept Iran as an official member of the E.K.U (European Karate Union), and not only that in the same year the European Karate Championships were held in Tehran, Iran. Thirteen European countries undertook the journey to Tehran, which President Delcourt called the capital of Europe.

In the fourth world Karate Championships in Tokyo, Japan Iran took third place in the world with France. So impressed was the world of Karate with me as the president, trainer and coach of my country's team that I was unanimously voted to become the vice-president of the World Karate Federation for a second four year term, I also re-qualified as a world judge and referee.

One week after my return from Japan with so many achievements as a coach as well as on a personal level, I returned to Iran mistakanly optimistic. I was against all logic removed as the president of the Iran Karate Federation, while still the president of the World Karate Federation. So many victories out of one basement club were thought to have come easily, so why not give it to the more privileged?

Feeling disappointed and let down by my country I retuned to my Dojo (the Karate Academy) and still in the eyes of the press I continued to teach my students as the world looked on in. But this was not to be the end, but the beginning of even more heartache.

In 1979 I was expelled from the Ministry of Foreign affairs, with no explanation given. And one year later all doors were closed on the love of my life as my Dojo was closed down, the authorities claimed that it was illegal, this was a contradicting due to the fact that I was the first person to have a permit for a Karate club. I was then forbidden to leave Iran and after the Iranian National Karate Championships in 1981 (ironically titled the Farhad Varasteh Cup), I was forbidden to leave Tehran.

So after so many years of hard work, accomplishments, and contribution to the sport and to the youth of my country I was deprived of everything that I had worked so hard for. In 1982 with all doors closed on me, I fled my beloved Iran for Paris, France only to start again from scratch, only this time with a wife and four children. I started teaching Karate in Paris and in 1984 with my son and a few students from Italy and France I was invited to participate in the European All Star Karate Championships in Rome. My team won gold in team Kumite and my son Pirooz also a member of the team won a gold medal in individual Kata. In 1986 I immigrated to Canada and with no funds and no connections I was to start again for the third time. I started teaching Karate three times a week out of a squash court. At times I still get tears in my eyes when I speak of the past, but I insist these are not tears of weakness, but of emotion.

Now in 2002 after my Dojo has been ranked number one for the past eight years in a row, with my students winning more medals than any club or style. One would think so much pain suffering and injustice would weaken a man's resolve.

About one year ago while accepting two more awards as the club of the year in Ontario I insisted that excellence is a habit, not an act. My final judgement as the founder of Kan-Zen-Ryu Karate-Do must be left to history.

And last but not least I want to remind every individual everywhere that if they choose to practice Kan-Zen-Ryu Karate-Do or use this name in any way they must teach and maintain my standards evaluations I have set forth. They must be graded according my standards set forth in the syllabus in Kumite, Kata and Kihon. Let there be no misunderstandings by anyone anywhere. This style of which I am the founder, over the years the price has been paid in sweat, blood and tears. And although a few people around the world have shared in the sweat and tears I assure you the blood has been all mine. It is my expectation and wish that if they do not or cannot maintain these standards they should change their name to any other style and refrain from using the word Kan-Zen-Ryu or Kan-Zen-Kai.

Copyright © 2002 Kanzen Kai Karate Do. All right reserved.

6-Jan-07

Nassim, your father's contributions were incredibly important to the entire generations of Iraninans whom I was a part of as a student in the Academy in Tehran, and to future generations who will undoubtedly benefit from the consequences of his work. I can not be there for the event in person but my well wishes are with him and his family.

My gratitude for him and his work is immense.

Affectionately,

Reza Ganjavi

www.rezamusic.com

Marcus Aurelius

PHILOSOPHER - EMPEROR: Marcus Aurelius - born April 26, AD 121, Rome died March 17, 180, Vindobona [Vienna], or Sirmium, Pannonia

Extracts from the Meditations (The text is from Moses Hadas, Essential Works of Stoicism, Bantam Books, New York 1960

(thanks to Paul Harrison http://www.pantheism.net/paul/history/aurelius.htm)

Unity of the universe

Everything harmonizes with me, which is harmonious to thee, o Universe. Nothing for me is too early or too late, which is in due time for thee.

There is one light of the sun, though it is interrupted by walls, mountains and infinite other things. There is one common substance, though it is distributed among countless bodies which have their several qualities. There is one soul, though it is distributed among several natures and individual limitations. There is one intelligent soul, though it seems to be divided. [12.30]

Constantly regard the universe as one living being, having one substance and one soul; and observe how all things have reference to one perception, the perception of this one living being; and how all things act with one movement; and how all things are the cooperating causes of all things which exist; observe too the continuous spinning of the thread and the contexture of the web. [4.40]

All things are implicated with one another, and the bond is holy; and there is hardly anything unconnected with any other things. For things have been co- ordinated, and they combine to make up the same universe. For there is one universe made up of all things, and one god who pervades all things, and one substance, and one law, and one reason. [7.9]

Change

The universal nature out of the universal substance, as if it were wax, now molds a horse, and when it has broken this up, it uses the material for a tree, then for a man, then for something else. . . . Nature which governs the whole will soon change all things which you see, and out of their substance will make other things. and again other things . . . in order that the world may be ever new. [7.23]

The nature of the Universe loves nothing so much as to change the things that are and to make new things like them. For everything that exists is in a manner the seed of that which will be. [4.36]

The social animal

We are made for cooperation, like feet, like hands, like eyelids, like the rows of the upper and lower teeth. To act against one another then is contrary to nature. [2.1]

Belonging to the whole

You must now at last perceive of what universe you are a part, and of what administrator of the universe our existence is an afflux, and that a limit of time is fixed for you, which if you do not use for clearing away the clouds from your mind, it will go and you will go, and it will never return. [2.4]

The soul of man does violence to itself, first of all, when it becomes an abscess and, as it were, a tumor on the universe, so far as it can. For to be vexed at anything which happens is a separation of ourselves from nature, in some part of which the natures of all other things are contained. [2.16]

You will give yourself relief, if you do every act of your life as if it were the last, laying aside all carelessness and passionate aversion from the commands of reason, and all hypocrisy, and self-love, and discontent with the portion which has been given to you. [2.5]

Harmonizing with the universe

This you must always bear in mind, what is the nature of the whole, and what is my nature, and how this is related to that, and what kind of a part it is of what kind of a whole; and that there is no-one who hinders you from always doing and saying the things which are according to the nature of which you are a part. [2.9]

Everything harmonizes with me, which is harmonious to thee, o Universe. Nothing for me is too early or too late, which is in due time for thee. Everything is fruit to me which thy seasons bring, o nature; from thee are all things, in thee are all things, to thee all things return. [4.23]

A contented life

If you work at that which is before you, following right reason seriously, vigorously, calmly without allowing anything else to distract you, but keeping your divine part pure, as if you might be bound to give it back immediately; if you hold to this, expecting nothing, fearing nothing, but satisfied with your present activity according to nature . . . you will be happy. And there is no man who is able to prevent this. [3.12]

Take away the complaint "I have been harmed," and the harm is taken away. [4.7]

Facing death

You have embarked, you have made the voyage, you have come to the shore: get out. [3.3]

You have existed as a part. You shall disappear in that which produced you; or rather, you shall be received back into its seminal principle by transmutation. [4.14]

Pass then through this little space of time conformably to nature, and end your journey in content, just as an olive falls off when it is ripe, blessing nature who produced it, and thanking the tree on which it grew. [4.48]

Every part of me will be reduced by change into some part of the universe, and that again will change into another part of the universe. and so on for ever. And by consequence of such a change I too exist, and those who begot me, and so on forever in the other direction. [5.13]

Bizet

This are the vocals of one of the french Bizet-Song from Cecilia Bartolis CD.

I'm learning now to sing this wonderfull music

The Farewell of the Arab Hostess

Since nothing will keep you in this happy land,

neither the shade of the palm tree, nor the yello corn,

neither rest, nor abundance,

nor the sight, at your voice, ofthe young

beating hearts of our sisters who, at night,

in a whirling swarm

crown the hillside with therir dance,

farewell, handsome traveller! Alas, farewell!

Oh!if only you were one of those

whose lazy feet are bounded by

their roof of branches or canvas!

Who, idly dreaming, listen unmoved to tales,

and at eventide, sitting before their door,

wish to be off and away among the stars!

Alas! Farewell! Farewell, handsome traveller!

Had you wished it, one of us perhaps

o young man, would have liked to serve you

on bended knee

in our ever open huts;

while lulling your sleep with her song

she would have made,

to drive the tiresome gnats from your brow,

a fan of green leaves.

If you do not come back, dream a little

from time to time

of the daughters of the desert, sweet-voiced

sisters,

who dance barefoot on the sandhills,

o handsome white man, fine bird

of passage,

remember, remember, for perhaps,

o quickly passing stranger,

your memory remains with more tham one!

Alas! Farewell! Farewell, handsome stranger!

Alas! Farewell! Remember!

Rudyard Kipling: If

If you can keep your head when all about you

Are losing theirs and blaming it on you;

If you can trust yourself when all men doubt you,

But make allowance for their doubting too;

If you can wait and not be tired by waiting,

Or, being lied about, don't deal in lies,

Or, being hated, don't give way to hating,

And yet don't look too good, nor talk too wise;

If you can dream - and not make dreams your master;

If you can think - and not make thoughts your aim;

If you can meet with triumph and disaster

And treat those two imposters just the same;

If you can bear to hear the truth you've spoken

Twisted by knaves to make a trap for fools,

Or watch the things you gave your life to broken,

And stoop and build 'em up with wornout tools;

If you can make one heap of all your winnings

And risk it on one turn of pitch-and-toss,

And lose, and start again at your beginnings

And never breath a word about your loss;

If you can force your heart and nerve and sinew

To serve your turn long after they are gone,

And so hold on when there is nothing in you

Except the Will which says to them: "Hold on";

If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,

Or walk with kings - nor lose the common touch;

If neither foes nor loving friends can hurt you;

If all men count with you, but none too much;

If you can fill the unforgiving minute

With sixty seconds' worth of distance run -

Yours is the Earth and everything that's in it,

And - which is more - you'll be a Man my son!

John Brown's Speech before the court

John Brown (1800-1859)

I have, may it please the Court, a few words to say.

In the first place, I deny everything but what I have all along

admitted: of a design on my part to free slaves . . . Had I interfered in the matter which I admit, and which I admit has been fairly proved . . . had I so interfered in behalf of the rich, the powerful, the intelligent, or the so-called great . . . and suffered and sacrificed, what I have in this interreference, it would have been all right. Every man in this Court would have deemed it an act worthy of reward rather than punishment. I see a book kissed which I suppose to be the Bible, or at least the New Testament, which teaches me that all things whatsoever I would that men should do unto me, I should do even so to them. It teaches me further to remember them that are in bonds as bound with them. I endeavored to act up to that instruction. I say that I am yet too young to understand that God is any respecter of persons. I believe that to have interfered as I have done, as I have always freely admitted I have done in behalf of His despised poor, I did no wrong, but right. Now if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children and with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel and unjust enactments, I say, let it be done.

THE GREAT ROSA PARKS

October 24, 2005

Civil Rights Pioneer Rosa Parks Dies at 92

By BREE FOWLER

DETROIT - Rosa Parks, whose refusal to give up her bus seat to a white man sparked the modern civil rights movement, died Monday evening. She was 92.

Mrs. Parks was 42 when she committed an act of defiance in 1955 that was to change the course of American history and earn her the title "mother of the civil rights movement.

At that time, Jim Crow laws in place since the post-Civil War Reconstruction required separation of the races in buses, restaurants and public accommodations throughout the South, while legally sanctioned racial discrimination kept blacks out of many jobs and neighborhoods in the North.

The Montgomery, Ala., seamstress, an active member of the local chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, was riding on a city bus Dec. 1, 1955, when a white man demanded her seat.

Mrs. Parks refused, despite rules requiring blacks to yield their seats to whites. Two black Montgomery women had been arrested earlier that year on the same charge, but Mrs. Parks was jailed. She also was fined $14.

Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick said he felt a personal tie to the civil rights icon: "She stood up by sitting down. I'm only standing here because of her."

U.S. Rep. Charles Rangel (news, bio, voting record), D-N.Y., lauded Mrs. Parks' mettle.

"I truly believe that there's a little bit of Rosa Parks in all Americans who have the courage to say enough is enough and stand up for what they believe in," Rangel said. "She did such a small thing, but it was so courageous for her as a humble person to do."

Speaking in 1992, Mrs. Parks said history too often maintains "that my feet were hurting and I didn't know why I refused to stand up when they told me. But the real reason of my not standing up was I felt that I had a right to be treated as any other passenger. We had endured that kind of treatment for too long."

Her arrest triggered a 381-day boycott of the bus system organized by a then little-known Baptist minister, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who later earned the Nobel Peace Prize for his work.

"At the time I was arrested I had no idea it would turn into this," Mrs. Parks said 30 years later. "It was just a day like any other day. The only thing that made it significant was that the masses of the people joined in."

Bill of Rights

Amendment I

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances.

Amendment II

A well regulated militia, being necessary to the security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear arms, shall not be infringed.

Amendment III

No soldier shall, in time of peace be quartered in any house, without the consent of the owner, nor in time of war, but in a manner to be prescribed by law.

Amendment IV

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

Amendment V

No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a grand jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the militia, when in actual service in time of war or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offense to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

Amendment VI

In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury of the state and district wherein the crime shall have been committed, which district shall have been previously ascertained by law, and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the assistance of counsel for his defense.

Amendment VII

In suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury, shall be otherwise reexamined in any court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law.

Amendment VIII

Excessive bail shall not be required, nor excessive fines imposed, nor cruel and unusual punishments inflicted.

Amendment IX

The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people.

Amendment X

The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the states, are reserved to the states respectively, or to the people.

Study: Left-Handed Snails Have Advantage

Left-handed snails are better than righties at defending against predators, according to a new study that suggests lefties have the same competitive advantage in nature that they enjoy on the baseball diamond or in the boxing ring.

Evidence for Universe Expansion Found

Physicists announced Thursday that they now have the smoking gun that shows the universe went through extremely rapid expansion in the moments after the big bang, growing from the size of a marble to a volume larger than all of observable space in less than a trillion-trillionth of a second.

Nizami Ganjavi

Thinker and Poet of Genius (1141-1209)

Among the great Azerbaijan poets, Nizami Gançavi is one of the most powerful personalities. Early in his youth Ilyas Yusif oglu Nizami had mastered literature, philosophy, a number of sciences, as well as several foreign languages.

Plunging into the literary world of Nizami Gançavi, as rich as a treasure-house and as great as world itself, picking the pearls it contains demands from one a highest capacity of scientific penetration o become a most persistent and courageous researcher, and a skilful "pearl-diver."

Nizami has left us an enormous legacy which we can only call a heroic accomplishment. His most famous works, regarded as the worthiest contribution to the world literature, are the five long poems consisting of 30,000 distichs and known as Khamsa (Quintiple).

His didactic poem The Treasure house of Mysteries written in 1173 and containing twenty chapters and "talks," with preachings and parables woven into the fabric of the narrative; his lyric poems that glorify the purifying and ennobling love of Khosrow and Shirin (1181) and Leili and Majnun (1188), Seven Beauties (1197) and his historico-philosophical poem Iskandar-Nama (Alexander the Great) are widely known in the Middle East and far beyond it. It is said that Shakespeare is the Nizami of the West!

The virtue of Nizami's poetry lies in his ability of expressing people's desires and yearnings, in humanism common to all mankind, in highest artistic skill, in delicacy of progressive ideas, in their fluency and simplicity, perceptibility, actuality and profoundness.

He reflected his socio-political and philosophical views in his last poem -- Iskandar-Nama. He created a social Utopia -- an ideal society, many centuries before the Western Utopists Charle Fourier, Robert Owen and Saint-Simon advanced this idea. In the society he depicted, people used to live happily without the state administration and its implements of the compulsion: the army, jails, etc. The people never fought each other, no blood was ever shed, all were willing to observe the rules of collective life.

Nizami noted the possibility of establishing a similar society only through the moral and spiritual perfection of the Man.

Nizami was not a poet of court, but he was obliged to dedicate his poems to rulers and eminent people, driven to it by the need to find protection. Thus, his Treasure-house of Mysteries was dedicated to Shah Bahram who liked it so much that decided to award Nizami a gift in person of a young slave girl, whose name was Appaq (Afaq). She became Nizami's first and only wife, and the mother of his son Muhammad.

A great number of researchers have studied Nizami's legacy, writing scores of monographs, hundreds of articles, defending numerous theses for their degrees. However there is still a lot to be learned and analyzed in Nizami's legacy. Undoubtedly his works and ideas will find way to the hearts of future generations, as they will preserve their topicality, significance and charm for many centuries ahead.

by Adil Baguirov

WOMEN IN IRAN

78 percent of Iranian women literate

Thu, 18 Oct 2007 06:53:21

Women constitute over 30 percent of the workforce in Iran.

Women literacy rate in Iran has improved over the past 3 decades to reach 78 percent in 2007, from 25 percent in '76 and 76 percent in '97.

Monday August 21 (2000?) 10:44 AM ET

Majority of Iranian Girls Wish They Were Boys

TEHRAN (Reuters) - Fifty-three percent of Iranian girls interviewed in a

recent survey said that if they could be born again they would prefer to be

boys, a newspaper reported on Sunday.

An Iranian man who recently had a sex change to become a woman finds life so difficult she has been trying to

reverse the operation.

Sex change operations are legal in Iran but there are no provisions for would-be transsexuals to test out their

new identity first.

Official statistics show suicide rates among women outstrips those of men -- the opposite of Western societies.

She was raised in Switzerland and her parents always told her not to do this and that because persian girls don't! Till she went to Iran for a visit and saw what some girls were doing !!! In a party she opened the wrong door to go to a bathroom and witnessed group action!

Woman warrior found in Iranian tomb

Gender determined by DNA testing, archaeologist says

Updated: 1:56 p.m. ET Dec. 6, 2004

TEHRAN, Iran - These days, Iranian women are not even allowed to watch men compete on the soccer field, but 2,000 years ago they could have been carving the boys to pieces on the battlefield.

DNA tests on the 2,000-year-old bones of a sword-wielding Iranian warrior have revealed the broad-framed skeleton belonged to a woman, an archaeologist working in the northwestern city of Tabriz said Saturday.

“Despite earlier comments that the warrior was a man because of the metal sword, DNA tests showed the skeleton inside the tomb belonged to a female warrior,” Alireza Hojabri-Nobari told the Hambastegi newspaper.

~~~

2006 05

TEHRAN, Iran (AP) -- Like others who come watch Iran's national soccer team prepare for the World Cup in July, they join in the chants and wave their flags. But these fans are cheering from outside the fence surrounding the field, barred by law from entering because they are women.

On Monday, more than 50 female soccer fans -- from girls to mothers with baby strollers -- pressed against the wobbling chain-link fence, screaming, whistling, and trying to make sense of their exile.

THE LOVES OF ALONZO FITZ CLARENCE AND ROSANNAH ETHELTON – by Mark Twain

My Watch – by Mark Twain

[Written about 1870.]

An Instructive Little Tale

My beautiful new watch had run eighteen months without losing or gaining,

and without breaking any part of its machinery or stopping. I had come

to believe it infallible in its judgments about the time of day, and to

consider its constitution and its anatomy imperishable. But at last, one

night, I let it run down. I grieved about it as if it were a recognized

messenger and forerunner of calamity. But by and by I cheered up, set

the watch by guess, and commanded my bodings and superstitions to depart.

Next day I stepped into the chief jeweler's to set it by the exact time,

and the head of the establishment took it out of my hand and proceeded to

set it for me. Then he said, "She is four minutes slow-regulator wants

pushing up." I tried to stop him--tried to make him understand that the

watch kept perfect time. But no; all this human cabbage could see was

that the watch was four minutes slow, and the regulator must be pushed up

a little; and so, while I danced around him in anguish, and implored him

to let the watch alone, he calmly and cruelly did the shameful deed. My

watch began to gain. It gained faster and faster day by day. Within the

week it sickened to a raging fever, and its pulse went up to a hundred

and fifty in the shade. At the end of two months it had left all the

timepieces of the town far in the rear, and was a fraction over thirteen

days ahead of the almanac. It was away into November enjoying the snow,

while the October leaves were still turning. It hurried up house rent,

bills payable, and such things, in such a ruinous way that I could not

abide it. I took it to the watchmaker to be regulated. He asked me if I

had ever had it repaired. I said no, it had never needed any repairing.

He looked a look of vicious happiness and eagerly pried the watch open,

and then put a small dice-box into his eye and peered into its machinery.

He said it wanted cleaning and oiling, besides regulating--come in a

week. After being cleaned and oiled, and regulated, my watch slowed down

to that degree that it ticked like a tolling bell. I began to be left by

trains, I failed all appointments, I got to missing my dinner; my watch

strung out three days' grace to four and let me go to protest;

I gradually drifted back into yesterday, then day before, then into last

week, and by and by the comprehension came upon me that all solitary and

alone I was lingering along in week before last, and the world was out of

sight. I seemed to detect in myself a sort of sneaking fellow-feeling

for the mummy in the museum, and a desire to swap news with him. I went

to a watchmaker again. He took the watch all to pieces while I waited,

and then said the barrel was "swelled." He said he could reduce it in

three days. After this the watch averaged well, but nothing more. For

half a day it would go like the very mischief, and keep up such a barking

and wheezing and whooping and sneezing and snorting, that I could not

hear myself think for the disturbance; and as long as it held out there

was not a watch in the land that stood any chance against it. But the

rest of the day it would keep on slowing down and fooling along until all

the clocks it had left behind caught up again. So at last, at the end of

twenty-four hours, it would trot up to the judges' stand all right and

just in time. It would show a fair and square average, and no man could

say it had done more or less than its duty. But a correct average is

only a mild virtue in a watch, and I took this instrument to another

watchmaker. He said the king-bolt was broken. I said I was glad it was

nothing more serious. To tell the plain truth, I had no idea what the

king-bolt was, but I did not choose to appear ignorant to a stranger.

He repaired the king-bolt, but what the watch gained in one way it lost

in another. It would run awhile and then stop awhile, and then run

awhile again, and so on, using its own discretion about the intervals.

And every time it went off it kicked back like a musket. I padded my

breast for a few days, but finally took the watch to another watchmaker.

He picked it all to pieces, and turned the ruin over and over under his

glass; and then he said there appeared to be something the matter with

the hair-trigger. He fixed it, and gave it a fresh start. It did well

now, except that always at ten minutes to ten the hands would shut

together like a pair of scissors, and from that time forth they would

travel together. The oldest man in the world could not make head or tail

of the time of day by such a watch, and so I went again to have the thing

repaired. This person said that the crystal had got bent, and that the

mainspring was not straight. He also remarked that part of the works

needed half-soling. He made these things all right, and then my

timepiece performed unexceptionably, save that now and then, after

working along quietly for nearly eight hours, everything inside would let

go all of a sudden and begin to buzz like a bee, and the hands would

straightway begin to spin round and round so fast that their

individuality was lost completely, and they simply seemed a delicate

spider's web over the face of the watch. She would reel off the next

twenty-four hours in six or seven minutes, and then stop with a bang.

I went with a heavy heart to one more watchmaker, and looked on while he

took her to pieces. Then I prepared to cross-question him rigidly, for

this thing was getting serious. The watch had cost two hundred dollars

originally, and I seemed to have paid out two or three thousand for

repairs. While I waited and looked on I presently recognized in this

watchmaker an old acquaintance--a steamboat engineer of other days, and

not a good engineer, either. He examined all the parts carefully, just

as the other watchmakers had done, and then delivered his verdict with

the same confidence of manner.

He said:

"She makes too much steam-you want to hang the monkey-wrench on the

safety-valve!"

I brained him on the spot, and had him buried at my own expense.

My uncle William (now deceased, alas!) used to say that a good horse was,

a good horse until it had run away once, and that a good watch was a good

watch until the repairers got a chance at it. And he used to wonder what

became of all the unsuccessful tinkers, and gunsmiths, and shoemakers,

and engineers, and blacksmiths; but nobody could ever tell him.

~~~

What Stumped the Bluejays - by Mark Twain

Animals talk to each other, of course. There can be no question about that; but I suppose there are very few people who can understand them. I never knew but one man who could. I knew he could, however, because he told me so himself. He was a middle-aged, simple-hearted miner who had lived in a lonely corner of California, among the woods and mountains, a good many years, and had studied the ways of his only neighbors, the beasts and the birds, until he believed he could accurately translate any remark which they made. This was Jim Baker. According to Jim Baker, some animals have only a limited education, and use only very simple words, and scarcely ever a comparison or a flowery figure; whereas, certain other animals have a large vocabulary, a fine command of language and a ready and fluent delivery; consequently these latter talk a great deal; they like it; they are conscious of their talent, and they enjoy "showing off." Baker said, that after long and careful observation, he had come to the conclusion that the bluejays were the best talkers he had found among birds and beasts. Said he:

There's more to a bluejay than any other creature. He has got more moods, and more different kinds of feelings than other creatures; and mind you, whatever a bluejay feels, he can put into language. And no rnere commonplace language, either, but rattling, out-and-out book talk - and bristling with metaphor, too - just bristling! And as for command of language - why you never see a bluejay get stuck for a word. No man ever did. They just boil out of him! And another thing: I've noticed a good deal, and there's no bird, or cow, or anything that uses as good grammar as a bluejay. You may say a cat uses good grammar. Well, a cat does - but you let a cat get excited once; you let a cat get to pulling fur with another cat on a shed, nights, and you'll hear grammar that will give you the lockjaw. Ignorant people think it's the noise which fighting cats make that is so aggravating, but it ain't so; it's the sickening grammar they use. Now I've never heard a jay use bad grammar but very seldom; and when they do, they are as ashamed as a human; they shut right down and leave.

You may call a jay a bird. Well, so he is, in a measure - because he's got feathers on him, and don't belong to no church, perhaps; but otherwise he is just as much a human as you be. And I'll tell you for why. A jay's gifts, and instincts, and feelings, and interests, cover the whole ground. A jay hasn't got any more principle than a congressman. A jay will lie, a jay will steal, a jay will deceive, a jay will betray; and four times out of five, a jay will go back on his solemnest promise. The sacredness of an obligation is a thing which you can't cram into no bluejay's head. Now, on top of all this, there's another thing; a jay can outswear any gentleman in the mines. You think a cat can swear. Well, a cat can; but you give a bluejay a subject that calls for his reserve powers, and where is your cat! Don't talk to me - I know too much about this thing. And there's yet another thing; in the one little particular of scolding - just good, clean, out-and-out scolding - a bluejay can lay over anything, human or divine. Yes, sir, a jay is everything that a man is. A jay can cry, a jay can laugh, a jay can feel shame, a jay can reason and plan and discuss, a jay likes gossip and scandal, a jay has got a sense of humor, a jay knows when he is an ass just as well as you do - maybe better. If a jay ain't human, he better take in his sign, that's all. Now I'm going to tell you a perfectly true fact about some bluejays. When I first begun to understand jay language correctly, there was a little incident happened here. Seven years ago, the last man in this region but me moved away. There stands his house - been empty ever since; a log house, with a plank roof - just one big room, and no more; no ceiling - nothing between the rafters and the floor. Well, one Sunday morning I was sitting out here in front of my cabin, with my cat, taking the sun, and looking at the blue hills, and listening to the leaves rustling so lonely in the trees, and thinking of the home away yonder in the states, that I hadn't heard from in thirteen years, when a bluejay lit on that house, with an acorn in his mouth, and says, "Hello, I reckon I've struck something." When he spoke, the acorn dropped out of his mouth and rolled down the roof, of course, but he didn't care; his mind was all on the thing he had struck. It was a knothole in the roof. He cocked his head to one side, shut one eye and put the other one to the hole, like a possum looking down a jug; then he glanced up with his bright eyes, gave a wink or two with his wings - which signifies gratification, you understand - and says, "It looks like a hole, it's located like a hole - blamed if I don't believe it is a hole!"

< 2 >

Then he cocked his head down and took another look; he glances up perfectly joyful, this time; winks his wings and his tail both, and says, "Oh, no, this ain't no fat thing, I reckon! If I ain't in luck!--why it's a perfectly elegant hole!" So he flew down and got that acorn, and fetched it up and dropped it in, and was just tilting his head back, with the heavenliest smile on his face, when all of a sudden he was paralyzed into a listening attitude and that smile faded gradually out of his countenance like breath off'n a razor, and the queerest look of surprise took its place. Then he says, "Why, I didn't hear it fall!" He cocked his eye at the hole again, and took a long look; raised up and shook his head; stepped around to the other side of the hole and took another look from that side; shook his head again. He studied awhile, then he just went into the details - walked round and round the hole and spied into it from every point of the compass. No use. Now he took a thinking attitude on the comb of the roof and scratched the back of his head with his right foot a minute, and finally says, "Well, it's too many for me, that's certain; must be a mighty long hole; however, I ain't got no time to fool around here, I got to tend to business; I reckon it's all right - chance it, anyway."

So he flew off and fetched another acorn and dropped it in, and tried to flirt his eye to the hole quick enough to see what become of it, but he was too late. He held his eye there as much as a minute; then he raised up and sighed, and says, "Confound it, I don't seem to understand this thing, no way; however, I'll tackle her again." He fetched another acorn, and done his level best to see what become of it, but he couldn't. He says, "Well, I never struck no such a hole as this before; I'm of the opinion it's a totally new kind of a hole." Then he begun to get mad. He held in for a spell, walking up and down the comb of the roof and shaking his head and muttering to himself; but his feelings got the upper hand of him, presently, and he broke loose and cussed himself black in the face. I never see a bird take on so about a little thing. When he got through he walks to the hole and looks in again for half a minute; then he says, "Well, you're a long hole, and a deep hole, and a mighty singular hole altogether - but I've started in to fill you, and I'm d****d if I don't fill you, if it takes a hundred years!"

< 3 >

And with that, away he went. You never see a bird work so since you was born. The way he hove acorns into that hole for about two hours and a half was one of the most exciting and astonishing spectacles I ever struck. He never stopped to take a look anymore - he just hove'em in and went for more. Well, at last he could hardly flop his wings, he was so tuckered out. He comes a-drooping down, once more, sweating like an ice pitcher, drops his acorn in and says, "Now I guess I've got the bulge on you by this time!" So he bent down for a look. Ifyou'll believe me, when his head come up again he was just pale with rage. He says, "I've shoveled acorns enough in there to keep the family thirty years, and if I can see a sign of one of'em I wish I may land in a museum with a belly full of sawdust in two minutes!"

He just had strength enough to crawl up onto the comb and lean his back agin the chimbly, and then he collected his impressions and begun to free his mind. I see in a second that what I had mistook for profanity in the mines was only just the rudiments, as you may say.

Another jay was going by, and heard him doing his devotions, and stops to inquire what was up. The sufferer told him the whole circumstance, and says, "Now yonder's the hole, and if you don't believe me, go and look for yourself." So this fellow went and looked, and comes back and says, "How many did you say you put in there?" "Not any less than two tons," says the sufferer. The other jay went and looked again. He couldn't seem to make it out, so he raised a yell, and three more jays come. They all examined the hole, they all made the sufferer tell it over again, then they all discussed it, and got off as many leather-headed opinions about it as an average crowd of humans could have done.

They called in more jays; then more and more, till pretty soon this whole region beared to have a blue flush about it. There must have been five thousand of them; and such another jawing and disputing and ripping and cussing, you never heard. Every jay in the whole lot put his eye to the hole and delivered a more chuckle-headed opinion about the mystery than the jay that went there before him. They examined the house all over, too. The door was standing half open, and at last one old jay happened to go and light on it and look in. Of course, that knocked the mystery galley-west in a second. There lay the acorns, scattered all over the floor. He flopped his wings and raised a whoop. "Come here ! " he says. "Come here, everybody; hang'd if this fool hasn't been trying to fill up a house with acorns!" They all came a-swooping down like a blue cloud, and as each fellow lit on the door and took a glance, the whole absurdity of the contract that that first jay had tackled hit him home and he fell over backward suffocating with laughter, and the next jay took his place and done the same.

< 4 >

Well, sir, they roosted around here on the housetop and the trees for an hour, and guffawed over that thing like human beings. It ain't any use to tell me a bluejay hasn't got a sense of humor, because I know better. And memory, too. They brought jays here from all over the United States to look down that hole, every summer for three years. Other birds, too. And they could all see the point, except an owl that come from Nova Scotia to visit the Yosemite, and he took this thing in on his way back. He said he couldn't see anything funny in it. But then he was a good deal disappointed about Yosemite, too.

====================================

Cannibalism In The Cars – By Mark Twain

I visited St. Louis lately, and on my way West, after changing cars at

Terre Haute, Indiana, a mild, benevolent-looking gentleman of about

forty-five, or maybe fifty, came in at one of the way-stations and sat

down beside me. We talked together pleasantly on various subjects for an

hour, perhaps, and I found him exceedingly intelligent and entertaining.

When he learned that I was from Washington, he immediately began to ask

questions about various public men, and about Congressional affairs; and

I saw very shortly that I was conversing with a man who was perfectly

familiar with the ins and outs of political life at the Capital, even to

the ways and manners, and customs of procedure of Senators and

Representatives in the Chambers of the national Legislature. Presently

two men halted near us for a single moment, and one said to the other:

"Harris, if you'll do that for me, I'll never forget you, my boy."

My new comrade's eye lighted pleasantly. The words had touched upon a

happy memory, I thought. Then his face settled into thoughtfulness--

almost into gloom. He turned to me and said,

"Let me tell you a story; let me give you a secret chapter of my life--

a chapter that has never been referred to by me since its events

transpired. Listen patiently, and promise that you will not interrupt

me."

I said I would not, and he related the following strange adventure,

speaking sometimes with animation, sometimes with melancholy, but always

with feeling and earnestness.

THE STRANGER'S NARRATIVE

"On the 19th of December, 1853, I started from St. Louis on the evening

train bound for Chicago. There were only twenty-four passengers, all

told. There were no ladies and no children. We were in excellent

spirits, and pleasant acquaintanceships were soon formed. The journey

bade fair to be a happy one; and no individual in the party, I think, had

even the vaguest presentiment of the horrors we were soon to undergo.

"At 11 P.m. it began to snow hard. Shortly after leaving the small

village of Welden, we entered upon that tremendous prairie solitude that

stretches its leagues on leagues of houseless dreariness far away toward

the jubilee Settlements. The winds, unobstructed by trees or hills, or

even vagrant rocks, whistled fiercely across the level desert, driving

the falling snow before it like spray from the crested waves of a stormy

sea. The snow was deepening fast; and we knew, by the diminished speed

of the train, that the engine was plowing through it with steadily

increasing difficulty. Indeed, it almost came to a dead halt sometimes,

in the midst of great drifts that piled themselves like colossal graves

across the track. Conversation began to flag. Cheerfulness gave place

to grave concern. The possibility of being imprisoned in the snow, on

the bleak prairie, fifty miles from any house, presented itself to every

mind, and extended its depressing influence over every spirit.

"At two o'clock in the morning I was aroused out of an uneasy slumber by

the ceasing of all motion about me. The appalling truth flashed upon me

instantly--we were captives in a snow-drift! 'All hands to the rescue!'

Every man sprang to obey. Out into the wild night, the pitchy darkness,

the billowy snow, the driving storm, every soul leaped, with the

consciousness that a moment lost now might bring destruction to us all.

Shovels, hands, boards--anything, everything that could displace snow,

was brought into instant requisition. It was a weird picture, that small

company of frantic men fighting the banking snows, half in the blackest

shadow and half in the angry light of the locomotive's reflector.

"One short hour sufficed to prove the utter uselessness of our efforts.

The storm barricaded the track with a dozen drifts while we dug one away.

And worse than this, it was discovered that the last grand charge the

engine had made upon the enemy had broken the fore-and-aft shaft of the

driving-wheel! With a free track before us we should still have been

helpless. We entered the car wearied with labor, and very sorrowful.

We gathered about the stoves, and gravely canvassed our situation. We

had no provisions whatever--in this lay our chief distress. We could not

freeze, for there was a good supply of wood in the tender. This was our

only comfort. The discussion ended at last in accepting the

disheartening decision of the conductor, viz., that it would be death for

any man to attempt to travel fifty miles on foot through snow like that.

We could not send for help, and even if we could it would not come. We

must submit, and await, as patiently as we might, succor or starvation!

I think the stoutest heart there felt a momentary chill when those words

were uttered.

"Within the hour conversation subsided to a low murmur here and there

about the car, caught fitfully between the rising and falling of the

blast; the lamps grew dim; and the majority of the castaways settled

themselves among the flickering shadows to think--to forget the present,

if they could--to sleep, if they might.

"The eternal night-it surely seemed eternal to us-wore its lagging hours

away at last, and the cold gray dawn broke in the east. As the light

grew stronger the passengers began to stir and give signs of life, one

after another, and each in turn pushed his slouched hat up from his

forehead, stretched his stiffened limbs, and glanced out of the windows

upon the cheerless prospect. It was cheer less, indeed!-not a living

thing visible anywhere, not a human habitation; nothing but a vast white

desert; uplifted sheets of snow drifting hither and thither before the

wind--a world of eddying flakes shutting out the firmament above.

"All day we moped about the cars, saying little, thinking much. Another

lingering dreary night--and hunger.

"Another dawning--another day of silence, sadness, wasting hunger,

hopeless watching for succor that could not come. A night of restless

slumber, filled with dreams of feasting--wakings distressed with the

gnawings of hunger.

"The fourth day came and went--and the fifth! Five days of dreadful

imprisonment! A savage hunger looked out at every eye. There was in it

a sign of awful import--the foreshadowing of a something that was vaguely

shaping itself in every heart--a something which no tongue dared yet to

frame into words.

"The sixth day passed--the seventh dawned upon as gaunt and haggard and

hopeless a company of men as ever stood in the shadow of death. It must

out now! That thing which had been growing up in every heart was ready

to leap from every lip at last! Nature had been taxed to the utmost--she

must yield. RICHARD H. GASTON of Minnesota, tall, cadaverous, and pale,

rose up. All knew what was coming. All prepared--every emotion, every

semblance of excitement--was smothered--only a calm, thoughtful

seriousness appeared in the eyes that were lately so wild.

"'Gentlemen: It cannot be delayed longer! The time is at hand! We must

determine which of us shall die to furnish food for the rest!'

"MR. JOHN J. WILLIAMS of Illinois rose and said: 'Gentlemen--I nominate

the Rev. James Sawyer of Tennessee.'

"MR. Wm. R. ADAMS of Indiana said: 'I nominate Mr. Daniel Slote of New

York.'

"MR. CHARLES J. LANGDON: 'I nominate Mr. Samuel A. Bowen of St. Louis.'

"MR. SLOTE: 'Gentlemen--I desire to decline in favor of Mr. John A. Van

Nostrand, Jun., of New Jersey.'

"MR. GASTON: 'If there be no objection, the gentleman's desire will be

acceded to.'

"MR. VAN NOSTRAND objecting, the resignation of Mr. Slote was rejected.

The resignations of Messrs. Sawyer and Bowen were also offered, and

refused upon the same grounds.

"MR. A. L. BASCOM of Ohio: 'I move that the nominations now close, and

that the House proceed to an election by ballot.'

"MR. SAWYER: 'Gentlemen--I protest earnestly against these proceedings.

They are, in every way, irregular and unbecoming. I must beg to move

that they be dropped at once, and that we elect a chairman of the meeting

and proper officers to assist him, and then we can go on with the

business before us understandingly.'

"MR. BELL of Iowa: 'Gentlemen--I object. This is no time to stand upon

forms and ceremonious observances. For more than seven days we have been

without food. Every moment we lose in idle discussion increases our

distress. I am satisfied with the nominations that have been made--every

gentleman present is, I believe--and I, for one, do not see why we should

not proceed at once to elect one or more of them. I wish to offer a

resolution--'

"MR. GASTON: 'It would be objected to, and have to lie over one day under

the rules, thus bringing about the very delay you wish to avoid. The

gentleman from New Jersey--'

"MR. VAN NOSTRAND: 'Gentlemen--I am a stranger among you; I have not

sought the distinction that has been conferred upon me, and I feel a

delicacy--'

"MR. MORGAN Of Alabama (interrupting): 'I move the previous question.'

"The motion was carried, and further debate shut off, of course. The

motion to elect officers was passed, and under it Mr. Gaston was chosen

chairman, Mr. Blake, secretary, Messrs. Holcomb, Dyer, and Baldwin a

committee on nominations, and Mr. R. M. Howland, purveyor, to assist the

committee in making selections.

"A recess of half an hour was then taken, and some little caucusing

followed. At the sound of the gavel the meeting reassembled, and the

committee reported in favor of Messrs. George Ferguson of Kentucky,

Lucien Herrman of Louisiana, and W. Messick of Colorado as candidates.

The report was accepted.

"MR. ROGERS of Missouri: 'Mr. President The report being properly before

the House now, I move to amend it by substituting for the name of Mr.

Herrman that of Mr. Lucius Harris of St. Louis, who is well and

honorably known to us all. I do not wish to be understood as casting the

least reflection upon the high character and standing of the gentleman

from Louisiana far from it. I respect and esteem him as much as any

gentleman here present possibly can; but none of us can be blind to the

fact that he has lost more flesh during the week that we have lain here

than any among us--none of us can be blind to the fact that the committee

has been derelict in its duty, either through negligence or a graver

fault, in thus offering for our suffrages a gentleman who, however pure

his own motives may be, has really less nutriment in him--'

"THE CHAIR: 'The gentleman from Missouri will take his seat. The Chair

cannot allow the integrity of the committee to be questioned save by the

regular course, under the rules. What action will the House take upon

the gentleman's motion?'

"MR. HALLIDAY of Virginia: 'I move to further amend the report by

substituting Mr. Harvey Davis of Oregon for Mr. Messick. It may be urged

by gentlemen that the hardships and privations of a frontier life have

rendered Mr. Davis tough; but, gentlemen, is this a time to cavil at

toughness? Is this a time to be fastidious concerning trifles? Is this

a time to dispute about matters of paltry significance? No, gentlemen,

bulk is what we desire--substance, weight, bulk--these are the supreme

requisites now--not talent, not genius, not education. I insist upon my

motion.'

"MR. MORGAN (excitedly): 'Mr. Chairman--I do most strenuously object to

this amendment. The gentleman from Oregon is old, and furthermore is

bulky only in bone--not in flesh. I ask the gentleman from Virginia if

it is soup we want instead of solid sustenance? if he would delude us

with shadows? if he would mock our suffering with an Oregonian specter?

I ask him if he can look upon the anxious faces around him, if he can

gaze into our sad eyes, if he can listen to the beating of our expectant

hearts, and still thrust this famine-stricken fraud upon us? I ask him

if he can think of our desolate state, of our past sorrows, of our dark

future, and still unpityingly foist upon us this wreck, this ruin, this

tottering swindle, this gnarled and blighted and sapless vagabond from

Oregon's hospitable shores? Never!' [Applause.]

"The amendment was put to vote, after a fiery debate, and lost. Mr.

Harris was substituted on the first amendment. The balloting then began.

Five ballots were held without a choice. On the sixth, Mr. Harris was

elected, all voting for him but himself. It was then moved that his

election should be ratified by acclamation, which was lost, in

consequence of his again voting against himself.

"MR. RADWAY moved that the House now take up the remaining candidates,

and go into an election for breakfast. This was carried.

"On the first ballot--there was a tie, half the members favoring one

candidate on account of his youth, and half favoring the other on account

of his superior size. The President gave the casting vote for the

latter, Mr. Messick. This decision created considerable dissatisfaction

among the friends of Mr. Ferguson, the defeated candidate, and there was

some talk of demanding a new ballot; but in the midst of it a motion to

adjourn was carried, and the meeting broke up at once.

"The preparations for supper diverted the attention of the Ferguson

faction from the discussion of their grievance for a long time, and then,

when they would have taken it up again, the happy announcement that Mr.

Harris was ready drove all thought of it to the winds.

"We improvised tables by propping up the backs of car-seats, and sat down

with hearts full of gratitude to the finest supper that had blessed our

vision for seven torturing days. How changed we were from what we had

been a few short hours before! Hopeless, sad-eyed misery, hunger,

feverish anxiety, desperation, then; thankfulness, serenity, joy too deep

for utterance now. That I know was the cheeriest hour of my eventful

life. The winds howled, and blew the snow wildly about our prison house,

but they were powerless to distress us any more. I liked Harris. He

might have been better done, perhaps, but I am free to say that no man

ever agreed with me better than Harris, or afforded me so large a degree

of satisfaction. Messick was very well, though rather high-flavored,

but for genuine nutritiousness and delicacy of fiber, give me Harris.

Messick had his good points--I will not attempt to deny it, nor do I wish

to do it but he was no more fitted for breakfast than a mummy would be,

sir--not a bit. Lean?--why, bless me!--and tough? Ah, he was very

tough! You could not imagine it--you could never imagine anything like

it."

"Do you mean to tell me that--"

"Do not interrupt me, please. After breakfast we elected a man by the

name of Walker, from Detroit, for supper. He was very good. I wrote his

wife so afterward. He was worthy of all praise. I shall always remember

Walker. He was a little rare, but very good. And then the next morning

we had Morgan of Alabama for breakfast. He was one of the finest men I

ever sat down to handsome, educated, refined, spoke several languages

fluently a perfect gentleman he was a perfect gentleman, and singularly

juicy. For supper we had that Oregon patriarch, and he was a fraud,

there is no question about it--old, scraggy, tough, nobody can picture

the reality. I finally said, gentlemen, you can do as you like, but I

will wait for another election. And Grimes of Illinois said, 'Gentlemen,

I will wait also. When you elect a man that has something to recommend

him, I shall be glad to join you again.' It soon became evident that

there was general dissatisfaction with Davis of Oregon, and so, to

preserve the good will that had prevailed so pleasantly since we had had

Harris, an election was called, and the result of it was that Baker of

Georgia was chosen. He was splendid! Well, well--after that we had

Doolittle, and Hawkins, and McElroy (there was some complaint about

McElroy, because he was uncommonly short and thin), and Penrod, and two

Smiths, and Bailey (Bailey had a wooden leg, which was clear loss, but he

was otherwise good), and an Indian boy, and an organ-grinder, and a

gentleman by the name of Buckminster--a poor stick of a vagabond that

wasn't any good for company and no account for breakfast. We were glad

we got him elected before relief came."

"And so the blessed relief did come at last?"

"Yes, it came one bright, sunny morning, just after election. John

Murphy was the choice, and there never was a better, I am willing to

testify; but John Murphy came home with us, in the train that came to

succor us, and lived to marry the widow Harris--"

"Relict of--"

"Relict of our first choice. He married her, and is happy and respected

and prosperous yet. Ah, it was like a novel, sir--it was like a romance.

This is my stopping-place, sir; I must bid you goodby. Any time that you

can make it convenient to tarry a day or two with me, I shall be glad to

have you. I like you, sir; I have conceived an affection for you.

I could like you as well as I liked Harris himself, sir. Good day, sir,

and a pleasant journey."

He was gone. I never felt so stunned, so distressed, so bewildered in my

life. But in my soul I was glad he was gone. With all his gentleness of

manner and his soft voice, I shuddered whenever he turned his hungry eye

upon me; and when I heard that I had achieved his perilous affection, and

that I stood almost with the late Harris in his esteem, my heart fairly

stood still!

I was bewildered beyond description. I did not doubt his word; I could

not question a single item in a statement so stamped with the earnestness

of truth as his; but its dreadful details overpowered me, and threw my

thoughts into hopeless confusion. I saw the conductor looking at me.

I said, "Who is that man?"

"He was a member of Congress once, and a good one. But he got caught in

a snow-drift in the cars, and like to have been starved to death. He got

so frost-bitten and frozen up generally, and used up for want of

something to eat, that he was sick and out of his head two or three

months afterward. He is all right now, only he is a monomaniac, and when

he gets on that old subject he never stops till he has eat up that whole

car-load of people he talks about. He would have finished the crowd by

this time, only he had to get out here. He has got their names as pat as

A B C. When he gets them all eat up but himself, he always says: 'Then

the hour for the usual election for breakfast having arrived; and there

being no opposition, I was duly elected, after which, there being no

objections offered, I resigned. Thus I am here.'"

I felt inexpressibly relieved to know that I had only been listening to

the harmless vagaries of a madman instead of the genuine experiences of a

bloodthirsty cannibal.

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THE LOVES OF ALONZO FITZ CLARENCE AND ROSANNAH ETHELTON – by Mark Twain

It was well along in the forenoon of a bitter winter's day. The town of

Eastport, in the state of Maine, lay buried under a deep snow that was

newly fallen. The customary bustle in the streets was wanting. One

could look long distances down them and see nothing but a dead-white

emptiness, with silence to match. Of course I do not mean that you could

see the silence--no, you could only hear it. The sidewalks were merely

long, deep ditches, with steep snow walls on either side. Here and there

you might hear the faint, far scrape of a wooden shovel, and if you were

quick enough you might catch a glimpse of a distant black figure stooping

and disappearing in one of those ditches, and reappearing the next moment

with a motion which you would know meant the heaving out of a shovelful

of snow. But you needed to be quick, for that black figure would not

linger, but would soon drop that shovel and scud for the house, thrashing

itself with its arms to warm them. Yes, it was too venomously cold for

snow-shovelers or anybody else to stay out long.

Presently the sky darkened; then the wind rose and began to blow in

fitful, vigorous gusts, which sent clouds of powdery snow aloft, and

straight ahead, and everywhere. Under the impulse of one of these gusts,

great white drifts banked themselves like graves across the streets; a

moment later another gust shifted them around the other way, driving a

fine spray of snow from their sharp crests, as the gale drives the spume

flakes from wave-crests at sea; a third gust swept that place as clean as

your hand, if it saw fit. This was fooling, this was play; but each and

all of the gusts dumped some snow into the sidewalk ditches, for that was

business.

Alonzo Fitz Clarence was sitting in his snug and elegant little parlor,

in a lovely blue silk dressing-gown, with cuffs and facings of crimson

satin, elaborately quilted. The remains of his breakfast were before

him, and the dainty and costly little table service added a harmonious

charm to the grace, beauty, and richness of the fixed appointments of the

room. A cheery fire was blazing on the hearth.

A furious gust of wind shook the windows, and a great wave of snow washed

against them with a drenching sound, so to speak. The handsome young

bachelor murmured:

"That means, no going out to-day. Well, I am content. But what to do

for company? Mother is well enough, Aunt Susan is well enough; but

these, like the poor, I have with me always. On so grim a day as this,

one needs a new interest, a fresh element, to whet the dull edge of

captivity. That was very neatly said, but it doesn't mean anything.

One doesn't want the edge of captivity sharpened up, you know, but just

the reverse."

He glanced at his pretty French mantel-clock.

"That clock's wrong again. That clock hardly ever knows what time it is;

and when it does know, it lies about it--which amounts to the same thing.

Alfred!"

There was no answer.

"Alfred! . . . Good servant, but as uncertain as the clock."

Alonzo touched an electric bell button in the wall. He waited a moment,

then touched it again; waited a few moments more, and said:

"Battery out of order, no doubt. But now that I have started, I will

find out what time it is." He stepped to a speaking-tube in the wall,

blew its whistle, and called, "Mother!" and repeated it twice.

"Well, that's no use. Mother's battery is out of order, too. Can't

raise anybody down-stairs--that is plain."

He sat down at a rosewood desk, leaned his chin on the left-hand edge of

it and spoke, as if to the floor: "Aunt Susan!"

A low, pleasant voice answered, "Is that you, Alonzo?'

"Yes. I'm too lazy and comfortable to go downstairs; I am in extremity,

and I can't seem to scare up any help."

"Dear me, what is the matter?"

"Matter enough, I can tell you!"

"Oh, don't keep me in suspense, dear! What is it?"

"I want to know what time it is."

"You abominable boy, what a turn you did give me! Is that all?"

"All--on my honor. Calm yourself. Tell me the time, and receive my

blessing."

"Just five minutes after nine. No charge--keep your blessing."

"Thanks. It wouldn't have impoverished me, aunty, nor so enriched you

that you could live without other means."

He got up, murmuring, "Just five minutes after nine," and faced his

clock. "Ah," said he, "you are doing better than usual. You are only

thirty-four minutes wrong. Let me see . . . let me see. . . .

Thirty-three and twenty-one are fifty-four; four times fifty-four are two

hundred and thirty-six. One off, leaves two hundred and thirty-five.

That's right."

He turned the hands of his clock forward till they marked twenty-five

minutes to one, and said, "Now see if you can't keep right for a while

--else I'll raffle you!"

He sat down at the desk again, and said, "Aunt Susan!"

"Yes, dear."

"Had breakfast?"

"Yes, indeed, an hour ago."

"Busy?"

"No--except sewing. Why?"

"Got any company?"

"No, but I expect some at half past nine."

"I wish I did. I'm lonesome. I want to talk to somebody."

"Very well, talk to me."

"But this is very private."

"Don't be afraid--talk right along, there's nobody here but me."

"I hardly know whether to venture or not, but--"

"But what? Oh, don't stop there! You know you can trust me, Alonzo--you

know, you can."

"I feel it, aunt, but this is very serious. It affects me deeply--me,

and all the family---even the whole community."

"Oh, Alonzo, tell me! I will never breathe a word of it. What is it?"

"Aunt, if I might dare--"

"Oh, please go on! I love you, and feel for you. Tell me all.

Confide in me. What is it?"

"The weather!"

"Plague take the weather! I don't see how you can have the heart to

serve me so, Lon."

"There, there, aunty dear, I'm sorry; I am, on my honor. I won't do it

again. Do you forgive me?"

"Yes, since you seem so sincere about it, though I know I oughtn't to.

You will fool me again as soon as I have forgotten this time."

"No, I won't, honor bright. But such weather, oh, such weather! You've

got to keep your spirits up artificially. It is snowy, and blowy, and

gusty, and bitter cold! How is the weather with you?"

"Warm and rainy and melancholy. The mourners go about the streets with

their umbrellas running streams from the end of every whalebone. There's

an elevated double pavement of umbrellas, stretching down the sides of

the streets as far as I can see. I've got a fire for cheerfulness, and

the windows open to keep cool. But it is vain, it is useless: nothing

comes in but the balmy breath of December, with its burden of mocking

odors from the flowers that possess the realm outside, and rejoice in

their lawless profusion whilst the spirit of man is low, and flaunt their

gaudy splendors in his face while his soul is clothed in sackcloth and

ashes and his heart breaketh."

Alonzo opened his lips to say, "You ought to print that, and get it

framed," but checked himself, for he heard his aunt speaking to some one

else. He went and stood at the window and looked out upon the wintry

prospect. The storm was driving the snow before it more furiously than

ever; window-shutters were slamming and banging; a forlorn dog, with

bowed head and tail withdrawn from service, was pressing his quaking body

against a windward wall for shelter and protection; a young girl was

plowing knee-deep through the drifts, with her face turned from the

blast, and the cape of her waterproof blowing straight rearward over her

head. Alonzo shuddered, and said with a sigh, "Better the slop, and the

sultry rain, and even the insolent flowers, than this!"

He turned from the window, moved a step, and stopped in a listening

attitude. The faint, sweet notes of a familiar song caught his ear. He

remained there, with his head unconsciously bent forward, drinking in the

melody, stirring neither hand nor foot, hardly breathing. There was a

blemish in the execution of the song, but to Alonzo it seemed an added

charm instead of a defect. This blemish consisted of a marked flatting

of the third, fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh notes of the refrain or

chorus of the piece. When the music ended, Alonzo drew a deep breath,

and said, "Ah, I never have heard 'In the Sweet By-and-by' sung like that

before!"

He stepped quickly to the desk, listened a moment, and said in a guarded,

confidential voice, "Aunty, who is this divine singer?"

"She is the company I was expecting. Stays with me a month or two.

I will introduce you. Miss--"

"For goodness' sake, wait a moment, Aunt Susan! You never stop to think

what you are about!"

He flew to his bedchamber, and returned in a moment perceptibly changed

in his outward appearance, and remarking, snappishly:

"Hang it, she would have introduced me to this angel in that sky-blue

dressing-gown with red-hot lapels! Women never think, when they get

a-going."

He hastened and stood by the desk, and said eagerly, "Now, Aunty, I am

ready," and fell to smiling and bowing with all the persuasiveness and

elegance that were in him.

"Very well. Miss Rosannah Ethelton, let me introduce to you my favorite

nephew, Mr. Alonzo Fitz Clarence. There! You are both good people, and

I like you; so I am going to trust you together while I attend to a few

household affairs. Sit down, Rosannah; sit down, Alonzo. Good-by; I

sha'n't be gone long."

Alonzo had been bowing and smiling all the while, and motioning imaginary

young ladies to sit down in imaginary chairs, but now he took a seat

himself, mentally saying, "Oh, this is luck! Let the winds blow now, and

the snow drive, and the heavens frown! Little I care!"

While these young people chat themselves into an acquaintanceship, let us

take the liberty of inspecting the sweeter and fairer of the two. She

sat alone, at her graceful ease, in a richly furnished apartment which

was manifestly the private parlor of a refined and sensible lady,

if signs and symbols may go for anything. For instance, by a low,

comfortable chair stood a dainty, top-heavy workstand, whose summit was a

fancifully embroidered shallow basket, with varicolored crewels, and

other strings and odds and ends protruding from under the gaping lid and

hanging down in negligent profusion. On the floor lay bright shreds of

Turkey red, Prussian blue, and kindred fabrics, bits of ribbon, a spool

or two, a pair of scissors, and a roll or so of tinted silken stuffs.

On a luxurious sofa, upholstered with some sort of soft Indian goods

wrought in black and gold threads interwebbed with other threads not so

pronounced in color, lay a great square of coarse white stuff, upon whose

surface a rich bouquet of flowers was growing, under the deft cultivation

of the crochet-needle. The household cat was asleep on this work of art.

In a bay-window stood an easel with an unfinished picture on it, and a

palette and brushes on a chair beside it. There were books everywhere:

Robertson's Sermons, Tennyson, Moody and Sankey, Hawthorne, Rab and His

Friends, cook-books, prayer-books, pattern-books--and books about all

kinds of odious and exasperating pottery, of course. There was a piano,

with a deck-load of music, and more in a tender. There was a great

plenty of pictures on the walls, on the shelves of the mantelpiece, and

around generally; where coigns of vantage offered were statuettes, and

quaint and pretty gimcracks, and rare and costly specimens of peculiarly

devilish china. The bay-window gave upon a garden that was ablaze with

foreign and domestic flowers and flowering shrubs.

But the sweet young girl was the daintiest thing these premises, within

or without, could offer for contemplation: delicately chiseled features,

of Grecian cast; her complexion the pure snow of a japonica that is

receiving a faint reflected enrichment from some scarlet neighbor of the

garden; great, soft blue eyes fringed with long, curving lashes; an

expression made up of the trustfulness of a child and the gentleness of

a fawn; a beautiful head crowned with its own prodigal gold; a lithe and

rounded figure, whose every attitude and movement was instinct with

native grace.

Her dress and adornment were marked by that exquisite harmony that can

come only of a fine natural taste perfected by culture. Her gown was of

a simple magenta tulle, cut bias, traversed by three rows of light-blue

flounces, with the selvage edges turned up with ashes-of-roses chenille;

overdress of dark bay tarlatan with scarlet satin lambrequins; corn-

colored polonaise, en zanier, looped with mother-of-pearl buttons and

silver cord, and hauled aft and made fast by buff velvet lashings; basque

of lavender reps, picked out with valenciennes; low neck, short sleeves;

maroon velvet necktie edged with delicate pink silk; inside handkerchief

of some simple three-ply ingrain fabric of a soft saffron tint; coral

bracelets and locket-chain; coiffure of forget-me-nots and lilies-of-the

-valley massed around a noble calla.

This was all; yet even in this subdued attire she was divinely beautiful.

Then what must she have been when adorned for the festival or the ball?

All this time she had been busily chatting with Alonzo, unconscious of

our inspection. The minutes still sped, and still she talked. But by

and by she happened to look up, and saw the clock. A crimson blush sent

its rich flood through her cheeks, and she exclaimed:

"There, good-by, Mr. Fitz Clarence; I must go now!"

She sprang from her chair with such haste that she hardly heard the young

man's answering good-by. She stood radiant, graceful, beautiful, and

gazed, wondering, upon the accusing clock. Presently her pouting lips

parted, and she said:

"Five minutes after eleven! Nearly two hours, and it did not seem twenty

minutes! Oh, dear, what will he think of me!"

At the self-same moment Alonzo was staring at his clock. And presently

he said:

"Twenty-five minutes to three! Nearly two hours, and I didn't believe it

was two minutes! Is it possible that this clock is humbugging again?

Miss Ethelton! Just one moment, please. Are you there yet?"

"Yes, but be quick; I'm going right away."

"Would you be so kind as to tell me what time it is?"

The girl blushed again, murmured to herself, "It's right down cruel of

him to ask me!" and then spoke up and answered with admirably

counterfeited unconcern, "Five minutes after eleven."

"Oh, thank you! You have to go, now, have you?"

"I'm sorry."

No reply.

"Miss Ethelton!"

"Well?"

"You you're there yet, ain't you?"

"Yes; but please hurry. What did you want to say?"

"Well, I--well, nothing in particular. It's very lonesome here. It's

asking a great deal, I know, but would you mind talking with me again by

and by--that is, if it will not trouble you too much?"

"I don't know but I'll think about it. I'll try."

"Oh, thanks! Miss Ethelton! . . . Ah, me, she's gone, and here are

the black clouds and the whirling snow and the raging winds come again!

But she said good-by. She didn't say good morning, she said good-by!

. . . The clock was right, after all. What a lightning-winged

two hours it was!"

He sat down, and gazed dreamily into his fire for a while, then heaved a

sigh and said:

"How wonderful it is! Two little hours ago I was a free man, and now my

heart's in San Francisco!"

About that time Rosannah Ethelton, propped in the window-seat of her

bedchamber, book in hand, was gazing vacantly out over the rainy seas

that washed the Golden Gate, and whispering to herself, "How different he

is from poor Burley, with his empty head and his single little antic

talent of mimicry!"

II

Four weeks later Mr. Sidney Algernon Burley was entertaining a gay

luncheon company, in a sumptuous drawing-room on Telegraph Hill, with

some capital imitations of the voices and gestures of certain popular

actors and San Franciscan literary people and Bonanza grandees. He was

elegantly upholstered, and was a handsome fellow, barring a trifling cast

in his eye. He seemed very jovial, but nevertheless he kept his eye on

the door with an expectant and uneasy watchfulness. By and by a nobby

lackey appeared, and delivered a message to the mistress, who nodded her

head understandingly. That seemed to settle the thing for Mr. Burley;

his vivacity decreased little by little, and a dejected look began to

creep into one of his eyes and a sinister one into the other.

The rest of the company departed in due time, leaving him with the

mistress, to whom he said:

"There is no longer any question about it. She avoids me. She

continually excuses herself. If I could see her, if I could speak to her

only a moment, but this suspense--"

"Perhaps her seeming avoidance is mere accident, Mr. Burley. Go to the

small drawing-room up-stairs and amuse yourself a moment. I will

despatch a household order that is on my mind, and then I will go to her

room. Without doubt she will be persuaded to see you."

Mr. Burley went up-stairs, intending to go to the small drawing-room, but

as he was passing "Aunt Susan's" private parlor, the door of which stood

slightly ajar, he heard a joyous laugh which he recognized; so without

knock or announcement he stepped confidently in. But before he could

make his presence known he heard words that harrowed up his soul and

chilled his young blood, he heard a voice say:

"Darling, it has come!"

Then he heard Rosannah Ethelton, whose back was toward him, say:

"So has yours, dearest!"

He saw her bowed form bend lower; he heard her kiss something--not merely

once, but again and again! His soul raged within him. The heartbreaking

conversation went on:

"Rosannah, I knew you must be beautiful, but this is dazzling, this is

blinding, this is intoxicating!"

"Alonzo, it is such happiness to hear you say it. I know it is not true,

but I am so grateful to have you think it is, nevertheless! I knew you

must have a noble face, but the grace and majesty of the reality beggar

the poor creation of my fancy."

Burley heard that rattling shower of kisses again.

"Thank you, my Rosannah! The photograph flatters me, but you must not

allow yourself to think of that. Sweetheart?"

"Yes, Alonzo."

"I am so happy, Rosannah."

"Oh, Alonzo, none that have gone before me knew what love was, none that

come after me will ever know what happiness is. I float in a gorgeous

cloud land, a boundless firmament of enchanted and bewildering ecstasy!"

"Oh, my Rosannah! for you are mine, are you not?"

"Wholly, oh, wholly yours, Alonzo, now and forever! All the day long,

and all through my nightly dreams, one song sings itself, and its sweet

burden is, 'Alonzo Fitz Clarence, Alonzo Fitz Clarence, Eastport, state

of Maine!'"

"Curse him, I've got his address, anyway!" roared Burley, inwardly, and

rushed from the place.

Just behind the unconscious Alonzo stood his mother, a picture of

astonishment. She was so muffled from head to heel in furs that nothing

of herself was visible but her eyes and nose. She was a good allegory of

winter, for she was powdered all over with snow.

Behind the unconscious Rosannah stood "Aunt Susan," another picture of

astonishment. She was a good allegory of summer, for she was lightly

clad, and was vigorously cooling the perspiration on her face with a fan.

Both of these women had tears of joy in their eyes.

"Soho!" exclaimed Mrs. Fitz Clarence, "this explains why nobody has been

able to drag you out of your room for six weeks, Alonzo!"

"So ho!" exclaimed Aunt Susan, "this explains why you have been a hermit

for the past six weeks, Rosannah!"

The young couple were on their feet in an instant, abashed, and standing

like detected dealers in stolen goods awaiting judge Lynch's doom.

"Bless you, my son! I am happy in your happiness. Come to your mother's

arms, Alonzo!"

"Bless you, Rosannah, for my dear nephew's sake! Come to my arms!"

Then was there a mingling of hearts and of tears of rejoicing on

Telegraph Hill and in Eastport Square.

Servants were called by the elders, in both places. Unto one was given

the order, "Pile this fire high, with hickory wood, and bring me a

roasting-hot lemonade."

Unto the other was given the order, "Put out this fire, and bring me two

palm-leaf fans and a pitcher of ice-water."

Then the young people were dismissed, and the elders sat down to talk the

sweet surprise over and make the wedding plans.

Some minutes before this Mr. Burley rushed from the mansion on Telegraph

Hill without meeting or taking formal leave of anybody. He hissed

through his teeth, in unconscious imitation of a popular favorite in

melodrama, "Him shall she never wed! I have sworn it! Ere great Nature

shall have doffed her winter's ermine to don the emerald gauds of spring,

she shall be mine!"

III

Two weeks later. Every few hours, during same three or four days, a very

prim and devout-looking Episcopal clergyman, with a cast in his eye, had

visited Alonzo. According to his card, he was the Rev. Melton Hargrave,

of Cincinnati. He said he had retired from the ministry on account of

his health. If he had said on account of ill-health, he would probably

have erred, to judge by his wholesome looks and firm build. He was the

inventor of an improvement in telephones, and hoped to make his bread by

selling the privilege of using it. "At present," he continued, "a man

may go and tap a telegraph wire which is conveying a song or a concert

from one state to another, and he can attach his private telephone and

steal a hearing of that music as it passes along. My invention will stop

all that."

"Well," answered Alonzo, "if the owner of the music could not miss what

was stolen, why should he care?"

"He shouldn't care," said the Reverend.

"Well?" said Alonzo, inquiringly.

"Suppose," replied the Reverend, "suppose that, instead of music that was

passing along and being stolen, the burden of the wire was loving

endearments of the most private and sacred nature?"

Alonzo shuddered from head to heel. "Sir, it is a priceless invention,"

said he; "I must have it at any cost."

But the invention was delayed somewhere on the road from Cincinnati, most

unaccountably. The impatient Alonzo could hardly wait. The thought of

Rosannah's sweet words being shared with him by some ribald thief was

galling to him. The Reverend came frequently and lamented the delay, and

told of measures he had taken to hurry things up. This was some little

comfort to Alonzo.

One forenoon the Reverend ascended the stairs and knocked at Alonzo's

door. There was no response. He entered, glanced eagerly around,

closed the door softly, then ran to the telephone. The exquisitely soft

and remote strains of the "Sweet By-and-by" came floating through the

instrument. The singer was flatting, as usual, the five notes that

follow the first two in the chorus, when the Reverend interrupted her

with this word, in a voice which was an exact imitation of Alonzo's, with

just the faintest flavor of impatience added:

"Sweetheart?"

"Yes, Alonzo?"

"Please don't sing that any more this week--try something modern."

The agile step that goes with a happy heart was heard on the stairs, and

the Reverend, smiling diabolically, sought sudden refuge behind the heavy

folds of the velvet windowcurtains. Alonzo entered and flew to the

telephone. Said he:

"Rosannah, dear, shall we sing something together?"

"Something modern?" asked she, with sarcastic bitterness.

"Yes, if you prefer."

"Sing it yourself, if you like!"

This snappishness amazed and wounded the young man. He said:

"Rosarmah, that was not like you."

"I suppose it becomes me as much as your very polite speech became you,

Mr. Fitz Clarence."

"Mister Fitz Clarence! Rosannah, there was nothing impolite about my

speech."

"Oh, indeed! Of course, then, I misunderstood you, and I most humbly beg

your pardon, ha-ha-ha! No doubt you said, 'Don't sing it any more

to-day.'"

"Sing what any more to-day?"

"The song you mentioned, of course, How very obtuse we are, all of a

sudden!"

"I never mentioned any song."

"Oh, you didn't?"

"No, I didn't!"

"I am compelled to remark that you did."

"And I am obliged to reiterate that I didn't."

"A second rudeness! That is sufficient, sir. I will never forgive you.

All is over between us."

Then came a muffled sound of crying. Alonzo hastened to say:

"Oh, Rosannah, unsay those words! There is some dreadful mystery here,

some hideous mistake. I am utterly earnest and sincere when I say I

never said anything about any song. I would not hurt you for the whole

world . . . . Rosannah, dear speak to me, won't you?"

There was a pause; then Alonzo heard the girl's sobbings retreating, and

knew she had gone from the telephone. He rose with a heavy sigh, and

hastened from the room, saying to himself, "I will ransack the charity

missions and the haunts of the poor for my mother. She will persuade her

that I never meant to wound her."

A minute later the Reverend was crouching over the telephone like a cat

that knoweth the ways of the prey. He had not very many minutes to wait.

A soft, repentant voice, tremulous with tears, said:

"Alonzo, dear, I have been wrong. You could not have said so cruel a

thing. It must have been some one who imitated your voice in malice or

in jest."

The Reverend coldly answered, in Alonzo's tones:

"You have said all was over between us. So let it be. I spurn your

proffered repentance, and despise it!"

Then he departed, radiant with fiendish triumph, to return no more with

his imaginary telephonic invention forever.

Four hours afterward Alonzo arrived with his mother from her favorite

haunts of poverty and vice. They summoned the San Francisco household;

but there was no reply. They waited, and continued to wait, upon the

voiceless telephone.

At length, when it was sunset in San Francisco, and three hours and a

half after dark in Eastport, an answer to the oft-repeated cry of

"Rosannah!"

But, alas, it was Aunt Susan's voice that spake. She said:

"I have been out all day; just got in. I will go and find her."

The watchers waited two minutes--five minutes--ten minutes. Then came

these fatal words, in a frightened tone:

"She is gone, and her baggage with her. To visit another friend, she

told the servants. But I found this note on the table in her room.

Listen: 'I am gone; seek not to trace me out; my heart is broken; you

will never see me more. Tell him I shall always think of him when I sing

my poor "Sweet By-and-by," but never of the unkind words he said about

it.' That is her note. Alonzo, Alonzo, what does it mean? What has

happened?"

But Alonzo sat white and cold as the dead. His mother threw back the

velvet curtains and opened a window. The cold air refreshed the

sufferer, and he told his aunt his dismal story. Meantime his mother was

inspecting a card which had disclosed itself upon the floor when she cast

the curtains back. It read, "Mr. Sidney Algernon Burley, San Francisco."

"The miscreant!" shouted Alonzo, and rushed forth to seek the false

Reverend and destroy him; for the card explained everything, since in the

course of the lovers' mutual confessions they had told each other all

about all the sweethearts they had ever had, and thrown no end of mud at

their failings and foibles for lovers always do that. It has a

fascination that ranks next after billing and cooing.

IV

During the next two months many things happened. It had early transpired

that Rosannah, poor suffering orphan, had neither returned to her

grandmother in Portland, Oregon, nor sent any word to her save a

duplicate of the woeful note she had left in the mansion on Telegraph

Hill. Whosoever was sheltering her--if she was still alive--had been

persuaded not to betray her whereabouts, without doubt; for all efforts

to find trace of her had failed.

Did Alonzo give her up? Not he. He said to himself, "She will sing that

sweet song when she is sad; I shall find her." So he took his carpet-

sack and a portable telephone, and shook the snow of his native city from

his arctics, and went forth into the world. He wandered far and wide and

in many states. Time and again, strangers were astounded to see a

wasted, pale, and woe-worn man laboriously climb a telegraph-pole in

wintry and lonely places, perch sadly there an hour, with his ear at a

little box, then come sighing down, and wander wearily away. Sometimes

they shot at him, as peasants do at aeronauts, thinking him mad and

dangerous. Thus his clothes were much shredded by bullets and his person

grievously lacerated. But he bore it all patiently.

In the beginning of his pilgrimage he used often to say, "Ah, if I could

but hear the 'Sweet By-and-by'!" But toward the end of it he used to

shed tears of anguish and say, "Ah, if I could but hear something else!"

Thus a month and three weeks drifted by, and at last some humane people

seized him and confined him in a private mad-house in New York. He made

no moan, for his strength was all gone, and with it all heart and all

hope. The superintendent, in pity, gave up his own comfortable parlor

and bedchamber to him and nursed him with affectionate devotion.

At the end of a week the patient was able to leave his bed for the first

time. He was lying, comfortably pillowed, on a sofa, listening to the

plaintive Miserere of the bleak March winds and the muffled sound of

tramping feet in the street below for it was about six in the evening,

and New York was going home from work. He had a bright fire and the

added cheer of a couple of student-lamps. So it was warm and snug

within, though bleak and raw without; it was light and bright within,

though outside it was as dark and dreary as if the world had been lit

with Hartford gas. Alonzo smiled feebly to think how his loving vagaries

had made him a maniac in the eyes of the world, and was proceeding to

pursue his line of thought further, when a faint, sweet strain, the very

ghost of sound, so remote and attenuated it seemed, struck upon his ear.

His pulses stood still; he listened with parted lips and bated breath.

The song flowed on--he waiting, listening, rising slowly and unconsciously

from his recumbent position. At last he exclaimed:

"It is! it is she! Oh, the divine hated notes!"

He dragged himself eagerly to the corner whence the sounds proceeded,

tore aside a curtain, and discovered a telephone. He bent over, and as

the last note died away he burst forthwith the exclamation:

"Oh, thank Heaven, found at last! Speak tome, Rosannah, dearest! The

cruel mystery has been unraveled; it was the villain Burley who mimicked

my voice and wounded you with insolent speech!"

There was a breathless pause, a waiting age to Alonzo; then a faint sound

came, framing itself into language:

"Oh, say those precious words again, Alonzo!"

"They are the truth, the veritable truth, my Rosannah, and you shall have

the proof, ample and abundant proof!"

"Oh; Alonzo, stay by me! Leave me not for a moment! Let me feel that

you are near me! Tell me we shall never be parted more! Oh, this happy

hour, this blessed hour, this memorable hour!"

"We will make record of it, my Rosannah; every year, as this dear hour

chimes from the clock, we will celebrate it with thanksgivings, all the

years of our life."

"We will, we will, Alonzo!"

"Four minutes after six, in the evening, my Rosannah, shall henceforth--"

"Twenty-three minutes after twelve, afternoon shall--"

"Why; Rosannah, darling, where are you?"

"In Honolulu, Sandwich Islands. And where are you? Stay by me; do not

leave me for a moment. I cannot bear it. Are you at home?"

"No, dear, I am in New York--a patient in the doctor's hands."

An agonizing shriek came buzzing to Alonzo's ear, like the sharp buzzing

of a hurt gnat; it lost power in traveling five thousand miles. Alonzo

hastened to say:

"Calm yourself, my child. It is nothing. Already I am getting well

under the sweet healing of your presence. Rosannah?"

"Yes, Alonzo? Oh, how you terrified me! Say on."

"Name the happy day, Rosannah!"

There was a little pause. Then a diffident small voice replied,

"I blush--but it is with pleasure, it is with happiness. Would--would

you like to have it soon?"

"This very night, Rosannah! Oh, let us risk no more delays. Let it be

now!--this very night, this very moment!"

"Oh, you impatient creature! I have nobody here but my good old uncle,

a missionary for a generation, and now retired from service--nobody but

him and his wife. I would so dearly like it if your mother and your Aunt

Susan--"

"Our mother and our Aunt Susan, my Rosannah."

"Yes, our mother and our Aunt Susan--I am content to word it so if it

pleases you; I would so like to have them present."

"So would I. Suppose you telegraph Aunt Susan. How long would it take

her to come?"

"The steamer leaves San Francisco day after tomorrow. The passage is

eight days. She would be here the 31st of March."

"Then name the 1st of April; do, Rosannah, dear."

"Mercy, it would make us April fools, Alonzo!"

"So we be the happiest ones that that day's suit looks down upon in the

whole broad expanse of the globe, why need we care? Call it the 1st of

April, dear."

"Then the 1st of April at shall be, with all my heart!"

"Oh, happiness! Name the hour, too, Rosannah."

"I like the morning, it is so blithe. Will eight in the morning do,

Alonzo?"

"The loveliest hour in the day--since it will make you mine."

There was a feeble but frantic sound for some little time, as if

wool-upped, disembodied spirits were exchanging kisses; then Rosannah

said, "Excuse me just a moment, dear; I have an appointment, and am

called to meet it."

The young girl sought a large parlor and took her place at a window which

looked out upon a beautiful scene. To the left one could view the

charming Nuuana Valley, fringed with its ruddy flush of tropical flowers

and its plumed and graceful cocoa palms; its rising foothills clothed in

the shining green of lemon, citron, and orange groves; its storied

precipice beyond, where the first Kamehameha drove his defeated foes over

to their destruction, a spot that had forgotten its grim history, no

doubt, for now it was smiling, as almost always at noonday, under the

glowing arches of a succession of rainbows. In front of the window one

could see the quaint town, and here and there a picturesque group of

dusky natives, enjoying the blistering weather; and far to the right lay

the restless ocean, tossing its white mane in the sunshine.

Rosannah stood there, in her filmy white raiment, fanning her flushed and

heated face, waiting. A Kanaka boy, clothed in a damaged blue necktie

and part of a silk hat, thrust his head in at the door, and announced,

"'Frisco haole!"

"Show him in," said the girl, straightening herself up and assuming a

meaning dignity. Mr. Sidney Algernon Burley entered, clad from head to

heel in dazzling snow--that is to say, in the lightest and whitest of

Irish linen. He moved eagerly forward, but the girl made a gesture and

gave him a look which checked him suddenly. She said, coldly, "I am

here, as I promised. I believed your assertions, I yielded to your

importune lies, and said I would name the day. I name the 1st of April-

-eight in the morning. NOW GO!"

"Oh, my dearest, if the gratitude of a lifetime--"

"Not a word. Spare me all sight of you, all communication with you,

until that hour. No--no supplications; I will have it so."

When he was gone, she sank exhausted in a chair, for the long siege of

troubles she had undergone had wasted her strength. Presently she said,

"What a narrow escape! If the hour appointed had been an hour earlier

--Oh, horror, what an escape I have made! And to think I had come to

imagine I was loving this beguiling, this truthless, this treacherous

monster! Oh, he shall repent his villainy!"

Let us now draw this history to a close, for little more needs to be

told. On the 2d of the ensuing April, the Honolulu Advertiser contained

this notice:

MARRIED.--In this city, by telephone, yesterday morning,--at eight

o'clock, by Rev. Nathan Hays, assisted by Rev. Nathaniel Davis, of

New York, Mr. Alonzo Fitz Clarence, of Eastport, Maine, U. S., and

Miss Rosannah Ethelton, of Portland, Oregon, U. S. Mrs. Susan

Howland, of San Francisco, a friend of the bride, was present, she

being the guest of the Rev. Mr. Hays and wife, uncle and aunt of the

bride. Mr. Sidney Algernon Burley, of San Francisco, was also

present but did not remain till the conclusion of the marriage

service. Captain Hawthorne's beautiful yacht, tastefully decorated,

was in waiting, and the happy bride and her friends immediately

departed on a bridal trip to Lahaina and Haleakala.

The New York papers of the same date contained this notice:

MARRIED.--In this city, yesterday, by telephone, at half-past two in

the morning, by Rev. Nathaniel Davis, assisted by Rev. Nathan Hays,

of Honolulu, Mr. Alonzo Fitz Clarence, of Eastport, Maine, and Miss

Rosannah Ethelton, of Portland, Oregon. The parents and several

friends of the bridegroom were present, and enjoyed a sumptuous

breakfast and much festivity until nearly sunrise, and then departed

on a bridal trip to the Aquarium, the bridegroom's state of health

not admitting of a more extended journey.

Toward the close of that memorable day Mr. and Mrs. Alonzo Fitz Clarence

were buried in sweet converse concerning the pleasures of their several

bridal tours, when suddenly the young wife exclaimed: "Oh, Lonny, I

forgot! I did what I said I would."

"Did you, dear?"

"Indeed, I did. I made him the April fool! And I told him so, too!

Ah, it was a charming surprise! There he stood, sweltering in a black

dress-suit, with the mercury leaking out of the top of the thermometer,

waiting to be married. You should have seen the look he gave when I

whispered it in his ear. Ah, his wickedness cost me many a heartache and

many a tear, but the score was all squared up, then. So the vengeful

feeling went right out of my heart, and I begged him to stay, and said I

forgave him everything. But he wouldn't. He said he would live to be

avenged; said he would make our lives a curse to us. But he can't, can

he, dear?"

"Never in this world, my Rosannah!"

Aunt Susan, the Oregonian grandmother, and the young couple and their

Eastport parents, are all happy at this writing, and likely to remain so.

Aunt Susan brought the bride from the islands, accompanied her across our

continent, and had the happiness of witnessing the rapturous meeting

between an adoring husband and wife who had never seen each other until

that moment.

A word about the wretched Burley, whose wicked machinations came so near

wrecking the hearts and lives of our poor young friends, will be

sufficient. In a murderous attempt to seize a crippled and helpless

artisan who he fancied had done him some small offense, he fell into a

caldron of boiling oil and expired before he could be extinguished.

Do not separate you from illusions. If they disappeared, you will have continued to exist, but have stopped living. Mark Twain

Playing 'Boy' Games Helps Girls, and Vice Versa

“Ten-year olds who spend more time engaging in activities typically associated with their gender tend to have more stereotypical academic interests, skills and characteristics two years later, new research reports. For instance, girls who logged many hours on "girl" activities like reading, knitting, dancing or playing with dolls tended to get better grades in English, show more signs of sensitivity, and were more likely to have low self-esteem, which is more common in girls, the Pennsylvania-based researchers noted. However, girls who spent more time on sports -- a traditionally masculine pursuit -- tended to become more interested in math two years later, regardless of their interest in math at age 10.”

REFERENCED IN SONG: "I'M SO TIRED" BY JOHN LENNON

Raleigh, Sir Walter

"1554?-1618, English soldier, explorer, courtier, and man

of letters. A favorite of ELIZABETH I, and a rival of

Robert Devereux, earl of ESSEX, Raleigh was given

position and vast estates in Ireland. He conceived and

organized the colonizing expeditions to America that

ended tragically with the lost colony on ROANOKE

ISLAND, Va. With Christopher MARLOWE and George

CHAPMAN, he was associated with the poetic group

known as the school of night, which won a reputation

for atheism. In 1595 he embarked on an expedition up the

Orinoco R. in Guiana in search of EL DORADO. His

fortunes fell with the accession of JAMES I, who was

convinced of his enmity. He was convicted of treason

and imprisoned in the tower. Released in 1616, he made

another expedition to the Orinoco in search of gold. It

failed, and he returned to England where he was

executed under the original sentence of treason. Raleigh

wrote poetry, political essays, and philosophical

treatises."

Study: Most College Students Lack Skills

By BEN FELLER, AP Education Writer

"Nearing a diploma, most college students cannot handle many complex but common tasks, from understanding credit card offers to comparing the cost per ounce of food.

Those are the sobering findings of a study of literacy on college campuses, the first to target the skills of students as they approach the start of their careers. More than 50 percent of students at four-year schools and more than 75 percent at two-year colleges lacked the skills to perform complex literacy tasks. That means they could not interpret a table about exercise and blood pressure, understand the arguments of newspaper editorials, compare credit card offers with different interest rates and annual fees or summarize results of a survey about parental involvement in school."

High-Tech Workers Being Sought Outside Of U.S.

"Reuters: According to Department of Labor estimates, America needs more than a million new information technology (IT) workers through 2005 -- far more than foreign temporary workers can provide.

<snip>

Moore quoted the results of the Third International Mathematics and Science Study that showed the poor academic performance of American students by the time they finish high school. He said students in the United States, including those most advanced, are ranked among the lowest internationally.

``... Until we get good qualifying people into teaching, these scores are not going to go up,'' Moore said.

Moore said one of the main reasons for America's dependency on high-tech foreign workers stems from the nation's inability to attract qualified science and math teachers into classrooms. ``If you are graduating with your first degree in science, say in chemistry, you've got all kinds of industry opportunities,'' he said. ``But (teaching) salaries are terrible. So why would young people do this?'' ...new teachers, regardless of their teaching subject, earn only about $25,012 annually... New software developers earn twice as much...

Teachers in the United States do not enjoy the same recognition as in Germany or in Japan, where their professional status is highly respected and where, once selected, they are almost guaranteed their tenure and paid handsomely. "

Tests are making children hate books, warns Pullman

"The award-winning children's author Philip Pullman today launches a broadside against the government's "brutal" school testing regime, warning that it is creating a generation of children who hate reading and "feel nothing but hostility for literature". ... Writing in Guardian Education, the author of the acclaimed His Dark Materials trilogy attacks a lack of focus on enjoyment in the teaching of reading and writing. Drilling to meet the demands of tests makes children's writing "empty, conventional and worthless", he says. ... "

"we are a nation obsessed by assessment, particularly external examinations".

Vigen (1929-2002)

Vigen was a legend in Iranian pop music. His biography appears on : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vigen_Derderian

he was an invited musician at the birtday party of one of our friends - I was one or 2 years old - mom recalls that I was sleeping on her lap and at the end of every song I'd get up and clap for him - and walked up to him once saying how much I liked his music.

(Reza Ganjavi, 2006)

These photos were taken by my good friend, Shahrokh Mortazavi.

'UTOPIA TODAY - REALITY TOMORROW - A vegetarian world'

The European Vegetarian Union is happy to announce that the book is now available!

Thirty five authors - nutritionists, medical doctors, authors of bestsellers, founders of important organizations, researchers, IT-specialists, philosophers, sci-fi fans, musicians and talented individuals - generously contributed to this EVU fundraiser project. The authors come from a variety of countries, cultural backgrounds and religions but they all have one thing in common: the conviction that a more compassionate world is not only possible but inevitable if humanity is to prosper.

The authors share their individual ideas of how tomorrow's vegetarian world will be, whilst looking at a more compassionate future from many different angles. The result is a cocktail of good vibes, light and hopes. Yes, it is true. Vegetarians are still a minority today. But WHAT a minority!

We have become a social group to be reckoned with, also at an international level. What better proof is there than the increasing effort by the food industry to accommodate our preferences? The veggie-market is not booming without good reason!

If you are interested in seeing what people expect from a future vegetarian world, you can order the book from the EVU, Bahnhofstr. 52, CH-9315 Neukirch-Egnach, via Amazon or through a book shop.

Sincerely,

Renato Pichler

President of the EVU

136 pages, 35 authors from 11 countries, ISBN 3-909067-05-0, this book is available in English only (translations are planned).

--------------------------------------------

List of the authors:

Arnal, Muriel - ONE VOICE (France): It is what being vegetarian is all about: caring for others.

Barnard, Neal D. M.D., President Physicians Committee for Responsible Medicine (USA): A vegetarian diet has the potential to revolutionize the health of humanity.

Bekoff, Marc, Professor of Biology (USA) Shame on those who bring so much pain and suffering to countless animals, too many to count. Shame on you.

Buist, Agnes, EVU member (UK): A vegetarian world ... this will be a real step forward for humanity.

De Leo, Sigrid, teacher and former Hon. Secretary General of EVU (Switzerland): Vegetarian nutrition is the diet of the 21st century.

Eck, Stefan Bernhard/Director of ArbeitsKreis Tierrechte & Ethik A.K.T.E.

and Hohensee, Barbara Assistant Director of A.K.T.E. (Germany): Necessary thought patterns: transcendent, international, universal.

Fox, Tina, Chief Executive of the Vegetarian Society UK: & In the future I expect to see meat eaters having to justify their aberrant and anti social behaviour on late night talk shows.

Ganjavi, Reza, musician and philosopher (Switzerland): minimize killing and suffering.

Hebbelinck, Marcel, Prof.em., PhD, Dr.h.c., FACSM, former President EVU (Belgium): Vegetarians: People of the future.

Hershaft, Alex has launched the Great American Meatout and World Farm Animals Day (USA): The most striking aspect of vegetarian utopia is that it will not be very striking at all.

Hertel, Frauke, freelance copywriter and translator (Belgium), quotes a voice from the future: The veg*n argument was won several decades ago, by default rather than by choice.

Jain, Permit Chand , EVU member and correspondent for India: &lsquoThe importance of AHIMSA&rsquo

Kaufman, Stephen M.D., Co-chair, Christian Vegetarian Association (USA): I think that a largely vegetarian world is almost inevitable.

Koerner, Heinz, bestseller author, and Boehm, Alexandra (Germany) quote a teacher from the future: be happy that we are no longer barbarians and that we finally see animals as our friends. Let us be glad that animals also greet us as friends again.

Leitzmann, Claus, Professor (Germany): Wholesome vegetarian diets offer distinct advantages regarding physical and mental health and well-being.

Méry, André, President of Alliance Végétarienne France: The vegetarian utopia is about individuals, their sensitivity, their desire to avoid suffering, and the satisfaction of their needs so as to lead a decent life.

Murthy, Vasudev, author, musician and scientist (India) writes about the Universal Declaration of Equality of Species.

Newkirk, Ingrid, founder and President of People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (USA) tells about the Abattoir Remembrance Museum opening its doors.

Ovetz, Robert, PhD is Save the Leatherback Campaign Coordinator with the US based Sea Turtle Restoration Project: History of the future: The talking ocean.

Pedersen, Helena, Ph.D. candidate at the Department of Education, and Dian, Natalie organization consultant (Sweden) speak about the final end to unethical factory farming and animal transport.

Pichler, Renato (Switzerland) leads the Swiss Union for Vegetarianism (SVV) and is the President of the EVU: Flashback from the future - Today we have almost forgotten the era when, day after day, millions of animals were killed.

Reilly, Ciaran works in information technology and is a member of the EVU webcrew (Ireland). He talks about the end to the consumption of meat and freeing billions of animals from the prospect of a short, brutal life.

Rinaldi, Massimo, computer programmer (Italy): What would the world be like without meat.

Risi, Armin, philosopher, esoteric theologian, author (Switzerland): The spiritual origin of mankind - Human beings did not always eat meat!.

Ruetting, Barbara, EVU honorary board member, actress, author, health consultant and member of the Bavarian State Parliament (Germany): Go veg to heal the Earth.

Thomas Schoenberger is the President of the Vegetarier Bund Deutschlands e.V. (Germany) : A journey to 2040.

Schwartz, Richard H., Ph.D., Professor Emeritus, author, President of the Jewish Vegetarians of North America (JVNA) (USA): Imagining a vegan world.

Spencer, Elsa, Ph.D. (USA): 'A minority in a McWorld: What can vegetarians do?'

Tanabe, Lydia, working at the German cultural institute in Tokyo and freelance translator, talks about &lsquoJapan back to the roots.

Vandenbosch, Michel, President and co-founder of GAIA (Belgium): Why I don’t eat meat - The importance of empathic sensitivity and ethical kinship beyond the human species.

Wardle, Tony, journalist and associate director of animal campaign group Viva! (UK): Future vegetarians will need to be brave, knowledgeable and committed.

Witten, Ilona, writer and translator (Italy/Germany): Time to change from animal awareness to animal friendly behaviour.

TO THE AUTHORS (by alphabet):

Arnal, Muriel

Barnard, Neal D.

Bekoff, Marc

Buist, Agnes

De Leo, Sigrid

Eck, Stefan Bernard and Hohensee, Barbara

Fox, Tina

Ganjavi, Reza

Hebbelinck, Marcel

Hershaft, Alex

Hertel, Frauke

Jain, Permit Chand

Kaufman, Stephen

Koerner, Heinz and Boehm, Alexandra

Leitzmann, Claus

Mery, André

Murthy, Vasudev

Newkirk, Ingrid

Ovetz, Robert

Pedersen, Helena and Dian, Natalie

Pichler, Renato

Reilly, Ciaran

Rinaldi, Massimo

Risi, Armin

Ruetting, Barbara

Schoenberger, Thomas

Schwartz, Richard

Spencer, Elsa

Tanabe, Lydia

Vandenbosch, Michel

Wardle, Tony

Witten, Ilona

Abbas Yamini-Sharif - Genius Iranian Educator, Author, My Primary School Principal

SEE UPDATES AT BOTTOM OF ARTICLE

Dr. Yamini Sharif was the principle and founder of the elementary school I went to in Tehran, called "Raveshe-No" (New Method). It was one of the most, if not the most progressive school of the day. -- Reza Ganjavi

4.1.1.1 Abbas Yamini-Sharif

Abbas Yamini-Sharif (1298-1368/1919-89), is considered the father of children’s poetry in Iran. Before his pioneering work there had been little Farsi poetry written for children. Yamini-Sharif began his career in 1317/1938, and was the most prolific children’s poet of the period, after Baghcheban.[1] Between 1946 and 1986, he published 27 works: 11 collections of poetry, 12 volumes of prose, one play and three translations. The genre flourished in the period 1350/1971 to 1356/1977, with Mahmud Kianush also publishing seven books of poetry for children aged from five to fifteen. Yamini-Sharif and a few others occasionally wrote poems in syllabic meter and in the colloquial style of nursery rhymes, and lullabies.[2]

Many of Yamini-Sharif’s poems, on themes related to the lives and development of children, were later collected and published in book form: Feri be asman miravad (Tehran, 1344/1965), Avaz-e fereshtegan ya as‘ar-e kudakan (Tehran, 1345/1966), and Nim qarn dar bagh-e she‘r[3] (Tehran 1366/1987).[4] He has also produced a Farsi language instruction book for foreigners, which includes Farsi poetry, information about the Iranian people and the country itself, Farsi-English vocabulary and some conversational sentences in Farsi along with the phonetic alphabet and English translations.[5]

Yamini-Sharif was part of the group of 37 experts, teachers and educators, along with Lili Ahi, Tamina Bagcheban, Turan Mirhadi (Komarlu), that established the Children’s Book Council in 1341/1963; and which was officially registered as an NGO in 1968.[6] In 1986, the CBCI honored Abbas Yamini-Sharif with a celebration of his work. Professor Noushine Ansari reported as follows:

‘On November 15 1986 CBCI celebrated the 50th anniversary of AbbasYamini-Sharif’s career as a poet, writer and translator for children and young adults. He studied education in Iran and at Columbia University in USA and worked for many years as a distinguished teacher and school director. In 1943 he published the first Iranian magazine for children called “Children’s Games”. Since 1946 he has published 27 works – 11 collections of poetry, 12 volumes of prose, one play and three translations. Mr. Yamini-Sharif has won several national as well as international awards. He is one of the founding members of CBCI and also established its annual awards to an Iranian author, illustrator and for an unpublished manuscript.’[7]

Fereshte Sarisa, Yamini-Sharif’s niece, also a poet, attributes her vocation to having grown up in a family in which nearly all were poets: ‘My uncle Abbas Yamini Sharif wrote poetry for children, and also my grandmother and my mother.’[8] Yamini-Sharif, himself,[9] tells how his six year-old twin grandchildren, Peyman and Sahar, liked books better than any toys, and especially the three books of Khaneh-ye Baba Ali which were written for them. He says his stories and poems are set in the village because he spent most of his youth in the village of Darband, which had yet to become a suburb of Tehran, and preferred the clean air and peacefulness, and the warmness, gentleness and innocence of country people compared to the noise and pollution of Tehran. He wrote the Two Kadkhoda (Village Headmen) to describe life in the village and Donkey and Donkey-boy to describe urban living.[10]

Yamini-Sharif says that later, as the children were growing up, they were still read bedtime stories before they went to sleep and adds ‘When I was young, I wasn’t satisfied with fewer that two stories to send me to sleep, and would insist and be so stubborn that one night when my mother had a helper to tell stories, and had told her first story and didn’t know which story to tell next, and I was still pestering her, she gave in and told the story of Yertanyert Zertanzert; she just made up these stories. And how enjoyable they were! She talked about two creatures born to a stepmother who lived in a village. All they did was eat and eat and eat. They ate all the food, all the inhabitants of the village, all the trees, all the animals, even the ones in the stable. There was only one child that they were unable to eat. In the end this child destroyed them and brought everything out of their stomachs.’[11]

When Yamini-Sharif was a child, his family and relatives were fond of poetry. As well as reading Hafiz’s poetry for fâl [12] and for ecstatic enjoyment, and reading Saadi and Mowlavi for morals and sayings and folk wisdom, they also read contemporary poetry.[13] They read the press and newspapers, and whatever poem or song became popular, they also memorized it and used it. Yamini-Sharif too, under the influence of this environment, and being blessed with a good memory at the time, read and memorized all these compositions and poems. In addition, his family had become friendly with Farrokhi Yazdi[14] because, both during his membership in the parliament and after his return from exile in Germany, he lived in the Kolah Farangi section of their orchard in Darband and considered its atmosphere perfect for poetry.

Yamini-Sharif recalls: ‘Of all the factors which drew me towards poetry, were those times when professional singers were employed to bring critical and political poems to people’s attention by singing songs and proclaiming messages in that garden on the mountain next to the Darband River. On Friday and Saturday nights, many families would take a stroll up and down the valley of Darband and Sarband, or rest in the gardens taking refreshments. Farrokhi used to write poems which he wished a singer to sing for the ordinary people so that his message would reach them, but the singer was illiterate; so I, who was 10 years old and attending Maktab, and could read, would sit next to the singer in the highest part of the garden overlooking the Darband River, and from Farrokhi’s handwritten notes, I would read the texts to the singer, and he would sing the words in a loud and resonating voice which spread throughout the valley and echoed several times around the mountains, and the whole of the valley would enjoy this beautiful poetry and lovely words, which had arisen from the heart …’[15]

Yamini-Sharif was thus exposed to critical and political poetry, as well as news and classical writings of all kinds, at an early age. Yet Samad Behrangi accuses him of only writing for rich children and of having a narrow, upper class, outlook on life, saying that his poetry has no message except possibly antiquated moral codes.[16] This is strong criticism for a writer who is considered the father of children’s poetry in Iran.

An example of Yamini-Sharif’s poetry for pre-elementary and early elementary age group children (5-8yrs) follows:

I fell to the Ground (Oftadam Zamin)

From up I fell down to the ground

my face became scraped and bloody

I just laughed again and again

my mum said sweet child

you didn’t cry well, well, bravo![17]

(from Songs of Angels, 1325/1946)

The next two poems are for children at the end of elementary and in guidance (10-14yrs):

Harvest Time (Hengam-e Deru)

The fall wind is blowing we’re getting everything ready

get up reaper get up with jumping feet

See how the harvest has become golden God has given us help

from each seed that we planted the earth has given a hundred grains

We were all fully occupied whether it was easy or hard

so that we could get back quickly to fill the barn with produce.[18]

(from Talking Flowers, 1350/1971)

***

Drop and the Sea (Qetre va Darya)

It appeared from the drops of rain from the teeny weeny grains of sand

What oceans without shores what mountains & plains without limit or end

From goodness little by little kindness from cheerfulness and eloquence

The world goes round like heaven full of affection & loyalty & happiness

What value is there from time if it becomes immediate?

What will come of so much immediacy in time?

But because instant is added upon instant

Time appears eternal.[19]

(from The Garden of Melodies, 1352/1973)

***

From these examples, it can be seen that concrete issues close to the hearts and everyday lives of children are touched upon, as well as universal and philosophical themes. ‘Arrow and Song’[20] is another poem in the second group which compares the effect of an arrow with that of a song, saying that one never knows where a song that you sing goes, unlike an arrow which you can trace. After years, the poet realized that his arrow had fallen on a tree and his song, which he thought had not affected anyone, had fallen upon the heart of his friend or soul mate. Such issues are delicate and open a way of deeper thinking for children that may not relate to everyday life and conditions. Farsi poetry traditionally deals with such issues, and children have been learning how to interpret abstract and intangible language and concepts for many centuries. Possibly it is this quality of tradition and abstraction in Yamini-Sharif’s work which Behrangi takes offence to. The next writer to be investigated, Mahmud Kianush, was strongly influenced by Yamini-Sharif and their work shares many similarities.

2005

Unfortunately I will be attending school in Grapevine, Texas on the proposed dates.

However, I am really replying to say that last night I met a recent arrival from Iran, a gentleman who has been writing poetry for children and adolescents there for many years. As soon as I mentioned the name Abbas Yamini Sharif, he launched into a long and enthusiastic monologue of praise, recognizing Mr. Yamini Sharif as a "peeshkesvat", "the father of children's poetry in Iran", and "the man who for fifty years was the guiding star". I was thrilled to be part of the conversation, thrilled to be related to Mr. Yamini Sharif even in such a tangential manner, and thrilled to be part of the great cultural entity that is Iran.

Especially in the last few years, I have remembered with renewed appreciation the poetry play we staged as students in a year-end ceremony, based on Mr. Yamini Sharif's poem. I don't know if you were present or recall this event...........

May god rest his soul.

KS

Dallas

Reza Ganjavi: My dad remembers a poem on our elementary school office wall.

Compare each person’s today with his yesterday.

Don’t compare person with person.

Kids, fruits that get ripe in different times.

Dr. Yamini-Sharif

Luigi Biscaldi - Guitar Master

Born at Vigevano in 1962, he studied guitar with Angelo Gilardino. He graduated with full marks and honours at the Conservatory "G. Pollini" in Padua, then he took another degree with the highest score and honours at the "Accademia Internazionaie Superiore Perosi" in Biella.

During the time of his studies he was awarded twice with the scholarship "Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco" offered by the family of the famous composer to the best Italian student of guitar. He studied also composition with the organist-composer Sergio Marciano. He got prizes in several national and international competitions; e.g. the "Andrés Segovia" in Spain, in 1987.

He begun his career as a concert player in 1981 and since then he played both as soloist, with orchestra and with chamber groups. He performed the guitar concertos by Krebs, Giuliani, Rodrigo, Villa-lobos, Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Brouwer (this latter also with the author conducting the orchestra); the Romancero Gitano by Castelnovo-Tedesco and the "Concierto Juglar" by Julia, the four concertos by Angelo Gilardino, the quintets with string quartet by Boccherini, Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Guastavino and many pieces with various groups. He plays regularly as a partner of famous soloists.

He has toured extensively in all Europe and has visited Canada.

He has published three books of "Esercizi speciali di virtuosismo", a book of "Esercizi e Studi elementari" (Basic Exercises and Studies) and "Quattro ricercari sulla Fortuna" for guitar. He is teacher at the Accademia Internazionale Superiore "L. Perosi" in Biella.

BRAIN HEALTH