Humanize the Earth!

Inviting Friends Potluck Dinner

Also at last night’s meeting, we planned a potluck dinner for October the 16th from 5 - 9 pm here in Chicago. If you’re interested in coming, please save the date and wait for more info closer to the time, or put a note in the comments and I’ll send details right now.

We’ll be contacting each person from the Giving Conference individually and asking everyone to bring friends and a favorite food dish to share. Children are welcome as well.

9. The Principle of Liberty

At last night’s meeting, Debbie, John and I looked at one of the Principles of Valid Action:

“When you harm others you remain enchained, but if you do not harm anyone, you can freely do whatever you want.”

There were two different ways we were looking at this principle. For some of us, this principle has to do with letting go of the guilt or perceived expectations on us from society or our family or our own sense of ourselves and truly doing what we want.

On the other hand, sometimes our actions are not meant to harm others but they do anyway (time spent away from my partner can leave me too tired to really be present and in relationship when we are together, for example) which ends up keeping me separate from others and enchained.

Illinois Politics

This just in from the New Humanist - News in London

Christ would not vote for Barack Obama

–Illinois Republican U.S. Senate candidate Alan Keyes referring to his opponent Barack Obama because of Obama’s pro-choice stance.

Read story here

AKMA outdoor wifi update

Seems AKMA’s case is now closed.

rss for haloscan comments

Warning: If you don’t read more than a couple of blogs, or if you don’t care about what’s in the comments at your favorite blogs, feel free to skip this post.

I use bloglines to track blogs and wikis that I’m interested in so I don’t have to go to each website individually every day to see if there’s anything new. Plus, it would be hard to remember what I’ve already seen and thus figure out what IS new and what isn’t. Bloglines is just one of many aggregators that are available to do this sort of thing. Some people use it to track headlines and stories from their favorite news sources as well (Common Dreams headlines are at the bottom of my sidebar, for example).

Anyway, it seems that at many blogs, the real action happens in the comments. I’ve been wondering if there was a way to use bloglines to track comments as well. Early on I figured it out for my own blog using haloscan comments by subscribing to this feed: http://www.haloscan.com/members/rss.php?user=TedErnst (that’s also how I generate the Recent Comments in the sidebar). It occured to me today that I could also subscribe to a feed like that for other people’s blogs if they’re using haloscan. How do I figure out what their user name is?

Here’s what I did:

• I went to easily amazed first.
  
• I clicked on the first post’s comments link and a javascript window popped up with just comments from that post.
  
• Then I clicked on the permalink for the first comment and found this: http://www.haloscan.com/comments/ashcooper/109390322326650529#132342
• The answer I’m seeking is the “ashcooper” part of that address. I then checked out by putting http://www.haloscan.com/members/rss.php?user=ashcooper into my address bar and sure enough, that’s the RSS feed I’m looking for.

I did the same thing at parking lot and came up with http://www.haloscan.com/members/rss.php?user=salishsea

If you use an agregator, try this out on your favorite haloscan commented blog.

8. The Principle of Wise Action 2

At tonight’s weekly meeting (at my house every Thursday, everyone invited), Steve and Gerry and I looked at one of the Principles of Valid Action:

“You will make your conflicts disappear when you understand them in their ultimate root, not when you want to resolve them.”

We had also discussed this one before, but every repetition can go deeper, plus the people were different.

One central question tonight was “How do I know when I comprehend?” It seems that this cannot necessarily be immediately known before pushing towards a solution without comprehension, but that progress can be made bit by bit, thus encouraging further progress (if I’m habitually passive agressive right off the bat, it’s progress if I delay that passive agressive response for a while, even if I don’t know how to replace it with anything yet and it comes out anyway).

This lead to another question: “How can I actually gain comprehension?” Some answers came out, such as: time, brainstorming ways of behaving, trial & error and practice.

What comes up for you with all of this?

Arrested at Ground Zero

—– Original Message —–
From: Ted Glick
To: ufpj-news@yahoogroups.com
Sent: Wednesday, September 01, 2004 1:00 PM
Subject: Arrested at Ground Zero

It is hard not to believe that yesterday’s illegal and repressive arrest of approximately 200 peaceful sidewalk walkers across the street from Ground Zero was not ordered from the top. And by top I don’t mean Chief Ray Kelly or Mayor Bloomberg. I mean the honchos of the Republican Party.

Maybe they wanted to send a message: stay away from that location during our convention. That’s our prop to use as we see fit.

They obviously didn’t see the tragic irony in what happened. Ground Zero is a sacred piece of land for many Americans, a place where we should rededicate ourselves to the struggle for justice and democracy for all. Ultimately, this is the only defense against the terrorism of the dispossessed or those angered by the USA’s increasingly militaristic and repressive go-it-alone role in the world.

And yet yesterday it was the backdrop for one more demonstration project of 21st century police state tactics.

I was one of those swept up by these arrests. I had gone to Ground Zero with no intention of getting arrested. Fifteen minutes before I was, I had spoken with a friend explaining to her that I just wasn’t moved to do so on this occasion, although I’ve been arrested 10 times in the past for nonviolent civil disobedience actions of some kind.

What I was prepared to do was to walk peacefully on the sidewalk in support of this War Resisters League-initiated action. And when a white-shirted policeman spoke over a bullhorn about 4:00 p.m. telling us that although this demonstration did not have a permit, everything would be OK if we walked in ones and twos on the sidewalk and obeyed traffic signals, the walk began. About 200 of us crossed Church St. headed across Fulton towards Broadway, where we intended to head uptown.

But within a couple of minutes we were stopped by a police line across the middle of the sidewalk and by several rows of police in the street. A few minutes later a four foot high orange mesh fence was rolled out and everyone who happened to be within this half block was trapped, unable to leave.

No warning was ever given that if people did not leave they would be arrested. No opportunities were given to leave despite requests by a number of people to do so. The arrests just started happening as the first paddy wagon rolled up.

Over the course of the next 15 hours that I spent in the holding areas at Pier 57 and 100 Centre St., I would learn of similar, smaller, police state actions. There were the three people who were putting on an anti-Bush skit on the sidewalk on 7th Avenue who were illegally arrested as they exercised their first amendment right to free expression. I was told about six young people who painted their faces white to symbolize sickness and death and who were arrested while riding the subways. There was the man from Istanbul, Turkey who was arrested with me at Ground Zero as he was distributing religious tracts to us peaceniks. The list can go on.

It was not fun being transported in the paddy wagon to Pier 57 with my hands handcuffed behind my back. It was not fun being shut in with 40 other men in a 25 by 15 foot pen with three short hardwood benches and a concrete floor to sit or lie on. It was not fun being forced into a small, caged space on a police bus, handcuffed again, with another arrestee for our bumpy ride from Pier 57 to 100 Centre St. It was not fun being held there in a similar type of holding cell arrangement or getting very little sleep in its bright, noisy and uncomfortable confines.

But it was clear that the dehumanizing and intimidating treatment we received was not having its desired effect. People’s spirits were high and the solidarity among us was palpable. Anger was the dominant emotion among almost all of us, anger at the violation of our rights and the treatment we were given.

I look forward to participation in the certain lawsuit against the city of New York and, I hope, the National Republican Party. These police state actions cannot be allowed to pass without a strong, public response.

You too can be liberated!

Via Mark Dilley:

1. The Principle of Adaptation

At last Thursday’s weekly meeting of the Humanist Movement at my house, we looked at one of the Principles of Valid Action:

“To go against the evolution of things is to go against yourself.”

Julie and Gerry and John and I went back and forth between talking about what this means for society and what it means in our own personal lives. There were examples about letting go when it was clear that something we want is just not to be. Maybe one of the others will remember more than I do and will share.

What about you? Do you have an example of this principle at play in your own life?