Little yellow teacup

Saw this for sale at my favorite Chinese restaurant and could not resist it.  The dragon has a red ball with lines coming out from it, apparently this symbolizes a flaming pearl which represents good luck and wealth.  The dragon in Tibetan lore is called Druk; Trungpa Rinpoche is known to his students, for example, as the Druk Sakyong or Dragon Earth Protector.  The dragon in Chinese lore is a symbol of imperial authority, as well as the ruler of water and weather.

Below is a closeup of said red ball.

 

Padma Sambhava

A statue made by a local Buddhist practitioner...Padma Sambhava or Guru Rinpoche is revered in Tibet as culture hero and founder of Tibetan Buddhism.  His story could be a great movie, I wonder if anyone has attempted it.  Along with Yeshe Tsogyal, his consort, he had quite an extraordinary life filled with adventures and dangers, as he vied with the established Bon shamanistic religion for the favor of the king.

Fierce Guard Dog

Polar Bear the warehouse guard dog, fangs and all, so ugly he is beautiful.  Ready to run down trespassers and corner them for the police to catch, but lovable to those he knows.  He had a mate for a while but she ran away when her owner left town.  Not much of a tail so he wags his whole butt when happy.  Nice enough so far not to bother my caged parrots I carry into work everyday. 

Van Jones Out

It is wonderful how how Associated Press can "report" the resignation of Van Jones, a self-declared Communist and Marxist, without mentioning those two words. If Jones had not resigned they would undoubtedly have continued to bury the controversy he aroused, as one after another of his past statements was uncovered. Obviously AP is still acting as Obama's watchdog, under-reporting his flaws and over-reporting his virtues. Even Wikipedia froze editing of their Van Jones article last night, and refused to allow anyone to describe Jones as a Communist.

Of course liberals don't think we should be afraid of Communists in our government anymore...but the obvious response to that is the fundamental hostility of Marxism to a limited concept of government as embodied in our Constitution. Marxist theory presupposes the supremacy of government in all phases of life, until a perfect state of communism arises of course, when society becomes classless and stateless. Of course, until that utopia comes, the iron hand of of the state must be wielded with harsh discipline to obliterate the parasitic bourgeoisie.

One cannot but suspect liberals don't care about the Constitution either, every day they are inventing new "rights" government bureaucrats must insure...the right to force others to provide people with anything that pops into their heads, food, shelter, health care, a job, dignity and so on. As if people were so guileless they had no idea how to go about providing these things for themselves. The only real rights we have are those that do not coerce others into taking care of us, such as the right to free speech and press, bear arms, life, liberty, property, due process and so on. All these other so-called rights are just an excuse to create a super Nanny state run by omnipotent bureaucrats. All powers not granted to the federal government are supposed to be reserved to the citizenry.

Nathaniel Hawthorne Remembered

I thought I knew my Nathaniel Hawthorne stuff but upon rereading The Blythedale Romance I discovered to my chagrin that the story was nearly new to me after all these years...but it was great to finally nail it down and figure it out once and for all...I used to think the town of Blythe, California, on I-10 on the Colorado River was named after the novel...no such luck, it was named after a gold prospector...oh well, another unverified fantasy exploded...anyway, to get back to The Blythedale Romance, I was originally attracted to it as a historical study of one of the mid-19th century utopian communes, Brook Farm, of which Hawthorne was the treasurer for a while apparently. There is a great blog commentary on the novel located at

http://zhiv.wordpress.com/2009/04/17/the-blithedale-romance-nathaniel-hawthorne/

One of Hawthorne's contributions to psychology is his study of Hollingsworth, a monomaniac who resembles the True Believer Eric Hoffer went on to describe a hundred years later. Zenobia is an interesting study of an early feminist leader, erotic and assertive, who, however he dooms to self-destruction unrealistically. She was a bit airy-fairy, lightweight intellectual, and that bothered him...although one gets the impression such strong women frightened him. Not that he was adverse to creating strong female characters as Hester Prynne of The Scarlet Letter.

It is rather touching that Hawthorne was one of the first tree-huggers, he was virtually the only person of the day to oppose the building of the Erie Canal in New York for the sole reason that it would destroy the forest. And in The Blythedale Romance we find his protagonist climbing a pine tree to get away from it all in a treehouse made by an enveloping grapevine...this guy really was a tree-hugger. He was also very human in his patriotic appreciation of General McClellan's grandiose military parades at the start of the Civil War, thinking like the other Northerners that such a great organizer and disciplinarian would soon rout the Rebels...of course it turned out McClellan was not only an idiot, coward and traitor, plotting to remove Lincoln, and then trying to lose the Civil War altogether by planning to allow the South to secede and become independent...but old Hawthorne cheered him on in 1861 or 62, who can expect an old literary genius to be a good judge of generals???

So the Blythedale Romance has very little to do with utopianism, merely a few wry comments about his inability to be creative after working so hard at farm labor all day...he actually does defend his unnamed companions as having the best of motives to create something new and just to contribute to the world community, but leaves it at that and concentrates all his attention on the triumvirate of Hollingsworth, Zenobia and Priscilla...when you come down to it, rather ordinary people, except for intimations of Zenobia's wild side, which is never shown...so the plot just goes on to show how these three suffer the consequences of having rejected the protagonist: Hollingsworth who tried to bully him into becoming a mere follower, is reduced to social and political impotence at the end, Zenobia, who failed to appreciate our hero's ego and ideas, kills herself, and Priscilla, who fails to favorably react to our hero's attentions, has to become a mere emotional crutch to a broken Hollingsworth. Our hero is really both jealous of and afraid of Hollingsworth, it is said H is merely the combination of 3 or more real persons of the day such as Horace Mann and Emerson, but I think he has to be based mainly on one real person Hawthorne knew during his Brook Farm period, given Hawthorne's intense emotions describing this character...not sure who yet...

The Big O Express Presses on towards Trainwreck

Events may bring about the day when the charismatic demagogue will be shunned by everyone except Jeremiah Wright and Bill Ayers...unfortunately, this will only come about at the expense of the American people, when the Big O's administration fails to seriously confront Islamic terrorism, and we suffer the consequences. It is only a matter of time now...the clock is ticking...every tinpot dictator is grinning from ear to ear now that the socialist Democrats are running things...a great opportunity for everyone from Kim Jong-Il to the Castro brothers to run amok without fear of American opposition...of course how could a guy who thinks there is a language called Austrian and gives the British prime minister a bunch of unusable DVD's of American movies, have a chance in the real world of international politics?...not to mention his inability to stop apologizing for imaginary American faults every time he opens his mouth while overseas...an empty suit, inflated by the party-line doctrinaire media as the Savior...I guess we deserve what we get...

Get Your Wheelbarrow Ready

In the 1920's it is said Germans had to use wheelbarrows to take their money to the market to buy food, thanks to hyper-inflation...well we might as well get the wheels greased on our wheel barrels, because Obama's war on our economy is in full swing and he is spending money and printed greenbacks like there is no tomorrow...no acceptable tomorrow for our children to be sure...if we or they survive his soft-on-terrorists foreign policy...one wonders if this neo-Carter would even oppose an attack by some rogue state like Iran, Venezuela, Russia, Cuba, the list goes on...he wants to make friends with these monsters, and ditch our friends like Great Britain, Poland, Hungary...throw them to the lions in the name of better international relations with anyone who is anti-American...so get your wheelbarrows out and pump up the tire and remove the rust, you are going to need it to get to the nearest supermarket with your worthless dollars very soon...

Election 2008

What is amazing about this election was the ability of the Clinton Democrats to sabotage the economy with the sub-prime mortgage time bomb, which explodes at the end of the following Republican administration, ensuring a new Democratic one. McCain's failure to pin the tail on the donkey due to his populist stance should be shunned by Republicans from now on. And Dick Morris predicts The Great O will win a second term based on blaming his Depression-era first term on the Republicans as well. A great explanation of the liberal inspired sub-prime mess is at a site called Wolf Howling:
Take a look.

Conversations with Don Carlos

Far be it from me to drop names, but I did run into Carlos Casteneda while hiking in the Santa Monica Mountains in the late 70's...apparently we both liked to go there through the years and this time we just happened to meet. I knew what CC looked like, having attended his UCSB lecture around 1970, surrounded as he was by stern-looking local Chicano activists trying to bask in his glory. That was such a joke considering how anti-political the Don Juan teachings are. Campus political activists hated mystics and gurus who diverted people's attention away from supposed horrible social conditions to meditate on their navel and realize inner peace. And this was exactly what CC really represented to most hippies.

On this occasion in the morning I had driven up to Mulholland Drive and parked my pickup near Fireroad 25, which was my favorite jumping off place. I had come especially to practice some of Don Juan's teachings, believing them valid in those days. More specifically, I had come to try to "stop the world", which in real terms means stopping the mind, from a meditative point of view. I found myself a secluded spot off the main road and sat down for hours staring off to the east, down at Sullivan Canyon and the ridge beyond. At a certain point I seemed to achieve a certain stillness of mind combined with a sharp focusing of the view in front of me, (with a little chemical help I must admit, well, let us say, a BIG chemical help), and by the late afternoon, I got up and starting walking back in the direction of Mulholland Drive. At this point I met Carlos Castenada, accompanied by a young blonde woman, probably Kylie, one of the 4 or 5 gringa "witches" that formed the inner circle around CC from this time to his death in 1998. I recognized him right away, from the lecture, but did not show that I did. I recall how he joked in Santa Barbara how people thought he should have "long mystical feet", but being a short Peruvian with equally short feet, this was his way of kidding himself, which put people off their guard. "Anyone who makes a joke at their own expense cannot be a big liar" etc.

Anyway, I just nodded and maybe said hi and tried to walk by, being by this time worn out, dehydrated and hungry, but Carlos started talking to me. He claimed he wanted to know where the fireroad went. I really didn't know at that time, except that if you took it south and veered left you would end up, after following a narrow ridge, at Will Rogers State Park. But I knew you could take it to the right and arrive around Eagle Rock, a midpoint in the Santa Monica trail system, and from there you could find your way down to Sunset Blvd. near the ocean. So I just summerized all this by saying, "It goes to the ocean."

But then Carlos started arguing no, no, no that can't be true, and kept arguing and arguing. I just stared at him in surprise. I really didn't care. At this point I recalled an episode in one of CC's books where his supposed teacher Don Juan just looks at him and says something like, "You know I can't stand the sight of you." And CC starts whining until DJ pretends to take it back. Now I could understand this event quite well, as I was beginning to feel quite annoyed. But I did not say much, and walked away, feeling sorry for someone so cunningly obnoxious.

Since I had a buddhist teacher at that point, I was less likely to fall under his spell. Apparently CC started conducting classes at a Santa Monica bookstore around this time. It is a good thing I did not hear of it and feel tempted to participate. As it turned out in the succeeding years, during this teaching period Castenda created a classic cult consciousness among his students. Amy Wallace's The Sorceror's Apprentice is a must for an insight into the sick group psychology of those years. Geuter's Filming Castenda adds more data.

The positive result of this odd encounter was that I determined to find out once and for all where the fireroad went. So another weekend day I hiked south on Fireroad 25, veered right, and kept going down along some newly developed housing, and finally ended up at Sunset Dr. exactly at the Self Realization Fellowship lake/temple founded by Yogi Yogananda. This mystical place is only a stone's throw from the ocean. So I felt justified by my answer to Castenada after all. By this time it was near dusk and I had to call my brother to drive all the way from the San Fernando Valley to Pacific Palisades to pick me up and take me back to Mulholland Dr. so I could retreive my vehicle.

The Curse of the Prime Directive

Star Trek's big political statement revolves around the Prime Directive, especially in the Next Generation series. The essence of this law is that Federation star ships and personnel are forbidden to "interfere" with pre-warp drive cultures and planets. What this amounts to is an attempt to avoid contact with "primitive" people, for fear of altering their "sacred" path of evolution....as if such isolationism was possible in the Star Trek universe filled with money-grubbing Ferengi, haughty Cardassians, militaristic Romulans, war-crazed Klingons, and even uglier races in other quadrants. It's OK to study these backward races, but not help them in any way, or enlist them as trading partners or allies.

Such a policy would bring about the downfall of the Federation, of course. Other races would grab territory, trading rights to valuable resources, military bases, and enroll the subject peoples as slaves or soldiers. What the noble Federation turns up its nose at, its enemies will absorb and grow in strength and even diversity. The Federation will not bother to interact with these pre-warp drive cultures, leaving their fate to the tender mercies of the other advanced races it is in competition with. Such a move is like making sure Route 66, which brought many tourists to the West in the early Twentieth century, did not pass through quaint towns as Santa Fe or Indian reservations, for fear of changing them or giving them a chance to make some money. Instead it would wind through the most barren wasteland avoiding towns along the way, preventing them from benefiting from free cultural interchange with whoever wanted to travel there.

Obviously the idea behind the Prime Directive is that any contact between differing technological levels will result in the colonization of the weaker by the stronger. They will be made into a Protectorate at best. The weaker society has nothing to offer the stronger. Is this the view of human nature the idealistic Federation holds? Why not be up front and say, here we are, we want a relationship with your people, let's get started now instead of waiting until the inevitable future contact with ourselves or some other unsavory race that may decimate your planet just for fun.