Officer Cartman: "You will respect my authority!" (Runescaper443*)
Occupy Los Angeles has cooperated with police requests on where to squat and what space to leave open. Amazingly, things have remained peaceful. Usually, the LAPD is eager to riot, arrest, and brutalize. Fellow at work forces in New York, Boston, San Francisco, Yemen, Egypt, Syria, Greece, Saudi Arabia, Iran, and other places that feel the Arab Spring resonate with the American Fall. The police see to it because the motto of a police state is "We don't want to have to tell you twice." You have no rights -- unless you assert them. What gets into Little Eichmanns/Officer Cartmans? It is a different view of the world from that side of the line, where punitive, obedient, conservative, oppression, and (often) hypocrisy rules. Many officers are ex-military or active-reserve agents of the state. They are trained to humiliate, brutalize, and kill civilians in Afghanistan, Iraq, Pakistan, Northern Africa, and in other secret "kinetic actions." They take that training into American society saying, "I fought in Afghanistan for your free speech, so the h*ll if I'm going to stand here and let you mouth off!" Officer, isn't that a contradiction? "You will respect my authority!" Deploy pepper spray, baton, Taser, tear gas, less-than-lethal projectile shotgun, disorienting EMF emitter, microwaves, semi-automatic handgun, automatic weapons, water canons at will. Why? It is because, as we learn from an observation by the Dead Kennedys, "Police can riot all that they please."
Diverse issues invite diverse solutions at Occupy LA; clip from "Hippie Infestation."*Section 107 of the Copyright Act of 1976: "Allowance is made for 'fair use' for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship, and research. Fair use is a use permitted by copyright statute that might otherwise be infringing. Non-profit, educational, or personal use tips the balance in favor of fair use."
(W.W. Norton & Company)
Rarely can we date with any precision the ebbs and flows of scientists’ research styles or intellectual approaches. Yet these transitions -- the how’s and why’s behind major shifts in a scientific field’s reigning questions and methods -- have long held a special fascination for me. We see laid bare in these moments a messy alchemy, intermixing the world of institutions with the world of ideas. Brilliant insights and dazzling discoveries take their place alongside political decisions, funding battles, personal rivalries, and cultural cues. These many ingredients combine to make one agenda seem worth pursuing in a particular time and place -- and worth teaching to students -- while quietly eclipsing other questions or approaches that had beckoned with equal urgency only a few years earlier. More
First, the most common question: “It’s not a concert, so no one is headlining.”So what is it?
This weeklong art event, which creates a temporary city of 50,000 in one of the harshest places on Earth, is an experience. It’s a trip!
For sterile stats on its origins (1996 and on a California beach), see Wikipedia.
The location is one of the most unlikely places to party on the planet, a desert of fine almost wispy white sand. It is three hours outside of Reno, Nevada. Nothing, and I really mean nothing (neither plant nor animal) is there most of the year.
Then the Burning Man crew comes in, weeks before the event. They lay out a clock-like grid for the temporary city, which partially wraps around a playa of art, a wooden man who stands ready to burn, and a temple that makes me cry each time I enter it. More
Burning Man from 373 miles above Earth: A European space satellite took photos of the 2011 Burning Man [Labor Day week] festival in the Nevada desert.(CSM) Burning Man is a weeklong art and self-expression festival that meets every year around Labor Day. This year, it runs from Aug. 29 to Sept. 5. Attendance was capped at 50,000, and the event sold out in July. This year marks the 25th anniversary... The event began modestly in 1986, when a handful of friends torched an 8-foot (2.4-m) wooden man on a San Francisco beach. More
(englishrussia.com)
The author of one of the most surprising and candid books on the "Buddhist" spiritual quest one may ever read (One Night's Shelter) is by Ven. Rahula. He is a former resident of West Virginia's Bhavana Society. He was once in line to succeed as its abbot when the noted elderly Sri Lankan scholar-practitioner Bhante G (author of Mindfulness in Plain English) stepped down. But he returned to the call of the open road after many years.
Jim attended Woodstock ("500,000 people... Lucky for them I went, or it would have only been 499,999"). He said he kept finding God everywhere -- except "he kept ditching me." He spent a year of his life making a macrame couch. He was once traded from his commune to another commune for two goats and a Donovan record. Jim once claimed that instead of finding NIRVANA, his 1960's experiences only left him with recurring flashbacks of the original Mouseketeers appearing as visions hatching out of seedpods.
(MajesticFilm/Flickr.com)
Enlightenment comes to Talbichl. Followers of Bhagwan Amrita ("Blessed Nectar") move from Berlin to the green Bavarian province with children in tow. They are going to create a special "treatment center." Primal scream therapy, whole grain meals...are all that stand between them and the normal family little Lili dreams of.
Lili [Lisa?], sitting in a tree like a homesick deva, feels all alone in her Scandinavian family
Bavarian vimana or castle (naerairtravels.com)
VIMANA: a Sanskrit word with several meanings ranging from celestial mansion, platform, palace, or temple to mythological flying machines described in the Indian epics; an akasha-deva vehicle or "chariot of the gods" is capable of traveling through the air. While Indian mythology speaks of the devas as possessing rapid self-moving chariots or vehicles with which they traverse space, deva or devi was often used as an honorific by ancient Indians for their highly intellectual, extremely scientific forefathers of now forgotten antiquity. 
So vimanas as those thought to have been used by Atlanteans are spoken of as being self-moving and carrying their occupants through the air (cf SD 2:427-8). In the Ramayana, aerial vehicles are also mentioned as being used by the rakshasas (asuras or "anti-devas") of Sri Lanka; Ravana's vimana was called Pushpaka.
Actor Peter Coyote suggested we meet for this interview at his home north of San Francisco. Nicknamed “the Treehouse,” it has a striking view of Mount Tamalpais and is close to Golden Gate National Recreation Area and San Francisco Zen Center’s Green Gulch Farm. It is a long way from Hollywood, where Coyote has worked since 1980, appearing in more than ninety films and television programs. He says that he is “a Zen Buddhist student first, an actor second.” He will be ordained as a Zen priest in August.
Coyote has had an eclectic life, having done everything from farming to being a stockbroker. A self-described “socialist radical hippie anarchist environmentalist,” he’s seldom without an opinion on an issue and never one to hold back his views. Born Rachmil Pinchus Ben Mosha Cohon in New York City in 1941, Coyote took his stage name from an experience he had while taking peyote in the Southwest. He has been socially and politically engaged since the age of fourteen, when he volunteered for the Adlai Stevenson presidential campaign in Englewood, New Jersey. Coyote’s passion for progressive reform continued at Grinnell College in Iowa, where, during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, he helped organize a group of twelve students to travel to Washington, D.C., and protest nuclear testing. They fasted for three days outside the White House before President John F. Kennedy invited them in to talk with National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy.
After college Coyote joined the San Francisco Mime Troupe, a guerrilla street-theater group still in existence today. He and some of his fellows from the mime troupe went on to form the Diggers, an anarchist group that “acted out” its ideas of what culture should be, questioning the core values of capitalism and distributing free food to runaways in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco, sometimes feeding hundreds of people a day. They also ran a Free Store, a Free Clinic, and even (briefly) a Free Bank. The Diggers evolved into the Free Family, a network of communes around the country pursuing an alternative economy and culture.
Coyote is the author of the memoir Sleeping Where I Fall: A Chronicle, a portion of which won a Pushcart Prize. A new book, about what he calls the “present mass hypnosis afoot,” is currently in revision. More
The 14th Dalai Lama -- who only represents a former theocratic kingdom/mountain empire (that in ancient times extended its influence west to Israel and south to Bangladesh), which follows a small but very influential brand of Buddhism called Vajrayana or sometimes Lamaism -- was on his way to Los Angeles when his doctor grounded him in Tokyo, a great place to recover from any mysterious illness. Eh-hem. Well, we can only hope he's safe. Will he make it to USC by Tuesday? Probably not, students, so get ready for a stand in. (Are these tickets refundable a some sort of show is still put on?)
There is no "avalanche of halos" the way there is at the Vatican since Pope John Paul II started handing out blessedness and sainthood (canonizing more people in one papacy than in all the papacies before him combined) making the Church more cosmopolitan but also making the faith more irrelevant. We obviously do not have more "real" saints, just a cheapening of the label. Los Angeles Catholics were blase -- unless they were in Rome for the beatification -- over the dead pope's new title "blessed."
Pope John Paul II beatified at the Vatican
The beatification ceremony in St. Peter's Square with Jewish leaders' support marks an important step on the late pope's path to sainthood. Crowds at the Vatican
Three days of hippie camping in Malibu to talk all things organic, gardening, farming, and green living -- now that sounds like a great time if it weren't so cold at night. But it's great by day!
Beavis and Butthead couch rocking (metalsucks.com)
Big 4 Festival (OCweekly's Heard Mentality)
There's more chance that outdoor Buddhist meditation is going on in honor of the Mother Goddess, the divine feminine (Kwan Yin, Tara, God's wife Asherah, Inana, Diana, Mother Mariam, Esther or Easter's namesake). So west we go, laughing along the way to here NPR advertising a death metal fest and making no mention of the annual Earth consciousness-raising that is Topanga.
