thenatureofmind

A Culture of Lying: Hillary's trip to Bosnia

The recent media flap about Hillary and Bill's lie about the events surrounding Hillary's trip to Bosnia underscores again, the pervasiveness of the Culture of Lying. In this article, the headline is "Clinton misstates wife's Bosnia Tale". Note the word "misstates". They didn't say lie. Look around and see how often the word "lie" is used in the media. People "misstate" things, they even "misspeak" at times. They never lie. The word "lie" has been effectively expunged from the national vocabulary. If there is no word for an untruth, there are no untruths and if there are no untruths, there are no truths. It is all a game to see whose propaganda is more effective. The truth is what you can get away with. No wonder the American people have lost their way. We have a culture of national secrecy so extreme, that even the people elected to represent us really have no idea what is really going on. To conceal their own inability to find the truth, they perpetuate the culture of lying.

Clinton misstates wife's Bosnia tale

A Culture of Lying: The McCain Family Recipes

It was discovered recently that the "McCain family Recipes" posted on the McCain family website were in fact lifted verbatim from the food network. A tempest in a teapot for sure, but in the aftermath of the flap, a staffer was fired for doing this. Clearly, John and Cindy McCain knew from the start that these were not family recipes because they did not provide them to the staffer in question. So they knew, assuming that they had knowledge of their own web site that the whole thing was a lie to begin with. That in fact, in Washington and in the broader American culture, lying is the business of the day. There is in the whole culture a confusion of truth with PR. The media culture that has honed the art of creating illusion is in fact a culture of lying. Truth has nothing to do with it.

Something Fishy In McCain "Family Recipes"

A Culture of Lying: The government creates a group of "Objective" analysts to deceive the public about the war in Iraq

In this lead article in todays New York Times is detailed the Pentagons 2005 program to program a group of retired military officers to serve as military experts to the media in a blatant attempt to deceive the public.

Behind Military Analysts, the Pentagon’s Hidden Hand

There were Orders to Follow....

In this New York Editorial are laid out in summary the crimes of John Yoo who as a lawyer for the Department of Justice (is that an oxymoron) laid out the (supposedly) legal framework that would allow the United States to torture and even kill prisoners. Ironically, John C. Yoo is now a professor of law and the University of California at Berkeley. He is busy teaching young kids how to subvert the law.

There were Orders to Follow....

Exporting Terror

U.S. Is Top Arms Seller to Developing World

Gitmo: A National Disgrace

From the New York Times Editorial Page...

The Guantánamo camp was created on a myth — that the American judicial system could not handle prisoners of “the war against terror.” It was built on a lie — that the hundreds of detainees at Gitmo are all dangerous terrorists. And it was organized around a fiction — that Mr. Bush had the power to create this rogue system in the first place....

Gitmo: A National Disgrace

Like an Illusion

  Like an Illusion 
  Originally uploaded by waywuwei

Whirling in the ocean of samsara
Are the myriad thoughts of love and hate.
Once you know they have no nature.
Then everywhere is the land of gold, my child.

If on all things, like an illusion,
One meditates, like an illusion,
True Buddhahood, like an illusion,
Will come to pass, due to devotion.
- The Dakini Naguma

Phenomena appear and yet have no true nature.
Immature beings take them for real
And are confused.
Appearances do not truly exist!
E MA HO!
- Khyungpo Naljor

But what does it mean to say that phenomena are like an illusion?

The Tibetan word for 'like an illusion' (sgyu ma lta bu) occurs frequently in Buddhist writings. It has become the norm to translate the word sgyu ma as 'illusion' as I have done here for poetic feeling, although that is perhaps not a completely accurate translation. 'Illusion' in English suggests a fancy, something imagined, nothingness. In Tibetan, however, sgyu ma is closer in meaning to 'magical scene'. A magician, given his skill, the right tools, and and a certain environment, will create a 'magical scene'. This magical scene is like an illusion in the sense that it has no inherent nature and simply arises in dependence upon causes and conditions.... The appearance arises in dependence upon his mental preconceptions and other causes and conditions. However, his 'fall' is not to be judged too harshly because his tendency to grasp at appearances has developed into a habit over many lifetimes. He fails to see the lack of inherent existence in appearance and thus believes in their reality.

From Like an Illusion by Nicole Riggs

Torture: It's effect on the torturers

Donald Rumsfeld once wondered aloud whether we were creating more terrorists than we were killing. In counterinsurgency doctrine, that is precisely the right question. Victory in this kind of war comes when the enemy loses legitimacy in the society from which it seeks recruits and thus loses its “recuperative power.”

The torture methods that Tenet defends have nurtured the recuperative power of the enemy. This war will be won or lost not on the battlefield but in the minds of potential supporters who have not yet thrown in their lot with the enemy. If we forfeit our values by signaling that they are negotiable in situations of grave or imminent danger, we drive those undecideds into the arms of the enemy. This way lies defeat, and we are well down the road to it.

-Charles C. Krulak, commandant of the Marine Corps from 1995 to 1999, and Joseph P. Hoar, commander in chief of U.S. Central Command from 1991 to 1994

‘Torture Betrays Us’

 

Free Aung San Suu Kyi

This is something long overdue. Aung San Suu Kyi has consistently taken a non-violent position, simply requesting dialog with the rulers of her country. Her payment has been solitary confinement. 59 world leaders have sent a letter to Than Shwe the senior General in Burma's government. He should read it and listen to the plea contained therein.
Letter to Burma

The End/The Beginning: Time to Wake Up

Almost 2 years ago I started this blog as a way of asking questions about what is going on in our world. What was it about the way we think that dictates a world where war, torture, starvation, disease and genocide can hold sway? In the first post I asked these questions:

I look at the news and wonder what could the protagonists be thinking. Ariel Sharon, George Bush, Sadam Hussein. Are they just caught up in a conceptual universe that they confuse with the real one and by that confusion forget that they have a choice? Are they like most of the earth's inhabitants, just robots programmed to act according to pre-programmed cerebral constructs that dictate actions within a narrowly prescribed set of choices?

What is the program?

Who is the programmer?

How did it get this way?

What do you do when you wake up?

Over those two years I drifted from the questioner of the thought process to the witness of the fundamental inhumanity I was seeing every day. In particular it was the egregious and unrepentant use of torture by the government of the United States that appalled me.

But the time has come to let the other groups which are following and publicizing this issue carry on the fight and to return to what I see as the main problem confronting us as a race of beings populating the planet: our minds and our unconscious assumptions which dictate our actions and our folly. It's time to wake up!