Samurai no Kokorō-e: Precepts of the Samurai
From “Flashing Steel” by Masayuki Shimabukuro and Lenard J. Pellman
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October 2007 archive
Oct 29 2007
Bushido: The Way of the Warrior
Oct 29 2007
My Personal Take On Why The Netroots Are Becoming Irrelevant
I realize that is a heavy statement. Here’s the good news: it’s not too late to turn this ship around given the primary characteristics members of the activist netroots community share: bravery, commitment, follow-through. So what’s the problem? In a nutshell: both a lack of real leaders as well as a lack of willingness to explore what leadership is about. More below.
Oct 29 2007
NANCY PELOSI ARRESTED FOR LOITERING!!!
If Nancy Pelosi were poor and sleeping on my sidewalk, she’d be arrested for loitering. But because she has $125 million bucks in the bank, and a sign on the door of her office reading “Speaker of the House,” it’s called “government.”
–Compound F
Nancy Pelosi’s statement about war protestors being arrested for loitering exhibited frustration at her base’s desire to end the evil in Iraq and also struck a rather authoritarian chord. While she voted against funding, she is obviously deeply conflicted about her commitments to the Constitution, oversight, and basic ethics. The same can be said of Congress as a whole. I hope we can agree that lying one’s way into an aggressive war in which a million people have been killed for the purposes of resource theft can be easily categorized as “evil.”
Evil is a loaded concept, so let me pare it down. Evil is not “out there” as a mythic, religious, or supernatural force. While I insist on looking inward to find evil, I also don’t care for the “empirical” notion that Good and Evil can be adequately represented by a continuum of pleasure and pain. I prefer the more philosophical or moral version in which evil is related to the intent to do harm.
Oct 29 2007
When Mercenary Armies Go Crazy
One of the things that always troubled me about the application of the term “Machiavellian” to the zany antics of the Bush misadministration is the extent to which Rovian Math – and even Cheneyian Cloak & Daggerism – ignores the master manipulator’s precepts. Indeed, like a conservative Christian who cherry-picks Leviticus, the architects of the failed philosophy of neoconservatism ignored some of the Prince’s very clear warnings about things like rulers relying on hired soldiers to look out for their interests – and look at the quagmire of black water it’s gotten us into.
Join me, if you will, in the Cave of the Moonbat, where tonight we’ll look into another occasion in which the use of mercenaries has bitten an empire in the ass. As usual, we Americans are by no means the first to experience the sort of happening-since-at-least-the-time-of-Rome setback that so shocks (shocks!) the neocons every time one of them so predictably comes to pass.
Oct 29 2007
LiveBlog with Aidan Delgado
OK – so here we go.
I don’t have a lot prepared to say up top here. I just want to welcome Aidan Delgado and give a brief intro. He will be posting here as TheObjector.
Aidan Delgado joined the Army Reserve in 2001 and was sent to Iraq in March 2003. He was assigned to the 320th Military Police Company where he worked as a mechanic and also as a radio operator. He spent 1 year in Iraq – 6 months at Tallil Airbase outside Nasiriyah and 6 months at Abu Ghraib. As a Buddhist he soon found that being in the Army and witnessing the inhumanity of war and its effects on his fellow soldiers, and of course the Iraqis, violated all his beliefs and principles. He decided he could not be a willing participant any longer so he turned in his weapon and filed for Conscientious Objector status. His book tells about everything he saw and felt and how difficult it was to go on living and working with most of the soldiers in his unit once he made the decision to become an Objector. It is a really amazing story of courage and compassion. Highly recommended.
You can read more about the book here: Review
Click the book cover to purchase from the publisher, Beacon Press.
Here is Aidan’s website with a lot more information and links.
Without further ado, I’ll open the floor, I mean blog, to questions. Post your comments at any time and Aidan can work his way down the page to reply.
Oct 29 2007
Is It Now?
Docudharma is subtitled, “Blogging the Future”. I’ve written before that, to me, that phrase means that this blog is dedicated to the construction or at least discovery of the Next Big Thing, the next world-view, the post-post modernism that will become the world we live in, the culture we inhabit, after the worn-out hand-me-down culture that we call “late twentieth century America” is finally tossed in the hamper. Of course, Docudharma is not unique in this venture; much of the blogosphere is committed to it, if not so explicitly.
However, I want to suggest that we cannot blog the future until we understand the present, and I don’t think we understand the present yet. I don’t think we know what the first decade of the twentieth-first century “meant” yet. We know it was a disaster. We know it was a cheat; a cheap trick. We know that because of George Bush and 9/11, in that order, the decade that was supposed to bring us flying cars instead brought us faith-based everything. We know that something went wrong.
But I don’t think the narrative that a country tells itself about where it is, is, yet. We don’t have a story for when we are.
Oct 28 2007
A Wedding
They came from different places . . . different as much in how they lived their lives as in where they lived them.
Debbie’s cousin, Laurie, cancer survivor, came from Hesperia, CA. Better here than in fire country. And Debbie’s twin brother Jim, a lawyer, and his new bride Nooshin came from near the La Brea tar pits. So there was some tension about back home.
Robyn was supremely thrilled that people came from Oregon. Her sister Jan, a cardiologist from Corvallis, and Jan’s son Ian, newly graduated from Santa Clara and embarking on an internship in PR with the University of Washington athletic department, and Robyn would see each other for the first time since 1993. They were all younger back then. We were pretty much different people on that occasion.
And there were some amazing women and men, who happen to be friends, who had been invited. There could be . . . and will be . . . a paragraph (and more) written about each and everyone of them of them, but not here, and not now. These people were Debbie’s and Robyn’s colleagues at Bloomfield College, their family at this time in our lives, their new cousins and brothers and sisters, nieces and nephews. And there were a couple of students, one of who was taking the ‘official’ photos (which have not been received yet, but which will be shown when they become available), witnesses from another viewpoint…another world. And they brought with them children from still another.
Learning was going to take place.
Oct 28 2007
No Centennial for Indian Territory
“Brand new state, Brand new state, gonna treat you great!
Gonna give you barley, carrots and pertaters,
Pasture fer the cattle, Spinach and Termayters!
Flowers on the prairie where the June bugs zoom,
Plen’y of air and plen’y of room,
Plen’y of room to swing a rope!
Plen’y of heart and plen’y of hope!
“The whole management of Indians has been abnormal . . . Everything is controlled by arbitrary laws and regulations, and not by moral, social, or economic principles.”
Oct 28 2007
Urgent: An Innocent Man is Dying [Updated]
You can help save an innocent man’s life.
His Guantanamo detainee ID number is 654. His first Combatant Status Review Tribunal (CSRT) unanimously concluded there was no evidence he was ever an “enemy combatant”, and yet he has languished in isolation and sensory deprivation for 5 years in notorious Camp 6 at Guantanamo Prison in a steel windowless room, with no charges ever brought against him.
Forty-five year old Abdul Hamid al-Ghizzawi was diagnosed with hepatitis B and tuberculosis over a year ago. Amnesty International has issued a worldwide alert, as his condition has deteriorated significantly, and the prison authorities refuse to allow treatment. Please read the following and consider contacting the authorities indicated. A man’s life is at stake… and a country’s soul. [Update at end of essay]
Oct 28 2007
HUGE live blogging DocuDharma News!
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Aidan Delgado, author of The Sutras of Abu Ghraib: Notes from a Conscientious Objector in Iraq, will be online at DocuDharma today, Sunday, October 28th at 9 PM Eastern to talk about the book and his experiences in Iraq.
The son of a diplomat, he spent his childhood and teen years overseas. He lived in Thailand, Senegal, and Egypt. He signed a contract to enlist in U.S. Army Reserves on 9\/11.
Enlisted as a mechanic in a military police company, when his unit was assigned to Abu Ghraib his Arabic language skills became especially valuable. He converted to Buddhism just before his training. The book (reviewed by On The Bus) is the account of his experiences as a soldier and his struggle to achieve conscientious objector status.
Oct 28 2007
Four at Four
Good afternoon. Today marks the last weekend Four at Four, at least for a while. After today, the series will be Monday through Friday only.
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The Independent reports Top Kenyan nature reserve under threat. “Little disturbs the tranquillity of the Tana Delta. As the deep orange sun sets above Kenya’s largest wetlands hippos wallow in the shallows, crocodiles slide off the banks into the brown river, while terns and whistling teals circle above. It is one of Kenya’s most important natural reserves and very soon it could all be gone. ¶ Plans have been drawn up to turn part of the delta into Kenya’s largest sugar plantation – an 80,000 acre area that could produce 100,000 tons of sugar a year and bring 20,000 jobs to a region where most people do not have jobs. Conservationists are alarmed. They warn that the plantation will destroy the wetlands and with it the habitats of dozens of species of bird”. -
The New York Times reports Indonesia seeks allies for pay-for-forests plan. “Determined to lead the discussion on climate change among developing nations, the Indonesian government spent much of the past week recruiting countries to join it in pressing richer nations to provide incentives to reduce carbon emissions. ¶ President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono made a direct plea on Wednesday at the start of a two-day gathering of 40 environment ministers near this capital, a precursor to the United Nations Climate Change Conference to be held in Bali in December. ¶ The environment minister of Indonesia, Rachmat Witoelar, said earlier this month that he wanted rich countries to pay up to $20 a hectare, or 2.47 acres, to preserve its dwindling forests.”
There’s more below the fold, including stories about the United States’ next nuclear warhead program in Texas, a brief Guns of Greed, and ‘bonus’ story about studying factory farm pollution. Plus my essay from yesterday, A Tale of Two Iraqs, may also be of interest.