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Lessons From Bengazi

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Hillary Clinton’s closing statements at the Bengazi hearing seized the high road. During eleven hours of redundant testimony, Mrs. Clinton educated Republican members regarding State Department operations and the proper boundaries between political and personal spheres. In summation, she offered that the problems that led to the death of four diplomats demanded consideration by policy makers. She hoped that such investigation would be conducted with an eye to problem solving, and that all involved would listen seriously to each other.

It is that last point that concerns me now. I did not watch the hearing, but what I observed in the excerpts was prosecutorial conduct that never would have been tolerated in a formal court of law. In a court-room setting, any judge – given the bulging case-loads created by Congressional refusal to empanel federal judges – would have allowed a defense team to raise objections to the relevancy of most of the questions asked by the panel, and prevented the questioners from interpreting testimony. As it is, the lack of a judicial figure in Congressional hearings allows license that was abused yesterday.

One of the most heart-breaking moments in Bill Clinton’s memoir concerns the suicide of Vince Foster, who was responsible for managing the White House relationship with the Whitewater investigators. In reflection, Mr. Clinton notes that the team of public servants he brought with him from Arkansas was simply unprepared for the destructive dynamic of Washington politics.

My concern at this time is that the fishing expedition engaged by the Bengazi panel will continue to be politicized. As with the violation of court orders that prohibited the release of illegally acquired videos of Planned Parenthood operations, I worry that the political operatives behind the Bengazi hearing will use the information they have gathered to attempt to break the will of those that associate with the Clintons.

This, to me, is intolerable – that popular politicians should find themselves ostracized by the threat that everyone in their personal circle can be caught up in the meat-grinder of a Congressional investigation. To prevent such abuse, I believe that Congress should be required to allow those testifying before it to request the presence of a federal judge to oversee the proceedings. If nothing else, that might motivate Congress to take action to fill the vacancies in the federal courts.

Christ Comes to Boyle Heights

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Take a risk for love? What do you mean? And end up looking like THAT guy? Bloody and torn, holes pounded in his flesh.

One of the most heart-rending stories I have heard was from Father Doyle, founder of Home-Boy Industries here in LA. One of the risks taken by the workers at Home-Boy is crossing lines to work with people from other gangs. They made a lot of friendships, and began to stand up for each other. Eventually the gangs began to enforce discipline on their own. In this story, a Hispanic man went down a dark alley one night and was beat up. The beating got out of control and ended in murder.

When Father Doyle went to the morgue, he was devastated to find that the man’s skull was completely broken. The head was swelled up to twice its normal volume. Father Doyle was at a loss to understand what could have moved anyone to continue beating someone like that, well after the point of death.

When I heard this story, I had a vision that the assailants had seen a halo around the victim’s head, and terrified of their own fate, had done their best to destroy it.

Talk about your “come to Jesus” moments. They’ll think about that for the rest of their lives, every time the deceased reaches his hand to them from heaven.

For whoever wants to save their life will lose it, but whoever loses their life for me will find it.

NIV Matt. 16:25

For in their sacrifice, just as Ezekiel, they are a physical realization of the sorrow that Christ endures in loving those that chose not to love themselves.

Long lay the world, in sin and error pining,
And then he came, and the soul felt its worth.

-Oh Holy Night

Do you not remember?

This is Power

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in 2002, Time magazine published a cover article that related the scientific consensus regarding the end of the universe. It was a terribly depressing outcome, with iron planets and neutron stars scattered across intergalactic space, all except the matter that was vacuumed up in black holes.

I was going through a really depressed stage of my life, and faced the strong urge to rebel against that outcome. One option was to take the day off from work to lie in bed. The other was to reach for another alternative. It came to me in this way: at the core of almost every galaxy is a super-massive black hole – an “Active Galactic Nucleus.” We know that galaxies are bound together in clusters, and every now and then pass through each other. Over a long enough period of time, it seemed to me that the AGN’s will eventually collide, spewing out the matter they have absorbed to initiate a new cycle of stellar evolution.

Then I thought: “Well, if that’s how stars get made in the end, maybe that’s how they got made to begin with. Maybe stars don’t come first, and then collide to form black holes. Maybe the black holes are made first, and the quasars we see in the earliest age of the universe are the signature of the light and matter created in that process.”

Scripture offers us three kinds of wisdom:

  • Regulation, the accumulated wisdom of what does and does not work in relationships.
  • Situational ethics, describing how the Divine presence led our ancestors out of trouble when they made mistakes.
  • Meaning, revealing the evolutionary process that provides understanding to guide our investments in the future.

When I look at the situation in Congress today, I see a terrible perversion of this process. I see:

  • In our penal code and permissive gun laws, a process that segregates our population into camps based upon fear, undermining relation.
  • A “survival of the fittest” mentality that insists that poverty is a sign of unfitness and wealth a measure of greatness. People that fall ill are consigned to misery, those that cannot master rapidly changing technology are pushed aside in the workplace, and those that do not subscribe to predatory management practices are ostracized.
  • The unchecked politics of terrorism, where those that resist the changing future throw legislative Molotov cocktails, threatening their opponents with impeachment, harassing civil servants and not-for-profit leaders, and obscuring or simply denying objective truth regarding the consequences of their policies on global climate change, economics, international relations and campaign finance reform.

I would like to be able to corner Rep. Chaffetz to ask, “Mr. Chaffetz, did you ever withdraw during ejaculation? Did you ever avoid sex while your wife was ovulating? If so, then you intentionally prevented the birth of a child. When do you intend to turn yourself in for manslaughter?”

I would like to be able to confront the Biblical literalists with the insight that the whole experience of the nation of Israel from Noah to Jesus was to demonstrate the inefficacy and injustice of fixed systems of laws. The Law of Moses was authorized by God, but it is not “God’s Law” because it condones murder, contrary to the experience of Cain and the teachings of Jesus. The only law that binds a Christian is the law of love, and when you attack and demean those that serve the disadvantaged, you violate that law.

He walked up the sidewalk, his mind whirling with the pattern of creation unfolded from beginning to end. But at the periphery of the beauty were the people that brought him forth but rejected him, and the women that he would serve but that had resolved to force him to comply with convention. Those stains threatened to spread.

In his mind’s eye, a light entered the atmosphere, rushing downwards, clouds rolling away from the super-heated air in its wake. It passed over his shoulder and slammed into the hills ahead, a huge cloud of dust engulfing the spring day that he walked through. In his mind, a great cry of fear arose.

“No. No. I choose that spring day. I choose life.”

Two months later, in the home of a woman that loved him, he found a newspaper open to an inside article that documented that a planet-killer asteroid had passed between the earth and the moon two months before.

That is power. It is power that arises from looking into the things that are wounded and seeing the possibility of their healing. It is to forgo destruction of that which is broken and ugly. It is to serve those that serve, rather than to be a servant to convention.

Rather than seeking glory, it is to be regulated by the sorrows of the world.

All males are created to change things. It is far easier to change things by breaking them that it is to create something new. We indulge the former in boys. It is time for you to be men. If you don’t like tet way the world is, give us concrete and documented demonstrations of what does work.

Otherwise, get out of the way.

Oh, Gosh

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One of the joys of dancing is that in caressing the air around people, they eventually come to realize that I’m clearing a space for them to manifest their strength and beauty. The most precious moments for me are those when I’ve lost track of the effort, just kind of puttering around the floor playing with my elbows, hips and knees, and I find myself wandering into a space where someone is really focused on understanding what is happening.

Usually they are off to the side, or sitting in lotus, or lying on the floor – but always with their eyes closed and a look of intense concentration on their faces. I come into their orbit and it’s like a force field comes up and I’m just compelled to address them.

It happened several times today – I had a really great experience at MovinGround and Ecstatic Dance LA. It was a lot of energy – roughly 4 hours on my feet, with another hour of rest. I also stubbed the nail on my right big toe, hard enough that it bled and looks completely ready to come off (it was pretty loose anyways).

But one encounter rises above the rest. The woman obviously had trained, her elegant features alight with pleasure as she moved the strong and slender body of a dancer. But she hooked me as I was puttering around, gliding through the other dancers. Noticing her attitude, I turned to face her from about four feet away, raised me hands to the heavens, and invoked my retinue. Slowly lowering my hands, I draped them all around her, opening my eyes to make certain that she was assimilating it well, and caught her peeking at me under her lashes. She quickly closed them in submission, and so I really went to work.

It starts with the motor sulci, a raising and lowering, stretching until the crown chakra opens. At this point I drop down into the heart, and I often get a surge of sexual energy, but I lift it back up until the heart and prefrontal lobe are enmeshed, then lift the crown chakra until it merges with my retinue.

I usually slip away at that point, but she stepped into the space I vacated. We didn’t flirt with our eyes, but followed the flow of energy leaving the fingers and running up our spines.

One of the joys of engaging a skilled dancer is that you can get really, really close without worrying about incongruous bumping and grinding. We got pretty deeply enmeshed, so I stretched it out around those that were close to us, finally flirting a little bit. We went on for several minutes until I found myself behind her, hand just millimeters from her back, caressing her heart chakra, and she just spread her arms and blocked my way. I stretched my arms as I dropped into a shallow lunge behind her, and she lowered her forearms until they rested against mine.

Contact dance can be physical or sublime, and this was definitely the latter. Just one or two points, a shoulder against the back, hips coming into contact as she pivoted behind me. Finally, when she lifted her leg to get around my crouch, I grabbed it and pressed her foot into my hip bone, reaching out with my left hand to accept her grip. She smiled in bemusement, not expecting this from an amateur, but rose to stand with both feet on my hips. Gripping her lower back, I stood.

It went on from there, never becoming overtly sexual. When we were done, I offered, “You’re an incredibly transparent person. Energy moves gracefully through you – you don’t grab on to it.” After she recognized the compliment, I said “No, thank-you for being you.”

Maybe I’ll see her again. I don’t know why, but most of the time, they don’t come back.

Confronting Fear

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Perhaps piqued by surveys that reveal that nearly half of all Republicans believe that our president is secretly a Muslim, Barack Obama has published a conversation with his favorite Christian author, Marilynne Robinson. The first half of the essay ends as a cliff-hanger, with Obama responding directly to Robinson’s declared pessimism with his own declaration of faith in the Christian virtue of doing quietly what is right. This practice is now his only explanation for why, despite appearing unwashed behind the ears, the candidate in 2008 became President. In retrospect, he now recognizes an inexplicable resonance with the small-town electorates that lead the primary schedule.

Eager for the conclusion, I did a number of online searches before returning to the New York Review and discovering that the transcript was a prepublication release for coverage to be completed on November 12. Intrigued by his celebration of Robinson, I followed the links to her recent reflection on Christianity and gun violence.

Since Roseburg, I have taken this topic up a number of times, arguing that both sound public policy (and other posts on 10/2 through 10/8) and Christian ethics requires that we improve our regulation of gun acquisition. But in reading Robinson’s essay, I was immediately disturbed. That essay has a subtly chiding tone, contrasting the rebelliousness of America’s modern gun culture with the patient and non-violent endurance of Christians confronting political persecution during both its early years and the Protestant reformation. It celebrates Calvin, who was the tyrannical overlord of Geneva, applying the ultimate sanction against the Unitarian “heresy” of Michael Servetus. Finally, while declaring that we should tread lightly lest we allow our own views to color our understanding of the mind of Christ, Robinson’s innate pessimism is reflected in her selected passage from scripture (“He who lives by the sword dies by the sword”) and invocation of the Final Judgment, which she implies will involve the destruction of those that idolize fear in the form of a gun.

I finished the reading in somewhat of a panic, and spent a good half an hour trying to find contact information for Marilynne. Her author page on Facebook receives little traffic, and it appears that she no longer holds an academic posting. So I went back to the NY Review of Books and submitted a letter to the editor with a link to my post on the relationship between government and self-governance.

In motivating my effort to contact Marilynne, I offered that:

The men “prowl[ing] in the woods” will not be swayed by an argument framed against the great sweep of history, but rather in terms both visceral and personal.

The solution, as I think President Obama would agree, is to manifest the strength the arises from the discipline that settles upon us as people of faith:

Christianity resolves the tension between vulnerability and freedom through celebration of the evidence in Jesus of the divine power that supports our capacity to love.

When we confront and accept that evidence, there is simply no room left for fear.

Our Extraterrestrial Saviors

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Astronomers tout a “high-frequency” (every couple of years) flickering in the light emanating from the star KIC 8462852 as possible proof of extraterrestrial intelligence. The extent and frequency of the flickering rule out the normal cause of such variation: temporary occlusion of the star by a planet in its orbit. This leaves open the possibility that the occlusion is due to a planetary-scale artificial structure.

The possibility of such structures was first popularized by Larry Niven’s “Ringworld” novels. However, the stresses on a ring encircling a star are inconceivably large – no material imaginable would be able to sustain the strain.

Exotechnologists thus turned their attention to another possibility: the spread of huge tree-like lifeforms rooted in Jupiter-size planets. Natural seasonal cycles would cause the density of the canopy to vary over time, thus explaining the flickering.

Given the huge quantities of carbon dioxide transferred to the stellar wind from such growth, CO2 sequestration, long pooh-poohed as prohibitively expensive, now appears to have long-term market potential. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization is leading commercialization efforts, beginning with leasing of the world’s largest radio telescopes in the hope that CO2 deliveries can be arranged before global warming exterminates life on Earth.

The SETI program, in reaction to this plan, reasons that “extraterrestrial intelligence must exist, because it is impossible that intelligence not exist somewhere in the universe.”

Dreams of a Worthy Man

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When I took my sons out to Georgia three years ago, my uncle led the way up the highway to his boat house. He pulled over at a wilderness station, and as I dropped down from the driver’s seat of his VW bus, I was immediately ravished by the lush exuberance of the woods. He made his way into the station for some purpose, my sons following, but I stayed in communion with the sense of life that had become so desicated in Southern California. Eventually, he came out and said, “You know, there’s an exclusive resort on the other side of the hill.”

I don’t know why, but I thought of that when my son started talking about Jimmy Carter. Since Mr. Carter’s illness was made public, I have had this urge to go out to Plains and sit in on his Sunday school. When I shared that with Greg, he said “Well, maybe you should.”

A couple of Saturdays back, as I was puttering around the house in the morning, I found myself visualizing what would happen in that event, finding myself guided into a role as interpreter of a passage of scripture. As is perhaps obvious from my writing here, it’s hard for me to couple my experience of life to the world of daily affairs. So I fumbled around with big picture issues – meaning of life and process of Christ abstractions – until I finally struck on “You know, what I really want to do is to celebrate you, and the contributions you have made to society.”

I haven’t gone out to price travel to Plains – I’ve been distracted by other issues. But it keeps on popping up, and became particularly pointed this morning. I found myself standing in a long line outside of the church, and realized that I didn’t actually need to be in the class. I went to the door and introduced myself to the Secret Service agent, saying that I just wanted to offer Mr. Carter my blessing.

So I was ushered into a waiting room. He sat calmly in a chair. I walked up and placed my hands on his shoulders, and then on his scalp, trying to feel the shape of the wound that he carried. A chair appeared behind me, so I sat to embrace him gently, rubbing my hand in circles on his back over his heart. As I laid my left temple against his, I felt this shaft of anger and fear piercing his mind – the anger and fear of those that had fought to sustain control against the influence of the tolerance and caring that Mr. Carter manifests so consistently.

I moved my hand so that my fingers interrupted the painful flow, and sent healing behind it. With the pressure relieved, his grace bloomed outwards into the conduit, relieving fear and pain as it went.

He was eager to leave at that point, but I held him still. “I want them to see your radiance,” I explained. I pressed our hearts more firmly together, and arched as the power of Christ filled him with joy. As he took the floor, I watched in the doorway as the gathering stared in awe.

Truth to Tell

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The good thing about science is that it’s true whether or not you believe in it.

-Neil deGrasse Tyson

As a physics student, my undergraduate curriculum was dominated by physics and math classes. Even then, though, I had a penchant for philosophy that culminated with Paul Feyerabend’s course on the philosophy of science. I didn’t do terribly well in those classes, having a fundamental misconception regarding the purpose of the term papers. Rather than summarizing the text, I always set out to propound novel thought. The teaching assistants were not amused.

Feyerabend may have read some of what I had written, however, because he called on me in his final lecture and asked me to offer my thoughts on the scientific process. Never one to deny credit where it was due, I began “Well, my father says…” which caused the rest of the class to erupt in laughter. Paul waved his hand and told me “Write a book some day.”

deGrasse Tyson’s observation is representative of the philosophy of those inspired by the engineering marvels of the industrial age. The associated advances in the public welfare seemed to demolish all the works of the past. Philosophers did see the scientific mindset as a matter of concrete truth. But it is far more and less than that. “Less”, because the equations that we teach in introductory physics are wrong. A ball doesn’t fall in a parabola because it is subject to other forces than gravity – air drag is one. What the solution without drag offers is a sufficiently good approximation for most engineering applications. “More” because the engineers so empowered change the truth that we experience. They create microchips and vaccines, things that would never exist in the natural world.

What I had concluded, a few years after taking Feyerabend’s course, is that science is not important because it tells us what is true. It’s important because it guides our imaginings into what is possible. But if you talk to most scientists, that isn’t why science inspires them. Most of them study science because they want to do what others believe is impossible. That was certainly my case – when I went off to college, in the middle of “Whip Inflation Now” and the first OPEC oil crisis, it was with the stated aim of “figuring out how to break the law of conservation of energy.” I wager that many creative scientists feel the same – they actually don’t want to believe their science. They want to prove it wrong.

I know that was the conclusion of my own journey into understanding of the nature of spiritual experience (follow the menu to “New Physics”), and so see a certain myopia in Tyson’s statement. This came to the fore one Saturday afternoon during a workshop run by Tom Owen-Towles, the foremost modern theologian/philosopher in the Unitarian Universalist tradition. In responding to a point Tom made, I offered my observations of the nature of our engagement with the divine source. Before I could get to the main point, a loud, sneering snort came from the assembly behind me. I turned around to face the originator, a man older even than I, and then proceeded to make my point. For the next five minutes, I felt pressure building from my antagonist, and just let it flow into me, finally broadening the focus to embrace the community of atheists that he represented. When I had their full attention, I sent this thought: “And yet here I am.”

And so my response to deGrasse Tyson is this: “You receive love from an inexhaustible source. Whether or not you believe it, I am glad that it is true.”

T-Shirt Heaven

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I prepared an experiment last week by creating some t-shirts that tried to explain what is going on with the energy that surrounds me. It was pretty much an act of desperation. I accepted long ago that when you send love out into the world, you surrender control over what is done with it.

In the specific context of the dance celebrations that I enjoy so much, what happens is that people channel it into sex. I’ve gotten to be much better, over the years, at controlling the reflection of that corrupted energy, but it’s been pretty exhausting. The political consequences are also disruptive to my life. A lot of men are visibly angry when I come into a club and start dancing by myself while the women stare in wonder at me. My son shared with me once that his female friends described it as “like discovering fire.” I kept on hoping that the men would be inspired by the beauty that wells up in a woman when she encounters a man that doesn’t want to dump poison into her, but in most cases the male reaction is rather to try and beat me down.

I thought that I was going to have to postpone the first trial this Sunday. I’ve been shifting energy in my yoga practice. It started three weeks ago when I held balancing stick posture beyond my normal point of collapse, and I felt energy emanating from my root Chaka and flushing up along my obliques, the wave cresting just under my ribs where the nerves erupted in burning. I knew that I had displaced something, and it manifested more recently in vertigo focused on the right side of my head. It was different from the normal cochlear vertigo (stimulated by a trapped air bubble), and finally shifted to the top of my head, directly over my foremen. I was a little panicked by that change, and was relieved when one of the ladies in class reassured me that “It’s just trying to work its way out.”

But with my obliques fully active, I’ve been building strength in them, which has led to stiffness in the area. That culminated on Saturday when I strained my right side during standing head-to-knee posture.

I wasn’t sure that I could actually dance – I could barely get in and out of the car on Sunday morning – but I went down to Culver City anyways. When an acquaintance asked me how I was doing, I explained my situation, and he jumped right in, rubbing, pulling, and massaging the right side of my back from hip to shoulder. I didn’t realize how much blockage I was dealing with, and when he was done, I was far looser that when he started.

So I went in to change and came out with my t-shirt on. He approached me almost immediately, sharing that he was an engineer and offering where he had heard similar thoughts. It was the first meaningful conversation that I have had in that community.

But what was most amazing was that people didn’t struggle against the energy that I organize when I dance. This was most evident in a young Filipina. She caught my attention, and we kind of skirted each other for a while. When I left the center of the room to rest against the stage, she took up the space I had vacated and began waving her arms gracefully in the energy there. Surprised, I pointed my finger to push energy into her heart, stilled the sexual response that came back, and then connected her cerebral cortex to the community of thoughts that was celebrating her courage.

When I had done this in the past, one among a group of men always approaches the woman to steal the gift from her. This happened next, and this lady just ignored him, staying focused on her dance. Finally, she turned to me, building a ball of energy in the air with her right hand, and pushed it back my way.

There was more – much more – and some of it wandered down the familiar pathways to sex. But as I laid Sunday evening on the couch trying to relax my abused muscles, I felt this great glow of energy enter my heart through the channel of the world. I’ve just kept on sending this message out: “Don’t focus on me. I don’t need more of it. Look rather into the world, and liberate people into the healing of it. It’s from there that the energy is magnified.”

Surely You’re Putin Me On?

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Desperate to bury the cumulative effect of the Bengazi persecution, fratricide against current and potential House Speakers, the mendacious Planned Parenthood hearings, the onrushing consequences of global warming, and bellicosity from the Chinese state to which we have outsourced our electronics manufacturing – well, the Republican Party is doing what it does best.

It took almost a year before POTUS 43 declared “Mission Accomplished” in Iraq. But with Russian and Chinese entry into the quagmire of the Middle East, Chris Christie and others have declared victory in less than a week. Russian victory, of course.

Let’s look at the beneficial side-effects of this development.

First, we’ll have to diversify our manufacturing sources. India has rushed into the 21st century with all wombs at full capacity, creating a labor glut that is consciously intended to undermine the economics that have made China the world’s manufacturing powerhouse. Given India’s position as a leading supplier of information technology services, India is ideally positioned to rapidly take up the role we must shift from China.

Of course, with a newly assertive Chinese navy operating in the South China Sea, the choke-point for most of Asia’s container shipping, we’d be well advised to bring our manufacturing back to the US. That will require an about-face from conservatives trying to destroy American unions. Then again, given Chinese dependence on Windows XP, the NSA might be able to force our adversaries to their knees in less than a week.

Secondly, we’ll have to limit our dependence on foreign oil. That will involve an “Apollo Program” style investment in renewable energy supply. Let’s hope the Koch Brothers are completely blind-sided by the opportunity.

Thirdly, we’ll have to relocate all of Israel to the United States. This innovative and educated community will spark a boom in our high technology industry.

Fourth, we’ll have the opportunity to seize interest payments on our Chinese debt, at a single stroke balancing the federal budget.

Sadly, we’ll accrue none of these beneficial outcomes. Russian victory in the Middle East is no closer than it was when Bush made his speech on the USS Independence. The bellicosity of the “Axis of Evil” – Russia, China, Iran and North Korea – reflects desperation in the face of unified action by the G20 to oppose their aggression with economic sanctions. They are playing 20th century great power politics, and will discover in due time the true cost of their adventurism: restless and demoralized populations at home, loss of markets, and attrition of military might and geopolitical stature in asymmetrical conflict against suicide bombers.

We’ll see how long it is before the oligarchs in the two countries organize the replacement of their military despots. And whether greedy American CEO’s will ever recognize the stupidity of outsourcing to dictatorships for the purpose of driving down global labor costs.