Personal and friends' links

My blog contains whatever I found interesting that didn't make it to this page.
Enjoy Collected quotes from various sources.

Dancing Ant is my wife's graphic and web design site. HipVintageCrochet.com is her crochet pattern CD site (hundreds of scanned patterns from old lapsed-copyright crochet magazines). Support small business capitalism and lower my wife's stress levels! Don't make her work at Walmart, she's a sensitive soul.

The Seattle Center for Peace, Compassionate Listening Project, Nonviolent Peaceforce and Edvita are all folks I hang out with on a regular basis. I've also been seen at Landmark. If you live in the Seattle area, you can join my Peacelab Yahoogroup.

Humor, games, art and religion

Apocamon is a hilarious and fairly accurate rendition of the book of Revelation.

Two parodies of Chick Tracts: Who Will Be Eaten First and the Olympian Chick Tract

Swami Beyondananda is both hilarously creative and politically relevant.

Overheard In NY and Overheard in the Office are very funny.

Psychobabble is a fun magnetic poetry game.

Arm yourself with the Shakespearean Insult Generator.

If you're shopping for a religion, allow me to suggest Scientific Pantheism or an article, Religion for the Coming Age - Transcending the dogmatic faiths and regaining wonder.
Or try a Religion Detoxification Web Guide, and give naturalism a go.

If reforming Christianity is your calling, refer to the Articles of Faith for A Christianity for the Third Millennium

Andy Kalin and Jasec Yerka have some interesting surreal art, as does Alex Gray

The Zoomquilt collaborative art project is something you just have to see.

Peace and activism

The Compassionate Listening Project

Martin Luther King's Sermons, Speeches and Audio Clips

Peace Begins With Myself is Thich Nhat Hanh's project involving Israelis and Palestinians.

Witness.org - using video and technology to fight for human rights.
The Beehive Collective uses art to narrate colonialism and indigenous rights.

Free Muslims Against Terrorism and How to Beat the Global Islamist Insurgency

Propaganda Critic is a useful site, have it handy when debating people who rely on name-calling, transfer, and logical fallacies

Glasl's Nine-Stage Model Of Conflict Escalation is an excellent article about how conflicts develop and progress, useful for comprehending the Middle East situation and other conundrums that seem unsolvable under current paradigms.

The Good News Network undermines the paranoia-inducing effect of sensationalistic network news.

Michael Ortiz Hill writes about Apocalypse as a rite of passage, healing and transformation.

Deena Metzger also has some good writing on crucial topics.

Marshall Rosenberg articles on nonviolent communication.

Assassinating the Assassin
Our belief in the government’s claim that it has the right to kill functions like the stones around a campfire. When we start to remove those stones, there’s a danger of the fire spreading. Violence that was once contained within the killing ritual, begins to seep out into the culture at large...The sacrificial system is revving back up. The real question is, Why can’t we stop doing it? The answer is actually pretty simple once you see it: we are trapped by the logic of the sacrificial system, even as it collapses all around us.

Why We Love War - And what we can do to prevent it anyway
Portraying humans as basically hating war might actually hinder the important work of deterring it, suggests research pyschologist Lawrence LeShan. New pyschological studies explain what history has long shown to be true—that war holds a deep attraction for large numbers of people in most cultures around the world. In accepting and understanding this hard truth, we may be better equipped to bring peace on earth. A timely new edition of his book The Psychology of War arrived last fall, just as the White House began beating the drums—and much of the American public eagerly fell in line—for a new war.

Articles

Science

The Big Bang Tango is a project I'm involved in with music publicist turned science author Howard Bloom. Howard worked with Michael Jackson, Bob Marley, Prince and other notables and drew from his experiences with cultural creatives to form his theory of mass mind. Read The Lucifer Principle on Bloom's theory of the Superorganism and the relationship between horror and creativity in nature.

DNA Computers (A short and very interesting cartoon essay)

Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines

A good article on free will

Media Psychology and PR

Frontline: The Persuaders is a good documentary on the persuasion industry.

The Return of the Hidden Persuaders is an article about the original Hidden Persuaders book.

Also see Corporate Front Groups - In her new book "Global Spin: The Corporate Assault on Environmentalism" Sharon Beder describes the way corporations and industry associations use front groups to put their views into the mouths of others who are portrayed as independent scientists or public interest advocates.

Influence: The Psychology of Persuasion is a fairly well-known book on how to avoid being manipulated by covert marketing techniques.

The Un-TV and the 10 Mph Car: Experiments in Personal Freedom and Everyday Life is a collection of student reports from an experimental sociology class. May change how you think about television, cars and other features of modern life.

Corporate Front Groups - In her new book "Global Spin: The Corporate Assault on Environmentalism" Sharon Beder describes the way corporations and industry associations use front groups to put their views into the mouths of others who are portrayed as independent scientists or public interest advocates.

Trust Us, We're Experts: How Industry Manipulates Science And Gambles With Your Future

Rockridge Institute has some of George Lakoff's writings on framing in politics.

Goebbels and today's mass mind control - When pro-Nazi or anti-Semitic propaganda came from the mouth of a popular German movie star on the screen, instead of directly from Goebbels, the public perceived it differently. In the same way, today's PR firms use front groups (fake grassroots, or "astroturf " groups) or so-called "third parties" to speak for corporations.

They Thought They were Free is a good piece on the descent into Nazism.

Rise of the Neo-Macho Man - To understand how this war is being packaged and sold, you have to look at the fantasies Americans consume as they graze through the vast terrain of TV, radio, movies and the Internet. In this charged environment, pop culture and politics swirl around each other like strands of DNA. The product of this interplay is the current crisis.

Other Psychology

A page of great Carl Jung quotes.

Deena Metzger has an essay on the Eleusian Mysteries. For the politically incorrect and curious, an afternoon at the Erowid drug experience archives or Lycaeum trip reports page will satisfy any urge to vicariously swim in the oceanic species mind.

Also good is Alan Watts, on the Wisdom of Insecurity.

Bert Hellinger has some articles on his unique form of therapy.

The Stanford Prison Experiment - What happens when you put ordinary people in an environment primed for cruelty? Reading about this famous psychological experiment helps us understand why people who go to prison often come out worse.

Ordinary people, extraordinary evil - "What kind of person can attack, mutilate and kill a total stranger or even a neighbor? A scholar talks about the dark potential in all of us."

The Roots Of Violence: Converging Psychoanalytic Explanatory Models For Power

Strugles And Violence In Schools

Violence Lessons - A year later, the children can't forget. They act it out over and over. Ernie kicks in doors, punches walls, beats his sister, tries to choke her. Brianna doesn't try to evade him. She knows there's no use. Males hurt; females get hurt. Kids don't think this stuff up. They are re-enacting the roles of the two most powerful people in their lives: Daddy and Mommy.

Childhood, Hatred and the Compulsion to Kill

Frontline: A Class Divided, Interview with Jane Elliot - I've learned that discrimination and its effects are the same no matter where you find them. I get the same results with the exercise in Berlin or in the Netherlands that I do in the U.S. or Australia or Curacao. And what's even more distressing is the fact that I've gotten the same results using the exercise with adults in Scotland and Australia in the year 2002 that I got using the exercise with children in Riceville, Iowa, in 1968.

Stereotype Threat (requires Atlantic subscription) is a thought-provoking article on the damage done by group perception. White kids who were told they were not expected to do as well as Asians on a math test had their scores drop in the same way that test scores of black students sink in the presence of reminders they are not expected to do as well as whites. Ironically, students most affected were those who tried hardest.

Another article on stereotype threat from Michigan State.

A Transformation Devoutly to be Wished is an article about Karen Pryor's clicker training method which was developed to drain dolphins and can be used with people. A gentler way to get people to do things for you without being a jerk.

The Social Alter - This massive denial of the origin of individual emotional problems in the traumatic abuse of children is in fact one and the same as the massive denial of the psychological origins of social behavior. They are two sides of the same historical coin. Both are rooted in the fact that our deepest fears are stored in a dissociated part of the brain that remains largely unexplored and is the source of the historical restaging of these traumas. Only when the contents and psychodynamics of these dissociated traumatic memories are made fully conscious can we understand the waking nightmare that we call history.

Ishmael - The Little Engine That Couldn't: How We're Preparing Ourselves and Our Children for Extinction
The Six-Lesson Schoolteacher
by John Taylor Gatto, New York State Teacher of the Year, 1991
A future is rushing down upon our culture which will insist that all of us learn the wisdom of non-material experience; this future will demand, as the price of survival, that we follow a pace of natural life economical in material cost. These lessons cannot be learned in schools as they are. School is like starting life with a 12-year jail sentence in which bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned. I teach school and win awards doing it. I should know.
Spiritualizing Foreign Policy
We must, with a heart that can think, grasp how the process of historical distortion and the cycle of humiliation reproduces itself as a process of "rotating paranoia." By this I mean that each cell within the distorted System or distorted nexus of human interaction—and by "cell" I mean each individual person as an existing Someone and each artificial "collective" of such persons, like "the Muslim people" or "the American people"—finds its inherent social-spiritual longing for love, recognition, and peace repeatedly short-circuited by a paranoiac fear of the Other, a fear that in any situation as complex as the current one has a long and patterned history of precisely this process, evolving pathologically like a single injured organism.

Orion Online - America after 911:
A Perspective from the Periphery
Thoughts in the Presence of Fear

Books, Movies, Music

Fiction

Ender's Game is a great sci-fi novel about kids training for alien warfare through video games.
Fight Club has a disturbing ring of truth.
Lamb: The Gospel According to Biff, Christ's Childhood Pal
The Last Summer of Reason - A bookseller deals with fundamentalist repression.
Place of the Lion is a unique, surreal story by Charles Williams, colleague of CS Lewis and Tolkein.
The Sneetches and Other Stories - My favorite Dr. Seuss book.
Uncle Sam is an astonishingly deep graphic novel with great art by Alex Ross, about the schizoid nature of American culture.
Weaveworld is one of Clive Barkern's more fantasy-oriented novels.
Winter's Tale is one of the most beautifully written novels, ever.

Nonfiction

Be Here Now is a classic, visually beautiful book from the hippie era.
The Cartoon Guide to Genetics
Crimes Against Logic - handy guide to the twisted often found in politics and debate
The Culting of Brands - Famous book on cults and marketing
The Disowned Self - An interesting psychological approach to repression and responsibility.
Dreaming the End of the World: Apocalypse as a Rite of Passage
The Ever-Transcending Spirit (free online)
Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty - Along with Prisoners of Hate and Violence: Reflections on a National Epidemic, one of the best books I've read on violence and genocide.
The Fifth Discipline: The Art & Practice of The Learning Organization
The Grail Legend is a Jungian interpretation of one of the Round Table myths.
In Search of the Warrior Spirit - Teaching Aikido philosophy to Green Berets
Introducing Lacan - Yes, that's right. A cartoon guide to Lacan.
Mean Genes: From Sex to Money to Food, Taming Our Primal Instincts
Parable of the Tribes - Why power is poison, and why it's so hard to detoxify.
Prisoners of Hate: The Cognitive Basis of Anger, Hostility, and Violence
Pronoia may be the new Be Here Now, should become a counterculture classic
The Psychological Dimension of Foreign Policy is a great book from the late 60's that describes groupthink and other reasons politics is insane.
Revenge: A Story of Hope is the story of a woman who goes undercover visiting the Palestinian family of the man who shot her father. Inspiring.
Steps to an Ecology of Mind - A key book on cybernetic and ecological paradigms.
Symbol, Story, and Ceremony: Using Metaphor in Individual and Family Therapy is one of my favorite books on metaphor in hypnotherapy.
Using Your Brain (For A Change) is a fun guide to neurolinguistic programming, the art of playing with words/feelings/pictures in the brain.
Violence: Reflections on a National Epidemic - A prison psyciatrist explores the relationship between shame and violence.

Movies

Napoleon Dynamite is the source of all the "Vote for Pedro" shirts and the new tetherball craze.
Powder has some nice pantheist overtones.
Mindwalk is a good talk-film about scientific holism.

Music

Blood of Abraham - Eye Dollar Tree: A mystical, slightly paranoid hiphop concoction of monotheism, smart lyrics, and revolutionary vibes.