Via Mano Singham…

Mano Singham is a regular at our Socrates Café sessions — you should attend for no other reason than to hear him speak — and he think just as well on his feet as he does in this letter to religious apologist, Plain Dealer columnist and United States Senator Sherrod Brown’s wife Connie Schultz who wrote this lede in a recent column:

Years ago, I criticized atheists who wanted to dissuade believers of their faith.

My argument was always the same: Why don’t you just leave us alone?

Mano replied:

What exactly were these atheists doing to bother you? Were they coming to your door? Were they stopping you on the street to hand out their literature? Do they have TV and radio shows that preach their viewpoint and warn of dire consequences if you do not convert to their point of view?

He concluded:

I find it a little odd that when atheists speak out about their disbelief, religious people feel as if they are being imposed upon, as if they have the right to be shielded from opposing views. Are they so insecure of what they believe that they need to be surrounded only by affirming views?

There is no reason why religious beliefs should be privileged and shielded from criticism. Surely we all benefit from a full airing of a wide diversity of views on issues?

Indeed we do.

To the list of Bourbon, Sherry Chandler, Ernie O’Dell, Green River Writers and Joseph Beth Booksellers I can now add a sixth reason for why Kentucky is such a great state: Bourbon Barrel Stout from Louisville’s Bluegrass Brewing on Shelbyville Road.

I had a similar beer last week in Tremont but I found the ale too sweet for my taste. The bartender said that stout held up better to the bourbon barrel aging (a far superior use for used bourbon barrels in my opinion) and so I went in search of. I found the above four-pack at the Cedar Green Wine & Cheese store where they occasionally even have the Bourbon Barrel Stout on tap.

While I may sing the praises of West Virginia as almost heaven, I’m beginning to think John Denver granted the state that honor because of its neighbor to the southwest.

MYANMAR/BURMA — Last evening I finished Zoya Phan’s Undaunted: My Struggle For Freedom And Survival In Burma. This portion of her story ends in the aftermath of the Saffron Revolution of August 2007 and in her epilogue she speaks of the election of Zipporah Sein to replace her father as general secretary of the Karen National Union and how increasingly, that women are the leaders of the struggle in Myanmar.

Of the political changes and coming faux elections, Phan writes:

Zipporah has described the new constitution that will come into force after the 2010 elections as a death sentence for ethnic diversity in Burma.

While I copied several passages into my electronic chapbook, Two came to be the bookends of my reading. The first is a description of Phan’s early days as a refugee:

One morning I plucked up the courage to ask my mother the one thing that was preying on my mind.

“Moe, when can we go back to the village?” I asked. “Will it be long?”

Bwa Bwa and Slone pricked up their ears. It was the one question that we had all been dreading to ask but to which we all wanted an answer. When can we go home?

My mother looked at me with tired eyes. “I’m sorry, Po Mu Sit, we can’t go back. Everyone has left.”

I was silent for a moment with the shock of it all. “Never? We’ll never go home?”

My mother shook her head. “Po Mu Sit, the Burmese soldiers have taken over our area. We can’t go home. There’s no home to go back to.”

I stared at the sand, tears pricking my eyes. I couldn’t hardly believe it, but that was what my mother had said. We weren’t ever going to go home. Despite everything, I had always believed that we would be able to return to our village and our life when all this was over. It was the first time my mother had told us the grim reality of our situation, and I felt devastated.

“But Moe, we just want to go home,” I heard Bwa Bwa whisper. “What’s so wrong with that? Why can’t we?”

“There’s nothing there for us anymore,” my mother answered. She was on the brink of tears herself. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry – but the village is gone.”

Tears trickled down Bwa Bwa’s face. “We’ll never see it again? Never?

My mother gave Bwa Bwa a hug and held out her free arm for me. “We have to go to Thailand as refugees and hope for the best. But we’ll still be together, we’ll still have each other won’t we?”

“But I don’t want to be a refugee,” I told her. “Refugees are people who need help. People who can’t survive on their own. We’re not like that, are we?

No, Po Mu Sit, we’re not like that,” my mother agreed. We have to go to Thailand. There’s nowhere else we can go.”

The second passage serves, I believe, as the coda for her work.

Many of my Karen friend who appear in this book are now scattered all over the world. Tens of thousands of people, mostly Karen, have been resettled: some to Australia, others to the United States, and some even to the frozen landscapes of northern Finland. One ethnic Karenni woman in her forties whom I met on a lobbying trip to Finland told me she felt hadn’t been born until she arrived there. She had lived her entire life in fear, she said. But she also said what everyone else says if you talk to them long enough: I want to go home. While the UN resettlement program is giving people a chance to escape from the misery of the refugee camps and start a new life in safety, I can’t help thinking that the Burmese generals must be delighted with the United Nations for doing this. Instead of taking action to stop the attacks, the United Nations whisks the refugees thousands of miles away. In a way, the United Nations resettlement program is cooperating with the ethnic cleansing policy of the regime. And no matter how many people it resettles, more come to the camps to fill their place, because the attacks haven’t stopped and the United Nations isn’t trying to stop them.

Reading about Myanmar and Darfur and any one of the myriad of spots on our globe where greed, I really attribute the suffering to nothing else, ravages the innocent I wonder about the efficacy of any sanctions short of total embargo. By total I mean an embargo enforced by military forces that prevent any commerce in or out of nation.

Only the United States, the world’s only superpower (for now, keep a close eye on China) could enforce such an embargo and when the business of government is business and not people, I hold out little hope for help from that quarter.

So what do we do?

Make this morning a good morning, Myanmar.

[Post script: More on those faux elections from The Associated Press:

The announcement said the Nov. 7 elections had been canceled in several townships of the Kachin, Kayah, Kayin, Mon and Shan states, including four townships in the Wa self-administered division.

Ethnic groups in those areas, which are mostly along the eastern and northern border, are at odds with the ruling junta over its insistence that they integrate their semi-autonomous security forces into the government’s border guard forces.

The attitude of the ethnic minorities has posed a real threat, since the government is hard pressed to ensure security in some areas where ethnic guerrilla militias are strong.

By election day, I imagine that the only place you’ll be able to vote will be in Than Shwe’s office between the hours of noon and 12:05 p.m. Entrance by invitation only.]

From 1730 today until 1830 tomorrow, I will be off-line. There will be no new posts during this time, nor will I be checking email. Go for a walk. Have coffee with a friend. Read a book.

On 8 December 2004, Sen. Robert Byrd (D-WV) slipped Section 111 of Title I, Division J, of the Fiscal Year 2005 Consolidated Appropriations Act (Pub. L. 108-447) and a new national holiday into our collective consciousness: Constitution Day. Our Constitution is the single most important document in Human History; read it all.

We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America. Please keep reading…

I never leave home without my pocket-sized copy of our Constitution.
Celebrate Constitution And Citizenship Day.
A Day Set Aside for the Constitution.

MYANMAR/BURMA — When he’s wearing a business suit to sit down with his bankers. Just as the evil fecks who’ve been poisoning Americans for decades with their high fructose corn syrup think they can make their public relations nightmare go away by re-branding their deadly product as corn sugar, so too do the military dictators of Myanmar — who’ve already tried to soften their image under Orwellian moniker of the State Peace and Development Council — want to shed their military uniforms and disappear into the crowd wearing blue suits.

If you must give up your uniform and playing with bombs and jets for bespoken finery, then the best place to play is a bank.

From Reuters:

Myanmar is expanding the number of private banks in the reclusive state ahead of November elections, a step that looks set to strengthen the hand of businessmen with close ties to the ruling generals.

The banking expansion follows signs of rising investment in the resource-rich country from neighbouring China and growing trade links to Southeast Asia, but economists doubt more banks in the army-run country will boost its capital-starved industries.

Instead, the increase in private banks to a total of 19, from 15 previously, illustrates a trend in which the military elite and their allies look set to emerge as the financial powerbrokers of a new era of civilian rule in the former Burma.

A Finance Ministry official said four businessmen have been authorised to each open new banks ahead of the Nov. 7 elections.

The four are among the closest allies of the ruling generals and the wealthiest civilians in one of Asia’s most secretive economies at a time when the top military brass are swapping fatigues for civilian clothes ahead of the first elections in two decades and the first civilian government in half a century.

Just how closely do you suppose the generals have been watching Wall Street?

Make this morning a good morning, Myanmar.

The making of Ner Tamid…

MYANMAR/BURMA — Three years ago it was the long silent files of saffron-robed Buddhist monks, flanked by the ordinary citizens of Myanmar, that scared the bejesus out of the State Peace and Development Council (aka, Myanmar’s, soon to be civilian but still military, dictators). The hundreds, then thousands of monks represented a quiet disgust with abuse by the country’s unelected rulers.

Even more horrendous abuse quickly followed. Monks were attacked, beaten, imprisoned and murdered. Abbots and other leaders were put on notice: stick with your begging bowls and leave politics to us.

With Myanmar’s faux election only a few weeks away, the generals’ minions are reminding the monks to stay home.

From the Democratic Voice of Burma:

U Ottama recalls joining thousands of fellow Buddhist monks who flooded Burma’s streets in a saffron-robed protest brutally crushed by the army. Three years on, he still lives in terror.

“We have to be very careful,” he said quietly, taking a break from his monastic duties in central Mandalay region. “The local authorities have a list of who was in the movement and I’m on that list.”

Whose list are you on?

Make this morning a good morning, Myanmar.

0947: [BREAKING]: Cuyahoga County Commissioner Jimmy Dimora is taking into custody by FBI

Via Plunderbund…

Last evening we gathered at our west side location to discuss: What does it mean to be passionate? We began by deciding if we wanted to talk about relationship passion, he was passionate for her, or vocational passion, she was passionate for her work. Using the works of Tom Peters – Passion For Excellence, etc. – I talked about how Peters had found business executives who were passionate for their work and who, through that passion, transformed their companies and made them stars in their industries. We next brought in sports stars such as Michael Jordan and Lance Armstrong. What we arrived at was that to be passionate was to be driven in a singular way towards a personal goal. The underlying pattern, however, quickly emerged that these passionate people led unbalanced lives; that in order to be at the apex of their field, all other demands on their time, particularly family, had to be pushed aside or ignored completely.

We agreed that passion was something that could be found, nurtured and grown, but only if there was a brain-chemical predisposition for passion: some of us have it and others don’t. In that sense, could passion be seen as a mental, possibly pathological, condition? In our society, people who are bi-polar or clinically depressed are seen as having a brain disease. Those, however, who are solely manic are seen as role models to be sought out and emulated. In that context, I thought of the example of President Teddy Roosevelt in Kay Redfield Jamison’s book Exuberance.

Passion, we began to think, might not be healthy. We considered what the difference, if any, there might be between passion and obsession. Societal norms would suggest that passion is a positive state and obsession a negative state, but is there a difference within the individual, or is the difference simply a question of whether or not society approves/disapproves of a particular passion/obsession? In that context we asked: what is the difference between a fan and a stalker? Is one passionate for a particular artist and another obsessed? One answer was that the fan feels a one-way connection to the artist, the stalker has a delusion that a two-way connection exists.

Now considering that passion and obsession were on a spectrum, we tried to find if a clear line existed between the two. We considered if harm, and who was harmed and whether or not the degree of involvement to the exclusion of all else, might be a factor, but couldn’t come up with a clear line.

I asked that in the case of my students who are encouraged by schools to seek and find their passion were being helped, or if in the our society, where hyperbolic language can render good and fine and negatives, that passion and passionate were improperly used? Do we really want students to find their passion if passion can ultimately wreck their lives. Should parents encourage their children to find their passion or should be we be using a different word and paradigm?

Finally we threw addiction into the mix I drew a Venn diagram with three overlapping circles (I thought of Jessica Hagy’s Indexed as I did this) and labeled them: passion, obsession and addiction. Chaz Braman suggested that the diagram helped him to clarify his thinking when he labeled passion as intellectual; obsession as emotional and addiction as physical. We also began to wonder how to label the areas of over lap between passion-obsession, obsession-addiction, addiction-passion and particularly, what would we call that central point where all three come together. Sadly, time ran out at that point so the ball is now is everyone’s court as we consider Socrates Café: The Morning After. Please share your thoughts and observations in the comments below.

MYANMAR/BURMA — Here in the United States we are proud of our political bloggers. They take the risks and ask the hard questions when the government attempts to abolish freedom. They suffer arrests, beatings, imprisonments; no wait, wrong country. Those are bloggers in Myanmar. The worst a blogger in the United States has to worry about is carpal tunnel syndrome.

From The Independent:

Burma’s military rulers won’t be inviting foreign observers to monitor November’s general election – a poll already dismissed as a sham by Western governments – but the country’s network of bloggers and “citizen journalists” is planning to do the job for them.

Despite internet censorship and harsh punishments for those caught criticising the junta online, Burma has a lively cyber community of bloggers and Facebookers who believe the internet is the strongest force for change in a country which has been locked under military dictatorship for half a century. The 7 November election won’t be free or fair – senior general Than Shwe has already seen to that by bankrolling a huge proxy party stuffed with ex-military candidates, while intimidating and financially squeezing the small opposition parties which have dared to stand.

But gathered in an internet café in central Rangoon, a group of young cyber-activists say they are taking the vote seriously, even if the result is a foregone conclusion.

“The regime is going to keep power after the election – we all know that – but boycotting the election will not help. We need to grab any opportunity to bring change,” said Aung, a 27-year-old female blogger and author of the popular Burmese-language blog “Me and My Stuff.”

Make this morning a good morning, Myanmar.

1017: The fog of religious language

1000: The current sad state of the American psyche

MYANMAR/BURMA — What disturbs me more than the actual images contained in this video, and I’m not over exaggerating in the least, watch this only if you have a very strong stomach, is that corporations around the world continue to do business with the men responsible for these atrocities. Not a penny of currency or wealth should be allowed to flow into or out of Myanmar until these war criminals animals are brought to justice.

I realize that this is hard to deal with after what you’ve just seen, but while we cannot choose the events we experience, we can choose how we react to them. In that spirit I say, Make this morning a good morning, Myanmar.

0828: Extracurricular at the conference

0814: Is religion good for anything?

MYANMAR/BURMA — I typically have a problem with celebrities taking up causes because I always wonder about the depth of their commitment. In this case, I have no idea how far Jim Carrey is willing to go, but he makes a good point when he says that most Americans have no idea who Aung San Suu Kyi is and every bit of effort to change that is valuable.

The two organizations that Carrey is asking those who hear his message to support are U.S. Campaign for Burma and The Human Rights Action Center.

Make this morning a good morning, Myanmar.

Even if you win the rat race, you’re still a rat. —William Sloane Coffin