BARBARA'S TCHATZKAHS

Religion And The Brain In the new field of "Neurotheology," scientists seek the biological basis of sprituality. Is God all in our heads? by: Sharon Begley with Anne Underwood One Sunday morning in March, 19 years ago, as Dr. James Austin waited for a train in London, he glanced away from the tracks toward the river Thames. The neurologist--who was spending a sabbatical year in England--saw nothing out of the ordinary: the grimy Underground station, a few dingy buildings, some pale gray sky. He was thinking, a bit absent-mindedly, about the Zen Buddhist retreat he was headed toward. And then Austin suddenly felt a sense of enlightenment unlike anything he had ever experienced. His sense of individual existence, of separateness from the physical world around him, evaporated like morning mist in a bright dawn. He saw things "as they really are," he recalls. The sense of "I, me, mine" disappeared. "Time was not present," he says. "I had a sense...

From IDDYBUD

By their fruits ye shall know them. By Stanley Kurtz What if Barack Obama’s most important radical connection has been hiding in plain sight all along? Obama has had an intimate and long-term association with the Association of Community Organizations for Reform Now (Acorn), the largest radical group in America. If I told you Obama had close ties with MoveOn.org or Code Pink, you’d know what I was talking about. Acorn is at least as radical as these better-known groups, arguably more so. Yet because Acorn works locally, in carefully selected urban areas, its national profile is lower. Acorn likes it that way. And so, I’d wager, does Barack Obama. This is a story we’ve largely missed. While Obama’s Acorn connection has not gone entirely unreported, its depth, extent, and significance have been poorly understood. Typically, media background pieces note that, on behalf of Acorn, Obama and a team of Chicago attorneys won a 1995 suit forcing the state of Illinois to implement the federal “m...

Rav Michael Laitman According to the World Health Organization, someone around the globe commits suicide every 40 seconds. In the year 2000 (a long time ago, but things have only worsened since), 815,000 people lost their lives to suicide — more than double the number of people who die as a direct result of armed conflict every year (306,600). For people between the ages of 15 and 44, suicide is the fourth leading cause of death and the sixth leading cause of disability and infirmity worldwide. Also, according to the National Survey on Drug Use and Health, "Combined 2004 and 2005 data indicate that 8.88 percent of youths aged 12 to 17 and 7.65 percent of adults aged 18 or older experienced at least one major depressive episode (MDE) in the past year." Millions of people the world over, and especially the younger generation, are committing suicide or suffering from suicidal tendencies, depression, drug addiction and violence because they're hopeless. They have real que...

Anti-Hillary Message Says 'Women Go Home' By Caryl Rivers Hillary Clinton's strong presidential bid has broken barriers. But Caryl Rivers cautions that a retro cloud is also following her campaign. College admissions, court rulings, congressional votes, media narratives are all telling women to stay home. ~~~~~~~~~~~ The presidential campaign of Sen. Hillary Clinton has some disturbing messages for uppity women in the United States. The reality that a woman is so close to the top political post in the country--perhaps even the world--has stirred up old ideas about the danger of female power and about woman's proper place in society. The backlash is sending a retro cloud across a number of fronts. I'd been hearing from female friends--some of whom do not support Hillary--that the backlash surprised them. Apparently, they missed the Wall Street Journal story on April 9 by Jonathan Kaufman and Carol Hymowitz, who wrote about the slurs and inflammatory language that man...

While I am pro-ending the illegal war in Iraq... ( no George, it has ZERO to do with 9/11 - and why is Osama bin-Laden still alive in Pakistan? Stop invoking 9/11 and admit that your PNAC buddies used the 9/11 tragedy to push their own agenda! ) I am not for "cut and run." Despite being a progressive I understand we can't just leave. I make my children tidy up their messes too. (And why don't you guys at the White House tell the American public about the billion dollar PERMANENT BASES you are building in Iraq while you count your Exxon and Halliburton shares?) Now here's another mess - on our doorstep. Those returning from 3 and 4 deployments with serious mental health issues. PTSD is a not a crime and NO, you can't just get over i t or suck it up . Just because you can't see pain doesn't mean its not there. That includes mental pain. The brain is an organ and it gets sick, too. Why aren't we helping our soldiers that went over to Iraq and...

If you have never been to Arlington National Cemetery... you've missed a profoundly moving experience. You can walk or take a tour through the graves and the history of America's true heroes. I've had the pleasure of being in Washington, D.C. enough times to have been there more than once. From the Revolutionary War, the Civil War, WWI & WWII, Korean War, Vietnam War -- right through to Section 60 -- the Iraq War. The aura of lives and dreams unlived because people chose to die for America is palpable. And when you go... take your tissues. You'll need them. By Dick Uliano America's most recent war dead lie in a quiet patch of ground at Arlington National Cemetery known as Section 60. In that parcel are 485 men and women who were killed in Iraq and Afghanistan. Most tourists keep to other paths at the cemetery, visiting the Tomb of the Unknowns or President John F. Kennedy's gravesite. However, especially on Memorial Day weekend, relatives and friends pay...

By Greg Palast for TomPaine.com/OurFuture.org I can’t make this up: In a hotel room in Brussels, the chief executives of the world’s top oil companies unrolled a huge map of the Middle East, drew a fat, red line around Iraq and signed their names to it. The map, the red line, the secret signatures. It explains this war. It explains this week’s rocketing of the price of oil to $134 a barrel. It happened on July 31, 1928, but the bill came due now. Barack Obama knows this. Or, just as important, those crafting his policies seem to know this. Same for Hillary Clinton’s team. There could be no more vital difference between the Republican and Democratic candidacies. And you won’t learn a thing about it on the news from the Fox-holes. Let me explain. In 1928, oil company chieftains (from Anglo-Persian Oil, now British Petroleum, from Standard Oil, now Exxon, and their Continental counterparts) were faced with a crisis: falling prices due to rising supplies of oil; the same crisis faced by th...

A few more tidbits on Obama... The following is from Trinity United Church of Christ’s official bulletin of July 8, 2007 Islam has as many manifestations as Christianity and Judaism, but most Americans are only fed a media diet on Islam as it relates to the “war on terror” and the Palestinian muslim problem in the “state” of Israel. -- Rev. Dr. Jeremiah A Wright, Jr. Senior Pastor FOR THOSE ON AN AGGREGATOR CLICK HERE TO SEE THIS IMPORTANT VIDEO Arab-American Activist Says Obama Hiding Anti-Israel Stance by Gil Ronen Democratic presidential hopeful Sen. Barack Obama is currently hiding his anti-Israel views in order to get elected, according to a well-known anti-Israel activist. The activist, Ali Abunimah, claimed to know Obama well and to have met him on numerous occasions at pro-Palestinian events in Chicago. In an article he penned for the anti-Israeli website Electronic Intifada, Abunimah wrote: "The last time I spoke to Obama was in the winter of 2004 at a ...