Dick Cheney was adamant at the inaugauration that diplomacy would lead to the answers in resolving the niuclear issues with Iran. According to him it would be highly undesirable for Israel to go it alone and bomb the Iranians. And the USA might seek sanctions at the UN if the Iranians did not come into line with the American view.

There are a number of issues of concern. Freedom is forced to ask: Is the only purpose of the UN, according to the US administration, to enact their pet trade sanctions? Should we let America pick and chose it’s UN involvement this way? We all know the US has refused to pay it’s UN dues for many a year - maybe we could start charging them fees for their “usage” to make it up. “Trade Sanctions, Mr Rumsfeld? Sure - that willl be seven billion dollars please”.

Mr Cheney’s double talk is the biggest problem. It would be “highly undesirable” for Israel to go it alone and bomb Iran should be read as “Mr Sharon, you have my tacit permission to bomb misery out of these backwards people if they don’t submit”. Mr Cheney’s ability to lie convincingly has to be said to rival in its skill, his ability to see both sides of a picture.

I have just been told
I am an individual.
The shock is with me still.
For my sword and my shield have gone now,
My cloak and my hat have too.
Left only with myself,
I don’t know what to do.

Poem from a Dharmic soul - words spring to my mind. They are usually simple and short. This one I wrote some years ago now. Sometimes it takes a while for the Dharma of the song to sink in and become the practitioners reality.

It’s the world out there,
Doing it to me.
Making me unhappy,
Not letting me be free.
The truth’s a little different,
Now I start to see.
The problem isn’t in the world,
It’s in my sense of me.

Clearly we have a limited capacity to remain interested in any subject and the Tsunami is no exception. Due to the placement of an article about the Tsunami on the same page as an old joke, freedomforall.net got a lot of traffic over the last couple of weeks from people looking for jokes about the recent disaster.

In the end it became apparent that once people found the site many of them stayed and read a few things. All well and good, thought I, because the sort of people who would look for humour in such a tragedy could benefit from some good old fashioned moralistic education of the sort offered here.

The waves of such traffic are dying down, I am glad to say, and not before time. Of course it means the whole Tsunami thing will die down too, although we will of course hear occasional references for years to come and in six months we’ll have the documentaries, then in a year or so, the Hollywood movie: “Death On The Beach”.

What a shame they can’t make a blockbuster about the daily death of 30,000 children from solvable causes that inspires change. Of course that is not news or film-script material because, like the sun rising and setting, it happens every day without fail. Of course, the sun does no such thing - it is the earth that rotates. Equally if 30,000 children dying every day is not news to you, what are you doing to help solve the problem?

Mr Bush, in his second inaugural speech, is to proclaim how freedom must spread to secure America and peace for the world. The nature of the freedom in his sights is one that is widely accepted in western and other “modern” democracies as freedom. It is the freedom to chose leaders from a narrow political sect who place above all other rights the right to own things, to keep them for yourself, free from interference.

As I pointed out in my last post, Post-Modernism, God and the Buddha. a truth universally acknowledged is not necessarily a universal truth. The kind of freedom offered to, actually demanded of, all the worlds people is as narrow and limiting as any other kind of freedom when imposed from above.

For the poor of America, who are likely to stay that way for generations, let alone the poor of less resource-rich land areas, this freedom has delineated their narrow hopes and opportunities. Mr Bush and his ilk are not inspired by any deep philosophical notions of freedom, for if they were their freedom would be more deeply rooted in the philosophy they claim, Christianity, and the poor would not suffer so.

We live in a sea of stories, to paraphrase from the title of an interesting novel from a rather tired novelist. Yet the stories we invent and invest in to explain our selves, perceptions and world are really investments in our way of being ourselves. They are the creations and justifications of ego.

In this post-modern age we are confronted by the stark reality that although everything may be true to somebody, real truth, universal truth, is lost. A truth universily acknowledged is not neccessarily a universal truth. Your feelings may be real and true to you yet they are not absolute truth.

Some would say there is no such thing as absolute truth, that “everything is relative”. It is true that everything can be viewed from a relative position. It is also true that absolute truth can be viewed, that everything can be viewed in its absolute light - if only the viewer can remove all the stories and just confront themselves with the bare facts of reality.

Take “God” for example, in its monotheistic creator god sense. “God” either exists, is real and true absolutely, or does not exist. There is no inbetween here. “God” as creator, did it, or didn’t. He cannot be true and real for some people and not for others.

If we deconstruct “God” we find a lot of human fear and hope behind the stories. If we deconstruct all the stories within ourselves can we find out the absolute truth? The Buddha said yes, and that, no, he didn’t do it. I’ll let you know when I meet him. Or not.

“postmodernism is usually held to be concerned with how the authority of those would-be-ideals, sometimes called metanarratives, are subverted through fragmentation, consumerism, and deconstruction.” From Wikipedia - Post-Modernism

We are taught in our societies that the highest ideal we can aim to is to to create our own success. The truth is probably a little different. The highest ideal we can truly attain is to be in harmony, at peace, with things as they are. As a daily practice “Que Sera Sera” is the most beneficial meditation.

The meditator takes the attitude of acceptance of things as they are without interference. He then starts to see things as they are including his own desire to interfere with them. This is the moment he becomes a meditator, or fails to. This is the moment he changes himself and the world around him too, just with his accepting awareness.

Investigative reporter Seymour Hersh has confirmed something that freedomforall.net predicted back in November last year. America is planning and preparing to invade or destroy the military capability of Iran.

There is a dangerous combination of personalities at work. A dry-drunk president who has tried and failed to win the love of his father by invading Iraq finds his mind meeting with that of Rumsfeld/Wolfowitz, the cold-war dinosaurs. They, so simplistic, are stuck in the win/lose them/us dualities of neanderthal human thinking.

That the world has moved on, that the turning point has been reached, where only win/win non-dualistic ecopolitics can aid human survival is beyond their understanding. Principally because they have delineated such thinking into the ‘bad’ camp, they can not possibly make the leap into the modern world so essential now.

They will only add to the negative influences in the world should they undertake this foolhardy mission. They will create more terrorism and more hatred, violence and fear.

Why would they do this? Because a world constantly at war with itself is a world that needs men like them to continue. They are unknowingly creating the disasters that will prove, in the short-term, their vision to be correct. In the long-term of course, these dinosaurs and dry-drunks can only lose. Knowing this in the back of their minds makes them very unsafe. We need to be prepared for more and more obtuse examples of their dangerous thinking and consequent action.

The American people made a great mistake in putting George W Bush and his bully-boy henchmen back in charge. I hope the American people gather their instincts and galvanise themselves to action which makes it clear to these fools that they do not wish for more war. It is not as if the dead from the war in Iraq have stopped flowing yet.

From Two Wars for the Price of One? freedomforall.net, Saturday, November 20, 2004: ‘And Mr. Bush, shut in the whitehouse and increasingly alone, thinking up ways to save his image. The worst excesses of dry-drunk thinking could be displayed, “Hell, why not do Iran while we’re over there? - two wars for the price of one”.’

Fifty one Britains are known to have died in the tsunami and another three hundred and fifty one are missing presumed dead. There are an additional five hundred and sixty eight Britains “unnacounted for”.

Britain was the only western European country not to announce a reasonably accurate figure quickly after the recent Tsunami and we have had to watch these figures mount over the past twenty days towards the higher figures we all had privately assumed. It was obvious from the beginning that the British Government had got their figures very wrong.

It is only now with these latest announcements that the British figure even vaguely approaches reality and still we have the unpleasant feeling that the Government cannot just say it straight: Over one thousand British died in this disaster.

There is a strong sense that this sums up what is wrong with Blair and his Government. This incessant need to spin every angle and to shine every facet of what is presented to the public has in this case made a mockery of the deaths of one thousand British Citizens.

Was the death count kept low to make Tony’s remaining on holiday not such a bad thing? Has the British Government told one lie too many now? Is it time, after all, for Blair to give up the reins and hand over to the better man, Gordon Brown? Freedom forall.net says yes, yes, yes.

I have written previously about the real nature of Jihad which is a personal battle against the negative influences in oneself. Thus it is my belief that Jihad is comprehensively misunderstood by those people who call themselves muslims and seek violence in the world.

The urge to violent or angry reactions towards the ‘bad parent’ of Israel, America or Osama Bin Laden is a habitual hangover from childhood. Bin Laden is Bush’s bad dad, Bush is Bin Laden’s. They are locked in a powerful divorce settlement in which the total hatred they both experienced towards their own fathers is being played out on the world and it’s people.

Islam means peace. There can be no place for violence in peace. Violence only begets violence because everything has equal and opposite reactions. This is called Karma in Buddhist thinking. It is all about causality. Man has free will however and this is exactly where he has the chance to use it. In discerning the negative influences in oneself and chosing not to indulge them but let go of them any man be he Muslim, Christian, Buddhist or Jew can be a Jihadi.

Palestine suffers more violence today. Hamas have proved that for them the war goes on. In this I believe they are doing great harm to the Palestinian people. There is a particular opportunity now for the Palestinians to prove they are men of peace. The world knows of the injustices they have suffered and is not blind to this, nor to the unjust support Israel has enjoyed from America.

With the formation of new governments on both sides of the divide the Palestinians can win this war at exactly this moment in time. Now the Palestinians can chose to live up to their name of men of peace. They will very quickly turn all the available energy to their side including America, even if Israel will never lose the open support of the USA.

If no violence is perpetrated by the Palestinians however, within a year or two George Bush will force Israels hand. He is a simple man as we all know but basically a good man. The Palestinians should take advantage of these things and chose a good simple solution to do so. It is called peace.