Milton Katselas

I lost a dear friend last Friday, Milton Katselas.
A brilliantly insightful man. An uncommon teacher. A respectful listener. A friend.
To those whose lives he touched, he inspired and, indeed, fueled us to reach further than we thought imaginable.
On Broadway and on film he directed the award winning performances of Blythe Danner (Tony), Eileen Heckart (Academy Award),
and Bette Davis (Emmy).
The list of his students at the Beverly Hills Playhouse is legendary, but the songs of praises are uniformly extraordinary.
Gene Hackman. Michelle Pfeiffer. George Clooney. Anne Archer. Catherine Bell. Chris Noth. David Carradine. Alec Baldwin. Miguel Ferrer.
Tom Selleck, Burt Reynolds, Ted Danson, Giovanni Ribisi. Tyne Daly. Patrick Swayze. And on and on.
A life well lived by how he brought out the very best in all those who knew him.
He will be dearly missed.
But the light he gave us will shine forever.

Thank you, Milton.
Thank you.

Synchronicity

Cherokee Story

The Finest Creative Juices

A behind the scenes tour of an award-winning creative farm and juicing process in South West England...

Whitman

"Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown, or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons, and with the young, and with the mothers or families, re-examine all you have been told in school or church or in any book, and dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem, and have the richest fluency, not only in its words, but in the silent lines of its lips and face, and between the lashes of your eyes, and in every motion and joint of your body." --Walt Whitman

Awareness Test

Yes, in an insane world it's very easy to be distracted in a shell game and not use our complete awareness.
Yet it is hardly an excuse to not be fully responsible for the world around us.
Economics is an example of a subject that is strewn with misleading and outright false data that makes it appear "impossible" to understand.
Indeed, it is made impossible to be understood by the unethical few who stand to benefit from a manufactured chaos.
Modern economics, based on Lord Keynes treatises, is a nightmare of clever deviousness in it's covert argument for a totalitarian state. He was hailed as the most brilliant economist of his time, but was also noted for his aberrant sexual proclivities as well as his interest in eugenics and racial cleansing and his oft quoted "Capitalism is the astounding belief that the most wickedest of men will do the most wickedest of things for the greatest good of everyone." Yet his solutions only opened the doors for the most wickedest of men to do their deeds.
But all this aside, isn't it peculiar that for the past 60 years a "campaign of distraction", as I've long called it, has been taking place?
As precisely executed as wartime battleplans and twice as insidious, we have been taught to love our distractions more than life itself. After all, if we're all distracted we don't observe the obvious. From sports to entertainment, television, media advertisements, and mindless consumerism, we have been distracted to not notice the obvious.
Back in the 60's the often repeated quip was "a frog thrown in boiling water would reflexively leap out, but a frog placed in a pot of cool water which was very slowly heated would remain in the pot till he perished".
Meanwhile, a world economy crashes because we fail to notice that money is not being burned, destroyed, or lost, it is simply redistributed by a few who have pulled off a massive shell game.
Could you imagine how much could be accomplished if we took one tenth the time to understand the basics of economics or our current fractional banking system or government, as we do say, a football game?

Look at what the "Bailout Plans" have cost us:

Bailout type.....Cost to taxpayers (Source: Reuters)
Financial bailout package approved this week up to or more than $700 billion
Bear Stearns financing $29 billion
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac nationalization $200 billion
AIG loan and nationalization $85 billion
Federal Housing Administration housing rescue bill $300 billion
Mortgage community grants $4 billion
JPMorgan Chase repayments $87 billion
Loans to banks via Fed's Term Auction Facility $200 billion+
Loans from Depression-era Exchange Stabilization Fund $50 billion
Purchases of mortgage securities by Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac $144 billion
POSSIBLE TOTAL $1.8 trillion+
NUMBER OF HOUSEHOLDS PER U.S. CENSUS 105,480,101
POSSIBLE COST PER HOUSEHOLD $17,064+


Mr. Obama and Mr. McCain both failed miserably to understand the basics of the consequences of their positions in our economy.
In a country where both parties have been corrupted by individuals and industries who back only flawed and
manipulable candidates, it is time to take full responsibility for the world we live in and to first understand
the position we are in.
It may seem boring.
It may seem time consuming.
It may seem overwhelmingly unconfrontable.
But no one can say it is not worth it.
We can blame the evil in this world for the condition we find ourselves in.
And we would soon perish as a boiling amphibian.
It is our world.
It is the world we are handing to our children.



One idea on the economic end...Click Here to Read the Article
It is just one idea.
Another can be found here
Many more can be developed and be put in place.
Of course, that is just one small aspect of what needs to be dealt with.
There is so much more.

We live in exciting times.
We could choose to simply turn away and ignore it.
Or we could choose, as Gandhi put it, "to be the change you want to see in the world."

Robert & Alison

A spellbinding collaboration between two great and truly unique voices, produced by the legendary T-Bone Burnett.

The Time Is Now

While this may bring a laugh, history shows there are certain steps that any would-be dictator must take to destroy constitutional freedoms.
A must read is Naomi Wolfe's piece in The Guardian. Click here for the article
And see this interview given two days ago...if you've read any amount of Presidential directives on the White House site
and have followed the radical unconstitutional changes in laws, you may see these are not acts of incompetence by our leaders,
but well thought out acts toward specific ends. For us, apathy and fear are not an option. Waiting for a presidential candidate or someone else will do little good without our own personal responsibility, courage and action.

Mystic Emotion

"The finest emotion of which we are capable is the mystic emotion. Herein lies the germ of all art and all true science. Anyone to whom this feeling is alien, who is no longer capable of wonderment and lives in a state of fear is a dead man. To know that what is impenetrable for us really exists and manifests itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, whose gross forms alone are intelligible to our poor faculties - this knowledge, this feeling ... that is the core of the true religious sentiment. In this sense, and in this sense alone, I rank myself among profoundly religious men."
-Albert Einstein