shortcomings

For me, hate is such an obvious a weakness. I mean, I can almost see how the cancer of hate eats away at the souls of the haters. That in itself seems to create more compassion, more often than not. But selfishnes, the real deep, oblivious kind where people can't understand that other people may see things differently. This narcissistic way of relating to the world, well now that's a challenge for me. I mean, I am never quite sure of how much to let roll off my back--it is them, I know--and at what point, I should say enough!

Serving Something Greater

When we're working solely for money, our motivation is getting rather than giving. The miraculous transformation here is a shift from a sales mentality to a service mentality. Until we make this shift, we're operating from ego and concentrating on the things of this world rather than on love.

—Excerpted from A Return to Love: Reflections on the Principles of A Course in Miracles

These are a few of my favorite things....

The Story of Stuff

Playing the Blame Game

Cited from http://www.factcheck.org/elections-2008/who_caused_the_economic_crisis.html

The Real DealSo who is to blame? There's plenty of blame to go around, and it doesn't fasten only on one party or even mainly on what Washington did or didn't do. As The Economist magazine noted recently, the problem is one of "layered irresponsibility ... with hard-working homeowners and billionaire villains each playing a role." Here's a partial list of those alleged to be at fault:

The Federal Reserve, which slashed interest rates after the dot-com bubble burst, making credit cheap.

Home buyers, who took advantage of easy credit to bid up the prices of homes excessively.

Congress, which continues to support a mortgage tax deduction that gives consumers a tax incentive to buy more expensive houses.

Real estate agents, most of whom work for the sellers rather than the buyers and who earned higher commissions from selling more expensive homes.

The Clinton administration, which pushed for less stringent credit and downpayment requirements for working- and middle-class families.

Mortgage brokers, who offered less-credit-worthy home buyers subprime, adjustable rate loans with low initial payments, but exploding interest rates.

Former Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan, who in 2004, near the peak of the housing bubble, encouraged Americans to take out adjustable rate mortgages.

Wall Street firms, who paid too little attention to the quality of the risky loans that they bundled into Mortgage Backed Securities (MBS), and issued bonds using those securities as collateral.

The Bush administration, which failed to provide needed government oversight of the increasingly dicey mortgage-backed securities market.

An obscure accounting rule called mark-to-market, which can have the paradoxical result of making assets be worth less on paper than they are in reality during times of panic.

Collective delusion, or a belief on the part of all parties that home prices would keep rising forever, no matter how high or how fast they had already gone up.

The U.S. economy is enormously complicated. Screwing it up takes a great deal of cooperation. Claiming that a single piece of legislation was responsible for (or could have averted) is just political grandstanding. We have no advice to offer on how best to solve the financial crisis. But these sorts of partisan caricatures can only make the task more difficult.
–by Joe Miller and Brooks Jackson

Home, Where My Spirit Calls Me

Sad But True--We Really NEED Some Change

HOW RACISM WORKS
This letter to the editor recently appeared in the Fort Worth Star-Telegram:

What if John McCain were a former president of the Harvard Law Review? What if Barack Obama finished fifth from the bottom of his graduating class?

What if McCain were still married to the first woman he said “I do” to? What if Obama were the candidate who left his first wife after she no longer measured up to his standards?

What if Michelle Obama were a wife who not only became addicted to painkillers, but acquired them illegally through her charitable organization?

What if Cindy McCain graduated from Harvard? What if Obama were a member of the “Keating 5”?

What if McCain were a charismatic, eloquent speaker?

If these questions reflected reality, do you really believe the election numbers would be as close as they are?

This is what racism does. It covers up, rationalizes and minimizes positive qualities in one candidate and emphasizes negative qualities in another when there is a color difference.

— Kelvin LaFond, Fort Worth

Thanks Andy. I borrowed this from your site.