The Cloud Forest

Posted on July 18, 2011 by Trish and Rob

 

We had one week to explore Costa Rica. We chose two spots – the Arenal Volcano region, which we wrote about here and Monteverde, known as The Cloud Forest. We wanted to see the Pacific coast and the southern part of the country, but when you travel by car through this country, you spend at least a day getting from one place to another. The roads in many places are bad, there’s just no way around that one. But even when the roads are bad, the scenery is so dramatic, so breathtaking,  your mind censors the potholes.

So on the morning of June 8, we set out in our little 4X4, headed for Monteverde and Arco Iris Lodge in Santa Elena. Just as we were leaving the property of the Arenal Lodge, the guard at the gate pointed upward. A pair of howler monkeys were bidding us farewell!  Well, the wave probably wasn’t for us, but I took this to be a positive omen for our journey.

The trip was supposed to take four hours, an ascent into the mountains to around 5,900 feet, higher than Denver, Colorado. The first hour or so, the road was fine – paved, with the usual dangerous bridge alert on our GPS.  At one point, Megan asked about the place we were going to be staying, Arco Iris. “What’s it like, Mom?”

“No clue,” I replied. “Got it off the internet.”

“Hmm,” she murmured. “Usually when you do that, the second place isn’t as cool as the first.”

Good point. Arenal Lodge would be tough to beat.

In some little village where we got coffee, the good road ended and the potholes began and the road was never again paved. But along the way, we met a baby goat, gasped at precipitous drops on one side of the narrow road, and could still pick up email on our cells.  Yes, I confess, this was more important for me than for Rob and was one of the criteria I used for lodging. How’s your Internet? I wish I could be more like Mike Perry, who travels to far flung spots with his wife and doesn’t even take a cell phone or laptop with him. But that’s not part of my script in this lifetime.

Finally, we reached the outskirts of…well, something. It looked like civilization, but the GPS was acting weird and we weren’t sure. We were supposed  to drive through a school soccer field. We were  in a town and were supposed to go down a hill and turn into what looked like an alley.  But suddenly, we were there.

The Arco Iris Lodge – the Rainbow Lodge – is tucked away on a hill off a well-traveled road in the village of Santa Elena.  Everything in town is within walking distance.But as we drove up the steep hill to the property, it was immediately obvious we were  in another world. Two friendly dogs and a cat greeted us. The man at the front desk spoke perfect English and took us over to cabin 1. Two bedrooms, one bath, a living room with TV, a small fridge for snacks, and yes, Internet!

The wide front porch overlooked the grounds and every afternoon, the fog rolled in and I felt as if I were walking into   scene from my novel, Esperanza. The first photo shows just how thick the fog gets. This is where we saw Capuchin monkeys zipping through a clutch of trees. We discovered a trail up through the property that led into an orchard of fruit trees, a small coffee plantation,  a place for the chickens that lay the eggs that were served for breakfast.

And here, in a magical moment that startled all of us, we encountered a white horse in a forest. A day later, we encountered two white horses in this forest, near a stream, and in my mind, they immediately became white unicorns, here but not here. When one of them charged Megan, we leaped back into the trees and they galloped past us, up a steep incline.

Santa Elena is a vibrant little town. Incredible restaurants, including one that is appropriately named Treetop, because a giant ceiba tree grows through the middle of it. People from all over the world come here for the ziplining. Unlike Arenal Lodge, where the guided hiking and horseback riding are free, nearly every  activity in this area costs something. That’s because most of the land is privately owned and is a preserved wilderness.

One day we paid a small fee for a guided tour through the rain forest and saw the largest and grossest spider I have ever seen – a tarantula that lived in the hollow of a tree. When the guide stomped on the ground near its tree, this sucker scampered out, and it was the size of a man’s fist. Atavistic. A throwback to some more primitive time. We also saw a pair of tremendous owls, the size of a barn, it seemed, perched together on a branch. “They mate for life,” the guide said. “Where there is one, there are always two.”

Every guide we encountered in Monteverde was an amateur biologist. Every waiter was a connoisseur of foods or wines, coffee or desserts. Every hotel clerk gave a little extra in time and knowledge. In the local market, every fruit and vegetable we saw was huge, excessive in size,  and prices were reasonable. Standing in line at the register, Rob noticed a woman wearing a black Namaste t-shirt and said, “My wife has one of those.”

It turned out that she and her husband were American expats who owned and operated a yoga studio in town, and that afternoon Rob  did some yoga in their studio while Megan and I shopped.  This was the town where Megan had the opportunity to head out for fun and exploration with  some girls her age from Australia who she’d met while we ziplined. This was the magical place where the sound of rain on rooftops whisks you back to your childhood.

I found that Costa Rica is my little paradise – and not just for the obvious environmental delights. You won’t find a single nuclear plant here. Electricity is generated through wind, solar, steam, hydro. They have no army, no death penalty. They welcome Americans. They respect and preserve the resources they have. The government is stable. And well, then there’s the odd animal life, like Stephanie, the macaw, and her ilk,  or the strange encounters in the woods with the unicorns.

Magic is the key to Costa Rica.

Inside the treetop restaurant

 

Posted in Costa Rica | 10 Comments

Synchro about synchros

Posted on July 17, 2011 by Trish and Rob

Diane Athill

One recent morning I pointed out an article to Trish that had come up on our Google alert for synchronicity . It began with a story of a novelist who had gotten an idea for a short story from a synchronicity. Since we were in the midst of preparing a proposal for a book on synchronicity and creativity, the story had caught my attention. In fact, finding it was a synchronicity…and then that synchronicity compounded.

Even though the Google alerts come to us daily, I rarely look at them anymore because so many of them have nothing to do with synchronicity – as we perceive it. The alert merely catches the word, which is often confused with synchronize, as in ‘let’s synchronize our watches.’ Also, an astonishing number of them refer to the Police album, Synchronicity, dating back to the ’80s.

In the story by Mark Vernon, which first appeared in The Guardian, novelist Diane Athill was walking her dog early one morning when a car slowed down and the driver, a stranger, asked if he could buy her a cup of coffee. The man looked very much like a lost old friend, who she recalled would have no problem approaching strangers in a similar fashion. The coincidence left her feeling ‘energized and strange’ and led to the creation of a short story.

The article goes on at some length to describe synchronicity and Carl Jung’s relationship with physicst Wolfgang Pauli. It’s well written and worth reading.

When Trish read the article, she mentioned that the author believed that meaningful coincidences were a rare occurrence. She disagreed with that assessment and noted that when you’re aware of synchronicities, they actually occur quite often. A neighbor who read The 7 Secrets of Synchronicity recently mentioned that she never thought about meaningful coincidence until reading the book, and now they happen all the time to her. Either the heightened awareness allows us to catch them before they pass away or that awareness causes them to occur more frequently.

But our synchronicity about synchronicity doesn’t stop there. Trish had no sooner made the comment when another Google alert came in. I opened it and found an article from a newspaper in British Columbia that had eerie similarities to the one I’d just read. While both articles give a similar definition of synchronicity near the beginning, amazingly the second article was about a man who encounters a stranger who starts a conversation and asks if he could buy him a cup of coffee!  Whoa! (I felt like I was reading a Steig Larrson novel with everyone talking about drinking coffee – as I was doing while reading these articles.)

When I told Trish about the similarities between the two articles about synchronicities, she first looked to cause and effect, suggesting that the second one was a take-off of the first. But that’s really unlikely since both authors were citing stories told to them by someone else.

It’s like Trish said, when you’re aware of synchros, they keep popping up.

If we weren’t sponsoring the Golden Scarab Synchro, I might enter that one! We’re still accepting stories until Friday, then we’ll start posting the five winning entries.

Posted in Uncategorized | 6 Comments

The Singing Bowl and Life

Posted on July 16, 2011 by Trish and Rob

 

 

Back in December, I wanted to find some special Christmas gift for Rob and after seeing a Tibetan singing bowl on Butternut squash’s website – aka Jeri Gerard – I emailed her. Then we spoke by phone. She wanted to find exactly the right bowl for him and asked me some questions about Rob – how he looked, his interests and so on. We agreed on a price and a week later, Butternut had tested dozens of bowls and found what she felt was the perfect singing bowl for him.

She only sells the genuine McCoy, bowls once owned by Tibetan monks who used the bowls for everything – for eating, begging, for the tone they produced.  I knew the bowl she had selected would be the real deal because once a year or so, Jeri travels to Nepal to buy jewelry from the local people that she sells on her website and at shows.  She also gets involved in the lives of these people, bringing supplies and books for the schools, meeting and living among the people. She recently started raising money for a school library in Nepal and reports that construction on the library has begun. She walks her talk.

Rob uses this bowl in his meditation classes, a particular tone to end each class, and every time, the tone is different and somehow fits the texture of that class.

A few days ago, eight  months after I purchased the bowl, I received an intriguing email from Butternut. She had come across something in a book on singing bowls that she thought we might find of interest. The book: Singing Bowls: A Practical Handbook of Instruction and Use by Eva Rudy Jansen.

The quote:

Sound creates and sound arranges. There is a third aspect which is just as important for understanding singing bowls and why they are increasingly being used therapeutically.

This aspect relates to the tendency of objects which make almost identical movements, to move completely synchronistically.  Christian Huygens, the 17th century Dutch scientist, noticed that when two pendulums were placed next to each other, they eventually started to swing in the same tempo.  Similarly, after a while, two wave movements which are almost but not quite the same, change and become increasingly similar until they are exactly the same.

This is called ‘the collective arrangement of phases’ or synchronization.  Women are familiar with this phenomenon in their menstrual cycle.  Friends or sisters who live in the same house often menstruate at the  same time.

The chapter, Butternut said, talks about how “the soothing waves that emanate from the singing bowl can help the body to resonate more harmoniously by working on the waves of water within one’s own body.”

She was struck by the implication of this passage’s global impact.  “It seems to indicate that the waves of energy or emotion, whether positive or negative, that we put out will resonate in everything around us. In effect, it is our own actions that cause the synchronicities around us.  To me, it points to the same thing that many religious leaders have talked about: we must become the change that we hope to see.”

She notes that negative emotions can also multiply. “A single tweet can cause enormous ripples. With the technology we have now, it is even more important to keep ourselves in the proper frame of mind.”

So in this era of instantaneous connections and communications, how can we each become the change we want to see?

( 28 years ago today, Rob and I got married at my parents’ home. Happy anniversary, Rob!)

Posted in butternut, tibetan singing bowl | 16 Comments

When the Impossible Happens…

Posted on July 15, 2011 by Trish and Rob

An editor once told us that she was wary of books about synchronicity because most manuscripts on the subject that had come her way were dry and academic with many convoluted sentences peppered with academic parlance. Such books tend to feature the scientific paradigm of controlled experiment and statistical analysis. Bottom line, they don’t sell well for commercial publishers.

While her comments ring true about some tomes published in the years since Jung introduced the link between coincidence and science, there  are other academic writers who say it all quite well for a general audience.

A couple that come to mind: The Bridge Between Mind and Matter, by physicist David Peat, and The Sage of Synchronicity, by futurist Marcus Anthony.

Another one I’m reading now is When the Impossible Happens, by Stanislav Grof.  Here is a bit of his clear thinking and writing from that book.

“Traditional psychiatry does not distinguish between true synchronicities and psychotic misinterpretations of the world. Since the materialistic worldview is strictly deterministic and does not accept the possibility of ‘meaningful coincidences,’ any intimation of extraordinary synchronicities  in the client’s narrative will automatically be interpreted as ‘delusion of reference,’ a symptom of serious mental disease.  However, there cannot be any doubt about the existence of genuine synchronicities, where any person who has access to the facts has to admit that the coincidences involved are beyond reasonable statistical probability. This certainly is the case with Joe’s extraordinary encounter with the praying mantis.”

That last line refers to a startling synchronicity experienced by Joseph Campbell. We wrote about that story here.

– R

Posted in Joseph Campbell, Jung, Marcus Anthony | 28 Comments

800 Statues & the Spear of Destiny

Posted on July 14, 2011 by Trish and Rob

Here’s an interesting exchange (at least I thought so) related to history, synchronicity, the Spear of Destiny and.. Indiana Jones. It began with an e-mail from Peter Levenda, author of the Unholy Alliance, a book that deals with esoteric Hitlerism and Nazi occultism. If you’re not familiar with the story of the Spear of Destiny, the spear in question supposedly is the one that pierced the side of Jesus and it was sought by Hitler as a power artifact.

Here’s our slightly edited exchange:

P.L.: Rob, you might be interested to know that they have discovered a cemetery in Indonesia that is “populated” by German U-boat crews from WW II!  The area is called “800 statues” because it was a sacred site to the Hindu religion before the advent of Islam to the area.  Nazi U-boat crews made it as far as Malaysia and Singapore during the war, where they transported valuable raw materials back to Germany and shipped technological information (plus uranium) to the Japanese.

I smell another Indiana Jones book in here somewhere!

Rob: That sounds like a natural for Indy…especially for a latter day saga in which Indy discovers A.H. alive in Malaysia long after the war. Of course, the Fuehrer has an important artifact that he’s using for protection or invisibility. Something like that.

P.L.: As a synchronicity … I am due to give another interview for a cable channel this month, on the theme of Hitler’s sacred artifacts, i.e., the Spear of Destiny, etc.

Rob: As another synchronicity, I once proposed a book called Indiana Jones and the Spear of Destiny, but Lucas nixed the idea. Oddly, he thought it would create legal problems because of the book, Spear of Destiny. I suppose that would relate to the fact that mainstream historians dis the Spear of D as fiction. Also, Lucas always wanted me to focus on actual artifacts, not made up ones. (Years later, the Spear of Destiny was the subject of an Indiana Jones comic book.)

P.L. Okay … the Spear of Destiny is an actual artifact, not a made up one.  The Spear of Longinus (also known as the Holy Lance) was held in Vienna, and taken to Germany after the anschluss along with the crown jewels.  Thus, there would never have been a legal problem because of Trevor Ravenscroft’s poorly documented book (the historians dis Ravenscroft because of the bad scholarship … but the Spear is and was real, and Hitler and the Nazis did covet it.)

In this regard I can heartily recommend “Hitler’s Holy Relics: A True Story of Nazi Plunder and the Race to Recover the Crown Jewels of the Holy Roman Empire” by Sidney D. Kirkpatrick.  Published last year by Simon & Schuster, it is a well-documented, no-nonsense approach to this aspect of history.

In any event, Lucas’s objections are without merit at least as far as the legal aspects of the case as well as the fact that the Spear did and does exist. In fact, there are several Spears … each with claims to authenticity (as the spear that pierced the side of Jesus) … which would make a good plot twist for an Indy novel.

Rob: I’ll be interested in seeing your interview. I enjoyed reading
Spear of Destiny years ago, but subsequently read that Ravenscroft
made up parts of it, including the scenario about Hitler repeatedly
going to a museum in Austria and staring at the spear for hours.

P.L.: As for it being the spear that pierced the side of Jesus … well, that’s the whole story.  It is supposed to be.  Of course — as in the case with the Shroud of Turin — archaeologists and scientists disagree that the Spear of Longinus is the actual spear … but it has always been presented as such.

If you subtract all of Ravenscroft’s speculations and inventions and go back to the basics, there is a Spear of Longinus in Vienna;  Longinus is the name of the Roman soldier who pierced the side of Jesus with his spear;  the one in Vienna is supposed to be the self-same spear.  Whether it is or not in actuality … well … what about the Holy Grail?  If Lucas only wanted to use real artifacts then the Grail would be out since no one has seen one or even knows what it is supposed to look like.  At least in the case of the Spear, one (or, actually, several!) exist.

The photographs in Ravenscroft’s book of the Spear are genuine, of course. It’s the same Spear that you can see today in Vienna.  What he made up is almost everything concerning Hitler … however, as Kirkpatrick points out, the Nazis were obsessed with the Spear (whether that includes Hitler or not is debatable, but Hitler was obsessed with the rest of the Crown Jewels and there is a photo of him staring at them).

****

By then, it was after midnight and the exchange ended with me raving that Indy’s mentor, Abner Ravenwood, had a last name close to Ravenscroft, and that I had been staring blindly at my mousepad, which featured a large capitalized word in the center: RAVEN – part of the title of my novel Romancing the Raven, the cover art on the pad. It was time for bed.

 


Posted in Uncategorized | 30 Comments

Ziplining: Or How to Confront Your Fear in the Rain Forest

Posted on July 13, 2011 by Trish and Rob

Megan, ziplining with the boot on her broken foot

+++

Ziplining is  advertised all over the mountainous regions of Costa Rica, but we had heard it was best in Monteverde – the cloud forest – an area at about the same altitude as Denver, 5000 feet.  So it was on our list of things to do.

The afternoon we arrived in Santa Elena, we made  a reservation for ziplining for the next morning. We would be picked up at 10:30 by a van from eXtreme Canopy. I didn’t particularly care for that word  EXTREME. There were plenty of other ziplining companies in town, why not choose one that just said, oh, you know, canopy flying or ziplining for the timid?  But Megan, the thrill seeker of the family, insisted we could all do it and would be fine.

I made the mistake of going online that night to check out exactly what was entailed in ziplining. And then I had the rest of the night to imagine myself in a harness, snapped onto one of fourteen cables that extended over the rainforest canopy, several hundred feet above ground. eXtreme canopy boasted the longest zipline in the region – nearly a kilometer long. And did I mention the Superman part of the  adrenaline rush? This is where you wear a chest harness, are snapped onto the cable facing the ground,  and race through the air with your arms extended at your sides and your feet cradled in little cuffs of rope.

Even the next morning when the van picked us up, I still was pretending I could do this.  Most of the people in the van were young – early twenties, Megan’s age, from all over the world, and were really psyched for the ziplining.  After a ride over a really bumpy road, we arrived at the facility.

More vans were pouring into the facility and we all lined up at the desk inside to pay and sign a waiver – you know, if the cable breaks and you fall to your death, your heirs  won’t sue the facility. Not exactly the kind of thing a paranoid person like myself wanted to read.  I passed on the Superman part of it, saved five bucks.

Then we filed into another room to be fitted for our harnesses. The guy who fitted me with a harness and helmet was super friendly, asked where I was from and had I ever ziplined before? By this time, my throat was so dry with fear I could barely speak. “Listen, is there any way to slow it down once I’m on the longest line?”

“Slow it down? No, no, no way, there are people behind you.” Then he gave me an odd look. “Why would you want to slow it down?”

We trekked into the information area in the woods, where one of the guys explains how it works: right hand behind the pulley, not in front of it; squeeze to slow self down, but don’t jerk on the cable;  if you start spinning,  squeeze gently and lean to one side. At this point, I looked at Rob, then Megan, and said, “I’m outta here.”

I returned to the building, divested myself of the harness and helmet, got a refund, and spent the next two hours talking life and politics with a young woman from Barcelona, Spain. She was four months pregnant,  worked as a nurse in a nursing home, had had her share of mystical experiences, and referred to Bush as “un assasino” – an assassin. I knew I was in good company.

Rob and Megan raved about their experiences afterward and I thought a lot about that.  What was there to be afraid of? Thousands of people had done this. It wasn’t like I had to jump out of an airplane. And wasn’t there a possibility that I could use ziplining in a novel? To do that, I would have to experience it.

So on our last day in Monteverde, we headed out again, with a different company, to zipline.  I still felt some of that same fear, the dryness in the back of my throat, a pounding in my head. But I thought of Megan’s two skydiving experiences, thought of DJan, who used to teach skydiving, thought of  everything that could go right – instead of everything that could go wrong.

One of the drawbacks of being a novelist, at least for the kinds of books I write, is the what if scenario that always lies at the nightmare end of the spectrum. What if the cables break, what if the child is abducted, what if the alien ship lands, what if, what if… So I shifted my thinking to what if it all goes perfectly and I love it?

There must have been fifty people in this group, all of them much younger than Rob and me. Their excitement was infectious. I climbed the stairs with Rob and Megan to the first platform. I suddenly wished I had my camera. I had even left my cell phone behind.

I was relieved the first cable was short. Two hundred feet, if that. I could do it. One platform to the next and there was a guy on the other end who would unhook me from one cable and hook me up to the next. I didn’t have to do anything except remember to place my hands correctly and bend my knees and cross my ankles.

Off went Rob. The cable didn’t break, he didn’t spin, he was racing toward the platform – and was laughing!

Then it was my turn. I made it to the second platform intact. That was my primary thought. I did it. Then as the guy connected me to the next cable, that dryness returned to my throat. This sucker was long. “How long is it?” I asked.

The young man laughed. “Not long enough,” he replied, then nudged me forward, off the platform, and I was airborne.

The wind sang, the smells of the rain forest rushed through me, the trees two or three hundred feet below me swayed like hula dancers,  the sky loomed above me,  vast, bluer than blue. And for brief moments, a bird soared just above me, as if celebrating with me, cheering me on. Hey, it’s not so bad up here, right? Pretty cool, isn’t it?

And so it went for fourteen cables, each one longer, higher, faster, and I loved it.  And I especially loved that my fear had dissolved. I plan to do this again, maybe even try the Superman part of it.

During the periods on the ground, we met others in our group – kids Megan’s age who traveled on a financial shoestring. That evening, Megan went out with a group of young women her age from Australia and returned to our cabin raving about the glories of backpacking around Central and South America.

I’m beginning to think that fear, at least this kind of physical fear, is an illusion, an atavistic throwback to some other life. Megan thinks my next step is jumping out of an airplane.

Well, maybe. Just maybe. Big maybe.

Posted in Costa Rica, ziplining | 14 Comments

The Golden Scarab Synchro Contest

Posted on July 12, 2011 by Trish and Rob

Trish and I were stopped at an intersection in the heat of the day, somewhere in the 90s, when she started fiddling with the air conditioning controls. “What’s wrong with the AC? It’s not working right,” she complained.

At that moment, I look out the window to the boulevard and noticed a hand-written sign about three feet away. It read: AC SERVICE – FREE TEST, followed by a telephone number. There really wasn’t anything wrong with our AC, but spotting the sign was still a meaningful coincidence.

That’s because we’d just been talking about synchronicity, actually about starting a contest offering several of our books in return for synchros. Earlier, three boxes of books had arrived at our door containing the new trade paperback version of The 7 Secrets of Synchronicity and also The Synchronicity Journal, a guide for recording your own synchros.

We will pick the best five synchro tales submitted and will give away five copies of the two books. So send us your story or stories through the comment section of this blog.

Entries for the contest will be accepted until  midnight Tuesday, July 19.

Update: We just learned that the journal, the trade paperback of 7 Secrets and Synchronicity and the Other Side are now all available from Amazon, in book form and for the kindle, and from Barnes and Noble.  Hmm. No one told us. We just happened to look and there they were. So our second synchro book, Synchronicity and the Other Side is out a month early!

Amazon: Synchronicity Journal, 7 Secrets, Synchronicity and the Other Side

Barnes and noble: Synchronicity Journal, 7 Secrets,  Synchronicity and the Other Side

 

Posted in Uncategorized | 21 Comments

Murdoch’s Watergate?

Posted on July 12, 2011 by Trish and Rob

If you’ve been following the phone-hacking scandal that began in Britain and which seems to be burgeoning like a crop of mushrooms after a hard rain, then you know who Murdoch is. Let’s take a closer look at this guy. There’s a synchro here. I promise.

In 1986, an Australian born, naturalized American citizen named Keith Rupert Murdoch created Fox Broadcasting Company. He became a naturalized citizen to satisfy the legal requirement that only  U.S. citizens could own American T.V. stations.  Before this, he had extensive media holdings in Britain, Australia, and in the U.S. Tabloids like The Star were owned by Murdoch – you know, those cheesy papers in the checkout line at your local supermarket that feature the latest celebrity sex scandal.

In 1996, Murdoch got into the cable news market with  the Fox News Channel, a  24/7 cable news network.  As progressives learned during the Bush years, Fox News became the mouthpiece for the Republicans and Murdoch’s power to influence – i.e. brainwash –  the public’s attitude about politics grew exponentially.

I remember being at the gym in the aftermath of 9-11 and looking around at all the televisions and every single one of them had Fox News on. A friend told me that her husband became so disgusted with seeing Fox News on at his gym that he quit the gym and found some other place to work out. I didn’t quit my gym (which later folded), but I started bringing a book with me for when I was on the treadmill.

After the U.S. invaded Iraq, the patriotic fervor on Fox News became a kind of grotesque and horrifying cheerleading squad for war – the war in Iraq, then on Afghanistan, and always, of course, for the war on terror. Through its mouthpieces like Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Glen Beck, and the chorus line of  blond bimbo Barbies, the network thrived on spewing hatred, racism, and any sort of divisiveness they could cook up.

During this period, when driving Megan to and from school, I would find solace in Air America, where  Stephanie Miller, Al Franken, Rachel Maddow, Ed Schultz, Thomas Hartman and other progressives provided a window of sanity. After Air American declared bankruptcy, Franken went on to become a senator and Maddow and Schultz, thanks to Keith Olbermann,  found a home at MSNBC. There,  they continue to present a more fair – if not exactly balanced – reportsa and opinions of the news, a counter to every major talking point the Fox News people have for a given day. And, let’s face it, if there was no Fox News, MSNBC would still be treading water in the middle-of-road CNN realm.

In 2008, when Obama really started gaining ground in the polls, Fox News pulled out the stops. The dark, reptilian brains in the newsroom were slammed into overdrive, cooking up bogus issues at the speed of light. The birther issue. The pastor issue. The socialist issue. But at the heart of it all was the race issue.

Meanwhile, Glen Beck was pulling in millions a year for spewing hatred and racism, people like Greta van Sustern who ran a respectable show on CNN, jumped ship for a million bucks, had a facelift, and became unrecognizable physically – and politically. She was now a Fox News mouthpiece. When McCain picked Palin as his running mate, Fox News was ecstatic about the cutie from Wasilla – wink, wink – and made valiant attempts to ignore the fact that she was so stupid and ill-informed about the basics that she could barely complete an interview with Katie Couric on September 24, 2008, weeks before the election. If McCain still wonders why he didn’t win, he can start by looking at a re-run of the interview in which Palin was baffled by a simple question about what newspapers she read.

Now here we are in July 2011. Fox News has been on the air for a mere 15 years and Murdoch’s personal fortune is now estimated to be nearly $8 billion. In the 2000s, he expanded his holdings to satellite TV, the Internet and film industry  and bought the Wall Street Journal. In 2010, On the Forbes list of the most powerful people in the world, he was ranked 13th (how’s that for a number ranking!).

One of Murdoch’s holdings in the UK is (or was) News of the World, a tabloid that had existed for 168 years before folding this week.  The newspaper has been accused of hacking into cell phones of everyone from royalty and the former prime minister to crime victims to get the scoop on stories.

And, because it’s always interesting to see what other countries think, here’s something from Times of India.

Princes Charles and Camilla, even the queen herself, may have been targeted. Then there’s the hacked phones of families of the 7-7 bombing victims in London, attempted bribery of NYC cops to release the phone numbers of families who lost loved ones in the 9-11 attacks, and the hacking of a  kidnapped teenager’s cell phone, which set off this furor.

The synchro, at least for us, seems to lie in the parallels to Watergate. From Wikipedia: “On September 29, 1972 it was revealed that John Mitchell, while serving as Attorney General, controlled a secret Republican fund used to finance intelligence-gathering against the Democrats. On October 10, the FBI reported that the Watergate break-in was part of a massive campaign of political spying and sabotage on behalf of the officials and heads of the Nixon re-election campaign.” Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, reporters for the Washington Post,  suggested “that knowledge of the break-in, and attempts to cover it up, led deep into the Justice Department, the FBI, the CIA, and even the White House.”

On August 9, 1974, Nixon – facing possible impeachment in Congress – resigned, the only resignation of a U.S president.

Back in 1974, cell phones didn’t exist. Neither did any brand of personal computers. So what’s the 21st century equivalent of a break-in? Getting hacked. Hacking is the nefarious shadow that slips into your life through your computer or your phone and steals parts of your personal life – your identity, your money, your soul. A hacker invades, like a virus, like cancer, like some alien life form.

Richard Nixon resigned, Murdoch probably will be forced out of his own company. Well, he’s also 80-years old and a billionaire. Very few will shed tears the day he steps down.

So does Fox News hack phones to get scoops as at least three of its sister newspapers have done? We don’t know yet, but we’ll probably find out a lot more in coming days and weeks as the scandal spreads across the Atlantic.

We’ll let Howard Kurtz, of the Daily Beast and former Washington Post media reporter, have the final word here:

“Mr. Murdoch, whose empire stretches from Fox News to The Wall Stdreet Journal to the Times of London, is engaging in corporate damage control by shuttering Britain’s bestselling newspaper. If media ethics were his prmary concern, he would have fired his top London executive who ran the paper during the phone hacking. Maybe someone should put up a statue of the media mogul outside the News of the World buidling, to remind us of the dangers of corrupt journalism.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Posted in Fox News, media, politicians | 14 Comments

The Ultimate Sweat Lodge Experience

Posted on July 11, 2011 by Trish and Rob

A  survivor

James Arthur Ray promised his sweat lodge experience would be transformational and he was right. In his last sweat lodge experience, three people died.

What are we to make of this over-the-top New Age guru and his kind? This article lays out the story well, but leaves us with a lot of questions about New Age entrepreneurs like Ray.

“Start living in harmony right now, and know that everything you want is within your reach.” That was a key message Ray offered. But who was he offering it to?

Mainly rich folks. His retreats cost between $10,000 and $20,000. You have to already possess quite a bit prosperity before you could take a trip with James Ray. So why did people do it? For self-improvement or a need to become even more prosperous? Maybe some were spending their life savings for a chance to be close to a New Age guru.

Ray told followers he planned to become the first new-age billionaire. In March 2009, Ray bought a 7,234 sq ft house in Beverly Hills for $4m.  But it seems that the dark trickster caught up with the proposal: How about a small concrete cell to work off some karma?

We’re not against wealth or even opposed to obtaining a prosperous life through writing New Age self-help books. We’d be hypocrites to say otherwise. Yet, it seems that Ray’s life was not so different from born-again Christian evangelists who promise the world and the beyond as long as you can pay.

 

Posted in Uncategorized | 26 Comments

Dust Storm

Posted on July 10, 2011 by Trish and Rob

 

 

 

It’s a dust storm moving into Phoenix and reminds me of scenes from every disaster movie I’ve ever watched. Is this normal? I found it bizarre.

 

Posted in weather | 12 Comments