The Effect of a Rose

Someone asked me about my avatar on Facebook. I'm so glad they did! Here's what I posted:

"It reminded me of a rose I found while walking in a village in Ontario, Canada. I stopped to admire it and was nearly overcome with the transporting wonder of the scent. The owner of the rosebush caught me in my euphoria, and after a brief conversation invited me in for tea. She and her friend shared the house and had made it into a beautiful home. I learned of their amazing histories, together and before, and of life in that village. The tea was delicious. The company of the two elderly and experienced ladies was wonderful. As I left, she picked up a pair of shears on the porch rail and snipped off that rose, the only one in their garden, and gave it to me. I was so moved.

"The Lily, the Lotus, and the Rose have always meant a higher awareness for me. In these times when so many are so overwhelmingly besieged by woes that their considerations have been forced to stay in the realm of survival, this Rose comforts me and points to the best in us, that which is detectable as our Presence. The name of this variety of Rose is "Fragrant Cloud". In the presence of its perfume division is forgotten in the enjoyment of the transporting gift of its essence. Thank you for reminding me of that experience!"


 

Some Thoughts on Geese

 I'm glad that there is music as background to the video a friend just posted of snow geese landing in and around an icy pond, instead of the honking! They are beautiful birds, for sure, as are the Canada geese which live in profusion here at the lake. But while I'm often in tears at the Beauty and Wonder of Nature, I remain in some aspects a pragmatist. 
Geese make a gawdawful racket, and when there are flights of 60-100 of them coming in for splashdown, it's both awesome to see and a very noisy proposition, as the newcomers often get the other hundreds on the ground roiled into a honker's chorus. Our park newspaper is called "The Quacker". Let me tell you that our ducky friends are far less of an obvious acoustic factor in our lives than the Wagnarian stentorizations of the several species of geese here. Out newspaper could be more accurately named "The Lake Oaks Honker" with no chance of that being misunderstood as a reference to a nose. And then there is mating season. 
All that I have said above pales in grandiosity during that time, when the geese leave their usual grassy haunts by the water, and make most of our rooftops their podiums for the loud and constant advertisement of their allegedly superior coupling qualities. Of course, the reverberations through the structural material of our homes adds to our greatly involuntary awareness of their amorous vocal, and yes, physical combats over our heads. It's not uncommon to see disgruntled homeowners with a high-pressure nozzle on their hose washing a coating of geese off their now besoiled roof. 
Don't get me wrong: I love birds. I sit many evenings on a bench by the shore path, my 7x50 binoculars handy, and watch herons--both blue and green--coots, egrets, cormorants, black swans, Muscovy, Wood, Bufflehead, domestic, and other ducks, and a dozen other kinds of birds indigenous to our lake. This is a birder's emporium. I am grateful for the show, and for that most of these creatures will actually walk by, and even if suspicious, will trust you to be tame. That goes for the deer and skunks as well, and the odd bipeds in electric carts. But one cannot help but be then aware of the huge disproportion in the population of geese, here of at least three sorts. Wonderous as they are as creatures, in our circle they also live with us as very noisy and often dirty, arrogant, and inconvenient neighbors. And I still get a kick out of them.

A religious solution to capitalism? Really?

On one of my subscribed-to Facebook pages, someone proposed that the most necessary solution to all the problems of capitalism anywhere must be a religious one, in fact it should appear as a healing of church doctrines. Why did I take exception to this? First you have to reflect on just which church and which Jesus, as there are at least 300 streams of christianism and about 40,000 named and practicing sects in the world, without counting other gods and other religions. So integrity can't be left to the vagaries of constantly changing religious assumptions, none of which might even vaguely reflect the perspective of the original "founder" who didn't found anything.

Never mind that his astoundingly few words can be much more viably ascribed to a perennial philosophy than anything original with him personally, even as an alleged fulfillment of a dubious prophecy parlayed into a political system in the third century CE. If there is any hope of changing our story, it most probably could happen by looking at the nature of human awareness itself. And this is not incongruent with the christianist idea that we are made in the "image and likeness of God". If that is true, then most certainly each one is capable, at least potentially, of looking at their own self to see what the template or pattern of their being is about.

This approach might have verification in that all the mystics of any religion, or lack of it, throughout history have converged through their self-work on a seemingly identical view of Unity. And as I've pointed out, these very real and tangible agreements transcend the vagaries of the insurmountable number of denominations and have the great advantage of cutting through the contentious claims each disparate group might have of being the "one, true, and only".

The argumentations, and even warring, of the speculative self-differentiated mental constructs that call themselves religions all fall before the incontrovertible fact of the fundamental nature of awareness itself as the ground of *any* experience or position it might be trained into by the accidents of time, place, or necessary but parochial familial training.Such belief systems are local and meant for initial survival purposes only. On a world stage, those positions desperately need to be outgrown and supplanted by a deep and practical experiential understanding of perhaps the only thing absolutely common to all humans and permanently endemic as their very nature. If we don't start on that common ground, we are already in ideological conflict. 

Why reject religion?

All that some of us are saying is that the values and qualities you value and live by are not directly derivative of any formal religion or holy book of *any* sort. They are innate in Nature and the awareness structure of the human as such. We don't have to postulate a christianist "God" in order to have those virtues, else they would not have existed before the third century when christianism was politicized into the ancestor of today's over 300 forms of it and over 40,000 named and practicing sects.
In fact, if there is anything useful in the Bible to be acted on, whatever it is that we misunderstand intellectually and through our beliefs as "God" is what we are made in the image and likeness of. That accepted, regardless of time or geography from the dawn of human awareness, the keys to the kingdom have always been immediately present as one's own Nature. In support of this, we can see that no matter the stream of faith or philosophy anywhere and anywhen, there is always the admonition to go within.
Why does anyone suppose that injunction to silence ("Be still, and know that I AM (is) God") and sonship is in the christianist or any Bible? Is not to discover *how* it is that "I" am the image and likeness of God? It is already so by our very nature. Atheism and agnosticism aren't really about a denial of Nature or Reality, but only of the necessary rejection of imposed belief systems arbitrarily ascribed by birth. That is to say the arbitrarily conceptualized "God" of imagination.
That rejection, in the same way as a teenager *must* rebel in order to gain the psychological muscles of maturity and self-reliance, must also be made, eventually, by anyone in the bounds of a formalized belief, whether scientific, political, or religious. That is why one man accurately said: "The search for Reality is the most dangerous undertaking; it will destroy your world. Yes, it will, as you thought it was before you re-assessed from a standpoint of deep inquiry, the one extant before any attempt to formalize it and put it *on* others, not draw it out from them as a pre-existing Reality.

Lessons from a Tree and a Book

"What I hadn’t anticipated was the tree. I was too weak to think or write or call or even watch a movie. All I could do was stare at the tree, which was the only thing in my view. At first it annoyed me and I thought I would go mad from boredom. But after the first days and many hours, I began to see the tree." ~Eve Ensler
Why did I post this? Because it reminded me of an acquaintance, a certified genius with patents and everything, who wanted to join a study group centered on a book by Harry Benjamin called "Basic Self Knowledge". My acquaintance told me that he was instructed to read the book and report back as to what he had learned. He came back, made his statement, and was told "Read the book". He went home and went through it again, and came back and reported and was told "Read the book".
This is a true story, so here I will save us many repetitions and simply inform you that for whatever reason he persisted, whether through ego, spite, curiosity, or some motive more subtle, this scenario was repeated a total of 26 (twenty-six) times. Yes, it was a short book, as most go. But it was on his twenty-sixth repetition that this genius became aware that he had all along been projecting his belief about the book on to the words it contained. At that twenty-sixth reading his perception, his genius perception, cracked enough to see what his mind, as a belief engine with its mission to make itself right no matter what, was doing to him, who was not his mind. Returning to the study group and making this confession got him admitted to the circle, and he, and they, proceeded happily and curiously from there.
I'm hoping that this offers some small indication of why I am constantly harping about the danger of unexamined belief and the lack of critical thinking, of unskilled thinking, that is rampant on our stage today. And I hope that in reading this that you either caught or were tweaked by the line "his perception, his genius perception, cracked enough to see what his mind, as a belief engine with its mission to make itself right no matter what, was doing to him, who was not his mind." I point to that because in so many discussions, conversations, etc, the participants identify with their own mental state as if it was their being itself.
Why is that worthy of note, or of any importance? It's because if you think your thoughts are reality, are a one-to-one correspondence with the actual maelstrom or impressions you are being swirlied by, [sic] there is little hope of understanding that your mind, as magnificent as it is, is not the essence of yourself, however inseparable from that that it might be. The point is, that if you think your thoughts are yourself, there is not the perceptual distance available to you to have a larger perspective from which your impressions you use for navigating your life can be sorted out, ordered, evaluated, appreciated, or whatever. In other words, without that perspective of emotional distance, or impartiality about your thoughts as simply things, or serving suggestions if you will, you are--because of your identificational involvement--asleep and dreaming for all practical purposes.
Now that doesn't mean you are not intelligent, good, perceptive, able to hold a job or lead people or any such thing. It only means that there is a point of view possible to us which some don't cognize and take advantage of, at least consciously. As evidence we have an impersonal example of a genius who didn't get the meaning of a simple small book on account of his investment in his world view as real. And yes, there is more to it than that, but these lines are about that part of the lesson we might learn.

The root of American racism?

Before we knew there were races in this Nation, as colonists, it was a matter of economic identity which kept indentured Europeans and African slaves in the same category. It was the fear of rebellion that motivated the legislation of an artificial distinction between members of a homogeneous group. It was one of the most brilliantly heinous tactics employed by the landowner class to divide and conquer, as the bonds of sameness between imports from the two continents grew, due to that economic sameness.
This was perceived as a great danger by those who relied on the system of indenture and slavery for their agricultural profit. Think of the relief, the savings in time, money, and especially the sense of security if that potentially rebellious class could be brought into a condition of severely policing itself. The scenario in the video is a perfect example of the exquisite extent of the success of that single move: that was the granting of legal superiority of whites over now legally inferior blacks. The identical economic situation of an entire class or humans had been divided by a totally artificial device into an autoimmune control system. And thus a heretofore new racism was birthed. The landowners had achieved their cause of self-protection in a kind and degree that perhaps even they had not realized the deadly extent of. And thereby we all lost, even to this day.
This loss is tragically pointed to by the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King by, as current evidence points to, the CIA. And they, as minions of one of the richest families on Earth, rated fifth worldwide, the Bush family, did the deed in their highly polished covert manner. This is not conspiracy theory.* This is what the evidence reveals. What was Dr. King's crime? He realized what the root cause of the need for his work in racial equality was: the poor people, the laborers in the fields and their support system of trades had been maliciously and deliberately set rabidly against itself in order to provide safety for the landowner class.
On the basis of this realization he shifted gears to campaign for the reunification and re-empowerment of the class upon which the landowners, industrialists, and most and by far importantly, the bankers depend on for their ease, comfort, exceptionalism, and privilege. Because of his already proved record at unifying and reinstating the dignity of part of the lower class, this set off every alarm klaxon and flashing red light in the back rooms of Wall Street and the .1%. This was (and still is) the greatest threat to the monied establishment which has ever come about in this Nation, and perhaps the world. It was an unforgivable crime of astonishing scope and consequence and had to be punished, severely, as soon as possible.
The unification of what are speciously called "races", that being a primarily economic invention legislated from many directions into the privilege/squalor dynamic for the purpose of the safety of a small class of people, is the greatest danger to the current financial control system ever conceived through the agency of clear vision. It attacks the policing power of a great portion of an economic class over its other half. And that policing power is so subtle and insidious that most who have it don't know they have it, never mind notice that they are exercising it. The clerk in the video was oblivious to the fact that she was doing what she was doing to one of her own, one who worked most likely harder than she did due exactly to the policing privilege the clerk unconsciously enjoyed.
This is why it is up to, primarily, the so called white folks to realize that all this time they have been duped into suppressing, demeaning, and even brutalizing our own allies. And this is happening because, if you are white, just like you inherited your religion, your politics, and how we hold a fork or drive a car, we inherited our emotionally charged and unconscious, very unconscious, privilege. And with that goes our very unconscious exercising of our police powers against our own allies who we were legislated into suppressing just as much as others were legislated into policing Jews or any other minority used to take your attention off what is behind the curtain you are not to look behind.
~~~~

*After four weeks of testimony and over 70 witnesses in a civil trial in Memphis, Tennessee, twelve jurors reached a swift unanimous verdict on December 8, 1999 that Dr. King was assassinated as a result of a conspiracy, the NY Times reported at the time. The King family, who filed the civil suit, was awarded $100. They donated the minuscule amount to charity.

The root of American racism?

Before we knew there were races in this Nation, it was a matter of economic identity which kept indentured Europeans and African slaves in the same category. It was the fear of rebellion that motivated the legislation of an artificial distinction between members of a homogeneous group. It was one of the most brilliantly heinous tactics employed by the landowner class to divide and conquer, as the bonds of sameness between imports from the two continents grew, due to that economic sameness.

This was perceived as a great danger by those who relied on the system of indenture and slavery for their agricultural profit. Think of the relief, the savings in time, money, and especially the sense of security if that potentially rebellious class could be brought into a condition of severely policing itself. The scenario in the video is a perfect example of the exquisite extent of the success of that single move: that was the granting of legal superiority of whites over now legally inferior blacks. The identical economic situation of an entire class or humans had been divided by a totally artificial device into an autoimmune control system. And thus a heretofore new racism was birthed. The landowners had achieved their cause of self-protection in a kind and degree that perhaps even they had not realized the deadly extent of. And thereby we all lost, even to this day.

This loss is tragically pointed to by the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King by, as current evidence points to, the CIA. And they, as minions of one of the richest families on Earth, rated fifth worldwide, the Bush family, did the deed in their highly polished covert manner. This is not conspiracy theory.* This is what the evidence reveals. What was Dr. King's crime? He realized what the root cause of the need for his work in racial equality was: the poor people, the laborers in the fields and their support system of trades had been maliciously and deliberately set rabidly against itself in order to provide safety for the landowner class.

On the basis of this realization he shifted gears to campaign for the reunification and re-empowerment of the class upon which the landowners, industrialists, and most and by far importantly, the bankers depend on for their ease, comfort, exceptionalism, and privilege. Because of his already proved record at unifying and reinstating the dignity of part of the lower class, this set off every alarm klaxon and flashing red light in the back rooms of Wall Street and the .1%. This was (and still is) the greatest threat to the monied establishment which has ever come about in this Nation, and perhaps the world. It was an unforgivable crime of astonishing scope and consequence and had to be punished, severely, as soon as possible.

The unification of what are speciously called "races", that being a primarily economic invention legislated from many directions into the privilege/squalor dynamic for the purpose of the safety of a small class of people, is the greatest danger to the current financial control system ever conceived through the agency of clear vision. It attacks the policing power of a great portion of an economic class over its other half. And that policing power is so subtle and insidious that most who have it don't know they have it, never mind notice that they are exercising it. The clerk in the video was oblivious to the fact that she was doing what she was doing to one of her own, one who worked most likely harder than she did due exactly to the policing privilege the clerk unconsciously enjoyed.

This is why it is up to, primarily, the so called white folks to realize that all this time they have been duped into suppressing, demeaning, and even brutalizing our own allies. And this is happening because, if you are white, just like you inherited your religion, your politics, and how we hold a fork or drive a car, we inherited our emotionally charged and unconscious, very unconscious, privilege. And with that goes our very unconscious exercising of our police powers against our own allies who we were legislated into suppressing just as much as others were legislated into policing Jews or any other minority used to take your attention off what is behind the curtain you are not to look behind.

~~~~

*After four weeks of testimony and over 70 witnesses in a civil trial in Memphis, Tennessee, twelve jurors reached a swift unanimous verdict on December 8, 1999 that Dr. King was assassinated as a result of a conspiracy, the NY Times reported at the time. The King family, who filed the civil suit, was awarded $100. They donated the minuscule amount to charity.

What so we worship

The Gods of this Nation are money and convenience. We are not a civilization, we are an economy run for the fatness of a few. From the death of 100,000,000 Native Americans at our hands and our 400 treaties with them, all broken by us, to the false wars and their economic reasons, to the out-costing by corporations that destroy lives, property, and our very narrow range of livable environment, it is all about pathological greed. 

And where does that come from, that greed? It comes from the same place as addictions and aberrant behavior: lack of being loved as a child and the lack of feeling worthy of being loved. We are not going anywhere until we grow up and decide that we matter as humans, not as economic, political, religious, or racial units. The values we hold as American and flaunt to the world as our magnanimity originally were meant only and solely for white men with money. Everything we have today as social justice has had to be wrenched from their hands by activism and even death. 

That holds for everything from freedom from slavery to women's rights, both ideals yet mostly unaccomplished. There are more slaves today in human trafficking and debt and prisons than we ever have had in the history of the world. The illusion of a peaceable America is an economically based ploy to keep the public in debt and quietly on the edge of just enough not to go to the streets and make demands. The manipulation of this balance point has been the true art of the ultra rich who have, proportionally, more wealth than any ordinary person is capable of even vaguely imagining. 

That wealth is enough for them to be in ridiculous luxury even if they gave away enough of it to feed all the hungry and educate all the ignorant. But that is exactly what cannot happen if they are to remain masters of the Race. It is exactly what we must do ourselves, as lovers of our own humanity and that of others if anything is to ever change, if we are to ever become a civilization or humanity instead of a global labor pool squabbling amongst ourselves, diverted from the actual enemy.

What is christianism?

What with more than 20 versions of the Bible in common use now, including the fascinating Lamsa version, we can wonder about questions surrounding everything from the nature of collections through the exigencies of translation to the near impossibility of an assured "correct" interpretation.* The King James version relied on thousands of differing texts, none original, to compile and interpret from the intellectual and pious standpoint of people who weren't there. And since there are about 300 major ecclesiastical traditions worldwide divisible as over 40,000 denominations,** it is difficult to imagine that any of them under these circumstances follow THE actual teachings of The Christ.

Those considerations point to modern christianism being some very modified version filtered through the 3rd-century politicization of Catholicism and then the Reformation. There is a very good argument that the *actual* Teachings were congruent with nondualism. In any case, Mark 4:33,34 casts grave reason to rely solely on the minute bit surviving as the compilation of the red letter versions of the Gospels, never mind the ruckus between Peter and Paul. All this, especially the passage from Mark, legitimately leaves one to wonder what christianism today might actually be.

~~~

* A fascinating book, often used in comparative religious studies, treats extensively of these questions in an easily understandable style and yet has all pertinent scholarly references. It has the unfortunate title of "Insights for the Age of Aquarius: a handbook for religious sanity", that being a moniker sure to be off-putting to some. That is unfortunate considering the actual practical value of its contents. The author is Gina Cerminara.

** The Center for the Study of Global Christianity at Gordon-Conwell Theological Seminary estimated 34,000 denominations in 2000, rising to an estimated 43,000 in 2012. These numbers have exploded from 1,600 in the year 1900.

not this or that

I have been reviled for both defending Islam and bashing Christianity.* In fact, neither is true. What I have found for myself is that there is a realm of consideration that precedes and is fundamental to the arguments which contrast allegations about this or that religion or Party. Those, in my estimation, are not only distractions but tend to serve to ensure failure in resolving questions or situations couched in those terms. In fact, any discussions which rely on labels of religion or party are doomed because they are restricted to the gravely limited portion of our considerations which have to do with externals and measurement. This is part of the parcel we inherit as the deterioration of the ideals of the Enlightenment which came to exclude the realm of meaning and feeling.

Further, the "us and them" category of arguments and righteousness is lowest and least useful or adaptable form of logic. It is essentially dualistic and defeats the fundamental sameness of the contrasted factions. These factions are ultimately acting from the same motivations. What isn't recognized or dealt with is that the adaptations of those motivation made necessary by things as simple as geography and cultural heritage are not where the actual problem lies. That is only where they are played out as contrast, when in essence they are in fact identical.

Our motivations all wear the clothing necessary for survival where we are. The fact that others have adapted clothing necessary for where *they* are is neither an actual cause for contention or for animosity. But we are not, at the level of those needs and motivations, inclusive of other's ways of dealing with them. That is because they are at such a fundamental level of awareness that we perceive differences as "not self, not mine" and react rather than study, consider, or inquire. So when both "opposames" see difference, that is what gets inflated because survival is our prime directive. Survival is also, if we are honest, the root of morality.

And this is where emotional and intellectual maturity, as well as education, have a role. Where the animal nature reacts and defends, the mature human, while very capable of doing that in various degrees, can step back and abstract the sense of self from its apparent circumstance. In fact, a huge part of maturity is to understand and to function from the standpoint that circumstance is largely appearance, even chimeric. And the ability to do this abstraction of self from appearance is what constitute the at least 10 levels of human awareness ability, each differentiated by a fulcrum of inclusion and transformation. But few seem to be aware of this process and its profound implications, either in themselves or others singularly or as levels of groups.

So we have solutions to all of these problems, including war, etc, at closer than our fingertips. But because of the ingrained superficiality of our society which educates us out of self-awareness, we miss the very tools which could lead to the rather simple solutions to the massive conflicts we engage in from within ourselves to over the globe. Go figure.

*I use the term "christianist" because there are over 40,000 named and practicing brands of that stream of religiosity. Those are all over the map as to belief, and it is hard to imagine that any of them match with any reasonable proximity the Original Teaching. That, if one considers the time, region, traditions, and other factors, much more closely resembles what can be called "nondualism" than anything purported to be His teaching by any contemporary institution.

Where's our attention in this?

[responing to the strange reversal of values on Facebook, which allows what amount to exploitative images of women, but balks in what someone called "a frat boy mentaltiy" at images of breast feeding or aboriginal women conducting ceremonies]
Somehow all our politicoreligious histories are tied together here, as being influenced by Englisch emigrants. I often remark when there are examples of gratuitous American prudery that many of the original settlers here, the Puritans in particular, left a remarkably sexually repressed England because for them it wasn't repressed enough. Of course on arrival here on our East coast they settled within five miles of a colony of libertines. This kind of set the stage for the interplay of the moral genes of American public thought and private behavior and has been a basic theme with some sprinklings along the way of some other exotic flavors up to the present day. 
As Heinlein outlined in his many explorations of possible sexual mores, the chief counterforce to alternative behaviors and styles in this Country has been the inevitable Ms. Grundy in her incarnations as various kinds of moral outrage at anything interesting or even perhaps useful. She brings out the Calvinist decorated lash at any hint of moral turpitude, her judgment being based on an ideology of inexperience and shortsightedness regarding practical realities which only deep religious conviction can bring. 
This parochialism can poison life experience well beyond only the sexual matters which are contended. The story comes to mind of the woman who refused to learn a second language when it would have been of great advantage to her. "God writ the Bible in English, so its good enough for me!" she exclaimed when asked about her refusal. And this ignorant refusal is a characteristic of conservatism in general and manifests as the obstruction of anything progressive to the point of heavily promoting one's own detriment. The American Congress and dangerously psychotic clown car of Republican presidential candidates is a current example of going too far down this road.
But the chief problem with this puritanical stance is that it backfires, causing and aggravating the very thing it is meant to prevent. For example, when I was living in Arizona there came on the news one night a story about a Catholic pastor in Norwalk, Connecticut. He was up in arms about the church parking lot being used by the patrons of the nudie bar, the Zebra Club, across the street. He raised such a fuss in a short time about his moral inconvenience regarding the use of his parking lot that it had become national news, and I was hearing about it two-thirds of the way across the land. And there's no doubt that the story reached the opposite coast as well.
As it happened, I moved shortly thereafter to Stamford, CT for a job operating a small printing press. I had friends who lived in Norwalk, and on my way there one day I drove by the site of the contention storied on the newscast I saw in AZ. I was amazed at the number of vehicles around the club, and in the church parking lot. It was a weekday afternoon, so the cars in the parish lot hadn't brought their occupants to Sunday mass. But what struck me, beyond the number of cars, was the number of out-of-state plates on them! There were plates from at least seven adjacent and nearby states! I thought to myself: if the owner of that club has any sense of decency he would give the pastor of the appurtenant church a tithe for his excellent and very productive free advertising!
And thus it is with much of public moral revulsion. Yes, while there are heinous things that deserve our intelligence to be used to quash them, my experience is that most such public hoopla as is aimed at sexual behavior or other moral matters backfires in that it draws more attention to the problem, thus promoting it, as did the good pastor in Norwalk. Here, in nearby Placerville, there are even picketers yet protesting a situation which has been legally and economically gone for months! Such is the ideological mind, one which tends to operate on fear, rather than the circumspect assessment of actual facts and the understanding of human nature as such.
This misplaced furor of moral outrage is often centered on the wonderful phenomenon of women's breasts, which in their biological capacity are a kind of innocent bystanders in the contention surrounding them and how they are used or when they are seen or why. Such silliness extended to their uncovered wonders being of no contention in NatGeo to requiring pasties on images of statuary depicting white women. In the meantime, toddlers and school children feasted on the real thing as they passed them in the towns of Europe so blessed with public art. 
We now know that after spending over a trillion fighting the marijuana cartels in Mexico, all we had to do was make it legal here. Now that part of the cartels hardly can do business. And we benefit here with the income that used to go there staying local and we also enjoy the indisputable health benefits of the plant where applicable. And while the main reason for banning weed was economical, its demonization was fueled by emotionalized propaganda. This kind of 
"morality" is expensive on many levels. 
So is the puritanism surrounding women's breasts. It is symptomatic of a much larger problem, the one manifesting as economic and other inequalities. But mostly it is symptomatic of a pathetic public immaturity about the biology and psychology of sex and relationship. Ultimately it is a failure in self-awareness, and therefore, social awareness, and above all a failure to love. We are not by any means a civilized people. Yes, we have toys, especially of destruction and consumption. 
But we have not, on a public scale, the emotional and spiritual maturity to have a sense of proportion about things. We will make a public furor about seeing a breast, and not nearly a large of one about sex trafficking or genital mutilation, or the horrors of child bridery and the raping of women and children in war zones. As is often the case with this kind of false morality, the public priority is bass ackwards. It diverts from actual, real, and urgent issues. The exposure of women's breasts, feeding babies, or in pictures for information or pleasure is not the cover-up we need to be concerned about. 
We have far more serious work to do. And it has to do with what wounds have been inflicted on the hearts and minds of millions by our ignorance and greed. We have not yet faced our actual enemy, projecting that on to another gender, Party, or country. Yet we discourage the kind of education and thoughtfulness that would lead to a resolution, an actual way forward, by engaging in mock skirmishes around diversionary bonfires lit well past the periphery of the actual battleground.

Arbor Economics and Your Taxes

I'm what might be called and arbor economist. That means that my understanding of economics comes from the nature of plants, trees in particular, as they were planted by my company in the desert. I came to this way of seeing the economy as a function of understanding that trees, like humans, are a circulatory life form. 
Very briefly, what I came to understand is that the tipping point of whether a tree or any other plant made it, and beyond that remained healthy, was what I called its "poverty line". At a tree's poverty line it was no longer taking things up from the roots and was doomed. This was true even if the pretty leaves and flowers stayed green for a while. You see, the leaves feed the roots, as well as the roots feeding the rest of the tree. But if nothing comes from the leaves or the soil, which is part dead leaves giving up their nutrients, the entire tree dies.
Since we knew this, we always ensured that the roots got the bulk of the money invested in the planting of a tree. That always paid off, because that strategy gave the tree the wherewithal to make itself strong in the ground and do its job of transpiring what was needed upwards. As long as there was nourishment there, the tree prospered. You see, we had discovered the hard way that in proportion to the poverty of the roots, the whole organism suffered. It may not have looked for a while like it was suffering, but suddenly it all went bad if the situations wasn't corrected.
Is it any wonder, then, that even Adam Smith, the Guru of capitalism, said in his "Wealth of Nations" that there must be a mechanism to return wealth, cash, to the lowest levels. If that wasn't done, and too much accumulated at the top, the system becomes unstable and in danger of collapse. But no one is going to go first in an oligarchy (democracy?? Phffffffttt......) like ours. This is why there must be regulation and even a proportionally large government that many conservatives fear on misconstrued grounds.
So the tipping point of the health of the "National" tree could be said to be the poverty line. That is because that is where the stress which can topple the tree occurs. Why? because the most expensive thing to be in this economy is to be poor. And as a corollary, the most expensive thing in terms of the economic health of the rest of the tree is at the cost of the middle class, the trunk of the tree. While few seem to think of it this way, the cost of maintaining poverty is far greater than simply addressing it and taking care of it. How is that done? Several ways.
First, stop taking away the means that the poor could use to sustain the economy where they are. In other words, stop taxing anyone who is say 10% above the poverty line and below. That way they can, because hey *must*, spend their money locally. And of course, that money almost invariably goes up. Had the bail-out money of recent time gone to the poor, in short order it would have ascended to its actual recipients through the paper economy as people paid off their mortgages.
The benefit would have been that the collateral damage of the now defunct middle class wouldn't have happened due to the money passing trough their hands one way or another on is way up, constituting circulation. Circulation is radically (look up the root of that word) different than accumulation, which the bailouts functionally were. And as bailouts they were used not to repair the transport system within the Nation tree, but to parasitically suck life from other trees by means of tap roots in the worst sense of the word. While this may seem to work for a while, what it actually does is ensure that eventually not just one tree, but the entire forest goes down.
So another thing that can be done is to simply "give" everyone a living wage balanced against a guaranteed basic income equal to poverty + 10%. While it sounds expensive, we know that say giving small houses to the homeless is far cheaper than dealing with them on the street, in hospitals and in jails. Why? Because even with the small number of inevitable freeloaders the cost is far less than maintaining the services and dissonant attitudes surrounding their being on the street.
Many might decry giving anyone "free" stuff, but if they had the presence of mind to run some numbers it would be obvious that less would come out of the public pocket, ie taxes, for this than for deliberately maintaining poverty. The "free stuff" is cheaper because then all the things necessary for personal wellbeing and job possibilities come into play, like having an address, communication, and cleanliness.

They don't deserve "free stuff"? How did they lose what they had, these Veterans, these victims of Wall Street, or these people who went bankrupt due to astounding medical bills and expenses that ANYWHERE ELSE WOULDN'T EVEN BE A BLIP IN THEIR LIVES so they and theirs could continue to be productive, instead of being a drag on our wallet. These homeless people are not the problem. They are the result of the problem.
And part of the problem is the ignorance that maintains their poverty in the most financially extravagant way. That's partly why you pay 100 times more federal taxes to support profitable companies than to support social programs which would be much less expensive if we were direct about it all. We are already paying more to maintain poverty than we would with "free stuff" that would actually take care of the problem.
We just need to stop giving the "free stuff" to people already so rich that your middle-class mind can't begin to comprehend it. You may be right about not wanting to give away large portions of your money, but if that's true, you damn straight better understand who you are already bleeding it to. It's not the poor and jobless, not even 1 to 100. The 100 would be to banks, oil, and the MIC. Get it straight. You have *already* taken care of the financial end of the poverty problem; only you have been feeding the wrong end. Try taking care of the roots for once.