THE KINGDOM OF SAUDI ARABIA

Saudi Press Agency - SPA

JEDDAH, JULY 25, SPA -- FOLLOWING IS THE STATEMENT ISSUED TODAY BY THE ROYAL COURT:
" THE KINGDOM OF SAUDI ARABIA HAS UNDERSTAKEN THE ROLE REQUIRED OF IT BY ITS RELIGIOUS AND NATIONAL DUTY WITH REGARD TO THE SITUATION IN THE REGION AND REPERCUSSIONS OF EVENTS IN LEBANON AND THE OCCUPIED PALESTINIAN TERRITORIES. IN THIS REGARD, IT HAS CAUTIONED, WARNED AND EXTENDED ADVICE. FURTHERMORE, IT HAS STRIVEN FROM THE FIRST MOMENT TO STOP THE AGRRESSION, MOVING ON MORE THAN ONE FRONT AND BY MORE THAN ONE MEANS, TO PERSUADE THE INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY TO FORCE ISRAEL TO AGREE TO A CEASEFIRE.
MEANWHILE, THE KINGDOM HAS DISPATCHED HRH THE FOREIGN MINISTER AND HRH THE SECRETARY GENERAL OF THE NATIONAL SECURITY COUNCIL TO MEET H.E. THE U.S. PRESIDENT IN WASHINGTON AND INFORM HIM OF ITS VIEWS ON THE GRAVE AND UNPREDICTABLE CONSEQUENCES OF THE UNREMITTING ISRAELI AGGRESSION IF MATTERS WENT BEYOND CONTROL. THE KINGDOM HAS ALSO ASKED PERSONAL ENVOYS TO VISIT THE CAPITALS OF THE SECURITY COUNCIL'S PERMANENT MEMBER STATES TO CONVEY THE SAME MESSAGE.
THE ARABS HAVE PROCLAIMED PEACE AS A STRATEGIC OPTION FOR THE ARAB NATION. THEY PRESENTED A JUST AND DISTINCT PLAN FOR REGAINING THE OCCUPIED ARAB TERRITORIES IN EXCHANGE FOR PEACE. THEY REFUSED TO RESPOND TO PROVOCATIONS AND IGNORED ANTI-PEACE EXTREMIST CALLS. IT SHOULD BE STATED THAT PATIENCE COULD NOT LAST FOREVER. IF THE ISRAELI MILITARY BRUTALITY PERSISTED WITH KILLINGS AND DESTRUCTION NO ONE COULD PREDICT THE CONSEQUENCES AND THAN REGRETS WILL BE IN VAIN.
THEREFORE, THE KINGDOM ADDRESSES AN APPEAL AND A WARNING TO THE INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY IN ITS ENTIRETY, AS REPRESENTED BY THE U.N. AND IN PARTICULAR THE U.S.
THE KINGDOM OF SAUDI ARABIA CALLS ON ALL TO ACT IN ACCORDANCE WITH HONEST, CONSCIOUS AND INTERNATIONAL MORAL AND HUMANITARIAN LAWS. IT ALSO WARNS ALL THAT IF THE PEACE OPTION IS REJECTED DUE TO THE ISRAELI ARROGANCE THEN ONLY THE WAR OPTION REMAINS AND NO ONE KNOWS THE REPERCUSSIONS BEFALLING THE REGION, INCLUDING WARS AND CONFLICT THAT WILL SPARE NO ONE INCLUDING THOSE WHOSE MILITARY POWER IS NOW TEMPTING THEM TO PLAY WITH FIRE.
--MORE 1625 Local Time 1325 GMT

Results of a Color Quiz

Your Existing Situation

Sensuous. Inclined to luxuriate in the things which give gratification to the senses, but rejects anything tasteless, vulgar, or coarse.

Your Stress Sources

Wants to overcome a feeling of emptiness and of separation from others. Believes that life still has far more to offer and that he may miss his share of experiences if he fails to make the best use of every opportunity. He therefore pursues his objectives with a fierce intensity and commits himself deeply and readily. Feels himself to be completely competent in any field in which he engages, and can sometimes be considered by others to be interfering or meddlesome

Your Restrained Characteristics
Unhappy at the resistance he feels whenever he tries to assert himself. However, he believes that there is little he can do and that he must make the best of the situation.

Your Desired Objective

Hopes that ties of affection and good-fellowship will bring release and contentment. His own need for approval makes him ready to be of help to others and in exchange he wants warmth and understanding. Open to new ideas and possibilities which he hopes will prove fruitful and interesting.

Your Actual Problem
The fear that he may be prevented from achieving the things he wants leads him into a relentless search for satisfaction in the pursuit of illusory or meaningless activities.

Your Actual Problem #2
Feels restricted and prevented from progressing; seeking a solution which will remove these limitations.

Ring of Fire

Down I went and yes, it burns. To suddenly feel older but not necessarily wiser at my age is not a good thing. But what can you do?

Love

O love is the crooked thing.
There is nobody wise enough
To find out all that is in it.


yeats

A folly of fools

Former secretaries of state and defense,
How many millions dead because of them?

The Nameless

always going deeper

Drinking from the well

What does sacrifice mean?

Hanged Man : Aeclectic Tarot

SACRIFICE

"Wounded I hung on a windswept gallows
For nine long night,
Pierced by a spear, pledged to Odin,
Offered myself to myself.
The wisest know not from whence spring
The roots of that ancient rood (Tree)

They gave me no bread,
They gave me no mead,
I looked down;
with a loud cry I took up the Runes,
From that tree I fell."

Don't tell the kids, but Rowling would be right to kill off Harry

Rachel Campbell-Johnston

Fiction allows us to come to terms with the emotions, such as the terrible outrage in Kes
 IS J. K. ROWLING going to commit Harry-kiri? Is she planning some appalling act of Potter-cide? The publishing world has been abuzz ever since Britain’s most celebrated children’s author insisted that the seventh volume of her series would, definitively, be the final one. And some of the characters, she suggested in an interview this week, would be coming to a sticky end. “One got a reprieve,” she confided, “but I have to say, two die that I didn’t intend to die.”

Rowling refuses to reveal anything more. And, if her last book is anything to go by, pre-publication secrecy will prove impenetrable — which will only whip up more frenetic speculation that it is the eponymous boy wizard himself who is about to perish.All over the country, muggle parents are already growing panicky.
They foresee tear-spotted pages. And how will they cope with all those
broken little hearts? “It’s such a betrayal of loyalty,” a friend of
mine railed before confiding her plan to kidnap Ms Rowling — like the
mad woman in Stephen King’s Misery — and force her at knifepoint to begin a rewrite.

But why? For the sake of our children we should look forward to
the death of Harry Potter. His demise seems a natural conclusion — and
not just for an author who is unwilling to see her creation resurrected
to some tacky commercial afterlife.

Death used to be an integral part of family life. People
prepared for their end at home, surrounded by those whom they loved.
They still do in many cultures. Once I stayed in the Amazon for a year
or so. When the grandmother of the family I was living with fell ill
she made a trip to the doctor. It took her a week to walk with her
stick through the forests. But as soon as she had arrived, she turned
round and came home. It wasn’t what the doctor had said, she explained.
It was that she had suddenly been frightened that, if she didn’t hurry,
she would never make it back.

So she spent her last month as a faint curve at the bottom of
a hammock. And on the night that she died, it was her 12-year-old
grandson who was sleeping beside her. And it was he and his sister who
helped their mother to wash her, who kept her corpse company until it
was buried.

But in our modern world death has grown lonelier. Too often
our elderly seem all but abandoned. Their little flats smell of urine
and solitude. When they fall ill, they are bustled off to hospitals: to
a strange world of hard surfaces and suffocating heat. Death is kept at
an antiseptic distance. And we seem to have derived a whole vocabulary
to obscure it. Granny doesn’t die: she is lost, or she passes away; she
is no longer with us, or she is called to God.

And yet children are instinctively fascinated by the subject.
You have only to watch the toddler fixated by the road-kill. You have
only to listen to all the brutally blunt questions of the “When you
die, Mummy, will Daddy cry?” sort. Death to a child is something solid.
It is something to be prodded at with a stick — or at least it is until
they realise that the adults around them are side-stepping the
question. Then they find it disturbing. Sometimes, in not talking, we
are communicating at our clearest. The child starts to sense all the
distressing dangers of taboo.

But literature can offer an arena in which, uncramped by
social expectations, children can discover and explore their emotions.
That is why all great children’s literature is preoccupied with death,
from the fairytales that first flirt with its possibilities to the
tragedies that encounter it in full-blown form. Fiction has a peculiar
power. It can create characters who feel as real as life; who become
our friends; who speak to our childhood imaginations in all their
hungry ferocity — as C. S. Lewis did to me, as J. K. Rowling clearly
does to another generation.

Like any child, I encountered death everywhere: in the
stillborn calves in the farmyard with their tiny blue tongues; in the
poisoned rats that turned to leathery mummies in the barn, in the
wounded wood pigeons whose slow deaths I presided over so attentively.
But as we retreat alone into the secret world of books, such
experiences gradually settle, find a context in life’s wider story.
Slowly we come to terms with all the emotions they arouse: lonely
abandonment (Babar’s mother), pained anger (Ginger in Black Beauty), unbearable outrage (Kes), heartbreaking disappointment (Midge in Ring of Bright Water). Slowly we draw towards some realisation of sad resolution.

Only when this is denied are we troubled. How many children, as I did, picked up Animal Farm
imagining it was some simple barnyard tale? I can remember my
bewilderment at the departure of Boxer. Was he killed or not? The lack
of certainty haunted me. It was as if some family pet had died and we
had never held the funeral.

Adults often fear that children are too fragile to face the
reality of death. But the only certainty of life is the thing about
which we seem most uncertain. It is better for our children to confront
death directly. Let Harry Potter be killed. It would be less confusing
than for him to grow up to become an accountant. Besides, as his
headmaster Dumbledore put it: “For the well-organised mind, death is
the next big adventure.”

the Well and the Tree

SUMBEL - INVOKING THE POWER OF THE PAST
The I in this article does not refer to myself but rather to Stephen A. McNallen of the Asatru Folk Assembly. A person who usually never fails to provide food for thought.

Sumbel, the ritual toasting which comprises an entire branch of Germanic religious observance, is practiced with many different variations across the country and around the world. Some groups pass the horn three times, while for others that would be only a warm-up. The subject of each pass varies, as do the rules for acceptable behavior. I have sat in some sumbels where the attitude was extremely informal, as well as in those that were highly structured and infused with elaborate protocol. Even the word itself is spelled differently from place to place; common spellings include the Old English symbel, the Old Norse sumbel, the Icelandic sumbl, and the American variant sumble.



Depending on the mood and the occasion, all these customs are within the acceptable range of Germanic practice in the early 21st century. There is one element, however, that I feel is often missing but which can add a great deal to the experience for novices and experienced Asafolk alike.



This "something" is nothing more than a verbal statement to the group calling to mind the theory and the purpose of the sumbel. It refreshes the essential principles in the minds of the old-timers, and instructs those who are new to our faith. Additionally, it serves as a good transition from mundane affairs to the sacred.



Anyone who sits at sumbel with me has heard this lecture, perhaps many times. It goes something like this, with various elaborations:



In Germanic cosmology there are two major features: the Well and the Tree. The Tree is the mighty Yew, the framework of the cosmos, and in it hang all the Nine Worlds. The Tree is all that which IS at any given instant.



The Well, on the other hand, is the repository of all that which has been - the past, if you will. As we go about our lives, our deeds deposit layers in that Well. These layers constitute our "fate," or more properly our orlog (or=primal; log=layers). These layers continue to influence the present. In other words, the layers we put in the Well help determine what happens to us. We get the fate we make, at least partially.



Philosophically, this is significant because it affirms free will and human effort while refuting fatalism.



However, it gets more complicated: We are not the only ones putting layers in the well. Our own deeds have greater immediacy for our own lives, but the outcome of events is also shaped by the deeds of others - vast forces, usually impersonal, that condition what can or cannot be done at any given time. Because the equation describing that-which-is is thus a complex one, we may not be able to get the outcome we desire in any given situation. The momentum of other layers in the Well may simply outweigh any power we can bring to bear.



It is here that heroism comes into play. Edith Hamilton, in her book Mythology, writes that "The hero can prove what he is only by dying." I read that line as a young man, and it took me years to truly understand it. A human may exert all his or her power (physical, mental, and spiritual) to attain a goal. This is a noble thing, but gaining victory is not the greatest test of heroism. The ultimate expression of the heroic ethic is to fight one's hardest and lose the battle - but to accept defeat calmly and meet death with a joke on one's lips. In other words, the enemy can take victory but they cannot take the dignity of the great soul; that remains forever under the control of the hero's will.



We can draw power from the past - from the Well itself - to aid us in our personal battles. The sumbel horn is, magically speaking, the Well. The mead within it is the accumulated orlog. By drinking from the horn with intent and invoking some specific form of that-which-has-been, we bring the might of the past into the present and immerse ourselves in it that we may use that might to seek our own victories. This involves making a toast (thus harnessing some of the Well-bound might of others, to include the Holy Powers themselves), a boast of a personal accomplishment (reaffirming our own layers laid down successfully) or some other mighty verbal gesture such as a song or poem that also captures the courage, power, endurance, or even the sense of humor expressed in the past.



While social bonding and the speaking of one's mind are valuable side effects of the sumbel, we would do well to remember the fundamental aim, which is to manifest the power of the past and apply it to our present and future struggles. As such, sumbel becomes a magical act of great significance, with immense benefits for the participants. I urge you to incorporate a verbal prologue at the beginning of your sumbels to take full advantage of this effect and to teach those who sit at your table!

When I Paint My Masterpiece By William Rivers Pitt

When I Paint My Masterpiece
By William Rivers Pitt
t r u t h o u t | Perspective

Sunday 02 July 2006


Someday,
Everything's gonna be smooth like a rhapsody,
When I paint
My masterpiece.

- Bob Dylan


Any starting point requires that we remember that this nation which birthed us, inspires us, blesses us, puts us to work, this nation that challenged us to remember the original promises whenever we said the Pledge of Allegiance all those times in school, this nation we'd all die for, this nation we call home is, in the end, nothing more or less than an idea.

An idea. A dream, an experiment, something sociologist Max Weber once described as "the slow boring of hard boards," a serious endeavor with a good chance of success but a better chance of failure, and if the one was to be saved from the other, there would have to be a lot of good will and hard work and devotion to the premises that got everything started in the first place. The lady who asked Benjamin Franklin what had been wrought after the Constitutional Convention of 1787 got the right answer. "A republic," Franklin told her, "if you can keep it."

"We the people" was a good start, if we're talking about the premises. No one had ever before, in all of history, bothered to lay down a national charter with that kind of thinking in mind. "Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" was another original stroke. There were a dozen more at least, ideas that have been around since time out of mind to be sure, but ideas that no one anywhere ever used collectively and comprehensively to define the reasons for a diverse people to stand under one flag and salute, and mean it.

It was supposed to be a lot of things, but it was never supposed to be easy.

That is America, or at least it was for a while. The song remains the same, as the band once said, but we are certainly not operating off the same ideas that marked the blueprint these last several generations, and anyone who tries to tell you different is also trying to sell you something. Rose-colored glasses are selling cheap these days. They're going for the price of a flag or a few hours of round-the-clock cable-news talking-head pablum, and unfortunately for all of us, that's about as cheap as it gets in the 21st century.

Why? Because America was about a lot of things, back when it all meant something, but there was always a virus in the matrix. George Washington and Thomas Jefferson and the rest of the great thinkers put all the good ideas to paper, but they also made sure the thing was hard-wired to favor anyone with a lot of money.

It was the taxes that burned the Fathers out of neutrality, after all, as well as the denial of commerce by the Crown. So when the revolution was over and the smoke had cleared, the Fathers carved out a separation of church and state, and codified free speech, and laid the groundwork for more freedom for more people than had ever been seen before, but they also made sure the well-to-do were going to remain thus for time out of mind. That was fine, because they put the work in, and freedom also means freedom to make money and be rich. Before too much time had passed, that kind of thing was called The American Dream.

The problem, though, was the virus, which was money. Money slowly bought power, money slowly won elections that used to be free, money started to be the defining reality of Congress and then the presidency, money began writing and signing the laws, money got judges put on the Supreme Court by the purchased aforementioned, and money made sure those judges made decisions designed to benefit the money. Washington and Franklin would have been horrified to see the way it started to shake out even fifty years after they finished their work, but of course, they were gone by then.

Two Supreme Court cases tell the story of where we're at: Santa Clara v. Southern Pacific Railroad in 1886, and Buckley v. Valeo in 1976. The first, a relatively straightforward eminent domain case, granted 14th Amendment rights to corporations. The second declared that money spent to influence elections is a form of Constitutionally-protected free speech.

And we roll the bones, because the 14th Amendment says, "All persons born or naturalized in the United States and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States and of the State wherein they reside," which makes corporations exactly the same as natural-born American humans, and further says that no state can create or enforce any law, "which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the United States; nor shall any State deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws."

So corporations are the same as natural Americans, but thanks to Buckley v. Valeo, all the money thrown at elections and candidates and campaigns and political parties is the same as free speech, and when massive multinational trillion-dollar corporations throw millions at the politicians, they do so with the same set of basic rights as the guy who empties their trash. Except they can't be held liable for anything, because they're corporations, and can hire million-dollar law firms to defend them, and those lawyers become judges appointed by the politicians who are bought and paid for, and it's all perfectly legal, and that's the virus.

Buy the laws, buy the law-makers, and you become the law. That is the definition of corporate freedom.

Money is why we're in Iraq. Money is why it's legal to spy on Americans, why the laws are rewritten to suit policy, why we go to war for resources, why we torture people. It doesn't have anything to do with safety or national security or anything else except money. Foreign policy decisions these days amount to little more than business deals writ large and with body counts to boot, but the latter is always folded in somewhere beneath the bottom line.

These are the Augean stables that have to be cleaned. It doesn't have a damned thing to do with George W. Bush or any of his merry men. That pack is a symptom, merely a cell, a string of proteins holding the genetic code for the virus that is everywhere, and it was there before they showed up, and will still be there when that pack is gone.

There is an election in November, which is good, because there are some people in Congress who know all this, and if it all shakes out the right way, those people will be in a position to make some changes. It's good because elections still matter, even with the corporate ownership of our votes. It's good because the idea may have been paved over with a hundred miles of money and corruption and greed, but that doesn't mean the idea is dead.

The nation which birthed us, inspires us, blesses us, puts us to work, the nation that challenged us to remember the original promises whenever we said the Pledge of Allegiance all those times in school, the nation we'd all die for, the nation we call home is, in the end, nothing more or less than an idea. It has trembled on the edge of dissolution for more than two hundred years, and never more so than today, but the margin is still there.

The margin, of course, is you and me, and everyone else. A lunatic might call this a great time to be alive, while a patriot would say it is a terrible time to be alive, and in the end, they'd both be right. Only a lunatic would think any of this could be changed, and only a patriot would stand up and volunteer for the fight to create that impossible change.

Lunatics and patriots, and a guarantee of broken hearts. That is what you sign up for if you get involved tomorrow, and that is what you've seen and felt and choked on if you were involved today. It was supposed to be a lot of things, but it was never supposed to be easy.

That was the idea to begin with, when you think about it. It has always been in danger, this idea, this dream, and it has been sustained all this time by edge-riders and lunatics and patriots. It was a masterpiece when it was created, and will be again when all is said and done. Too many of us refuse, absolutely refuse, to have it any other way.

William Rivers Pitt is a New York Times and internationally bestselling author of two books: War on Iraq: What Team Bush Doesn't Want You to Know and The Greatest Sedition Is Silence.

-------
© : t r u t h o u t 2006