I don't remember that movie at all. I do remember Hayes being adept at quoting passages that disproved his point. I think I remember one where he was quoting an Iraqi document where the regime was actually talking about disrupting Ansar al-Islam in Kurdistan, and thought that was just the proof of the pudding.

I'm sure that was the best meal SWWB Hayes ever had especially the chocolate sauce on it. Now someone's going to have to tell him what a 'Dirty Sanchez' is.

For a moment I felt a surge of hope.

Jury Finds Steven Hayes Guilty . . .

Steven Hayes Could Face The Death Penalty
http://abcnews.go.com/US/TheLaw/jury-finds-steven-hayes-guilty-deadly-petit-home/story?id=11793886

Dammit, NE, I was about to post the same thing.

"Dr. William Petit, the only survivor of the slaughter, clutched his sister but remained stoic. Relatives of his slain wife wept while Hayes hung his head."

Is this the same Dr. Petit who has ties to Al Queda and is developing a nuclear weapons program in his basement?

I don't want to debate this under a mushroom cloud.

In an earlier thread, now closed to further comment, it was suggested I would probably like Black Elk Speaks. I've already read it, decades ago, but I see there's now an annotated edition. The catastrophic collapse that the Oglala Sioux went through may have some analogies to the tough times some see as possible consequences of the decline of the American Empire and economy, and yet Black Elk was able to "keep the faith." I'm going to read the book again.

My secular pessimism and renewed interest in spiritual things also has me revisiting books by and about G. I. Gurdjieff (1866?-1949), and I came across this story about one of his visits to the U.S.:

The rather young son of a former member of the Orage group asked me [Edwin Wolfe] to get permission for him to speak with Mr. Gurdjieff about something personal. When I told Mr. Gurdjieff about this he nodded, yes, bring him.

The next evening I took the youth up to Mr. Gurdjieff's suite in the Hotel Wellington. After greetings, the young man said, "Mr. Gurdjieff, my grandmother gave me some money not long ago. I'm going to buy a small piece of land in the country with it. I'll build a log cabin and I'll put in a vegetable garden so I can grow all my own food. I'll live there like that. So I wanted to ask you, would that be a good thing for me to do? Is that a good life?"

"Yes," Mr. Gurdjieff answered, "that good life. For dog. For man, no. You eat, you sleep, live in dream. How could this ever be life for man?"

The cabin and garden in the middle of nowhere works for me and has for years. But since WE're talking about Ole Cousin Deadeye's buddies and all I wonder IF there was ANY mention about outting a CIA Agent in time of war being TREASON against The People Of The United States OF America. Shouldn't The Memoirs be some kind of "tell all or rebutal"?

Mistah Charley,

I thought I typed something in response to this, but either my computer ate it or I just had a vision.

I hope you enjoy the Black Elk and Neihardt synergy as much with annotations. I wish I were more able to attain meditative discipline, but I suspect I'm not going to fully appreciate Black Elk in this lifetime. Still, I do see and feel those parallels to the collapse of the Lakota nation, and I think they're universal, even if social and economic and environmental change has now acquired so much momentum and possesses so little mercy that the parallels feel especially strong to me at present. (By the way, the Oglalas are just one of the seven Lakota-speaking subtribes of the titonwan, the Teton Sioux. Read the long-dead old curmudgeon George Hyde's Red Cloud's Folk for a lively though curmudgeonly history of those fabled, fabulous people. It's a sympathetic history for the most part, and it doesn't make the Noble Savage mistake--the Indians were people too, some very good, some very bad, most some of both, and with plenty of questionable customs of their own.)

The destruction of the Indian horse culture on the plains was indeed a very rapid catastrophic collapse, and there were some false bottoms to it too, just as there are false bottoms to our present collapse, or cascade of collapses. You can read a fine book, or even just a review of a fine book, called Education for Extinction to get a feel for what I mean by that obscure remark. It's not an easy thing to navigate between worlds, even for beings as adaptable as children, and each generation faced new hardships, just as our children now face new hardships, which I think ironically includes things that are mistaken for blessings.(http://www.kansaspress.ku.edu/adaedu.html) It took the Lakota generations to stop their cultural free fall, and they are still in the bottom of a deep ravine. We're not all quite there yet, but we seem to still be falling.

Imagine what it must have been like to live through what Lakota parents lived through, to feel your whole world collapsing under your feet--and, much worse, your childrens' feet. Most parents know what it feels like to look toward the uncertain future with the realization that there will come a time when they can no longer protect those they love. All parents face that, and its that universality--beyond my nostalgia for the wind-swept grasslands of my boyhood--that makes me feel so much poignance in the tragedy that befell the Lakota.

Anyway, enjoy Black Elk. I hope you get an even better feel (because you seem to have some of it already) for the peace beyond knowing that all those mystics seem to feel, which I understand about as well as I understand dogs.

Peace.

Point of view worth considering:

No, Higher Consciousness Won’t Save Us

by Norman Solomon

http://atlanticfreepress.com/news/1/13809-no-higher-consciousness-wont-save-us.html