“The world is a very complicated place and there are not always easy solutions to a lot of the problems out there,” says John Brennan, a top Obama intelligence advisor and former senior CIA official who co-founded the Terrorist Threat Integration Center and the National Counterterrorism Center, a post-9/11 effort to integrate the US government’s terror threat intelligence. “If you look at the world in black and white, you miss a lot of the subtleties out there. ‘Either with us or against’—the world is not divided into good and evil a lot of time. Despite America’s military might, a lot of these problems do not lend themselves to kinetic solutions"—i.e. the use of force. And world dynamics are likely to get more complicated and nuanced, not less, by 2025. An intelligence forecast being prepared by the US intelligence community for the next president “envisions a steady decline in US dominance in the coming decades, as the world is reshaped by globalization, battered by climate change, and destabilized by regional upheavals over shortages of food, water and energy,” according to the Washington Post.
Happy Saturday… just sitting in the back of the bus… listening to the Radiohead stems from the song Reckoner… I just downloaded them from the i tunes store for 99cents… separate tracks for Drums/Percussion, Vocals, Guitars, Bass, Piano/Strings… It’s so fun to listen to the different components of a song that you know so well… We’re gonna offer that to y’all soon… there is a very exciting project in the works from us…
I hope you’re having a great day… here’s a nice video to look at… jrc
Hi everyone… happy night-time… we just had a great show in Denver… so fun… And now it’s on to Kansas City… Hope you’re all having a good night… a good day… a good now…
Like I said, i wanted to write a bit more about what exactly everyone is talking about in the news these days…
Just in case you don’t know what’s going on, here is a brief synopsis of why we seem to have a problem on Wall Street, and why congress should hear from us… the public… that the first proposal from the Federal Treasury is unacceptable:
The Background: People buy homes with loans from banks, and they pay their loans back in their monthly mortgage payments, which are based on the current interest rates. When interest rates were low (set low by the federal government in order to stimulate the economy) many people took out loans. And it seems that many people didn’t understand that the interest rates on their loans could and would increase, thereby making their monthly payments unaffordable after a certain amount of time. Thus, many people lost their homes in foreclosures to the banks that gave them the loans in the first place… and then in the new higher priced climate, since people weren’t buying homes as much, the value of the housing market overall went down, thus the stocks of the banks that made their money by selling mortgages went down… some huge banks even had to declare bankruptcy… thus the entire Wall Street system was shaken and people began to take money out, or at least not put new money in, and suddenly the whole complicated internationally and domestically based American financial system showed signs of potentially grinding to a halt…
The Solution?: Therefore, after a few seemingly contradictory measures, such as letting one major bank declare bankruptcy, and then deciding to use 85 billion tax payer dollars to bail out the debts of another bank, the Federal Treasury unveiled a plan at 1 am on this last saturday morning asking URGENTLY for at least 700 billion dollars of tax payers money to fix the unstable conditions on Wall Street. And the truth is that everyone seems to agree that some major “bailout” such as this is necessary. And furthermore, everyone is confident that the economy will recover in time…
The Problem With the Solution: However, the specific terms of this proposal are dangerous because they give too much power to the one branch of the government that was supposed to be overseeing economic matters in this country and making sure that we didn’t get into a financial disaster like this in the first place. According to the New York Times, the proposal says that the Federal Treasury, which will be in charge of stabilizing the situation on Wall Street with at least 700 billion dollars of tax payers money, cannot be supervised, regulated or prosecuted “by any court of law or any administrative agency”. That request seems to ignore completely the system of checks and balances that this country was founded on.
So please join me in reaching out to our congress men and women, urging them to make sure any plan to fix the current financial instability is not only well thought out and regulated by a bi partisan oversight committee, but that it also distributes the burden of its 700 Billion dollar price tag not just on the tax payers, but also on the banks and financial institutions that helped get us into this mess. To fix this situation, it seems like we need level headed, calm, rational leadership… not frantic, fear based bully tactics that could pressure congress into passing a bill before it has been better thought out.
Below is the e mail from MoveOn.org which has a link to their online petition as well as the phone numbers to your states congress men and women. Thanks for your time… Again… Hope you’re having a great day. JRC
“From MoveOn.org Subject: Main Street before Wall Street
Hi,
This is outrageous. Bush wants taxpayers to give his administration a $700 billion check with no strings attached, which they’ll hand over to the Wall Street firms that got us into this financial mess.
Would it help families struggling to keep their homes? NO. Do taxpayers get any share of the firms we’re bailing out, so we can benefit from any eventual profit? NO. Would the firms we’re bailing out be required to stop paying their executives multimillion-dollar salaries? NO. This is a pure giveaway.
I signed a petition urging Congress to put Main Street before Wall Street, and to not give Bush a blank check. Can you join me at the link below?
Yay… new website… hope you like it… i’ll be interested to see what people do and don’t like about it… let us know…
So it is another beautiful day… i’m here in Boulder Colorado with my father the day before our Denver show… My dad is coming back on the road with us to take more photographs… should be nice… i just looked at all the shots he took in Japan… that trip seems like a long time ago… time really flies…
i hope y’all are having a great day.
and P.S. for any of you that already know that the latest Federal “Bail Out” proposal needs some reworking before we could feel comfortable with congress signing it into action… go to this www.MoveOn.org petition and sign your name…
for those of you who don’t know about it… i’m gonna write something up that hopefully makes it easy to understand and get involved with… and i’ll post that soon, but i just wanted to spread this link as soon as possible because this really is something congress needs to hear public disapproval about... Thanks a lot.
AND, as I promised, in the spirit of balanced blogs, for every “citizen responsibility” link I add, I’ll also put up just some cute inspirational animal video… =) jrc
We gotta start doing more video blogs… we’ll get on this soon… Another fun show tonight… this time outside of Portland… great crowd… thanks to everyone who came out to the show… I wonder if my new friends I met at the Vietnam memorial out by Washington Park were there… hope you guys are feeling good today…
namaste…
well… life is trippy… isn’t that a crazy understatement? life is soooo trippy… I was reading a book that james gave me called The Inner Game of Tennis… and it had this passage about how amazing the human body is, how subconsciously interconnected everything is… how right now as you’re reading this, your eyes are differentiating between the color of the letters and the background… comparing them with our memories of other symbols and forming words and cohesive thoughts out of the combination of words… and all the while, our heart is beating constantly and our organs are gathering the essential elements from our food… and on and on and on… it’s just a wonder how everything works…
isn’t it all so wild??? and to think that our bodies grew themselves, and all the hair and skin and bones and everything that keeps growing… how do we know how to DO this?
crazy… We’re off to Seattle tomorrow… and then on and on…
I just wanted to say hello… and put up a nice video i just saw… here it is…
I was going to put up a post that I found on on http://www.huffingtonpost.com about something to do with the election… but then I decided to just ... not put up anything about the election… Still, that huffington post website is full of good information if you’re interested… and you SHOULD be interested because so much of our deeply interconnected world will be affected by the outcome of this election, and we’d better hope that whoever “wins” is gonna help the most amount of people possible… there is just SO much stuff on the internet… it’s amazing.
everything is amazing… all of these beautiful things and all of these tragic things happening side by side everyday… we all just gotta keep breathing deeply and doing our best…
what a mystery life is…
Hope you’re having a great night… and I hope this Sunday is a day of rest and relaxation for you. Love, jrc
So here we are… how are you? Another day… how did you sleep? enough? feeling rested? busy? happy? stressed? First of All… thanks to you all for coming out to our shows with the counting crowes and augustana and sara bareilles ... this has been our favorite tour so far… and we’ve really had a great time with y’all so far. Second of all… Someone responded to the last blog about this upcoming US election with the question “is it really all that simple?” and… i don’t know the answer… part of me says Of course it’s not simple… there are SO many people on this planet, and all of us are leading unique lives with totally different circumstances shaping our worldviews… but then on the other hand, if you look at it from a certain angle, that fact does indeed become simple… because if we realize that not everyone thinks about the world the way that we do, and we give people space to lead their lives according to their beliefs, then hopefully we can figure out a way to set up a structure in society that cares for everyone’s health and basic needs. Now, i know that there are times when certain peoples worldviews include some kind of insane belief that people with opposing viewpoints from theirs need to be killed… for either economic gain, or in the name of God…
In either case, i hope we can all agree that it’s just not right to go out and kill people… It seems hard to imagine that any divine force out there (an all powerful, all knowing entity that we could call God… or Allah… or Krishna… or Boran… or Shangdi… or Thixo, Gunab, or Tsui… or any other name that humans have given the unfathomable… go look on widipedia for Names of God) would actually want us to kill people who used a different name for IT… I like to think of the different interpretations of this divine force as cultural nicknames… they’re endearing… sometimes people have lots of nicknames… it’s not surprising that God would have lots too. God is very popular.
I don’t know how to deal with those people who kill for the second reason… I’d like to just say “Look!!! No single person on this planet ACTUALLY knows what God’s will is for us humans… but most people agree that God is interested in us leading basic moral lives… don’t kill others… try not to cause suffering… etc… The golden rule sounds pretty good to me… or as the classic movie Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure so eloquently put it… “Be Excellent to Eachother… and… Party on Dudes!!!!”
So… to answer your question “is it really all that simple"… I guess i’m gonna go with: NO… it’s not that simple when you try and deal with the whole world… obviously each of us as individuals can’t really change the sweeping scope of this human drama… but we can do our part by trying to peaceful and loving in our own lives… looking deeply into our selves and finding our flaws and working to make them better… respecting each other… finding joy and spreading it… blah blah blah…
I love you guys… I love seeing all the different opinions… and i’m just trying to think about practical things that can be done to make the world a better place… Voting is an important one… especially in this election because things seem pretty chaotic right now. But to be honest, that’s just the beginning because we all have a responsibility to do our part… I hope we can figure out a way to keep making things better before things get a lot worse...
Here’s a video I wanted everyone to see to just put a simple light on a major problem of the political process, which is that important issues get overshadowed by petty and childish arguments… check it out:
and also… here’s a link to Joe Biden’s speech from the DNC:
Hello From Dallas Texas… another beautiful day… we’re about ready to leave the hotel and go to soundcheck… I’m watching the speeches of Sarah Palin and John McCain… and I just wanted to pass them along to you so you could watch them and see what you think.
I hope you’re having a great day.
Thanks for watching these and taking the time to just look at both sides of this election…
I’m thinking a lot about this election these days because it’s such an important time and i know how much we all want things to just get better. It’s kind of overwhelming isn’t it? War… Lack of Jobs… Gas prices… Climate Change… Devastating Storms… Pollution… Overflowing Land Fills… Overpopulation… Lack of Food and Drinking Water… Fear of terrorism… Distrust of Politicians… Anger… Racism… Ignorance… Fear… phew…
I feel like making a list to counteract that one... Friendship… Love… Family… Hope… Music… Art… Sports… Plumbing… Clothing… The Postal Service (the actual postal service that delivers mail all around the world with an unbelievably high success rate for unbelievably low prices… not the band… but, yeah… now that i think of it… the band too)… Cell Phones… The Internet… Communication… Language!!!… Movies… Eyesight… All the senses… Dreams… Nature… Cities… Recycling… Sustainable Farming… Responsibility… Honor… Nobility… Forgiveness… ETC…
I think we just need to take a deep breath… get informed about what we can do as individuals… and also make the best decision about who to vote for in this next election. What we DON’T need is any kind of divisive or angry or defensive energy… that is my least favorite part of politics… such a distraction from the issues… we need UNITY and UNDERSTANDING and OPEN-MINDED-NESS…
Here’s another blog to bookmark… my friends in New York seek out inspiring things and post them here…
hey everyone… happy daytime… or night time… or whatever… hi.
what a beautiful day it is in los angeles… sunshine… blue skies… etc…
i just wanted to make a post with a link to Barack Obama’s speech from the DNC last week… it was an amazing speech, and I think that everyone in America should watch it regardless of what political party they “belong” to…
I’m looking forward to seeing what John McCain has to say in his upcoming speeches... honestly, i don’t consider myself a democrat or a republican… honestly I don’t even like to think of myself as an “American"… which is not to say that I don’t love this country… especially the amazing ideas that it was founded on… but I just consider myself a human being who was lucky enough to be born on planet earth on part of this continent known as The United States of America with all of its beautiful and also complicated and also ugly and also noble and wonderful (etc) history… Personally, because I get to travel all around the world, and see how similar people are in different countries, I just wish there was more of a spirit of the United Countries of the World, and not so much divided interests in just our individual countries… but that’s a whole other issue…
getting back to this election… i just want to help elect whichever candidate I believe is going to do the most amount of good for the most amount people, and also put this country back in good standing with the rest of the world… I know we all want that… so let’s just keep watching the speeches, and researching the candidates… it just takes a little time… and then we’ll know… and then we’ll choose…
and also… here are some interesting photos from the protests at the Republican National Convention in Minneapolis… did anybody see any news coverage of protests from the RNC? lemme know what where you saw it… and what it was like… thanks... http://www.motherjones.com/:
