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Basic Issues of the Social Question - Unresolved by Frank Thomas Smith
Juancito is nine years old but looks six.
He lives on the streets of a Latin American city and lives by the laws of the
streets. He is already a criminal of sorts because begging is illegal and he is
a beggar. In a year or two he will graduate to petty thievery and then on to
violent crime. More than likely he will become a drug addict, thereby making
his own violent end at the hands of the police or disease inevitable. Members
of the middle and upper classes will shake their heads at the depravity of the
poor or in commiseration, consciously or not will wish him good riddance and
carry on as before. Juancito's name is legion; he can be found in virtually all
regions of the world. He is a victim of social injustice -- a euphemism for
greed...
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Features
The Liberation of Buchenwald by Harry Herder - Introduction: FTS
Introduction: It was the
early nineties, only a few years after the fall of the Berlin Wall
and the demise of the so-called German Democratic Republic (East
Germany), when I was working as a management consultant
specializing in organization development. I belonged to an
international association that organized meetings of like-minded
(anthroposophical) consultants. That year, our German colleagues
had organized a conference in Weimar, Germany – a town known
for two of its previous famous residents: Goethe and Schiller, as
well as having been the cradle of the Weimar Republic, the last
democratic government before the Nazis came to power...
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Edward W. Said on Orientalism
by Gaither Stewart
In Edward Said’s preface to the 25th
anniversary edition of his magisterial work, Orientalism,
the author rapidly begins his definition of the Orientalism that has
resulted from the “immense distortion introduced by the empire
(of imperialism) into the lives of ‘lesser’ peoples and
‘subject races’…. How little it wishes to face the
long succession of years through which empire continues to work its
way in the lives of, say, Palestinians or Congolese or Algerians or
Iraqis." For
Said, the West’s Orientalist line begins with Napoleon’s
entry into Egypt two centuries ago, continues with the rise of
Oriental studies (one of the author’s principle targets) and
the takeover of North Africa, and goes on to similar undertakings in
Vietnam, in Egypt, in Palestine and during the entire twentieth
century in the struggle over oil and strategic control in the Gulf,
in Iraq, Syria, Palestine, and Afghanistan. The author poses the
question that if the Holocaust has permanently altered the
consciousness of our time, then why do we (the imperialist West) not
afford the same recognition to what imperialism has done, and what
“Orientalism” continues to do...
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Signs and Portents
by Joel A. Wendt
When those holding power and wealth do not take care of their
primary resource, ordinary people, there are natural consequences
that cannot be avoided. Venezuela is nearing total collapse. Power systems are breaking
down, and hyper inflation is making "money" meaningless. The Chinese government is trying very hard to control the flow of
information to its People - something actually impossible. All this
at a time when their central bank is working furiously to try to
prevent a real estate collapse that will look like small potatoes
next what happened here in 2008. Their "underwater" loans
are to businesses and belong to commercial buildings, not homes.
A madman, and a morally compromised woman, are the main contenders
for the next President of the United States of America...
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The Decay of American Politics - An Ode to Ike and Adlai
by Andrew J. Bacevich
My earliest recollection of national politics dates back
exactly 60 years to the moment, in the summer of 1956, when I watched
the political conventions in the company of that wondrous new
addition to our family, television. My parents were supporting
President Dwight D. Eisenhower for a second term and that was good
enough for me. Even as a youngster, I sensed that Ike, the
former supreme commander of allied forces in Europe in World War II,
was someone of real stature. In a troubled time, he exuded
authority and self-confidence. By comparison, Democratic
candidate Adlai Stevenson came across as vaguely suspect. Next
to the five-star incumbent, he seemed soft, even foppish, and
therefore not up to the job. So at least it appeared to a
nine-year-old living in Chicagoland...
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Giordano Bruno the Brave
by Stephanie Merritt
Go to Campo dei Fiori in Rome on 17 February and you will find yourself surrounded by a motley crowd of atheists, pantheists, anarchists, Masons, mystics, Christian reformers and members of the Italian Association of Free Thinkers, all rubbing shoulders with an official delegation from City Hall.
Every year, this unlikely congregation gathers to lay wreaths at the foot of the 19th-century statue that glowers over the piazza from beneath its friar’s cowl; flowers, candles, poems and tributes pile up against the plinth whose inscription reads: ‘To Bruno, from the generation he foresaw, here, where the pyre burned.’ In the four centuries since he was executed for heresy by the Roman Inquisition, this diminutive iconoclast has been appropriated as a symbol by all manner of causes, reflecting the complexities and contradictions inherent in his ideas, his writings and his character...
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Fiction
They Call Me Jackie Robinson in Brazil / En Brasil me llaman Jackie Robinson by Frank Thomas Smith
Sometimes I woke up and didn't know where I was and what language I should say good morning to the maid in. I'd eat breakfast, usually alone, sometimes with my mother if she didn't get to bed late the night before, and head for school in a bulletproof, chauffeur-driven limousine with my two bodyguards. In case you didn't know, the United States is a big, unloved country that likes to throw its weight around so American companies can buy the world and the so-called Third World is full of assholes who think they can change everything by kidnapping the American ambassador's son.I had this recurring dream. I'm spread-eagled naked on a cot in a dingy basement room. The terrorists decide that the only way to convince the United States to give Texas back to the Mexicans is to cut off my balls and send them to the White House with a note graphically stating what would be next. A hairless albino is approaching me with a hacksaw when I wake up screaming. I thought what good is being an ambassador's son if all those assholes want to emasculate you to prove they mean business and you have to be surrounded by bodyguards all the time...
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A Girl I Knew by J.D.Salinger
At the end of my freshman year of college, back in 1936, I flunked
five out of five subjects. Flunking three out of five would have made
me eligible to report for an invitation to attend some other college
in the fall. But men in this three-out-of-five category sometimes had
to wait outside the Dean's office as long as two hours. Men in my
group - some of whom had big dates in New York that same night -
weren't kept waiting a minute. It went one, two, three, the way most
men in my group like things to go. The particular college I had been attending apparently does not
simply mail people's grades home, but prefers to shoot them out of
some kind of gun. When I got home to New York, even the butler looked
tipped off and hostile. It was a bad night altogether. My father
informed me quietly that my formal education was formally over...
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Anthroposophy
Mi
Educación Esotérica, Mi Introducción a la
Antroposofía, y Cómo Conocer los Mundos Superiores por Monique Sanchíz de Mihalitsianos
No
puedo dormir. Es una de esas noches…He
estado pensando en esto mucho últimamente y, finalmente, he
decidido utilizar este tiempo en vela, bajo el decepcionantemente
nublado cielo nocturno, para poner, de una vez por todas, los
pensamientos en papel y el punto sobre las í-es. Aquiiiiií
va:
Fui
re-introducida al esoterismo a la tierna edad de los 14 años.
Digo re-introducir, porqué estoy segura que he estudiado
esoterismo anteriormente, en mis vidas pasadas. Fui criada dentro de
una familia Protestante-Cristiana (debido a la influencia americana
de mi madre en el hogar), dentro de un país Católico,
con un Padre Católico, pero no practicante. Por ende, es
seguro decir que crecí dentro de un ambiente religioso. Leí
muchas novelas fantásticas al crecer, muchas novelas épicas.
Jugué mucho deporte (todavía lo hago). Fui una chica
normal con una vida feliz y saludable. El
cambio sucedió cuando mi primer novio me prestó un par
de libros sobre Metafísica...
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What is the Human Being? by Judith von Halle
Knowledge about the human
being, his true inner and outer nature, can be acquired if one begins
to consider him – which is, after all, his own being –
with the methods of anthroposophical spiritual science. Practicing
anthroposophical spiritual science is possible for everyone.
No special qualifications are needed. By being human one is
qualified. For it is not at all the task of anthroposophical
spiritual science to investigate the spirit, but by means of the
spirit to investigate the world and humanity. The fact that this
spirit is available to the human being means that we are –
without any kind of specialized training – very well equipped
for anthroposophical investigative work, provided that we are really
willing to do so...
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Reincarnation and Karma - Lecture Two by Rudolf Steiner
The thoughts contained in the last
lecture will in that form have seemed to many incomprehensible,
perhaps even matters of doubt; but if we go further into the
subject to-day they will become clearer. What was it that was presented to us in the last lecture? For the
whole being of man it was somewhat similar to what a man
accomplishes when he is in some position in life where he has to
reflect upon earlier occurrences and experiences, and call them
back into his memory. Memory and remembrance are experiences of
the human soul which, in ordinary consciousness, are really
connected only with the course of the soul's life between birth
and death — or more exactly, with the period of time which
begins in the later years of childhood and lasts until death.
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"Apologia" concerning the publication of the the First Class Lessons: Apologia
Karmic Relations, Volume IV, Introductory Lecture by Rudolf Steiner
Many
friends have come here today for the first time since the
Christmas Foundation Meeting and I must therefore speak of it,
even if only briefly, by way of introduction. Through this
Christmas Foundation the Anthroposophical Society was to be given
a new impulse, the impulse that is essential if it is to be a
worthy channel for the life which, through Anthroposophy, must
find embodiment in human civilisation. Since the Christmas
Foundation an esoteric impulse has indeed come into the
Anthroposophical Society. Hitherto this society was the
administrative centre for Anthroposophy. From its beginning
onwards, Anthroposophy was the channel for the spiritual life
that has been accessible to mankind since the last third of the
19th century. Our conception of the Anthroposophical Movement,
however, must be that what takes its course on earth is only the
outer manifestation of something that is accomplished in the
spiritual world for the furtherance of the evolution of humanity...
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Poetry
Evolution and Occult Science by Frank Thomas Smith
How easy to claim
that we crawled one day,
Cloudy and warm,
up from the slime
For no reason
except we could.
Why not be happy
and dumb and stay
Home and leave
evolution for another time?
But then you'd
never be a crocodile,
Not to mention an
anthropoid:
A simian, that is, a monkey or ape.
It seems to me a crooked pile,
Tottering ineptly into the void...
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Red Rain Boots and Other Poems by Kimberly Potter Kendrick
He desired rain boots,
specifically Red Rain Boots
She being she
and him being him
She knows wants are not needs
He knows what he wants
He knows her
She knows him
Together they scheme
Stores around the town
Stores online
Zealously searching
Suddenly she spots them,
Red Rain Boots...
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The Death of Rubén Darío / La muerte de Rubén Darío by Antonio Machado
If all the world’s
harmony was in your verse,
where did you go, Darío,
harmony to seek?
Gardener of Hesperia,
nightingale of the seas,
heart at astral music
awed,
Has Dionysius taken you
by the hand to hell
and you’ll return with
new triumphal roses?
Si era toda en tu verso la armonía
del mundo,
¿dónde fuiste, Darío, la armonía a buscar?
Jardinero de Hesperia, ruiseñor de los mares,
corazón asombrado de la música astral,
¿te ha llevado Dionysos de su mano al infierno
y con las nuevas rosas triunfantes volverás?
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You can find us under the
Southern Cross constellation in the Traslasierra Valley, Province of Córdoba, Argentina. Visitors always welcome. Just follow the sign that reads: La Cruz del Sur.
Frank Thomas Smith, Editor
JoAnn Schwarz, Associate Editor
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