Marc Lafrance teaches courses on masculinity at Concordia University. “If we can get men to feel that their lives don’t need to correspond to this mythic machismo, that will open them up to life experiences,” he says.

Marc Lafrance teaches courses on masculinity at Concordia University. “If we can get men to feel that their lives don’t need to correspond to this mythic machismo, that will open them up to life experiences,” he says.

The male stereotype of the all-powerful protector and provider is doing a disservice to men – pressuring them to conform and ultimately leaving many powerless to face the challenges of modern society.

That’s the thesis that binds many academics in the new area of masculinity studies, who say their examination of how the culture of maleness impacts men, rather than those around them, has been a long time coming. While women’s studies have been gaining a foothold at universities across the country since the early 1970s, academic courses and research on men could barely be found, most often hidden under the umbrella of gender studies.

Now, however, researchers who focus on the study of men and masculinity are coming out of the cold. They are the vanguard, whose theories are often used in newspaper and magazine stories about how men are faring. “Clearly it’s at a very nascent stage in its development, in the humanities and social sciences,” says Concordia University sociologist Marc Lafrance, who teaches about men and masculinity as part of several courses on gender and sexuality.

But even though there are just a few courses in masculinity studies given at the university level across Canada, and no departments of men’s or masculinity studies, Lafrance, 35, says that since arriving at Concordia in 2006 after completing a PhD at Oxford, “I went from supervising nothing on masculinity over my first two years to supervising four students and then five and now, we’re waiting to hear about the status of three new applications in our graduate program in the upcoming year.”

And more and more research is being published in Canada. At the University of Western Ontario, for instance, anthropologist Wayne Martino has recently completed extensive work on masculinity, gender and role modelling; Christine Ramsey, a media studies professor at the University of Regina is editor of Making It Like a Man: Canadian Masculinities in Practice; while Lafrance will be contributing to an upcoming volume, Canadian Men and Masculinities: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives.

The push to study masculinity might be viewed as a logical extension of women’s studies, which examine the problems of gender and the social construction of sexuality mostly from a female perspective. In addition, there’s the “masculinity crisis” widely discussed today, males under pressure from societal changes.

“These two things together have created a fertile context for study, and we’re starting to see concrete evidence that this is becoming a full-fledged area of inquiry,” Lafrance says. But rather than looking only at men’s behaviour through the tired lens of their power and destructiveness, he believes we need to look at how masculinity “as a structure, as a lived experience, can also be fundamentally disempowering to men.”

The aggressive arena of men’s sports and its connection to serious emotional damage is being studied by sociology graduate student Cheryl MacDonald, 24, who interviewed a number of major junior hockey players about what masculinity means to them.

“I find that hockey players are socialized to adhere to more traditional forms of masculinity, being very tough and competitive, and sometimes those practices become more problematic – men committing suicide, drugs and alcohol, and those head shots,” MacDonald says.

The research attempts to understand how these “masculine” behaviours are linked to the way in which young men are socialized, how they express their values.

MacDonald began considering men’s studies when she took an undergraduate course with sociologist Anthony Synnott, who discussed the importance of studying both genders. “In my undergraduate experience in sociology, a lot of courses on women and even courses about gender focused on women and not much on men,” she says.

Synnott, who has been teaching a course on the Sociology of Men for 10 years, wrote the 2009 book, Redefining Men: Heroes, Victims and Villains, and currently writes a column on men for Psychology Today. He believes that the rallying cry of “male chauvinist pig” has ignored important realities that men face. “Men dominate at the top and also the bottom,” he points out. “The vast majority in prisons, victims of accidents, victims of work fatalities, 99 per cent of military fatalities – are all male.”

Men, argue McGill University professor Paul Nathanson and his colleague Katherine Young, suffer from the myth that they are the gender with the power and therefore cannot be damaged by criticism and ridicule. The physical, political and economic power that a small percentage of men do wield renders women, they believe, “either unwilling or unable to see men as fully human beings, people who can indeed be hurt both individually and collectively.”

Nathanson and Young have written five books chronicling the rise of misandry, the hatred of men, which they view as a culture war being fought because of the feminist activism that led to the changed role of men.

But Lafrance and many of his colleagues are eager to avoid setting men and masculinity studies up against women’s studies. “We need to figure out what it is about masculinity in our culture that is oppressive not just to women, but to men,” he says.

“Since the 1960s and ’70s, the push was issues relating to the lives and experiences and injustices faced by women. In my view, it was totally appropriate that this kind of scholarship should have taken centre stage, mainly because those forms of knowledge had been silenced for so long.”

At this point, he considers it counterproductive for theorists of men and masculinity to “organize our analysis around who has more power and who’s in more trouble. There’s evidence to suggest men have lots to deal with but it’s also true about women who confront injustice on a daily basis.”

Only by looking at the issues contextually can you understand where the gender balance really lies, Lafrance says.

“There’s lots of anti-male stuff out there and anti-female stuff,” Synnott agrees, “and a lot of people are badly hurt by men versus women. We should be noting the glory of female and male achievements.”

These scholars note an increasing restlessness in the academic community over the last decade, a need to shift the gaze to focus on men.

Acknowledging “there’s sometimes a sense that we’re trying to re-appropriate centre stage for the straight white guy,” Lafrance points out that in much of the ongoing study claiming to be about women’s experiences, there will be reference after reference to men, about their bodies, desires, behaviour – without any real theories being put forward.

What this means is that “men constitute a present absence around the work that’s going on in the university,” Lafrance says. “There are assumptions about men in gender studies, but men themselves aren’t being seen as a legitimate object of inquiry.”

Never has an understanding of masculinity been more urgent, because the stereotype macho man is not going to survive very long if he doesn’t adapt, Lafrance believes. “The irony is the dominant norms of masculinity, what the academics call hegemonic masculinity – the breadwinner, the guy who never gets scared, the guy who is extremely successful – really make for an unlivable life for men.

“These structures distance men from themselves,” he says. “You can’t be a person who can feel, you can’t be weak, you’re not allowed to be sad, to fail.”

Although he discusses issues of masculinity with male friends, and many are actively thinking about their roles as men, one of the reasons there’s no coherent movement around this rethinking is precisely because talking is so taboo among men, Lafrance says. “Talking about stuff in a meaningful, considered way has always been associated with femininity – traits like caring and sensitivity that many men are taught to eschew.

“One of the key challenges is going to be how you form a movement when dealing with a part of the population systematically taught not to talk.”

Undergraduate courses on men and masculinity still attract slightly more women than men, but the majority of graduate students are men, Lafrance notes.

In doing her graduate research, MacDonald has certainly come up against a code of silence among the hockey players she has interviewed. “When asked about something like hazing, it’s really hard to break through,” she says. “The coach would say everything’s fine and we’re all best friends, but there are players who are struggling with the common rituals of the sport and tell me about the darker side of hazing and competition.”

After 14 interviews and 20 surveys, she has concluded that the code of silence prevailed in her research. “It seemed that half of the people I spoke to gave me the same story about how great things are and the other half told stories about what they are able to get away with.

“We can’t really solve any of these problems of masculinity and hockey if people aren’t going to speak out.”

But even in the classroom, Lafrance says, “my female students are more than happy to talk about these issues, but the men are silent.

“Men are not talking – especially not with other men. Just talking about masculinity, acknowledging there’s something to talk about, seems to transgress the conventions of our society.”

But when you understand how power functions, the context in which men operate, you realize it’s no way to live, he says. “It’s a model of masculinity built on competition, success at all costs, it’s emotionally empty and ruthless and focuses on a need to be constantly invulnerable.”

Men have got to realize, he says, that their silence reinforces the social structures.

“If we can get men to feel that their lives don’t need to correspond to this mythic machismo, that will open them up to life experiences.”

This burgeoning field of study is ripe to make that case, these academics believe, and is an opportunity for dialogue between women’s studies and men’s studies. While there is still considerably more emphasis placed on women’s studies, there are more and more conferences focusing on men’s studies and even at Concordia’s Simone de Beauvoir Institute, Lafrance says, “I don’t find any resistance to thinking critically about men and masculinity.”

But more research is needed and he and colleague Synnott are discussing an innovative idea: the creation of a centre for the study of men and masculinity.

Synnott says he believes the models of gender are slowly shifting. There was the “romantic model in which we become a couple, the patriarchy model characterized by unequal rights and the feminist model of female superiority,” he says.

“Now we have the postmodern model in which gender is completely irrelevant.”

By Rebecca MacKinnon, National Post January 27, 2012

In fall 2009, I sat in a large auditorium festooned with red banners and watched as Robin Li, CEO of Baidu, China’s dominant search engine, paraded onstage with executives from 19 other companies to receive the “China Internet Self-Discipline Award.” Officials from the quasi-governmental Internet Society of China praised them for fostering “harmonious and healthy Internet development.” In the Chinese regulatory context, “healthy” is a euphemism for “porn-free” and “crimefree.” “Harmonious” implies prevention of activity that would provoke social or political disharmony.

China’s censorship system is complex and multilayered. The outer layer is generally known as the “great firewall” of China, through which hundreds of thousands of websites are blocked from view on the Chinese Internet. What this system means in practice is that when one goes online from an ordinary commercial Internet connection inside China and tries to visit a website such as hrw. org, the website belonging to Human Rights Watch, the web browser shows an error message saying, “This page cannot be found.” This blocking is easily accomplished because the global Internet connects to the Chinese Internet through only eight “gateways,” which are easily “filtered.” At each gateway, as well as among all the different Internet service providers within China, Internet routers – the devices that move the data back and forth between different computer networks – are all configured to block long lists of website addresses and politically sensitive keywords.

These blocks can be circumvented by people who know how to use anti-censorship software tools. It is impossible to conduct accurate usage surveys, but it is believed likely that hundreds of thousands of Chinese Internet users deploy these tools to access Twitter and Facebook every day. Yet researchers estimate that out of China’s 500 million Internet users, only about 1% or so (a number somewhere in the single-digit millions – still a large number of people but not enough percentage-wise to shape majority public opinion) use these tools to get around censorship, either because most do not know how or because they lack sufficient interest in, or awareness of, what exists on the other side of the “great firewall.”

Fortunately for the government, there are plenty of social networking platforms and other delightfully entertaining and useful services on the Chinese Internet to keep people occupied, without much need to access sites and services based overseas – assuming they have no interest in politics, religion or human rights issues. Baidu, the homegrown search engine, enables people to locate all the content on the Chinese-language Internet that their government permits. The social networking platforms RenRen and Kaixinwang substitute for Facebook. People can blog on platforms run by Chinese companies like Sohu and Sina, which also runs a wildly popular Twitter-like microblogging service, Weibo. QQ, run by the company Tencent, offers instant messaging, gaming and all kinds of interactive services that work seamlessly across both PCs and mobile phones.

These companies have all benefited from substantial Silicon Valley investment over the past decade, and many are listed on U.S. stock exchanges or others outside of China. Thanks to the many Americans who find China’s rapidly growing Internet market to be an irresistible investment opportunity, these companies are well funded to provide highly entertaining and useful – albeit censored and heavily monitored – content and services.

These domestic companies are the stewards and handmaidens, the tools and enforcers, of China’s inner layer of Internet censorship. Why simply block content when you can delete it from the Internet for good? Why hire government employees to carry out censorship and surveillance when companies can be compelled to do it? The government requires companies operating inside China to use a combination of computer algorithms as well as human editors to identify objectionable material and remove it from the Internet completely. Companies that fail to obey government orders face different grades of punishment: from warnings or stiff fines to temporary shutdowns or revocation of the company’s business license. Many thousands of Chinese websites and dozens of companies have been shuttered because they failed to control their content adequately.

This requirement of cor-porate self-censorship applies to all Chinese websites, from small online communities to the largest commercial sites, like Baidu. It also applies to all foreign Internet companies with operations inside China – including Google.cn before Google decided to pull out.

Google’s experience with Chinese censorship helps illustrate how these different layers work. Before it entered China in 2006, Google operated outside the “great firewall,” which means that it was subject to blocking by the Chinese network. For example, if one were on the Internet in China and typed the Chinese characters for something politically uncontroversial, say, “automobile,” into the search box on Google.com, everything would work fine. But if you tried to search for anything politically sensitive – such as the Chinese phrase for “Tiananmen Square massacre” or something related to politically sensitive breaking news, like the name of a city where a riot had just occurred – the page would be blocked. The page existed on a server overseas, but it could not be viewed in China. In other words, the search was blocked not by Google but by Chinese network engineers.

Then in 2006, Google decided that subjecting users to the inconvenience and frustration of such increasingly frequent blockages was not the best way to attract Chinese Internet users to its search engine. So they launched Google.cn inside China, agreeing to abide by the Chinese government’s censorship requirements. To gain permission to operate from within the firewall, Google had to agree to adjust its search algorithms so that results on Google.cn would not include websites blacklisted by the Chinese government. Rather than get a blank page when searching for the Chinese name of a city where a riot had recently been put down by police, users of Google.cn would get a sanitized set of search results about that city, minus web pages containing reports from human rights and dissident websites.

After Google announced in January 2010 it was reconsidering its business in China, then pulled its search engine out of China in March, the government imposed strict media controls on the story. As a first line of defence, the “great firewall” blocked overseas Chinese-language news reports about Google’s decision to remove its search engine. The government also deployed a range of offensive tactics: All blog-hosting services, microblog platforms and social networking services operating inside China were required to censor what Chinese Internet users said about Google. Authorities issued specific instructions to spin and manipulate the domestic media, in an aggressive effort to shape public opinion about what had happened. Not that people could not say anything: they were free to show Google in a negative light, and there were plenty of Chinese Internet users happy to trash Google, as there are all over the world.

But Chinese bloggers and social network users who expressed sympathy for Google’s situation quickly found their postings deleted and blocked by all Internet companies – domestic and foreign – operating inside China. Writings by liberal-leaning people who argued that the free flow of information would be better for China’s economy and that censorship only makes it harder for the Chinese government and people to resolve problems were also deleted. The government’s State Council Information Office issued a direct and detailed order on the subject to all websites and news organizations. A Chinese blogger obtained the full text and posted it online. Here is a portion of that text, translated by the California-based website China Digital Times, run by the exiled activist Xiao Qiang: 1. It is not permitted to hold discussions or investigations on the Google topic.

2. Interactive sections do not recommend this topic, do not place this topic and related comments at the top.

3. All websites please clean up text, images and sound and videos which attack the Party, State, government agencies, Internet policies with the excuse of this event.

4. All websites please clean up text, images and sound and videos which support Google, dedicate flowers to Google, ask Google to stay, cheer for Google and others have a different tune from government policy.

5. On topics related to Google, carefully manage the information in exchanges, comments and other interactive sessions.

6. Chief managers in different regions please assign specific manpower to monitor Google-related information; if there is information about mass incidents [the Chinese euphemism for "protests"], please report it in a timely manner.

Such directives are common, forcing Internet companies to maintain entire departments full of people whose job it is to respond to them. In late December 2010, Wang Chen, deputy head of the Communist Party’s propaganda department and chief of the State Council Information Office – two of several party and government bodies in charge of Internet censorship policies – boasted in a speech that 350 million pieces of “harmful content” had been deleted from the Chinese Internet over the course of one year. Earlier that year, in a presentation to top government leaders, Wang gave a detailed description of an Internet “management system that integrates legal regulation, administrative supervision, industry self-regulation and technological safeguards.” Some sections of his speech (the full text of which was leaked to the New York-based group Human Rights in China) were deleted from the publicly released version. One of these deleted sections, which the government did not intend to share with the public, said:

“We are following the overall thinking of combining Internet content management with industry management and security supervision; combining prior review and approval with supervision afterwards; combining technological blocking with public opinion guidance; combining hierarchical management with local management; combining government management with industry self-regulation; and combining online monitoring with offline management.”

In such an environment where search engines and social networking services are so heavily censored, most people are not even aware of the existence of many facts, incidents or ideas unless somebody they know who is technically savvy enough to access uncensored online spaces happens to email a link to them. People who use domestic email services and social networking platforms to disseminate such information, of course, are subject to monitoring and potential arrest. Data-mining software and “deep packet inspection” technologies make it easy to automate surveillance through the Internet service providers and mobile carriers of all unencrypted Internet traffic no matter what service is being used or where it is based.

In 2011, the government moved to extend these censorship and surveillance mechanisms, as well as to improve their coordination. In March 2011, spooked by the Arab Spring, the central government established a new overarching government agency responsible for controlling all Internet platforms and services. The number of censored foreign websites, social networking platforms, and even data-hosting and “cloud computing” services expanded dramatically. Surveillance systems were upgraded to more aggressively track and identify Chinese citizens who managed to circumvent the blockages to use tools like Twitter. It became commonplace for Twitter users to be questioned about their postings, and at least one person was arrested for no other reason than a tweet she had sent out.

Reprinted from Consent of the Networked: The Worldwide Struggle For Internet Freedom, by Rebecca MacKinnon. Available from Basic Books, a member of The Perseus Books Group. © 2012.
© Copyright (c) National Post

One-in-five children in the US are currently living in poverty. RT’s Anastasia Churkina takes a look at a harsh reality of America’s recession that many wish to avoid.

Children are commonly associated with being playful and innocent, but one-in-five in the US are currently struggling with hunger.

“The federal government tells us that by the time a child reaches the age of 18, it will have a one out of every two chance of being on food stamps. So the federal government tells us itself that half of all children will be on food stamps by the time they reach the age of 18,” said Michael Snyder, founder of the Economic Collapse Blog.

On any given day, one-in-four are on food stamps, and over 21 percent are living in poverty.

For African-American kids, that number jumps to 35 percent.

“In a country with a government and a model that’s focused on the well-being of its people, obviously its children would be a priority, but unfortunately the United States is not a country with that kind of model,” said author and lawyer Eva Golinger.

Food pantries like this one see parents barely keeping afloat financially, their paychecks not stretching to feed their children every day.

“We are serving now almost 12,000 individuals per month. The majority are children,” said founder and executive director of the Bed-Stuy Campaign Against Hunger Organization, Melony Samuels.

Forty-four percent of single mothers in America are on food stamps. Yet struggle to put food on the table.

“I have six kids of mine, I have 15 grandkids, and it’s rough. The food stamps – it’s not enough, so you’ve got to go out there and struggle,” said jobless mother Janet Matos.

Getting food is a non-stop battle for these mothers.

“A lot of people don’t come out because of pride. But now, even pride gets pushed aside when your children are hungry,” said jobless mother Anna Jones.

For these people, poverty is a growing pandemic.

“I’m afraid of what’s going to happen to the next generation, because everything is just falling apart. I feel very angry. I feel like they’re making the poor suffer”, said single mother of two Saadia McMurren.

The Voices of Poverty is a website showing many faces of American hunger.

“The single greatest economic challenge facing America – the vast numbers cascading into poverty. This is something that just shouldn’t exist in a country with all the food resources that America has,” said journalist and author Sasha Abramsky, who created the site.

RT went to a New York school, one of many, where more than half of students are eligible for free lunches – in order to ensure the kids get at least 1 proper meal a day.

“It is sad. It is, it is sad. And I wonder when people are going to get it together,” said stay at home grandmother Cecilia Banks.

Experts say the problem of hunger in the US is more widespread than in other developed nations.

“It’s getting worse, it’s not getting better in this country. It’s a crisis. You look at countries like the UK or France, they have child poverty rates that are under 10 percent – yet in the US it’s now well over 20 percent,” said Michael Snyder.

Meanwhile, America is estimated to waste from a quarter to an entire half of all the food it produces. Occupy Wall Street activist Messiah Rhodes was homeless and underfed in his teens. He says times are much tougher now.

“Just a few years ago, during the bush era, I was like 17, 18. The crazy thing about that time, even though I was homeless, I was still able to find work,” he said.

A growing number of Americans say the time has come to bail out the people.

“They were very quick to bail out Wall Street, when Wall Street was in trouble. But Wall Street wasn’t in danger of going hungry,” said Michael Snyder.

With one-in-five children in America facing hunger, brushing the elephant in the room aside can’t remain an option for the US much longer. The suffering children are not only missing out on meals, but their entire childhoods.

via Hungry and poor in the Big Apple — RT.

Related articles

• Land of the free, home of the hungry (talesfromthelou.wordpress.com)

A new WordPress plugin makes it dead easy to uncensor blocked websites. In just a few clicks people can setup their own proxy site with the popular blogging software. An essential tool for people whose speech is restricted by oppressive regimes, and handy for downloaders in The Netherlands, Italy, Finland and other countries where ISPs are blocking The Pirate Bay. Additionally, the plugin partially defeats the PIPA and SOPA bills in the US.

repressThere’s been a lot of talk about censorship lately. Last week the Internet witnessed the largest protest in its history, against the Internet censorship bills PIPA and SOPA. And earlier this month ISPs in Finland and the Netherlands were ordered to censor The Pirate Bay.

Alongside the millions who protest against these increasing censorship initiatives, there’s also a group of people who come up with ways to route around it. One of these projects is the RePress plugin for WordPress.

The plugin is developed by the hosting company Greenhost and allows everyone with a WordPress blog to start a proxy for sites that are censored elsewhere in the world. As an example, Greenhost have setup a Pirate Bay and Wikileaks proxy.

“By adding this plug-in to your WordPress website it will start functioning as a proxy and uncensor any blocked website you’d like,” Greenhost explains. “The only thing you’ll need is a WordPress website and the ability to install new plug-ins. After that you can maintain a list of websites you’d like to keep open freely available on the web.”

One of the main motivations for the plugin’s developers was to provide people in the Netherlands full access to The Pirate Bay when the recent court order is enforced. However, if SOPA or PIPA pass there might also be a need for people in the US to have a tool like this.

“We hope people outside Holland use the plug-in to uncensor piratebay.org, as it is in danger of being blocked in our country after a court-ruling. In the Netherlands we could then uncensor websites for people in oppressive regimes like Iran, Syria or the US after SOPA is passed.”

“[SOPA and PIPA] are said to defend the interests of the Entertainment industry, but will mainly cause grave and undeniable damage to the Open and Free web and all of its users: from the end-consumer to the cutting edge developers and inventors. Our aim is to make this impossible,” the Greenhost team notes.

Although the plugin can’t prevent domain names from being seized, it is indeed a good solution to bypass all of the common blocking measures that are used today.

The RePress initiative is applauded by several politicians, including European Parliament member Marietje Schaake. “This is a fantastic opportunity for human rights activists and a solution for people who face technological censorship and repression,” she told Webwereld.

To those eager to start their own proxy of blocked websites, RePress can be downloaded in the WordPress repository.

Related Posts

The Pirate Bay: “The Battle of Internets is About to Begin”

It’s Time To Go On The Offensive For Freedom Of Speech

The Pirate Bay Slams PIPA / SOPA in Public Statement

The Pirate Bay: PIPA/SOPA Won’t Stop Us!

The Pirate Bay Launches Promo Platform For Artists

via WordPress Plugin Unblocks Censored Sites, Including The Pirate Bay | TorrentFreak.

(NaturalNews) The pressure is on for researchers and pharmaceutical companies to develop drug-based, non-synthetic versions of marijuana for medical use, as the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is poised to approve such varieties in the near future. But this potential approval appears to be reserved only for Big Pharma, as the marijuana plant itself could continue to remain a controlled substance at the federal level with no recognized health benefits.

The Associated Press (AP) reports that GW Pharma, a British pharmaceutical company, is currently undergoing advanced clinical trials for the world’s first drug made from raw marijuana, which it will seek FDA approval for by the end of 2013. There are currently a number of synthetic cannabinoid drugs on the market that have been approved by the FDA, but none that incorporate actual marijuana (http://www.justice.gov/dea/ongoing/marinol.html).

Known as Sativex, the marijuana spray contains both delta 9-tetrahydrocannabinol (THC) and cannabidiol, which are considered to be raw marijuana’s two most well-known active components. GW Pharma is hoping to receive US FDA approval of Sativex for the treatment of cancer pain, as the drug has already been approved in several other countries for the treatment of muscle spasm pain caused by multiple sclerosis.

While this is great news on the medical marijuana front in America, it does not necessarily imply that either the FDA or the US Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) will loosen its regulatory grip on the actual marijuana plant. Like regulators did with the stevia plant, marijuana could receive approval only in patented form from drug companies (http://www.healthynewage.com/blog/stevia-fda-approved/).

“To the extent that companies can produce effective medication that utilizes the components of [marijuana], that’s great. But that should not be the exclusive access for people who want to be able to use medical marijuana,” said Kris Hermes, a spokesman from the pro-marijuana group Americans for Safe Access.

“That’s the race against time, in terms of how quickly can we put pressure on the federal government to recognize the plant has medical use versus the government coming out with the magic bullet pharmaceutical pill.”

If the federal government does approve Sativex and other drug-based forms of real marijuana, though, it will have to change its official position that marijuana has no medical benefits. If the plant’s two most known ingredients are approved for medical use as a drug, in other words, the government’s only choice to remain consistent will be to finally admit that marijuana does have medicinal value, and thus legalize it.

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• Juicing medical marijuana the latest trend in amazing cures (talesfromthelou.wordpress.com)
• PBS documentary highlights marijuana’s amazing ability to treat disease (talesfromthelou.wordpress.com)
• Sativex: A Legal Marijuana Mouth Spray (readverde.com)

I came into Zen in my late teens after being raised a catholic.

The dogma of the church just did not do it for me.

So I ex-communicated myself and went on a quest for truth. I came across the antics of the Beat writers of which Jack Kerouac became my favorite.

Say what you will about those pre-hippies but they were the closest thing to genuine creativity in the US in the late fifties.

The Beatniks opened my mind to Alan Watts (Alan Wilson Watts /January 1915 – 16 November 1973) who turned me into Zen. At the time he was instrumental in making Zen understandable in the West.

I also discovered marijuana during that time.

Now, before I go any further, I must admit that writing this post torqued my brain around.

Zen is pure Buddhism.

It is a natural consequence and part of Buddhism. Siddhartha, in all his wisdom came up with five guiding rules for us to follow in order to reach enlightenment:  to abstain from harming living beings, stealing, sexual misconduct, lying and intoxication.

Buddha

Here it is. Intoxication. What is intoxication?  Ingesting poisons that will harm you physically and mentally.

You cannot get intoxicated from cannabis.

If you intake too much marijuana you are just wasting your time, money, and weed.

Once you are in the zone there is no more higher “stoned” level.

Cannabis focuses your mind by freeing it from the daily mundane. It gives you a measure of peace and calm that recharges your energy and allows you to become disciplined.

Zen and Zazen both require discipline.

It is one of the most difficult spiritual practices to get involved with, but the rewards are out of this world.

Zen changed my existence.

It has given me: Empathy, compassion, discipline,  patience, an open mind, the desire not to hurt sentient beings by not eating them which in turn gave me incredible health and stamina, an understanding of life that is intertwined with death, and much more.

Zen changed my life and I arrived at Zen through off-beat counter culture readings and cannabis.

I am not advocating for everyone to get stoned like the song says.

Life should be experienced fully and soberly.

But you must admit that modern life is beyond stressful. It has become so complicated that most of us depend on legal and illegal drugs in order to cope with the insanity of it all. Roughly half the North American population is ingesting legal antidepressants and anti-anxiety drugs.

Personally, I won’t consume cannabis until the necessary daily  rituals have been performed: Exercise, zazen, work, chores, etc..
At the end of the day cannabis becomes the holy grail of ceremonial and spiritual ceremonies.

It makes it all make sense.

Lou

http://zazenlife.com/2012/01/23/guest-post-lou-catarino-zen-marijuana/

From Diana at http://balancingshadows.wordpress.com/
How much is older? My neurons are changing lately, things are becoming much clearer and I seem to understand these technical things less every day. So what is old ?
Interesting piece! My path lies with shamanism but I started out with yoga and still am very much in touch with buddhism. But shamanism also uses “drugs” to clear the mind. And, just as Marihuana, they are not addictive. And isn’t meditation (or a trancejourney) also a kind of drug? You get into a state where your body produces chemicals that I think are probably much the same effect as these socalled “drugs”. They clear the mind, they highten your senses, creativity can flow….. The lead singer of my favourite band is an avid user of marihuana, but homegrown. And when he and his wife go of to the forest to retreat from everyday society he almost never uses it, he doesn’t need it. I think people like us, the truth-seekers (what is the truth anyway) need a clear mind and clear senses.
Also…. when in shamanism you go on a vision quest, you go to the forest for a few days with nothing but yourself, a drum and water. And I think that also puts you in a state like that. And didn’t Siddharta go through a similar fase? His quest was a bit longer then four days but I think it had the same effect. And you know, I think there is always the question of what is true: you cannot ask Siddharta or Jesus or any other spiritual leader what the true meaning was of their words, and how many of that has been altered by other man through time.

I think people who are very spiritual or enlightend often talk in metaphores or riddles, and that can be misunderstood a lot. Marihuana in it’s pure form is not toxic, it is even a very good medicinal plant, so what is intoxication indeed. Isn’t that using substances that lead you away from reality rather then letting you see the real reality?
People have always used some form of plants to get them into a higher or creative state. Who knows, maybe Siddharta also has, maybe he had the same way of thinking as us and didn’t consider these things intoxication
Just my two cents….
I used marihuana once in my life, when I was 15, and everyone around me had a great time and I ended up with a very bad headache for more than a week and nothing happened like opening up or clearing the mind….  Maybe it was not good quality, I don’t know, but I never touched it again, the headache was so bad…..
Greenz
Diana

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Source: www.analuisacid.com and La Voz de la Frontera
Date: 01.24.2012

Mexico: Police Engage in UFO Chase
By Juan Galvan – Mexicali, Baja California

“A UFO with white lights, blue and yellow flashes” — The first report was received from the airport area, and [the object] was even seen by C-4 operators manning the safety cameras that appear to have recorded it. The sighting prompted the mobilization of police officials. Martin Ruelas, supervisor of the western sector, was able to see it with his own eyes, but it was too fast and it was impossible to follow.

An Unidentified Flying Object (UFO) prompted an intense mobilization by elements of the Public Safety Forces of the City of Mexicali, arising from citizen reports about the presence of a strange device in the air.

Alejandro Monreal Noriega, general commander of Patrols in the Dirección de Seguridad Pública Municipal (DSPM) reported that the first news item was received from people living in the vicinity of the airport.

Even C-4 operators, responsible for urban security cameras, saw the object in their systems and it appears to have been recorded. Furthermore, hundreds of phone calls were received at the “066″ number, reporting the flying object’s presence.

It was seen around the airport and subsequently flying at dizzying speeds toward the new guard post after citizens reported seeing it over the Marán Industrial Park, and subsequently in the Rivera Campestre district and related areas.

Martin Ruelas, supervisor of the DSPM’s western region, saw it and stated that it was a sizeable round white object with visible blue and yellow flashes. He added that the object was seen high in the sky and moved up, down and sideways at very high speeds, vanishing from sight after heading south from the valley of Mexicali.

Deputy Commander Medina, from the valley’s southern area, also saw it and said it was too fast and impossible to follow, as it changed direction suddenly.

A “chase” by patrolmen ensued, but since the object changed position within seconds, they simply relayed its location in order to have the nearest unit continue the report. Unfortunately, it was impossible to obtain an answer.

Monreal Noriega stated that consultations were made with airport authorities and SEDENA, as well as their U.S. counterparts, and they awaited more information on the subject.

Inexplicata-The Journal of Hispanic Ufology: Mexico: Police Engage in UFO Chase.

(Translation (c) 2012, S. Corrales, IHU. Special thanks to Ana Luisa Cid)