Never Underestimate Small States

"Failed State" Myths

Welcome to Lebanon: Graveyard of the Arrogant

By PATRICK COCKBURN

Why has Lebanon ended up as the graveyard of so many invaders? Israelis used to say in the 1960s that one of their military bands would be enough to conquer the country. Sometimes, prior to Israel and Egypt agreeing a peace in 1979, they would add archly that “I don’t know which will be the first Arab country to sign a peace treaty with Israel, but I do know the name of the second.” The idea was that Lebanon, only the size of Wales and its population divided by communal, sectarian and party hatreds, would inevitably be a pushover for the greatest military power in the Middle East. Lebanon’s Maronite Christian minority was an obvious ally for Israel against the forces of Arab nationalism. The well-earned reputation of the Lebanese for commercial ingenuity and capacity to survive in all circumstances suggested that they would be the last people to die in the last ditch fighting an overwhelmingly powerful enemy...READ+

Assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri: Hezbollah Exposes Israeli Hit Men

Global Research, August 10, 2010
Press TV - 2010-08-09

Hezbollah leader Seyyed Hassan Nasrallah has presented evidence proving that Israel masterminded the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.

At a press conference in Beirut on Monday night, the Lebanese resistance movement's secretary general presented video materials captured by Israeli unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) as well as recorded confessions by Israeli fifth columnists substantiating that the February 14, 2005 assassination of Hariri in the capital was carried out on orders from Tel Aviv.

The Lebanese network Al-Manar aired the speech and incorporated the evidence, showing intercepted footage of Hariri's house in the lead-up to the massive car bombing which killed him and claimed the lives of 22 other people.

The network showed videos, taken by the drones, monitoring the route that Hariri used to take every day.

The Lebanese Defense Ministry reports show Israeli warplanes and reconnaissance aircraft flew over the area where Hariri was assassinated on the day he was murdered, Nasrallah said.

Al-Manar also aired film footage showing Israeli espionage agents acknowledging their roles in the assassination.

One of the Israeli operatives, Ahmad Hussein Nasrallah, "gave false information to former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri through someone who worked with Hariri in the security area," the Al-Manar narrator stated, and added, "He said that Hezbollah wanted to assassinate Rafik Hariri."

Afterwards Al-Manar showed the agent admitting to the ruse.

Syria was accused of being behind the plot to assassinate Hariri, which undermined the tenuous ties between Damascus and Beirut and eventually led to the withdrawal of Syrian troops from Lebanon.

The Hezbollah leader said Ahmed Nasrallah had sought to frighten the late Lebanese premier with the allegations as part of a larger plot to drive Syria out of Lebanon.

He went on to say that the assassination was meant to spark a sectarian and religious war in Lebanon, adding that if the United Nations tribunal investigating the case fails to consider the new evidence, it will show that the investigation has been politicized.

Nasrallah had said last month that he had been informed by the slain leader's son and successor, Saad Hariri, that the Special Tribunal for Lebanon "will accuse some undisciplined [Hezbollah] members."

He rejected the allegation and warned that the plot was part of "a dangerous project that is targeting the resistance."

The United Nations tribunal is expected to announce its findings by the end of the year.

HN/HGhttp://www.globalresearch.ca/index.php?context=va&aid=20558L

I Wish It Would Rain

"Whence shall he have grief, how shall he be deluded, who sees everywhere the Oneness?"
SRI AUROBINDO





Roger Penzabene
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia


Roger Penzabene (d. December 31, 1967) was a songwriter for the Motown label. Among his most notable compositions are "The End of Our Road" by Gladys Knight & the Pips and Marvin Gaye, and a trilogy of hits for the Temptations: "You're My Everything", "I Wish It Would Rain", and "I Could Never Love Another (After Loving You)".

The mournful break-up song "I Wish It Would Rain" in particular drew from Penzabene's real-life pain & suffering. The songwriter found out that his wife was cheating on him, but could not bring himself to leave her, and his emotions on the situation are present in both of his final compositions, "I Wish It Would Rain" and "I Could Never Love Another". However the lyrics to the song were changed from the original one. On New Year's Eve 1967, a week after the release of "I Wish It Would Rain", Penzabene committed suicide.

Sin,Virtue And Evil Part1

We may think that this is an altogether mystical vision of the universe, with very little in common with our daily reality; at every step we encounter ugliness and evil; this world is riddled with pain, saturated with strangled cries. Where is the Divine in all this? Is the Divine that barbarism ever ready to open its torture camps? Or that pervading egoism? Or that villainy, concealed or flaunted? God is innocent of all these crimes. He is perfect. He cannot be a party to this – neti neti – God is so pure that He is not of this world. There is simply no place for Him in all this suffocating squalor! We must look existence in the face if our aim is to arrive at a right solution whatever that solution may be. And to look existence in the face is to look God in the face; for the two cannot be separated.... This world of our battle and labor is a fierce dangerous destructive devouring world in which life exists precariously and the soul and body of man move among enormous perils, a world in which by every step forward, whether we will it or no, something is crushed and broken, in which every breath of life is a breath too of death. To put away the responsibility for all that seems to us evil or terrible on the shoulders of a semi-omnipotent Devil, or to put it aside as a part of Nature, making an unbridgeable opposition between world-nature and God-nature, as if Nature were independent of God, or to throw the responsibility on man and his sins, as if he had a preponderant voice in the making of this world or could create anything against the will of God, are clumsily comfortable devices.... We erect a God of Love and Mercy, a God of good, a God just, righteous and virtuous according to our own moral conceptions of justice, virtue and righteousness, and all the rest, we say, is not He or is not His, but was made by some diabolical Power which He suffered for some reason to work out its wicked will or by some dark Ahriman counterbalancing our gracious Ormuzd, or was even the fault of selfish and sinful man who has spoiled what was made originally perfect by God.... We have to look courageously in the face of the reality and see that it is God and none else who has made this world in His being and that so He has made it. We have to see that Nature devouring her children, Time eating up the lives of creatures, Death universal and ineluctable and the violence of the Rudra¹³⁵ forces in man and Nature are also the supreme Godhead in one of his cosmic figures. We have to see that God the bountiful and prodigal creator, God the helpful, strong and benignant preserver is also God the devourer and destroyer. The torment of the couch of pain and evil on which we are racked is his touch as much as happiness and sweetness and pleasure. It is only when we see with the eye of the complete union and feel this truth in the depths of our being that we can entirely discover behind that mask too the calm and beautiful face of the all-blissful Godhead and in this touch that tests our imperfection the touch of the friend and builder of the spirit in man. The discords of the world are God's discords and it is only by accepting and proceeding through them that we can arrive at the greater concords of his supreme harmony, the summits and thrilled vastness of his transcendent and his cosmic Ananda....¹³⁶ For truth is the foundation of real spirituality and courage is its soul.¹³⁷

Then the wound is healed that seemed forever to divide the world between Satan and Heaven, as if there were nothing else but Good and Evil, with us in between like an infant coddled and whipped into virtuous ways.¹³⁸ All duality is a vision based on Ignorance. There is nothing but the innumerable One¹³⁹ everywhere, and "God's discords" to help the Godhead grow within us. Even so, quite a gap remains between this perhaps divine imperfection and the ultimate Perfection. Is not this cosmic Divine a lesser Divine? Should we not try to find elsewhere an untarnished, transcendent, and perfect Divine? If there is an opposition between the spiritual life and that of the world, it is that gulf which he [the integral seeker] is here to bridge, that opposition which he is here to change into harmony. If the world is ruled by the flesh and the devil, all the more reason that the children of Immortality should be here to conquer it for God and the Spirit. If life is an insanity, then there are so many million souls to whom there must be brought the light of divine reason; if a dream, yet it is real within itself to so many dreamers who must be brought either to dream nobler dreams or to awaken; or if a lie, then the truth has to be given to the deluded.¹⁴⁰

http://www.aurobindo.ru/workings/satprem/adventure_of_consciousness_e.htm#036

Divine Grace and Faith, Sincerity and Surrender

[Yusufali 16:39] (They must be raised up), in order that He may manifest to them the truth of that wherein they differ, and that the rejecters of Truth may realise that they had indeed (surrendered to) Falsehood.
[Yusufali 16:48] Do they not look at Allah's creation, (even) among (inanimate) things,- How their (very) shadows turn round, from the right and the left, prostrating themselves to Allah, and that in the humblest manner?
[Yusufali 13:15] Whatever beings there are in the heavens and the earth do prostrate themselves to Allah (Acknowledging subjection),- with good-will or in spite of themselves: so do their shadows in the morning and evenings.

Third letter in "The Mother"

(Divine Grace and Faith, Sincerity and Surrender)
(August 1, 1927)
by Sri Aurobindo


To walk through life armoured against fear, peril and disaster, only two things are needed, two that go always together:
- the Grace of the Divine
- and on your side an inner state made up of faith, sincerity and surrender.

Let your faith be pure, candid and perfect.
An egoistic faith in the mental and vital being tainted with ambition, pride, vanity, mental arrogance, vital self-will, personal demand, desire for the petty satisfactions of the lower nature is a low and smoke-obscured flame that cannot burn upwards to heaven.
Regard your life as given you only for the divine work and to help in the divine manifestation.
Desire nothing but the purity, force, light, wideness, calm, Ananda of the divine consciousness and its insistence to transform and perfect your mind, life and body.
Ask for nothing but the divine, spiritual and supramental Truth, its realization on earth and in you and in all who are called and chosen and the conditions needed for its creation and its victory over all opposing forces.

Let your sincerity and surrender be genuine and entire.
When you give yourself, give completely, without demand, without condition, without reservation so that all in you shall belong to the Divine Mother and nothing left to the ego or given to any other power.

The more complete your faith, sincerity and surrender, the more will grace and protection be with you.
And when the grace and protection of the Divine Mother are with you, what is there that can touch you or whom need you fear?
A little of it even will carry you through all difficulties, obstacles and dangers; surrounded by its full presence you can go on surely on your way because it is hers, careless of all menace, unaffected by any hostility however powerful, whether from this world or from the worlds invisible.
Its touch can turn difficulties into opportunities, failure into success and weakness into unfaltering strength.

For the grace of the Divine Mother is the sanction of the Supreme and now or tomorrow its effect is sure, a thing decreed, inevitable and irresistible.

August 1, 1927

Sri Aurobindo

Sri Aurobindo

Note on surrender in Karma Yoga

The progressive surrender of our ignorant personal will and its merger into a greater divine or on the highest summits greatest supreme Will is the whole secret of Karma Yoga. To bring about the conditions in which alone this vast and happy identity becomes possible and to work out the lines we must follow to their end if we are to reach it, is all the deeper purpose of this discipline.

The first condition is the elimination of personal vital desire, for if desire intervenes, all harmony with the supreme Divine Will becomes impossible. Even if we receive it, we shall disfigure its working and distort its dynamic impulse. To give up all desire, all insistence upon fruit and reward and success must be renounced from our will and all vital attachment to the work itself excised from our nature; for attachment makes it our own and no longer the Godhead's.

The elimination of egoism is the second condition, not only of the rajasic and tamasic egoisms that twine around desire, but of the sattwic egoism that takes refuge in the idea of the I as the worker. The ordinary consciousness of man cannot accept this difficult renunciation or, if it accepts it, cannot achieve this tremendous change. The human mind is too ignorant, narrow and chained to its own limited movements, the human life-instincts too blind, selfish, obscure, shut up in their own earth-bound pursuits and satisfactions, the human body too clumsy and hampering a machine. There is here no freedom, no large and infinite room, no willing and happy plasticity for the greater play of the Divine in Nature. A certain half-seeing and imperfect subordination of the personal will to an ill-understood greater Will and Power, a stumbling and occasional intuition or at best a brilliant lightninglike intimation of its commands and impulsions, a confused, clouded and often grossly distorted execution of the little one seizes of a divine Mandate seems to be the uttermost that the human consciousness as it is at its best seems able to accomplish. Only by a growth into a greater superhuman and supramental consciousness whose very nature is to be attuned to the Divine can we achieve the true and supreme Karma Yoga.

This transformation is only possible after certain steps of a divine ascent have been mastered and to climb these steps is the object of the Yoga of Works as it is conceived by the Gita. The extirpation of desire, a wide and calm equality of the mind, the life soul and the spirit, annihilation of the ego, an inner quietude and expulsion or transcendence of ordinary Nature, the Nature of the three gunas and a total surrender to the Supreme are the successive steps of this preliminary change.

Only after all this has been done, can we live securely in an infinite consciousness not bound like our mental human nature. And only then can we receive the Light, know perfectly the will of the Supreme, attune all our movements to the rhythm of its Truth and execute perfectly from moment to moment its imperative commandments. Till then there is no firm achievement, but only an endeavour, seeking and aspiration, all the stress and struggle of a great and uncertain spiritual adventure. Only when these things are accomplished is there for the dynamic parts of our nature the beginning of a divine security in its acts and a transcendent peace.

(Circa 1927)

in "Essays Divine and Human",
SABCL, volume 17
CWSA - vol.10 - page 1300
published by Sri Aurobindo Ashram - Pondicherry
diffusion by SABDA

Death Of Capitalism

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Paul You Beauty!

Paul, an octopus in Oberhausen, Germany, gained notice around the world last week by blowing away soccer fans with his wise World Cup picks. The marvelous mollusk accurately predicted the outcome of all of Germany's group play matches -- including the country's stunning loss to Serbia -- by choosing between two mouthwatering mussels, one for Germany and one for its opponent.

Last week, the German guru navigated split allegiances (he was born in the United Kingdom) and successfully picked Germany to beat England. As if on cue, the German squad trounced their English opponents on Sunday.

Paul is now attempting to make an astonishing fifth consecutive correct pick. The football forecaster thinks that Germany will beat Argentina in the World Cup quarterfinals, in what could be the country's toughest match yet. The amazing octopus's power of prediction will be tested on Saturday, when the two teams face off. Scroll down for pictures and a video of Paul at work...source

See The Similarities Part3