Having bombed Dublin and, perhaps, a few IRA training bogs in Tipperary, we could not have afforded to be complacent. We would have had to turn our attention to those states which had supported and funded the IRA terrorists through all these years. The main provider of funds was, of course, the USA, and this would have posed us with a bit of a problem. Where to bomb in America? It's a big place and it's by no means certain that a small country like the UK could afford enough bombs to do the whole job. It's going to cost the US billions to bomb Iraq and a lot of that is empty countryside. America, on the other hand, provides a bewildering number of targets.

Should we have bombed Washington, where the policies were formed? Or should we have concentrated on places where Irishmen are known to lurk, like New York, Boston and Philadelphia? We could have bombed any police station and fire station in most major urban centres, secure in the knowledge that we would be taking out significant numbers of IRA sympathisers. On St Patrick's Day, we could have bombed Fifth Avenue and scored a bull's-eye.

DOES GOD want us to kill innocent Iraqi children? Judging by the apparently unanimous approval in the Senate chamber from all those truth-immune political celebrities watching President Bush's most recent State of the Union address — all of whom are at least overtly religious churchgoers — the message is clear: HE does. Apparently there is not a single member of Congress who opposes the idea of dropping more bombs on Iraq. Sure, there are a few who want U.N. endorsement, but if they get that — that is to say, if they can ultimately avoid blame for this atrocity by later saying the U.N. said it was OK to do it — there is nobody in the entire U.S. government apparatus who opposes obliterating Iraq, and murdering still thousands more of its defenseless women and children. If there were, we would have heard them booing that speech, and we didn't. If there were, we would have heard an outraged Democratic response, instead of the cowardly endorsement of the principles of the Bush plan for continuing genocide that we did hear."

- If we win the award, it will show just how huge the movement for change has become, and in turn gain more exposure for our campaigns.

So please follow this link to the BBC Radio 3 web-site and click on
REGISTER in order to vote for Seize The Day.
[link]

To vote in the final round they ask you to register with the BBCi, which involves making up a username and password and giving any email address - it takes 10 seconds, then you can vote!

Seize The Day are an environmental activist band from Glastonbury who campaign for social justice, a GMO free world, peace and all sorts of good causes. .... If you want to hear their music, there are five Seize The Day songs on the Radio 3 web site.

Just as Dr. King spoke out against the war in Viet Nam, one wonders what he would be thinking as we prepare for war against Iraq. Neither Dr. King in his time, nor any of us now, wish to see a weak America. Yet many of us, like him, have come to question how much strength there is in violence. "The ultimate weakness of violence," said Dr. King, "is that it is a descending spiral, begetting the very thing it seeks to destroy. Instead of diminishing evil, it multiplies it."

It is difficult to express such things in America today, without being branded an unrealistic dreamer. Indeed, the status quo no more embraces the philosophy of non-violence today than it did thirty-five years ago. For love, peace, brotherhood and justice are radical concepts, as much so today as they were decades ago, or centuries ago. And the notion that military power is strength -- while brotherhood and love are weakness -- is a spiritually perverse worldview with unfortunately as much grip on the American mind today as it had during Dr. King's lifetime. It is that assumption, I believe, which he would challenge, were he here.

Dr. King inspired us to look to the love at the core of the human experience, for a vision that beckons all humanity. "We are challenged to rise," he said, "above the narrow confines or our individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity. The new world is a world of geographical togetherness. This means that no individual or nation can live alone. We must all learn to live together, or we will be forced to die together.

... Through our scientific genius we have made of the world a neighborhood; now through our moral and spiritual genius we must make it a brotherhood. We are all involved in the single process. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. We are all links in the great chain of humanity... we have before us the glorious opportunity to inject a new dimension of love into the veins of our civilization."

Dr. King was as serious when he talked about love, as some people are when they talk about war. And so should we be, if we claim to truly embrace what he lived and died for.

"It is a tragedy what is happening, what Bush is doing in Iraq," Mandela told an audience in Johannesburg. "What I am condemning is that one power, with a president who has no foresight, who cannot think properly, is now wanting to plunge the world into a holocaust," he added, to loud applause.

"If you don't think that something as common as the plastic Visa credit card in your wallet could be part of evolution's plan, consider this:

Visa International ... espouses no political, economic, social or legal theory, thus transcending language, custom, politics and culture to successfully connect a bewildering variety of more than 21,000 financial institutions,16 million merchants and 800 million people in 300 countries and territories. Annual volume of $1.4 trillion continues to grow in excess of twenty percent compounded annually. A staff of about three thousand people scattered in twenty-one offices in thirteen countries on four continents provides ... around-the-clock operation of two global electronic communication systems with thousands of data centers communicating through nine million miles of fiber-optic cable. Its electronic systems clear more transactions in one week than the Federal Reserve System does in a year."

(SNIP)
"The Chaordic Commons (www.chaordic.org), explains this phenomenon in captivating detail. Principally, a chaordic organization is a self-organizing and self-evolving entity, which ends up looking more like a neural network (like the Internet) than a hierarchically-organized bureaucracy in which decision-making power is centralized at the top and trickles down through a series of well-regulated departments and managers. Chaordic organizations do not fear change or innovation. They are, by their very nature, supremely adaptive. They also tend to be inclusive, multicentric, and distributive and, ultimately, strongly cohesive due to their unshakable focus on common purpose and core principles. If you can't quite visualize it, there's a good reason, which Hock will explain in the following interview."

"using a misleading portion of my copyright article on 2012 .... and that you have it wrongly attributed.

You have titled the portion you used "The Mayan Calendar: The World Will note End." However, that is just a subheading of the original and complete article.

But please do not maintain this misleading fragment of the 2012 article, with the wrong attribution, on your website.

It gives an incomplete and inaccurate picture of who Mr. Barrios is, and what he said to me during my interviews with him in Santa Fe. Readers are being confused.

I am the original author and sole copyright holder of this material. I earn my living as a professional journalist, and so this is a matter of importance to me.

As a point of honor, I ask that you correct the article immediately. You are welcome to describe the article, to quote briefly from it within the general guidelines of "fair use," and to provide a direct link to the article:"