Hemingway on the effects of the Spanish Civil War

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

For those who came in late – this is another in a series of conversations I have with people who have passed over to the other side. I have found that at least seemingly we can connect with anyone we have a reason to connect with. I call it The Cosmic Internet. The process has been described by some as Active Imagination, which is not the same thing as fantasy. I suggest that you read this not trying to decide whether it is Hemingway speaking, or my idea of Hemingway, or whatever. Instead, feel whether the material resonates, in and of itself. Truth is great, and will prevail, but you have to be open to the possibility before it can do so. This particular interaction took place on June 14, 2007.

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The South’s pro-war history, and our times

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

I found this article, which was forwarded to me by a friend, to be most interesting in light of what Joseph Smallwood had to say (in Chasing Smallwood) about the causes of the Civil War.

SOUTH’S PRO-WAR HISTORY MAJOR FACTOR IN IRAQ WAR
By Sherwood Ross

The South is far more inclined to war than the rest of America and its politicians played a major role involving the U.S. in Iraq, a noted legal authority says.

“We’d better find some way of ending the solidly-conservative-to-reactionary-bloc- power of the South or it will cause us disaster again in the future,” writes Lawrence Velvel, dean and cofounder of the Massachusetts School of Law at Andover.

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“The Evangelization Of The World In This Generation”

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

This was my column for September in The Meta Arts, an online magazine, which is to be found at http://www.themetaarts.com/pages/frankdemarco.html

“The Evangelization Of The World In This Generation”

I got involved in one of those arguments. You know the kind, where the two sides start from so far apart, believing “facts” that are diametrically opposite, that there is no real way to come to agreement. What’s more, she was a friend of a friend, and I wanted to be careful not to let an argument become a heated dispute.

But the “facts” she was quoting with such certainty were just not so. Missionaries, she said, were merely agents of imperialism, using their religion as a weapon to destroy native institutions. Like so many people – political liberals, mostly — she assumed that religious institutions are automatically corrupt, that missionaries are automatically bigots, and that efforts to convert natives of other cultures were mere manifestations of racism.

But in this she, as most people in our generation, was the victim of ignorance fostered by leftist ideology and propagated by lack of historical memory. For instance, she had never heard of the slogan “the evangelization of the world in this generation,” and when I quoted it, had no idea what it meant or why it was adopted.

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The suppressed history

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

If I were a young man and again had unlimited energy and time (for so it seems to the young, and it isn’t all that untrue, relatively speaking), I think one of my projects would be to write what might be called the suppressed history of the west.

In such a history I would incorporate the things that conventional histories omit because they are considered not quite respectable (that is, things that go against the accepted party line). When you go looking, you find whole threads that are systematically ignored.

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Going out on a limb, a long time ago

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

In 1987 I was an Associate Editor of the Virginian-Pilot. When I returned from doing the first Higher Self Seminary (for reasons I describe in my book Muddy Tracks) I wrote this piece of the Sunday Commentary section. This was at a time when favorable articles about such things did not appear in mainstream newspapers. But I told it as I saw it.

In the spirit:
Shirley MacLaine isn’t the only one out on that limb

by Frank DeMarco

I was among those who paid $300 to attend Shirley MacLaine’s two-day seminar in Virginia Beach on “Connecting with the higher self” last weekend. Let me go out on a limb a bit myself: That weekend already has changed my life.
I know, from talking to others, that I was not the only person there who had questioned his own judgment for plunking down $300 to attend. It left many wondering, as the session started, if we had been ripped off. Someone questioned Shirley MacLaine about it, and she said she had struggled with the question of money and had finally set the fee so high in order, as she put it, to eliminate those who “might want to have a spiritual tea party with a celebrity” after reading her book or seeing her recent TV special, “Out on a limb.”
Correct decision. Those who came despite the fee were those who had a strong inner need to be there.
I deal first with the seemingly peripheral issue of money because when I tell someone I attended, the first (usually incredulous) response I get is: “You paid $300?” Which is to say” “You were that gullible?” Well, yes, we were tilling to risk being that gullible. We went not in blind sleep-walking assurance, but in confidence mixed with hope — and hope implies doubt. But doubt was removed — for me at least — before we trooped out again at the first intermission.

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Embracing Alternative Care

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

This is from the U.S. News and World Report website (http://health.usnews.com/articles/health/2008/01/09/embracing-alternative-care.html)

There is hope! We’re gradually making our point about conventional medicine’s incomplete picture. 

 

Embracing Alternative Care

Top hospitals put unorthodox therapies into practice

By Avery ComarowPosted January 9, 2008″To be blunt, if my wife and I didn’t think it was helping him, we wouldn’t have continued with it,” says Dan Polley. He’s talking about Mikey, the Polleys’ 2½-year-old in the next room, who was diagnosed with acute lymphocytic leukemia when he was 6 months old. Chemotherapy, radiation, and a bone marrow transplant have been crucial elements of Mikey’s treatment. But the “it” his father speaks of is nothing like these aggressive, costly, and heavily researched exemplars of western care-it is a kind of touch therapy, from the camp of alternative medicine. Gentle and benign, “healing touch” is intended to rebalance the energy field that its practitioners believe surrounds the body and flows through it along defined pathways, affecting health when disrupted. Several times a week, therapist Lynne Morrison spends 20 minutes unblocking and smoothing Mikey’s energy field, which energy healers like Morrison say they can feel and correct.

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New map IDs the core of the human brain

Posted on by Frank DeMarco

 

A very interesting article

http://newsinfo.iu.edu/news/page/normal/8469.html

 

BLOOMINGTON, Ind. — An international team of researchers has created the first complete high-resolution map of how millions of neural fibers in the human cerebral cortex — the outer layer of the brain responsible for higher level thinking — connect and communicate. Their groundbreaking work identified a single network core, or hub, that may be key to the workings of both hemispheres of the brain.

Brain Connections

The first complete high-resolution map of the human cerebral cortex identifies a single network core that could be key to the workings of both hemispheres of the brain.

Print-Quality Photo

The work by the researchers from Indiana University, University of Lausanne, Switzerland, Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, Switzerland, and Harvard Medical School marks a major step in understanding the most complicated and mysterious organ in the human body. It not only provides a comprehensive map of brain connections (the brain “connectome”), but also describes a novel application of a non-invasive technique that can be used by other scientists to continue mapping the trillions of neural connections in the brain at even greater resolution, which is becoming a new field of science termed “connectomics.”

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