The Yes Men Explain How To Pull Off An International Prank (VIDEO)

Last week while I was in Copenhagen, I got a press release in an email stating that Canada was totally reversing its climate change position, announcing aggressive limits on carbon emissions, and would start paying "climate debt" to developing countries.

"This is interesting, I thought. I'm going to have to see how this will play out." I didn't realize at the time that I'd been punked by The Yes Men. The Yes Men are a group of international pranksters who challenge free market doctrine, capitalism and unresponsive governments and call attention to environmental crises and injustice through elaborate public hoaxes.

Past hoaxes have included announcing Dow Chemical would pay $12 billion in reparations to the victims of the Bhopal gas leak on BBC World News, pretending to be the US Chamber Of Commerce and announcing it was totally reversing its position on climate legislation (they are now being sued for this) and creating fake editions of the New York Times and New York Post. You can learn all about their antics in their recently-released film, "The Yes Men Fix The World".

The prank continued in elaborate detail, chronicled and updated by our Eat The Press Editor, Jason Linkins. After the fake announcement, there was a fake press conference between Canada and Uganda (Watch it here) on a fake UN set streamed on a fake UN website. A fake Wall Street Journal article covered Canada's change of heart, which was followed by a fake statement from the Canadian government condemning the prank. Elaborate!

I went behind the scenes in Copenhagen to meet The Yes Men and their team of pranksters to find out what it takes to pull off such an elaborate hoax. I particularly loved the tour of the set they created for the UN press conference, which was designed by art students and used tons of found objects.

WATCH:

A special thanks to Jennifer Prediger from Grist.org for shooting and editing this video.

Coercive Psychiatry vs. Motivational Therapy

The Problem with A.A.

How We Meet Change

...from the Field Center...

Since the launching of the latest incarnation of the Field Center just two days ago on 04 July, with its new focus on supporting the emerging community of students and other interested parties, I had a front row seat on how some of us meet change. Almost without exception, the response was excited, appreciative, and encouraging. Then there was the occasional reaction from someone taken hostage by the sudden disappointment that a class he or she had been waiting to take was no longer available under the new order. So ensued the email exchanges of the sort one might expect—mostly involving the larger issue of change and the authority we sometimes give change to determine who we are, especially when the change is disappointing. The few students who took the time to express this disappointment are appreciated, of course; they care, and care deeply. There is, however, as the Course tells us, “no time off from our consciousness”—and it is the unexpected development, the left turn we didn’t anticipate, the stinging disappointment that seems to come out of nowhere that reveals to us our intentions, how much we’ve reclaimed our creative authority to choose who we are, and how much we’re still willing to export that authority to the world and to others.

Such moments, obviously, have enormous instructional value, provided that we’re willing to recognize and accept the instruction. When I see a student in the iron grip of contradiction, immersed in blame, busy being the effect, and demanding that the world be this or that while all the while missing his or her power to rise above, to disengage, to refuse to let any worldly prize count more than the inner pearl of alignment, I remind myself that each of us walks the path of evolving consciousness at his or her own pace, and that sometimes suffering is the only instruction we’ll accept. It’s a hard way to go, but the Particle infatuation with its will coupled with its determination to assign the world causal authority, is a formula for suffering. It is a real consolation to remember that contradiction is dialectical—that is, it contains the seeds of transcendence. Pushed far enough, the will becomes exhausted. Denied long enough, the truth becomes unavoidable. Sooner or later, we’re compelled by our very resistance to put down resistance, accept things as they are, and begin again from a place of greater willingness. It isn’t a matter of whether or not we’ll awaken from the dream of willfulness, urgency, and demand, only of when.

It’s not the things we win that make us more than we were, but the things we lose. Change always involves the proverbial doors—one closing, the other opening. How we meet change reveals our intentions, who we’re willing to be and, correspondingly, who we’re unwilling to be. Informed by practice, who we’re willing to be includes coming into relation to the world with its ever changing events as something greater than our will, while who we are unwilling to be involves refusing to allow ourselves to be hostages to the world. So we have our desire, but it doesn’t have us. Poise, acceptance, the willingness to move with rather than against—these are the unmistakable features of the practice of what we call “alignment,” that state of self-honoring that has gained the winning perspective that knows that nothing in the world is worth the selling of our soul.

At the end of the day, what we lost is far less important than how we meet the loss. There is no time off, and the lesson continues to show up until we accept it. Resistance ultimately is a failure method. To catch the moment of opportunity in the disappointment, to take the instruction and “overcome the world”—these are the nuggets of gold waiting to be panned from the river of change.

"Great Man" Theory? History Is Driven by the Little Guy

...by Viggo Mortensen...

Actors have the privilege of exploring fictional characters, to see the world from the perspective of another person's imagined life. Sometimes, usually less often, we have the opportunity to speak the words of historical figures, to say the words they themselves spoke. This presents a different kind of challenge, in many ways, something I have been thinking about personally since becoming involved with a performance project and now documentary film called The People Speak, which is airing on History Channel, Sunday, December 13, at 8 pm (7 pm Central). (A soundtrack of music from the film is available from the Verve label December 9.)

The project is inspired by Howard Zinn's books A People's History of the United States and, with Anthony Arnove, Voices of a People's History of the United States, two books that have had a deep influence on how I understand this country. Howard's books provide a history of the United States from below, from the standpoint of ordinary people often overlooked in our textbooks and in our culture.

In 2005, I had the chance to be part of reading in Los Angeles with a remarkable lineup of actors, including Sandra Oh and Josh Brolin, which we called Voices of a People's History of the United States. The enthusiastic reaction of the audience to hearing the words of people in our country's history who have spoken out, fought injustice, and made a change, demonstrated how empowering it can be for people to reclaim this history and to make it their own. And how enlightening it is to shine the light of history on the issues and concerns of the present.

The success of these performances throughout the country -- some in high schools and some in theaters, some with professional actors and musicians, some with high school students -- led a few of us to think that we should make a film that could highlight and preserve these stories. The stories of people like Plough Jogger, a farmer in Shay's Rebellion, who asserted "We've come to relieve the distresses of the people."

Or an anonymous member of the Industrial Workers of the World who was arrested for denouncing World War One, saying, "This war is a businessman's war and we don't see why we should go out and get shot in order to save the lovely state of affairs which we now enjoy."

Or Orlando and Phyllis Rodriguez, who lost their son on 9/11, and issued this heartfelt statement a few days after: "Our son died a victim of an inhuman ideology. Our actions should not serve the same purpose. Let us grieve. Let us reflect and pray. Let us think about a rational response that brings real peace and justice to our world. But let us not as a nation add to the inhumanity of our times."

What we have found in making this film over the past two years is that people respond to these voices is profoundly personal and emotional ways. They take inspiration from seeing how people struggled in the past, often against far greater odds than we face today, to make their voices heard and to right historic wrongs. They find insight from these expressions of the past into how they feel and live in the present. And they also find hope for a different future.

As Howard Zinn has often pointed out, history told from above -- from the standpoint of generals and kings and presidents -- encourages passivity, a sense of helplessness. In this version of history, "great men" make history, not ordinary people. But looked at from below, history has another lesson. Whenever change as happened, it has been through protest, dissent, struggle, social movements, ordinary people picketing, striking, boycotting, sitting down, sitting in. All this mans that we make history, history is effected by our everyday decisions. And we have a responsibility to speak out when we see injustice. We can't wait on others to "lead" us or solve our problems for us. We have to participate, to engage, every day and not just once every four years.

Howard Zinn's work also reminds us that we always need to ask: what stories am I not hearing? Whose voices am I not hearing? And that if no one is telling our stories, we need to find ways -- creative, dynamic -- ways of telling them ourselves.

What the Dr. Seuss Stories Were Really About

Today would have been Dr. Seuss’s 105th birthday. To celebrate, here are 10 Stories Behind Dr. Seuss Stories, an article we originally published last fall.

1. The Lorax. In case you haven’t read The Lorax, it’s widely recognized as Dr. Seuss’ take on environmentalism and how humans are destroying nature. The logging industry was so upset about the book that some groups within the industry sponsored The Truax, a similar book—but from the logging point of view. Another interesting fact: the book used to contain the line, “I hear things are just as bad up in Lake Erie,” but 14 years after the book was published, the Ohio Sea Grant Program wrote to Seuss and told him how much the conditions had improved and implored him to take the line out. Dr. Seuss agreed and said that it wouldn’t be in future editions.

2. Horton Hears a Who! Somehow, Geisel’s books find themselves in the middle of controversy. The line from the book, “A person’s a person, no matter how small,” has been used as a slogan for pro-life organizations for years. It’s often questioned whether that was Seuss’ intent in the first place, but I would say not: when he was still alive, he threatened to sue a pro-life group unless they removed his words from their letterhead. Karl ZoBell, the attorney for Dr. Seuss’ interests and for his widow, Audrey Geisel, says that she doesn’t like people to “hijack Dr. Seuss characters or material to front their own points of view.”

3. If I Ran the Zoo, published in 1950, is the first recorded instance of the word “nerd.”

4. The Cat in the Hat was written basically because Dr. Seuss thought the famous Dick and Jane primers were insanely boring. Because kids weren’t interested in the material, they weren’t exactly compelled to use it repeatedly in their efforts to learn to read. So, The Cat in the Hat was born, and I must agree: it’s definitely more interesting.

5. Green Eggs and Ham. Bennett Cerf, Dr. Seuss’ editor, bet him that he couldn’t write a book using 50 words or less. The Cat in the Hat was pretty simple, after all, and it used 225 words. Not one to back down from a challenge, Mr. Geisel started writing and came up with Green Eggs and Ham – which uses exactly 50 words. The 50 words, by the way, are: a, am, and, anywhere, are, be, boat, box, car, could, dark, do, eat, eggs, fox, goat, good, green, ham, here, house, I, if, in, let, like, may, me, mouse, not, on, or, rain, Sam, say, see, so, thank, that, the, them, there, they, train, tree, try, will, with, would, you.

6. Marvin K. Mooney Will You Please Go Now! It’s often alleged that this book was written specifically about Richard Nixon, but the book came out only two months after the whole Watergate scandal. It’s pretty unlikely that the book could have been conceived of, written, edited and mass produced in such a short time; also, Seuss never admitted that the story was originally about Nixon. That’s not to say he didn’t understand how well the two flowed together. In 1974, he sent a copy of Marvin K. Mooney to his friend Art Buchwald at the Washington Post. In it, he crossed out “Marvin K. Mooney” and replaced it with “Richard M. Nixon”, which Buchwald reprinted in its entirety. Oh, and one other tidbit: this book contains the first-ever reference to “crunk,” although its meaning is a bit different than today’s crunk.

7. Yertle the Turtle = Hitler? Yep. If you haven’t read the story, here’s a little overview: Yertle is the king of the pond, but he wants more. He demands that other turtles stack themselves up so he can sit on top of them to survey the land. Mack, the turtle at the bottom, is exhausted. He asks Yertle for a rest; Yertle ignores him and demands more turtles for a better view. Eventually, Yertle notices the moon and is furious that anything dare be higher than himself, and is about ready to call for more turtles when Mack burps. This sudden movement topples the whole stack, sends Yertle flying into the mud, and frees the rest of the turtles from their stacking duty. Dr. Seuss actually said Yertle was a representation of Hitler. Despite the political nature of the book, none of that was disputed at Random House – what was disputed was Mack’s burp. No one had ever let a burp loose in a children’s book before, so it was a little dicey. In the end, obviously, Mack burped.

8. The Butter Battle Book is one I had never heard of, perhaps with good reason: it was pulled from the shelves of libraries for a while because of the reference to the Cold War and the arms race. Yooks and Zooks are societies who do everything differently. The Yooks eat their bread with the butter-side up and the Zooks eat their bread with the butter-side down. Obviously, one of them must be wrong, so they start building weapons to outdo each other: the “Tough-Tufted Prickly Snick-Berry Switch,” the “Triple-Sling Jigger,” the “Jigger-Rock Snatchem,” the “Kick-A-Poo Kid”, the “Eight-Nozzled Elephant-Toted Boom Blitz,” the “Utterly Sputter” and the “Bitsy Big-Boy Boomeroo.” The book concludes with each side ready to drop their ultimate bombs on each other, but the reader doesn’t know how it actually turns out.

9. Oh The Places You’ll Go is Dr. Seuss’ final book, published in 1990. It sells about 300,000 copies every year because so many people give it to college and high school grads.

10. No Dr. Seuss post would be complete without a mention of How the Grinch Stole Christmas! I couldn’t find much on the book, however, so here are a few facts about the Dr. Seuss-sanctioned cartoon.

Frankenstein’s Monster himself, Boris Karloff, provided the voice of the Grinch and the narration for the movie. Seuss a little wary of casting him because he thought his voice would be too scary for kids. Can you imagine the cartoon with any other voice?! If you’re wondering why they sound a bit different, it’s because the sound people went back to the Grinch’s parts and removed all of the high tones in Karloff’s voice. That’s why the Grinch sounds so gravelly.

Tony the Tiger, AKA Thurl Ravenscroft, is the voice behind “You’re a Mean One, Mr. Grinch.” He received no credit on screen, so Dr. Seuss wrote to columnists in every major U.S. newspaper to tell them exactly who had sung the song.

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Also: 5 Stories About Dr. Seuss Himself

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http://www.mentalfloss.com/blogs/archives/20266

Recognizing Grace

...from the Field Center

‘Tis the season to be joyful, but many experience something far short of it. The proverbial “blue Christmas” is one name given to that unique brand of sadness that seems to attach itself to the end-of-year holidays, especially for those who are struggling in the throes of contradiction in one or more of the four staging areas of experience: love, health, supply, and life direction.

Of course, only a Field training student would be likely to think of it in those terms; for others, the problem is “out there”—the loneliness of being without a partner or other family, the frustration of financial lack in a season defined by the giving of gifts, the added burden of a health issue at a time when the rest of the world is celebrating.

As always, though, a burden is a gift waiting to be unwrapped. This, however, is not necessarily easy to see, though seeing it invariably brings home the truth that sets free. One student, for example, was suffering greatly because a partner with whom she had spent many end-of-year holidays had up and left her, and this after a long and steady history of neglect and indifference that seemed to flow naturally from him.

No time of year has the power to exacerbate the loneliness of loss like the season of joy, and she found herself missing him acutely and wishing that she could be with him, even intending, in our terms, a rapprochement and reconciliation. She could not, in that moment, recognize all that she was being spared by his departure.

There is an old caution, perhaps its origins lie in the well-known horror story first published in 1902, “The Monkey’s Paw,” by W.W. Jacobs: “Be careful what you ask for lest it come true.” George Bernard Shaw expressed the same sentiment in his inimitable way: “There are two tragedies in life: not getting what you want and getting what you want.”

Along the same lines, there is this observation from a source I do not recall: “The magic wish is granted and can’t be taken back.” All of these remind us that there is often a grace operating in wishes not coming true. More than a matter of finding the proverbial silver lining in the cloud, or seeing the glass half full rather than half empty, recognizing grace in our disappointments, challenges, even burdens and losses calls for a “seeing through” the facts to a deeper truth: In the great punctuation of our experience, there is no period.

Things change.

The simple willingness to remember this, to refrain from assigning the status of a conclusion to whatever is happening at the moment, may open a window in the psyche and let in the fresh air of a broader context, one in which we can see the blessing hidden in the burden, the gift delivered in the unlikely form of a wound.

There is a famous Zen story (it has several forms) about an old farmer who lived on a small tract of land in a remote village with his son. They were dirt-poor, and worked hard just to get by. One day, a wild horse came out of the mountains and wandered onto their land. Under the law, this meant that the horse now rightfully belonged to them, and as horses were considered to be of great value, the incident made them literally wealthy overnight by their standards. The son, overjoyed at their good fortune, ran to his father and asked him what he thought about this miracle, to which the farmer replied, “We’ll see.” The next day, the horse ran away, and the son, bemoaning the crushing disappointment, went to his father again. “We’ll see,” said the farmer. The third day, the same horse returned from the mountains with half a dozen stallions following, all of which immediately became the property of the farmer and his son. Ecstatic, the son hurried to his father, thrilled and incredulous at the further turn of luck in their favor. The farmer said only, “We’ll see.” On the fourth day, the boy climbed on one of the horses and was thrown badly, breaking his leg. As the doctors were tending to him, the boy complained bitterly. Brushing the hair gently from his eyes, his father said only, “We’ll see.” And on the fourth day, the province went to war and the army recruiters came through the village to conscript all of the young men—except, of course, the one with the broken leg.

Grace works in our behalf continuously.

The whole of creation is grace in motion—but we are not always present to recognize and appreciate its ingenuity because our unhappy conclusions blind and bind us.

Simply to refrain from such conclusions, to be a little less infatuated with things that we only think we know, to be open and willing enough for life to present the treasure within the trial—these are things that can open us to the true magic of the season, restore the weary spirit, and give us peace.

http://www.fieldcenter.org/realities/