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"Dr. Katari ... invited me to a first session with a lovely group of rapists, murderers and robbers." --John Cleese in The Benefits of Laughter Yoga with John Cleese

Whenever I start researching uplifting stories involving science or technology for Kenneth Cole's Awearnessblog, I always end up unearthing some really funky project from India. The latest is the Yoga of Laughter created by Dr Madan Kataria who has this published on his website, Laughter Yoga :

Quiero decirte que mi respaldo no ha sido el producto de la espontáneidad, ni del ciego optimismo.

Primero, me ha alarmado la falta de entusiasmo y apoyo que has demostrado por activistas en la red que no han sido en alguna forma aprovados por tu equipo. Aunque hablas de un movimiento, en la red veo que ese movimiento tiene que venir de tu espacio, de que tiene que darse dentro de los parámetros controlados por tu campaña.

Si los instrumentos de la red resultan en la subversión de jerarquías; haz demostrado como con el caso de John Anthony o con el repudio de la acti-red que tus esferas de influencia son inclaudicables. Que hay jerarquías pre-establecidas a tu alrededor que si se alteran, son recibidas tanto con el activo repudio de tus subalternos como con el desdén de tu silencio.

¿Cómo ha de ser éste un movimiento democrático si quieres controlar como el pueblo no dicta ni decide?

¿Cómo ha de ser transformativo, si uno no controla, desecha o reinventa tu campaña política?

¿Cómo hemos de saber que nuestras palabras valen si no haz de escuchar nuestra voz?

Sin embargo, éstas son dudas quedan rebasadas por la serie de epifanías que tu campaña me han revelado.

De cómo el miedo me llevaba a negar tu candidatura en un intento falaz de protegerte.

De cómo los grilletes del prejuicio me immobilizaban ante la mar de clases sociales, de lenguajes, de creencias y de edades que te cercan por donde pasas.

De cómo la inspiración de tus palabras alimentaba el cinismo que ha subrayado mi activismo político.

No espero que tu optimismo te convierta en un mesías.

No espero que tu mulataje borre el racismo.

No espero que tu deseo de una democracia transformativa contrareste la corrupción.

No espero que tu procedencia como hijo de un immigrante le abra las puertas a los millones que sufren los efectos del nativismo eurocentrista que infectan esta nación.

No espero que este país ni el mundo entero cambien el día que te confirmen frente a la Casa Blanca.

No.

Sin embargo ...

Welcome to the new culturekitchen WIKI. What is a |wiki? Glad you asked :

A wiki is a collaborative website which can be directly edited by anyone with access to it. Ward Cunningham, developer of the first wiki WikiWikiWeb, originally described it as "the simplest online database that could possibly work". One of the best-known wikis is Wikipedia.

This is the one post that you should read over and over again, as I do, to understand what gets Liza Sabater's inner blogsheroe going.

I wrote Secular Blue America after an election "post mortem" written by Steve back in 2004. Steve's article is titled, They Voted For This Mess and it talked about how important it was for 'liberals' to understand that those who voted for Bush in 2004 were not stupid.

In Steve's reality check book, people who voted Republican did so because they had to:

I have had several interesting discussions around here about global warming. Of course we get the foolish denial lobby drones who yammer “it’s a myth” despite the overwhelming scientific evidence, and I merely deal with them with a slap down, fools that they are. But there also is the legitimate discussions of what can we do—as a society, as individuals. We have a 10 year window according to top scientific and economic experts coming at the question from different angles. We have a 10 year window.

I have expressed how one of my main motivators for personal action is my son. I would say my step-daughter as well, and that is also true. By my son is 2…and completely dependent on my for everything, so the need for me to care and act based on that care is so striking with my baby. So I look at my son and feel a huge responsibility. I consider the 10 year window to MITIGATE global warming’s effect on my son’s world. It is already too late to stop the effects. We would have to have acted when scientists first were telling us we should act. But we didn’t. So we now have a 10 year window to mitigate.

The analogy I use is I consider my great-grandparents and grand parents who worked hard so their children would have a better life. I feel I must work hard to give my children a life that isn’t significantly worse than mine. That is where we are, starkly and realistically. There are huge hurdles, but also huge opportunities.

Over the past year and a half, Liza's little blog empire has been growing remarkably. Daily Gotham really took off thanks to several highly contentious Brooklyn issues (development issues, arson issues, race issues, and some particularly divisive primaries). For me it was a pretty dizzying rise that included quite a few heated exchanges between the DG editors/writers and other bloggers, political organizations and partisans of particular campaigns. At the end of it, we were credited with (perhaps given TOO much credit) defeating a Congressional candidate who raised $1.8 million and had assumed he would win as the only white candidate in a majority black district where the black vote was split among several black candidates. At the end of it we also had earned the respect of many who at first hated us. The president of one local club we took on who coined the phrase "I'd rather be flogged than blogged" after we took her club to task for disenfranchising a large group of new members recently welcomed me onto the board of the same club. Gatemouth, a local NYC blogger who really slammed us at first, wound up having us as his defenders when he was attacked. One State Senator we have slammed claims to be a loyal reader.

So, somehow, and I really am somewhat clueless how we did it, we became noticed on DG in a very short period of time. Put another way, we were successful.

During that whole time I spent far more time on DG than Culture Kitchen. But Liza asked me to be a managing editor for CK. Since then, through the efforts of Liza and the editors, CK has been growing as well. And has been noticed.

Drinking Liberally is a group I have been publicizing almost since its inception. The idea of liberals getting together regularly and drinking booze (or coffee, or tea, or whatever) creating grassroots, social bonds and just plain fun sounded like a perfect idea. Seems like the idea is taking off!

From AlterNet:

Drinking Liberally: A New Strategy for Progressive Politics

By Nick Pinto, AlterNet. Posted January 18, 2007.

Every week, in cities and towns all over the country, thousands of the nation's progressives are coming together to drink beer. But far from drowning their despair in drink, these progressives are building networks that could form the underpinning of a new renaissance for the American Left. What do they call this movement? Drinking Liberally, naturally.

Three years after it was founded in a Hell's Kitchen Dive Bar, the Drinking Liberally organization has grown to include 174 chapters. And they're not just in predictable cities like New York, Washington D.C., and San Francisco, but also scattered in seemingly unlikely places like Salt Lake City, Utah; Moscow, Idaho; Amarillo, Texas; and South Bend, Indiana.

In September, the Drinking Liberally regulars gathered in Denver for their second annual national convention, and under the umbrella name of "Living Liberally," the organization is developing a national comedy tour, networks of reading groups and movie clubs, and perhaps even a dating service...

You have two sources of information for styling your posts. On top of the post form you have a series of buttons. These buttons allow you a minimum of formatting with no knowledge of style coding in either HTML or CSS.

inserts the tags to create italics.

inserts the tags to bold the text.

is absolutely necessary to introduce quotes from a source that are a paragraph or more long. You wrap the text in


tags in order to get the following effect:

culturekitchen is a community blog aimed at cultural creatives who believe progressive activism starts in the kitchen, the bedroom, the home, the wallet. It is open for all who believe the decline of progressive and libertarian values have set us back as a democratic nation.

For more information on how to handle quotes, please go to How To Quote Sources.

makes it easy to create links to other sites. Now pay attention because there are two parts to using this button.

• When you click on the button you will get the . You need to put the internet address (URL) to the place you are linking to after the backward slashes [ // ] and right up to the quotation mark with closing bracket [ "> ].
• Right after the the quotation mark with closing bracket [ "> ] is where you put in the text you want to use to point to the link.

  Normally I prefer people use the title of the article or page they are pointing to; but you can use text like "Source", "Here", "Link", etc.

• Click on the button again to insert , the link that closes your code.

So culturekitchen looks like this : culturekitchen.

is used to insert the <"!--break--"> PHP tag (without the quote marks) to divide the content that will go the front page from the rest of the post.