pencak silat Inti Ombak

This is Pencak Silat Inti Ombak (inner wave), a style of silat created by Guru Daniel Sulestya Agung Prasetya.



You can find out more about this fascinating form of silat by clicking HERE.

QUOTE OF THE DAY

You are responsible for your own happiness. Happiness never comes from outside of you. If you put your happiness in someone else's hands, they can always take it away. Happiness can only come from inside of you and is the result of your love.

~Don Miguel Ruiz

I HOPE EVERYONE HAD A HAPPY MEMORIAL DAY!!!

...And I hope everyone has many more to come.

Top 10 Spiritual Questions Answered - 6

QUOTE OF THE DAY

You are what you believe you are. Humans are powerful magicians. You have the power to make yourself what you are right now, but it's not your reasoning mind that controls your power; it's what you believe.

~Don Miguel Ruiz

Top 10 Spiritual Questions Answered - 5

Sunday School Video

Video description from You Tube:

Uploaded by dervishx on Jun 28, 2006
This short 5 min video provides brief answers to what is Islam,what it stands for and what has been its contribution to civilization. . .
Category:
Film & Animation
Tags:
what is Islam nasheed religion Muslims Muslim Quran Muahmmad Peace

Freedom Ride 2011

Video description taken from You Tube:


Uploaded by devchelle2 on May 29, 2011
Contact me for details and watch for upcoming videos outlining pick up locations, dates and more information.

When we allow the government to control everything our nation is lost

I will not shut up
will you?
Category:
Nonprofits & Activism
Tags:
Free speech Thunderf00t xxxthepeachxxx washington DC Freedom Ride protest constitution

QUOTE OF THE DAY

Your heart is like a magical kitchen. Your heart can create any amount of love, not just for yourself, but for the whole world. Open your heart, open your magical kitchen, and refuse to walk around the world begging for love. In your heart is all the love you need.

~Don Miguel Ruiz

Top 10 Spiritual Questions Answered - 4

Top 10 Spiritual Questions Answered - 3

SOME POLITICIANS GETS THINGS DONE...

Click HERE to see the original article:

Ron Paul Backs Industrial Hemp Farming Bill


Opinion by NORML
(2 Days Ago) in Society / Drug Law
By Paul Armentano

Texas Republican Ron Paul and a coalition of 25 co-sponsors are once again seeking to allow for the commercial farming of industrial hemp.

House Bill 1831, The Industrial Hemp Farming Act of 2011, would exclude low potency varieties of marijuana from federal prohibition. If approved, this measure will grant state legislatures the authority to license and regulate the commercial production of hemp as an industrial and agricultural commodity.

Several states — including North Dakota, Montana, and Vermont– have enacted regulations to allow for the cultivation of hemp under state law. However, none of these laws can be implemented without federal approval. Passage of HR 1831 would remove existing federal barriers and allow states that wish to regulate commercial hemp production the authority to do so.

“We are pleased to see the re-introduction of the Industrial Hemp Farming Act in Congress. Vote Hemp is currently working with a Democratic Senator who is preparing to introduce companion legislation in the Senate in support of industrial hemp farming,” says Vote Hemp President, Eric Steenstra. “It is due time for the Senate as well as President Obama and the Attorney General to prioritize the crop’s benefits to farmers and to take action like Rep. Paul and the cosponsors of H.R. 1831 have done. With the U.S. hemp industry valued at over $400 million in annual retail sales and growing, a change in federal policy to allow hemp farming would mean instant job creation, among many other economic and environmental benefits,” adds Steenstra.

According to a 2005 Congressional Resource Service report, the United States is the only developed nation that fails to cultivate industrial hemp as an economic crop. As a result, U.S. companies that specialize in hempen goods — such as Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soaps, Patagonia, Nature’s Path, and Nutiva — have no choice but to import hemp material. These added production costs are then passed on to the consumer who must pay artificially high retail prices for hemp products.

Previous versions of The Industrial Hemp Farming Act were introduced, but failed to receive a public hearing or a committee vote. Please write your members of Congress today and tell them to end the federal prohibition of industrial hemp production. For your convenience, a prewritten letter will be e-mailed to your member of Congress when you enter your contact information below.

For more information about industrial hemp, please visit: http://www.votehemp.org.

Thank you for assisting NORML’s federal law reform efforts.

QUOTE OF THE DAY

Imagine that you are made of light, of spirit. There is nothing you need to do. There is nothing you need to be except what you really are. Remember what you are, and the dream of your life will have no limits.

~Don Miguel Ruiz

DANNI EL PERFORMING THIS SUNDAY NIGHT!!!

Danni El and Jessi Bell will be performing at this event Sunday night at the Libertan Lounge
8210 sunset blvd west hollywood ca 90046

In case you don't know who she is, she's this great singer who occasionally performs on Hollywood blvd. Here she is performing her song Drain:

Top 10 Spiritual Questions Answered - 2

I'M SHOCKED. BUT NOT REALLY SUPRISED...

Priest Sex-Abuse Case Hits Church of Pope's Adviser
By Alessandra Pieracci and Giacomo Galeazzi / La Stampa / Worldcrunch


(GENOA) — The latest sex-abuse case to rock the Catholic Church is unfolding in the archdiocese of an influential Italian Cardinal who has been working with Pope Benedict XVI on reforms to respond to prior scandals of pedophile priests.

Father Riccardo Seppia, a 51-year-old parish priest in the village of Sastri Ponente, near Genoa, was arrested last Friday, May 13, on pedophilia and drug charges. Investigators say that in tapped mobile-phone conversations, Seppia asked a Moroccan drug dealer to arrange sexual encounters with young and vulnerable boys. "I do not want 16-year-old boys but younger. Fourteen-year-olds are O.K. Look for needy boys who have family issues," he allegedly said. Genoa Archbishop Angelo Bagnasco, who is the head of the Italian Bishops Conference, had been working with Benedict to establish a tough new worldwide policy, released this week, on how bishops should handle accusations of priestly sex abuse.

Bagnasco said that when he met the Pope this weekend, he "asked for a particular blessing for my archdiocese" in light of the alleged crimes, adding that "like every father toward a son [feels] great pain in seeing a priest who is not faithful to his vocation."
Vatican spokesman Father Federico Lombardi praised Bagnasco's handling of the Sastri Ponente case, lauding its "timeliness and competence." On Saturday, May 14, the Cardinal visited the Santo Spirito church, where Seppia was the parish priest.
According to investigators, Seppia told a friend — a former seminarian and barman who is currently under investigation — that the town's malls were the best places to entice minors. In tapped phone conversations the two cursed and swore against God. The priest is charged with having attempted to kiss and touch an underage altar boy and of having exchanged cocaine for sexual intercourse with boys over 18.

Seppia's defense lawyers are expected to argue that those conversations — monitored since Oct. 20, 2010 — were just words, sex games that were played by adults. It was just a game even when he claimed to have "kissed on the mouth" a 15-year-old altar boy, according to the defense.
On Monday, May 16, during formal questioning by Genoa's investigating magistrate Annalisa Giacalone, Seppia chose not to respond. The magistrate decided to keep him in custody to avoid a risk of relapse or tampering with evidence. Defense attorney Paolo Bonanni said the defense wants to evaluate all the charges, reserving the right to respond to public prosecutor Stefano Puppo in the coming days.
Questioned by the investigators, the altar boy reportedly confirmed the attempted kiss. Another male minor who, according to the investigators, was stalked with messages and pressing invitations, will be questioned soon. Psychologists are helping Carabinieri police officers obtain testimony from the alleged victims. "The boys are ashamed to talk and to admit what happened," says one of the investigators. The evidence amounts to at least 50 messages and phone calls. In the tapped phone conversations, the drug dealer contacted the boys and gave their phone numbers to the priest, who paid them with cocaine or 50 euros each time for sexual intercourse.

"[The investigators] made us listen to that man saying terrifying things about our children. Things so terrible that I cannot repeat them," a father of one of the boys said.
Investigators are also examining three confiscated computers: the priest allegedly looked for partners via chat as well.
Seppia is currently being kept in a confinement cell in a Genoa prison. He met the jail's priest and psychologist. "He has read the newspapers, and he is pained by his parishioners' comments," says his lawyer. The investigation is ongoing.


Read more: http://www.time.com/time/world/article/0,8599,2072613,00.html#ixzz1NVJTabr4

QUOTE OF THE DAY

We are born in truth, but we grow up believing in lies. One of the biggest lies in the story of humanity is the lie of our imperfection. When we believe this lie, we use the lie to judge ourselves, to punish ourselves, and to justify our mistakes.

~Don Miguel Ruiz

QUOTE OF THE DAY

You are the force that is Life. You are alive because of power of God, which is the power of Life. You are the force that is Life, but because you are able to think at the level of the mind, you forget what you really are.

~Don Miguel Ruiz

Top 10 Spiritual Questions Answered - 1

I never knew...

I heard there was a short life span for professional wrestlers, but I never thought it was this SERIOUS.

YOU GOTTA BE SHITTING ME!!!

In this installment of YOU GOTTA BE SHITTING ME!!!, I came across this video from The Young Turks a couple of days ago.



And if you think that was crazy, check this next video out:

Well, I guess we have to wait till October for the world to end...

I just ran across this article from THE RAW STORY. You can find the original article HERE.


Judgment Day forecaster points to new doomsday date

LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - The evangelical Christian broadcaster whose much-ballyhooed Judgment Day prophecy went conspicuously unfulfilled on Saturday has a simple explanation for what went wrong -- he miscalculated.

Instead of the world physically coming to an end on May 21 with a great, cataclysmic earthquake, as he had predicted, Harold Camping, 89, said he now believes his forecast is playing out "spiritually," with the actual apocalypse set to occur five months later, on October 21.

Camping, who launched a doomsday countdown in which some followers spent their life's savings in anticipation of being swept into heaven, issued his correction during an appearance on his "Open Forum" radio show from Oakland, California.

The headquarters of Camping's Family Radio network of 66 U.S. stations had been shuttered over the weekend with a sign on the door that read, "This Office is Closed. Sorry we missed you!"

During a sometimes rambling, 90-minute discourse that included a question-and-answer session with reporters, Camping said he felt bad that Saturday had come and gone without the Rapture he had felt so certain would take place.

Reflecting on scripture afterward, Camping said it "dawned" on him that a "merciful and compassionate God" would spare humanity from "hell on Earth for five months" by compressing the physical apocalypse into a shorter time frame.

But he insisted that October 21 has always been the end-point of his own End Times chronology, or at least, his latest chronology.

The tall, gaunt former civil engineer with a deep voice and prominent ears has been wrong before. More than two decades ago, he publicly acknowledged a failed 1994 prophecy of Christ's return to Earth.

To publicize his latest pronouncement, the Family Radio network posted over 2,000 billboards around the country declaring that Judgment Day was at hand, and believers carried the message on placards in shopping malls and street corners.

Asked what advice he would give to followers who gave up much or all of their worldly possessions in the belief that his Judgment Day forecast would come true, Camping drew a comparison to the nation's recent economic slump.

"We just had a great recession. There's lots of people who lost their jobs, lots of people who lost their houses ... and somehow they all survived," he said.

"People cope, he added. "We're not in the business of giving any financial advice. We're in the business of telling people maybe there is someone you can talk to, and that's God."

(Editing by Greg McCune)

QUOTE OF THE DAY

To master love, you have to practice love. The art of relationship is a whole mastery, and the only way to reach mastery is with practice. To master a relationship is, therefore, about action; it is not about attaining knowledge.

~Don Miguel Ruiz

More on "The end of the World"

Taken from Yahoo:

Doomsday prophet, followers ‘flabbergasted’ world didn’t end

By Liz Goodwin


It's hard to feel bad for someone whose doomsday predictions caused so much anxiety, but 89-year-old Harold Camping's recent admission that he's "flabbergasted" the world didn't end last weekend sounds somewhat pitiful.
"It has been a really tough weekend," Camping said Sunday, after emerging from his Alameda, California home for the first time to talk to a reporter from the San Francisco Chronicle. "I'm looking for answers ... But now I have nothing else to say," he said, adding that he would make a full statement today.

Camping's PR aide, Tom Evans, told the L.A. Times that the group is "disappointed" that 200 million true believers weren't lifted up to heaven on Saturday while everyone else suffered and eventually died as a series of earthquakes and famine destroyed the Earth. "You can imagine we're pretty disappointed, but the word of God is still true," Evans said. "We obviously went too far, and that's something we need to learn from." The group posted 2,000 billboards around the country warning of the rapture, while Camping--an uncertified fundamentalist minister--spread the word on his radio show.

Camping's Family Radio, which airs on 66 U.S. stations, has apparently rebranded itself quickly. Business Insider notes that the station's website has scrubbed all mentions of the Judgment Day. The site previously featured a countdown clock to the May 21 rapture on its homepage.
But the false prediction might not be so easily effaced from the lives of Camping's followers. The L.A. Times writes that Keith Bauer, a 38-year-old tractor trailer driver, took a road trip with his family to see the Grand Canyon before the world ended.
"With maxed-out credit cards and a growing mountain of bills, he said, the rapture would have been a relief," the paper writes.

But Bauer is not angry at Camping for his false prediction. "Worst-case scenario for me, I got to see the country," he told the paper. "If I should be angry at anybody, it should be me."
Robert Fitzpatrick, who spent $140,000 of his life savings to advertise the rapture in New York, said he was dumbfounded when life went on as usual Saturday.
"I do not understand why ...," he told Reuters while awaiting the event in Times Square. "I do not understand why nothing has happened."

An NPR reporter talked to two Camping followers on Sunday. "One man, his voice quavering, said he was still holding out hope that they were one day off. Another believer asserted that their prayers worked: God delayed judgment so that more people could be saved, but the end is 'imminent,'" she reported.

Evans, Camping's PR aide, told NPR he hopes Family Radio will reimburse followers who spent their savings in anticipation of the rapture, but that he can't guarantee it.
Protesters gathered outside Camping's radio headquarters to mock the false prophecy over the weekend. Some of them set aloft a toy cow with balloons to lampoon the idea that a select elite would ascend to heaven. Meanwhile, other religious groups tried to recruit disappointed Camping followers.


You can read the original article from Yahoo HERE.

JUST DO SOME SHIT!!!

I found this page on facebook and thought I'd post it here and pass it on to all of you.

Do Some Shit is an international movement for those determined to leave the world a better place than they found it; for those that don't just want to talk about shit, but actually DO SOME SHIT!
Description
Do Some Shit is an international movement for those determined to leave the world a better place than they found it; for those that don't just want to talk about shit, but actually DO SOME SHIT!


For more information, check out thier facebook page HERE.

HAPPY MONDAY! And welcome to the first day of the rest of our lives...

So, it's been 2 days since the rapture that NEVER happened... If you were a true believer in this event, what now? Well, I posted an article from Yahoo discussing this very subject. you can read the original article HERE.

When Doomsday Isn't, Believers Struggle to Cope


Stephanie Pappas, LiveScience Senior Writer,

LiveScience.com – Sat May 21, 10:31 pm ET

If you're reading this, Harold Camping's predictions that the end of the world would start Saturday (May 21) failed to pan out.

That's good news for most of us, but Camping and his followers were looking forward to the end. After all, they believed that they were likely to be among the 200 million souls sent to live in paradise forever. So how do believers cope when their doomsday predictions fail?
It depends, said Lorenzo DiTommaso, a professor of religion at Concordia University in Montreal who studies the history of doomsday predictions.

"If you have a strong leader, the group survives," DiTommaso told LiveScience. "Sometimes the group falls apart. Most often, the answer given by the group is that the prophecy is true, but the interpretation was wrong." [Read: Why People Look Forward to the End]

In 1994, Camping predicted a September doomsday, but hedged his bets with a question mark. On his website (familyradio.com), Camping wrote that he had misunderstood a key biblical passage, but since that time, biblical evidence for a 2011 end had "greatly solidified."

Doomsdays without doom

The classic study of "doomsdays gone bad" took place in 1954. A Chicago woman named Dorothy Martin predicted a cataclysmic flood from which a few true believers would be saved by aliens. Martin and her cult, The Seekers, gathered the night before the expected flood to await the flying saucer. Unbeknown to them, however, their group had been infiltrated by psychologist Leon Festinger, who hoped to find out what happens when the rug of people's beliefs is pulled out from under them.

Festinger's study, which became the basis of the book "When Prophecy Fails" (Harper-Torchbooks 1956), revealed that as the appointed time passed with no alien visitors, the group sat stunned. But a few hours before dawn, Martin suddenly received a new prophecy, stating that The Seekers had been so devout that God had called off the apocalypse. At that, the group rejoiced — and started calling newspapers to boast of what they'd done. Eventually, the group fell apart. Martin later changed her name to "Sister Thedra" and continued her prophecies.
Other failed doomsday prophets have struggled to keep their followers in line. One self-proclaimed prophet, Mariana Andrada (later known as Mariana La Loca), preached to a gang of followers in the 1880s in the San Joaquin Valley of California, predicting doomsday by 1886. But Andrada was not consistent with her predictions, and believers began to defect. Trying to keep one family from leaving, Andrada told them one of them would die on the journey. Sure enough, the family's young son soon fell violently ill and passed away. The family accused Andrada of poisoning him. She was arrested and found not guilty, but never returned to preach to her followers.

Searching for explanations

How Camping's followers will cope with a failed doomsday prediction depends on the structure of the group, said Steve Hassan, a counseling psychologist and cult expert who runs the online Freedom of Mind Resource Center. [After Doomsday: How Humans Get Off Earth]
"The more people have connections outside of the group, the more likely it is that they're going to stop looking to [Camping] as the mouth of God on Earth," Hassan told LiveScience. "Information control is one of the most important features of mind control."
In his experience, Hassan said, about a third of believers become disillusioned after a failed prediction, while another third find reason to believe more strongly. The remaining group members fall somewhere in between, he said.

Doomsday groups in history have run a gamut of responses after failed predictions, said Stephen Kent, a sociologist at the University of Alberta who studies new and alternative religions. On occasion, a leader will admit he or she was wrong; other groups will come up with a face-saving explanation. Some groups may blame themselves, rationalizing that their lack of faith caused the failure, Kent told LiveScience. Other groups blame outside forces and redouble their efforts.
"One of the options is for the group to say, 'Society wasn't ready, Jesus felt there weren't enough people worthy of rapturing. Hence, we've got to go out and convert more people,'" Kent said.

After the apocalypse

Often, a failed prediction leads to splinter groups and re-entrenchment. After Baptist preacher William Miller predicted the end of the world on Oct. 22, 1844 — a date thereafter known as "The Great Disappointment" when nothing happened — his followers struggled to explain their mistake. One subset decided that on that date, Jesus had shifted his location in heaven in preparation to return to Earth. This group later became the Seventh-Day Adventist church. [Infographic: Doomsdays Past and Present]

Sociologists and doomsday experts agree that Camping is likely convinced of doomsday rather than perpetuating a hoax or running a scam. A con artist, Hassan said, would never set himself up for failure by giving a firm date.

A belief in doomsday gives followers a clear sense of the world and their place in it, Kent said. Those comforting beliefs are difficult to maintain after the world fails to end.
"This could be a fairly sad day for these people," Kent said. "There will be some greatly disheartened people who may be terribly confused about what didn't happen."

QUOTE OF THE DAY

Cultivate wisdom. You don't need to accumulate knowledge to become wise; anyone can become wise. When you become wise, you respect your body, you respect your mind, and you respect your soul. When you become wise, your life is controlled by your heart, not your head.

~Don Miguel Ruiz

Pencak Silat An Indonesian Fighting Systems with Pendekar Joko Suseno

for more info about this style, check out www.tapak-suci.de. and www.pencaksilat-concept.com

O.K., I couldn't resist...

I had to post 2 more stories on this "rapture" thing. You can find the original story HERE.

Family Radio chief Harold Camping silent as Rapture fails to occur

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - With no sign his forecast of Judgment Day arriving on Saturday has come true, the 89-year-old California evangelical broadcaster and former civil engineer behind the pronouncement seemed to have gone silent.

Family Radio, the Christian stations network headed by Harold Camping which had spread his message of an approaching doomsday, was on Saturday playing recorded church music and devotional messages unrelated to the apocalypse.

Camping previously made a failed prediction Jesus Christ would return to Earth in 1994.

In his latest pronouncement, he had said doomsday would begin in Asia, but with midnight local time come and gone in Tokyo and Beijing and those cities already in the early hours of May 22, there was no sign of the apocalypse.

The Oakland, California, headquarters of the network of 66 U.S. stations, which has international affiliates and had posted billboards around the country warning of a May 21 Judgment Day, were shuttered with a sign in the door that read "This Office is Closed. Sorry we missed you!"

The headquarters, which appears to be normally closed on Saturday, was also shuttered on Friday.

Camping, whose deep sonorous voice is frequently heard on his radio network expounding the Bible, could not be reached immediately for comment on Saturday.

On Friday, the shades were drawn and no one answered the door at his house in Alameda, California.

Atheists in different parts of the country were planning celebrations and get-togethers to mark the failure of Camping's May 21 prediction to come true.

In Oakland, the same city where Camping's network is based, over 200 people gathered at an atheist convention where speakers jokingly took note of the Judgment Day pronouncement.

In New York, at least one of Camping's followers continued to hold out hope that Judgment Day would come.

Retired Metropolitan Transportation Authority worker Robert Fitzpatrick, 60, said he spent more than $140,000 of his savings on subway posters and bus shelter advertisements warning of the May 21 Judgment Day.

"God's people are commanded to sound the warning, to sound the trumpet so to speak so people know," Fitzpatrick said of his advertising blitz.

Fitzpatrick said Camping led him to believe Judgment Day would be May 21, but added that he disagreed with the broadcaster's prediction it would begin in Asia.

In Fitzpatrick's view, from his reading of the Bible, Judgment Day would begin around 6 p.m. Eastern Time. He said on Saturday that he still had no doubts Judgment Day would come this day.

"I wouldn't even entertain that question because there's too much proof from the Bible," he said.

(Additional reporting by Erik Tavkar: Writing by Alex Dobuzinskis: Editing by Jerry Norton)

Source: Reuters US Online Report Domestic News


Broadcaster silent as Judgment Day hours tick by

Gabrielle Saveri
Reuters US Online Report Domestic News

May 21, 2011 14:31 EDT

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - With no sign his forecast of Judgment Day arriving on Saturday has come true, the 89-year-old California evangelical broadcaster and former civil engineer behind the pronouncement seemed to have gone silent.

Family Radio, the Christian stations network headed by Harold Camping which had spread his message of an approaching doomsday, was on Saturday playing recorded church music and devotional messages unrelated to the apocalypse.

Camping previously made a failed prediction Jesus Christ would return to Earth in 1994.

In his latest pronouncement, he had said doomsday would begin in Asia, but with midnight local time come and gone in Tokyo and Beijing and those cities already in the early hours of May 22, there was no sign of the apocalypse.

The Oakland, California, headquarters of the network of 66 U.S. stations, which has international affiliates and had posted billboards around the country warning of a May 21 Judgment Day, were shuttered with a sign in the door that read "This Office is Closed. Sorry we missed you!"

The headquarters, which appears to be normally closed on Saturday, was also shuttered on Friday.

Camping, whose deep sonorous voice is frequently heard on his radio network expounding the Bible, could not be reached immediately for comment on Saturday.

On Friday, the shades were drawn and no one answered the door at his house in Alameda, California.

Atheists in different parts of the country were planning celebrations and get-togethers to mark the failure of Camping's May 21 prediction to come true.

In Oakland, the same city where Camping's network is based, over 200 people gathered at an atheist convention where speakers jokingly took note of the Judgment Day pronouncement.

In New York, at least one of Camping's followers continued to hold out hope that Judgment Day would come.

Retired Metropolitan Transportation Authority worker Robert Fitzpatrick, 60, said he spent more than $140,000 of his savings on subway posters and bus shelter advertisements warning of the May 21 Judgment Day.

"God's people are commanded to sound the warning, to sound the trumpet so to speak so people know," Fitzpatrick said of his advertising blitz.

Fitzpatrick said Camping led him to believe Judgment Day would be May 21, but added that he disagreed with the broadcaster's prediction it would begin in Asia.

In Fitzpatrick's view, from his reading of the Bible, Judgment Day would begin around 6 p.m. Eastern Time. He said on Saturday that he still had no doubts Judgment Day would come this day.

"I wouldn't even entertain that question because there's too much proof from the Bible," he said.

(Additional reporting by Erik Tavkar: Writing by Alex Dobuzinskis: Editing by Jerry Norton)

Source: Reuters US Online Report Domestic News

OH SHIT! IT'S THE END OF THE WORLD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!(part 2)

O.K., it's after the rapture... or is it?



Well, I said that I would welcome it if the end of the world was to happen. The reason is because whenever something ends, Something else (hopefully better) begins. To me, Death is not an end... well, it is an end, but also the start of something else, like a transition. So, if the entire world as we know it was to end yesterday, to me, that would mean the beginning of a brand new world. A better world. I live to see such a day.

So, How did I spend my "Last Day" yesterday? I had lunch in the city of Hawthorn with a beautful woman, then I gave her a hug, a kiss, and I gave her ass a nice squezze, then I went out to hollywood, sent god my prayers, and got 3 great hugs from a beautiful musician. And when I got back to carson, I bought some gummy bears from a beautiful cashier who to my surprise, had the nicest pair of legs I've seen in a LONG time. I got no hug from her, but I did give her a cookie. And just before I went home, I bought a smoothie from a very beautiful buisness woman. In short, I HAD A HELL OF A DAY!!!

There's only one thing about yesterday I'm not happy about.

It's not something that happened, but something that didn't happen. I ran across this video on You Tube today...



NOW WHY THE FUCK DIDN'T I THINK OF THAT?!


Oh well. now for the first day of the rest of our lives...

QUOTE OF THE DAY

Good Morning!!!

Create the perfect relationship between you and your body. Treat your body with all your love, honor, gratitude, and respect. When you make it your goal to adore your own body and accept yourself completely, you are learning to have a perfect relationship with anyone else you are with.

~Don Miguel Ruiz

OH SHIT! IT'S THE END OF THE WORLD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!(part 1A)

O.K., I know I said I will talk more about this now, but I'm tired and need to rest. Until tomorrow...

OH SHIT! IT'S THE END OF THE WORLD!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Armaggedon. Ragnarok. The Apocalypse. The End Times. There are many names for the time that the world is supposed to end. Many dates have been set for this event to happen in the past, and all those dates have come and passed. Now, a new date, Today, May 21 at 6:00 P.M. has been set for the beginning of this process, and of course, the people who set this date Have thier reasons, of course. But as of this moment in some parts of the World, 6 P.M. May 21 has come and gone and nothing has happened yet...

But if such a day ever does come, I wouldn't fear it I would welcome it. I'll tell you why at the end of the day, but here's some videos to tide you over till then.

QUOTE OF THE DAY

GOOD MORNING!!!

You have the power to create. Your power is so strong that whatever you believe comes true. You are the way you are because that is what you believe about yourself. Your whole reality, everything you believe is your creation.

~Don Miguel Ruiz

R.I.P. Macho Man Randy Savage

Another one of my childhood heroes joins that big wrestling ring in the sky...

‘Macho Man’ Randy Savage dies in a car crash
By Chris Chase

"Macho Man" Randy Savage, a professional wrestler who became a fan favorite thanks to his outlandish outfits and trademark catchphrase, died Friday in a car wreck, as first reported by TMZ.
The 58-year-old Savage -- whose legal name was Randy Mario Poffo -- reportedly suffered a heart attack while driving his 2009 Jeep Wrangler in Tampa, Fla., and careened across lanes of oncoming traffic before colliding head-on with a tree. He died later at a local hospital.
Savage's wife Lynn, who was riding in the passenger seat, escaped with only minor injuries. Both passengers were wearing seatbelts and the police do not believe alcohol was a factor.
[Related: Macho Man's lasting legacy]
The World Wrestling Federation favorite from Ohio burst onto the scene in 1985 and quickly drew attention with his flamboyant outfits and "ooh yeah!" catchphrase. His marriage to Elizabeth Hulette, Ms. Elizabeth to fans, was one of the first high-profile wrestler/valet relationships. They divorced in 1992. Savage remarried last year.
He won two WWF championships in his career. His match against Ricky Steamboat in 1987's Wrestlemania III is considered one of the best WWF bouts ever. Savage won the title late that year, setting the stage for memorable battles with Hulk Hogan, who would eventually dethrone him as champion.
[Related: Randy Savage's brief pro baseball career]
World Wrestling Entertainment released an official statement on Friday afternoon.
"WWE is saddened to learn of the passing of one of the greatest Superstars of his time, Randy Poffo, aka Randy "Macho Man" Savage.
One of Macho Man's biggest rivals was Hulk Hogan. Hogan said he and Savage had just started talking again after 10 years.
"He had so much life in his eyes & in his spirit, I just pray that he's happy and in a better place and we miss him," Hogan wrote.
Savage also appeared in memorable ads for Slim Jim and played a wrestler in the 2002 hit film "Spider-Man."

You can find the link to the original article from Yahoo! Sports HERE.

QUOTE OF THE DAY

GOOD mORNING EVERYONE!!!

Transform your life with self-love. From now on, let every action, every reaction, every thought, and every emotion be based on love. Increase your self-love until the entire dream of your life is transformed from fear and drama to love and joy.

~Don Miguel Ruz

Found this great video somebody posted on Facebook...

It's about the secret relationship between the Music and Prison Industries.

Complex-ED from Tara Sabre Collier on Vimeo.

Here's an Article that's a great companion to this video: Prison in Hip Hop: A Rite of Passage?

QUOTE OF THE DAY

Love and honor your physical body. To create a relationship that takes you all the way to heaven, you have to accept your body completely. You have to love your body and allow it to be free to give, free to receive, without being shy ... because "shy" is nothing but fear.

~Don Miguel Ruiz

You learn something new every day...

Yesterday, I read this very interesting article on the civil war... you can find the original article HERE.

Black or White?
By DANIEL J. SHARFSTEIN


In February 1861, just weeks after Louisiana seceded from the Union, Randall Lee Gibson enlisted as a private in a state army regiment. The son of a wealthy sugar planter and valedictorian of Yale’s Class of 1853, Gibson had long supported secession. Conflict was inevitable, he believed, not because of states’ rights or the propriety or necessity of slavery. Rather, a war would be fought over the inexorable gulf between whites and blacks, or what he called “the most enlightened race” and “the most degraded of all the races of men.” Because Northern abolitionists were forcing the South to recognize “the political, civil, and social equality of all the races of men,” Gibson wrote, the South was compelled to enjoy “independence out of the Union.” (Read Randall Lee Gibson’s article, “Our Federal Union.”)

The notion that war turned on a question of black and white as opposed to slavery and freedom was hardly an intuitive position for Gibson or for the South. Although Southern society was premised on slavery, the line between black and white had always been permeable. Since the 17th century, people descended from African slaves had been assimilating into white communities. It was a great migration that was covered up even as it was happening, its reach extending into the most unlikely corners of the South: although Randall Gibson was committed to a hardline ideology of racial difference, this secret narrative of the American experience was his family’s story.

Gibson’s siblings proudly traced their ancestry to a prosperous farmer in the South Carolina backcountry named Gideon Gibson. What they didn’t know was that when he first arrived in the colony in the 1730s, he was a free man of color. At the time the legislature thought he had come there to plot a slave revolt. The governor demanded a personal audience with him and learned that he was a skilled tradesman, had a white wife and had owned land and slaves in Virginia and North Carolina. Declaring the Gibsons to be “not Negroes nor Slaves but Free people,” the governor granted them hundreds of acres of land. The Gibsons soon married into their Welsh and Scots-Irish community along the frontier separating South Carolina’s coastal plantations from Indian country. It did not matter if the Gibsons were black or white — they were planters.



The Gibsons were hardly alone in their journey from black to white. Hundreds of families of color had gained their freedom in the colonial era because they had English mothers, and within a generation or two, they could claim to be white. Their claims were supported by law, which never drew the color line at “one drop” of African ancestry in the antebellum era. Most Southern states followed a one-quarter or one-eighth rule: anyone with a black grandparent or great-grandparent was legally black, and those with more remote ancestry were legally white. Antebellum South Carolina, though, never had a legal definition of race. “It may be well and proper,” a state judge and leading defender of slavery wrote in 1835, “that a man of worth, honesty, industry and respectability, should have the rank of a white man, while a vagabond of the same degree of blood should be confined to the inferior caste.” Preserving the institution of slavery mattered far more than preserving the purity of white “blood.” As long as people who claimed to be white were productive members of society — in effect, supporting the prevailing order — it made little sense to mandate a stricter measure of race.

When the Gibsons moved west in the 1790s, they had money and land and slaves, but professed to know very little about their history, explaining a tendency towards dark complexion with vague accounts of Gypsy or Portuguese roots. They soon epitomized the manners and attitudes of the planter aristocracy. Randall Gibson grew up shuttling between a family mansion in Lexington, Ky., where his mother was from, and Live Oak, a sugar plantation in Terrebonne Parish, La., where his father had sought his fortune. He knew the family’s slaves well and often asked after them in his letters home from Yale, referring to them always as “servants.” Gibson’s father, a Whig and longtime supporter of “the Great Compromiser” Henry Clay, gave significant responsibility to his slaves, hiring no outside overseers. Indeed, Tobias Gibson repeatedly expressed dismay at the institution. “I am in conscience opposed to slavery,” he wrote. “I don’t like it and the older I get the worse it seems.” Such sentiment provided an easy way for him to feel virtuous about his way of life — disliking slavery made him an enlightened master.

Enlisting in the Louisiana army represented a humbling new start for Randall Gibson. At Yale he had been lionized by his classmates, the flower of a select group of Southerners walking in the footsteps of John C. Calhoun and Judah P. Benjamin. Gibson had thought of himself and his peers as the nation’s great hope, an educated brotherhood that could guide the country through sectional crisis. The years that followed his graduation, however, were full of disappointment. He studied law, only to decide that he did not wish to practice. After traveling around Europe, he bought a sugar cane plantation near his father’s land southwest of New Orleans, but could not make a profit and found the neighbors distasteful.

Almost as soon as Gibson returned to Louisiana from Yale, he embraced an uncompromising Southern position on slavery, declaring his opinions to be “as decided as if I were a member of Congress.” This was a predictable stance: without a fortune or connections to the primarily Northern-born merchant elite in New Orleans, Gibson could not afford to take an unpopular political stance. At the same time, he became convinced that “Southern society is based, its life and soul are staked, upon the inequality of the races, not only its aims, its expansion and progress, but its very existence.”

Gibson’s position that war was necessary to preserve white supremacy reveals how racism flourished at the prospect of abolition. When slavery served as a broad proxy of black and white, there was little need to dwell on the purity of “white blood” and the finer points of racial difference. Only freedom required a hard line on race, to preserve the existing order. As the abolitionist chorus swelled in the generation leading up to secession, Southerners responded, in one Virginian’s words, by “rising up to promulgate the philosophical, sociological, and ethnical excellence of slavery.” In 1857, the Louisiana Senate considered a bill for the “prevention of marriages where one of the parties has a taint of African blood.”

Had the bill passed, the racial status of countless whites would have been put in jeopardy. That it was proposed at all reveals a society that could not imagine such consequences. The South’s traditional flexibility on questions of race — the ease with which families like the Gibsons were able to assimilate into white communities and the security that most people living as white had in their racial status — actually enabled white Southerners to embrace the idea of absolute, blood-borne racial difference.

If Gibson’s ideology demanded secession, more practical considerations motivated him to enlist in the army. Well before the presidential election of 1860, Gibson expressed doubts that the Union would survive and urged the South to “prepare for every emergency,” but his views did not bring the success that he craved. He ran for a seat at the state convention that would determine whether Louisiana would stay in the Union, but placed third out of four candidates. He had failed in business and politics. War seemed the only path left to a world that was bigger than cane fields and river levees. Ironically, when army life forced Gibson to confront the gap between his theories about race and how Southerners experienced it every day, the opportunity to serve trumped his ideology.

Soon after enlisting, Gibson was promoted to captain of an artillery company and then elected a colonel in the 13th Louisiana Volunteer Infantry Regiment, 10 companies totaling 830 men, mostly from New Orleans. They were, according to an aide, “as cosmopolitan a body of soldiers as there existed upon the face of God’s earth. There were Frenchmen, Spaniards, Mexicans, Dagoes, Germans, Chinese, Irishmen, and, in fact, persons of every clime known to geographers or travellers of that day.” They wore “jaunty zouave uniform[s],” drilled in English and French, sang songs in their native languages, speculated on their regiment’s unlucky number and lived a continuous “saturnalia” of gambling and drink.



Rather than dwell upon his recruits’ racial origins, Gibson focused on turning them into soldiers. As he worked with his officers in camp, he refused to subscribe to the gentlemanly romance of war. While many in his regiment predicted a glorious Confederate victory before they had finished their training, Gibson devoted himself to the study of military tactics. Without any experience in war, he knew that the army’s true weakness was a lack of “military men by education,” “scientific officers” and “West Pointers.”

By late autumn, the regiment was leaving Louisiana for the war’s western front, marching as a band played “The Girl I Left Behind Me.” They reached Kentucky on the last day in November. Shrouded in snow and sleet, they camped on frozen ground and waited for the fight.

Follow Disunion at twitter.com/NYTcivilwar or join us on Facebook.


Daniel J. Sharfstein is an associate professor of law at Vanderbilt and the author of “The Invisible Line: Three American Families and the Secret Journey from Black to White.”

QUOTE OF THE DAY

Serve the one you love, Once you decide to be a couple, you are there to serve the one you love, to serve your love to your lover. In every kiss, in every touch, you feel you are there to please the one you love, without expecting anything back.

~Don Miguel Ruiz

This Just In...

This Article was taken from Yahoo news. You can find the original article here.



Bin Laden family condemns killing, while wife says one son escaped

By Zachary Roth





Osama bin Laden's family is taking center stage in the fallout over his death.

Yesterday, the al Qaeda leader's sons denounced what they called their father's "arbitrary killing." Meanwhile, Pakistani officials believe one of bin Laden's sons--perhaps one known as "the Crown Prince of Terror"--may be missing after escaping from the U.S. raid.



In a statement, Bin Laden's sons questioned why their father "was not arrested and tried in a court of law so that the truth is revealed to the people of the world." It is not known how many of bin Laden's numerous sons (there are believed to be as many as 17) endorsed the statement.

"We maintain that arbitrary killing is not a solution to political problems," the statement continued, adding that "justice must be seen to be done."

President Obama has rejected suggestions that the killing was improper, telling "60 Minutes" that anyone who questioned whether bin Laden deserved his fate "needs to have their head examined."



The sons' statement, which also called for bin Laden's three wives and several children to be released from custody, is said to have been prepared at the direction of Omar bin Laden, 30.

Omar bin Laden, a metals trader who has been living in Cairo, appears at pains to disassociate himself from his father's belief in political violence. "We want to remind the world that Omar bin Laden, the fourth-born son of our father, always disagreed with our father regarding any violence and always sent messages to our father, that he must change his ways and that no civilians should be attacked under any circumstances," the statement said.

It continued: "Despite the difficulty of publicly disagreeing with our father, he never hesitated to condemn any violent attacks made by anyone, and expressed sorrow for the victims of any and all attacks."



In a separate statement posted on a jihadist website yesterday, the sons accused President Obama of ordering "a criminal mission" that "obliterated an entire defenseless family ... contrary to the most basic human sentiment."



And they objected to the decision to bury their father at sea, which some Islamic scholars also have questioned. "It is unacceptable--humanely and religiously--to dispose of a person with such importance and status among his people, by throwing his body into the sea in that way, which demeans and humiliates his family and his supporters and which challenges religious provisions and feelings of hundreds of millions of Muslims," the statement read.



Separately, ABC News reports that one of bin Laden's wives, who was captured in the U.S. raid, has told Pakistani investigators that one of the terror leader's sons escaped and is missing. Pakistani officials are said to have done a head count, and to believe it's true, though U.S. officials say they're confident no one escaped during or after the raid.

"Out of 21, one person is not accounted for," a Pakistani intelligence official told ABC. "I believe that's the son."



Pakistani investigators are probing whether the son could be 22-year-old Hamza bin Laden, known as "The Crown Prince of Terror." Hamza was credited with writing a poem praising the 2005 London bombings, and was accused by Pakistani prime minister Benazir Bhutto of attempting to assassinate her. Bhutto was killed by Islamic extremists in 2007.

Bin Laden's wives are currently being questioned by Pakistani investigators in a safe house. It's not clear if U.S. officials will be given the chance to question them directly.

YOU GOTTA BE SHITTING ME!!!

In this installment of "YOU GOTTA BE SHITTING ME!!!", I posted up this story someone put up on facebook. Here's the link to the original story:

IN Sheriff: If We Need to Conduct RANDOM HOUSE to HOUSE Searches We Will

IN Sheriff: If We Need to Conduct RANDOM HOUSE to HOUSE Searches We Will


CROWN POINT, Ind. – According to Newton County Sheriff, Don Hartman Sr., random house to house searches are now possible and could be helpful following the Barnes v. STATE of INDIANA Supreme Court ruling issued on May 12th, 2011. When asked three separate times due to the astounding callousness as it relates to trampling the inherent natural rights of Americans, he emphatically indicated that he would use random house to house checks, adding he felt people will welcome random searches if it means capturing a criminal.

Speaking under the condition of anonymity, a local city Police Chief with 30 years experience in law enforcement directly contradicted the Newton County Sheriff’s blatant disregard for privacy & liberty, stating that as an American first, such an action is unconscionable and that his allegiance is to the Indiana and federal Constitutions respectively. However, he also concurred that the ruling does now allow for police to randomly search homes should a department be under order by state or federal officials or under a department’s own accord.

At this time we are still awaiting comments from several state offices.

However, the spokesperson for the INDIANA ATTORNEY GENERAL took umbrage at what he referred to as “large” assumptions regarding police power and at this time has no comment. He did however indicate that should the INDIANA Attorney General, Greg Zoeller feel it necessary to make a statement, that this reporter would be included in the distribution of the release.

Source(s): Indiana Supreme Court Ruling, BARNES vs. STATE of INDIANA No. 82S05-1007-CR-343 • Telephone interview for comment with Newton County Sheriff Don Hartman Sr., May 16th, 2011


THIS JUST IN!!! There's an update to this story. check it out: Indiana Supreme Court Threatened After Ruling Allows Warrantless House to House Searches

QUOTE OF THE DAY

Respect each other's dream. In a relationship, there are two dreamers with two different dreams. You need to accept the differences that exist between two dreamers; you need to respect each other's dream.

~Don Miguel Ruiz

Danni El - Colores

I was walking down Hollywood Blvd. one afternoon, and I saw this street performer singing some of the most beautiful songs I've ever heard.

Her name is Danni El and here she is performing her song Colores (which just so happens to be my favorite)...



And here she is performing the same song on Hollywood blvd...



Check her out on her You Tube Channel HERE

She also has a music page on Facebook and onTwitter

If any one of you happens to walk down Hollywood blvd. while she's performing, be sure to check her out. You will not be dissapointed!

QUOTE OF THE DAY

To change the story of your life is what the Toltec call the mastery of transformation. It's about transforming you, the storyteller, the dreamer. Life is changing so fast, and you can see that you are always transforming, but you master transformation when you no longer resist change. Instead, you take advantage of change, and you enjoy change.

~Don Miguel Ruiz

Shastar Vidya

I've been checking this art out fron the punjab in Northern India for a while now, and I'm VERY impressed... I wish there was a school teaching this art out here in the L.A. area...



Here's another video...



Check out thier website here at SHASTARVIDYA.ORG

QUOTE OF THE DAY

Love others without conditions. When you love with conditions, you the human, and you the God, align with the spirit of Life moving through you. Your life becomes the expression of the beauty of the Spirit, and your dream becomes a masterpiece of art.

~Don Miguel Ruiz

A Letter from MICHAEL MOORE

Some Final Thoughts on the Death of Osama bin Laden …a letter from Michael Moore

"The Nazis killed tens of MILLIONS. They got a trial. Why? Because we're not like them. We're Americans. We roll different." – Michael Moore in an interview last week


Thursday, May 12th, 2011

Friends,

Last week, President Obama fulfilled a campaign promise and killed Osama bin Laden. Well he didn't actually do the killing himself. It was carried out by a very brave and excellent team of Navy SEALs. Not only does Mr. Obama have the overwhelming support of the country, I think there are millions who gladly wish it could have been their finger on the gun that took out bin Laden.

When I heard the news a week ago Sunday, I immediately felt great. I felt relief. I thought of those who lost a loved one on 9/11. And I was glad we finally had a President who got something done. This is what I had to say on Twitter and elsewhere on the internet in that first hour or two:

I want to point out that Barack Obama took two years to do what Bush couldn't do in over seven. That's the difference between STUPID in charge and SMART in charge. STUPID pursues two reckless wars, lets OBL escape from Tora Bora, keeps looking for him in caves and invades the wrong country. He bankrupts us to the tune of $1.2 trillion for the Iraq War (it will eventually actually be over $3 trillion), and worse, he cost us the lives of almost 5,000 of our troops, not to mention hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan – and, after all that, he STILL couldn't bring the perp to justice. In fact, in 2005, Bush closed down the CIA station that was devoted to looking for bin Laden! What does SMART do? He sends in a small elite strike force, no troops are killed, and the perpetrator is stopped for good.

I was thrilled that the Osama bin Laden era was over. There was now an end to the madness.

Being near Ground Zero that night, I decided to head over there and join with others who saw this event as a chance to have some closure. On 9/11, Bill Weems, a good and decent man I knew and worked with (we had just recently completed a shoot together in Boston), was on the plane that was flown into the Twin Towers. I dedicated 'Fahrenheit 9/11,' in part, to him.

But before leaving to go to the former World Trade Center site, I turned on the TV, and what I saw down at Ground Zero was not quiet relief and gratification that the culprit had been caught. Rather, I witnessed a frat boy-style party going on, complete with the shaking and spraying of champagne bottles over the crowd. I can completely understand people wanting to celebrate – like I said, I, too, was happy – but something didn't feel right. It's one thing to be happy that a criminal has been captured and dealt with. It's another thing to throw a kegger celebrating his death at the site where the remains of his victims are still occasionally found. Is that who we are? Is that what Jesus would do? Is that what Jefferson would do? I was reminded of the tale told to me as a kid, of God's angels singing with glee as the Red Sea came crashing back down on the Egyptians chasing the Israelites, drowning all of them. God rebuked them, saying, "The work of My hands is drowning in that sea – and you want to friggin' sing?" (or something like that).

I remember my parents telling me how, on the day it was announced that Hitler was dead, there was no rejoicing in the streets, just private relief and satisfaction. The real celebration came six days later at the announcement that the war in Europe was over. THAT'S what the people wanted to hear – not just the demise of one evil madman, but the end to all the killing.

When the atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, people didn't pour into the streets to whoop it up. Yes, people were happy that it might help end the war, but there was not a public display of "Yippee! A hundred thousand Japs have been fried!" If they had done that, well, who could have blamed them after so many tens of thousands of their sons and fathers had been lost in the war (including my uncle, a paratrooper, killed by a sniper near Manila). But the sailor kissing the girl in Times Square was on August 14th, 1945, when the Japanese surrendered and the war was officially over. That's when America went crazy with joy – not over a killing, but over an announcement of peace.

We are a different people now, aren't we? Well, sorta. There was no bloodlust euphoria on the day Timothy McVeigh was executed. We were silent. The families of the Oklahoma City dead were silent, relieved. What is the difference between McVeigh and bin Laden, other than the number they slaughtered? I wonder. I think we know the answer.

Though bin Laden is dead, we are told that Orwell's Permanent War – the "War on Terror" – must continue! Not allowed to have our V-J day and run into Times Square with exhilaration! No, there could be terrorists there. So all we're left with is to cheer the death of one evil man, and that is supposed to make us feel powerful and good. There can be no celebration for the end of the Afghanistan War because the war isn't ending. The war must continue! Even though our own CIA tells us there are no more than a few dozen al Qaeda left in Afghanistan. We still have 100,000 troops there fighting a few dozen crazies? We say we're fighting the Taliban, too, but the Taliban are Afghan citizens, not an invading force, and, for better or worse, they seem to enjoy the support of many of the common people throughout Afghanistan. (If you don't believe that, ask any soldier who has served there and seen it. Every day is like 'Apocalypse Now.' Poppies, anyone?)

Meanwhile, we – me, included – get lost in the weeds of how this one madman was killed. The official story from the Pentagon changed four times in the first four days! It went from OBL firing on the troops with one hand and using his wife as a human shield with the other, to, by the fourth day, not single person in the main house, including bin Laden, being armed when killed. Instantly, this created a lot of suspicion about what really happened, which itself was a distraction.

Here's my take: I know a number of Navy SEALs. In fact (and this is something I don't like to talk about publicly, for all the obvious reasons), I hire only ex-SEALs and ex-Special Forces guys to handle my own security (I'll let you pause a moment to appreciate that irony). These SEALs are trained to follow orders. I don't know what their orders were that night in Abbottabad, but it certainly looks like a job (and this is backed up in a piece in the Atlantic) where they were told to not bring bin Laden back alive. The SEALs are pros at what they do and they instantly took out every adult male (every potential threat) within a few minutes – but they also took care to not harm a single one of the nine children who were present. Pretty amazing. This wasn't some Rambo-style operation where they just went in guns blazing, spraying bullets. They acted swiftly and with expert precision. I'm telling you, these guys are so smart and so lethal, they could take you out with a piece of dental floss. (And in fact, one of my ex-SEAL guys showed me how to do that one night. Whoa.)

In a perfect world (yes, I would like to reside there someday, or at least next door to it, in Slightly Imperfect World), I would like the evildoers to be forced to stand trial in front of that world. I know a lot of people see no need for a trial for these bad guys (just hang 'em from the nearest tree!), and think trials are for sissies. "They're guilty, off with their heads!" Well, you see, that is the exact description of the Taliban/al Qaeda/Nazi justice system. I don't like their system. I like ours. And I don't want to be like them. In fact, the reason I like a good trial is that I like to show these bastards this is how it's done in a free country that believes in civilized justice. It's good for the rest of the world to see that, too. Sets a good example.

The other thing a trial does is, it establishes a very public and permanent historic record of the crimes against humanity. This is why we put the Nazis on trial in Nuremberg. We didn't do it for them. We did it for ourselves and for our grandchildren so that they would never forget these horrors and how they were committed. And we did it for the German people so they could see the evidence of what their elected leaders had done. Very helpful. Very necessary. Very powerful.

And for those who wanted blood back then – well, the majority of the Nazis all hanged in the end. So, it doesn't mean the bad guys get away – they still swing from the highest tree.

My own spiritual beliefs do not allow for capital punishment, and I was raised in the state (Michigan) that in the 1840s was the first government in the English-speaking world to outlaw it. So, I'm just not inclined that way. I don't believe in "an eye for an eye." I know the old book said that, but I like its sequel better (a rare case in which the sequel – like Godfather II, Star Trek II, Terminator II – is better than the original). If you don't believe the way I believe (it's also the official position of the Catholic Church, for whatever that's worth these days), then that's your right, and I understand.

Perhaps there was no way to bring him back alive – I sure as hell wouldn't want to be in that dark house trying to make that snap decision. But if the execution was ordered in advance, then I say we should be told that now, and we can like it or not like it.

For nine years I wrote and I said that Osama bin Laden was not hiding in a cave. I'm not a cave expert, I was just using my common sense. He was a multimillionaire crime boss (using religion as his cover), and those guys just don't live in caves. He had people killed under the guise of religion, and not many in the media bothered to explain that every time Osama referenced Islam, he wasn't really quoting Islam. Just because Osama said he was a "Muslim" didn't make it so. Yet he was called a Muslim by everyone. If a crazy person started running around mass-killing people, and he did so while wearing a Wal-Mart blazer and praising Wal-Mart, we wouldn't automatically call him a Wal-Mart leader or say that Wal-Mart was the philosophy behind his killings, would we?

Yet, we began to fear Muslims and round them up. We profiled people from Muslim nations at airports. We didn't profile multi-millionaires (in fact, they now have their own fast-track line to easily get through security, an oddity considering every murderer on 9/11 flew in first class). We didn't run headlines that said "Multi-Millionaire Behind the Mass Murder of 3,000" (although every word in that headline is true). You can say his wealth had nothing to do with 9/11, but the truth is, there is no way he could have kept Al Qaeda in business without having the millions he had.

Some believe that this was a "war" we were in with al Qaeda – and you don't do trials during war. It's thinking like this that makes me fear that, while bin Laden may be dead, he may have "won" the bigger battle. Let's be clear: There is no "war with al Qaeda." Wars are between nations. Al Qaeda was an organization of fanatics who committed crimes. That we elevated them to nation status – they loved it! It was great for their recruiting drive.

We did exactly what bin Laden said he wanted us to do: Give up our freedoms (like the freedom to be assumed innocent until proven guilty), engage our military in Muslim countries so that we will be hated by Muslims, and wipe ourselves out financially in doing so. Done, done and done, Osama. You had our number. You somehow knew we would eagerly give up our constitutional rights and become more like the authoritarian state you dreamed of. You knew we would exhaust our military and willingly go into more debt in eight years than we had accumulated in the previous 200 years combined.

Maybe you knew us so well because you were once one of our mercenaries, funded and armed by us via our friends in Pakistan to fight the other Evil Empire in the last battle of the Cold War. Only, when the killing stopped, the trained killer, our "Frankenstein," couldn't. The monster, you, would soon turn on us.

If we really want to send bin Laden not just to his death, but also to his defeat, may I suggest that we reverse all of that right now. End the wars, bring the troops home, make the rich pay for this mess, and restore our privacy and due process rights that used to distinguish us from any other country. Right now, our democracy looks like Singapore and our economy has gone desperately Greek.

I know it will be hard to turn the clock back to before 9/11 when all we had to worry about were candidates stealing elections. A multi-billion dollar industry has grown up around "homeland security" and the terror wars. These war profiteers will not want to give up their booty so easily. They will want to keep us in fear so they can keep raking it in. We will have to stop them. But first we must stop believing them.

Hideki Tojo killed my uncle and millions of Chinese, Koreans, Filipinos and a hundred thousand other Americans. He was the head of Japan, the Emperor's henchman, the man who was the architect of Pearl Harbor. When the American soldiers went to arrest him, he tried to commit suicide by shooting himself in the chest. The soldiers immediately worked on stopping his bleeding and rushed him to an army hospital where he was saved by our army doctors. He then had his day in court. It was a powerful exercise for the world to see. And on December 23, 1948, after he was found guilty, we hanged him. A killer of millions was forced to stand trial. A killer of 4,000 (counting the African embassies and USS Cole bombings) got double-tapped in his pajamas. Assuming it was possible to take him alive, I think his victims, the future, and the restoration of the American Way deserved better. That's all I'm saying.

Good riddance Osama.

Come back to your ways, my good ol' USA.

Yours,
Michael Moore
MMFlint@aol.com
MichaelMoore.com

Someone posted this article on Facebook and I reposted it there, so I thought I would post this here too.

Kenya's Kickboxing Grannies: Elderly Women Learning To Protect Themselves From Rape In Nairobi



Nairobi's elderly community faces an increasing threat of sexual assault, with almost 20 percent of reported rapes in Kenya's capital city involving women over the age of 60 last year.

But now, some strong-willed grannies are taking tough measures to protect themselves by attending self-defense groups that cater to the elderly, GlobalPost is reporting.

"At first when we were starting with the grannies, I would say they were fearing...they were kind of, 'Karate for us? No, that's for young people,'" says Sheila Kariuki, who began organizing the classes in 2007. "But when we sat down with them and showed them that these were simple techniques, they took up the training...and now it's three years down the line, and they will faithfully come to the class and they are willing to learn."

Kariuki's efforts seem to be paying off -- as one 70-year-old grandmother describes, she was recently able to defend herself against attackers after attending the classes. "One day these young men came to house...one grabbed my dress, but I was too quick for him," she says proudly. "With my hand I grabbed his privates...when he screamed, the neighbors heard and the men ran away."

Watch GlobalPost's report on Kenya's kickboxing grannies here:

QUOTE OF THE DAY

Be generous with your love. you are never going to be alone if you are generous with your love. What makes you happy is love coming out of you, and if you are generous with your love, everyone is going to love you.

~Don Miguel Ruiz

QUOTE OF THE DAY

Love is the medicine that accelerates healing. Love yourself, love your neighbor, love your enemies, but begin with self-love. You cannot love others until you love yourself. You cannot share what you do not have. If you do not love yourself, you cannot love anyone else either.

~Don Miguel Ruiz

YOU GOTTA BE SHITTING ME!!!

Sometimes, you come across a news story that is so unbelievable, that you just have to say well, "YOU GOTTA BE SHITTING ME!!!" well, this story fromThe Raw Story is one of those times, and the 3rd time in this blog.

Nation
Fox News guest says women ‘are asking for sex if they’re dressing immodestly

Fox News’ Sean Hannity invited Christian pop singer Rebecca St. James to discuss recent “slutwalk” protests.

The first demonstration was called earlier this month after a Toronto police officer claimed “women should avoid dressing like sluts in order not to be victimized.” Since then, protests have spread through cities across the U.S.

“I think there has to be responsibility though for what a woman is wearing,” St. James told Hannity Monday. “When a woman is dressing in an immodest way, in a proactive way, she’s got to think about what is she saying by her dress?”

“They’re asking for sex,” she continued. “They’re asking for sex if they’re dressed immodestly.”

Watch this video from Fox News’ Hannity, broadcast May 9, 2011 and clipped by Media Matters.

President Obama on the Death of Osama Bin Laden

This is the official speech that President Obama gave announcing the death of Osama Bin Laden.



There are also pictures and videos of people celebrating Bin Laden's death, but I won't post those here. I just don't feel that we should be celebrating the violent death of another human being that way, even if that person was a mass murderer that quite frankly, had it coming.

However, I will post this spoof video. I like this video because it has a real catchy song and it conveys much the same message that obama conveyed to the world in the official video:

WE AMERICANS REFUSE TO LIVE IN FEAR!!!!!!!

QUOTE OF THE DAY

To master transformation is to live in the present moment, all the time. Life is an eternal now because the force of life is creating everything right now, and it is transforming everything right now.

~Don Miguel Ruiz

Obama on bin Laden: The full "60 Minutes" interview

I copied this interview with President Obama from the CBS News website.

A riveting 30 minutes with President Barack Obama as he describes the weekend that made history



On Wednesday, May 4, 2011 -- three days after he announced that American troops had killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan -- President Barack Obama talked with "60 Minutes" correspondent Steve Kroft in the Roosevelt Room of the White House. Below is a transcript of that interview. The video of this interview is also available on this Web site.

STEVE KROFT: Mr. President, was this the most satisfying week of your Presidency?

PRESIDENT BARACK OBAMA: Well, it was certainly one of the most satisfying weeks not only for my Presidency, but I think for the United States since I've been President. Obviously bin Laden had been not only a symbol of terrorism, but a mass murderer who's eluded justice for so long, and so many families who had been affected I think had given up hope.

And for us to be able to definitively say, "We got the man who caused thousands of deaths here in the United States and who had been the rallying point for a violent extremist jihad around the world" was something that I think all of us were profoundly grateful to be a part of.

Watch part one, part two and part three of Steve Kroft's report.

KROFT: Was the decision to launch this attack the most difficult decision that you've made as Commander-In-Chief?

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Certainly one. You know, every time I send young men and women into a war theatre, that's a tough decision. And, you know, whenever you go to Walter Reed [Army Medical Center] or Bethesda [Naval Hospital] and you see the price that our young people pay to keep this country safe, that's a tough decision. Whenever you write a letter to a family who's lost a loved one. It's sobering.

This was a very difficult decision, in part because the evidence that we had was not absolutely conclusive. This was circumstantial evidence that he was gonna be there. Obviously it entailed enormous risk to the guys that I sent in there. But ultimately I had so much confidence in the capacity of our guys to carry out the mission that I felt that the risks were outweighed by the potential benefit of us finally getting our man.

KROFT: When the CIA first brought this information to you . . .

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Right.

KROFT: What was your reaction? Was there a sense of excitement? Did this look promising from the very beginning?

PRESIDENT OBAMA: It did look promising from the beginning. Keep in mind that obviously when I was still campaigning for President, I had said that if I ever get a shot at bin Laden we're gonna take it. And I was subject to some criticism at the time, because I had said if it's in Pakistan and, you know, we don't have the ability to capture 'em in any other way, then we're gonna go ahead and take the shot. So I felt very strongly that there was a strategic imperative for us to go after him.

Shortly after I got into office, I brought [CIA director] Leon Panetta privately into the Oval Office and I said to him, "We need to redouble our efforts in hunting bin Laden down. And I want us to start putting more resources, more focus, and more urgency into that mission."

Leon took that to the CIA. They had been working steadily on this since 2001, obviously. And there were a range of threads that were out there that hadn't quite been pulled all together. They did an incredible job during the course of a year and a half to pull on a number of these threads until we were able to identify a courier who was known to be a bin Laden associate, to be able to track them to this compound.

So by the time they came to me they had worked up an image of the compound, where it was and the factors that led them to conclude that this was the best evidence that we had regarding bin Laden's whereabouts since Tora Bora.

But we didn't have a photograph of bin Laden in that building. There was no direct evidence of his presence. And so the CIA continued to build the case meticulously over the course of several months. What I told them when they first came to me with this evidence was: "Even as you guys are building a stronger intelligence case, let's also start building an action plan to figure out if in fact we make a decision that this is him or we've got a good chance that we've got him, how are we gonna deal with him? How can we get at that?"

And so at that point you probably had unprecedented cooperation between the CIA and our military in starting to shape an action plan that ultimately resulted in success this week.

KROFT: When was that when you set that plan in motion?

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Well, they first came to me in August of last year with evidence of the compound. And they said that they had more work to do on it, but at that point they had enough that they felt that it was appropriate for us to start doing some planning. And so from that point on we started looking at the time what our options might be.

The vigorous planning did not begin until early this year. And obviously over the last two months it's been very intensive in which not only did an action plan get developed, but our guys actually started practicing being able to execute.

KROFT: How actively were you involved in that process?

PRESIDENT OBAMA: About as active as any project that I've been involved with since I've been President.

Obviously we have extraordinary guys. Our Special Forces are the best of the best. And so I was not involved in designing the initial plan. But each iteration of that plan they'd bring back to me. Make a full presentation. We would ask questions.

We had multiple meetings in the Situation Room in which we would map out -- and we would actually have a model of the compound and discuss how this operation might proceed, and what various options there were because there was more than one way in which we might go about this.

And in some ways sending in choppers and actually puttin' our guys on the ground entailed some greater risks than some other options. I thought it was important, though, for us to be able to say that we'd definitely got the guy. We thought that it was important for us to be able to exploit potential information that was on the ground in the compound if it did turn out to be him.

We thought that it was important for us not only to protect the lives of our guys, but also to try to minimize collateral damage in the region because this was in a residential neighborhood. I mean one of the ironies of this is, you know, I think the image that bin Laden had tried to promote was that he was an ascetic, living in a cave. This guy was living in a million dollar compound in a residential neighborhood.

KROFT: Were you surprised when they came to you with this compound right in the middle of sort of the military center of Pakistan?

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Well, I think that there had been discussions that this guy might be hiding in plain sight. And we knew that some al Qaeda operatives, high level targets basically, just blended into the crowd like this.

I think we were surprised when we learned that this compound had been there for five or six years, and that it was in an area in which you would think that potentially he would attract some attention. So yes, the answer is that we were surprised that he could maintain a compound like that for that long without there being a tip off.

KROFT: Do you believe it was built for him?

PRESIDENT OBAMA: We are still investigating that, but what is clear is that the elements of the compound were structured so that nobody could see in. There were no sight lines that would enable somebody walking by or somebody in an adjoining building to see him. So it was clearly designed to make sure that bin Laden was protected from public view.

KROFT: Do you have any idea how long he was there?

PRESIDENT OBAMA: We know he was there at least five years.

KROFT: Five years?

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Yeah.

KROFT: Did he move out of that compound?

PRESIDENT OBAMA: That we don't know yet. But we know that for five to six years this compound was there, and our belief is that he was there during that time.

KROFT: What was the most difficult part? I mean you had to decide. This was your decision -- whether to proceed or not and how to proceed. What was the most difficult part of that decision?

PRESIDENT OBAMA: The most difficult part is always the fact that you're sending guys into harm's way. And there are a lot of things that could go wrong. I mean there're a lot of moving parts here. So my biggest concern was, if I'm sending those guys in and Murphy's Law applies and somethin' happens, can we still get our guys out? So that's point number one.

Point number two, these guys are goin' in in, you know, the darkest of night. And they don't know what they're gonna find there. They don't know if the building is rigged. They don't know if, you know, there are explosives that are triggered by a particular door opening. So huge risks that these guys are taking.

And so my number one concern was: if I send them in, can I get them out? And a lot of the discussion we had during the course of planning was how do we make sure there's backup? How do we make sure that there's redundancy built into the plan so that we have the best chance of getting our guys out? That's point number one.

Point number two was: as outstanding a job as our intelligence teams did -- and I cannot praise them enough they did an extraordinary job with just the slenderest of bits of information to piece this all together -- at the end of the day, this was still a 55/45 situation. I mean, we could not say definitively that bin Laden was there. Had he not been there, then there would have been significant consequences.

Obviously, we're going into the sovereign territory of another country and landing helicopters and conducting a military operation. And so if it turns out that it's a wealthy, you know, prince from Dubai who's in this compound, and, you know, we've spent Special Forces in -- we've got problems. So there were risks involved geopolitically in making the decision.

But my number one concern was: can our guys get in and get out safely. The fact that our Special Forces have become so good -- these guys perform at levels that 20, 30 years ago would not have happened -- I think finally gave me the confidence to say, "Let's go ahead." I think that the American people have some sense of how good these guys are, but until you actually see 'em and meet them, it's hard to describe how courageous, how tough, how skilled, how precise they are. And it was because of their skills that I ended up having confidence to make the decision.

KROFT: I mean it's been reported that there was some resistance from advisors and planners who disagreed with the commando raid approach. Was it difficult for you to overcome that? And what level of confidence did you have?

PRESIDENT OBAMA: You know one of the things that we've done here is to build a team that is collegial and where everybody speaks their mind. And there's not a lot of snipin' or back-biting after the fact. And what I've tried to do is make sure that every time I sit down in the situation room, every one of my advisors around there knows I expect them to give me their best assessments.

And so the fact that there were some who voiced doubts about this approach was invaluable, because it meant the plan was sharper, it meant that we had thought through all of our options, it meant that when I finally did make the decision, I was making it based on the very best information.

But as I said, you know, there were sufficient risks involved where it wasn't as if any of the folks who were voicing doubts were voicing somethin' that I wasn't already runnin' through in my own head. You know, we understood that there were some significant risks involved in this.

KROFT: How much did some of the past failures, like the Iran hostage rescue attempt, how did that weigh on you? I mean . . .

PRESIDENT OBAMA: I thought about that.

KROFT: . . . was that a factor?

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Absolutely. Absolutely. No, I mean you think about Black Hawk Down. You think about what happened with the Iranian rescue. And it, you know, I am very sympathetic to the situation for other Presidents where you make a decision, you're making your best call, your best shot, and something goes wrong -- because these are tough, complicated operations. And yeah, absolutely. The day before I was thinkin' about this quite a bit.

KROFT: It sounds like you made a decision that you could accept failure. You didn't want failure but after looking at . . .

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Yeah

KROFT: . . . the 55/45 thing that you mentioned, you must have at some point concluded that the advantages outweighed the risks . . . .

PRESIDENT OBAMA: I concluded that it was worth it. And the reason that I concluded it was worth it was that we have devoted enormous blood and treasure in fighting back against al Qaeda. Ever since 2001. And even before with the embassy bombing in Kenya.

And so part of what was in my mind was all those young men that I visited who are still fighting in Afghanistan. And the families of victims of terrorism that I talk to. And I said to myself that if we have a good chance of not completely defeating but badly disabling al Qaeda, then it was worth both the political risks as well as the risks to our men.

KROFT: How much of it was gut instinct? Did you have personal feelings about whether . . . .

PRESIDENT OBAMA: You know, the thing

KROFT: . . . he was there?

PRESIDENT OBAMA: The thing about gut instinct is if it works, then you think, "Boy, I had good instincts." If it doesn't, then you're gonna be running back in your mind all the things that told you maybe you shouldn't have done it. Obviously I had enough of an instinct that we could be right, that it was worth doing.

KROFT: After you made the decision to go ahead, you had like this incredible weekend where you were you surveyed the tornado damage in Alabama.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Right.

KROFT: You took your family to the shuttle launch and met with people down there. With Gabby . . . .

PRESIDENT OBAMA: With Gabby . . . .

KROFT: . . . Giffords.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Giffords, yeah.

KROFT: You attended the White House Association dinner. There was a commencement address. And this was all going on, I mean you knew what was gonna happen.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Yeah. Yeah. The decision was made. I made the decision Thursday night, informed my team Friday morning, and then we flew off to look at the tornado damage. To go to Cape Canaveral, to make a speech, a commencement speech. And then we had the White House Correspondents' Dinner on Saturday night. So this was in the back of my mind all weekend.

KROFT: Just the back?

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Middle, front.

KROFT: Was it hard keeping your focus?

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Yes. Yeah.

KROFT: Did you have to suppress the urge to tell someone? Did you wanna tell somebody? Did you wanna tell Michelle? Did you tell Michelle?

PRESIDENT OBAMA: You know one of the great successes of this operation was that we were able to keep this thing secret. And it's a testimony to how seriously everybody took this operation and the understanding that any leak could end up not only compromising the mission, but killing some of the guys that we were sending in there.

And so very few people in the White House knew. The vast majority of my most senior aides did not know that we were doing this. And you know, there were times where you wanted to go around and talk this through with some more folks. And that just wasn't an option.

And during the course of the weekend, you know, there was no doubt that this was weighin' on me. But, you know, something I said during the campaign that I've learned over and over again in this job is the Presidency requires you to do more than one thing at a time. And it is important for you to be able to focus on somethin' that matters deeply to you, but still be able to do the things on a daily basis that are makin' a difference in people's lives.

KROFT: I want to go to the Situation Room. What was the mood?

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Tense.

KROFT: People talking?

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Yeah, but doing a lot of listening as well, 'cause we were able to monitor the situation in real time. Getting reports back from Bill McRaven, the head of our special forces operations, as well as Leon Panetta. And you know, there were big chunks of time in which all we were doin' was just waiting. And it was the longest 40 minutes of my life with the possible exception of when Sasha got meningitis when she was three months old, and I was waiting for the doctor to tell me that she was all right. It was a very tense situation.

KROFT: Were you nervous?

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Yes.

KROFT: What could you see?

PRESIDENT OBAMA: As I said, we were monitoring the situation. And we knew as events unfolded what was happening in and around the compound, but we could not get information clearly about what was happening inside the compound.

KROFT: Right. And that went on for a long time? Could you hear gunfire?

PRESIDENT OBAMA: We had a sense of when gunfire and explosions took place.

KROFT: Flashes?

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Yeah. And we also knew when one of the helicopters went down in a way that wasn't according to plan. And, as you might imagine that made us more tense.

KROFT: So it got off to a bad start?

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Well, it did not go exactly according to planned, but this is exactly where all the work that had been done anticipating what might go wrong made a huge difference.

KROFT: There was a backup plan?

PRESIDENT OBAMA: There was a backup plan.

KROFT: You had to blow up some walls?

PRESIDENT OBAMA: We had to blow up some walls.

KROFT: When was the first indication you got that you had found the right place? That bin Laden was in there?

PRESIDENT OBAMA: There was a point before folks had left, before we had gotten everybody back on the helicopter and were flying back to base, where they said Geronimo has been killed. And Geronimo was the code name for bin Laden. And now obviously at that point these guys were operating in the dark with all kinds of stuff going on so everybody was cautious. But at that point cautiously optimistic.

KROFT: What was your reaction when you heard those words?

PRESIDENT OBAMA: I was relieved and I wanted to make sure those guys got over the Pakistan border and landed safely. And I think deeply proud and deeply satisfied of my team.

KROFT: When did you start to feel comfortable that bin Laden had been killed?

PRESIDENT OBAMA: When they landed we had very strong confirmation at that point that it was him. Photographs had been taken. Facial analysis indicated that in fact it was him. We hadn't yet done DNA testing, but at that point we were 95 percent sure.

KROFT: Did you see the pictures?

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Yes.

KROFT: What was your reaction when you saw them?

PRESIDENT OBAMA: It was him.

KROFT: Why haven't you released them?

PRESIDENT OBAMA: You know, we discussed this internally. Keep in mind that we are absolutely certain this was him. We've done DNA sampling and testing. And so there is no doubt that we killed Osama bin Laden. It is important for us to make sure that very graphic photos of somebody who was shot in the head are not floating around as an incitement to additional violence. As a propaganda tool.

You know, that's not who we are. You know, we don't trot out this stuff as trophies. You know, the fact of the matter is this was somebody who was deserving of the justice that he received. And I think Americans and people around the world are glad that he's gone. But we don't need to spike the football. And I think that given the graphic nature of these photos, it would create some national security risk. And I've discussed this with Bob Gates and Hillary Clinton and my intelligence teams and they all agree.

KROFT: There are people in Pakistan, for example, who say, "Look, this is all a lie. This is another American trick. Osama's not dead."

PRESIDENT OBAMA: You know, the truth is that - and we're monitoring worldwide reaction -- there's no doubt that bin Laden is dead. Certainly there's no doubt among al Qaeda members that he is dead. And so we don't think that a photograph in and of itself is gonna make any difference. There are gonna be some folks who deny it. The fact of the matter is, you will not see bin Laden walkin' on this earth again.

KROFT: Was it your decision to bury him at sea?

PRESIDENT OBAMA: It was a joint decision. We thought it was important to think through ahead of time how we would dispose of the body if he were killed in the compound. And I think that what we tried to do was, consulting with experts in Islamic law and ritual, to find something that was appropriate that was respectful of the body.

Frankly we took more care on this than, obviously, bin Laden took when he killed 3,000 people. He didn't have much regard for how they were treated and desecrated. But that, again, is somethin' that makes us different. And I think we handled it appropriately.

KROFT: When the mission was over . . .

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Uh-huh.

KROFT: . . . and you walked out of the situation room . . . .

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Yeah.

KROFT: . . . what did you do? What was the first thing you did?

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Yeah, I think I walked up with my team, and I just said, "We got him." And I expressed my profound gratitude and pride to the team that had worked on this.

I mean keep in mind this is something, first of all, that that wasn't just our doing. Obviously since 2001, countless folks in our intelligence community and our military had worked on this issue. President Bush had obviously devoted a lot of resources to this, and so there was a cumulative effort and a testament to the capacity of the United States of America to follow through. And to do what we said we're gonna do. Even across administrations, across party lines and the skill with which our intelligence and military folks operated in this was indescribable.

So it was a moment of great pride for me to see our capacity as a nation to execute something this difficult this well. And obviously, it also made me think about those families that I had met previously who had been so profoundly burdened by the fact that he was still runnin' around out there.

You know, I got a letter the day after, an e-mail from a young person who had spoken to her dad when she was four years old before the towers collapsed, he was he was in the building. And she described what it had been like for the last ten years growing up, always having that image of her father's -- the sound of her father's voice, and thinking that she'd never see him again, and watching her mother weep on the phone. And that's what I thought about.

KROFT: When you announced that bin Laden had been killed last Sunday, you said "Our counterterrorism cooperation with Pakistan helped lead us to bin Laden in the compound where he was hiding." Can you be more specific on that, and how much help did Pakistan actually provide in getting rid of bin Laden.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: You know, I've gotta be careful about sources and methods and how we operate and how we pieced together this intelligence, because we're gonna still be goin' after terrorists in the future.

What I can say is that Pakistan, since 9/11, has been a strong counterterrorism partner with us. There have been times where we've had disagreements. There have been times where we wanted to push harder, and for various concerns, they might have hesitated. And those differences are real. And they'll continue.

But the fact of the matter is, is that we've been able to kill more terrorists on Pakistani soil than just about any place else. We could not have done that without Pakistani cooperation. And I think that this will be an important moment in which Pakistan and the United States gets together and says, "All right, we've gotten bin Laden, but we've got more work to do. And are there ways for us to work more effectively together than we have in the past?"

And that's gonna be important for our national security. It doesn't mean that there aren't gonna be times where we're gonna be frustrated with Pakistanis. And frankly, there are gonna be times where they're frustrated with us. You know, they've got not only individual terrorists there, but there's also a climate inside of Pakistan that sometimes is deeply anti-American. And it makes it more difficult for us to be able to operate there effectively.

But I do think that it's important for the American people to understand that we've got a stake in continuing cooperation from Pakistan on these issues.

KROFT: You didn't tell anybody in the Pakistani government or the military.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: No.

KROFT: Or their intelligence community?

PRESIDENT OBAMA: No.

KROFT: Because you didn't trust?

PRESIDENT OBAMA: As I said, I didn't tell most people here in the White House. I didn't tell my own family. It was that important for us to maintain operational security.

KROFT: But you were carrying out this operation in Pakistan.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Yeah.

KROFT: You didn't trust 'em?

PRESIDENT OBAMA: If I'm not revealing to some of my closest aides what we're doin', then I sure as heck am not gonna be revealing it to folks who I don't know.

KROFT: Right. Now the location of this house, the location of the compound just raises all sorts of questions.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Uh-huh.

KROFT: Do you believe people in the Pakistani government, Pakistani intelligence agencies knew that bin Laden was living there?

PRESIDENT OBAMA: We think that there had to be some sort of support network for bin Laden inside of Pakistan. But we don't know who or what that support network was. We don't know whether there might have been some people inside of government, people outside of government, and that's something that we have to investigate, and more importantly, the Pakistani government has to investigate.

And we've already communicated to them, and they have indicated they have a profound interest in finding out what kinds of support networks bin Laden might have had. But these are questions that we're not gonna be able to answer three or four days after the event. It's gonna take some time for us to be able to exploit the intelligence that we were able to gather on site.

And I just want the American people to think about this. These guys, our guys, go in in the dead of night, it's pitch black, they're takin' out walls, false doors, gettin' shot at, they killed bin Laden, and they had the presence of mind to still gather up a whole bunch of bin Laden's material which will be a treasure trove of information that could serve us very well in the weeks and months to come. It's just an indication of the extraordinary work that they did.

KROFT: Do you have any sense of what they found there?

PRESIDENT OBAMA: We are now obviously putting everything we've got into analyzing and evaluatin' all that information. But we anticipate that it can give us leads to other terrorists that we've been lookin' for for a long time, other high value targets. But also can give us a better sense of existing plots that might have been there how they operated and their methods of communicating.

All of this should help us continue to push harder and harder. And one of the things that I said when I came into office was we had to remember what our primary focus was. Who carried out September 11th and how do we make sure that we are laser-focused on getting them.

We have done a great job even before we got bin Laden in degrading their capacity. And we now have the opportunity, we're not done yet, but we've got the opportunity, I think, to really finally defeat at least Al Qaeda in that border region between Pakistan and Afghanistan. That doesn't mean that we will defeat terrorism. It doesn't mean that Al Qaeda hasn't metastasized to other parts of the world where we've gotta, you know, address operatives there. But it does mean we've got a chance to, I think, really deliver a fatal blow to this organization, if we follow through aggressively in the months to come.

KROFT: Is this the first time that you've ever ordered someone killed?

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Well, keep in mind that, you know, every time I make a decision about launching a missile, every time I make a decision about sending troops into battle, you know, I understand that this will result in people being killed. And that is a sobering fact. But it is one that comes with the job.

KROFT: This was one man. This is somebody who's cast a shadow in this place, in the White House for almost a decade.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: Right.

PRESIDENT OBAMA: As nervous as I was about this whole process, the one thing I didn't lose sleep over was the possibility of taking bin Laden out. Justice was done. And I think that anyone who would question that the perpetrator of mass murder on American soil didn't deserve what he got needs to have their head examined.