I thought this had to be something from The Onion, but nope, it's real: commenting on the massacre at Utoya, Glenn Beck said that "There was a shooting at a political camp, which sounds a little like, you know, the Hitler youth. I mean, who does a camp for kids that's all about politics? Disturbing."

Beck is apparently unaware that not only have the the Young Republicans had camps for teens, but the Tea Party followers who briefly catapulted him to stardom have done camps for kids -- modeled, not surprisingly, on vacation Bible schools, and full of the usual teabagger delusions about history and economics.

And so, having compared his own core consistency to the Nazis (accurately or not...), methinks that about wraps it up for Mr. Beck. Thanks for playing and we have some lovely parting gifts.

Zelda's Inferno exercise: write a poem from one or more of the following random phrases (from the Urbanite, July 2011):

until the age of 21
a unique selection
white foam churns on the surface
spend less time in their cars

taking a class on sound
no boys allowed
appeals to and attracts the people
the summer of 1919

there is this big panoramic photo on the wall
from a company picnic or a community sports day or something
back in the summer of 1919 or 1929 or sometime back then
over eighty years ago

Sometimes I look at it and
I think "the odds are very good that
everyone in this photograph is dead now"

did some of those strong-thewed young men in their
       running uniforms die in one of the wars between then and now?
Or did they live the serene lives of sages, staying well away
      from history?

what of that girl-woman over on the right side
the one with the fiery look, direct into the camera
standing just in front of her friends
did she quietly marry and
become a dutiful mother?
trying to look through time I can't believe that, no,
I see her wild, an artist of some sort, of life if nothing else,
this world her canvas

a hundred pairs of eyes peer out of the past
at us, their unguessed-at inheritors

i am sure that we are not at all what they expected

According to some teachers, the most fundamental statement in Zen is "I don't know". For example, Zen Master Wu Kwang (Richard Shrobe) tells this tale:

Poep An came to a particular monastery and greeted Master Ji Jang, who was to become his final teacher. Ji Jang asked Peop An, "You're travelling all around China; what's the meaning of your pilgrimage?" Initially, Peop An felt stuck and momentarily all thinking stopped. Then he said, "don't know". Ji Jang responded, "Not knowing is most intimate". Sometimes you'll see this translated as: "Not knowing is closest to it." ...This one sentence, "don't know" or "Not knowing is most intimate", is very much at the heart of our practice.

This idea goes all the way back to the semi-mythical founder of Zen, Bodhidharma, and an interview he supposedly had with the Emperor of China. The Emperor, who had sponsored all sorts of temple-building and sutra-copying, was not pleased with this smart-assed barbarian telling him that this wasn't going to get him reborn in the Pure Land or whatever, and so challenged him by saying, "Who are you?" (I've always read the subtext of that as "Who are you to give me lip, monk?") Bodhidharma's amazing answer was, "I don't know."

Another way of expressing this idea comes from Zen Master Shunryu Suzuki: "In the beginner's mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert's there are few."

There's a Star Trek: The Next Generation episode where Data expresses a similar idea: "Captain, the most elementary and valuable statement in science, the beginning of wisdom, is I do not know. I do not know what that is, sir."

The beginning of wisdom is, "I don't know." What an amazing idea.

Have you ever tried to teach someone something, only to be told, "I know, I know!" I've been on both sides of that one! If I know, then I'm closed off to learning, but if I'm not attached to "knowing," the possibilities are endless.

Let's juxtapose that with a Twitter post from the man behind the recent massacre in Norway. Anders Behring Breivik, the lunatic who killed at least 92 people in what seems to be a politically motivated attack, recent posted this: "One person with a belief is equal to the force of 100,000 who have only interests."

If we didn't know the context, we might look at that and think it a positive statement about the value of strong belief and determination. But in order to go off and shoot scores of people, Breivik had to "know" that what he was doing was right.

Just a bit of "I don't know" could save a lot of lives.

Yeats's poem "The Second Coming" has the famous lines, "The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity." While perhaps a situation where the best lack all conviction tilts too far, it will always be the case that the wise have doubts, while those who perpetrate violence lack them. You've got to be pretty damn sure of your ideas -- pretty damn attached to them -- to kill people over them.

Here's a Zen story for a hot day. This one is about Dogen, the founder of the Soto school of Zen and one of the most important figures in Japanese religious history. He went to China to learn about Buddhism and Zen (they called it Ch'an over there), and after wandering around met an old monk on a hot day...

It was summer, and very hot. There was a very old monk there working, drying mushrooms. Old and frail as he was, he was spreading the mushrooms out in the sun. Master Dogen saw him and asked him, "Why are you working? You are an old monk and a superior of the temple. You should get younger people to do this work. It is not necessary for you to work. Besides, it is extremely hot today. Do that another day." Master Dogen was young then. The old monk's answer was most interesting and has become famous in the history of Soto Zen. It was a satori for Master Dogen. The monk said to him, "You have come from Japan, young man, you are intelligent and you understand Buddhism, but you do not understand the essence of Zen. If I do not do this, if I do not work here and now, who could understand? I am not you, I am not others. Others are not me. So others cannot have the experience. If I don't work, if I do not have this experience here and now, I cannot understand. If a young monk helped me to do the work, if I were to stand by and watch him, then I could not have the experience of drying these mushrooms. If I said, ``Do this, do that. Put them here or there,'' I could not have the experience. I could not understand the act that is here and now. "I am not others and others are not me." Master Dogen was startled, and he suddenly understood.

Slowly settling back in the "real" world now, more than a week after returning from the Starwood Festival. (And the tail end of X Day.)

As I joked several times before and during Starwood, it was nice to go to an event where I was not responsible for anything, in stark contrast to this year's FSG. And yet...as I was in this space of self-exploration, taking some time to reflect on life, the universe, and everything, the message I kept finding was, "Time to step up"; that it's time to accept a more prominent role in the communities of which I am a part.

This was, if I've counted on my fingers and toes right, my twelfth Starwood, and my ninth as a presenter. Each year that I've been a presenter, I've done two or three workshops, and maybe ten people on average show up for each one. (Sometimes it's twenty or thirty, and sometimes it's one!) So over the years, on the order of two hundred people have taken classes from me there...meaning, that I'm becoming a familiar face. Ok, fine, but I've always seen myself as sort of "filler" around the "big name" presenters. Not that anyone had ever made me feel "second rate" or anything by the way they treated me, just my own self-assessment.

I've previously mentioned the evidence that those of us whose ancestral group developed outside Africa, have inherited some percentage of our genome from Neanderthal ancestors. There's more evidence to add to the pile now: a specific region of the X chromosome, which had looked suspicious for almost a decade, has been shown to originate from Neanderthals. The sequence in question was present in people from all over the world except for sub-Saharan Africa.

If you need conclusive proof that the Transportation Security Administration carefully picks the most ignorant and incompetent applicants, consider the words of Sabrina Birge, an airport security officer at at Nashville International Airport. When Andrea Fornella Abbott refused to have her daughter subjected to molestation or to radiation, Birge informed her that the scanner was not an X-ray but "uses the same type of radio waves as a sonogram."

That's right. She claimed they use the the same sort of radio waves as a sonogram.

The new backscatter scanners do, in fact, use X-rays, and the evidence is clear that the TSA has lied about the evidence for their safety.

Stanford Magazine looks at Philip Zimbardo's famous "prison experiment", forty years later. The Prison Experiment ranks with the Milgram experiment as a classic study of how authority corrodes ethics, demonstrating how otherwise normal and decent human beings can become abusive monsters when handed power.

Here are some choice quotes from participants in the experiment:

"The prison study has given me a new understanding of what 'heroism' means. It's not some egocentric, I'm-going-to-rush-into-that-burning-building thing—it's about seeing something that needs to be addressed and saying, I need to help and do something to make it better." -- Christina Maslach, who stepped in to insist that the experiment be stopped

"When the Abu Ghraib scandal broke, my first reaction was, this is so familiar to me. I knew exactly what was going on. I could picture myself in the middle of that and watching it spin out of control. When you have little or no supervision as to what you're doing, and no one steps in and says, 'Hey, you can't do this'—things just keep escalating. You think, how can we top what we did yesterday? How do we do something even more outrageous? I felt a deep sense of familiarity with that whole situation." -- Dave Eshelman, described as the prison's most abusive guard

"It really was a unique experience to watch human behavior transform in front of your eyes. And I can honestly say that I try never to forget it. I spend a lot of time with real prisoners and real guards, and having seen what I saw then, while a graduate student, gave me respect for the power of institutional environments to transform good people into something else." -- Craig Haney, a graduate student researcher

"One thing that I thought was interesting about the experiment was whether, if you believe society has assigned you a role, do you then assume the characteristics of that role? I teach at an inner city high school in Oakland. These kids don't have to go through experiments to witness horrible things. But what frustrates my colleagues and me is that we are creating great opportunities for these kids, we offer great support for them, why are they not taking advantage of it? Why are they dropping out of school? Why are they coming to school unprepared? I think a big reason is what the prison study shows—they fall into the role their society has made for them." -- Richard Yacco, one of the prisoners

You can read more about the Prison Experiment at Wikipedia and at the Prison Experiment website.

You also ought to check out Zimbardo's "Heroic Imagination" project, which seeks to "provide the knowledge, tools, strategies, and exercises to help individuals overcome the inertia which keeps them from taking positive action at crucial moments in their lives...[to] train individuals to transform their innate desire to do the right thing, into the ability to actually do it."

Tripped across this interesting little bit in an interview with Jim Steinman, the songwriter behind the classic Meat Loaf album Bat Out Of Hell:

...This goes back to Jim Morrison and The Doors, my favorite group from the '60s. They always used the word Shaman a lot, Shaman being the tribal leader who would conduct the rituals. The sorcerer or the tribal leader and the guy who would hand out the magic mushrooms.

Or the guy who would say the right prayers. Basically it's if the Pope was cool, he'd be a Shaman, the biggest Shaman. It was always interesting to me that Meat [Loaf] was kind of like a Shaman, which is so close to showman. I don't know if there's any connection linguistically but a great showman to me is also a Shaman, in that tears open doorways and lets you see things behind doors that you would never see.

And creates altars so you could worship things that you're not aware of. It shows you the underbelly and that's always interested me more than anything else. What, the secret underbelly of things.