Happy B-Day, Krishna! (UFOs from Heaven)

Pat Macpherson, Dhr. Seven, Ashley Wells,  Seth Auberon, CC Liu, Wisdom Quarterly; BBC

The dark lord, blue Krishna: krsna means black or dark (Reuters/BBC.com)

What will a public UFO landing display look like? There was that War Over LA. Albert Hall during the Ultimate Fighting Championship, London, 2002 (Mike Hewitt/Getty Images).

Robert Bingham (center) guides Los Angelenos to daylight UFO summonings and sightings.

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And this one's for patriarchy, Asherah!

Hindus believe that both the Buddha and Lord Krishna were earthly incarnations or avatars of the celestial god Vishnu.
 
India's great celestial goddess and god, Radha and Krishna, are the beloved ultimate couple.

Just as Yahweh (Jehovah, YHVH, one of the Old Testament gods of the Bible and, apparently, the only One that mattered) was once married to Asherah in Judeo-Christian tradition, Radha and Krishna are the immortals, space (akasha)-devas, who came to Earth to frolic.

Ancient Asherah bas-relief

Wait, wait, wait, and hold hold your horses! God had a wife? There is more than one God in the Jewish and Christian Bible? Yes, and yes. The whole sacred book tells of their, the plural gods' exploits on Earth, which scholars construe and misrepresent as a monotheistic -- "one god" -- text about only a single God speaking of Himself in the royal "We." But many kinds of celestial gods and space lords are referred to by name. Scholars who know better gloss this by saying, it's all names for one God. He likes lots of names and classes of names and to refer to himself always in the plural.

Birth then carried across the water in a basket reminiscent of Moses... In pictures: Hindus around the world celebrate Krishna's birthday, one of the most popular Hindu gods (BBC).

• The foundations of Hinduism: Brahminical Vedas

The Bible is much closer to the ancient myths (true and attested to accounts) of the Vedic Pantheon, Ancient Roman Gods, Ancient Greek Gods, and post-Vedic Buddhist cosmology. Buddhists do not worship these gods -- devas, gandharvas, apsaras, brahmas, asuras, nagas, garudas -- but they are well aware of them. And the Buddha taught that if one so wished and, moreover, undertook the appropriate courses of conduct (merit, profitable karma), one could be reborn among the devas. The devas are recollected (devatānussati) rather than worshipped for this reason.

Goddess Radha devi, the favorite consort of the lord: kids play dress up (AP/BBC.com)

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Radha the milkmaid (gopi) was already on Earth in a scene reminiscent of Western religious tradition, as the gods -- including the Cowherd avatar or Shepherd Krishna -- found the "daughters of men" attractive and came in unto them and bore with them hybrid-offspring, heroes of old, men of renown.
 

Janmashtami is Hindu Xmas in India, Lord Krishna's birthday commemoration. Krishna has risen in popular importance above all other incarnations and manifestations of the One God of the Brahmins Brahma (called "Great Brahma" or Maha Brahma in Buddhism).

• [There is something higher but it is not a personality, and it is Brahman, the Ultimate Reality behind the Illusion of Maya, Godhood, Godhead, GOD, realization and union. So we always distinguish: "gods" (devas, deities) from "Gods" (brahmas, divinities) from "GOD" in nontheistic Buddhism. Nontheism does not mean atheism, but rather denotes the fact that whether or not there are gods is not pertinent to enlightenment. Enlightenment transcends that discussion And whether or not their are creators (DNA splicers, cosmic magicians, manipulators of energy, mind/heart readers, powerful aggressors, peaceful enjoyers of the Brahma Viharas or "Divine Abidings"), there is no ultimate uncreated Creator God creator of all...unless one thinks of the impersonal GOD as that creator, but that is more a syncretic Hindu-Mahayana concept than anything the historical Buddha ever taught.]

How the Sumerians depicted the flying visitors from space on compact cylinders

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The Dogon of Mali, Africa

Whether it is Buddhism, Brahmanism (the pre-Buddhist Vedic teachings of the Brahmin-caste priests, later Hinduism, Mahayana Buddhism (a kind of Buddhism steeped in Hindu concepts), Jainism, Sumerianism (of Sumer, Mesopotamia, Iraq), Zoroastrianism, Judaism (Bedouins, Hebrews), Islam, early Christianity, or later Catholicism there are "gods" who came down from on high in space. At least that's where these beings said they were from They may have come from the hollow Earth, nearby Moon, the visible planets, or from the next solar system over, but they came. Even the Dogon know they came.

In Buddhism these "shining ones" (beings of light of varying radiance) are generally referred to as akasha-devas from the akasha-deva-loka or "space light beings world" to distinguish them from the earthling-devas (bhumattha-devas).

Playground of the devas

Recollect the Devas' Merit: Mediterranean Greece as the playground of the "gods" (D&G)

What UFO abductees can teach us

David M. Jacobs with George Boory (coasttocoast.com, Aug. 19, 2014)

Documented research

Prof. David M. Jacobs (ICAR, "International Center for Abduction Research," ufoabduction.com) has conducted decades-long research into the alien abduction phenomenon. He was on last night trying to explain his conclusions to a kind, half-witted host. Jacobs outlined his early interest in UFO sightings, how he focused on alien abductions after he met Budd Hopkins, and expressed his disappointment at how academic and scientific communities generally dismiss the subject of UFOs. There is, he feels, a preponderance of evidence to demonstrate their existence.
 

ET Semjase devi (theyfly.com)

From the beginning of human civilization ,aliens have shown an interest in human reproduction, he notes. UFO abduction incidents reveal this interest. The reason for this are their programs to create hybrids, he explains, describing an early case that Hopkins shared with him in which a woman was shown a baby that looked half-human, half-alien, and was asked by the aliens to hold and nurse the baby.

"They are making hybrids so that they can come down and be here," possibly to takeover this planet, he conjectured. Jacobs also mentioned the telepathic abilities of aliens: They can transfer and access data into and out of someone's mind.
 
He theorizes that hybrids are being created with a tremendous amount of information dumped into them by some insect-like ETs (praying mantis type), who seem to direct the hybrid program, not so much the reptilians (nagas) or Nordics (devas) or titans (asuras).


The show was rounded out by aerospace and defense systems developer Sir Charles Shults talking about his work on the technology of education, as well as various advancements and innovations in the fields of space exploration and AI (artificial intelligence). More

Free your mind, the rest will follow

Pat Macpherson, Dhr. Seven, Wisdom Quarterly; David G Allen, Wise Up (BBC.com, 6-2-14)

“You can’t shut it up by trying to shut it off.” [Observe it without judgment.] (Thinkstock)

 

Is it Zen, or just the art of getting things done?

The new hot trend in Silicon Valley office culture is a Buddh-ish encouragement of workplace mindfulness. Guided meditation is the new free cafeteria meals.

 

But David G Allen, author of the international bestselling productivity bible, Getting Things Done, has been teaching people how to reach higher levels of cognitive thinking for almost two decades. Like Eastern [Buddhist] mindfulness, his solution is simple but challenging to fully implement.

If that doesn’t raise any follow-up questions you can stop reading and get to it. But the truth is most people don’t know how to clear their mind.

 

Combat expat homesickness

Buddhism encourages you to focus on the breath or a single thought to calm the mad monkey screeching in your skull. Such practice has been empirically shown to strengthen emotional resilience and increase happiness.

 

But then the nagging thoughts start to creep in. You know the ones. Not big thoughts, but the mundane, seemingly benign nagging mental memos: “Did I send that email?” “I need to tell my boss something before the meeting.” “What was that idea I had this morning in the shower?” “I know I’m forgetting something.”

 

“We have to shut the mundane up,” Allen said to me in a phone interview a few months after we met on a stage in Austin, Texas, in the US at the South by Southwest (SXSW) Festival to discuss his well-known productivity method. Allen’s route to freeing the mind of its detritus is a more practical one than prescribed by most religions.

 

Would you work here?

“The strange paradox is you actually have to use your mind to shut your mind up,” he said. But not by meditation or mantras. “You can’t shut it up by trying to shut it off. What you have to do is [ask yourself,] ‘Why is this on my mind?’” More

Military puts Buddhist Thailand on brink (video)

Pfc. Sandoval, Ashley Wells, Wisdom Quarterly; VICE News, 5-24-14 (tumblr)

(BBC) 60 second background to the 2014 coup d'etat in Thailand as conservative Yellow Shirts gain upper hand over revolutionary Red Shirts by ousting the people's candidate, billionairess PM Yingluck Shinawatra, through the Thai court. Now the Yellow Shirt Royalists seem to have called in the military to enforce an economic system the majority is unhappy with.

Thailand's military detained former Prime Minister Yingluck Shinawatra on Friday in the latest development of the country's unraveling political crisis. The army, which is consolidating its grip on Thailand following Thursday's coup d'état, barred 155 prominent citizens from leaving the country.

• Thailand's anti-democratic royalists precipitate political chaos
• Thai court ousts prime minister over abuse of power
• Watch all of VICE News' coverage in Thailand

BBC News: Thai coup, Andrew Sarchusa
(Arirang) Int'l leaders denounce coup
(ANN) Look at the Shinawatra family
May 23: Day after Thai military's coup
Life after Thailand's Splendid Little Coup (Journeyman Pictures)

Making a new fake threat: CIA's "Boko Haram"

Pat Macpherson, Pfc. Sandoval, Ashley Wells, Wisdom Quarterly (COMMENTARY); BBC

Is it possible to control the weather? Can social media catch bogeymen? Some agencies already wield the power to make it rain (by cloudseeding with toxic heavy metals), "drive" hurricanes/cyclones and cause/avert catastrophic weather disasters (with HAARP). But let's pretend they are not yet doing it: the BBC investigates.

 
UPDATE: The photos of the "abducted" girls are fake

American invaders arrive to find, rape, kill...

BORNO, Nigeria (BP News) - More than 200 Christian girls Boko Haram [is said to have] kidnapped a month ago from a state school are not the same girls shown in a ransom video the ["]terrorists["] released, Nigerian relations expert Adeniyi Ojutiku told Baptist Press today (May 13).

When the Borno state government shared copies of the video with the parents of the kidnapped [CIA abducted] teenagers, none of the parents could find their children in the video, Ojutiku said he learned from the Borno government.

"They are not the same. They are not the girls abducted," said Ojutiku, a Southern Baptist in Raleigh, N.C., who receives frequent updates from members of the grassroots group Lift Up Now. He co-founded the group to address political, economic and social challenges in his homeland Nigeria. More

• Video of Boko Haram killing a girl found to be fake

Fear, fear, don't forget to be afraid! They're savages! They're monsters! Protect us, military-industrial complex, protect us! They're mean to innocent little schoolgirls and puppies! They're black! They're Muslims! And worst of all they hate "Western education" for girls!

 

First it was the Red Menace, those darn Cold War communists taking over the capitalist world like a big Dominoes game, one nation falling after another trying to set up a just economic system that does not exploit workers. Then it was Al Qaeda and the Bogeyman (Emmanuel Goldstein/Osama bin Laden). Now it's Bo Go Harm, Bogeyman II, the BOGUS black monsters of Boko Haram ("Western-style education is forbidden"). What kind of Fear of a Black Planet is this farce exploiting?

The CIA paid me to launch a media campaign

Look, they confessed! They say Allah is making them do it! Jehovah would never sell kids! Be afraid, be more afraid! Hey, let's not forget to vote to get some boots on the ground in Africa with American troops searching for Kony, too!

Who are Boko Haram?

The group that has claimed responsibility for abducting hundreds of Nigerian schoolgirls has long waged a campaign of terror. BBC News takes a look at the leadership, methods, and beliefs of Boko Haram.

Boko Haram "to sell" abducted girls

Oh no! Be afraid, very afraid! The Nigerian Islamist militant group Boko Haram says it will "sell" the hundreds of schoolgirls it abducted three weeks ago.

It's Shakespeare's Birthday (video)

Ashley Wells, Seven, CC Liu, Wisdom Quarterly; BBC; Delahoyde; Anderson; de Vere S.A.

Whoever it was who wrote these words must be remembered as world heritage (BBC)

There are tell-tale signs of the true author (de Vere Society Australia)

Shakespeare Unlocked

(BBC) William Shakespeare, the pseudonym of a British writer (likely the historical Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford) and/or writers, wrote many popular and widely studied plays. They are unlocked by actors and directors at the Royal Shakespeare Company, a fantastic resource for students and teachers of Shakespeare. More

• E-BOOK: The Hyphen, the Mask, the Daughter
• E-BOOK: Shakespeare by Another Name (view)
• What the world loses because of sexism as explored in Reincarnating Shakespeare’s sister: Virginia Woolf and the “uncircumscribed spirit” of fiction. The tension established between the writing subject and this vital “spirit” or “reality” has implications for the relationship between women and fiction Woolf imagines in A Room of One’s Own. For the movement of the writing subject beyond the self and towards the vital “spirit” of the “real” proves to be essential for the reincarnation of “Shakespeare’s sister,” that is, for the creation of a genuinely feminine literature (not the other SS).
• VIDEO: Shakespeare's Restless World
  
  Neil MacGregor explores the world of Shakespeare and his audience through 20 objects from that turbulent period.

Edward de Vere (Oxfordian theory of authorship) rivals France's Moliere, Spain's Cervantes, Latin America's Garcia Marquez, North America's plain Jane Austin, England's Virginia Woolf, China's... well, everyone gets the picture. But who was "the Bard"? According to Dr. Delahoyde of Washington State University: 

 

The Real Shakespeare

Prof. Michael Delahoyde (public.wsu.edu)

Remembering literature (bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01dtvpl)

 

J. Thomas Looney [Loan-ee], an English schoolteacher early in the 20th century for whom the Stratford myth [referring to Shakespeare's alleged birthplace] seemed worse than unsatisfactory, went back to the start of the logical process. 

 

From the works themselves he constructed a list of [at least 18] traits that must have been associated with the true author:...

Looney found a perfect match in the Dictionary of National Biography when he read about Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford.

Looney published his discovery in 1920; unfortunately, therefore, some would like to dub this the Looney theory (though his name is pronounced Loan-ee, like Roosevelt). But Freud was convinced by it; Orson Welles was; Leslie Howard, Derek Jacobi, Jeremy Irons, Supreme Court judges, scholars, and more and more have been ever since.

The de Vere family, originally from France, settled in England before the Norman Conquest. In 1066, Alberic (or Aubrey) de Vere sided with William the Conqueror and afterwards was rewarded with many estates. The youngest son of William, Henry, appointed de Vere the hereditary Lord Great Chamberlain of England -- involving duties associated with coronations.

De Vere is the Bard without getting credit.

The fourth successive Aubrey in the 1100s was created Earl of Oxford. An Earl of Oxford was a favorite of Richard II (and therefore is excised from that history play), another was given a command at the battle of Agincourt, and Earls of Oxford supported the House of Lancaster in the Wars of the Roses in the 1400s. One accompanied Henry VII in 1485 and proved himself invaluable at Bosworth Field. More

This is clearly a mask covering a face

Lady Susan de Vere (1587-1629), Countess of Montgomery, was the producer and "Grand Possessor" of the First Folio (1623), the Collected Works of "William Shake-speare," the pen-name of her father the Elizabethan courtier, poet, and playwright Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford.

 

Considering that more shelf space in book stores and libraries is dedicated to Shakespeare, and more movies cover the subject than any other, that makes Susan de Vere the most important person in history.

Yet, she has been completely erased from the picture by the elitist snobs of the Stratford Sham Industry. Until the de Veres came along there was no book, no Wikipedia page, no documentary, and no movie about this very resourceful woman, who despite the social constraints of the time, cunningly figured out a way to send us the ultimate "message in a bottle."

 

Still unpublished before Susan de Vere’s First Folio and otherwise lost to posterity were:... More

By Another Name
Mark Anderson (shakespearebyanothername.com)

Shakespeare by Another Name (Anderson)

The debate over the true authorship of the Shakespeare canon has raged for centuries. Astonishingly little evidence supports the traditional belief that it was Wm. Shakespeare, the actor and businessman from [the hamlet of] Stratford-upon-Avon, England.

Legendary figures such as Mark Twain, Walt Whitman, and Sigmund Freud have all expressed grave doubts that an uneducated man, who apparently owned no books and never left England, wrote plays and poems that consistently reflect a learned and well-traveled insider's perspective on royal courts and the ancient feudal nobility.

Recent scholarship has turned to Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford -- an Elizabethan court playwright known to have written in secret and who had ample means, motive, and opportunity to in fact have assumed the "Shake-speare" disguise.
 

Yes, I was wearing a mask! (DVSA)

"Shakespeare" by Another Name is the literary biography of Edward de Vere as "Shakespeare." This groundbreaking book tells the story of de Vere's action-packed life -- as Renaissance man, spendthrift, courtier, wit, student, scoundrel, patron, military adventurer and, above all, prolific ghostwriter -- finding in it the background material for all of The Bard's works.

Biographer Mark Anderson incorporates a wealth of new evidence, including de Vere’s personal copy of the Bible (in which he underlines scores of passages that are also prominent Shakespearean biblical references). More

Racism in Buddhist Burma: Muslim Rohingya

CC Liu, Ashley Wells, Wisdom Quarterly; Kathmandu Post (ekantipur.com); BBC News America; 

Beloved daughters of Burma must be protected from feared minority? It's racist discrimination. Sandalwood paste is used on many children to lighten and keep skin clear (Dietmar Temps/Deepblue66/flickr)

 

Proposed law is discriminatory

(KP) Burma’s human rights record will hit a new low if a proposed marriage bill becomes law. Couched in an idiom that merely seeks to give “protection and rights” to Buddhists, the proposed law targets the country’s Rohingya Muslim minority and forbids Muslims from marrying into the majority community. 

 

Spearheaded by a monk, Ven. Wirathu, the move, it seems, has officialdom’s blessings. President Thein Sein, succumbing to pressure from the extremist lobby, asked parliament to consider enacting such a law, which proposes a 10-year jail sentence for a Rohingya marrying a girl from the Buddhist community without obtaining her parents’ permission.

Vaguely worded, the proposed law, which bans polygamy, would “balance the increasing population” -- of whom, the legislation doesn’t specify. The proposal has also been criticized by Aung San Suu Kyi, who called it “a violation of women’s rights and human rights.” 

 

Already subjected to a discriminatory two-child policy, the Rohingya community is considered by the UN as the world’s most persecuted group. The state doesn’t recognize the Rohingyas as Burma’s citizens [regarded as rightly belonging in neighboring Muslim Bangladesh, who rejects them] even though most of them have been living in Burma for generations. They are not allowed to own land, and they cannot travel without permission. More

US Army prosecutor accused of groping

 
A top prosecutor of sexual assault cases in the US Army has himself been accused of groping a female colleague, military officials say. [What chance was their for justice for victims of rape and sexual assault in the US military?]

• Guilty plea in US general's sex case
• Anti-sex assault officer cleared
• Senator links "hormones" to abuse
• US military in new sex assault case 
• Quebec legislators vie for majority

Campaigning begins in Quebec after Premier Pauline Marois of Parti Quebec dissolved the legislature and launched a bid for a majority.

• Quebec mulls religious headwear ban 
• Creator of Bitcoin "found" in US

Claims by Newsweek to have found the man who invented the Bitcoin virtual cash system have drawn criticism and skepticism.

• VIDEO: "Bad apples in any industry"
• Bitcoin dogged by tech troubles
• Mt. Gox gives bankruptcy details 
• "Two years" to overcome Snowden's NSA leak It will take the US two years and billions of dollars to overcome the harm done by the Snowden leaks, the top-ranking US military officer claims. [We've been enormously harmed by our lying, which Snowden exposed. It's going to cost us a lot to cover up again. We should imprison that man.]
• Staples closes North American stores American stationer Staples says it will close 225 stores in the US and Canada as sales in the fourth quarter fell 10.6%
• DoJ probes Comcast-Time Warner deal
• US men convicted of China espionage
• Bin Laden son-in-law's trial begins
• Second US HIV-positive baby "cured"
• CIA probes Senate staff monitoring
• Facebook tightens rules on gun posts
• US Senate blocks Obama nominee 
• Money, music, and why LORDE matters New Zealand's biggest popstar represents a cultural turning point in a society exhausted by consumerism 
• Inflation soaring? Currency crumbling? Not now, I’m eating While Argentina’s economy totters, the president lunches with Fidel Castro.

Wall Street's Reefer Madness

The horrors of Syria's police state (audio)

Amber Larson, CC Liu, Wisdom Quarterly; investigative journalist Lyse Doucet (BBC News), Producers Traci Tong and Matthew Bell, Host Marco Werman, The World (pri.org)

Residents wait to receive food aid distributed by the UN Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) at the besieged Yarmouk camp, south of Damascus (UNRWA/Reuters/pri.org)

  

Strike terrorists then starve 'em!

After more than three years of war in Syria, we have all seen plenty of photos of bombed out neighborhoods, piles of rubble, and dead civilians.

But for those of us peering into these distant, man-made disaster zones from the outside, it is easy to forget that these scenes of destruction are also still home to many people.

Tom Tomorrow (thismodernworld.com)

And some of them are facing a relentlessly grim situation. The Yarmouk district of Damascus (the capital of Syria) has been home to Palestinian refugee families going all the way back to the 1948 Arab-Israeli war. Additional waves of refugees helped the area grow into a busy residential and commercial section of the Syrian capital, where about 150,000 Palestinians lived alongside Syrians. But no longer.

 

 I myself, I'm innocent, I tell ya. I did nuthin.

Today in Yarmouk more than 20,000 people find themselves under a punishing siege that began nearly a year ago. The fighting has made it impossible for them to get out. Residents do leave their hiding places most days -- hoping to find some food being handed out by aid groups.

 

The BBC's Lyse Doucet just returned from a visit to Yarmouk, and she says starvation is being used as a weapon of war against this besieged section of the Syrian capital.  

 

Syrian graffiti, Pres. Al-Assad

“Even in wars there are rules,” Doucet said from Beirut. “One of the rules is that civilian populations should not be punished. It's happening every day in Syria."

 

Doucet accompanied aid workers with UNRWA, the United Nations refugee agency for Palestinian refugees, delivering emergency food aid to people in Yarmouk. She described the road leading into the district as a “ghostly corridor,” and said the level of human suffering she saw was shocking.

 

Al-Assad is your friend, citizen!

“There was a tide of people waiting in this narrow alleyway,” said Doucet, a veteran war correspondent. “No matter how many images you see uploaded on YouTube and other social media sites, no matter how many photographs you see, it does not prepare you for the shock of this, when you actually enter and see it with your own eyes.” More

A Buddhist Response to Contemporary Dilemmas of Human Existence

Bhikkhu Bodhi (accesstoinsight.org)

American scholar Ven. Bodhi

What does it mean "contemporary dilemmas"? It does not refer explicitly to the momentous social and political problems of our time -- global poverty, ethnic hostility, overpopulation, AIDS, the suppression of human rights, environmental ruin, and so on. 

 

These problems are symptoms or offshoots of a more fundamental dilemma, one which is essentially spiritual in nature.

 

Our root problem is at its core a problem of consciousness. It is a fundamental existential dislocation, with cognitive and ethical dimensions. That is, it involves both a disorientation in our understanding of reality and a distortion (inversion) of the proper scale of values. That scale follows from a correct understanding of reality. 

Because our root problem is one of consciousness, any viable solution must be framed in terms of transformation.

Anthology of sutras (Bodhi)

It requires an attempt to arrive at an accurate grasp of the human situation and a turning of the mind and heart in a new direction, one commensurate with this new understanding, one that brings light and peace rather than strife and distress.

 

Religion might have a response to the outstanding dilemmas of our age, but first let us propose a critique of the existential dislocation that has spread among such a significant portion of humankind.

 

Through most of this century, the religious point of view has been defensive. It may now be the time to go on the offensive by scrutinizing closely the dominant modes of thought that lie at the base of our spiritual malaise.

 

The problem of existential dislocation is integrally tied to the worldwide ascendancy of a type of mentality that originates in the West. But today it has become typical of human civilization as a whole. It would be too simple to describe this frame of mind as "materialism." First of all, those who adopt it do not invariably subscribe to materialism as a philosophical point of view. Second, obsession with material progress is not the defining characteristic of this outlook, only a secondary manifestation. 

To coin a single expression conveying its distinctive essence, let us call it the "radical secularization" of human life.

The Historical Background

The underlying historical cause of this phenomenon seems to lie in an unbalanced development of the human mind in the West, beginning around the time of the European Renaissance. This development gave increasing importance to the rational, manipulative, and dominating capacities of the mind at the expense of its intuitive, comprehensive, sympathetic, and integrative capacities. More

• VIDEO: watch Doucet's report from Yarmouk
• Visiting Disneyland? Here's a quick side trip: Li'l Baghdad
• Jews are making their way to Burma, like their ancestors
• How a nightmare brought one Syrian couple together — then they fell in love
• (BBC) Syria crisis: Thousands awaiting food in Yarmouk

• "Damascus Diary": An Observation of Syria's Bloodshed
• A History of Syria's Uprising Through Protest Chants
• Syria Rocked by Fresh Bloodshed
• Syrian Fighter Pilot Defects to Jordan

  Syrian Activist in Damascus Says Half His Neighborhood Has Fled Due to Violence