Summary: <br> <a href="https://www.dailyevolver.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/262.jpg" target="_blank"></a><br> <br> It’s good to be back for the 2014 Summer Series of the Daily Evolver weekly live calls! If you ever wish to join the calls in real time, you can <a href="http://www.dailyevolver.com/the-daily-evolver-live/" target="_blank">register here</a>. Thank you to my friends at Integral Life, the world’s leading online integral community, for hosting the calls each week.<br> ITEM #1: FISH STORY<br> I start this call with an account of my personal discovery of the interior world of our finned friends. It began with a <a title="Fish Can Feel" href="http://www.dailyevolver.com/2014/06/welcome-future-fish-can-feel/" target="_blank">post I wrote</a> on the Daily Evolver blog late last week linking to new research that shows that fish can think, feel, make friends and suffer. A report of the research out of Macquarie University in Sydney Australia, stated:<br> Fish have very good memories, live in complex social communities where they keep track of individuals and can learn from one another. This helps to develop stable cultural traditions. And there is mounting evidence that they can feel pain in a manner similar to humans.<br> My discovery ended two days later, when I Inadvertently brightened a little corner of my own back yard.<br> ITEM #2: QUICK REVIEW OF MALEFICENT<br> Next I share some thoughts about the new movie, Maleficent, which retells the classic fairy tale, Sleeping Beauty, and stars Angelina Jolie as the wicked godmother. Fairy tales have been told for centuries as a means of transmitting life lessons about good and evil, particularly to children. In the traditional telling of Sleeping Beauty the princess presented a role model that was beautiful and good, but essentially passive and powerless. The wicked godmother on the other hand was…well, wicked; she put a curse on the King’s newborn daughter because he had snubbed her at the christening.<br> In Maleficent, Angelina Jolie’s version of the wicked godmother is motivated by a far more justifiable anger. And that’s a key point. In our new, post-modern retellings of these tales, which in addition to Maleficent include Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, OZ the Great and Powerful, and even the current Disney mega hit Frozen, the protagonist isn’t just “good” and the antagonist just “evil”; they each contain some of both ends of the polarity. We see that while the evil character may do bad things, it is a result of being mistreated or misunderstood.<br> The new lesson is that good and evil reside in each of us. The word Maleficent is itself a mash-up of the words malevolent and magnificent. And as the narrator intones in the last line of the movie (spoiler alert) as the camera pans away from the image of a newly wiser, stronger, more mature Angelina Jolie, “And so the kingdom was brought together not by a hero or a villain, but by someone who was both hero and villain…”<br> ITEM #3: CAN INTEGRAL THINKING HELP US UNDERSTAND IRAQ?<br> I begin my comments on Iraq with a look inside the minds and hearts of the jihadis who have surprised the world with their sudden success in taking over the northeast, Sunni-dominated areas of the country.<br> This week we got a remarkable view into what motivates these young men, when they released a well produced twelve minute video on YouTube, in English, directed to the young Muslim men of the West. In the video a small group of fighters, later identified as having come from the UK and Australia, sit in a row in an outside setting and tell their stories. Entitled “There is No Life Without Jihad,” the video makes a passionate case for forsaking the comforts of western life to come fight for Allah. One speaker, a Brit named Abu Bara Al Hindi, says:<br> Oh my brothers living in the west, I know how you feel. In the heart you feel depressed.
