A Shattering Breeze

Democracy's Future

2011-10-19T09:04:00.000-07:00

The Downfall of Democracy, from ApatheticVoter.com

The Downfall of Democracy

Rarely have democracies survived beyond 200 years. Why do democracies fail? Two of the major reasons are: 1) democracies generally progress through an initial period from bondage to spiritual faith escalating to the point where the citizens become totally dependent on the government to where they eventually revert back to bondage, and 2) once the democracy shows signs of prosperity, citizens vote themselves generous bounties from the public treasury. Does this not sound familiar? Is democracy only a temporary and marred refuge until social engineers miraculously discover the ultimate solution?

Democracy, or the form used in the United States and most advanced countries, representative democracy or a republic, seems to be the best method social engineers have concocted to date to afford people an opportunity to have a voice in their government. The world continues to be overrun with dictatorships, socialist governments, a few communist governments, and Islamic theocracies. We can argue the merits of democracy versus the alternatives, but at this point in history, most authorities on the subject recognize that democracy has proven to be the best solution ever tried on the planet. The United States is not the first successful democracy in the world. Over 2,500 years ago, the people of Athens, Greece created a true democratic form of government that lasted for nearly 200 years but was eventually destroyed not by the people but by a military overthrow by a powerful neighbor. On the negative side, they kept slaves in much the same manner as in the days of our fledgling democracy. The most intriguing aspect of the Athenian democracy was that the people voted directly on every issue that affected their lives. Politicians, or so-called representatives of the people, did not exist.

Although the origin of the “Downfall of Democracies” is often attributed to Alexander Tyler, a Scottish history professor who lived in the 1700s, the origin of the material below may be attributed to Alexander Tyler, or even Arnold Toynbee, or Lord Thomas Macaulay. Whoever can lay claim to the study of democracies that had existed until that time had remarkable conclusions. He had this to say about democracy in general, “A democracy is always temporary in nature: it simple cannot exist as a permanent form of government. A democracy will continue to exist up until the voters discover that they can vote themselves generous gifts from the public treasury. From that moment on, the majority will always vote for the candidates who promise the most benefits from the public treasury, with the result that every democracy will finally collapse due to loose fiscal policy, (which is) always followed by a dictatorship.”

Does this sound familiar? With almost one-third of all Americans feeding at the public trough, its only a matter of time before everyone receives some form of benefit and henceforth, the entire country will crash and burn with most likely a military dictatorship filling the void.

The professor went on to say: “The average age of the world’s greatest civilizations from the beginning of history, has been about 200 years. During those 200 years, these nations always progressed through the following sequence:

q From bondage to spiritual faith;

q From spiritual faith to great courage;

q From courage to liberty;

q From liberty to abundance;

q From abundance to complacency;

q From complacency to apathy;

q From apathy to dependence;

q From dependency back into bondage.”

Does this not sound familiar! We’ve gone from being overtaxed slaves of King George of England, to a new republic that accepted any religious faith, to a wonderful new country with a brilliant constitution, to being the richest country in the world, to today over 50% of the voters are apathetic to politics, to where a major portion of Americans are literally demanding government benefits, to eventually losing all of our freedoms (just read some sections of the Patriot Act). Many people now believe that we are now at the “apathy to dependence” phase of the professor’s theory with over 30% of the nation’s population already having reached the “governmental dependency” phase.

Let us not forget that during the 2004 presidential election, the candidates collectively amassed a war chest of over $2 billion. We know that the individuals, carpetbaggers, organizations and corporations don’t make these donations out of the goodness in their hearts. That’s when we, the citizens, get to take it on the chin in the form of government contracts and special legislation/bills that are decreed to reward these people for their excessive contributions.

To ensure our survival, that’s the future for America – eliminate the politicians. Of course I’m advocating a radical concept but it’s time to think outside the box to save the country. With emerging technologies there is realistically no reason why within 10 to 20 years we cannot eliminate the obnoxious power of Congress and place the onus of responsibility back on the people where it belongs, by voting directly on every statewide or nationwide issue. Just watch what happens to taxes and the budget if the people are directly responsible for expenditures. Of course, the professional politicians will fight that prospect with lies and every dirty trick in the book but the American people can prevail.

Best & Worst

2011-10-18T21:58:00.000-07:00

At its best, religion connects to our soul, our heart, the infinite. At its worst, it takes advantage of men's fear of death to keep them from standing up for their rights or to lead them to make war against people they should not harm.

Music

2011-10-16T20:59:00.001-07:00

Music is the human body's experience of the sensations of movement and time in a form that the ears can experience.

Plausible Denial

2011-10-14T20:21:00.001-07:00

Plausible denial (and the pursuit of having it) is the deepest sickness of our government, and a method to allow the most evil acts to occur in our name with our very own money. Even if it's usually in the interest of one individual or a select group. It is a belief that it is okay to let (or cause) others suffer and die to ensure one's own existence.

Double the Points, Double Your Fun

2011-10-13T12:41:00.000-07:00

Math For Dummies for corporate America: If your company has a reward program, and it gives you 2 points per dollar spent, and it's ALWAYS been 2 points per dollar, it's not "double points," it's "you get 2 points per dollar." It's arbitrary. You can't start a program at 21 points per dollar and say "We give you 21 times the points!"

Civil Rights Integration

2011-10-12T12:26:00.001-07:00

I just rediscovered that decades ago my parents singlehandedly integrated their church's nursery school...the school had a sponsorship program for needy children. My Dad and a friend went around banging on doors until he found parents of an african-american child that they were willing to send to the nursery school. Then they marched him into the school, with the church's pastor, assistant and teacher ready to hand over their resignations if the council tried to kick him out. This, from my parents, who don't always make the best assumptions about other cultures. I'm humbled.

2011-10-11T13:04:00.001-07:00

Laughter is the strangest thing that the human mind is capable of. It is not words, it is the mind producing a physical reaction to the absurdity of the universe.

Ftroop 5/11

2011-05-11T07:09:00.001-07:00

<a href="http://www.mapmyrun.com/routes/view/34028472">Ftroop 5/11 (2)</a><br/>
<a href="http://www.mapmyrun.com/routes/?location=Fort Wayne, IN">Find more Runs in Fort Wayne, IN</a>

2010-07-12T13:26:00.001-07:00

"The program for this evening is not new. You've seen this entertainment through and through. You've seen your birth, your life and death. You might recall all the rest. Did you have a good world when you died? Enough to base a movie on?"

Jim Morrison

"When the doors of perception are cleansed, things will appear as they truly are: Infinite."

William Blake

New Posts

2010-04-22T08:20:00.000-07:00

Please note: I will be posting several writings from my Myspace blog here today; they're from different times in the last several months but I just realized that I hadn't kept up with posting in both places so I wanted to get them synched up again. Enjoy!

2009-06-25T10:50:00.000-07:00

Say nothing of my religion. It is known to God and myself alone. Its evidence before the world is to be sought in my life: if it has been honest and dutiful to society the religion which has regulated it cannot be a bad one. -- Thomas Jefferson

Subtleties

2009-06-24T08:20:00.000-07:00

(From a scene in the book "Assassin of Gor" by John Norman; the characters are using intricate knots of rope of 50 to 100 knots to keep out intruders and show them whether anyone had entered their room -- because if an intruder undid the knot, they would not be able to put it back together the same way. The narrating character, Tarl Cabot, had designed a very complicated knot and showed it to his companion, Elizabeth; she wanted to not only learn his knot but design her own as well, because this would be fun and she could make one that would show her personality. Though he thought they should just use the same knot and that would be difficult enough, he was persuaded.)

It is perhaps suprising, but I think there would have been little difficulty telling which knot had been tied by a man and which by a woman; moreover, though this was much subtler, Elizabeth's knot did, in its way, remind me of her. It was intelligent, intricate, rather aesthetically done and, here and there, in little bendings and loopings, playful. In such a small thing as these knots I was again reminded of the central differences in sex and personality that divide human beings, differences expressed in thousands of subtleties, many of which are often overlooked, as in the way a piece of cloth might be folded, a letter formed, a color remembered, a phrase turned. In all things, it seemed to me, we manifest ourselves, each differently.

The Paradoxical Commandments

2009-06-11T07:49:00.000-07:00

The Paradoxical Commandments
by Dr. Kent M. Keith

(Originally published by Dr. Keith for a student training booklet in 1968, this list has since gained international renown and he has published two books on them, as well as one on understanding the paradoxical nature of many of Jesus's commandments.)

**************************

People are illogical, unreasonable, and self-centered.
Love them anyway.

If you do good, people will accuse you of selfish ulterior motives.
Do good anyway.

If you are successful, you will win false friends and true enemies.
Succeed anyway.

The good you do today will be forgotten tomorrow.
Do good anyway.

Honesty and frankness make you vulnerable.
Be honest and frank anyway.

The biggest men and women with the biggest ideas can be shot down by the smallest men and women with the smallest minds.
Think big anyway.

People favor underdogs but follow only top dogs.
Fight for a few underdogs anyway.

What you spend years building may be destroyed overnight.
Build anyway.

People really need help but may attack you if you do help them.
Help people anyway.

Give the world the best you have and you'll get kicked in the teeth.
Give the world the best you have anyway.

Current

2009-06-10T12:05:00.000-07:00

Everything you hold must fall eventually.
Why not send it on its way, with whispers
And an open palm so you can blow it blissfully away,
Letting the wind take it upon its whim?
Does it matter the destination?
Or do you deem yourself decider of its fate?
I beg to differ.
You never make a thing's fate less uncertain
Than when you grip it with all your strength.
Pure will and arbitrary decisions, you say;
They mean nothing when we pass away.
Fate is upon the way the sand falls,
The way the pebbles slide,
The way you react to the never-ending flow.

William A. Otis

Summer apex

2009-06-10T12:04:00.001-07:00

When the summer comes, and you can sense the rising heat all the way to your bones
You can feel even in the middle of the night that the heat will not go away,
There will be no permanent cooling, it will not sap our inner heat so much that
It will not be built up again even stronger and hotter the next day.
There is a feeling of endless strength, of a world that is not drawing in
But going forth further and further every day with more and more energy,
More fury, more spectacular feats and variety and life.
Summer is an endless source of energy we are too small to contain,
And we seek to let it out, let out the excess we know we cannot
Do justice to without bigger feats and a rage of self-expression that
Might resemble the hot, expanding world around us in some small way.

William A. Otis

2008-09-25T18:36:00.000-07:00

Into a soul absolutely free
From thoughts and emotion
Even the tiger finds no room
To insert its fierce claws.

One and the same breeze passes
Over the pines on the mountain
And the oak trees in the valley;
And why do they give different notes?

No thinking, no reflecting,
Perfect emptiness;
Yet therein something moves,
Following its own course.

The eye sees it,
But no hands can take hold of it --
The moon in the stream.

Clouds and the mists,
They are midair transformations;
Above them eternally shine the sun and the moon.

Victory is for the one,
Even before the combat,
Who has no thought of himself,
Abiding in the no-mind-ness of Great Origin.

- A Taoist Priest

...From the opening pages of "Tao of Jeet Kune Do," Bruce Lee's posthumous masterpiece on his theory of martial arts. I am somewhat mourning that I sold a copy of it today.

"The point is the doing of them rather than the accomplishments. There is no actor but the action; there is no experiencer but the experience."

I'm A PC Ad

2008-09-20T09:01:00.000-07:00

My comments on this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9V7NoRjI0H0

This is more a commercial for the people who already have a PC or at least know the difference between a PC and a Mac. It's a metaphor, folks. You can do anything with a PC. You can only do with a Mac what the Mac wants/allows, and it's damn little. You can program/add-on/create almost anything with a PC right out of the box that costs thousands less than a Mac with comparable customization and commercial/creative abilities. You can get right into the guts of a PC, a Mac is a shiny box with a few buttons. You can tear a PC apart with little or no training and make it something completely different than what you started with, because that's what PCs are designed to be -- adaptable, compatible, like puzzle pieces you can put together however you want (on both the hardware and software side). The difference is like the difference between a pretty picture and an industrial-strength erector set, at least for me. There's also the subject of the way the Mac ads indeed portrayed PCs and their users as a very unattractive and inaccurate stereotype, but I think that goes without saying.

Also, keep in mind: PC doesn't have to and/or can't put out ads the way Mac does. That's because PCs aren't one company -- PC ISN'T A MONOPOLY. It's an open concept used by thousands of manufacturers, not one company doing all the supplying AND pricing. You can get what what you want with a PC; you get (and give) what *they* want with a Mac. Ever heard of a little place called the Soviet Union? Macs are kinda like that, complete with a shiny, whitewashed appearance and plenty of propaganda.

A Clockwork Orange/Freedoms

2008-09-08T12:15:00.001-07:00

I had a sort of conversation through Myspace comments with someone the other day regarding the movie A Clockwork Orange -- she was too disturbed/revolted by it now due to the rape/murder content, despite having liked it when she was younger. I'm not sure how many people are aware that this is exactly how the movie is supposed to make you feel, and for very good reason. The point or question it presents is, would you rather that human beings had free will, no matter what the consequences? Specifically as to the examples in the movie, do you want everyone to have free will even if it means a few (or even many) people are going to get raped, robbed or killed? Is our faith in justice and the police system enough to calm our fury over these crimes? Or, as it really seems to be asking, is the importance or beauty of free will enough to make putting up with these crimes worth it?

A similar film in many ways is Larry Flynt. In this case the question is, are the principles of free speech and freedom of the press so important that can we can put up with people trying to publish anything and everything, no matter how offensive to our particular sensibilities or morals? In both cases and to most people, the answer is yes. But these films take us to the very brink of our commitment to our beliefs, showing us the worst possible consequences of allowing others to make their own decisions. We can shield porn from children, we can put criminals in jail, but that's about it. I think that the beauty of these movies is the way they remind us how important our beliefs are, how beautiful the things they represent are, and how much we may be sacrificing for them, making them all the more precious. Most of the principles this country was founded on (the various rights, commitments and tolerances) are truly beautiful things, particularly in the way they transcend individual communities, governments and religions; when we try to pin them down to one particular group's beliefs and restrict them, we take away their power and beauty and ruin them. A freedom is only meaningful and inspiring if it is complete.

On a side note, his is also why I am against most of the circumventions of civil rights placed on us since 9/11; if we allow our freedom to be stifled (our communications monitored, our houses searched when we aren't home, our civil rights suspended if arrested in relation to "homeland security," ad nauseum) because of a few terrorists, then they have already won. It would be much more beautiful to continue living our lives the way we want to, without fear, knowing it is right.

Alternate thinking about how to help

2008-02-27T07:57:00.000-08:00

The following was originally written on a Facebook application that was supposedly dedicated to helping the poor but does not appear to be run by any known organization.

***

First of all, I like the idea of this group but I would like to see some official information as to the organization behind it (if any), their tax status and so forth, to determine if we are dealing with an individual or an actual charity. Since I have some doubts as to the validity of this application and its owner's actions and methodology, I just wanted to point out some alternative ways to help the needy/starving.

1. Give to food banks and thrift stores. This is a no-brainer -- you have extra food, you buy some extra food, or clothes, whatever, then you take it to your local food bank or charity store (Goodwill, Salvation Army, etc.). This helps people in your own area, as well.

2. Save all that time you would have spent clicking and just make a donation. For myself personally, I run a home business (as a rare book dealer) and should be spending most of my computer time listing new things for sale or fulfilling orders. This makes a great impact on my income and would make it easier to just make a donation to a charity that I can pick out myself. Even $10 would probably be more than is raised by my clicks in a year's time, if you understand how banner and click advertising works (I do, I use Google Adsense and have used Engage, ValueClick, and numerous other publisher/advertiser programs in the past). Your situation may be different; but it's something to think about.

3. Buy Fair Trade goods. Fair Trade goods are bought from the producers at prices that allow the seller to make a profit but still give the producer a fair shake instead of pennies per day. This helps them, their families and communities immensely and Fair Trade programs are also usually tied to programs to improve education and sustainability in third world countries. You may have to go to health food stores or specialty gift stores to find such products, but they are becoming more abundant in stores and are easy to find online.

4. Invest in or donate to microfinance programs. These are programs that give poor people the chance to break the cycle of their poverty and go into business. Often these are people that already have businesses but are so poor that they are locked into business deals that yield almost no income, such as a basket weaver that cannot buy her own supplies so she makes her baskets for someone else at pennies per product. These people sometimes only need the equivalent of $10-$25 to get out of these horrible situations. You can donate small amounts to these programs or invest in them, in which case your money is returned with interest and you are still helping others immensely. There are also mutual funds that do some microfinance investing, such as the PAX World mutual funds. In my opinion this is the best idea since donations are meaningless unless the people can begin to produce food and income for themselves.

5. Go green and conserve resources. Until the world switches completely to renewable energy (which I don't see happening by the end of this century), our energy and materials (metals, etc.) are finite. Finding ways to save energy saves you money and leaves more for the people who can ill afford rising energy prices (and keeps those prices from rising more steeply). Likewise with recycling; prices for metals and other materials have skyrocketed in the last five years and will continue to do so without extensive recycling and more creative use of materials by manufacturers. Recycling does our part to make sure the little people can afford the things they need as well.

6. Buy locally from the little guy. Buying food and other goods locally saves greenhouse gases and helps those in your community immensely. Of each dollar you spend at a national chain, around $.40 is returned to your own community and the rest goes to corporate expenses and coffers. Of each $1 you spend at a farmer's market or locally-owned store, usually $.65 or more makes it directly to your community. It may seem that this does not impact people around the world, but it does both through the benefit to the environment, the money not getting "lost" in corporations, and the fact that this is thinking about the "big picture" -- "thinking globally, acting locally." This is what everyone else around the world should be doing (in Tunisia, in Kenya, in Bangladesh) so we should do it here as well.

Just a few thoughts, I will add more if I get a chance. If you think some of these things take a little more effort, thought or observation, you are right -- but to those who care, it is worth it and can even become like a game and a fun and rewarding habit to have.

William A. Otis
http://media-log.blogspot.com

New Portishead Album

2008-02-17T10:28:00.000-08:00

Just a bit of news that is very important to me and might be to you: Portishead is putting out a new album! One of my favorite bands of the 90's (think minimalist techno with classy, emotional lyrics) is coming out with their first album in eight years. I thought they were lost to the sands of time and weren't even together anymore...this didn't make me stop listening to them since their music is so timeless, but I'm completely thrilled that they're coming back. Read more about it here: http://www.buzznet.com/web/music/journals/entry/1833241/portishead-back-new-album/

Ron Paul

2007-12-30T18:52:00.000-08:00

I am becoming a Ron Paul addict...try the "Republican" the Republicans hate...even though he stands for what they say they've wanted all along. Ron Paul is so "old school" he seems like a living version of our founding fathers, and somehow that is quite refreshing. He exposes the things no one wants to talk about, the things that are rapidly destroying our country -- like the way the Federal Reserve is subtly taxing the nation's poor by printing massive amounts of money and making our money worth less and less. The Fed, which is in control of our nation's currency, is in fact a private corporation...look into it.

Thoreau's departure

2007-11-20T07:41:00.001-08:00

One thing most people don't know about Henry David Thoreau is that he didn't really leave the woods. We often hear his quote: "I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one," and think that's all there is to it. People like to talk about his time there as if it were a brief flash of revelation in his life, something he tried, found amazing and fulfilling for a time but ultimately wanting -- basically giving us "an out" as to our own desire to live in harmony with nature, making our brief trips to the park seem like enough. The truth is...I'll use a paraphrased version from the book "At Home in the Woods" (1949?) by Brad and Vena Angier:

"Besides...Well, I still don't understand how Thoreau went wrong. He must have been wrong in leaving the woods when all that meant so much to him. Yet he was so right in everything else."
"But he was never really wrong, not in real life. That's where we made our mistake." I managed to smile, and I lifted my face. His questioning lips touched mine, warm and alive. "Thoreau left his cabin, yes. He didn't mention the rest of it in that book we have, but I've finally been reading more about him as we always said we would."
"What do you mean?" Brad asked.
"Thoreau moved only as far as Concord where he used to walk regularly from the cabin, anyway," I said. "He spent the rest of his life roaming about the same woods, the same fields, and the same Walden Pond."

This revelation sent the authors of the book back to the wilderness of Northern Canada (this time mostly permanently), and has strengthened my resolve to move to the country and live a more sustainable lifestyle in the future. I leave you with two other important quotes, the first being his reason for moving to the woods, and the second his conclusion regarding the experience.

"I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived."

"I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with success unexpected in common hours."

And perhaps a couple of the most essentials truths he learned while there...

"Most of the luxuries, and many of the so-called comforts of life, are not only dispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind."

"What people say you cannot do, you try and find that you can."

Moments that changed my life - Neil Young/Pearl Jam

2007-10-09T14:30:00.000-07:00

There are three moments in my life involving music that I look at as having changed it (and/or my tastes and understandings) decisively; this is one. It was the MTV Music Awards, 1993. This was when MTV's name still meant something; and what's more, it was when MTV had been forcibly invaded (by way of its viewers and the record-buying public) by people that actually gave a shit about the music and what it was saying. It was probably one of the most anticipated MTV awards, with grunge and "alternative" rock having reached a peak far outshining other genres; only in this case, that didn't mean dumbing down and settling for the lowest common denominator -- it meant a continued reaching for meaning and high art (albeit by way of flannel and occasional smashing of equipment to further drive home the point that this was not an ego or glamour contest). As you can probably tell, I was a big fan of the Pearl Jam/Nirvana/Live/REM revolution.

And out walks (though I didn't know it at the time) the epitome of their ideals -- Neil Young. To me it was simply an old, somewhat unsightly old man. I was of the MTV generation; then, (unlike now), I knew next to nothing of the 60's and 70's. However, the music was incredible, the tune and words were familiar (and..."pleasant" or pleasing in a way most music at that time was not), and the energy of the entire room was like nothing I'd ever seen. Then came Neil's new verses throwing a direct attack at George Bush the first (something I had hardly considered doing at that point in my life -- most of us just followed him blindly -- Heil Bush!), and then the most insane (almost psychotic) and best-sounding guitar solo I had ever heard. The rest is history. Below are two versions of the performance, one seems to be widescreen and the other full-screen -- the latter's detail is quite a bit better.

2007-09-13T14:06:00.000-07:00

Slowly, people are coming around to the idea that improving a thing is not as important as appreciating and understanding what it is.

Organic Junk Food?

2007-08-31T07:09:00.000-07:00

I've been reading "Sane Living in a Mad World: A Guide to the Organic Way of Life" by Robert Rodale (1972). Note the year and the author; this is the Rodale, the same one whose Rodale Press has published hundreds of books on gardening and growing things over the years, as well as other products. The year of publication was 1972 -- 35 years ago. Organic farming is a very old idea -- indeed, "old as the hills," but even its current resurgence is much older than the 5 or 10 years since we started seeing a respectable amount of organic products on the store shelves. Robert Rodale's father, J. I. Rodale, is actually credited with introducing the organic idea to the U.S. in 1942 - some 65 years ago. I found the following quote from the book on refined foods that I found quite interesting: (emphasis my own)

"Organically-grown food is handled differently after it is harvested. It is not refined, chemically treated, or processed beyond the dictates of bare necessity. There is no such thing as organically grown white bread, for example, since by refining the wheat you would destroy its "organic" quality. You can see that the word organic has grown beyond its original farm and garden meaning, and has become a matter of interest and concern to all people who want to improve their health."

Note the very broad and decisive statement that there is no such thing as organic white bread, and that it is said by someone with such authority on the subject and presented as fact. It was basically considered to be self-evident that "organic" meant preserving the organic nature of not one but three things: the soil, the food, and the food as it will be presented to the public. This means increasing the organic material in the soil and not presenting any refined/dangerous/toxic chemicals to it; harvesting food from that soil that contains no refined chemicals; and in fact presenting the food to the public in an "organic" state, which a refined/pure chemical is not. This actually did seem self-evident to me, as I balked the first time I saw food items that included "refined organic cane sugar" or "sea salt" in them. Sea salt is technically still a "whole food;" it is similar to honey in that it is predominantly one chemical, yet contains small amounts of many other minerals and/or vitamins. But when we have companies pushing Oreos with "organic flour and sugar," I think we've gone too far. If these are the only organic items in these Oreos, they are not two important things:

1. 70% of the ingredients are most likely not organic. (Which is the usual definition of whether an item can be certified as organic -- most people prefer 100% actually)
2. It is not a "whole food."

This brings to light a few important things we need to think about with "organic foods," lest we buy anything that mentions the "o" word and think we're getting our money's worth in the form of better taste, less toxins and more benefits to our health.

A. Food that was organically-grown but then refined is no longer "organic" in nature but a refined chemical. It does not contain a healthy balance of calories-vitamins-minerals which is a primary goal of organic eating.

B. Food that has been shipped from another country or even several states away may have lost much of its nutrients along the way, and may have used up an awful lot of fossil fuels to get to you (an increasing concern among vegetarians and organic enthusiasts). Caveat emptor.

C. Food that was organically-grown but then processed in numerous ways (especially those that involve cooking or soaking) will have lost much of their nutrients and become more of a refined chemical product than an organic/whole food. Check the vitamin content of processed "organic" foods; if they're the same as their non-organic counterparts you may be doing a little better than if you bought the national brand, but you're probably not getting your money's worth. You're paying extra for all the processing the manufacturer did to the food, so you are basically paying them to degrade your food.

In summary I would like to see store items such as those touted for their "organic white flour" also having in the same print size a note that they are not a certified organic food, nor a whole food. And perhaps we should begin to be a bit more vocal (with our mouths or pocketbooks) about the types of foods and ingredients we expect to see available to us, lest we end up with the same old junk food, processed chemically and mechanically to the point of mutilation, simply minus the poisons (pesticides/chemical fertilizer residues) and drugs (antibiotics/hormones/etc.). While that would be a minor victory, we would still be an obese nation prone to diabetes, heart disease and cancer -- which are the main problems whole foods and exercise are meant to solve.

Ayn Rand vs. Taoism, and the Spirit Festival

2007-04-24T09:02:00.001-07:00

This is something that I've felt a need to clear up/figure out since I became so interested in objectivism/individualism via Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. If we are supposed to reason everything, where does that leave our instincts and spirituality? How do the characters in Atlas Shrugged occasionally seem to reach moments of a similarly sublime lack of conscious effort despite the completely logical underpinnings of their philosophy? I see two things here: One, that logic is part of our nature and so giving in totally to using it can bring a sense of freedom of its own; and two, that perhaps Ayn Rand hated collectivism so much that she ignored the ways in which we are actually one (an integral part of Taoism). But I will skip over that and explain why the two seem to be compatible.

Taoists believe that modern society has brought us away from our true selves, and we find that again by being harmonious with nature (including our own) and studying it. Logic is part of our nature, and we should use it; instincts are also part of our nature and should be used as well. If we are in harmony with nature enough (or one with the Tao you might say), we will use both when each is needed and not have to give the matter much thought. We will think logically but not have to make effort to do so; we are without dogma or preconceived notions, which makes us open to more and subtler possibilities, which has given Taoists a slightly unfounded supernatural reputation (though Taoism is more like science and has indeed founded many scientific discoveries and inventions). Taoist religion is a separate tradition involving many gods and such (Taoism has one, if any), and is in my opinion what happens when we are not just open to more and subtler possibilities, but accepting of almost any of them with little discernment or judgment (a tendency that sometimes befalls New Age traditions in the Western world).

Which brings me to the Spirit Festival, an event that's coming up in my area; I really want to go but almost feel that I will need some sort of button or handout explaining my views if I am to successfully say "no, thank you" to offers of tons of things or services I don't believe in. I haven't been to something like this, but even a seance can be a uncomfortable situation for me due to my philosophy. Basic Taoism presents little dogma, such that I can actually sum my position up in one paragraph (hence I am tempted to shorten it to a little card to pass out if I am lured into an argument, lol):

As a Taoist, I basically believe in only one thing: the Tao (though the Tao encompasses everything). I don't believe in dogma and don't really have any. I do have a belief in certain things that seem self-evident to me, such as yin and yang, the Tao's existence (the existence of reality and the way it works), the laws of physics, and so on. I believe that logic is part of my nature and must be used, and it is only modern society's coddling that allows us to get away with not using it as the rule. My philosophy demands that I observe nature and try to understand it (and be harmonious with it), and that places a high hurdle on the belief in anything supernatural, unless it can be experienced directly. I seek to observe objectively and effortlessly, and act intuitively and effortlessly. If something is not obvious or proven to me, I will likely give it little time -- though that is not the same as saying it cannot be real or that someone could not have discovered something new.

India...is going to kick our ass.

2007-04-20T19:59:00.000-07:00

India

(I thought about calling this post "We're going to be India's biatch." but decided against it. ;) ) Just some quick food for thought...India has approximately two and a half times our population. They are one of the fastest growing economies in the world, and their GDP (Gross Domestic Product -- the sum of their efforts to manufacture products and offer services) has long been expected to be higher than ours by 2030 if I remember right. A few things people don't often talk about include India's "addiction" to gold. They literally tend to not consider their country's money to be "money" the way we see ours. They look at it as a way to trade their efforts for more gold (Ayn Rand would be quite proud of this perception, I think). They buy jewelry, coins, bars. They have over 290 billion dollars worth of it. I'm not going to give you a long treatise on the way world currencies and precious metals work, I'll just say this: If you take a long look at history you will find that the value of any civilization and country's currency always eventually returns to where it started: zero. Gold, however, has always been valuable. Its properties and reasons for value never change (literally).

Anyway, a couple other interesting facts are that certain companies in the country of India are planning to produce an automobile that will cost $2,500, putting cars within reach of millions upon millions of Indians and doing for their country what Henry Ford did for ours. This will radically change their economy as well. Lastly, I think something has to be said for countries such as India and China whose philosophies and religions are quite frankly designed to expect and transcend suffering; I think this and their astute view of the value of things has something to do with why people on that side of the world do so well everywhere else (and are so willing to go through seven years of schooling, while many of us can hardly stand to get through high school). Anyway I don't think any of this is a bad thing, as I've said before I think the entire world deserves to be like us (at least in the ways we're not completely mucking things up), I just find it very interesting.

Methane: Ticking Time-Bomb

2007-04-20T08:31:00.000-07:00

Well, I'm pretty much convinced we're screwed now. Having read this article, I'm not sure there's any way out of another mass extinction based on global warming. I had read similar items before but it hadn't really sunk in. I guess the fact is, there have been mass extinctions before from the methane calthrates (sp?) "melting" into the atmosphere, including the worst one of all time 250 million years ago, after which there was virtually nothing on most of the earth including the ocean. There's an excellent book on that extinction. Anyway all it took was a rise of about 10 degrees fahrenheit; we'll most likely hit that even if we stop making greenhouse gasses now. Barring something spectacular such as putting something (non-harmful) into the atmosphere that will block most of the sun's rays (we've already been blocking much of them with our particulate pollution, which, ironically and perhaps harmfully, we're now trying to get rid of), I feel pretty strongly that it'll happen. I wish I could tell you something hopeful, but I don't think I can. I think many of us will have to end up getting off the planet or dying; it seems clear to me that the planet can't sustain this many of us. Perhaps with entirely renewable energy we can sustain life, but I'm not sure we can keep making our iPods and beanie babies. I'll write more about this later after giving some consideration to what life would be like without all of our "things," and whether it is worth it.

John Galt tidbit

2007-04-11T17:07:00.000-07:00

John Galt tidbit

One of my favorite bits from John Galt's speech in Atlas Shrugged. Perhaps it will entice you to pick up the book or an audiobook edition, which is what I've been listening to.

"Damnation is the start of your morality, destruction is its purpose, means and end. Your code begins by damning man as evil, then demands that he practice a good which it defines as impossible for him to practice. It demands, as his first proof of virtue, that he accept his own depravity without proof. It demands that he start, not with a standard of value, but with a standard of evil, which is himself, by means of which he is then to define the good: the good is that which he is not.

"It does not matter who then becomes the profiteer on his renounced glory and tormented soul, a mystic God with some incomprehensible design or any passer-by whose rotting sores are held as some inexplicable claim upon him—it does not matter, the good is not for him to understand, his duty is to crawl through years of penance, atoning for the guilt of his existence to any stray collector of unintelligible debts, his only concept of a value is a zero: the good is that which is non-man."The name of this monstrous absurdity is Original Sin.

"A sin without volition is a slap at morality and an insolent contradiction in terms: that which is outside the possibility of choice is outside the province of morality. If man is evil by birth, he has no will, no power to change it; if he has no will, he can be neither good nor evil; a robot is amoral. To hold, as man's sin, a fact not open to his choice is a mockery of morality. To hold man's nature as his sin is a mockery of nature. To punish him for a crime he committed before he was born is a mockery of justice. To hold him guilty in a matter where no innocence exists is a mockery of reason. To destroy morality, nature, justice and reason by means of a single concept is a feat of evil hardly to be matched. Yet that is the root of your code.

"Do not hide behind the cowardly evasion that man is born with free will, but with a 'tendency' to evil. A free will saddled with a tendency is like a game with loaded dice. It forces man to struggle through the effort of playing, to bear responsibility and pay for the game, but the decision is weighted in favor of a tendency that he had no power to escape. If the tendency is of his choice, he cannot possess it at birth; if it is not of his choice, his will is not free.

"What is the nature of the guilt that your teachers call his Original Sin? What are the evils man acquired when he fell from a state they consider perfection? Their myth declares that he ate the fruit of the tree of knowledge—he acquired a mind and became a rational being. It was the knowledge of good and evil-he became a mortal being. He was sentenced to earn his bread by his labor—he became a productive being. He was sentenced to experience desire—he acquired the capacity of sexual enjoyment. The evils for which they damn him are reason, morality, creativeness; joy—all the cardinal values of his existence. It is not his vices that their myth of man's fall is designed to explain and condemn, it is not his errors that they hold as his guilt, but the essence of his nature as man. Whatever he was—that robot in the Garden of Eden, who existed without mind, without values, without labor, without love—he was not man.

"Man's fall, according to your teachers, was that he gained the virtues required to live. These virtues, by their standard, are his Sin. His evil, they charge, is that he's man. His guilt, they charge, is that he lives.

"They call it a morality of mercy and a doctrine of love for man. No, they say, they do not preach that man is evil, the evil is only that alien object: his body. No, they say, they do not wish to kill him, they only wish to make him lose his body. They seek to help him, they say, against his pain—and they point at the torture rack to which they've tied him, the rack with two wheels that pull him in opposite directions, the rack of the doctrine that splits his soul and body.

"They have cut man in two, setting one half against the other. They have taught him that his body and his consciousness are two enemies engaged in deadly conflict, two antagonists of opposite natures, contradictory claims, incompatible needs, that to benefit one is to injure the other, that his soul belongs to a supernatural realm, but his body is an evil prison holding it in bondage to this earth—and that the good is to defeat his body, to undermine it by years of patient struggle, digging his way to that gorgeous jail-break which leads into the freedom of the grave.

"They have taught man that he is a hopeless misfit made of two elements, both symbols of death. A body without a soul is a corpse, a soul without a body is a ghost—yet such is their image of man's nature: the battleground of a struggle between a corpse and a ghost, a corpse endowed with some evil volition of its own and a ghost endowed with the knowledge that everything known to man is nonexistent, that only the unknowable exists.

CrimethInc vs. Ayn Rand

2007-04-08T13:09:00.000-07:00

I saw a bulletin about CrimethInc.com recently, and after reading some of their material I think I know who they are, and I think certain people have already been speaking to them for 60 years. To them, I submit the Francisco d'Aconia "money" speech from Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. I think no further case is needed. If I am wrong, I still have John Galt in my back pocket. For an antithesis of Crimethinc.com try Working-Minds.com. Without further ado, Fransico.

Rearden heard Bertram Scudder, outside the group, say to a girl who made some sound of indignation, "Don't let him disturb you. You know, money is the root of all evil – and he's the typical product of money."

Rearden did not think that Francisco could have heard it, but he saw Francisco turning to them with a gravely courteous smile.

"So you think that money is the root of all evil?" said Francisco d'Aconia. "Have you ever asked what is the root of money? Money is a tool of exchange, which can't exist unless there are goods produced and men able to produce them. Money is the material shape of the principle that men who wish to deal with one another must deal by trade and give value for value. Money is not the tool of the moochers, who claim your product by tears, or of the looters, who take it from you by force. Money is made possible only by the men who produce. Is this what you consider evil?

"When you accept money in payment for your effort, you do so only on the conviction that you will exchange it for the product of the effort of others. It is not the moochers or the looters who give value to money. Not an ocean of tears nor all the guns in the world can transform those pieces of paper in your wallet into the bread you will need to survive tomorrow. Those pieces of paper, which should have been gold, are a token of honor – your claim upon the energy of the men who produce. Your wallet is your statement of hope that somewhere in the world around you there are men who will not default on that moral principle which is the root of money. Is this what you consider evil?

"Have you ever looked for the root of production? Take a look at an electric generator and dare tell yourself that it was created by the muscular effort of unthinking brutes. Try to grow a seed of wheat without the knowledge left to you by men who had to discover it for the first time. Try to obtain your food by means of nothing but physical motions – and you'll learn that man's mind is the root of all the goods produced and of all the wealth that has ever existed on earth.

"But you say that money is made by the strong at the expense of the weak? What strength do you mean? It is not the strength of guns or muscles. Wealth is the product of man's capacity to think. Then is money made by the man who invents a motor at the expense of those who did not invent it? Is money made by the intelligent at the expense of the fools? By the able at the expense of the incompetent? By the ambitious at the expense of the lazy? Money is made – before it can be looted or mooched – made by the effort of every honest man, each to the extent of his ability. An honest man is one who knows that he can't consume more than he has produced.

"To trade by means of money is the code of the men of good will. Money rests on the axiom that every man is the owner of his mind and his effort. Money allows no power to prescribe the value of your effort except by the voluntary choice of the man who is willing to trade you his effort in return. Money permits you to obtain for your goods and your labor that which they are worth to the men who buy them, but no more. Money permits no deals except those to mutual benefit by the unforced judgment of the traders. Money demands of you the recognition that men must work for their own benefit, not for their own injury, for their gain, not their loss – the recognition that they are not beasts of burden, born to carry the weight of your misery – that you must offer them values, not wounds – that the common bond among men is not the exchange of suffering, but the exchange of goods. Money demands that you sell, not your weakness to men's stupidity, but your talent to their reason; it demands that you buy, not the shoddiest they offer, but the best your money can find. And when men live by trade – with reason, not force, as their final arbiter – it is the best product that wins, the best performance, then man of best judgment and highest ability – and the degree of a man's productiveness is the degree of his reward. This is the code of existence whose tool and symbol is money. Is this what you consider evil?

"But money is only a tool. It will take you wherever you wish, but it will not replace you as the driver. It will give you the means for the satisfaction of your desires, but it will not provide you with desires. Money is the scourge of the men who attempt to reverse the law of causality – the men who seek to replace the mind by seizing the products of the mind.

"Money will not purchase happiness for the man who has no concept of what he wants; money will not give him a code of values, if he's evaded the knowledge of what to value, and it will not provide him with a purpose, if he's evaded the choice of what to seek. Money will not buy intelligence for the fool, or admiration for the coward, or respect for the incompetent. The man who attempts to purchase the brains of his superiors to serve him, with his money replacing his judgment, ends up by becoming the victim of his inferiors. The men of intelligence desert him, but the cheats and the frauds come flocking to him, drawn by a law which he has not discovered: that no man may be smaller than his money. Is this the reason why you call it evil?

"Only the man who does not need it, is fit to inherit wealth – the man who would make his own fortune no matter where he started. If an heir is equal to his money, it serves him; if not, it destroys him. But you look on and you cry that money corrupted him. Did it? Or did he corrupt his money? Do not envy a worthless heir; his wealth is not yours and you would have done no better with it. Do not think that it should have been distributed among you; loading the world with fifty parasites instead of one would not bring back the dead virtue which was the fortune. Money is a living power that dies without its root. Money will not serve that mind that cannot match it. Is this the reason why you call it evil?

"Money is your means of survival. The verdict which you pronounce upon the source of your livelihood is the verdict you pronounce upon your life. If the source is corrupt, you have damned your own existence. Did you get your money by fraud? By pandering to men's vices or men's stupidity? By catering to fools, in the hope of getting more than your ability deserves? By lowering your standards? By doing work you despise for purchasers you scorn? If so, then your money will not give you a moment's or a penny's worth of joy. Then all the things you buy will become, not a tribute to you, but a reproach; not an achievement, but a reminder of shame. Then you'll scream that money is evil. Evil, because it would not pinch-hit for your self-respect? Evil, because it would not let you enjoy your depravity? Is this the root of your hatred of money?

"Money will always remain an effect and refuse to replace you as the cause. Money is the product of virtue, but it will not give you virtue and it will not redeem your vices. Money will not give you the unearned, neither in matter nor in spirit. Is this the root of your hatred of money?

"Or did you say it's the love of money that's the root of all evil? To love a thing is to know and love its nature. To love money is to know and love the fact that money is the creation of the best power within you, and your passkey to trade your effort for the effort of the best among men. It's the person who would sell his soul for a nickel, who is the loudest in proclaiming his hatred of money – and he has good reason to hate it. The lovers of money are willing to work for it. They know they are able to deserve it.

"Let me give you a tip on a clue to men's characters: the man who damns money has obtained it dishonorably; the man who respects it has earned it.

"Run for your life from any man who tells you that money is evil. That sentence is the leper's bell of an approaching looter. So long as men live together on earth and need means to deal with one another – their only substitute, if they abandon money, is the muzzle of a gun.

"But money demands of you the highest virtues, if you wish to make it or to keep it. Men who have no courage, pride, or self-esteem, men who have no moral sense of their right to their money and are not willing to defend it as they defend their life, men who apologize for being rich – will not remain rich for long. They are the natural bait for the swarms of looters that stay under rocks for centuries, but come crawling out at the first smell of a man who begs to be forgiven for the guilt of owning wealth. They will hasten to relieve him of the guilt – and of his life, as he deserves.

"Then you will see the rise of the double standard – the men who live by force, yet count on those who live by trade to create the value of their looted money – the men who are the hitchhikers of virtue. In a moral society, these are the criminals, and the statutes are written to protect you against them. But when a society establishes criminals-by-right and looters-by-law – men who use force to seize the wealth of disarmed victims – then money becomes its creators' avenger. Such looters believe it safe to rob defenseless men, once they've passed a law to disarm them. But their loot becomes the magnet for other looters, who get it from them as they got it. Then the race goes, not to the ablest at production, but to those most ruthless at brutality. When force is the standard, the murderer wins over the pickpocket. And then that society vanishes, in a spread of ruins and slaughter.

"Do you wish to know whether that day is coming? Watch money. Money is the barometer of a society's virtue. When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion – when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing – when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors – when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don't protect you against them, but protect them against you – when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice – you may know that your society is doomed. Money is so noble a medium that it does not compete with guns and it does not make terms with brutality. It will not permit a country to survive as half-property, half-loot.

"Whenever destroyers appear among men, they start by destroying money, for money is men's protection and the base of a moral existence. Destroyers seize gold and leave to its owners a counterfeit pile of paper. This kills all objective standards and delivers men into the arbitrary power of an arbitrary setter of values. Gold was an objective value, an equivalent of wealth produced. Paper is a mortgage on wealth that does not exist, backed by a gun aimed at those who are expected to produce it. Paper is a check drawn by legal looters upon an account which is not theirs: upon the virtue of the victims. Watch for the day when it becomes, marked: 'Account overdrawn.'

"When you have made evil the means of survival, do not expect men to remain good. Do not expect them to stay moral and lose their lives for the purpose of becoming the fodder of the immoral. Do not expect them to produce, when production is punished and looting rewarded. Do not ask, 'Who is destroying the world?' You are.

"You stand in the midst of the greatest achievements of the greatest productive civilization and you wonder why it's crumbling around you, while you're damning its life-blood – money. You look upon money as the savages did before you, and you wonder why the jungle is creeping back to the edge of your cities. Throughout men's history, money was always seized by looters of one brand or another, but whose method remained the same: to seize wealth by force and to keep the producers bound, demeaned, defamed, deprived of honor. That phrase about the evil of money, which you mouth with such righteous recklessness, comes from a time when wealth was produced by the labor of slaves – slaves who repeated the motions once discovered by somebody's mind and left unimproved for centuries. So long as production was ruled by force, and wealth was obtained by conquest, there was little to conquer. Yet through all the centuries of stagnation and starvation, men exalted the looters, as aristocrats of the sword, as aristocrats of birth, as aristocrats of the bureau, and despised the producers, as slaves, as traders, as shopkeepers – as industrialists.

"To the glory of mankind, there was, for the first and only time in history, a country of money – and I have no higher, more reverent tribute to pay to America, for this means: a country of reason, justice, freedom, production, achievement. For the first time, man's mind and money were set free, and there were no fortunes-by-conquest, but only fortunes-by-work, and instead of swordsmen and slaves, there appeared the real maker of wealth, the greatest worker, the highest type of human being – the self-made man – the American industrialist.

"If you ask me to name the proudest distinction of Americans, I would choose – because it contains all the others – the fact that they were the people who created the phrase 'to make money'. No other language or nation had ever used these words before; men had always thought of wealth as a static quantity – to be seized, begged, inherited, shared, looted, or obtained as a favor. Americans were the first to understand that wealth has to be created. The words 'to make money' hold the essence of human morality.

"Yet these were the words for which Americans were denounced by the rotted cultures of the looters' continents. Now the looters' credo has brought you to regard your proudest achievements as a hallmark of shame, your prosperity as guilt, your greatest men, the industrialists, as blackguards, and your magnificent factories as the product and property of muscular labor, the labor of whip-driven slaves, like the pyramids of Egypt. The rotter who simpers that he sees no difference between the power of the dollar and the power of the whip, ought to learn the difference on his own hide – as, I think, he will.

"Until and unless you discover that money is the root of all good, you ask for your own destruction. When money ceases to be the tool by which men deal with one another, then men become the tools of men. Blood, whips and guns – or dollars. Take your choice – there is no other – and your time is running out."

2007-03-14T12:39:00.000-07:00

George Bush made some rather disheartening comments today about sending our jobs overseas being good for us. It was rather disturbing to a lot of people I suppose, but my comments were as follows (posted on Care2.com):

He's wrong that it's good--for us. It's good for other countries, and the U.S. is not everyone. It's also a sad, unavoidable fact given the country's current situation. Other countries are improving in every way, though they still lag far behind us in almost every way. Let them catch up, I say; they deserve the unfair advantages we've pressed on them (often by military force) for over a hundred years. Jobs are going overseas because we're too lazy and stupid. I'm part of the "X Generation" and that sums most of us up. If you don't want to see this happen, get a proper education and a challenging job. That's really all you can do; but in the end the trend of the dollar falling, foreign economies improving and outsourcing increasing is probably going to continue for quite some time, until either: 1. An equilibrium is reached. 2. The U.S. makes education (including secondary education) its top priority. 3. Other nations stop caring about education and seizing our economic and competitive advantages from us. It's a dog-eat-dog world; and we're an awfully big dog.

Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain

2007-01-31T13:22:00.000-08:00

A few vignettes from the book: (the paragraphs are bunched together due to the way I copied it; I will fix this later.)

Neuroscientist Helen Mayberg had not endeared herself to the pharmaceutical industry by discovering, in 2002, that inert pills -- placebos -- work the same way on the brains of depressed people as antidepressants do. Activity in the frontal cortex, the seat of higher thought, increased; activity in limbic regions, which specialize in emotions, fell. She figured that cognitive-behavioral therapy, in which patients learn to think about their thoughts differently, would act by the same mechanism.At the University of Toronto, Dr. Mayberg, Zindel Segal and their colleagues first used brain imaging to measure activity in the brains of depressed adults. Some of these volunteers then received paroxetine (the generic name of the antidepressant Paxil), while others underwent 15 to 20 sessions of cognitive-behavior therapy, learning not to catastrophize. That is, they were taught to break their habit of interpreting every little setback as a calamity, as when they conclude from a lousy date that no one will ever love them.All the patients' depression lifted, regardless of whether their brains were infused with a powerful drug or with a different way of thinking. Yet the only "drugs" that the cognitive-therapy group received were their own thoughts.The scientists scanned their patients' brains again, expecting that the changes would be the same no matter which treatment they received, as Dr. Mayberg had found in her placebo study. But no. "We were totally dead wrong," she says. Cognitive-behavior therapy muted overactivity in the frontal cortex, the seat of reasoning, logic, analysis and higher thought. The antidepressant raised activity there. Cognitive-behavior therapy raised activity in the limbic system, the brain's emotion center. The drug lowered activity there.With cognitive therapy, says Dr. Mayberg, the brain is rewired "to adopt different thinking circuits."

* * *

Such discoveries of how the mind can change the brain have a spooky quality that makes you want to cue the "Twilight Zone" theme, but they rest on a solid foundation of animal studies. Attention, for instance, seems like one of those ephemeral things that comes and goes in the mind but has no real physical presence. Yet attention can alter the layout of the brain as powerfully as a sculptor's knife can alter a slab of stone.That was shown dramatically in an experiment with monkeys in 1993. Scientists at the University of California, San Francisco, rigged up a device that tapped monkeys' fingers 100 minutes a day every day. As this bizarre dance was playing on their fingers, the monkeys heard sounds through headphones. Some of the monkeys were taught: Ignore the sounds and pay attention to what you feel on your fingers, because when you tell us it changes we'll reward you with a sip of juice. Other monkeys were taught: Pay attention to the sound, and if you indicate when it changes you'll get juice.After six weeks, the scientists compared the monkeys' brains. Usually, when a spot on the skin receives unusual amounts of stimulation, the amount of cortex that processes touch expands. That was what the scientists found in the monkeys that paid attention to the taps: The somatosensory region that processes information from the fingers doubled or tripled. But when the monkeys paid attention to the sounds, there was no such expansion. Instead, the region of their auditory cortex that processes the frequency they heard increased.Through attention, UCSF's Michael Merzenich and a colleague wrote, "We choose and sculpt how our ever-changing minds will work, we choose who we will be the next moment in a very real sense, and these choices are left embossed in physical form on our material selves."The discovery that neuroplasticity cannot occur without attention has important implications. If a skill becomes so routine you can do it on autopilot, practicing it will no longer change the brain. And if you take up mental exercises to keep your brain young, they will not be as effective if you become able to do them without paying much attention.

* * *

Since the 1990s, the Dalai Lama had been lending monks and lamas to neuroscientists for studies of how meditation alters activity in the brain. The idea was not to document brain changes during meditation but to see whether such mental training produces enduring changes in the brain.All the Buddhist "adepts" -- experienced meditators -- who lent their brains to science had practiced meditation for at least 10,000 hours. One by one, they made their way to the basement lab of Richard Davidson at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He and his colleagues wired them up like latter-day Medusas, a tangle of wires snaking from their scalps to the electroencephalograph that would record their brain waves.Eight Buddhist adepts and 10 volunteers who had had a crash course in meditation engaged in the form of meditation called nonreferential compassion. In this state, the meditator focuses on unlimited compassion and loving kindness toward all living beings.As the volunteers began meditating, one kind of brain wave grew exceptionally strong: gamma waves. These, scientists believe, are a signature of neuronal activity that knits together far-flung circuits -- consciousness, in a sense. Gamma waves appear when the brain brings together different features of an object, such as look, feel, sound and other attributes that lead the brain to its aha moment of, yup, that's an armadillo.Some of the novices "showed a slight but significant increase in the gamma signal," Prof. Davidson explained to the Dalai Lama. But at the moment the monks switched on compassion meditation, the gamma signal began rising and kept rising. On its own, that is hardly astounding: Everything the mind does has a physical correlate, so the gamma waves (much more intense than in the novice meditators) might just have been the mark of compassion meditation.Except for one thing. In between meditations, the gamma signal in the monks never died down. Even when they were not meditating, their brains were different from the novices' brains, marked by waves associated with perception, problem solving and consciousness. Moreover, the more hours of meditation training a monk had had, the stronger and more enduring the gamma signal.It was something Prof. Davidson had been seeking since he trekked into the hills above Dharamsala to study lamas and monks: evidence that mental training can create an enduring brain trait.Prof. Davidson then used fMRI imaging to detect which regions of the monks' and novices' brains became active during compassion meditation. The brains of all the subjects showed activity in regions that monitor one's emotions, plan movements, and generate positive feelings such as happiness. Regions that keep track of what is self and what is other became quieter, as if during compassion meditation the subjects opened their minds and hearts to others.More interesting were the differences between the monks and the novices. The monks had much greater activation in brain regions called the right insula and caudate, a network that underlies empathy and maternal love. They also had stronger connections from the frontal regions to the emotion regions, which is the pathway by which higher thought can control emotions.In each case, monks with the most hours of meditation showed the most dramatic brain changes. That was a strong hint that mental training makes it easier for the brain to turn on circuits that underlie compassion and empathy."This positive state is a skill that can be trained," Prof. Davidson says. "Our findings clearly indicate that meditation can change the function of the brain in an enduring way."

Mind over matter

2007-01-31T12:26:00.000-08:00

The East had it right. Or, more specifically, Buddhists, Taoists, Hindus, and monks of all faiths.

Your brain is not hard-wired. I'll say that again: Your brain is not hard-wired. That phrase, which has been beaten into Americans and other Western peoples for decades, has been proven incorrect. The term that is now used in the scientific community and will eventually reach household usage (for geeks, at least) is "neuroplasticity." Your physical state affects your thoughts; your thoughts, in turn, affect your physical state--including your neurons, the growth of new neurons, and which parts of your brain do which function. There is no longer any use for the phrase "it's all in your mind" except in relation to hallucinations; if your mind does something, it does something to your brain.

This started with a preponderance of evidence from a variety of Eastern cultures and researchers, started getting more serious consideration with articles like "Science Explores Meditation's Effect on the Brain", and is now effecting a sea change in the scientific community to neuroplasticity (a sea change is when a new consensus is reached and an old one is turned over). Articles like NPR's this morning on the new book "Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain" show that the research is now real.

Some interesting examples: Placebos (inert pills) have the same effect on the brain as anti-depressants -- Activity in the frontal cortex, the seat of higher thought, increased; activity in limbic regions, which specialize in emotions, falls.

When a person is born without eyesight or loses it, the sensitivity of some of their other senses greatly increases. This is now known to be because the part of the brain that once received visual signals decides it has to "get a new job" and starts feeling, hearing and so forth, processing the information in the great detail that it would have with sight -- NOT because your other senses (the part of your brain that processes them) simply "work harder. "

People with dyslexia and other comprehension disorders are now routinely "cured" through scientific therapies. Most impressive is the way dyslexia has been shown to have a aural (hearing sensory) cause in many individuals due to their inability to process many fast, "explosive" sounds such as P and D; and that this can be reversed through therapies such as slowing down the sounds until their mind can process them, then gradually increasing the speed, causing the brain to process something it had never tried to.

Lastly, transcendental meditation and other forms of meditation are being shown to effect changes on the brain's wiring/"real estate" and usage (particularly in the area of emotions, such as which ones are felt and to what degree), not to mention several other organs.

Depression, Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, etc., need not be "the way you're wired" anymore. Look up "Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain" on Google or Google News and find out what your thoughts could be doing for you.

Heroes

2007-01-26T14:32:00.000-08:00

I would have to say that John Lennon is one of my greatest heroes. Hated for breaking up the Beatles, he still became a bright, shining example of unconditional love and acceptance. He wouldn't let the revelations and ideals of the sixties die. He kept them in our face, he went to the wall on it, and ultimately he went to the grave for it.

David Lynch was a Painter

2007-01-03T12:44:00.000-08:00

Most people who know David Lynch's films either love him or hate him, but I don't think most people know where he comes from. For many of the people who don't "get him," I think this would be extremely helpful (even if it doesn't change their mind). David Lynch (Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, Dune, Twin Peaks, etc.) started out as a painter, and came to film merely as an addition to his work. This is extremely clear in his early short films, in fact one of them was originally exhibited as a projection onto a sculpted/painted "screen" that formed part of the picture. Thus he does not necessarily look at films as storytelling so much as expressing and communicating emotions, ideas, fragments of thought, explorations of psyche. It is this painter's viewpoint that is why David will almost never discuss the meaning of his films. In the graphic art world, one may have an idea that caused them to create a painting, or a "reason" for painting a particular work, but meaning? The ultimate meaning of one's work is often very personal and does not translate well; the meaning and historical significance of art is often best left to critics and audiences. Thus he believes the same can be said of film, at least the ones that he is doing. I think the content of many of his films makes more sense in this context as well, particularly the "dream logic" quality of them and their non-linear stories.

Carrie Underwood and the foot-washers

2007-01-03T12:38:00.000-08:00

I'm a wee bit irritated that "Jesus Take the Wheel" is the number one country song for the year. Don't get me wrong, I'm a nice guy. I love Jesus. I think he was a perfect soul who gave perfect teachings (that may have gotten a bit corrupted). But it started with the "Jesus is my co-pilot" stickers, and now we want him to take the wheel altogether? Please, do me a favor. If you are in the car and coming towards me in a non-standard manner that will most likely get us killed, do not let Jesus take the wheel. As far as anyone can tell, the Lord does not directly counteract the laws of physics. I need you to keep your hands on the wheel and save your family's life and mine. And keep in mind that life works much the same way. If you are on the very verge of suicide, yes it is good to give your will over to Jesus or He or That whom you worship. But I would rather not see another massive outbreak of people who let their own will, mind and body atrophy because they are "letting God take care of it." A kind woman who owned the house I live in before me did this, in her words. She let the house fall into a situation of having dogs pee on the floors, she never finished the roof and the back storage room had a completely soaked and rotted floor (which she kept from me). God didn't want that for her, nor for me. Don't let "letting God take care of it" turn into you wasting your precious gifts and abilities. The key is balance, which is a subject not often taught in Western schools of thought; looking at the personalities of myself and those I know (I am certainly not immune to the dangers of overdoing things, stressing out, etc.), I think it should be a top priority. If we understood balance and listened to our bodies more, we would "hit bottom" a bit less and rebound more easily. My 1 AM rant is now finished, thank you.

Edit: Yes, in the light of day this was quite unnecessary, I suppose I and the ones I love have just been too mistreated by people who were supposedly in tune with God's will, in harmony with the universe, etc.; it's really too bad that these kinds of things really are shown by one's actions, yet most everyone around those that take advantage of these social structures take them at their word and treat it as an honor system. And usually, we consider it blasphemous or treasonous to question those in our own group, so the wolves in sheep's clothing often get quite far. Not that every religious person is like this, far from it; but it's very hard to get Americans to set aside their egos long enough to really get in touch with basic standards like respect, love and tolerance, let alone come to those things by aligning themselves perfectly with the ideals of a higher power. I think what can be especially grating is when one is mistreated by someone who is telling you that if you would only get right with their sect, all your problems will go away. I don't really believe in "tough love" other than staying away from those that hurt you; I think hurting or threatening someone because they're not on your side, or to get them to come to your side is extortion or bullying. I much prefer the attitude shown by the Christians who were recently in the newspaper because they washed the feet of the homeless people who came to their mission each evening; they get down on their knees in front of them, take their smelly, soiled feet in their hands and wash them. That's faith.

The death of literacy

2006-12-13T09:44:00.000-08:00

The death of literacy?
I've noticed that, especially in the last couple years, no one is editing or proofreading their material anymore--not for books, for magazine articles, magazines, television copy, and so on. Not everyone of course, but it's happening so often that it makes reading all of these things somewhat irritating. I remember when I was a child that grammar and spelling errors were rather rare; seeing one was an event that would make you pause, point it out and make fun of it. Even five years ago it was still basically that way. Today, I can't seem to read more than a few pages of anything without multiple glaring errors. I don't know about most people, but to a lot of the people I know, these kinds of errors really stick out like a sore thumb. They give my girlfriend such pause that she can't see one without correcting it with a pencil. And they don't bring the kind of attention that makes an article or advertisement stick out in your mind (brand-building, as they say); instead they make people dismiss the material quickly and think of it as poor or "amateur" quality. Do companies and publishers not realize that this happens? My thinking is that four things are occuring:

1. Individuals -- students, parents and teachers -- are not thinking of grammar and spelling as being extremely important anymore.

2. Poor writing skills are being overlooked or even encouraged in such non-professional mediums as e-mail and online chat.

3. Manufacturers and publishers are aware that much fewer people today are truly literate, are good spellers or know grammar; and therefore

4. Companies have added skipping proofreading and editing (or giving these tasks to individuals who are not capable of doing them well) to the list of corners they are cutting to save time and continue to offer supposedly quality products at prices the public will consider "low" in an ever-inflating market (where our dollars actually have less and less purchasing power). Outsourcing more and more manufacturing and customer service to third-world markets is another example of this "dumbing down" and corner-cutting.

I'd like to end this with part of a widely-quoted bit about the history of one of the first blockbuster PC game (in terms of sales), "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy."

"So it proved - the Hitchhiker's Guide adventure game was one of the best-selling games of its era, selling some 350,000 copies. In 1984.

Then graphics games came along and the computer using portion of the human race forgot all about 500,000 years of language evolution and went straight back to the electronic equivalent of banging rocks together - the point'n'click game. Infocom and most of its competitors went to the wall - signaling the arrival of the post-literate society. That's the way it's been for most of the last dozen years."

Though this article went on to say that things are now turning around due to e-mail and the web, I would have to say that evidence shows that we are once again becoming more "wordy" -- but not necessarily more literate.

Sexual Maturity

2006-11-04T09:15:00.000-08:00

I was watching Desmond Morris's "The Human Animal" series last night, and during a segment about teenagers I noticed an interesting thing he said. He was talking about how humans become sexually mature--in other words, fully sexually developed--at 13 or 14, but due to the complexity of modern society they have to just count time for a few years until they can begin to reproduce. I'm actually not sure that "complexity" is the correct word for it. I think "separatism" or "loneliness" would be a more accurate term, if you really want to pin it down. In older societies (I will refrain from calling them primitive or simpler because I do not believe that they were), you only had small villages, and every lived together as if they were one big family. In this situation, it would be okay for someone who was sexually mature but not intellectually so to have children, since the rest of the community could help them and teach them while they mature. So in fact, having children would actually be part of their learning and a jump-start to it. It is with great humility that I now realize that I agree absolutely, 100%, entirely with Hilary Clinton's famous statement/book title, "It takes a village to raise a child." That may not be true today, but it certainly was in previous times, and it would certainly be better for us, though we--as even I do--may often shudder at the idea due to the way we have gotten so far away from small-town/village-style living that we are quite frankly scared or irritated sometimes at the idea of dealing with other people.

Domestic spying

2006-10-24T13:06:00.000-07:00

Congress has been trying to pass a law that will allow the government to spy on anyone's e-mail without consent or warrant. Go to the following address if you wish to sign the petition against it:

http://www.thepetitionsite.com/takeaction/295861101

My rather inflammatory signature comment was as follows:

"I'd rather risk terrorism than be spied on without a warrant. Every time we take away someone's liberties, the terrorists win. We don't need to live in fear, we need to live boldly and with honor."

This situation is beginning to remind me more and more of the pesticide vs. organics issue, the whole "I don't care about spots on my apples, leave me the birds and the bees." My analogy would be "I don't care if a few nuts are running around, leave me my peace and civil liberties." This is just a drop in the bucket of course, with laws having been passed in the last several years that would even allow the CIA to enter someone's home and search it, as long as the occupants are not home. As long as things like that are allowed, I don't live in a free country as far as I'm concerned.

Things that influenced our childhoods

2006-10-19T09:26:00.000-07:00

I sometimes wonder what it would be like if we all made lists of things that struck us as extremely important or influential moments/materials during our childhoods, and how those lists would resemble us. Two such things struck me today, one of which was "The Value of Believing in Yourself: The Story of Louis Pasteur." I think this is the only book from the ValueTale series that I ever read, but it left an extremely deep impression on me. The boy being bitten by the rabid dog and getting very ill, the ideas of evil little creatures living inside our bodies (and sending in soldiers in full Nutcracker regalia to fight them) presented in such an innocent, cartoon-like format was almost traumatizing I think, as strange as that sounds.

The other moment that I was reminded of was when I was very young and I was with my dad in a local laundromat. I looked at the front window and there was a small round hole in the glass with very small cracks around it; I asked him what it was, and he said that a long time ago someone must have shot at the window. The thought of there being a time in the past when someone would have shot a bullet at such a place (and that it might happen again) was almost otherworldly to a six year old, as if I was in some fantasy post-apocalyptic world. Ever since when I see such a hole it still captures my attention and has a strange hold on me for a brief moment.

Perspective on Worship

2006-10-17T16:41:00.000-07:00

Look at creation. Look at the unimaginable size of the universe. Our entire species, our entire planet is like a single atom in a fingernail -- and that is only compared to our GALAXY. Our galaxy's place is even feebler in comparison to the universe. Do you really think that the happiness and concerns of the creator of all THIS would really depend on whether we worship him, and that he would be satisfied with that worship if he demanded it from us? Intelligent beings will worship creation without fail, in their own way. You might even go a step further and say that sentience and self-consciousness are a worship of the universe in themselves.

Blog titles

2006-09-21T13:38:00.000-07:00

Okay, posts about Googling are extremely cliche and I never thought I'd write one, but I was recently second-guessing my blog's title. I really liked the original one, "A Shattering Breeze," with its yin/yang Eastern feel and Bruce Lee-type visual. However, I recently fell in love with a line from a Doors song about how before it was all over he wanted "to hear the scream of the butterfly." Almost immediately I was torn about the title though, since the whole "a butterfly flaps its wings in Connecticut and starts a tornado in Montana" is a bit overused and is personally a bit silly to me--not the concept of small things having effects or the idea that many things have effects that we are not aware of, just that particular example seems unlikely from what I know of such things. That isn't really what I wanted to reference with the title. Anyway I decided to test the uniqueness of the titles, and found to my surprise that my blog was possibly the ONLY instance of "A Shattering Breeze" on the entire web. Still, there were only three instances of "The Butterfly's Scream." But what really did it for me was that there were about 12,900 instances of "The Scream of the Butterfly," and most of them weren't even Jim Morrison-related. So, I think that did it...the new title will be back up tomorrow. :P

And the winner is...

2006-09-14T20:34:00.000-07:00

Just a bit of odd information, I just realized what the biggest killer of the last century was: Refined and processed foods. That's right, from the deficiency epidemics at the beginning of the century (scurvy, beri-beri, burning feet syndrome, Vitamin D, etc.), heart disease (did you know that heart disease was so uncommon before the 1950's that heart attacks were not even recognized as a medical phenomenon until 1912, and what happens was not understood until the 1930's when they became more common?), stroke, diabetes, obesity, and certain cancers, refined/processed foods have destroyed more human lives than any other phenomenon by many times. The most disgusting, disturbing thing about all of this is its beginnings. In the early 1900s people around the world started filling large percentages of their diets with refined sugars and flours and canned/pasteurized/sterilized foods. This was done so that the food would last longer without spoiling--things were done to the foods to make them unpalatable to other organisms. But lucky humans still got to eat these items that were basically inedible to the entire rest of the animal kingdom. Soon after, the world saw massive outbreaks of a variety of vitamin deficiencies, including Vitamins C, D, B1, B12, Thiamin (India and Indonesia had particularly spectacularly outbreaks of Thiamin deficiency diseases after they went from whole rice to milled white rice), and so forth. Faced with this, the world had to make a decision. Which was? To make the vitamins artificially and add them back to the foods.

The world missed the point. The point was, if other animals don't want our food after what we've done to it, we shouldn't eat it either. If processing and refining the foods means removing things we need to live, then we should have left them whole. Instead the world's governments had the audacity to believe, faced with thousands of foods containing millions of different chemicals, that they could pick out which ones in which ratios and forms were the important ones. Among other things the problem with this was that they caught the diseases that will kill you in a month or year or two, but they missed the ones that will work on you for decades. Diabetes. Heart Disease. And so on. We now know that it was vitamins that were mostly left out of the vitamin fortifying programs -- Vitamins B6, B12, and Folic Acid -- that are at the "heart" of heart disease and diabetes, among many other illnesses. This is because they control homocysteine in the body--this chemical damages your arteries; cholesterol, fat and calcium (and only certain forms of them, most of which are avoidable) only attach themselves to the problem after the damage has been done. The homocysteine theory of heart disease was developed by 1975, and by 1998 had been untouchably proven over and over. Unfortunately, governments have not accepted or acknowledged this, though luckily doctors, nutritionists and food manufacturers are beginning to catch on. You can have heart disease without having high cholesterol or fat in your body; and high cholesterol or fat (triglycerides) cannot predict or prove heart disease for you. And you can live your entire life and basically be 100% certain that you will not get heart disease or diabetes (possibly even alzheimer's) if you simply get enough B6, Folic Acid and B12 in your diet. Unfortunately, processed foods aren't going to get you there. In the end good health is always going to be not about WHAT you eat, but what's been done to it. This has been proven time after time, with the French Paradox, the netherland eskimos, and the causes and histories of dozens of diseases. The goal of anyone -eating- for any sort of goal (like physical or mental competition, good mental health, lack of diseases, or just plain living longer) has to be seeing how fast you can get your food from its source to your mouth, with as little corruption and alteration happening in between. No, we can't usually eat meat we cleaned ourselves, and no, we can't always eat fruits and vegetables we've just plucked from their stems, but those are the ultimate starting points and we work out whatever compromises we can from there.

And a note to people who worry about getting diseases from foods that are not "sufficiently processed" (read: sterilized/pasteurized/irradiated. Boiled, burned, fried, zapped, strained and denatured.): You are actually being counter-productive. The nutrients that you need to fight diseases are in the foods that are the most whole and least processed. Yes, you need to be careful about sources and freshness But if you truly want strong health, you need whole foods. Otherwise you are simply the boy in the bubble, slowly weakening yourself until the day something gets past your screens and knocks you out in one punch because you've developed a glass chin. Trust the natural chemicals in your food, they've been fighting for you for millions of years. If you want strong health, you have to take a chance and eat what nature gives you, with the knowledge that the odds are stacked hugely in your favor.

(Common sense and widely acknowledged scientific data should always be highly regarded, though even these can often be overturned, such as with the heart disease revolution or food revolutions such as the one in carefully produced whole, raw milk that is going on in this country.) If you would like any information about any of the more obscure things mentioned in this article, I welcome you to ask me for more information or Google/Wiki them. There are several books published about the homocystein theory of heart disease, the most important of which is called "The Heart Revolution."

Global Dimming

2006-08-06T18:19:00.000-07:00

I am very disturbed that I've seen three major news pieces on global warming in the last month, yet none that have mentioned global dimming. Global dimming is the way waste particles we put into the air cause less of the sun's light to reach us; it was only fully proven in the last few years, but it is extremely important. Even with the global rises in temperature we are already seeing, we basically have no way to stop the ice caps from melting even if we stop putting out greenhouse gasses this instant. That would seem horrible enough, but the cooling effect of global dimming has actually been masking the full effect of global warming--and as the trend is reversed (as countries clean up the particulate pollution in their atmospheres but do not neccessarily slow their production of greenhouse gasses), we will finally see the full amount of global warming we have caused. It seems very likely that civilization as we know it will end within the next fifty years when this is all said and done, due to several consequences of this:

1. Most of our major cities and much of the landmass (the most fertile landmasses, I might add) will be under water. There will be less land and less food for ever-more people.

2. Hurricanes, typhoons, heat waves, earthquakes and other disastrous phenomena will increase in intensity (we are already seeing this). A hot earth is an active earth, something we definitely do not want.

3. Much of the earth will become unbearably hot and dry, further reducing our livable land and food output.

4. The rise in temperature could very easily loosen up the methane deposits near the poles. Methane's greenhouse effect is approximately six times that of carbon dioxide. This happened about three million years ago and could raise temperatures worldwide as much as 20 degrees fahrenheit.

There's a lot more to this, but I guess what really makes me mad is all the people over fifty who deny it or act like it doesn't matter. That's easy for them to say, but our children and their grandchildren are the ones that are going to have to live through this. It's all fine and good for them that they can pop off to the grave without seeing the worst of it. Bah. In any case, when it's all said and done we might be better off than we were before; maybe we'll go back to hunter/gatherer ways and not live so crowded and unhealthily. It's just the transition that'll be a real bitch!

A couple links on global dimming:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_dimming
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/sun/ - Probably the best resource on this subject.

Credit Unions vs. Banks

2006-08-04T17:42:00.000-07:00

I'm a member of a credit union; I've always been a member of one (two different so far) as long as I've had bank accounts, actually. I've noticed, though, that there doesn't seem to be much difference between them and a regular bank. My credit union hits me with fees that I don't consider very fair, and from what I can see commercial banks are offering both savings and loan rates just as high or higher than any of the credit unions are. This is pretty much the way it's been since I was a teenager; the idea has been that credit unions and banks offer essentially the same rates, credit unions just don't charge you some of the fees that banks do. The situation does make a whole lot of sense to me though; to me, the idea of a credit union should be to operate the same way a bank does, but to pass on the profits that banks usually make back to their members. For instance, any good bank is surely making at least 15% profit off of the money it is holding, through loans, fees and investing the funds (for instance, bonds generally make 5-9% per year overall, stocks generally make 8-12%). Why can't our credit unions pay us this kind of interest rate, paying back to us what they are making from our money? I believe the reason is that they are charging us less fees, which means their operating costs cut into their earnings more. Another reason would be that credit unions generally run a looser operation with less attention paid to costs and looser pursestrings on the capital expenditures budget (new buildings, equipment, advertising, etc.). I would like to see a new kind of credit union: One that charges the same fees as a regular bank (mine basically does anyway, and these fees can be avoided for the most part), but actually pays their earnings back to their members. Not only would this be fair, it would actually make credit unions a thrilling alternative to banks and completely change the way the average person can grow their savings in this country.

Minimum Wage Increase/Estate Tax Cut

2006-07-31T14:36:00.000-07:00

On Friday the House of Representatives passed a bill that will increase the minimum wage in this country (which has not been raised since 1997) from $5.15 to $7.25. This bill also includes a tax cut on the inheritance of estates; I believe it would now be free for estates up to $5 million, 15% on estates from 5 to 25 million, and 30% on estates over 30 million. I have noticed that liberals are going nuts about this, attacking Republicans for putting this "tax giveaway to those who least need it" onto such a needed bill for the poor of this country. I would like to suggest that liberals are gnawing their own feet off, and/or too busy playing the "I'm a liberal, therefore I must attack the conservatives" game to think straight.

Minimum wage clearly needs to be raised. However, the estate tax cut is also an extremely fair bill. I am actually against ANY taxes on estates, for two main reasons:

1. It is a double tax; the same money is being taxed twice, or even three or more times if it was earned through a corporation or small company. I am a big believer that once money is created (earned), it should be taxed once and then it's over with. Instead companies are taxed on their profits, the people who receive any part of those profits are taxed when they receive that money, and then that money is taxed AGAIN when they try to leave it to their children. Even for the average person it can be devastating. Let's say you earn $100,000 during your lifetime that you put away for your children, and that you pay 30% tax on that money. You are left with $70,000 after you pay taxes on it. Now, when your children receive it as their inheritance, if they pay 40% on that money, they're only left with $42,000. Your hard-earned $100,000 turned into $42,000 simply because you tried to leave it to your own flesh and blood. Does that seem fair? And if they leave THAT money to their children and so forth, pretty soon your savings has been completely destroyed by the government (if it hasn't been eaten up by estate fees and lawyer fees already). Something needs to be done about this for the average person. That is what this bill does--note that the tax breaks are HUGELY more for the people whose states are worth the least. Is that kind of thing not what liberals are (or should) be about?

2. Estate taxes are due on all estate items, even if their value is non-monetary or even sketchy at best. For example, if your grandma leaves you her $100,000 farm and no money, you now owe tens of thousands of dollars in estate taxes. What do you do now? Sell the farm to pay the taxes, or the government will seize the property. Same thing if your great-uncle leaves you a priceless painting, a pair of horses, and so on and so forth. You CANNOT tell me that liberals are for this kind of thing, the destruction of family properties handed down through generations. If they are, they are literally insane in my opinion. Inherited property should be allowed to remain intact, or quite frankly it is not inherited, it is simply an opportunity for the government to force to auction your family's property for their benefit, or for them to take what was once your family's. If I leave my children a farm, quite frankly I'd rather my family went medieval on the government, told it to go screw itself, dug a moat and fought it off with an army than let it take our family's farm away from us just because I died. So there you have it. :)

Investors: Avoid Amazon.com

2006-07-27T13:21:00.000-07:00

I just wanted to write this post real quick to warn investors to avoid buying shares of Amazon.com. They are implementing a new policy that all "Collectible" marketplace listings have to be higher than the list price for the item or $10, whichever is higher. In my years as a seller I have noticed many, many policies on Amazon's part that seem self-destructive, and this is no acception. Due to this new policy, the following will occur:

1. Millions of listings will be deleted by Amazon.com or the sellers because they do not meet the requirements.
2. Many new items will not be listed because though they are "Collectible" (physically different versions or value-added versions in some day), they are not worth the artificial minimum price imposed by Amazon.com.
3. A huge portion of Collectible items that ARE listed will not sell because their prices are far higher than anyone would want to pay for them.

Amazon.com is basically killing off more than one-third of their listings, and arguably the highest priced/most desirable section. This doesn't seem good for Amazon's already iffy financial situation.

The Heart of Religion

2006-07-24T18:43:00.000-07:00

After intense study of an extremely wide variety of religions and philosophical traditions, I am convinced that there are only a few basic ideas that are at the heart of all of them when you come right down to the true meaning of their teachings. Much of the rest is useful or helpful, but much of the rest is often prejudice or false pretense for harmful desires as well (such as the kinds of things that make some Muslims hate non-Muslims, or that make some Christians hate/get angry at gay or “pagan” individuals or even individuals of different sects of their own religion, or Wiccans that get mad at people that call themselves pagan and such without being “Wiccan subscribers,” etc.).

1. You are not separate from the rest of the universe; you are intimately connected with it. Your separatism and the selfishness it often brings are illusions. (The Tao, being born-again, etc.)
2. You are the only person who can control your own actions. (Concept of a higher self, often in Christianity this higher self concept is considered letting the holy ghost into you to guide your actions)
3. You must accept your own death, and the death of all other creatures. If you cannot face your death, your actions will be curtailed and second-guessed because of it. (You can extend this to many other fears and worries. Not committing to an action completely often ruins it completely.)
4. You are equally as much a part of the universe as everything else, and if God is in the universe, God is also in you. Or if the universe IS God, you are God. Numbers 1 and 4 here are to me the main purposes of meditation and such; even when your mind is quieted completely, there is something else there. I would call that God, the universe’s consciousness, the creative energy of the universe, or the simple realization that you are not separate from it, that there is no true boundary between self and environment, just a sea of molecules and space we like to draw lines in. You still exist even when you are not thinking any thoughts at all; you are simply a part of the universe, a part that is able to contemplate itself and ask why (though sometimes not asking questions and just listening is best).
5. You should end up equating that stillness within you with love. God, the universe’s creative energy, whatever it is, is love. Since it is everything, we should love everything. We love existence for its own sake, not for what it does or doesn’t give us. Ultimately we might look at almost everything as a fascinating part of the universe or an instructional example of its ways.

Music

2006-07-15T12:48:00.000-07:00

A quote I loved that I found in the booklet for a CD I recently purchased.

"Within each of us is
A loving, magical
powerful being...
A real self.

Music, friend that it is,
cocoons us from
our worries, enabling
that hidden self
to emerge.

Terence Yallop
President, Real Music

Addition Re: Souls

2006-05-16T13:31:00.000-07:00

I guess the biggest point that I forgot to make (but was trying to), is that the best Eastern athletes/martial artists/philosophers/artists are so good at what they do is because you might say they are actually at "one" with their souls, not separated from them. Thought and action are one. The best Asian kung-fu artist reacts to his enemy's blows so quickly because he is at one with his body; the best Taoist poet's writing feels so much like nature because the writer *is* nature. I think that whether we know it or not, this is really what the practitioners of almost every discipline and art strive for: To give their maximum effort without attachment to the results. To give their very best without constantly having to decide what to do beforehand, and without worrying whether they will win or whether they will be "good enough." I catch glimpses of this occasionally but it is a very slippery thing to hold onto; but it is what most Eastern disciplines/cultures are designed to achieve.

Souls of Asians

2006-05-14T13:30:00.000-07:00

I am compelled to write a response to a comment someone made in my presence several weeks ago. It bothered me deeply at the time but I didn't get an opening to begin discussing it. The comment was regarding an Asian fencer, and it was stated that Asians can move faster because they have no souls; they are not weighed down by a soul. I assume this was purely a "harmless" in-joke among some of those present, but I have heard this a couple other times in my life, though I had forgotten about it until this happened. I am deathly afraid that this is a common perception/in-joke among Westerners, and it makes me very fearful for our future, not to mention it simply brings out the worst frustration in me, which I will try to transform into helpful dialogue and instruction.

Asians are human like the rest of us. Their genes are nearly identical, and though they may be of a different race than yourself, they are surely no different in their humanity and you would certainly not want someone to single out YOUR kind in the same way. I think that the perception of Asians as not having souls comes from the way that they are sometimes completely single-minded, that is, they will follow a goal to the bitter end, without thinking of themselves or what is best for them. Does this mean they do not have a soul? Does thinking less of yourself make you lose your soul? Is, then, selfishness the measure of a soul? I'm sure a lot of Christians that are very uninformed about their own religion (not to mention other ones) do make this sort of unconscious conclusion. What is our soul? Is it our body? Or is it something higher, something we believe may exist even without it? What use, then, is our body to our soul? You will probably notice that usually when Asians are not thinking of themselves, they are thinking of *others*. This is called compassion. You may notice that when they are sticking to a principle even to the point of harming themselves, this can usually be called "loyalty" and "respect for authority." Asians are often willing to give their life for the sake of others. I dare say that we throw their self-sacrifice and compassion into a cold bin and call it "soullessness" because we do not want to deal with the fact that we are most likely not as brave or committed as they are, given the same circumstances. How many Americans anymore would actually save someone that is in danger if it means they may lose their own life? How many of us think of others more than we do of ourselves? I think there is a deap-seated guilt in many of us for how shallowly and selfishly we live our lives, and yet we justify it by pseudo-Christian ideology and the power structure of our particular religion that we believe is more important than anything else--if our power and wealth come down, so will our religion, we believe; or, more importantly to many of us, we may be out on the street, having to deal with some of the very hard facts of life. I am rambling since this is a very hard subject to talk about, and please understand that I am only talking about the kind of people who actually *believe* these kinds of things, the people who honestly believe that not all men are equal, that their blood is somehow "better." I will end with two examples and interpretations:

(This tale is paraphrased as I do not have time to look up the particulars again) One of the most famous things that ever happened to Japan was when, several hundred years ago, 47 samurai were working for a master that was evil and had one of their families killed. The samurai killed their master, and then turned themselves in to the Japanese emperor. The emperor decreed that they should receive the death penalty; and all 47 samurai took their own lives. This was an outrageous punishment it may seem, but the fact that the samurai were so loyal to the emperor that they actually carried out his instruction absolutely stunned the country, and they put their faith into the samurai wholeheartedly after that. Their trust was won, and the samurai were exalted and treated with the highest honor and dignity after that; that moment is seen as a great turning point in the history of Japan. There is a similar story in Roman lore, of a battle where fighting in a narrow pass and were hugely outnumbered by the enemy and taking massive losses. The Roman army's group of 300 elite warriors, who had been at the back of the army, took the front right in the middle of the narrowest part of the pass and let the rest of the army flee back to Rome so that the country might live to fight another day. The 300 warriors fought off their opponents until the Romans were much of the way home, and not a single one of them survived. The fact that the Romans' very best were willing to give their lives for their country had an astoundingly aspiring effect on the morale of their countrymen, and this moment and the intensity of the rebuilding that followed and the sense of valor it bestowed (the entire Roman army felt for some time after that they were living on borrowed time, only alive because those 300 men sacrificed themselves for them, wanting to honor them in their own actions as well as they could) is considered to have been the start of the Roman Empire's greatness.

Another thing that comes to everyone's mind who has been alive since World War II or has relatives that were, is the way the Japanese soldiers went Kamikaze toward the end of the war, or gave their lives to inflict damage or fatalities on the enemy. Though this may seem insane to us, there is much that we didn't know at the time about what was going on in Japan that has been explained on many documentaries since then and may end our inability to understand them in a simple flash, such as this: The Japanese government was telling its troops that when the United States army got to their homeland, they were going to rape all of their women, barbecue their babies, destroy their gardens. They were propagandizing to make their soldiers (who might not have otherwise cared) fight harder. We did a fair bit of propaganda over here as well, demonizing our enemies and removing their humanity in ways that often only their highest superiors really deserved; many of our German and Italian enemies were simply fighting to save our their own lives (something that I am very glad Asians would not be willing to do; most Asians would simply take their own life or kill their leader if they knew they were being forced to commit violence for something they did not believe in), though it is true that many of them were sucked in by the song of superiority and riches that their leaders gave them. In any case, the Japanese government's warnings to their soldiers had far more effect than they had ever imagined; many of the younger soldiers began banding together and purposely driving their planes into American ships, hoping to inflict the most damage possible with their single life and iron coffin in the hopes that the Americans would not come to their shores and commit the atrocities they feared. The Japanese government at first condemned the suicides, but the intense loyalty of the kamikazes roused the nation's spirit, reminding it of the sacrifices of the samurai armies of old, and they reluctantly let it go on. It was a spontaneous revolution of sorts, not a command from on high; it was men who cared so much about their wives and children, or even the wives and children of others, as many of them were too young to have either, that they gave their lives in their place. Their reasons may have been unfounded, but their principles, compassion and total commitment were so passionate that I think many of us fear it because we do not know what it is like to be like that. Our principles are for sale, our compassion forgets everyone but ourselves, our commitment is anything but to the mortal end. At least on our worst days. And on our worst days, we would rather think that Asians do not have souls than commit to the kind of martyred love and fierce action we have seen in them. I say on those days, rest. Allow us to all have our souls and our differences, and save up your energy for something that truly matters.

Powaqqatsi

2006-05-14T13:24:00.000-07:00

I just watched this film last night...surely, this must be the best film ever for Taoists. (Or the other two films in this series, but I have not yet seen them.) No words, nothing but images of life as it is and beautiful music. Absolutely perfect for Taoist meditation and trying to catch brief glimpses of that beautiful...way that things are. I think this is unique because it allows you to catch glimpses of the true selves of *people*; this is often difficult because conversations and all the analyses and judgments they involve are usually in the way. This is a film where you can get lost in humanity the same way you can in nature so much more easily. I loved it.

Art: Emotional vs. Intellectual

2006-04-08T07:22:00.000-07:00

Most "good art" tends to be made up of emotional content or intellectual stimulation, and the two are often exclusive or follow the yin-yang principle (if there is little of one, there is much of the other)--and most importantly, neither is more "important" or valuable than the other. There may be much emotional content to a picture of Mount Everest obscured by clouds, but there is little concrete intellectual content. A picture of burning smokestacks put adjacent to words of natural scenery to make you upset about deforestation may make you think, but it is likely to have little emotional content/beauty. While a Jackson Pollock painting is an expression of his soul, it contains few if any straightforward intellectual statements. While it is true that intellectuals (and art gallery dealers) can find either in any of these things, I think you can see what I'm saying. There is also sheer informational content (detail/quality of technique/realism), but this is usually not an end in itself but the means to getting to one of the other two means. I think that it is only in rare cases and/or in some of the very highest art--certain works by Dali, Francis Bacon, perhaps others--that the emotional and intellectual content actually fuse or become fairly equal.

Tasaday

2006-04-03T13:07:00.000-07:00

Received a response from Whyfiles.org (quoted below) and wrote back to them as follows...I generally consider anyone who accepts the hoax theory of the Tasaday to be a conservative with an agenda, but perhaps many people simply heard the hoax theory and accepted it because it made a big splash in the media, and have not paid attention to scholarly/scientific examinations since that time.

*********************************************

Thank you for your response (I can't decide whether you are going to change your article though). I must respectfully differ that your position is actually not the one of science and anthropology today though, as you will confirm in such resources as http://www.tasaday.com/, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tasaday, and others; it is generally concluded that the right-wing interests of the West wanted the Tasaday to be a hoax just as much as the left-wingers wanted it to be real, and of course people are always more than willing to accept something as being too good to be true. Ah well, just my position and more fodder to post in my blog :)

Sincerely,
William A. Otis

David Tenenbaum wrote:

Thanks for writing.

You may be right, but the point was that much of the book was a hoax...
unfortunately. I read it at the time and found it fascinating...

On Apr 2, 2006, at 2:36 PM, caedmonv55@yahoo.com wrote:

>
> Below is the result of your feedback form. It was submitted by
> caedmonv55@yahoo.com on April 2nd, 2006 at 02:36PM (CDT).
>
> name: William A. Otis
> email: caedmonv55@yahoo.com
> referer: http://whyfiles.org/welcome/index.php?g=questions.txt
> comment: Hello, I have a correction for your article on the Tasaday
> (http://whyfiles.org/084hoax/2a.html). The article says that
> scientists found no midden at the caves where the Tasaday had lived;
> this is incorrect. The Tasaday's midden is mentioned several times in
> "The Gentle Tasaday" by John Nance, most noticeably (including its
> measurements) on page 123. There are also pictures of their midden in
> the photograph sections of this book.
>
>
David Tenenbaum
staff writer

The Gentle Tasaday's discards

2006-04-02T12:38:00.000-07:00

Comment sent to the writers of "The Why Files" website copied below; The Why Files stated among their refutations of the Tasaday's existence that they had no midden (trash/compost pile). The Tasaday actually had a massive sixty-foot tall midden going up to the entrance of their cave; this is explained and photographed in the most well-known book about them so I'm not sure why this myth persists. I also noticed in a college article written by three students on the web, and perhaps that is where The Why Files got its information--which would suggest to me that it's not much of a publication.

Hello, I have a correction for your article on the Tasaday (http://whyfiles.org/084hoax/2a.html). The article says that scientists found no midden at the caves where the Tasaday had lived; this is incorrect. The Tasaday's midden is mentioned several times in "The Gentle Tasaday" by John Nance, most noticeably (including its measurements) on page 123. There are also pictures of their midden in the photograph sections of this book.

Books

2006-03-26T16:33:00.000-08:00

Books read to add to list:

Politically Correct Fairy Tales
Where Does the Weirdness Go? - Why Quantum Mechanics is Strange, But Not As Strange As You Think
Dragon by Clive Cussler
The Art of Happiness at Work by The Dalai Lama (and someone else I don't recall)
Pale Blue Dot by Carl Sagan
I, Robot by Isaac Asimov
The Hydra by ?
Return to Sodom and Gomorrah by Charles Pellegrino
Contact by Carl Sagan
2001, A Space Odyssey by A.C. Clarke
The Gospel According to Jesus by Stephen Mitchell (fascinating book; surprisingly enough, most of the United States' founding fathers were basically gnostic Christians, and this author continues in that kind of scholarship/spirituality)
The Spirit of Tao by ? (Mini-book)
King Alfred: Makers of History by Jacob Abbot
The Tao te Ching by Lao-Tzu

Female Chastity

2006-03-04T12:41:00.000-08:00

I thought my reply to Wood Nymph over the "King Alfred" post might be of interest, though thoroughly rehashed ground I'm sure:

I must say I consider any and all judgments of and against female promiscuity to be biased and simply worthless when any kind of equality of basic human rights enters the picture, since women can be held accountable to these things by physical evidence (pregnancy/loss of virginity), while men cannot. Therefore any judgments on this basis are men taking advantage of their position and lack of similar responsibility to oppress women. And while I, like David Lynch, find the oppression of women an interesting subject or fantasy, I don't care for it myself nor do I think anyone should base their laws or estimations of anyone's worth on such utterly fascist bull.

Demon Xanth

2006-03-04T12:08:00.000-08:00

Poem from 2001 about the Xanth book series.

in the belly of the earth, in the bowels of the beast
'neath the grass and the crust and the lakes along the east
in the caves down deep, among the worms and the rock
lies a singular being, with power overstocked.
under the roof, just above the floor
his presence virtually unknown, but just beyond the door
substance of spirit, souless and a blight
formed in the fires of the dying of the light.
only one of many, all others never seen
and neither would he, but for his changing of the green.
a solemn brotherhood, or a vile eternal pact
following rules confounding and possibly evil in tact.
he sits in the cave, following unknown regulations
while the world revolves and travels the constellations.
waiting for the outcome in solemn isolation
his essence exudes, imbuing rock with enchanted animation.
millenia ensue with little effect for him
while above the world churns and whirls to magic's every whim.
spells and hexes and impossible creatures
the world above is changed, with completely undreamed features.
the world is changed forever, yet the cause is a transient being
brought too close to the surface and kept by a game from fleeing.
an evil tale of another world, a place in unruly oscillation?
perhaps...or a world of tales, dawned by Demon X(A/N)th²'s immobile rumination.

2006-03-04T11:50:00.000-08:00

One of the last short stories I wrote before the blogging era and the first one I felt was actually of moderately high quality. As with most of my stories, this was based on a dream, heavily embellished/redirected. I think this was the final version of it, but I'm not sure.

Lucidity

by William A. Otis

I feel cold and slow. My body is like a cold block of wood,
an inanimate object of light weight, solid with uniform depth, no
variations in texture or sensitivity. I really don’t care though,
and I feel better than I have ever felt in my life. And that is
probably the saddest thing you will ever hear.

I was sitting in a car, in the front seat, driver’s side.
Next to me...was a woman. I was far down in the seat, as if I had
slid down a foot or so from immense pressure or shock or loss of
control. My right arm was across something, the armrest I think,
and it was touching, overlapping the arm of the woman beside me,
holding her forearm. We were having sex. I know that doesn’t
make sense; we were each in our separate seats, our legs going
more or less straight down toward the floor and only our arms were
touching. And yet I knew we were somehow experiencing sexual
pleasure; I knew this because I felt euphoric and sensitive, and
more strangely, I saw the word in my head. It was floating around
in capital letters, as it if was trying to tell me that’s what I
was experiencing, as if maybe it had to tell me because otherwise
I wouldn’t know it.
I turned my head slowly and looked at the woman beside me. I
should probably call her a girl; she looked to be between 18 and
23, although it’s hard to tell. I didn’t think I knew her. I
felt like I knew her; I could see pictures of two or three women--
girlfriends?-- from my past, and I somehow associated her with
them. Of course at that point, I wondered if those girls were
even really my girlfriends, or if I ever really knew them at all.
Things were increasingly confusing. But like I said, I really
didn’t care. I wished I could have. I had a very small sense
that things are very wrong here and that I should do something
about them. It’s amazing how much that little twinge upset me,
small as it was. I think it’s because I knew it was the truth.
But, I was cold and slow. I found myself talking to the girl
beside me. I was comfortable with her and felt fond of her,
although I don’t really know why. She was pretty in a non-
descript way, blonde, like a shy, “pretty-but-not-so-pretty-as-to-
attract-attention” girl I would’ve liked in school but never
talked to, probably because she hardly ever talked either. I
wonder now whether anyone else would understand the way I describe
and associate her in my mind.
“This...is incredible.” I wasn’t sure whether I’d just made
a statement or asked question.
She didn’t look over at me, but I could tell she heard me. I
could see it in her body language somehow. She was moving from
side to side slightly and seemed to either be in great pleasure or
trying to wake up. Maybe both.
She moaned and then said, “How are we doing this...?” She was
clearly very relaxed but, as I was, maybe a little unsure as to
why this was happening.
“It’s...wonderful. We’re asleep...” I told it to her as
much as I told myself. We were indeed asleep; I knew that. I was
cold, and I was slow, not because I was drugged, not because I was
tired, but because I was hibernating. We both were. We were
hibernating, our bodies were slowed to an impossible crawl, I
could feel the passage of days, months, as we lay in our seats.
We were hibernating and we were having sex through our bodily
contact. And at the back of my mind, as sluggish and contented as
I felt, I truly wondered why.
Words cannot describe what I was feeling; I wonder why I am
even trying to use them. And words could not possibly describe
what happened next.
I was outside the car, looking at it from behind. I was
looking at two cars actually. It was clear to me that I was
looking at my own car and the car of the girl who was beside me,
although that makes no sense whatsoever. She was sitting in the
driver’s seat of the car beside me. We were at a stop light
outside the entrance of some sort of apartment complex. I was in
the left turn lane and she was in the lane beside me on a four
lane road--five if you counted my turn lane. Our cars were modern
but a little boxy, like Grand Ams, one red and one blue, although
I know that means absolutely nothing. She was in the car that was
next to mine, I could see the back of her head--the message was
clear to me: This is reality. Obviously it was only in my mind,
or on the plane of consciousness/existence/whatever the hell I was
on, that she was next to me, grasping my arm as I grasped hers.
I began to panic. My view went back to the inside of the car
through my own eyes, then to the view from behind the cars, and
over again several times. Things either continued happening
inside the car or not happening, depending on your view, since we
had been in the car for an agelessly long time now. The apartment
complex was somehow creepy and I had seen it somewhere before,
perhaps in a dream. I wondered if I’d ever had a life where I
dreamt; I knew I did, and it angered me that I could only see it
in glimpses, as if someone was trying to take it away and was
succeeding. My mind turned again to the field across the street.
It was a large field, like any flat, unkempt field you would
find in the Midwest. A tree there, a thicket of large wheat-like
stalks here, tall grass and small bushes there. And water, small
little ponds like you see when it has been a fairly wet season. I
was looking at the field from a point far away from the cars, and
I could see them in the distance. I was shocked and horrified at
what I saw now. I saw people coming up from the ground of the
field...they rose slowly and unnaturally like plastic action
figures being raised from prone positions by a boy’s hand, and my
mind held an after-image of their bodies lying face-down on the
ground, dark with soot or mud, and I couldn’t decide whether they
had ever been lying down like that or I was just seeing an image
of them that way.
Regardless, they were moving now. They were running, in the
direction of the cars. I was in the car again, and I now knew
that my body was not moving from place to place, I was simply
seeing or being allowed to see other places outside myself. I
knew the girl was able to see these things too. I know this
because she too was horrified.
The “people” that were running in our direction were running
with unbelievable energy. It was as if they were being pushed,
almost hurled into each stride. Each stride was a little too
long, their other leg came forward a little too fast to be
believable, to be real, to be normal. I quivered slightly in my
seat and spoke to my companion.
“Those people are dead...how can they be here? We know them,
right? ...They’re dead...” We knew them from high school, or a
friend, or a relative. I didn’t know how, we simply KNEW them and
that they had died. No other words needed to be exchanged. We
were both absolutely terrified and didn’t want to know what would
happen when they reached the car. I hallucinated again for a
moment, and saw something I don’t think I was intended to see.
Darkness. It was cold. Suddenly it was light, and I was
standing outdoors. It was a bright day; my eyes hurt. After a
little bit I was able to look around me. I was wearing glasses.
I was standing next to a car in a field and I could see rows of
dying corn in the distance. I was also standing next to a woman;
not the woman who was with me in the car earlier but one of the
women I had seen in my mind and associated with her. She was a
brunette with long hair, deep green eyes and fair skin. We were
watching as snowflakes were coming down around us. There was a
tablecloth on the hood of the car (a green Grand Am?) and
sandwiches and plates and bottles and bags of chips. We felt
giddy as the snowflakes hit our shoulders and fell past our faces.
One large snowflake fell slowly past my eyes, and I reached out
with my tongue to try to catch it. Its fall lasted an eternity as
I watched it. I could see every single tiny detail of it as the
light sparkled and reflected off of it. It was indescribably
beautiful, crystalline and intricate and genius, full of wonder
and hidden mysteries and power and a mesmerizing, almost
otherworldly brilliance. Every tiny triangle and floret of its
design burned its way onto my retina with a hypnotic intensity, as
if radiance equaled importance and it was trying to tell me the
most important thing in the world. I never felt it hit my tongue,
it just held there in its slow descent. The reality of it faded
away and my passive mind was pulled back into the car, and I
wondered why I had seen this.
The figures in the field were moving faster now, or maybe it
only seemed that way because they were so much closer. One of
them, closest to our view, was a strong man, bulky and dark.
Their bodies were still covered in soot; perhaps they simply
weren’t human and this was their color, like aliens that morphed
into other creatures but couldn’t mimic the colors of their
clothes and features, like I thought I had seen in sci-fi movies.
We could barely make out the features of other figures, but we
weren’t really trying because we felt the sickening thud of the
knowledge that we would see more of them than we wished to soon
enough. They closed in on the car in leaps and bounds, and our
horror pounded to a cacophony and smothered us as the first of
them reached the car the girl was “in” and landed a heavy hand on
it.

It was bright. I was standing on a sidewalk with several
other people. I looked to my right and saw the girl from the car
beside me. I was aware that the four people from the field were
in this group, as well as a few others. I wasn’t particularly
scared anymore though. We were standing in a close circle with
the four from the field in the center. They were no longer black,
human-shaped masses, instead they were just like us, normal-
looking. There was a sense of shock among everyone there, and it
reminded me of the scene in nearly every episode of Lassie where
she comes barking to one or more people, and they instantly are on
the alert and know there’s trouble. The three people that were
not from the field were giving me that feeling. They were
anxious.
One of the “dead” from the field was a young girl, perhaps
eighteen, dark-haired, fairly thin, white with a strong tan and
somewhat full cheeks. The others were Caucasian men; one chubby
with short blonde hair, another was young with a firm, almost
gaunt face, and I am certain the last was the large, strong man I
saw clearly earlier striding his way through the soggy field with
unbelievable inertia. They seemed fine and full of life now,
although perhaps a bit shaken. The young man with the firm jaw
was clearly distressed and began speaking.
“What in the hell’s going on here? That man is dead!
There’s no way he can be alive!” He pointed at the chubby man.
Somewhere in my mind I knew that he was right, that I knew the
same thing earlier, and yet I found myself arguing with him.
“But he clearly is alive...look at him. He’s right in front
of us.” I wondered why I was increasingly losing control of
myself and going along with things I not only didn’t quite
understand, but also didn’t even believe. Then again I had to
wonder how I knew he had been dead in the first place? Yes I
might have known him, but I didn’t have any proof of that. The
young man was getting more adamant and raising his voice. I
wondered if he knew that he had once been dead too.
“But his face was mangled! It was torn and bruised and he
was dead.” We saw an image in our minds of his face this way, and
it was horrible. His face was darkened, reddened, as if the
entire thing had been bruised somehow. His eyes were gone and
there was something black and deeply textured, like jet-black
cottage cheese, where his mouth was slightly open and where his
eyes should have been. Everyone else there was seeing the image
too, except possibly the four from the field. I didn’t understand
why these things happened or why I knew the others were seeing
them too, but I was becoming increasingly comfortable with it.
Two of the three strangers among the group were men, the
other was a woman; there was nothing particularly worth describing
about them. They looked like an average white suburban couple, if
such couples came in threes. I was paying little attention to
them. One of the two men was speaking in a calm voice.
“His face clearly isn’t bruised now and he has no problems
that I can see...”
“EXACTLY!” yelled the young man, almost insanely. “We KNOW
his face was like that before! Sow how is this possible?”
I could take it no longer. I started in gently. “Okay...you
have a good point. Now...do you know what happened to you?” I
tried not to stress the word “you” but I did a little bit anyway.
He looked at me numbly and then a look of fear began to work its
way across his face. I asked the inevitable. “You...were dead
too, weren’t you?”
The young man shuddered, his shoulders seeming to strain
against their sockets. He shuddered again, this time more of a
convulse. He stepped backward with stuttering feet and fell into
the arms of the large, sturdy man from the field. The wild look
on his face passed and he slowly closed his eyes and went
unconscious. I turned away and looked at the apartment complex we
were in front of.

And that is where I am now. I’ve been standing here for what
seems like an eternity, thinking back over the whole thing while I
still can. One of the apartment doors is only a few feet from us.
We are on a sidewalk, but there’s something not quite right with
it. There’s something not quite right about the whole place.
There are no sidewalks leading away from this building or any of
the others here, they only go directly around the perimeter of
each. I am hit with the realization that I have seen this
apartment complex before, in dreams. I shudder worse than the
young man did. I have only seen it in occasional dreams with an
eerie, alien tone to them. My mind is wandering again and I can
see the complex further in. There is grass along the road, but
past the first set of buildings there is...snow. Ice and snow on
the ground, but not on the buildings. These are the same images I
saw in my dreams. There is another set of sidewalks here, but
they are several feet out from the sidewalks going directly around
all of the buildings. And there is ice in between the two sets of
sidewalks, and a slope going down to the outer one. The
sidewalks, like the buildings, are dry and spotless. I see people
gliding from the inner sidewalk to the outer one; they take no
steps, they just slide right across to it. They also glide upward
to the inner sidewalk. They walk single-file down the sidewalks
and glide back and forth between them like strange ants. Each has
a different look on their face but none are looks I’ve ever seen
before. They’re human like myself but somewhat....skewed. There
are no numbers or letters on the doors anywhere in the complex,
and it seems more like a concentration camp than apartments. I
thought this place only showed up occasionally in my dreams, and I
now know it is real. I can see it stretching out before me,
exaggerating itself, the sides of the buildings stretching out and
up like the spires of a cathedral. The image is impressing and
intoxicating, almost holy.
I don’t know what’s going on here, but I can feel my mind
strengthening itself, putting up even sharper barriers to who
I...am. I can feel so much more than I once did, but I hate it.
No, I love it. I ...am it. I no longer make any sense. I turn
very slowly back toward the group I had been with. The three
strangers among the group are putting the adamant young man and
the girl from the field into the cars. The other two from the
field are standing there dumbly...and the girl who had been with
me is just standing there with them. She’s a little more alert
than they are, though. She looks...depressed. Slowly she turns
her head toward me...she squints at me and her face is a mixture
of sadness and sternness and resignation. For a moment I remember
a snowflake very, very vividly. Her shoulder-length hair and
pouty, soft face almost make me cry, like I’m missing something,
like I’m losing something. It almost makes me cry. My mind
swims. Everything I’ve seen today keeps pouring over me, the
sidewalks, the car, the field, the jet-black eyes of the dead
chubby man. I feel almost as if I can see everything at the same
time. New worlds are being opened, but I know the most important
ones are being closed. I wish I had the strength to fight it. I
look toward the sky in the direction of the field and see the sun
setting, large and red with a dark cloud going across its center.
I wonder how many times in my life I’ve ever...ever seen a sun
like that. I...wonder...how long, it will be,
before...I...lose...my....will.

2006-03-04T11:46:00.000-08:00

Another poem from "1999," this one was more of an exercise than anything else, the meaning of which I'll let you try to figure out.

fire, fire, fault and ire
wrap my pain around your spire
bring it from the inside
make it a clean hide
burn it out with a pint of gin
burn it out and let in the sin
deep, deep underground
wrap it up and twist it around
watch the river flow on through
catch the filthy festering flu
pain of mastery and pain of slave
always the dastardly things you crave
futilely writing down the words
watch them shrivel and sour as curds
dread and the dead and the fires of hell
products of the process of the emptying of the shell
wholeness and nothingness and the certainty of the latter
the substance and the sustenance and the illusion from the chatter
the beginning of the end and the finality of the droning
the feeling of the question of the chances of detached phoning
bringing about the end of a long and unenchanted elaboration
of subjects unclear but hopelessly lost in vague elucidation
and no one will unravel the fleshy underneath
but the one who put down the matter and its polished, meandering sheath
meanings are thin
and clouded in ornamental variation
but every expression had its ambition, and with effort you may untangle the mystification.

2006-03-04T11:39:00.000-08:00

Another find, a poem that also appears to be from seven years ago, though I might have actually written it when I was 14 or 16, it has that kind of angsty feeling (the date on my computer says 1999 but I've been saving stuff from each hard drive I transfer since I was about 15 for the most part).

I always skirt the issue.
My art isn't what it should be.
I don't go deep enough for you.
Why should I expose my private thoughts for you?
Why should I bring out my deepest pain and lay it on the altar,
for all of you to see?
Would you respect it and appreciate my effort?
Or would you poke at it and quietly snicker, taking your little jabs at my open sores.
Why should I express my deepest fantasies and hope for the future?
Would you be interested? Would you find it worthwhile?
Or would you shrug it off, call me trite and go back to your circles.
Why should I rip aside the mental blocks I've labored so hard to build?
Those blocks aren't there by chance, I had to forge every single one and hold it in place until it was strong enough.
It took a long time to build the wall.
Maybe it's there for a reason? Maybe I'll shatter if I shatter IT without thinking?
Maybe the line between my sanity and hopelessness is thinner than you think.
Would exposing what's behind those blocks somehow vindicate the pain, clean out the sores?
Or would it make the rage of the injustices burn anew, and torment me perpetually?
I've answered my own question, and it's not like you'd care anyway.
It's so hard to teach an old dog new tricks, and it's damn near impossible with humans.

Gauze

2006-03-01T17:40:00.000-08:00

There's a companion story to be added onto this one that I haven't had time to do yet.

My girlfriend and I were walking back to the car from another dismal garage sale; it was the beginning of winter in Indiana, and the good sales of the fall were long gone at this point. I made much of my income as a rare book dealer, and this took me almost anywhere in the county looking for new things to sell. This particular sale was in a large barn, the classic red kind with the curved pointed roof, giving it the general shape of an egg sitting in a small cup. We were out in the country a long ways; I always felt that I was truly in the backwoods not when the roads turned to gravel, but when they became one laned, gravel or not. In fact I almost felt like I was in a different country or time whenever I was in these kinds of places; all of a sudden it was as if all of the things I had known and been used to about society and civilization were gone, and there were just these winding little roads leading to nowhere, with houses along them that looked like they had been forgotten about by the people back in the cities. In fact it seemed to me that most of the people in the cities didn't even know these places existed; these thoughts gave an almost mystical quality to these little country roads. Just the fact that the road had now become one-laned suggested that the usual rules and customs were now off, and whether the road was a soon-ending path into private lands (this final stretch giving one the absurd feeling that it was a sort of afterthought, put here just to humor us, for OUR convenience, more than theirs) or a steeply curving shorefront going down amongst the shanties along one of the state's hundreds of lonely lakes, the very narrowness and absence of straight-a-ways on the road seemed to say that things were out of your control now. Nothing seemed to be done the same here; near the cities all the lawns were roughly flat and kept up about the same. Here the ground rolled and thumped whichever way it wanted, and every landowner seemed to have completely different ideas about how to take care of their property. Often the only sign of use visible from the road would be a dirt roadway with two tire tracks worn into the weeds; some houses were near the road and well-kept, some were hundreds of feet from the road with no paths going to them at all, as if they had been left and forgotten before these roads had ever been laid. The trees wandered about aimlessly--that is, they weren't planted by any humans, almost nothing here was--and their wildness and the vines and grain stalks growing against and into them gave them a fairytale appearance, as if one would expect to see Ichabod Crane come rolling through them at any moment, headless horseman (or unicorn, for that matter) in tow.

It was in this kind of area that we were on this afternoon, with the temperature slowly dropping and the end of our futile sally for sales material about to end, when we walked back up the long driveway from the barn to our cars. As we passed by the main house of the residence, we saw again the display cases that had been laid out on the lawn in the small space between the house and the drive. Misty, my girlfriend, stopped and looked at them very carefully, as I paused as well. Looking into the cases I saw that they contained glass ornaments of many different shapes, but with much the same color pallette, mostly orange and blue. Clearly they were all made by the same person, hand-blown or whatever way it was that these kinds of objects were made; some had little flecks of yellow and red, and all were fairly impressive. I noticed one shaped vaguely like a harp that was particularly nice.

Misty went especially nuts over the art pieces (calling them art pieces may have been giving them a bit of a lofty description, since they were probably just hobby pieces created by an old country woman with a lot of time on her hands and not too many cats to keep her fully occupied-but I digress), as she tended to do about anything hand-made. I persuaded her to leave them alone so we could go, and I looked out at the lawn between us and our car and puzzled again at the strange white gauze that had been lain across it. I had noticed it when we walked in as well and thought it was very strange. But we had parked a ways down the road and walking across the "grass" as it were would save us a lot of time, so we started walking across it.

As I made it about six feet into the yard, I realized that the white gauze was actually insects-strange black insects with intense white wings. They reminded me of termites, or termite queens, whatever type of termite it is that has wings as long as their body. Though the yard had looked uniformly white/gray from a distance, I now realized that it was much more patchy, and the patches were swarms of the insects. What was worse, my footsteps were disturbing them and they were shooting up angrily from the grass and flying all around me. I ran across the yard as fast as I could while at the same time trying to avoid the heaviest patches of the insects. Many of them brushed against my face as they went by, making me shudder and yell involuntarily-I've always been mildly afraid of or disturbed by insects. As I neared the end of the grass some of the insects were much larger and looked like wasps; at this point I was losing it a bit and just started running to get away, hoping none of them landed on me.

Finally I reached the car. Misty reached it just before me, and we both looked back in horror at the grass, which the insects had once again settled onto. We also saw a very old, slightly hunched woman walking down the front steps of her house towards us. Her front stoop (which, as was often the case out here, ended abruptly at grass with no sidewalk or pathway to the drive or road) was directly in front of us and so was just off the edge of the "gauze."

She beckoned to us and asked something I couldn't hear. She took a few more steps, pointed at me and asked if she could take my picture, then beckoned towards the area next to the wooden cases with the glass ornaments inside them. I calmly stated that she was crazy if she thought I wanted to go back over there; she said it would only take a second. I said that I had only just gotten out of that hell; she said again very sweetly that it would only take a second. For some strange reason I actually began moving over there, though I took the road up until it reached her driveway this time, rather than going through the grass. Though once I got to the wooden cases, she asked me to come onto the grass anyway. I noticed that the grass once again looked uniformly white, rather than patchy with swarms as it had when I ran across it. I then watched with disbelief as the old woman actually lifted the surface of the yard-it was now literally some sort of white thin clothlike material; I very well could've mistaken it for the white gauze the drugstores sell for wrapping wounds.

The rest of this I cannot explain any more than I can the last sentence; I am simply stating what happened. The woman lifted the cloth as if it were my bedsheets and she were my mother tucking me in; but with a bit more pomp and presentation, as if this were some regal undertaking. I got on the ground and lay under the blanket as she let it fall back down onto me. Then she hurried away towards the rear of her house, and came scurrying back only seconds later, with a black cat in her hands. She put the cat under the cloth as well, right next to me. As the old woman ran off to her backyard a final time I looked at my new neighbor with a startled expression; he did not appear at all happy to be next to me either. In fact he started hissing and jerking like a stray cat being cornered. The odd thing about this was that even though he was doing this, he was barely moving; the cloth was losing its bedtime texture and sticking to him firmly like sticky gauze. As soon as I realized this I also realized that my own fingers were stuck to the material, and then my nose. My girlfriend was no longer anywhere in sight. I looked over at the cat as the old woman brought another black cat and stuck it, too, under the gluey blanket on the other side of me. The cat's face looked so strange, snarling as it was with gauze stuck firmly to its entire muzzle. I could only imagine what mine looked like, as the gauze was now stuck to most most of my chest, chin, chin nose and forehead. It was clearly stuck to my legs too, as I was now trying to squirm my way up onto them to no avail. The cats scrambled helplessly, only making more of themselves stick flat against the glue and clawing me several times in the process. I was vaguely aware of the old woman putting a tripod camera down roughly onto the deadly white sheet a short distance in front of me and gaily snapping the shutter as I slipped away to unconsciousness.

******************************************

I stood in the living room of a great old house in the country, looking at the bay window which was almost entirely darkened by the blinds which were pulled down almost all the way to the sofa and bookcases beneath it.

"Here are the ones I was talking about."

I turned to look at a young woman, who was vaguely familiar to me even though I knew I had just arrived at her house only moments ago. She was a bit of an artist and made some very interesting glass pieces which were for sale outside on the lawn. When she came out I had found her quite interesting and somehow the conversation had turned to photography and other arts, and I had somehow found myself in here, for a cup of coffee if I remembered right. I wasn't feeling all that well now and so wasn't very interested in the coffee anymore but she was pleasant enough and kept the conversation going. She handed me some photos of her classmates and told me the story of her prom, wherein there had been all sorts of intrigue and practical jokes. The photos made an almost point for point companion to her words. Then she got out more pictures of herself and her family, vacations to all sorts of kitschy family vacation spots, with a genuinely interesting bit of nature or architecture cropping up here and there. There were many photos involving horses, swingsets and views of the ocean.

We did more picture swapping, only of her pictures of course, them being handed to me and then back to her and receiving more. The conversation was quiet and pleasant. The pictures went back further and further in her life, and were now of her at what seemed to be about ten or eleven years old. Her outfits slowly started seeming more risque, or maybe the proper word would be more tasteless; more halter tops and short shorts. I didn't know whether to think this was normal for her age and the place she had been living, but gave it the benefit of the doubt. But I started to notice that the pictures were seeming a bit more posed, and almost in a cheesecake-type fashion; I also noticed that her father wasn't in any of these, suggesting him as photographer. By the time I realized that he was the photographer I came on a few pictures that were unmistakably exploitative, with her missing certain necessary articles of clothing on the beach, smiling away, not realizing how advantageous the photographer's view was. My skin got a little bit prickly, and the room suddenly seemed much darker than it had been. I didn't understand what was going on here, and tried to make out like I simply found the pictures curious; I turned and saw my host several feet away looking down at a ceramic rocking horse on a small hexagonal table. I gestured to her and said something about the pictures being rather odd in a conversational manner and put them on top of the sofa in the small slit of sunlight coming in the room from under the blinds as if to get a better look. She came a few steps nearer and said something I don't remember. I looked up at the dim sun I could see through the blinds, and a deep sense of yearning came over me. I suddenly realized that I had left a girlfriend behind and had never called her for many weeks, and wondered what she must be thinking. I felt a sense of dread for the reaction she might have, but at the same time a calming acceptance of this just being part of the way things are. I felt the tears in her voice, but had no ability to truly acknowledge or reconcile them. I felt a vague realization that I had been in this room with this girl for much longer than I had thought, maybe even many years; that while she had been spinning tales of her life going backwards so far, my own life had been advancing similarly without me really knowing it. I had been looking at the photographs, mostly of swingsets and riversides, and looked up at the darkened sun through the blinds again. It seemed to me that it was not a sunset and not a sun at all, but some sort of alien body that was signaling the end of time, perhaps the deepening glow of a red sun past the billions of years of its prime, its ageless fires inside faltering. The sky flickered dim shades of red and orange, and I felt agony and comfort all at once, all the supplicant emotions and desires of life and all the knowledge and understanding of nothingness and timelessness hitting me at once and wrestling wordlessly with one another, trying to strike a balance between willfulness and acceptance. I could not decide whether I had been tricked into an eternal thrall, the huntsman at snow white's side, or was simply absorbing the bittersweet truth of existence, the sunset that defines the midday and the night we cannot know.

Media violence

2006-03-01T09:35:00.000-08:00

I've been looking through my computer for some of my old writings; I wrote the following seven years ago. It shows the beginnings of my intellectual journey, I think (it's not quite the way I would state things at this point, but not far off either).

The American society seems to be well on its way to hell in a handbasket. How did this come about? Some say it's the movies and TV. I agree, in this fashion: portrayals of violence become increasingly glamorous and "fun." Portrayals of sex and nudity become increasingly seen as controversial, "dirty" and immoral by the establishment. We are taught to feel shame for our bodies and many of the wonderful things we can do with them, and yet we are bombarded, saturated by sexually oriented, amoral media that seems to give the opposite message, or just says "to hell with it", figuratively and literally. The gap between what we see around us and the shame we were taught to feel about it widens ever deeper. At the same time violence becomes an increasingly acceptable option in a world that glorifies violence even in real life, virtually deifying its society's most horrific killers. A star is a star is a star. And everyone wants to be a star. We are pushed into a lifestyle we feel deep shame about, and even if we do things right that shame is still present. The rift inside deepens. And if we are unable to live out our sexual desires, especially the most taboo and outrageous desires that are nevertheless dangled in our faces constantly in print and on screen, the rage we feel inside identifies with the serial-killing/mass-murdering "stars" of our media. ...YOU DO THE MATH. Look around the world for awhile. Almost every single West European country and dozens of others including Australia, Greenland, New Zealand, and to a large extent even our neighbor Canada follow this model: realistic representation of the horror and dread of violence; villification of but NOT fascination with murderers; and most importantly, a "no big deal" approach is taken to our bodies and sex. The rift never opens; the extremes never occur; the forbidden, shame and guilt-filled "candy" of sex and nudity is never dangled in their faces because both things are simply a natural part of life. The ease of this approach to the subjects takes many things, including reverse psychology, out of the equation; the resulting unsplintered minds make better, more responsible decisions about their lives and their bodies, and actually FEEL GOOD about these decisions. ...So this is our problem. Our arts and media are involved, but they are far from the whole matter. And it's up to all of us to change things, but I think it's too late. My suggestion is just move across the Atlantic and leave this continent to itself, and hope it doesn't poison yours any further.

Isonomy

2006-02-28T17:31:00.000-08:00

Misty surprised me yesterday with the following thought, paraphrased/expanded by myself as follows:

When you are alone with an animal, you are presented with the option of becoming an animal as well; with no other humans around you are capable more than at any other time of being on equal terms with it rather than master-servant or opressor-dominated. Two animals rather than animal and person concerned with this and that. In this instance it is as if the animal lets you into their secret world, the society of animals; the animal may let you in more or less depending on their particular personality and respect for you (one might say horses are particularly capable of this).

If you, the human, value nature above all other things, you have an opportunity here to achieve your highest purpose. Among humans you may be belittled, rejected, criticized; thought of as "less" in many ways. Analyzed and found wanting according to their particular wants, needs, preferences, ideas of "normal" and "cool." Nature does not have these rules, and when an animal lets you in, you have reached the highest of the high. This is not an exclusive club, and there are no hierarchies; nature is nature, the universe is the universe. It is what it is, everything participates equally.

2006-02-22T15:03:00.000-08:00

Wheat grows unevenly, no longer domesticated, spilling right up to the roadsides and tree trunks.
The cool afternoon breeze feels neither like fall nor spring, its scent carrying no familiar cues.
A buzzard circles slowly just beyond the next hill and a murmur of low sharp notes keeps coming and going from detection with the changing direction of the wind.
Changes are like portals, and do not need to be feared, but entered into wholly and understood.

Cartoon Protests

2006-02-15T09:05:00.000-08:00

I am unbelievably angry and saddened at the protests I keep seeing regarding these cartoons that pictured Mohammed with a bomb on his head. I hope a few of the protesters see this, because I have something to tell you:

The rest of the world believes in free speech. This means, you can insult our religions such as Christianity, Judaism, etc. (as you often do, sometimes with bombs) and we can insult yours. It is a two-way street. Everyone is allowed to analyze and criticize everyone else.

But my biggest point is, if you do not like the fact that Mohammed was portrayed as violent, then DO NOT BE VIOLENT. Prove them wrong, don't just show us that you're every bit as violent and prejudiced as we may have thought you were. Show us that you can love and be understanding and not hurt your fellow man. Show us that you understand that living your own holy life is more important than trying to force others to do the same.

Bog Men

2006-02-13T16:07:00.000-08:00

Last night I was watching a presentation of PBS's Perfect Corpse on the "Bog Men" of Europe, specifically two well-preserved bodies recently found in England. The bodies were from the Iron Age, around 200 BC and 100 AD if I remember right; but what disturbed me was that before the bog men could scarcely get their leathery hides out of the swamps and onto an examination table, the narrators were already hinting at the idea that human sacrifice could be responsible. This smacked of bad science to me, and instantly made me think of the producers sitting around a table saying to themselves, "they want some big ratings on this--I know, let's play the human sacrifice card." The whole thing just seemed quite ridiculous considering that one of the men was hit two or three times in the face with an axe, and the other was stabbed by a knife that went through his arm and continued down into his chest--in other words it appeared as if his arm had been up to defend himself from the blow. I'm sorry but from what we know of sacrifices, you don't usually just murder someone in their home or run them down in a field; that kind of defeats the whole purpose of ritual. Sacrificial victims (or volunteers) are procured, prepared, words are said, ceremonies are observed--and killing blows are delivered efficiently and economically.

That's not to say there COULDN'T have been some sort of sacrificial ceremonies where the victims were treated as if they were animal prey (there are certainly parallels in some Celtic fertility and coronation ceremonies), but let's look at this a bit. The bodies were staked to the bottom of bogs on the borders of early medieval territory borders, as were at least 40 other bodies that have been found. Someone said this pointed to human sacrifice, since the bodies' locations seemed to have a purpose; I think we can be a little more creative than that and actually think this over rather than point to the most sensational answer. From the injuries to these men, I would actually assume that they were killed during warfare, and their clansmen planted their bodies to rest on the borders of their land so that their spirits would defend them and ward off evil. The bogs were considered spiritual places, between this and the next world; and who would have more unfinished business than someone murdered violently? Who would want to take revenge on their foes more than these individuals? So they planted their bodies at their borders so that their spirits might get the chance to watch over their clansmen and ward off any intruders. One of the bodies was severed at the waist and head after he received his fatal injuries. Perhaps his enemies did this to his body after they killed him; perhaps they did it right on the field, in front of his humiliating and traumatizing his clansmen...I really can't imagine a spirit I would want to encounter less on a dark night in an ancient bog than that one.

Michelle Kwan - A note to Flip Bondy

2006-02-13T12:15:00.000-08:00

I read an article this morning on MSN that I was greatly displeased with. The article basically bashed Michelle Kwan's significance, worth, talent and legitimacy simply due to her not having won a gold medal. The author was Flip Bondy, who I have not run into before; but I must say I have no use for authors that make their living on this kind of thing. I'm sorry Flip, but there is more to life than medals. Michelle lived to skate, gave it all she could, and that's all that really matters. Take your desire for results elsewhere; it really has no place in art and sports. People play and create because it matters to them and it's the greatest expression of themselves, not because they need a trophy at the end of the day. You're probably the same kind of writer that keeps calling for Andre Agassi to retire, just because he might not win another grand slam. I have news for you: You cannot tell someone else to retire, and you should not suggest it, because it taints their entire performance. People can only do what they believe they can do, and they don't need someone who's never picked up a racquet or skated across an Olympic stadium to mess with that. To some people sport is the sacred way they get in touch with their soul; second-guessing and hesitation defeats the whole purpose.

King Alfred of England and 19th Century racism

2006-02-01T13:51:00.000-08:00

I began reading the book "King Alfred of England" by Jacob Abbott (1849) the other day, and what I thought was going to be a pleasant book on England's first "true" king turned into something altogether different. I was completely shocked that the writer basically stopped in mid-narrative to give his reasoning as to why Caucasians were clearly the superior race. I would like to reprint it here just for laughs and contemplation; though much of what he says is true, to me it paints us not as superior, but as the bullies of the world. Literally, the author seems to take delight in the way we have raped the world for our own pleasure and gain. He basically had a captive audience; at the time anyone reading the book was almost certain to be caucasian/anglo-saxon descended. Though I myself am Caucasian of mainly English descent, I personally consider the Indian (Asian/Hindu Indian) and Asian races to be far superior to us, in attitude, capability and spirituality (which are, indeed, what count in my opinion). Jacob Abbott brief dissertation read as follows:

Any one who will look around upon the families of his acquaintance will observe that family characteristics and resemblances prevail not only in respect to stature, form, expression of countenance, and other outward and bodily tokens, but also in regard to the constitutional temperaments and capacities of the soul. Sometimes we find a group in which high intellectual powers and great energy of action prevail for many successive generations, and in all the branches into which the original stock divides; in other cases, the hereditary tendency is to gentleness and harmlessness of character, with a full development of all the feelings and sensibilities of the soul. Others, again, exhibit congenital tendencies to great physical strength and hardihood, and to powers of muscular exertion and endurance. These differences, notwithstanding all the exceptions and irregularities connected with them, are obviously, where they exist, deeply seated and [page 35] permanent. They depend very slightly upon any mere external causes. They have, on the contrary, their foundation in some hidden principles connected with the origin of life, and with the mode of its transmission from parent to offspring, which the researches of philosophers have never yet been able to explore.

These same constitutional and congenital peculiarities which we see developing themselves all around us in families, mark, on a greater scale, the characteristics of the different nations of the earth, and in a degree much higher still, the several great and distinct races into which the whole human family seems to be divided. Physiologists consider that there are five of these great races, whose characteristics, mental as well as bodily, are distinctly, strongly, and permanently marked. These characteristics descend by hereditary succession from father to son, and though education and outward influences may modify them, they can not essentially change them. Compare, for example, the Indian and the African races, each of which has occupied for a thousand years a continent of its own, where they have been exposed to the same variety of climates, and as far as possible to the same general outward influences. How [page 36] entirely diverse from each other they are, not only in form, color, and other physical marks, but in all the tendencies and characteristics of the soul! One can no more be changed into the other, than a wolf, by being tamed and domesticated, can be made a dog, or a dog, by being driven into the forests, be transformed into a tiger. The difference is still greater between either of these races and the Caucasian race. This race might probably be called the European race, were it not that some Asiatic and some African nations have sprung from it, as the Persians, the Phœnicians, the Egyptians, the Carthaginians, and, in modern times, the Turks. All the nations of this race, whether European or African, have been distinguished by the same physical marks in the conformation of the head and the color of the skin, and still more by those traits of character—the intellect, the energy, the spirit of determination and pride—which, far from owing their existence to outward circumstances, have always, in all ages, made all outward circumstances bend to them. That there have been some great and noble specimens of humanity among the African race, for example, no one can deny; but that there is a marked, and fixed, and permanent constitutional [page 37] difference between them and the Caucasian race seems evident from this fact, that for two thousand years each has held its own continent, undisturbed, in a great degree, by the rest of mankind; and while, during all this time, no nation of the one race has risen, so far as is known, above the very lowest stage of civilization, there have been more than fifty entirely distinct and independent civilizations originated and fully developed in the other. For three thousand years the Caucasian race have continued, under all circumstances, and in every variety of situation, to exhibit the same traits and the same indomitable prowess. No calamities, however great—no desolating wars, no destructive pestilence, no wasting famine, no night of darkness, however universal and gloomy—has ever been able to keep them long in degradation or barbarism. There is not now a barbarous people to be found in the whole race, and there has not been one for a thousand years.

Nearly all the great exploits, and achievements too, which have signalized the history of the world, have been performed by this branch of the human family. They have given celebrity to every age in which they have lived, and to every country that they have ever possessed, [page 38] by some great deed, or discovery, or achievement, which their intellectual energies have accomplished. As Egyptians, they built the Pyramids, and reared enormous monoliths, which remain as perfect now as they were when first completed, thirty centuries ago. As Phœnicians, they constructed ships, perfected navigation, and explored, without compass or chart, every known sea. As Greeks, they modeled architectural embellishments, and cut sculptures in marble, and wrote poems and history, which have been ever since the admiration of the world. As Romans, they carried a complete and perfect military organization over fifty nations and a hundred millions of people, with one supreme mistress over all, the ruins of whose splendid palaces and monuments have not yet passed away. Thus has this race gone on, always distinguishing itself, by energy, activity, and intellectual power, wherever it has dwelt, whatever language it has spoken, and in whatever period of the world it has lived. It has invented printing, and filled every country that it occupies with permanent records of the past, accessible to all. It has explored the heavens, and reduced to precise and exact calculations all the complicated motions there. It [page 39] has ransacked the earth, systematized, arranged, and classified the vast melange of plants, and animals, and mineral products to be found upon its surface. It makes steam and falling water do more than half the work necessary for feeding and clothing the human race; and the howling winds of the ocean, the very emblems of resistless destruction and terror, it steadily employs in interchanging the products of the world, and bearing the means of comfort and plenty to every clime.

The Caucasian race has thus, in all ages, and in all the varieties of condition in which the different branches of it have been placed, evinced the same great characteristics, marking the existence of some innate and constant constitutional superiority; and yet, in the different branches, subordinate differences appear, which are to be accounted for, perhaps, partly by difference of circumstances, and partly, perhaps, by similar constitutional diversities—diversities by which one branch is distinguished from other branches, as the whole race is from the other races with which we have compared them. Among these branches, we, Anglo-Saxons ourselves, claim for the Anglo-Saxons the superiority over all the others.

[page 40]
The Anglo-Saxons commenced their career as pirates and robbers, and as pirates and robbers of the most desperate and dangerous description. In fact, the character which the Anglo-Saxons have obtained in modern times for energy and enterprise, and for desperate daring in their conflicts with foes, is no recent fame. The progenitors of the present race were celebrated every where, and every where feared and dreaded, not only in the days of Alfred, but several centuries before. All the historians of those days that speak of them at all, describe them as universally distinguished above their neighbors for their energy and vehemence of character, their mental and physical superiority, and for the wild and daring expeditions to which their spirit of enterprise and activity were continually impelling them. They built vessels, in which they boldly put forth on the waters of the German Ocean or of the Baltic Sea on excursions for conquest or plunder. Like their present posterity on the British isles and on the shores of the Atlantic, they cared not, in these voyages, whether it was summer or winter, calm or storm. In fact, they sailed often in tempests and storms by choice, so as to come upon their enemies the more unexpectedly.

[page 41]

They would build small vessels, or rather boats, of osiers, covering them with skins, and in fleets of these frail floats they would sally forth among the howling winds and foaming surges of the German Ocean. On these expeditions, they all embarked as in a common cause, and felt a common interest. The leaders shared in all the toils and exposures of the men, and the men took part in the counsels and plans of the leaders. Their intelligence and activity, and their resistless courage and ardor, combined with their cool and calculating sagacity, made them successful in every attempt. If they fought, they conquered; if they pursued their enemies, they were sure to overtake them; if they retreated, they were sure to make their escape. They were clothed in a loose and flowing dress, and wore their hair long and hanging about their shoulders; and they had the art, as their descendants have now, of contriving and fabricating arms of such superior construction and workmanship, as to give them, on this account alone, a great advantage over all cotemporary* nations. There were two other points in which there was a remarkable similarity between this parent stock in its rude, early form, and the extended social progeny which [page 44] represents it at the present day. One was the extreme strictness of their ideas of conjugal fidelity, and the stern and rigid severity with which all violations of female virtue were judged. The woman who violated her marriage vows was compelled to hang herself. Her body was then burned in public, and the accomplice of her crime was executed over the ashes. The other point of resemblance between the ancient Anglo-Saxons and their modern descendants was their indomitable pride. They could never endure any thing like submission. Though sometimes overpowered, they were never conquered. Though taken prisoners and carried captive, the indomitable spirit which animated them could never be really subdued. The Romans used sometimes to compel their prisoners to fight as gladiators, to make spectacles for the amusement of the people of the city. On one occasion, thirty Anglo-Saxons, who had been taken captive and were reserved for this fate, strangled themselves rather than submit to this indignity. The whole nation manifested on all occasions a very unbending and unsubmissive will, encountering every possible danger and braving every conceivable ill rather than succumb or submit to any power except [page 45] such as they had themselves created for their own ends; and their descendants, whether in England or America, evince much the same spirit still.

"Lost" message

2005-12-02T17:14:00.000-08:00

A funny thing happened to me the other night; I was chatting on Yahoo Messenger and sent a particular message, then made a comment referring back to it. The person I was talking to said something like "huh?? lol, where'd that come from?" and then I discovered that they hadn't received the message before it; so I pasted it in the window again. Again they didn't get the message; I tried pasting it in other applications and then copying it from there, copying it with my name in front of it, anything you can think of, and it still wouldn't get to her. Then I went and posted it in my blog, and she was able to read it there; then she sent it to me, which I received. I copied her message and sent it back to her--and she didn't get it. The only way I was able to send any of it was by breaking it down into three or four portions and sending those one at a time. I've never seen anything like this so I thought I'd preserve the message here in my blog. I half-wonder if all this happened for a reason actually, maybe to bring attention to what the message contained. The original comment:

sounds very good... I used to be kind of bad about spending but I'm very good about it now, it was out of necessity but (and you may think I'm weird) I actually enjoy being careful about my spending now. Partly because of the discipline involved (I yearn to be a monk, lol), partly because I like making less impact on the environment, partly because I enjoy finding smart ways to buy better things for less.

Haiku

2005-12-01T18:18:00.000-08:00

Another one, very much from the heart:

Sludge on sample cup
Can't wash it off with water
Icky profession.

2005-12-01T17:53:00.000-08:00

Haiku to put on the Blue Lion's Haiku board: (The Blue Lion is a cafe in Pierceton, Indiana)

Hand on steering wheel
Pushing up crowding goosebumps
Winter is present.

Dream Story

2005-11-21T13:57:00.000-08:00

I heard a sound at the front door, and peered out from my bedroom door. I was vaguely aware that I couldn't remember anything else happening today, though I was wide awake. I looked down the hall, darkened except for a bit of natural light filtering in from the kitchen door, the small living room window and the slit in the front door. But as I looked, more light entered the end of the hallway, because the door was slowly being opened, letting sunlight in unfiltered.

A boy poked his head into the room from behind the door; he was black and appeared to be about ten years old. I felt weak and terrified that someone was entering my home, even though it was a boy; I tried to call out to him but my voice was stuck. I was on the floor instead of standing up, though I don't know why. The terror in me rose when I realized that my voice wasn't working as the boy stepped further into the room; I kept trying to yell and low growls started to come from my throat, and I felt that speech was on its way if I could just unclench my adam's apple. One of the growls was loud enough for the boy to hear, and he turned his head sharply towards me, saw me for an instant and backed up and shut the door immediately.

I was able to get to my feet now--I was wearing only gray boxers as far as I'm aware--and went to the door. I looked through the small window-slit, about 4" tall and consisting of five panels across the door, and saw a teenager, black or of similar descent, staring right back at me. His hair was cropped very short, his head was tilted forward and his eyes were staring directly into mine. I moved away from the door and gave a sort of "go on" gesture with my left hand as I did so; but as I walked away I thought about the fact that the young man's eyes hadn't wavered even as I had brushed him off and turned away. I walked back down the hall and turned left to enter the kitchen.

It was a quaint kitchen, like you'd see in a 50's movie; like they had on Leave it to Beaver, only this was real, in color and a bit dirtier. But the first thing I really noticed was the windows: Outside them were more men and children, all dark-skinned, at least six or seven that I could see; and they were all staring at me. Each one's arms hung straight down at their sides, and their heads, at least the ones right in front of me, were hanging down and leaning forward a bit with their eyes still right on me, making them look as if they were starting to roll upwards and into their heads. But offhand my reaction was just that they were angry; I was now thinking that someone in the neighborhood must have said that I was racist, and muttered something under my breath about how pissed off it made me.

As I grabbed a can from the top of the pantry, my cat jumped on my head. Completely startled, I leaned forward and tried to make him get down; he wouldn't. He was doing something to my head, scratching at it I guess, and I started to get really upset. I started trying to pull him off of me but he wouldn't move. After a few more seconds I realized that he wasn't hurting me, yet he was definitely doing something to me with his paws; I became curious and grabbed a pan and tried to look at him in it. What I saw ended any sanity I'd had up until this point.

I saw my cat on top of another cat -- a dead black cat looking right at me, with dirt and dung hanging off of its fur to be exact. The vision made absolutely no sense; I had the "mirror" directed at me, yet I saw two cats on top of a high cupboard like the one to my left. The dead cat's fur seemed strange and long in places, even though its head looked like a normal black tabby's; and there were several cobwebs on its head and body as well. My cat was kicking the dirt and pieces of feces off of it--and as I saw him kick another chunk off, I saw it go by my eyes and hit my nose as it fell to the ground. Another piece hit my shoulder. I was met with both horror and a strange relief--I could not be a dead cat, yet if these things were in my hair I was glad he was getting rid of them. Feeling him on my head and feeling and seeing the things falling off of me made the visualization of having crusty, disgusting things on my head very real.

Finally he jumped off of me and landed on the low cupboard/stand in front of the window. A moment later I didn't see him anymore, and instead there was a hazy person laying on the stand. In a matter of another second or two there was a person laying there, as real as anything else; it was a man and he only had jeans on. I completely panicked, something switched in my head, I don't even know what; and I knew I had to kill him. I reached for a knife in a knife block to my left and immediately plunged it into his stomach; I so desperately needed to kill him that I held onto the knife even after it went into him, trying to make it go deeper. Right then he grabbed the knife and started to double up in pain; I turned and ran out of the room. I saw the knife out of the corner of my eye as it whizzed by and hit the cupboard doors in front of the sink as I reached the doorway.

I reached the hallway and was heading towards my front door which seemed to be slightly ajar again with the light streaming in eerily through the crack again, when I heard shuffling behind me. I turned toward the kitchen doorway and saw a figure holding itself upright against it. The figure lurched forward a bit, then started walking toward me more calmly. I turned away to look at the doorway, which was now just the opposite end of the hallway, nothing but a small stand with some flowers on it; perhaps I had gotten turned around somehow but now there was no obvious escape. I looked at my follower in horror. It had a woman's face, but its bare chest had no breasts. In fact I could see every rib quite clearly through the thin skin, which was bright white. Her face was a little more yellow than white, but just barely; and her eyes bulged a bit in the fervor with which they looked at me. She was talking, but I could barely hear what she was saying; not because she was too quiet, but because I was scrambling backwards in sheer terror. She came too close, within a foot or two, and I stabbed her in the stomach; I don't know where the knife came from. She looked down at it--I now noticed her long, stringy/dirty blond hair--and I twisted it, even pulled it downward, trying to make the wound larger and kill her for sure.

She looked up at me, began talking again and getting even closer to me. I pulled the knife away and cut her throat this time--I slit it hard, three times very quickly. She staggered backwards a bit and her words were choked, as if I had actually given her the deathblow--and I watched her throat and saw each of the cuts I had made turn from red to white and close up entirely. She lurched forward and was standing upright again and resumed all of her previous behavior, talking excitedly and commandingly and pushing me further down the hall with my terrified avoidance of her entering my space.

After I saw the cuts close themselves, I knew I couldn't kill her and was sure she'd do the same to me. For some reason my last ditch effort to save my life came out in the form of asking her almost pleasantly, "Do you want to fuck?" Her eyes took on new life but she said "Oh no, I'm not going to do that. We're going to dry fuck." That was the last thing I heard as everything went blurry and the world started tilting very dramatically and diagonally. I hit the ground unconscious before I could find out that I was the next reincarnation of Amon-Ra.

Definition of "Upgrade"

2005-11-19T10:31:00.000-08:00

Something I found interesting from a recent Yahoo conversation I had--this was right after I'd mentioned that my computer had had another one of its five-minute temper tantrums:

nanookfw: my computer does that a lot, it seems I can't run more than two or three programs. meh
nanookfw: I just wanted to listen to music and sell things on Amazon with Yahoo open
freedom1314stb:
freedom1314stb: time to upgrade
freedom1314stb: are at least spec out
nanookfw: hehe...wait spec out?
nanookfw: I'm not sure what that meant...lol
freedom1314stb: um....upgrading all the components in your computer to their maximum potentila
nanookfw: oh...I figured that's what you meant when you said upgrade; back in the old-school 80's that's what upgrading was--upgrading your RAM, your processor, your video card, blah blah...now technology moves so fast and prices are so cheap that people just assume they have to buy new equipment and that's become the new "upgrading."
nanookfw: That's rather interesting actually, I think I'm going to go make it a blog post. lol

2005-11-14T19:27:00.000-08:00

By Misty, with my spontaneous comments after:

I’ve done a whole lot of thinking and my conclusion is this:
Romantic problems could be avoided if people never kissed.

If love was not the drug it is, if sex was not so fun,
if all those songs didn’t rattle on about “two becoming one”

If people had not half a soul, but the whole one from the start,
then not so many would despair and die of lonely hearts.

So let’s design a line of folk who have heats like the deer.
With mating season, ruts and all, and no more sex all year.

Do not despair for these gentle folk who spend less time in bed.
The rest of the year their blood will be sent to their upper head.

Think of what this race will do with less time spent in tents!
They’ll have more time to build, and think, and read and to invent.

And once a year, if they’ve done well, to cure the world’s unease
They’ll win the rut and the other sex will do all they can to please.

hehe...yeah I'm not sure how one would word that in a more awe-inspiring way. But what it's getting at is certainly interesting, though I think ultimately our intense need for other people might not end with heats like that because I think it stems from our being self-aware and the contradiction of being part of a whole (the world/universe) yet feeling separate from it.

2005-11-11T15:02:00.000-08:00

You know, I can't stand President Bush or the things he does for the most part...but you know what I think would be really funny? If Bush honestly thought there were WMD's in Iraq and was duped into it by Cheney...and only went to Iraq to save us from WMD's and make sacrifices to bring justice and democracy to a muderous and sadistic nation's government. The idea that the sacrifices (the expenditure of money and the loss of lives, though tiny compared to those of the Iraqi soldiers and people) we're yelling at him so angrily for might actually be truly altruistic in the interest of people other than ourselves, sacrificing a little bit of ourselves for their greater good--and therefore actually be more liberal than the actions of 99% of the liberals in this country. Crazy, eh? ;)

India/Pakistan Crisis

2005-10-18T15:35:00.000-07:00

Another post that may put our (the United States citizens') place in the world in better perspective. After the most recent quake in Asia, this one in India/Pakistan, the number of deaths has reached at least 42,000. This kind of number is extremely common in natural disasters that occur in countries less fortunate than ours. There are entire countries whose sea-level/flood/dam situations mirror those of Louisiana; when those places flood, the number dead do not reach what we consider horrific numbers in the low thousands, they begin in the tens of thousands and then often start tapping their way up the hundreds of thousands. Take the earthquakes/tsunamis last year for example. I am not taking anything away from those who are struggling or deceased because of the hurricanes this year; a death is a death, and all are important. Many people's lives have been erased to a third-world existence; this is terrible, but seeing it with our own eyes is hopefully changing our perspective a bit and helping us get aid to those involved in our own disasters and others more quickly/effectively. And we should remember that the much lower death tolls of our own disasters is a blessing, due mostly to our more affluent/effective government, military and modes of transportation.

A few points I found especially interesting:

"The Office for Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA), which coordinates U.N. relief work, said it had received only five percent of the $272 million for which it appealed last week.
The International Federation of Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies -- the world's largest disaster relief network -- said it had only some 25 percent of the $57 million it wanted." -- In the U.S., we simply ask the government for 20-50 BILLION dollars, and it arrives. Yet in a situation of this magnitude (not unlike the tsunamis last year), they struggle to get far less than a billion -- and believe that will help tremendously! Why does it take so much less money to "fix" these situations? Because things cost so much less there, because governments aren't willing to pay contractors and private companies many multiples of what their products/services are worth, and because the standard of living is so much less there--it takes much less effort and goods for these people to consider their lives greatly improved. This should serve as a reminder of how good we have it here, and how much more our money/effort can do in these countries compared with the same amount of effort spent here (I realize we still have much to do in this country).

"An agreement to open the border would be a leap forward as thousands of people are still waiting in their ruined villages for relief which Islamabad admits could take up to another 10 days to reach them." -- While congress is lambasting FEMA (and almost everyone is quietly trying to forget that President Bush's delay in realizing that he needed to order the military to act in the region before they could do so was a tragedy as much as FEMA and local government delays/inefficiencies), let's keep in mind that massive delays of aid are just the best they can do in most countries, and they just have to deal with it.

That's about it, I hope I'm done messing with everyone's viewpoint for awhile. :)

P.S. Also note that this article is about how India/Pakistan are working WITH each other in the very region they have waged war with each other over; and contrast this with the way we shunned Cuba's help during our recent crises...I was personally very proud of the attitude these countries are showing.

Iraqi Death Toll

2005-10-14T17:13:00.000-07:00

Today the Associated Press released a very sobering story that I hope will shut a few people up. The story stated that conservative statistics put the number of Iraqi deaths in the last six months (the point at which the first interim Iraqi government took power) at at least 3,663. Iraqi deaths in that period outnumber American deaths 10 to 1. So please, let's stop bitching so much about how finishing our job there is causing more American soldier deaths. The Iraqis are giving up their blood and souls at a rate of almost 100 for every 10 of us, and you don't hear them whining. And no I'm not a Bush supporter and I'm not sure we got into this war for the right reasons; but to me a death is a death, blood is blood, and a life saved or lost is just that. I don't think that American lives are "worth more." In fact I think that other cultures often value life more than we do. Most of the Iraqi people live in extremely barren conditions, without most of the comforts, conveniences and distractions we possess. When they lose their family...they may truly lose everything they have. This kind of harkens back to the +Live+ song ("Brothers Unaware") I posted on Sept. 11; this viewpoint may not be popular but it's one that needs to be heard considering the quantity and loudness of the opposing viewpoint.

*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-*-

Now if we just do something about the genocidal situations occuring in Africa, I might actually trust our government a bit. I'm the kind of person that would rather help the world even if it puts us in debt or even ruins us, but let's do be consistent.

EDIT: After reading this article, it appears that the ratio of deaths is not as bad as it appeared due to some of the Iraqis counted being insurgents terrorists themselves; but it's still quite substatial. And considering the fact that you had around a 1 in 80 chance of being murdered if you lived in Iraq during Saddam's regime (the article I've linked to is about statistics such as this, compared over time and to other wars), I just don't feel upset about it, at least not for that reason.

Organic

2005-10-13T09:44:00.000-07:00

Yesterday I was having lunch at my parents' house, and afterwards we were sitting and talking a bit. The subject of organic foods came up, at which point my mother said "I hate organic food." I damn near choked and in complete disbelief; her ignorance in this statement and what she said after (regarding distaste for natural fertilizers) was so strong it was almost like a wall being thrown at me.

I don't blame her or fault her necessarily; ignorance isn't necessarily something you did wrong. My parents are very much a product of what suburban commercialism has created; a class of people who get their food heavily processed, watered down and salted with generous portions of trans fat.

But the audacity in this statement is really quite amazing if you think about it; being able to say that the way produce was raised for thousands of years, getting us here, is not good enough for you; saying that even the way you got your food and the food you ate until you were about 35 is not good enough for you. She ate that food all her life and LOVED it; how can people be so completely ignorant now? "I don't care about spots on my apples, leave me the birds and the bees..." (God I love that song) That's part of the problem; she doesn't like birds, she doesn't like bees, she doesn't like chipmunks or most other living creatures, at least if they come anywhere near her. She is disenfranchised from the earth, living in plastic and concrete and unable to see life away from it as acceptable. This is a danger for us all I think.

Anyway I imagine a lot of people think this way; but this involves a massive denial of the way life works. Yes your green beans may come from pastures that used manure; but we need to accept that ALL life comes from the decay and destruction of other life. In fact the very soil, as I understand it, is created by the wriggling and shuffling of worms and insects, and is almost entirely made up of their droppings and all the things that go into that (dead or living plant and animal flesh). Most of us don't think about that much, but it's true: Think about it, what would the surface of the earth be without life? Solid rock.......why is it so different? Life. Dead, decaying, or processed and expelled life, to be exact. Yet while this may make you shudder, we have to get past that and give some acceptance and gratitude to this; for not only do we owe every morsel we put into our mouths (our ability to live, life itself you might say) to this cycle, but nearly all the economic progress and conveniences we have enjoyed for the last 100+ years, through fossil fuels (though I believe we are slowly conquering that dependency) -- which as you probably know is not "fossils" in the usual form of imprints on rocks, but living things that died, decayed and got compressed or sunk under the earth before they could complete that process--leaving us with an oily residue of their existence that is quite explosive, has made us trillions of dollars and given us almost everything we take for granted.

2005-10-09T14:31:00.000-07:00

You know, I really miss the days back in the late 80's/early 90's when all you had to know was that someone else was online to know that you'd be compatible with them. There was a certain open-mindedness, idealism and a bit of "going against the grain" that was just inherent in people that were into the online/internet scene. These days the prom queens get online just to show everyone how sexy their new shirt looks in the pics they took in the mirror with their cellphone.

Oh well, there's always a trade-off with new technologies....

2005-10-07T17:28:00.000-07:00

Confronting History -- Dealing a Blow to Holocaust Deniers - I thought this was pretty interesting.

Strawberry Reloaded?

2005-09-22T17:42:00.000-07:00

I noticed that one of my favorite bloggers, Nanette commented indiffidently in defense of the symbol-analyzing she and her blog commenters did on the Strawberry story; I think this is important so I'll post the response I made below.

I would say that one has every right to do that, but that is like taking a painting by an artist that has explained his painting to you, and then looking at each of its symbols and coming up with whatever they remind you yourself of. One can find insights of their own by doing that kind of thing; but the author's intent and the meaning of the story and others like it (there are many, many koans, all with the same objective--to wake one up from "ordinary reality" and into true awareness of the present) is very well established and known. That doesn't mean you can do with it what you want, analyzing it for symbols and such; but giving respect to the story's original meaning and the Eastern concepts and history behind it is also important, IMHO.

Vise

2005-09-22T14:52:00.000-07:00

You have wrapped yourself around my heart like ribs around a torso.
You support it and help give it shape...but you pierced its flesh to do so.
You lie beneath the surface, intertwined with it to the extent that I no longer can tell myself, from you.
Yes you give it shape, but you also cage it. Its movements are restricted by your vise's grip, your painful cell bars of flesh and bone.
Do you mean to make it hurt like this, and sway with your every breath? Or is this just something that happened, your love just got there somehow and couldn't remove itself anymore even if it wanted to, its latticework of faith, fear, need and desire pulled through me and tied like so many slipknots.
I wonder if this why we think Adam's mesmerizing companion came from a rib ripped from beneath his skin. Is that the way it really happened.....or did it just feel that way.

2005-09-11T14:09:00.000-07:00

This is the kind of song that might shock/irritate supporters of our reaction to 9/11, but it's one of my favorites and I keep going back to it.

War in me
War overseas
There ain't no difference between

Blood in me
Blood overseas
There ain't no difference between

The chills in your spine are oh, so sweet
People honor you so high
You've got to defend the stage at your feet
No!

Take, Take, Take my anthem today

Hands on me
Hands overseas
There ain't no difference between

Heart in me
Heart overseas
There ain't no difference between

+Live+, "Take My Anthem" (Mental Jewelry, 1992)

2005-09-09T17:41:00.000-07:00

Take a piece of paper and fill it with a bunch of dots (use a post-it if you don't have time for that). Imagine that these dots are the universe; the sea of atoms, molecules and light waves that make up everything in it. Now draw a simple outline of a person somewhere on your sheet of paper. A bunch of your little dots are now inside the outline of that person. This is how we look at the world; we're separate from it, in our own little shell, our own needs and desires separate from the sea of dots outside it. It's easy to convince yourself of this; in fact we don't need any convincing, most of us simply take it as a given by the time we're 6 or 7 years old. Now erase your outline. This is what I believe the world is like...there are no boundaries, just a sea of particles we are within. The universe is like the sand on a beach; we may think some things are completely different from others, we may think we're alone and distant, but we're really just another grain of energy rolling down the sand dunes. Our thoughts make us feel like we are separate from everything, but in fact everything in the universe is a part of us, and we're a part of it. No one is small, no one is insignificant, we are all participating equally in the beauty of the universe's creation and the unfolding of its destiny.

If that was too weird for you don't worry, I'll be back with more seemingly meaningless poems and rants about relationships. >:)

Strawberry revisited

2005-08-08T22:01:00.000-07:00

It just occured to me that I posted about the meaning of the "sweetest strawberry" story over at Nanette's blog, but mentioned nothing about its meaning on my own blog. I think I tend to think that the posts I write here are somewhat self-explanatory--you will either "get them" or you won't, and there's nothing I can do to help you--but clearly it's helpful sometimes, considering the way the strawberry story was analyzed in that other blog (everyone was trying to figure out what each of the story's characters and objects represented, rather than looking at the meaning of the story itself). I realized later that my comments on her blog may have seemed a bit arrogant; I was just putting on my guru hat and hope it didn't come across that way. Anyway, my comments on the story were:

The point is not what any of the story's objects are or mean, the point is to savor every moment of life. One takes a strawberry and all the subtle details of its flavor for granted, unless we focus on it. The story doesn't tell us a whole lot, but we can imagine. Perhaps (as many of us do) she didn't give many of the experiences in her life her full attention, and it took this kind of situation to make her finally realize how precious everything around her really is, how precious even being ABLE to taste a strawberry is.

(untitled poem)

2005-08-04T14:16:00.000-07:00

Why do you care only from afar?
Why do you deprive yourself of what you need?
Why can't you trust your instincts?
Or why don't your instincts trust me?
Why don't you want one that wants you, while your brain's player piano only rolls over on maybes and non-existent potentials?
Why do you choose solemn questing over rapturous communion?
Why does familiarity breed contempt?
Why do clean slates seem more attractive than intimate knowledge?
Why can't you touch for joy if the touch is desired?
Why can't you be touched to bring peace rather than arousal or fear?
Why do you only invite if your defenses are down, when your defenses should be defending your need for love? If the best defense is offense, why don't you attack for comfort rather than defending the distance between you and everyone else on a rock in the moat? Where are you, exactly? What are you defending?
Why can't you let go?

2005-07-29T19:18:00.000-07:00

Note: Finished revisions to book participation request letters. Will prepare mailings next week if possible.

The Strawberry

2005-07-28T15:59:00.000-07:00

I noticed that Nanette posted the "Sweetest Strawberry" story, which is among my favorite Eastern parables, so I'm inspired to post a few versions I've known or come across.

One of the most famous versions is this brief one published by D.T. Suzuki: (can be found here with some reactions)

One day while walking through the wilderness a man stumbled upon a vicious tiger. He ran but soon came to the edge of a high cliff. Desperate to save himself, he climbed down a vine and dangled over the fatal precipice. As he hung there, two mice appeared from a hole in the cliff and began gnawing on the vine. Suddenly, he noticed on the vine a plump wild strawberry. He plucked it and popped it in his mouth. It was incredibly delicious!

A note on this version:

(One reader claimed that Thomas Cleary once told him that the original ending of this story was quite different. According to Cleary, D.T. Suzuki changed the ending because he thought the original would not appeal to Westerners. The story was then picked up by others, such as Paul Reps. In the original version, the strawberry turns out to be, in fact, deadly poison.)

My favorite quote about this version is:

"What a story! Indeed, it points out that the essence of zen must be to live until you are dead!"

An excellent version from India:

A man was walking across a field when he heard a rustling in the tall grass beside him, and turned to see the hungry eyes of a large tiger staring at him. The man began to run, fear giving him greater speed and stamina than he knew he possessed. But always, just behind him, he could hear the easy breathing of the hungry tiger. Finally, the man stopped, not because his strength had failed but because he had come to the edge of a high cliff and could go no further. "I can let the tiger eat me, or take my life in my own hands and jump." The man turned and saw the tiger slowly walking toward him, licking its mouth in anticipation. Resolved to take his own life, the man stepped to the edge of the cliff and bent his legs to jump, when he suddenly noticed a thick vine growing out of the side of the cliff, several feet from the top. Carefully, he let himself drop down the cliff face, catching hold of the vine as he slid past, and thanked God when it was strong enough to support his weight. Hanging now, the man looked up and saw the tiger's eyes peering over the edge of the cliff. It roared down at him, then began to pace back and forth along the top of the cliff. For the first time, the man looked at the vine that had saved his life. It was thick enough for him to wrap his legs around, resting his arms, and long enough that he might be able to let himself far enough down to jump safely to the ground below. And the moment he had this thought was the same moment that he saw the second tiger, pacing back and forth at the foot of the cliff, licking its mouth, and looking hungrily up at him. Well, thought the man, if my strength and the strength of the vine are great enough, perhaps I can outwait the tigers. Surely, they'll go someplace else to eat when they're hungry enough. And the man prepared to settle in for a long wait. His preparations halted quickly, however, when he heard a scurrying, scratching sound close to his own face. Glancing upwards, he saw two mice, one white and one black, emerge from a small hole in the cliff. They made their way swiftly to the base of the vine, and began to gnaw through it with their small sharp teeth. There was nothing else he could do, a tiger above, a tiger below, and the vine that kept him from their jaws about to break. The man was closing his eyes to begin his prayers, when he noticed, a little to his right, a tiny patch of red color on the face of the cliff. He reached toward it precariously, pulled, and brought his hand back beneath his eyes. There, in his palm, was a luscious, red strawberry. The man swiftly pressed the strawberry between his lips, onto his tongue, and hanging between those still visible tigers, he enjoyed the finest , juiciest, sweetest meal of his life.

-----------------------------

And the story as told on "King of the Hill" (you do indeed find the most profound wisdom in the most unexpected places sometimes)

KAHN: At first I didn't much like Buckley, I admit. But then I saw how much he piss off my neighbor, Mr. Hank Hill, and I decide I should seek out this Buckley fellow and get to know him. I grew to love that boy. Now that he's gone, I feel a big hole in my life -- I think we all do. Is a world without Buckley a world we want to live in? ... As a Buddhist, of course, I get comfort from a story. I don't need to tell you how much Buddhists love a story! ... Anyway, story begins with man being chased by ferocious man-eating tiger. Tiger chase him to edge of cliff. Man falls off. Halfway down, he grab onto branch. He look up, he see ferocious tiger. Now he look down, he see another hungry tiger, waiting for him on the ground below. Not a good place to be. He knows for sure he gonna die. Then out of corner of his eye he see a wild strawberry growing on same branch. He pluck it and eat it. And it was the sweetest-tasting strawberry he ever had.

Ah-ha!! I knew this was a koan! (As this Chinese monk's blog says) Browse my blog a bit for a few koans of my own creation, as well as the definition of what a koan is. Following is the version written by the Chinese blogger referenced above.

---------------------------

Once, a young monk was sent forth from the monastery to carry a message to another monastery far away. As he walked through the dense forest, he caught glimpses of orange fur in the dappled shade and heard low growls. Surmising that he was being stalked by a tiger, he quickened his steps, but the large cat easily kept pace with him. Fear gnawed at the young monk, and he began to run blindly through the trees, leaving the path he knew in an attempt to outdistance the hungry cat whose panting breath he could feel upon his neck.

The monk lost his way, and to his terror, found himself at the edge of a great precipice. Behind him, he heard the tiger stop, and begin pacing back and forth among the trees, its golden eyes glinting among the leaves. Shaking, the monk looked down and saw that there were vines clambering over the jagged rocks and he determined to try and climb down them. Just as he swung himself over the cliff, and began clambering down the vines which creaked under his weight, he heard the tiger roar, and saw it stare balefully down at him from above.

From below cane an answering roar, and the monk startled and looked down to see a second tiger, pacing along the stones that lined the bottom of the cliff face, waiting for him to descend.

Shuddering, the young monk closed his eyes and clung to the vine, his only means of support. The sound of nibbling teeth caught his attention and he opened his eyes to see a mouse chewing at the vine that held him suspended between the hungry cats.

Next to the mouse, he saw a flash of red.

A wild strawberry grew in a crevice of the stone, and a lone fruit shone invitingly.

The monk reached out, and plucking the crimson fruit, held it to his nose. The sweet fragrance rushed into his nostrils as the last bit of the vine gave way and the monk began to fall. As he plummeted toward the tiger, the monk popped the strawberry in his mouth, and the flavor was the sweetest thing he had ever experienced.

--------------------------

There are many other versions of this story, but these are probably my favorites (I particularly like the pacing of the last one).

2005-07-27T18:47:00.000-07:00

Five more addresses and I'm ready to send my book project solicitations. Also fleshing out a photo book idea that I may work on while waiting for the other to shape up. I NEED to find that short story I submitted to some magazines a couple years ago, so I can post it here.

Edit: Finished draft of photo book idea and posted it, it'll show up before this one.

Marriage...bah humbug??

2005-07-27T18:41:00.000-07:00

Something I wrote in an e-mail recently, edited a bit for artistic purposes:

By the way, I've been thinking lately and have pretty much decided I don't want to get married again either. LOL Sounds silly I guess, I'm sure I will if I find someone and that's what they need. But I've thought about how much people change after you get married, and how so much of that is because of the obligation, the fact that you "have" to be with that person now, and are expected to be with them for the rest of your life. I'm sure that people have paired up (or had harems in some cases) since prehistoric times, but it wasn't until men wanted a sure-fire way to get a virgin and then make her his property forever that people started doing "marriage" as we know it. I have no need to make someone my property, to make a woman feel that way or to feel that way about a woman. I also think that people are probably a lot kinder to someone that could leave them at any moment, than someone who is obligated to stay. And the fact that they DO stay is actually more true and meaningful if you think about it. When we talked about it you threw Kurt Russell and Goldie Hawn out there and I chuckled at it, but I was watching something about Kate Hudson's life the other day and quite frankly she thought her parents were wonderful and she obviously turned out pretty damn well, so maybe it can work for your kids too, with the right attitude. I think in the end you find out that men AND women often want variety, and only stay with someone for a long time if they really, truly love them, OR because they got married and feel obligated and see no other way out. If things always still seem exciting and fresh, if every time you kiss your lover you are renewing your decision to be with them, and if every time your loved one touches you you know it's because they WANT to be there, I really can't imagine that the love you had could've been any more fully lived any other way. Maybe you can reach that with a signed contract between you, but it just doesn't seem like it anymore, and it certainly can't be assured.

2005-07-25T17:47:00.000-07:00

Photography book idea. Introduction. (probably 2-3 pages) Rather risque, but in a world where there are women making a name for themselves by making coffee-table books out of graphically documenting their sex lives, this won't bat an eye. :) Aside note: I was one a permanent featured photographer in Compuserve's Photography Showcase Forum, alongside heady Herb Ritts/Ansel Adams-types, although I don't know if I still "have it." :)

The premise for this book starts, somehow appropriate I think, with smut. The ideas within basically started from the fact that there are women close to me in my life who I have seen nude photos of. This has been a very strange thing to deal with for the last few years, and I have occasionally wrestled with what exactly it meant. I have tried to decide whether this meant I was more intimate with these women having seen this, or not--particularly since it was without their knowledge (in one case I was shown them, in the other they were just happened upon). Did this mean the same thing as if I had seen them in person? Does the fact that they didn't will me to see them mean anything? I knew that I had seen something that I really only would have seen if I'd had sex with them--brief glimpses of some parts included in the pictures notwithstanding. This led me to wonder what the nature of looking at a photo is. Are you really seeing what you think you're seeing? Does the subject of the picture have a bearing on that question? Someone might say that seeing a picture of a national monument is much less like seeing the real thing than seeing a picture of a person. So that's the question, is looking at a photo equal to seeing the photo's content in real life? Are the experiences implied by the picture the key here? I think that's the heart of this question and what this book explores. For example, seeing someone on a roller coaster does little to tell you what it's like. Seeing a photo vase sitting on a table, however, doesn't really leave you feeling like you missed out on much.

But many other things are involved in this question of whether seeing in photos is as good as our eyes. Does the quality of the photo matter? I thought about other situations and how our mind works about them. If, for instance, you are with someone and you look at them in a mirror. You are probably quite convinced that looking at them in the mirror is just as good and accurate as turning to the real person and looking at them. If you were having sex with someone and you were looking at them in a mirror, you'd probably be quite satisfied that you had really seen them. If you take a photo where the photographer had purposely cast darkness across the model's feet, and you brightened the image and found that you could now see their feet, you'd probably be quite satisfied that you now indeed know what the model's toes look like. Is this all that all forms of reproduction and seeing are, simply the gathering of information? A mirror reflects light. The light reflected has basically the exact same content as the light we'd get if we looked at the mirrors subject ourselves (although this is a major assumption; a mirror may be imperfect or even purposely distorted). This isn't as true for a photo. Every photo has a different exposure time, focus point and f-stop (focus depth); these are not necessarily the same exposure conditions that our eyes would have in the same situation. But if someone had a very good camera and film that could make pictures at dusk be as detailed as ones taken at high noon, you probably wouldn't have any qualms about whether you were really seeing what you thought you were--you might even mistake one for the other! Computer manipulation brings a whole other set of concerns to the table. When someone starts adding filters or contrast to an image--basically deleting part of the image to bring out certain aspects of it--does what we see really have anything to do with reality anymore? Can we trust our eyes now? Do we take whatever information we can get from these altered images on trust, or discard the whole thing as fantasy? It's a judgment call, I think.

These photos explore these concepts. If, as I sometimes do, you basically see photos and eyesight as the collection of information, some of the compositions here may give you information that you can trust completely. Others may not be so easy to decipher, and many go right to the heart of the difficulty of these concepts and force you to decide for yourself how you feel about them before you can decide how "real" what you're looking at is. And then think about the fact that your eyesight is just the gathering of light in cells in your eyes and then transferred to neurons and on to your brain (not nearly as "physical" and earthy as the process that occurs in your nose, where molecules of the air are actually accepted by cells that send the information to your brain--you smell something because it actually became a part of you and your body recognized its new visitor), look at the things around you and then look back at this book and wonder if the size of the dots we printed the images has any effect on how "true" what you see here is. We've tried to minimize this particular interference, I assure you.

If on the other hand you see pictures as being worth nothing compared to the actual experience of our own sight, I've given you nothing. If you've intellectualized the issue in some other way, then I've just given you more of whatever it is that you've discovered for yourself.

I also often wondered, in the making of this book, whether what I saw in my camera's viewfinder was less real than what I saw when I looked over the top of it. True, the viewfinder was sometimes just a flat piece of glass--but that is still an entire layer of solid material between me and the subject. Did the glass in the viewfinder mean that I was looking at the world through a window, locked away from my actual subject? Does this mean that the eyeglasses that I wear are doing the same thing! My glasses certainly distort what my own eyes would normally see. (Is seeing things for real always the most important thing, or does it vary with the situation? If you have sex with a girl in the dark under the covers, I think you'd be much more satisfied that you had actually seen her naked if you had some pictures she took of herself in broad daylight.) They twist and bend light before it reaches my eye, so that I can see what I "ought" to see. I think this is the most damning indictment of this whole concept, although I cannot for sure say what I mean. We say that our eyesight is "better" with glasses, because while less true to our body's ability to see, we are able to perceive things in more detail ("resolution") and gather information about what the things around us are like with much greater accuracy. In the end, if all seeing is just the experience of gathering information, I guess I'll take what I can get.

(Ideas: picture of a signature stamp, stamp on check, compared to real signature, show hand making signature. pictures of woman in a mirror, showing only the mirror, then showing woman and mirror, then only the woman. pictures through windows/filters. pictures altered, filtered, contrasted. pictures shown and then shown brightened, revealing aspects/objects totally unseen beforehand. pictures of pictures--this and the mirror pictures being the most important. pictures of pictures containing an action, then pictures of the action itself. pictures taken through glasses? taken through glasses the right way, then the wrong way. at least one form (hopefully an unusual one) of an infinite image just for the fun of it. picture of photographer taking image, picture of photographer away from his camera and talking to the subject. most of these will be done in facing page sets or triptych form. explore various types of pictures where you feel that you see something, but adding something to the image (widening the view) or changing the angle changes the context. Would need models, will ask friends first.) EDIT: Need pictures exploring the relationship between what is seen in a photo, and the experiences implied or experienced in the photo. This is such a large subject that maybe it should be its own book; when I added the sentence about this to the intro it seemed out of place.

2005-07-25T17:46:00.000-07:00

I'm going to add this onto the other thing I wrote (I saved it but didn't post it) about what I'm looking for in a relationship.

As to what I'm looking for, when I originally wrote this I said I didn't have any preference other than being attracted to her personality and body. But I don't think that's true. No matter who you are I'd love to meet you, nothing's set in stone, opposites attract, all that good stuff. But this is what really gets me going where it counts--in my head. It sort of turned into a poetic ramble, but you get the general idea. ;)

I don't want a pretty girl. That is, I don't want a girl who thinks she's pretty and thinks that's important. In fact, I want a girl who hates girls like that. I want a geek, an emo, I want a movie-lovin' art freak. I want a glasses-wearing, pimple-faced, t-shirt wearer. I want a girl who doesn't wear contacts because she's against the concept, not for convenience. I want a girl who might wear trashy clothes, but mainly just to piss off her other friends that wish they had a rack like her, fully aware of the irony in the way they covet an intimate part of her body as if they could make it their next fashion accessory. I want a girl who simply eats what she decides to, because she refuses to eat or not eat because of how YOU might look at her. I want a girl who thinks there's more to the world than what she can see and hear, but maybe just hasn't really looked into it yet. But sometimes she can feel it. I want a girl who might be hot, but doesn't want to be, because the conspiracy of beauty in this country, the way everyone is treated like their life's worth is equal to how "bangable" they are, is something she doesn't want to associate with. I want a girl who sometimes has dark, disturbing thoughts about destroying her beauty, because she doesn't want to be egotistical about it, she doesn't want to use it to get things from men she doesn't actually like, but most importantly because she wishes that could be no chance that she could ever, ever become another high-maintenance bitch in pumps and Versace.

2005-07-19T17:40:00.000-07:00

Overbearing and overinflated disclaimer for dating me: (consider this your contract.)

First of all, even if we get serious, don't be expecting us to have sex more than once a week. I'm a Lab Technician in a factory (I would personally call most of it bath maintenance), and between the heat, the manual labor and toxic chemicals, it just wears me the hell out. (I could probably avoid that but I'm one of those old-school freaks who actually gives a shit, so if I'm not worn out, I know it usually means I missed a few things.) Please make other arrangements for this. (Arrangements with one of your girlfriends when I come home from work would probably work out the best for me personally.) However, I AM a kinky bastard. You WILL at some point find yourself performing strange sex acts involving a webcam and carefully selected fruits and condiments. Any efforts to prepare for this in advance will be greatly appreciated. I'm into alternative rock, techno, art films and unusual fiction. But I appreciate damn near everything. You should also be aware that I play tennis. I will probably play tennis until I die; if this is a problem we can probably arrange something though (like, say, buying you a new tennis racquet). I also like to write and have a couple book projects I'm trying to put together; if you don't like guys who have weird ambitions then you should just go right on ahead and get thy self to the nunnery, shopping mall…forensics workshop, whatever it is that you're into. That reminds me, I’m into weird stuff. Like empty shopping malls, cemeteries, stores after they’ve closed, lonely parks, museums nobody actually goes to. This is not because I think you’re ugly (or too beautiful) and want to keep you away from the world, it’s because I love the morbid and “this SHOULD make you sad, but it’s actually really interesting” sense I get from these things. Relax darlin’. :D

Anyway, I would call myself spiritual but not religious. I'm all about respect. Yet I like to have extremely devious fun. If you at least try to live by the golden rule ("do unto others...") except for when not doing so is just too damn delicious, you’re just fine by me. I have a job, I own my house, my car is paid off. I have money, but I’m not the kind of guy who’s used to going out to expensive restaurants as an expected routine or because I think there’s nothing better to do. If I’m going to plunk down $40 for something I don’t need, I’d rather it be on a vacation than just the irresponsible way I live my life.

Also: I am in the process of getting divorced. I’m the one that wanted out, there’s no chance of me going back to her. But, I AM damaged goods. Expect me to take a little while to warm up and get going. Right now I am just overawed at the enormity of my last mistake, and I don’t expect to let anyone into my life very deeply again until I am VERY sure about them.

What I'm looking for? A woman I'm attracted to, body and soul (personality). That's about all there is to say, I really don’t have any worries or demands, I’m sure I'll figure it out when I meet you. :)

2005-07-18T19:31:00.000-07:00

I came across a Jane Campion message board and saw the following comment:

>> In the past, until recently, I have hugely enjoyed Jane Campion's films for its intelligence and seeking out the important aspects of human existence and representing them fairly.

I was so shocked and revolted to watch 'In The Cut', her latest film, to see the derogatory and gratuitous way that she portrayed urban Black people: male and female.

She pandered to all the nasty and evil stereotypes that have been historically associated with Black people: sexually licentious, rapists, inarticulate the list goes on.

It really amazes me how when you dig deep down, White people always, even without provocation, their evil hatred towards Black people.

When we say that it is they that have a problem with race, it stands as a fact. >>

This made me angry, so I posted the following:

To say that we -always- have hatred is just as racial as anything Jane Campion has done. Don't deal in absolutes and stereotypes, you know it's wrong no matter which side it's thrown from. Many black people have a problem with race too, which I personally think is largely disappearing since their race has pretty much taken over commercial society (music, sports, etc.), which is the only part of society that much of our younger generations are concerned with anymore. I think that once the two oldest generations (Baby boomers and the generation before them) have gone, there will be much less chip on the shoulders of black men and women, since there will really be no one left who's "hip" and doesn't look up to and/or spend a great deal of their time and money on things done and produced by black people, which believe it or not, greatly increases the profile of the average black person. I should know, a lot of the white women I fall for seem to end up with black men. :) And most of my white friends only listen to hip-hop and rap. Maybe this is just my perception, coming from recent experiences among the lower-middle-class part of society. I think there will always be differences between the races, cultural mannerisms and such that make us different (and different is NOT a bad word), but at our core we will always be the same.

2005-06-27T19:44:00.000-07:00

My efforts to find contact addresses for my book project turn up a lot of interesting material.

A Chat with Arthur C. Clarke

2005-06-27T18:25:00.000-07:00

Browsing message boards I come across a lot of strange quotes in people's signatures that I like.

"Natural to the Universe is Oblivion, which is in itself the Universe. Through the art of Nothingness, one may harness the power of destruction, and rebirth. In the shadows... it waits.

Innate in the blood lies a power, it is the light of the dawn, her breath is our breath, her blood is our blood, we will spill it in her name."

2005-06-23T13:49:00.000-07:00

Regarding God's identity and name, since there are so many different religions and philosophies that seem to think they know these things: My view is always that if there is a God, he/she exists and does whatever he does regardless of whether we know it or not (or appreciate it or not!), but I do not believe that we know him/her very well or know his name(s). So for instance I don't believe that the Hebrews knew God much better than I do, or that Yahweh is a better name for him than the simple nameless feeling I have in my heart about him/her.

In sex...

2005-06-08T13:33:00.000-07:00

Men are aggressive, and willful.
Women are passive, and willing.

Men offer; women accept.

(Except for those rare occasions when they could instead be said to grind and envelop)

2005-06-03T18:33:00.000-07:00

A quote harkening back to my infamous "dominance/submission/David Lynch" essays:

Go to your fields and your gardens,
and you shall learn that it is the pleasure of
the bee to gather honey of the flower,
But it is also the pleasure of the flower
to yield its honey to the bee.

For to the bee a flower is a fountain of life,
And to the flower a bee is a messenger of love,
And to both, bee and flower, the giving
and the receiving of pleasure is a need and
an ecstasy.

-- Kahlil Gibran (author of "The Prophet")