so i haven't written in here for a bit. but seeing as i'm the only one who reads this, i guess i don't have any 'splaining to do. i've been reading a lot about 'smart mobs' lately. a tremendously powerful innovative idea i think. i like this quote from Machiavelli:

"Innovation makes enemies of all those who prospered under the old regime, and only lukewarm support is forthcoming from those who would prosper under the new."

and then howard rheingold, in his book smart mobs goes on to say:

"those who created an infrastructure in which the devices (telephones, televisions, and radios) are inexpensive and dumb, the network that connects the devices is highly specialized and expensive to install, and the service is sold on a metered basis (telephony, cable tv, and wired internet access) are challenged by new enterprises in which cheap devices are the network, and no private enterprise owns the medium that carries their messages."

maybe all that seems outofleftfield. but hey, leftfield's a pretty damn cool place if you ask me. i can now sit in a cafe and connect wirelessly to the internet and listen to free music over the internet (broadcast by the bbc, not pirated btw) email friends all over the place and choose what news and info i want to read. and this all seems tremendously (there's that word again) empowering and enabling and creative and changing. it happens slowly and quietly and then all of a sudden you wake up and the world around you no longer functions the way you thought it did. whatever. just ramblings i suppose.

did you hear that michael moore is going to melt down the gun he bought in bowling for columbine, mold it into a bust of john ashcroft, and auction it off on ebay?

so i just added this link to the righthand column called the new american century. it is crazy. the front page is a letter by some folks about what the US should do. it's dated 1997. they say some pretty intense stuff. i have not yet had a chance to look through the entire site. what are those labels of all the parts of the world about anyway? then, see who it's signed by. whoa boy. written in 1997---weird.

this reminds me. this page your reading now hasn't ever been viewed by anyone besides me i don't think. so right now, it continues to exist as a sort of personal diary for all to see. like the guy taking a shit in the stall with no door on it, i continue to go about my business here regardless of if anyone's looking. but now i have stumbled upon some pretty intense info (see prior paragraph) and i wonder if a few people did see this and spoke about it a bit and some not so nice people started paying attention to the crap i write. then all of a sudden i am gone. you don't know what happened for sure. does that sort of thing really happen? could all of this patriot act induced fear actually result in some catastrophic loss of personal freedoms? it's hard to imagine that those people sued by the record industry for sharing songs on their home computer or the military reservist killed in post-war iraq or me sitting here typing up links that share the info they don't want you to know--that any of us could see it coming. surprise surprise. you're in court or your in the desert or your monitored--not like the movies, for real this time--or you disappear.

ever hear about the kid who had a weblog and was killed and then his family and friends began using his posthumous blog as a place to share feelings? that really happened.

another thing i was thinking about is the paradoxical nature of information access today. we live in an age when our personal access to info is overwelming. tv listings, music, television, newspapers, books, cell phones, magazines, blogs, and on and on and on. yet we believe that there exists a network of power behind the scenes that controls it all. the only thing is they're not behind the scenes. you can go to many many websites that state flatout the intentions of many folks. you can see how the heads of governments, their administrations, media personalities and moguls, and industry leaders are intertwined. in fact, many are players in multiple areas. what bush administration official doesn't have some vested in some company out there somewhere? it makes no sense for them not too. everybody's got some vested interest out there somewhere. i'm not denying that. i'm asking that we admit that it's an obvious truth and that certain steps have to be taken to protect government officials from the termptation of acting in their own best interests, not the best interests of americans as a whole. anyway.

it's all just ones and zeros in the end.

when it rains it pours. what can i say. this, and the two previous entries sorta represent recent thoughts of mine (or scraps of paper in my back pocket) that i've had with me for a while. now, as i enter them onto this page, i liberate my mind from their intense contemplation--safe in the knowledge that they will continue to be there, but maybe not so everpresent to my mind. hmmm.

the three difficulties

1) recognize your neurosis as neurosis

2) then not to do the habitual thing, but to do something different to interrupt the neurotic habit

3) to make this practice a way of life

good good.

here are a few buddhist concepts that i had written down on a piece of scrap paper in my back pocket. i'm not sure if they belong on here, but then again who decides what belongs here? for some reason i have a difficult time throwing out this piece of scrap paper--for fear that these insightful words will be forever lost. so maybe if i write them on here they will continue to thrive and move me...

the four preliminaries

1) maintain an awareness of the preciousness of human life

2) be aware of the reality that life ends; death comes for everyone

3) recall that whatever you do, whether virtuous or not, has a result; what goes around come around.

4) contemplate that as long as you are too focused on self-importance and too caught up in thinking about how you are good or bad, you will suffer.

my mind sorta gets wrapped in a paradox when i read these words over and over. i want to know them because i feel i need to know them. but do i feel like i need to know them because i want to be a better person? and if so, isn't that exactly what it's telling me not think about? so what's the solution then? to throw this piece of paper out and forget about this whole thing? where does that leave me?

some quotes i want to remember:

"each man is haunted until his humanity awakens." -Blake

"custom will reconcile people to any atrocity." -George Bernard Shaw

"if we believe absurdities, we shall commit atrocities." -T.H. Huxley

"sit down before fact like a little child, and be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abyss Nature leads, or you shall learn nothing." -T.H. Huxley

and here's a quote i read in the Shambhala Sun that i really enjoyed:

"it suddenly dawned on me that i was on a bus, that outside the bus, as it moved down the street, it had turned dark, night had come on, lights were on in the buildings that lined the street; and above the buildings was the night sky, and all was right with the world. in that moment, it would seem that my consciousness had switched from its microcosmic state of personal issues and problems, to a macrocosmic awareness that inhabited a large universe--that in fact my consciousness was but a single filament of this larger whole."

those words are so beautiful to me. i love to imagine myself as a single filament of a larger whole, in fact i would say that when i truly feel those words it's not my imagination running wild, but my inner true nature exposing itself. i suppose these quotations are significant for me because they seem so different in many ways, but actually incorporate the true human sensations in their perspective. good or bad don't really make sense to these words, they exist on a plane of truth that makes no sense of human judgments. yes yes.

"comfort is a means, not an end. the modern world seems to regard it as an end in itself, an absolute good. one day, perhaps, the earth will have been turned into one vast feather-bed, with man's body dozing on top of it and his mind underneath, like desdemona, smothered"

"the condition of an expanding and technologically progressive system is universal craving...desirelessness is the condition of deliverance and illumination."

-Aldous Huxley

And through Dr. Miller in Huxley's Eyeless in Gaza:

"i've never really liked it, you know. not what's ordinarily meant by prayer at any rate. all that asking for special favours and guidances and forgivenesses--i've always found that it tends to make one egotistical, preoccupied with one's own ridiculous, self-important little personality. when you pray in the ordinary way, you're merely rubbing yourself into yourself. you return to your own vomit, if you see what i mean. whereas what we're all looking for is some way of getting beyond our own vomit."

i need to read Huxley's The Perennial Philosophy i think.

in other news...

Herb Brooks, the brilliant, complicated coach who led the United States to the "Miracle on Ice" at the 1980 Olympics, died Monday afternoon in a car accident.

so i was bouncing around a bit just now, trying to figure out how to improve this blog attempt of mine and i was reading what i have on here so far and it struck me as mildly humorous that i'm the only person that ever reads this crap. i'm sure some psychologist could draw some interesting conclusions about my mental stability or lack there of by the fact that i write all this like someone else is gonna read it, when they never really do. then again, there's nothing wrong with a little self-serving flattery once-in-a-while. maybe years from now this page will be ellaborate and witty and "cutting edge" and such and people will find it amusing to reread (nix the "re" i suppose) my initial comments to see all the stupid crap i was espousing. yes yes. love the big words sometimes.
i'm pleased that i've started writing in here more. sometimes i'm amazed that people are given the opportunity to write a "column" in mass produced media publications. they often, if not always, consist of their thoughts on a particular topic that just popped in their head and i wonder, what's so freakin' unique about the crap this guy's got to say. (you, the imaginary reader are probably asking yourself the same thing right now)

The Kids Aren't All Right

so i guess i didn't originally intend for this little ditty i call supposedly to consist mainly of links to articles that i find intriguing, but if it feels good do it. i really appreciate articles that sorta serve as wake-up calls to me and make me realize how i might not have understood exactly what's going on around me. this article's a review of a book by this guy Henry Giroux, but it's actually much more than that. it puts into perspective how we're all being conned into playing this goofy little game. we're systematically convinced to care about certain things, which actually may be of minor significance, when we are surrounded, literally, day by day by gross atrocities.
now let's just say, hypothetically, that our government was intending to push forth its own self serving interests while neglecting the wants and needs of the general population. if that were the case, wouldn't they do their best to convince us that something else matters besides what we know, truly does? they don't underestimate the populace, they know we're smart folks. so they come up with all sorts of distractions to prevent us from addressing real, down to earth everyday american realities.
well anyway, i digress. that's what this article's about. an author who does a way better job than i do to remind us about what we should really be paying attention to. phew.

bits and pieces. so much of our world today is about creating the illusion of choice when actually the choices we are making are less and less significant. who fuckin' cares what sugar water i put in my body or what kind of motorized vehicle i move around in? it seems to me that so much of this "choice" is just a bunch of crap. six of one, half a dozen of another. the real choice would be drive a car or walk or ride a bike or stay at home and don't go anywhere in the first place. or drink sugar water or drink plain old water or stop giving a fuck about what kind of sugar your consuming--it's all the same old crappy white powder in the end anyway. the choices we are supposedly given are just distractions. keeping us occupied so we never bother asking ourselves real questions about who we are, what we care about, and what the hell is going on around us.

check this out (Claritas is a marketing firm btw):

(Claritas) breaks down the U.S. population into sixty-two psycho-demographic clusters, based on such factors as how much money people make, what they like to read and watch, and what products they have bought in the past. For example, the "suburban sprawl" cluster is composed of young families making about $41,000 a year and living in fast-growing places such as Burnsville, Minnesota, and Bensalem, Pennsylvania. These people are almost twice as likely as other Americans to have three-way calling. They are two and a half times as likely to buy Light n' Lively Kid Yogurt. Members of the "towns & gowns" cluster are recent college graduates in places such as Berkeley, California, and Gainesville, Florida. They are big consumers of DoveBars and Saturday Night Live. They tend to drive small foreign cars and to read Rolling Stone and Scientific American.

From Wired News:

Long Distance Relationship
A Russian cosmonaut circling 240 miles above the earth on the International Space Station married his fiancé in Texas on Sunday in the first space wedding. Bride Ekaterina Dmitriev blew her new husband Yuri Malenchenko a kiss as the two exchanged vows on a satellite hookup before 200 people. A beaming Dmitriev, dressed in a traditional white wedding dress, told reporters she was very happy. "It's a celestial, soulful connection that we have," said the bride, adding that their long-distance communication brought them close. A wedding organizer said the ceremony was highly traditional except for the absence of the groom. Well, hey, let's not stand on convention. Only thing is, will they be able to talk in person?

Setting It Right by Al Gore

if only mr. gore had given a speech like this in, say october of 2000, we might not be in the mess we're in right now. on the other hand, maybe a bright side of things is that georgie pooh's ticked off so many people now that the opposition is slowly finding its identity. and since al's not running for prez he has the ability to say some pretty strong stuff about the current administration. i hope to hear more speeches like this in the coming months.

oh yeah, and check out Move On if you haven't already.

yeah yeah yeah.

Killing Saddam: A Summer Blockbuster
is killing saddam the next bit of reality tv headed our way? Tom Hayden seems to think so:

"The Iraqi people, on the other hand, are seen by the Pentagon as the frightened villagers in "The Wizard of Oz." Once they sing "Ding dong, the wicked witch is dead," they will shake off their fears and sign up for their duties in the new order: to work happily for Bechtel and Halliburton and start policing their malcontents."

so this is it. this is my rather self indulgent attempt at expressing my thoughts on here and sharing them with the world (or maybe just myself if no one ever reads this). i feel like there's a certain egotistical nature to any sort of endeavor like this, whether it's writing a book, giving a speech, or putting together a nice long string of ones and zeros on a computer. but hey, if you can't beat em join em. so here i am. practice does make perfect so maybe my entries on here will start out crappy and slowly--ever so slowly--improve with time. and hey, if you don't like the crap i write, then go visit one of the other fifty billion websites out there.
it's my hope that i can share some of the things i'm interested in and think about and learn about and what have you. and sometimes i think maybe other people would be interested in the stuff i'm into. but maybe not. who knows really? so there you have it.

let there be light...