Today I listened with awe to Keith Olbermann “Sacrifice” speech. I can only hope that this, appearing in a mainstream media outlet, will have the effect of ending our modern day McCarthyism: “the War on Terror.”
[tags]War on Terror,McCarthyism,Sacrifice, Iraq,war,Iraq war,George Bush[/tags]
Well, Bruce Sterling, as usual, has an idea. It seems to me that we are walking a knife edge, nay, a ceramic blade edge of incredible sharpness, on one side of which is evolved conciousness, and the other, dismal slavery. That blade hurts my feet.
On this July 4th, I’m thinking that God has already blessed America, many times over, with great natural resources, with a powerfully and deep intellectual, spiritual, and political heritage that is the product of the coming together of many strains of human history. We are a blessed melting of many metals that make an alloy of unusual qualities.
Our task is to share these blessings, not to greedily ask for more.
[tags]God,bless,America[/tags]
This week I was given a copy of Paul Krafel’s mini-film The Upward Sprial. Which, despite, nay in part because of, some hoakyness, provides deep and powerful language and images for how to look at the world. He talks about flow, feedback spirals, and a “second solution” to the problem posed by the second law of thermodynamics. It is both philosphical and practical for those looking to change our broken world.
Just for fun I took this an opportunity to learn kml so that we could map the flow of the spread of Krafel’s ideas using google earth. If you want to play, go to a little site I created where you can add your location and then add to a network link into your google earth and see the location of all of those who have entered their locations to the map.
Enjoy!
[tags]Krafel, flow, google earth,kml,feedback[/tags]
“Power properly understood is nothing but the ability to achieve purpose. And one of the great problems of history is that the concepts of love and power have usually been contrasted as opposites-polar opposites-so that love is identifiedwith the resignation of power, and power with the denial of love. We’ve got to get this thing right. What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anaemic. Power at its best is love implementing the demands of justice, and justice at its best is power correcting everything that stands against love. It is precisely this collision of immoral power with powerless morality which constitutes the major crisis of our time.�
–MartinLuther King Jr.
[tags]love,power,MLK,quotes[/tags]
Back in 1995, when I was madly collecting web resources for the second edition of my book, The Internet Directory (by the way, don’t buy it unless you are an Internet historian), I kept coming across people’s personal jounals. I read all kinds of stuff that to me seemed incredibly inappropriate to be made public for the whole world to see. I just couldn’t imagine why people would want to divulge their private lives in such a fashion, and I assumed it was just a modern form of hubris. So I decided that these Web sites wouldn’t be included in the book, it just wasn’t interesting enough for my readers (I thought), and besides there were so many of them, they would just be taking up space.
As of today, technorati is “watching” 6,481,744 weblogs. It appears that I was wrong. Public journaling turns out to be one of the webs killer-apps.
When I told a friend that I had started a blog, she rolled her eyes and said, “Oh, no! your not going to be another blogger!” This is a fascinating sentiment. Since the very begining of the web, people have put their jounals on-line, but blogging as it has now developed is something altogether different. It’s more accurate to view it as a collective journal of humanity. Most of our individual journal entries are mundane and quite boring, even for ourselves to go back and look at (like this one!) but some entries, get at a bigger truth of our lives and reflect the greater experience of what it is to be human, and so it is with blogs. Taken as a whole, they provide something quite similar.
[tags]blog[/tags]
A few days ago I stopped at a gas station. As I was pumping, I noticed a vole scurrying across the parking lot. The lot was covered with a thin layer of that dry compacted, dirty snow that you get when it’s been cold enough that the snow never melted or turned ice. The vole would zip along for about six feet, and then try to burrow under a clump of snow, only to hit pavement so it would zip another few feet and try again. It had come from behind the gas station where there is a field, and it was headed in the direction of a very busy road. This vole was in for trouble and I’d better do something about it. I was half way through pumping so I finished filling my tank and then turned to see what I could do for the creature.
By the time I’d spotted it again, it was about twenty feet from the road. I headed not towards the vole, but at an angle that would cut it off from the road so I could shoo it back to the field. But it must have know that I was trying to prevent it from moving towards its intended direction because it immediately headed for the road at a modified angle calculated precisely to avoid me.
Within seconds the vole was in the middle of the road. The first semi missed it by five feet. The next one flattened it.
I don’t know if the vole would have gone on to the road had I not tried to save it, probably it would have. But I do know that if I had stopped pumping gas right when I realized that this vole was in for trouble, that I would have had a much better chance of saving it.
I hate pumping gas. Every time I do it, I feel like I’m that vole flinging myself and my fellow humans as fast as possible right toward those tractor-trailer truck wheels. The vole’s consciousness doesn’t even include roads and trucks, but unlike the vole, I know about peak-oil, and global warming. I can see the truck coming. But why didn’t I stop pumping for that vole? Why don’t I stop pumping for all us? How conscious can I become?
[tags]vole,peak oil,consciousness,oil[/tags]