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18 Oct 2004 @ 11:45, by swanny. Spirituality
"9/11 as metaphor"
10-18-04, 04:41 am (PDT)
There is a term in film making which I can't seem to recall
which in effect means that a film takes on an "unintentional"
effect on the audience and world at large.
I was wondering about this in regards to 9/11.
The "unintended" aspect that seems to have emerged
despite the "intentional" ones.
It becomes kind of a metaphor of sorts describing a
quintessential "shared" moment in time. It is one thing
for 9/11 to have happened and it is tragic true but in the
bigger unintentional picture perhaps it is a "witness to history"
effect occuring or to "horror" or perhaps simply to "reality".
Never have so many perhaps witnessed via a medium an
act of such a nature.
Now was that intentional.... it is hard to say.... Could the
results be predicted..... not quite exactly..... What in effect then
happened?.... What did we witness?.... The brutality of humanity
or wait..... is there something more here..... we witness sort of the
power of intent and yet the power of unintent perhaps as well.
Certainly it had the effect the perpetrators "intended" yet metaphorically something else is happening almost on a
spiritual level..... we are caught in the dilemna of "existence"
why are we here ...??? to witness ourselves and our self-destructive tendancies and brutalities....
We capture as it were or are caught in kind of a philosphical
or quintessential struggle of humanity. I don't know if that was
an intended effect though. We witness a tradgey but we witness
it together enmasse and it poses a question to our very souls.
?Why are we here? What are we doing? Who are we? Who are
they?
This kind of shared question is almost like a group meditation
a group query.
We are all gathered at one shared moment asking the same
"deep" and unanswerable questions and they resonate in us and out to the Universe. It is well for each of us to ask these question
but in masse there is like a shared prayer or intent or solicitation
effect to the Creator or Great Spirit.
We are caught in a Celestial group hug or concern as were....
and take solace in the shared echoe as it resonates in atmosphere and ? possiblity in our sharing and togetherness the Universe
responds??????? More >
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 18 Oct 2004 @ 03:34, by koravya. Politics
Here is a brief response essay I wrote this afternoon for my students, since I am asking them to write a response essay to a video that I will be showing them this week. I’ve got quite a few very conservative people in some of these classes, and a reasonable minority of them are relatively liberal people. It’s a good class of responsive, thoughtful, and opinionated minds. (relevant link is [link]) More >
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16 Oct 2004 @ 21:26, by skookum. Ideas, Creativity
The Black Raven Sails
The tattered forms walked the rotten scow
Wind blew the sails and rocked the bow
Ghosts of the Black Raven were aboard
A filthy crew and haunted hoard More >
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 16 Oct 2004 @ 11:36, by ming. Philosophy
I like to make complicated things simple.
And simple things complex.
The world we live in is mostly upside down and inside out. Simple things are made terribly complicated. And things that are very complex are made very simple. Falsely.
You'll often find the amazing infinite complexity of the universal organism reduced to a few simple platitudes. Religions are very good and degrading into that. Here you go, all you need to know about life is to follow these 10 rules.
And it becomes terribly complicated to just exist. You have to keep track of loads of abstract and self-contradictory disjointed information. Most people don't get around to the simplicity of just being present.
It is really quite simple. Or complex, if you will. We screw it up by abstracting. Abstracting in the sense of forming abstract notions about reality, and then getting lost in the abstractions.
Lying in the grass, looking at the clouds drift by, feeling a light breeze, listening to the rustling of leaves - that might be complete and whole in itself. The simple enjoyment of life. As might be the satisfaction of figuring out the periodic table of elements. But when you try to pack it up and take it with you, trouble easily starts. You might accidentally assume that your experience is THE experience, and you might persuade others to adopt a symbolic version of your experience, rather than having their own real experience. And since that initially seems to work, we easily get further and further away from the real world, which is both complex and simple. And we end up in shadow worlds of the mind that are simple and complex in the wrong places.
But sometimes we wake up and feel the breeze. And sometimes the condensed learnings of others help us do so, or help improve our lives. So we easily forget that most of the time we're wallowing in misplaced abstractions.
We all share the fault, of course. We seem to think we're something that we really aren't, thinking we're capable of something we really aren't. And we're not noticing that we really are something much grander.
We can walk through the mirror any time, of course. Turning ourselves rightside in and out. More >
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15 Oct 2004 @ 17:59, by craiglang. Paranormal
Over the last two years or so, we have had a running remote-viewong experiment (and general free discussion) going on in the group "PSI, Parapsychology and Field Consciousness". During that time, we have had people come and go from the group - basically in three waves: the original founders, those who came in during the first year, and a shift of members about 8 to 12 months ago. And during the two years the group has been in operation, I believe that we have learned some very interesting things.
Currently, the membership is at a minimum as several people have recently left the group, due to it's current quiescence. So I would like to ask past and present members of the PSI room about what they see as the future of the room. I would also like their views on how the results we have collected should be reported, etc.
Furthermore, I would like to put some questions out to the NCN populace at large, and get feedback on them. Specifically I would like to learn the degree of future interest, and what - if any - changes we should make in the direction we have taken. More >
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 14 Oct 2004 @ 21:54, by ming. Social System Design
Michel Bauwens wrote an excellent paper:
Peer to Peer - from technology to politics to a new civilization? A specter is haunting the world: the specter of Peer To Peer. The existing economic system is trying to co-opt it, but it is also a harbinger of a new type of human relationship, and may in the end be incompatible with informational capitalism. Indeed, it may. And this is important stuff. First, if anybody's still confused about what Peer to Peer is, here's this from Wikipedia: Generally, a peer-to-peer (or P2P) computer network is any network that does not have fixed clients and servers, but a number of peer nodes that function as both clients and servers to the other nodes on the network. This model of network arrangement is contrasted with the client-server model. Any node is able to initiate or complete any supported transaction. Peer nodes may differ in local configuration, processing speed, network bandwidth, and storage quantity. One of the first uses of the phrase "peer to peer" is in 1984, with the development of the "Advanced Peer to Peer Networking" architecture at IBM. It is that we can do something between our computers, without needing centralized servers. Sharing music files has been the most successful application of this model. It is widely held by internet enthusiasts as some kind of holy grail ideal of how things should work. Ultimate democracy and freedom from hierarchies. Individuals working together as they please, without needing hierarchical control. It is not just the technical thing as described above. It is also something way beyond internet protocols. It is for example a new way of doing work: P2P is not just the form of technology itself, but increasingly, it is a "process of production", a way of organising the way that immaterial products are produced (and distributed and "consumed"). The first expression of this was the Free Software movement launched by Richard Stallman. Expressed in the production of software such as GNU and its kernel Linux, tens of thousands of programmers are cooperative producing the most valuable knowledge capital of the day, i.e. software. They are doing this in small groups that are seamlessly coordinated in the greater worldwide project, in true peer groups that have no traditional hierarchy. Eric Raymond's seminal essay/book "The Cathedral and The Bazaar", has explained in detail why such a mode of production is superior to its commercial variants. And it isn't an entirely new thing. This way of working is what has worked fairly well in science for a long time. Please also remember that peer to peer is in fact the extension of the methodology of the sciences, which have been based since 300 years on "peer review". Scientific progress is indeed beholden to the fact that scientists are accountable, in terms of the scientific validity of their work, to their peers, and not to their funders or bureaucratic managers. And the early founders of the Free Software movement where scientists from MIT, who exported their methodology from knowledge exchange to the production of software. In fact, MIT has published data showing that since a lot of research has been privatised in the U.S., the pace of innovation has in fact slowed down. Or simply compare the fact of how Netscape evolved when it was using Open Source methods and was supported by the whole internet community, as compared to the almost static evolution of Internet Explorer, now that it is the property of Microsoft. Peer to Peer production, as in open source software, might potentially do it better than the development of science, which is after all still based heavily on entrenched hierarchies, which don't allow entrance to just anybody. P2P done right might allow the best stuff available to be distributed most widely. And it might simply be a better way of organizing, which naturally will outcompete the older, more inefficient and cumbersome approaches. One has of course to ask oneself, why is this emergence happening, and I believe that the answer is clear. The complexity of the post-industrial age makes centralised command and control approaches, based on the centralised control, inoperable. Today, intelligence is indeed "everywhere" and the organisation of technology and work has to acknowledge that.
And more and more, we are indeed forced to conclude that peer to peer is indeed a more productive technology and way of organising production than its hierarchical, commodity-based predecessors. This is of course most clear in the music industry, where the fluidity of music distribution via P2P is an order of magnitude greater, and at marginal cost, than the commodity-based physical distribution of CDs.
This situation leads to a interesting and first historical analogy: when capitalist methods of production emerged, the feudal system, the guilds and the craftsmen at first tried to oppose and stop them (up to the physical liquidation of machines by the Luddites in the UK), but they largely failed. It is not difficult to see a comparison with the struggle of the RIAA (Recording Industry Association of America) against Napster: they may have won legally, but the phenomenon is continuing to spread. In general, we can interpret many of the current conflicts as pitting against each other the old way of production, commodity-based production and its legal infrastructure of copyright, and the new technological and social practices undermining these existing processes. In the short term, the forces of the old try to increase their hold and faced with subverting influences, strengthen the legal and the repressive apparatus. But in the long term the question is: can they hold back these more productive processes? In a free market, they can't, of course. But it isn't an entirely free market. You can legally force people to use inferior and more expensive solutions. At least to an extent.
P2P also applies to poltical organization and to economics and to news.
Politically speaking, we're talking about that people might rise up and change things, without any centralized hierarchical organization, and without obvious leaders. Which, when it works, seems a better fit than the alternatives. Traditionally, movements towards putting The People in power have been considered leftists, and have usually involved some massive centralized organization which tries to get their hands on government power. And when they do, it again becomes just another hierarchy and not really power to the people. Look at communism, obviously. Now, free people in a network, well organized, but in a flexible non-hierarchical manner - that can be quite a different matter. Something very difficult for the traditional oppressive powers to fight against, because they don't know who to take out.
As to economics, there are local currency systems like LETS, and there's barter systems. And underground economies and black markets. And gift economies. In P2P the idea is that you can just go and do it, and that you can exchange with whoever it is appropriate to exchange with. Whether the government or a bank thinks it is good or not.
As to news, there are blogs. Networked peer to peer information. And there are networks like IndyMedia. Hard-hitting grassroots non-corporate owner information. No spokesmen, no anchors, no owners.
P2P networks work on different rules than what they're replacing. It is no longer that the winner is whoever has the most power, the most money, the best ads, or the biggest police force. These things are replaced with a more free market competition. Reputation suddenly becomes more important. It is now more important that people know about and like what you're doing, and that they find it useful. Actually useful, not just being tricked into buying it.
In an economy of abundance, like the internet's abundance of information, there's competition for the scarce resource of attention. Thus it becomes an attention economy. Or, rather, that's the still somewhat corporate way of looking at it. The real way of getting attention is to put good stuff into the hands of as many people as possible, and letting them know you did it. Not just by, eh, attracting attention, in the advertising sense.
P2P production works on different principles, different motivations. People do stuff because they feel like it, because it needs to be done, because it is cool, because people will like them, or whatever. But they don't do it because anybody forces them too. And they cooperate simply because it makes sense in order to accomplish things we'd like to do. They'll cooperate even if they have no great ideological belief in cooperation as opposed to the alternatives. But cooperation naturally happens.
And now to the exiting stuff. We could say that there's an evolutionary trend towards widespread cooperation, in the P2P fashion. That our next step is a cooperative planetary organism. Evolutionary psychologics John Stewart talks about things like that: Evolution's Arrow also argues that evolution itself has evolved. Evolution has progressively improved the ability of evolutionary mechanisms to discover the best adaptations. And it has discovered new and better mechanisms. The book looks at the evolution of pre-genetic, genetic, cultural, and supra-individual evolutionary mechanisms. And it shows that the genetic mechanism is not entirely blind and random.
Evolution's Arrow goes on to use an understanding of the direction of evolution and of the mechanisms that drive it to identify the next great steps in the evolution of life on earth - the steps that humanity must take if we are to continue to be successful in evolutionary terms. It shows how we must change our societies to increase their scale and evolvability, and how we must change ourselves psychologically to become self-evolving organisms - organisms that are able to adapt in whatever ways are necessary for future evolutionary success, unfettered by their biological or social past. Two critical steps will be the emergence of a highly evolvable, unified and cooperative planetary organisation that is able to adapt as a coherent whole, and the emergence of evolutionary warriors - individuals who are conscious of the direction of evolution, and who use their evolutionary consciousness to promote and enhance the evolutionary success of humanity. Yeah, I believe that. I want that. I hope that's what's happening. But there's the question of how to get from here to there. Maybe it will happen by itself, but one can't help wondering what ought to be done to facilitate it.
An immediate obstacle in moving more thoroughly to P2P methods in our society is that their presence to a large degree is paid for out of the side-effects of the old system. The central problem is that most of the existing peer to peer emergence is based on the surplus created by the present economic system, and that many forms of peer to peer live from the wealth created by this system, being unable to sustain themselves independently. I am personally not convinced yet that peer to peer can sustain itself economically, and so are many of its proponents. Which is the reason why many peer to peer oriented theorists point to the need of a "generalised citizen wage", which would replace all existing transfers (unemployment, etc..) and allow for a generalisation of peer to peer activities, based on the surplus generated by the money economy. And he goes on to outline various visions for a P2P type of society. Like a GPL Society, based on the principles of the General Public License. I.e. production not based on exchange, but based on making things that are needed, and making them as easily accessible as possible.
It isn't clear how to get there. Maybe the old style centralized hierarchical capitalism will collapse under its own weight. But maybe it won't. There are many possible scenarios where it instead will be able to swallow up the alternatives and be able to control even more aspects of your life.
Anyway, most of this is directly from Bauwens' paper, so read the real thing. Some parts are in French, but you can probably do without them. More >
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13 Oct 2004 @ 16:58, by ov. Alternative Money Systems
Souls Sold For Plastic Debt
Feh the credit card, that slippery slope toboggan ride, that leads to the mark of the beast tattoed on your hide.
Every day the debt climbs to ever higher levels and our entire culture is in denial about how we will ever pay it back. At the national level the majority of the real money collected in taxes is used to pay the interest on existing debt, and the infastructure expenses are paid with borrowed money. The ponzie pyramid grows like a volcano being pushed up but which hasn't yet exploded. Everybodies bluffing, nobody is calling and yet another round of power poker stokes up the pressure seeking out the point that will blow us all to hell and back.
Been going on so long now that all the chicken littles have been labeled as boys crying wolf, and the warnings of the bottom falling out are regulated to forgotten myths, and placing faith in a safety net of Bretton Woods that no longer exists, all the common man feels like a fool for not grabbing onto the gravy, or is it a hell bound train wreck in the making, and everybodies hoping that unspoken thought that they will die before it runs off the tracks.
Got to eat, got to live, we deserve a life they insist and we got a little plastic card that confirms the reality of this as the fact that is. Who has time to worry of tomorrow when they are busy trying to make it through the day, and the upcoming night is to scary to even think about. If worst comes to worst there is always bankruptcy like the corporations do, but powers that be have decreed that credit card debt need not apply, and with no way out are debtor prisons far behind, or perhaps a buy out with a spot on some Iraqi front line, there are no free rides with devil's deals all comes due in time. Charge the rent, charge the food, what else can we do.
The text that inspired the above rant of mine was this mornings news story on the Microsoft money network written by MP Dunlevy, and what follows was written by her, and can be found in the title link.
More >
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 12 Oct 2004 @ 22:40, by bkodish. Death & Dying
On September 26 I went to Pittsburgh, PA for a week to spend some time with my father who lived by himself in a small condo apartment. He was doing okay. We had a nice visit hanging out together. We ate out (Dad drove wherever we went), he did some cooking, we drank some wine, talked politics (he didn't like Bush and was voting for Kerry)and other things, watched T.V., etc. Dad drove me to the airport in the afternoon and I got back to my home in Pasadena, CA. late on Sun. Oct. 3.
Dad had been having some pain in his back and side the last couple of days and feeling weak. Didn't sleep well, Fri. night. Bad news given that he had a large thoracic aneurysm that had, according to a recent CT scan, gotten bigger.(I had spent about 3 months in Pittsburgh earlier this year helping him recover from an earlier bout with this--which almost killed him.) But he had recovered and was independent again, albeit with "no energy" and "feeling pooped" most of the time. More >
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 11 Oct 2004 @ 15:50, by quinty. Ideas, Creativity
Once upon a time there was a cave. Nobody knew very much about it except that it was quite large. And that when you looked inside it was dark. More >
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 10 Oct 2004 @ 19:45, by jhs. Communication
Ed Dawson made some excellent remarks to the previous article.
(Italian translation at the end).
A true firework of brilliant insights.. just like this picture I made at Cannes/France the other night...
I wholeheartedly agree with all he said. One remark only: the supercharge created by Girapoli is inherently different from 'normal' peakstates because they are built on a CLEAN polarity. Since the first Girapoli activation in April, NOT a single crash occured. The energy just goes flattens after some weeks BUT can be restored by a simple act of giving attention to it...
Read here for Ed's comments: More >
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