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 25 Aug 2004 @ 12:42, by jazzolog. Ideas, Creativity
If we were not already Buddha, we could not bow to the Buddha. When the Buddha receives our bow, we become one with him. At that very moment the practice of the bow is actualized. The Buddha does not force the practice of the bow upon us, but that which has been offered is brought back to us.
---Dainin Katagiri
Silence is as deep as Eternity; speech as shallow as Time.
---Thomas Carlyle
Those who believe they have plenty of time get ready only at the time of death. Then they are ravaged by regret. But isn't it far too late?
---Padmasambhava
For over 40 years I have honored my teacher, mentor, and friend, John Tagliabue. More recently he has retired from work at Bates College in Maine, relocated with his lovely wife Grace to Rhode Island, and encouraged me to distribute his recent poems on the Internet. He doesn't use computers himself, and a couple years ago wrote an elegy to his manual typewriter. When we returned from Canada yesterday, a small envelope of poems were waiting. I think I'd better get them to you right away.
The photo is of John last year at Bates with 2 students who just won the first John Tagliabue Prize For Creative Writing. [link] More >
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 25 Aug 2004 @ 00:42, by magical_melody. Ideas, Creativity
AT LAST, A FILM FOR US PRACTICAL MYSTICS!
What the Bleep Do We Know?
Are you ready for a spiritual film that combines quantum physics, multi-dimensional visual effects and animation, a dramatic story and interviews with leading scientists and mystics?
What Happens When You Combine Today's Cutting Edge Scientists & Mystics?
Can Science And Religion Really Be On The Same Path? On The Same Planet? In The Same Movie!?
What The Bleep Movie More >
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 23 Aug 2004 @ 01:24, by i2i. Environment, Ecology
"If plastic is not degradable, well, the planet will simply incorporate plastic into a new paradigm: the earth plus plastic. The earth doesn't share our prejudice towards plastic. Plastic came out of the earth. The earth probably sees plastic as just another one of its children. Could be the only reason the earth allowed us to be spawned from it in the first place. It wanted plastic for itself. Didn't know how to make it. Needed us. Could be the answer to our age-old egocentric philosophical question, 'Why are we here?' Plastic...asshole."
---George Carlin, The Planet is Fine More >
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 22 Aug 2004 @ 22:34, by spells. Politics
WSWS : News & Analysis : North America
Why was Senator Kennedy placed on US “no fly” list?
By David Walsh and Barry Grey
21 August 2004
At a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on August 19, convened to discuss the September 11 commission’s recommendations, Senator Edward Kennedy revealed that for a period of five weeks this spring he had been repeatedly told he could not fly on commercial airplanes because his name was on the government’s “no fly” list.
The longtime Massachusetts Democratic senator (first elected to complete his brother John’s term in 1962, and now the second most senior member of the Senate) disclosed that between March 1 and April 6 airline agents had blocked him from boarding flights, mainly between Washington DC and Boston, on five separate occasions.
The 72-year-old Kennedy briefly recounted the Kafkaesque incidents: “He [the ticket agent] said, ‘We can’t give it to you ... You can’t buy a ticket to go on the airline to Boston.’ I said, ‘Well, why not?’ He said, ‘We can’t tell you.’ Tried to get on a plane back to Washington ... ‘You can’t get on the plane.’ I went up to the desk and said, ‘I’ve been getting on this plane, you know, for 42 years. Why can’t I get on the plane?’”
On each occasion, at Boston’s Logan International Airport, Washington’s Reagan National Airport and one other, airline supervisors ultimately overruled the ticket agents and permitted Kennedy to board his plane. All the flights were on US Airways.
Kennedy staff members eventually telephoned the Transportation Security Administration, a branch of the Department of Homeland Security, and officials there promised to rectify the mistake. However, it took them several weeks to clear up the matter. In fact, only days after Homeland Security Secretary Tom Ridge called Kennedy in early April to apologize, another airline agent attempted to block the Massachusetts Democrat from boarding.
Kennedy commented at Thursday’s hearing, “If they have that kind of difficulty with a member of Congress, how in the world are average Americans, who are getting caught up in this thing, how are they going to be treated fairly and not have their rights abused?”
This seemingly bizarre episode is largely being treated as a joke in the US media. But it raises questions that are anything but amusing.
The secret “no-fly” list was instituted after the September 11 hijack bombings. The government will not disclose any information about the watch list. The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has obtained FBI documents indicating that more than 350 Americans have been delayed or denied boarding since the list came into being. None of them, however, has been arrested or charged with any crime.
Senior ACLU counsel Reggie Shuford told the Washington Post, “That a clerical error could lend one of the most powerful people in Washington to the list—it makes one wonder just how many others who are not terrorists are on the list. Someone of Senator Kennedy’s stature can simply call a friend to have his name removed, but a regular American citizen does not have that ability. He [Kennedy] had to call three times himself.”
The ACLU has filed lawsuits in San Francisco and Seattle, demanding that the government explain how wrongly flagged travelers may get their names off the list.
The day after Kennedy’s revelation, Democratic Congressman John Lewis of Georgia reported that he too has been singled out for special scrutiny because someone on the watch list allegedly has the same name. Lewis told reporters he cannot obtain an electronic ticket, must show extra identification, and has his luggage checked by hand.
According to the Associated Press, Lewis said one airline representative in Atlanta told him, “Once you’re on the list, there’s no way to get off it.” A faculty member at the University of Houston, also named John Lewis, reported a similar problem.
There is some unclarity as to the name appearing on the watch list in the Kennedy incident. The Washington Post reports that “A senior administration official who spoke on condition he not be identified said Kennedy was stopped because the name ‘T. Kennedy’ has been used as an alias by someone on the list of terrorist suspects.” A number of media outlets carried the same version of the story.
Of course, “Ted” Kennedy’s real first name is Edward, and would appear as such on any ticket or identification documents, so why the senator’s name should set off alarms, even if a ‘T. Kennedy’ appeared on a “no fly” list, is a mystery that has not been explained.
The New York Times reports a different story: “The alias used by the suspected terrorist on the watch list was Edward Kennedy, said David Smith, a spokesman for the senator, who uses his full name, with a middle initial, of Edward M. Kennedy.”
Homeland Security officials, echoed uncritically by the media, present the Kennedy episode as an innocent mistake, an example of continuing glitches in the Homeland Security system. Even if one accepts the claim that Kennedy’s flight problems were the result of a mistake, considering what they reveal about the government watch list, the episode can hardly be deemed innocuous. If the seven-term senator from Massachusetts, one of the most prominent figures in national politics, can be treated as a terrorist suspect, then what are the implications of the government watch lists and databases for ordinary people?
Even if Kennedy got caught up in the Homeland Security network by mistake, the fact remains that scores of others have found themselves blocked from boarding planes because of their antiwar and anti-Bush political views.
There are, moreover, aspects of the Kennedy affair that cannot be so easily explained away. Why did it take Ridge four weeks to apologize, and why, after the mistake was supposedly corrected, was Kennedy stopped yet again?
Given the decade-long history of political conspiracy and provocation carried out by the Republican right against prominent Democrats—from the scandal-mongering and entrapment of Clinton that culminated in the Kenneth Starr witch-hunt, the Monica Lewinsky affair, and Clinton’s impeachment, to the stolen election of 2000, to the still unexplained anthrax attacks against Democratic leaders in Congress—the state harassment of Kennedy and Lewis, both of whom are considered in media and official circles to be “icons” of the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, cannot be so casually dismissed.
With the installation of the Bush administration, the most right-wing forces within the US political establishment assumed power, and they have continued to employ the same methods they used to capture the White House. As a result, relations within the political establishment have become increasingly poisoned, even as the Democratic Party has continued to lurch to the right and sought to conciliate its Republican antagonists.
Events of the past few years have demonstrated that extreme right-wing elements in and around the Bush administration are moving toward the criminalization of political opposition.
In May 2003, for example, Republican officials in Texas, taking their lead from House Majority Leader Tom Delay, called on the Department of Homeland Security to track down 53 Democratic state legislators who had boycotted the Texas House of Representatives and fled to neighboring Oklahoma in an attempt to block a redistricting bill that favored the Republicans. Delay asked the FBI to intervene and return the “fugitives” to Texas.
Two months later, in July 2003, a leading Republican in the US House of Representatives, Congressman Bill Thomas of California, called on Capitol police to oust Democrats from a room where they were caucusing. The Democrats were meeting to discuss how to deal with Republican legislation that would sharply reduce corporate payments to workers’ pension funds.
No serious investigation has ever been carried out into the attempted assassination of the Democratic leadership of the US Senate, when letters filled with anthrax spores were sent to the offices of senators Tom Daschle and Patrick Leahy in the fall of 2001. The anthrax attacks are widely believed to have been carried out by right-wing elements with ties to the US military or intelligence apparatus.
Kennedy embodies the flaccid and impotent state of American liberalism. He is nonetheless demonized by elements within and around the Republican Party, who denounce him as a traitor for his criticisms of the Bush administration and its conduct of the Iraq war.
Was the airport harassment a deliberate act of political intimidation—a “shot across the bow” aimed at Kennedy and other congressional critics of Bush’s policies?
Another intriguing question arises: why did Kennedy remain silent during the five weeks of his harassment?
Was he concerned that the revelation would discredit the “no-fly” list and the panoply of sinister Homeland Security operations, which he and the rest of the congressional Democrats have endorsed? Did he sense that he was, in some way, being set up? Or did the incident have its desired effect of further intimidating a “liberal” critic?
In any event, Kennedy’s failure to immediately denounce these episodes amounts to one more Democratic capitulation to the police-state propensities of the Bush administration.
See Also:
Specter of a police state
FBI “anti-terror” task force targets Bush administration opponents
[18 August 2004]
A further attack on democratic rights
All US airline passengers to undergo government background checks
[21 January 2004]
ACLU files lawsuit challenging “no-fly” list
[7 May 2003] More >
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 20 Aug 2004 @ 10:51, by scotty. Personal Development
After A While
After a while, you learn the subtle difference
Between holding a hand and chaining a soul,
And you learn that love doesn't mean leaning
And company doesn't mean security,
And you begin to learn that kisses aren't contracts.
And presents aren't promises,
And you begin to accept your defeats
With the grace of God, not the grief of a child,
And you learn to build all your roads on today
Because tomorrow's ground is too uncertain for plans,
And futures have a way of falling down in mid-flight
And after a while you learn
That even sunshine burns if you get too much.
So you plant your own garden and decorate your own soul,
Instead of waiting for someone to bring you flowers.
And you learn that you really can endure ...
That you really are strong
And you really do have worth
And you learn and learn ...
And with every goodbye, you learn.
By Veronica A. Shoffstall
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 18 Aug 2004 @ 12:19, by scotty. Spirituality
"Being conscious is cutting through your own melodrama
and being right here.
Exist in no mind, be empty, here now, and trust that as a situation arises, out of you will come what is necessary
to deal with that situation including the use of your intellect when appropriate.
Your intellect need not be constantly held on to
to keep reassuring you that you know where you’re at,
out of fear of loss of control.
Ultimately, when you stop identifying so much
with your physical body and with your psychological entity,
that anxiety starts to disintegrate. And your start to define yourself as in flow with the universe; and whatever comes along ~ death, life joy, sadness ~ is grist for the mill of awakening, Not this versus that but whatever."
(Ram Dass)
More >
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 17 Aug 2004 @ 12:53, by ming. Internet
"Microcontent" seems to be one of the buzzwords now. So, what is that, really?
Jakob Nielsen, interface guru, used it (first?) in 1998 about stuff like titles, headlines and subject lines. The idea being that first you might see just a clickable title, or a subject line of an e-mail, that you then might or might not decide to open. So, that title needs to be representative of the full thing, or you might not click it, or you'll be disappointed when you do. Microcontent (the title) needs to match macrocontent (the page, e-mail, article).
Now, that doesn't quite seem to be how "microcontent" is used nowadays. OK, on to 2002, Anil Dash says this, talking about a client for microcontent: Microcontent is information published in short form, with its length dictated by the constraint of a single main topic and by the physical and technical limitations of the software and devices that we use to view digital content today. We've discovered in the last few years that navigating the web in meme-sized chunks is the natural idiom of the Internet. So it's time to create a tool that's designed for the job of viewing, managing, and publishing microcontent. This tool is the microcontent client. For the purposes of this application, we're not talking about microcontent in the strict Jakob Nielsen definition that's now a few years old, which focused on making documents easy to skim.
Today, microcontent is being used as a more general term indicating content that conveys one primary idea or concept, is accessible through a single definitive URL or permalink, and is appropriately written and formatted for presentation in email clients, web browsers, or on handheld devices as needed. A day's weather forcast, the arrival and departure times for an airplane flight, an abstract from a long publication, or a single instant message can all be examples of microcontent. Oh, and an absolutely excellent article it is. It calls for the building of a client, a program that will allow us to consume and create microcontent easily. Not just aggregate it, but allow us to use it in meaningful ways. I.e. seeing the information how we want to see it, without having to put up with different sites' different user interface quirks. Good examples he gives at the time is Sherlock or Watson on Macs. You can browse pictures, movies, flight schedules, ebay auctions and more, all from the same interface, and without having to go to the sites they actually come from. But we're still not quite talking open standards for all that.
What is needed is the semantic web, of course. Where all content has a uniform format, and is flagged with pieces of meaning that can be accessed and collected by machines. Isn't there yet. Many smart people are playing with pieces of it, like Jon Udell, or Sam Ruby. Or, look at Syncato. All stuff mostly for hardcore techies at this point. But the target is of course to eventually let regular people easily do what they find meaningful with any data that's available on the net. More >
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16 Aug 2004 @ 01:31, by ov. Spirituality
Monday 16th Aug -- Manifestation Monkey
Ten / Manifestation
-------------------
What were once intentions or ideas, hopes or fears become physically present with the energy of Ten. This is the energy when what has had attention and intention focused upon it becomes real. A powerful energy that carries a great responsiblity.
Monkey
------
Monkey, is known to the Maya as the Weaver or the Weaver of Time. Monkey takes ideas as threads or vines and weaves them into the fabric of our reality. New patterns or inventions are also woven into our lives by Monkey. Amiable, intelligent, generous and a jack of all trades, Monkey's innocent curiosity leads to artistic expression and constructive solutions. Many Monkeys become highly respected merchants or speakers. They love performing practical jokes and crave attention, so much so that they may over-act or play the fool to the spotlight. Monkeys have a short attention span and find it difficult to stay with anything long enough to master it.
A good day do: Begin anything new in your life.
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 16 Aug 2004 @ 00:10, by koravya. Spirituality
Dancing in Circles [link]
”Once upon a time, they say, we danced our lives through - as we worked, played, ate, slept, fought, and loved. We danced to petition and appease the gods, to help the sun rise, the rivers flow, and the plants grow and thrive. By dancing we understood our power and our place in the universe, and through dance we transmitted this understanding to the next generation. We danced to celebrate life’s rites of passage, from birth to death; through the dance we attuned to and imitated the rhythms, cycles and the awe-inspiring process of nature, and we danced to express our joy, fear, grief and hope. According to Bernhard and Maria Gabrielle Wosien, "Dancing has always been an imitation of the divine mystery in manifestation." To live was to dance. More >
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 14 Aug 2004 @ 10:12, by mre. Religion
Work continues, slowly, on developing the specs for the Voice of Humanity Network. Meanwhile in an important side development, a prototype collective email dialog program is being assembled using Python and MySQL. Time frame is to have it ready by January for a possible Jewish / Muslim Interfaith Dialogue. Focusing on the Middle East, this dialogue will use collective communication to build consensus in a non-confrontational way. Each of these three terms needs a short explanation. More >
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