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16 Jul 2007 @ 11:41, by vector8. Spirituality
From time to time I have experiences that make me go hmmm. Here's one example.
I'd been thinking of a friend I haven't seen in a while and wondered how he was. I couldn't believe it when I saw him in my local library. What was he doing in this part of London? On closer inspection I realised he wasn't my friend but his double. My friend is getting paranoid about losing his hair and this man's hair was also getting thinner around the same spot. Even their skin tone was similar. It was so uncanny. It's a shame we didn't speak; it would have been interesting to see whether he had an Irish accent. More >
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 16 Jul 2007 @ 09:28, by jazzolog. Legal, Justice
The great way of the Buddhas is profound, wondrous, inconceivable; how could its practice be easy? Have you not seen how the ancients gave up their bodies and lives, abandoned their countries, cities, and families, looking upon them as like shards of tile? After that they passed eons living alone in the mountains and forests, bodies and minds like dead trees; only then did they unite with the way. Then they could use mountains and rivers for words, raise the wind and rain for a tongue, explain the great void...
---Dogen
When we speak of being highly developed spiritually, this does not mean that we float in the air. In fact, the higher we go, the more we come down to earth.
---Chogyam Trungpa
You are seeing impeachment as a constitutional crisis. Impeachment is the cure for a constitutional crisis. Don't mistake the medicine for the disease. When you have a constitutional crisis, the founders are very clear. They said there is a way to deal with this. We don't have to have a war. We don't have to raise an army and go to Washington. We have procedures in place where we can sanction a president appropriately, do what needs to be done up to the point of removing him from office and continue the republic.
---John Nichols on Bill Moyers Journal, 7/13/07
Alessandro Pigna (1883-1903)
Paying Homage To The Emperor
I am not a constitutional scholar. I'm not a lawyer. I might think about citizenship quite a bit, but I may be pretty much an average American. As I understand the Constitution of the United States, that qualifies me to register concern...and to do so with forceful words.
Whatever our history has been and however we managed it, a republic was established so that each citizen could have a fair chance of a voice in the conduct of government which so affects our lives. My understanding of how that works is through a series of representative assemblies from local to state through federal levels.
At the top, in Washington, DC, we have the House of Representatives and the Senate. Between them, they legislate and debate and ultimately create laws and programs that enable us to live better lives...and maybe help people in other countries too. A system of public education was considered vital to maintain an informed electorate.
But at that point the Congress must turn over the created legislation to the Executive, whose job it is to put these examples and results of the will of the people into action. Sometimes, for one reason or another, the President doesn't think he can or should do it...and he tells Congress that. Maybe they can overrule his judgment or perhaps the Supreme Court must decide who is right, according to the Constitution.
Sometimes a great threat materializes and war must be declared. The Congress does this and thus hands to the President the awesome duties of Commander in Chief of the armed forces of the country. When this happens, everyone in the nation is expected to sacrifice aspects of life and liberty to enable the President to expedite the battle quickly. All Americans know this and we have done it.
There have been instances in the histories of all nations when supreme leaders have used occasions of warfare to increase personal and family fortunes. We expect such events in a dictatorship, but it is the worst thing to happen in a republic. Here, there is no question but that the money in the Treasury is ours, kept and spent in trust by freely elected representatives. If those people are stealing our money for themselves, they must be stopped or all fails. More >
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 12 Jul 2007 @ 23:14, by quinty. Violence, War
After Saddam Hussein destroyed the World Trade Center - with the help of what’sname, oh you know, that guy who’s head of al Qaeda (if Bush can’t think of his name why should I?) - and we drove Saddam from power, thereby removing a greater threat than Hitler from the world’s stage, all his terrorists buddies, all those jihadi types, you know, came rushing to Iraq to take us on. More >
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 12 Jul 2007 @ 22:53, by ming. Systems Thinking
Emergence is one of my most favorite subjects. The one I'd maybe most like to figure out. What makes things emerge? Good stuff. Seemingly out of nothing. Here's a definition by Jeffrey Goldstein, from Wikipedia. It is: the arising of novel and coherent structures, patterns and properties during the process of self-organization in complex systems. And some common characteristics: (1) radical novelty (features not previously observed in systems);
(2) coherence or correlation (meaning integrated wholes that maintain themselves over some period of time);
(3) A global or macro "level" (i.e. there is some property of "wholeness");
(4) it is the product of a dynamical process (it evolves); and
(5) it is "ostensive" - it can be perceived. Excelleeent! More of that, please.
Monday I was taking part in an online discussion organized by Extreme Democracy, around emergence in relation to politics. Sort of poking around in the thought of whether a better and more direct democracy possibly might emerge from the bottom and up. I can't seem to locate a transcript, so I can't quote all the good points.
One of the starting points was Two ways to emerge, and how to tell the difference between them (pdf) by Steven Johnson.
The two types he's talking about, he calls "Clustering" and "Coping". Those aren't very good choices of words, but it is a good observation that there are different kinds.
Clustering would be where a bunch of somethings get together and do the same thing. Like slime mold. Or a flash mob, or other group phenomena where large numbers of people suddenly get excited about one thing or another, and they all show up at the same time, or they do the same thing.
Coping would be where a bunch of individuals get together, and they don't just do one simple thing, but they form a more complex organization. Like an ant hill. The ants specialize, they take on different roles, they solve problems, they change their behavior if necessary, etc. Without anybody handing out the orders.
It is a lot easier to simply get a large number of people together, or to get them together for one well-defined purpose, than it is to get large numbers of people to self-organize towards solving unknown problems.
Somebody suggested the Howard Dean presidential campaign as an example of a bottom-up emergence of the clustering kind. It was a successful attempt of getting a lot of people together in being excited about one thing, organizing their own local meetings to futher it, etc. But it only worked as long as the main point was being excited about Dean being a leading candidate, and as long as things went well. The moment people started being dissatisfied about something, or they wanted to change direction, there was no vehicle for that, and it fell apart rather quickly. It wasn't the Coping kind of emergence. I don't think it really was emergence at all. That a political candidate gets a lot of grass-roots support might be interesting, but it isn't something that emerged from the grass-roots, or it would have been the assembled crowds that told him what to say, rather than him telling them what to be excited about.
A lot of things that might be given as examples of bottom-up self-organization and emergence probably aren't. Or they're very weak examples. If the date and time of the Superbowl broadcast is announced, and millions of people organize parties around it in front of bigscreen TVs, is that self-organization? Sure, it inspires some self-organization, but it is based on something you're provided from the top down. If some big movie or music star is very popular, and their fans organize fan clubs and websites and online forums, is that self-organization? Yes, it is, on a local level, but it isn't a whole lot of emergence. It is a clustering effect based on stimuli provided from a central source, a movie, an album, a TV show, etc.
If a political candidate hears that through the internet one can easily launch thousands of self-replicating self-organizing local support groups, and forums and meetings, etc, he'll say "great!" Saves a lot of advertising dollars. He'll love it exactly until the point where that network of people starts disagreeing with him, wanting him to do something different from what he had in mind. Which is what would happen if it really were some kind of emerging self-organizing democracy. Candidates with a program don't go well together with real bottom-up democracy. Nobody's really seen such a democracy, so that probably isn't entirely obvious.
Anyway, it of course isn't enough to get a whole lot of people together. That's the clustering thing. If one promotes and organizes it well, and one hits the right nerve, one might get 100s of thousands of angry people to show up at the same time and express themselves. But that doesn't necessarily add up to doing something in any organized fashion. For large numbers of people to do something complex together requires a complex organization. The traditional way of doing that is the top-down way. Somebody's in charge, somebody sets the tone, inspires everybody, sets goals, hands out jobs. They delegate some of their power to others, and so forth. It works, but it creates dumb, inflexible, slow organizations.
We sense that something better is becoming available. The networked world. We're all more and more connected, and the world is moving faster and faster, and obviously it is better if decision making is distributed to those who're most involved with whatever decisions need to be made about. So, many organizations are busy trying to develop more flat structures, more networks, more communities, more self-organization. But if we're talking business or government, there's still somebody in charge who largely decides what one should self-organize around.
The very hard problem is how stuff can actually emerge from the bottom and up, how one can self-organize around what emerges, and how that can scale to a bigger size.
Self-organization amongst people can work great in small groups. If your family is going to have a picnic, you'll probably all figure out how to contribute, without anybody having to be in charge. A few dozen people can maybe do that. But can thousands? Or millions?
Could the world possibly work without anybody being in charge? It is sort of a ridiculous idea to expect that a few people can be in charge of governing the world. Sooner or later it will be not just a little ridiculous, but it will become impossible, as the world moves faster and becomes more complex. Sooner or later the answer has to be that it is some kind of emergent self-organizing direct democracy. It isn't just some idealist notion. The alternatives will stop working sooner or later.
But nobody seems to know how, yet. Hopefully the answer will somehow emerge, and be a delightful surprise.
A couple of other excellent papers on the subject are: Emergent Democracy by Joi Ito, and The Second Superpower Rears Its Beautiful Head by James Moore. Both PDFs. More >
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 12 Jul 2007 @ 14:58, by bimbo. Communities
I watched a great documentary last night on TV ...
Auroville
The Auroville Charter
1. Auroville belongs to nobody in particular. Auroville belongs to humanity as a whole. But to live in Auroville, one must be the willing servitor of the Divine Consciousness.
2. Auroville will be the place of an unending education, of constant progress, and a youth that never ages.
3. Auroville wants to be the bridge between the past and the future. Taking advantage of all discoveries from without and from within, Auroville will boldly spring towards future realisations.
4. Auroville will be a site of material and spiritual researches for a living embodiment of an actual Human Unity.
[link]
[link]
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12 Jul 2007 @ 06:23, by skookum. Personal Development
My friends at reiki are using this as a emotional baggage releasing tool.
Basically she explained...when an unwanted emotion rears its ugly and usually buried head...you...
say...
"I'm sorry" *I see this as showing a certain responsibility for your issue.
"Please forgive me." *an acknowledgment of our humanity and vulnerability
"Thank you" *for the lesson I have learned or whatever you want to think it is.
"I love you" *a remembrance that you and others deserve love.
She basically said that this done with intention can work wonders. I believe her. Sometimes just facing the issue and addressing it and then forgiving yourself or others can do great good.
another good link
[link] More >
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10 Jul 2007 @ 18:37, by a-d. Politics
"Are You A US
Citizen Or Not?" ( or any other Nation with Central Bank & Soc Sec numbers for the People? If so; you are in the same boat as all Americans! MAke no mistake about it! / a-d )
/// 7-3-7
Link to the article: [ [link] ] Posted by a-d
"WARNING: Information provided here will challenge your comfort zone and will involve some reading and research.
Can you handle the truth ? More >
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 10 Jul 2007 @ 00:38, by Unknown. Government, Public Sector
The view of Michael Copps, like FCC fellow commissioner, Jonathan Adelstein, is that "Democracy is premised on giving people sufficient depth and breadth of information that they'll generally make intelligent decisions" for their own good or "for the good of the country."
"We are skating perilously close to denying folks that kind of information, in no small degree because of media consolidation," Copps says. More >
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 9 Jul 2007 @ 04:03, by nemue. Spirituality
It has been a while since I last posted. Like so many others my life is a 'merry-go-round', never enough time to do all of things I want to do. I have managed however to keep up with my reading and research and I want ask a question
Why the silence?
Recent events in my country with regards to announced actions to protect our indigenous children and women have been met with interesting responses from the 'politically correct lobby'. Their concerns centre more on ideals than helping to stop inherent abuse of our children and also women. I fail to understand this attitude.
Likewise we are silent - mute - when it comes to speaking out about the abuse that is metered out daily in third world countries. As an example a report compiled on the request of the Federal Women Division, places the number of honour killings in Pakistan at around 2,500 to 3,000 cases every year.
The report, however, adds that a good number of honour killing cases still go unreported or are passed off as suicides. Not more than 25 per cent honour killing cases are brought to justice, states the report while calling for tougher laws on domestic violence. Please do not think this behaviour is restricted to countries like Pakistan it happens in the UK, the Netherlands, India, Africa, the US to name but a few. We now have the judiciary supporting abuse of women. The following ruling took place in Germany earlier this year.
23/03/2007: 'He beat her and threatened her with murder. But because husband and wife were both from Morocco, a German divorce court judge saw no cause for alarm. It's a religion thing, she argued.' (Der Spiegel)
The Koran seems to have become the basis for a court decision in Frankfurt. I have just finished reading Infidel by Ayaan Hirse Ali, she makes similar points regards the behaviour that she witnessed firsthand in The Netherlands.
Men go to war whilst turning a blind-eye to the brutalisation of women and millions of women themselves stay silent. Why I ask myself? Well I have made myself a vow, I will no longer stay silent. More of us need to speak out and support our 'sisters' around the world. More >
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8 Jul 2007 @ 00:25, by skookum. Ideas, Creativity
yeah... and it isn't even raining...;-) More >
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