A great figure in the libertarian cause has passed on. Read more about it here. I was fortunate enough to see Harry speak once during the 2000 election. His passion for liberty moved me to work for the cause of freedom. I even had a chance to speak with him about my concerns with corporatism, and he was gracious and open with me (while disagreeing). I'm deeply saddened by this, but Harry had been sick for some time and he can now rest in peace. God bless you, Harry Browne. My condolences and prayers to his family.
UPDATE: Thomas Knapp has a much better tribute to Harry. So does Lew Rockwell.
I read The Celestine Prophecy when I was a sophomore in high school (holy shit, they're making a movie out of it!). Actually, my high school German teacher gave me a copy as a result of some conversations we had about metaphysics. The book is a poorly written yet compelling story about a lot of ideas like energy fields, synchronicity, finding your purpose in life, etc. Hippy stuff, told in an almost Clancy-esque narrative style (ok, maybe that's stretching it).
I took a lot of insights from that book into my own life. A lot of those insights made sense, such as dealing with children in an honest and non-condescending manner, how a child integrates the parents' personalities, how intentions determine outcomes, stuff like that. Later, I found out that the whole adventure was not a first hand account, but fiction (one of my more naive moments - I was thoroughly disappointed).
Anyway, the book did have an impact on me, and one of the ideas I took from it was that humans are rediscovering their hidden potential in this age. We have the latent ability to do telepathy, receive accurate premonitions, and affect situations with out thoughts and feelings. You may not believe we have that capability, and that's fine, because it's not important to my point, as I will explain.
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Thomas Knapp has great commentary on
the legal situation for defendants in New Orleans, who are waiting in jail for long periods while the system catches up. He made an especially interesting point that I wanted to highlight:
In every criminal prosecution, there is a prosecutorial team and a defense team. If both teams are tax-financed, then they should receive equal amounts of tax money to pay for their operations.
In other words, the public defenders' budget should be the same as the prosecutor's budget, perhaps with a rebate-to-the-treasury requirement for each criminal defense that the public defenders don't handle. A public defender should be paid as much as a prosecutor. A public defender should have just as much money to investigate, test evidence, etc., as the prosecutor opposite.
That makes a hell of a lot of sense. I've always been uncomfortable with the idea of paying somebody for the sole purpose of putting people in jail.
Great commentary on how the blogosphere compares with the mainstream media. Although I agree with the points made in the MSM, I don't think they were very insightful. If I want fluff, I can find that on the blogosphere - what the hell else do I read fafblog for?
For a while, I've been really, really slack about my music projects. I was having problems getting things set up correctly, and when we moved it was too much hassle to get everything set up again. Then I got swamped with a killer virus and just got bogged down in things. For me, I get ideas and inspiration quickly, and having to mess with a bunch of mundane equipment details is a big drag.
However, I think it's time for me to get started again. I completely wiped my production computer's hard drive and reinstalled all my software. The biggest task now is organizing my old projects so that they work with my new setup, and getting my outboard synths and keyboards MIDI-ed up correctly. And I'd love to get some better equipment: while my computer is powerful, it is extremely loud. I could use a good Access Virus synth, as well.
I've sort of been motivated to reengage in creative affairs by a number of chance meetings. First of all, I ran into an old buddy of mine at a Brothers Past show with whom I used to play in a band around Richmond. He expressed interest in getting together and doing something soon. Secondly, a guy from Britain named Jacob contacted me via the Bring4th web site. He's an electronica producer who's into the Law of One - yes, there is more than one! Hopefully we'll be collabbing, as he appears pretty accomplished as a producer. I also heard through a friend that another musician buddy of mine was trying to get in touch with me now that I'm in Richmond. Finally, I just found in browsing the web the other day that there's a hip-hop collective called Social Memory Complex in North Carolina. Talk about things building to a head.
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I've been using del.icio.us quite a bit recently: to create a linkblog, to bookmark categorize sites, and even to create a queue of articles to read, blog about, and explore more in depth. So if you don't understand how del.icio.us works (and you're sufficiently shamed into wanting to learn), here's a Wikipedia entry about del.icio.us. Social internet services like this are the wave of the future, and you might as well educate yourself now, since I'm typically the last to catch on to the bleeding edge stuff before AOL buys it and makes it into a commodity.
As if the past twenty years have not been enough, we're about to decide in a court of law what should be decided by societal consensus. Gee, I can't wait for a bunch of hotheads to clash once more and monopolize the news with their tortured arguments about how life as we know it will cease to exist unless we do what their God says / do what their body wants. I believe in a woman's right to choose, but not strongly enough to listen to her bitch about incessantly - let alone a whole nation of N.O.W. activists. And holy shit we are going to see some bible thumping the likes of which haven't been seen Jimmy Swaggart accidentally copulated on top of one in the backseat of his limo.
I just want to go off into the woods, grow a beard, and eat trail mix for the rest of my life. And write code. This may be the event that forces my hand.
Check out the new linkblog I've created. It's basically the top 20 pages I've bookmarked at del.icio.us. The list is pretty sparse now, but I'm getting the hang of it.
How do I provide such mind blowing content? (I see the look of utter disbelief on your face. Through the screen.) Well, I use cool websites to get information, ideas, etc.
- Del.icio.us: great way to bookmark sites and carry those bookmarks around with you no matter what computer you're at. There's an extension for Firefox that allows you to easily tag, or apply a one word label to, any page you visit. So if I read a page that's about politics that I want to save, I simply tag it with the label "politics". Now, anytime I go back to del.icio.us, I can see all my pages with the "politics" tag. Not only that: you can share tags and pages with others in the del.icio.us community. As the community grows, all these people tagging things is starting to form a sort of web that is contextualizing the web spontaneously!
There's other cool things you can do, too: Matt told me about using a special tag with which you label pages you want to follow up on. So anytime I visit a page I want to return to in order to read more in depth, I tag it with "toread". I have a live bookmark in my toolbar that is served by an RSS feed from del.icio.us of all my "toread" items. Whenever I want to read something, I always have a queue of interesting items to go to! And as soon as I'm done reading it, I simply remove the "toread" tag (I'd like to come up with a one click way to do this).
- Flickr: I've been into flickr for some time, but it has a slick user interface and great features. You can blog with it, catalog and tag pictures, share with friends, etc. Just a great place to have pictures overall - worth the money, I assure you.
- Oyogi: A great resource for asking questions. There are powerful search features that allow you to leverage the knowledge of the internet community, rather than just the documents it's generated. Lots of ajaxy stuff along with a great Javascript chat client.
- Runbox: I keep track of 10 different email accounts here. Their UI could use some work but overall it's a pretty nice system. 10 gigs of email storage should keep me busy.
- Drudge Report: I know, I know... but it's a great way to keep up with the mainstream. If you're into that thing.
- FeedLounge: Since Matt has ended his OneFeed service, I tried out some free feed reading systems but they just didn't cut it. The UI for FeedLounge is acceptably slick (again, ajax) and I love the tagging! Alex King also is letting the users vote on new features. Seems very tidy for such a new service. All we need now is a merging of FeedLounge tags with Del.icio.us tags.
Just so people's feelings don't get hurt, this post is not about blogs - it was more about impersonal services I use.
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Here's Tobey Wheelock's take on an introduction to the Law of One. I'd like to write an essay of my own. Additionally, there is a wiki being built as a reference to the Law of One.
Tim O'Reilly has published a thought provoking article based on talks he's given called Open Source Paradigm Shift. From a software developer's standpoint, it is fascinating. But more intriguing yet is his contention that open source is a fundamental paradigm shift for society as a whole:
In short, if it is sufficiently robust an innovation to qualify as a new paradigm, the open source story is far from over, and its lessons far from completely understood. Rather than thinking of open source only as a set of software licenses and associated software development practices, we do better to think of it as a field of scientific and economic inquiry, one with many historical precedents, and part of a broader social and economic story.
This is very interesting for me because it provides the final bridge between the actual experience of open source in the computer world and the emerging projections of this process onto other fields like economics. Kevin Carson has done a good job of referencing open source processes in various fields, such as the textbook racket. What the software industry provides us with is a first look into what decentralized economic and productive activity really looks like.
While tenuous politically, such a paradigm of human interaction is exciting and pregnant with opportunity - not just for progress, but for understanding of how this paradigm has already contributed to the progress so far.
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Check them out at my Flickr site.
I published an essay on the political and sociological implications of the Law of One back in April of 2004. The essay was intended to be an introduction to Bring4th, a site that was newly launched at the time for spiritual activism and discussion. Since then that site was hacked to hell, crashed, and burned. I have been involved with relaunching it, but in the midst of all the hackery my essay was lost. I've since found it and am republishing it here. I'd be interested in any feedback on this.
UPDATE: Another synchronicity among several this past month! Orion Magazine has an article about politics and spirituality as well, and it dovetails well with mine (though their politics are a bit more socialist than mine). But the writer's key point - that politics is the opposite of love - is a great way of saying what I've been trying to say for a while now.
By the way, I realize that many readers may not know what the hell the Law of One is. I plan on writing a post on my approach to the Law of One from a beginner point of view. This is preparation for a monthly meeting club on metphysics, spirituality, culture, art, history, and other stuff my friend Bill and I are starting in the Richmond area. I think the tentative title of our club is Progressive Culture Richmond.
The idea is that we do some yoga and meditation, and each meeting a member gives a presentation on something he or she believes in. So one meeting Bill would do a yoga presentation, one meeting another member would do another, and I'm planning on doing a presentation on the Law of One. There's also a roundtable where everybody brings up a book, CD, movie, or something that they're basically digging and want to share with the group. It's a way to ground our beliefs in sort a social setting, and I think the idea is powerful.
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I've been having a lot of trouble composing posts with the WYSIWYG editor in WordPress. This appears to be a known problem. Hopefully this release will fix that.
UPDATE: The WYSIWYG editor is not fixed. It's killing me when I'm doing nested lists. Please do something about this, WordPress.org.
UPDATE: I should have originally posted the statement by Google upon which I was commenting, for clarity's sake.
My friend Jim argues that censorship on the internet is doomed. Of course, he's right. But IMHO that's not the real point, and it glosses over the potential for harm with which Google is playing. And my opinion is in line with that of L. Neil Smith (via Brad Spangler).
What's going on is that a private company is assisting a government in oppressing its people. It's that simple. They're doing it pretty much in a direct manner, as a matter of fact, and they admit this. While that may be doomed to failure, that doesn't mean that people won't be harmed in the process. Slavery was doomed to failure from the start, but while it was going on it did a lot of stuff to impact actual people's lives.
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