My Thoughts Pass Like Clouds

Walking on a sunny September day
A noisy breeze sweeping the first leaf
Scuttling by my feet.

I look up at the source of brightness
A blue sky white clouds
Blaring silent infinity above.

A whispy cloud passes
I saw its shadow first, descending the hill
Over my head, a little grey, and it's gone.

In brightness again, I think
That the cloud passing
Was like a thought through my mind.

Could a cloud be a thought?
No, I think, it's less.
Chemistry of H2O, temperature, density.

But is it less than a thought?
Who am I to say.
Who am I to weigh my thoughts?

My thought brought no water.
My poem provides no shade.
And like a sunny day, passes forgotten.

Transcendental Understanding

A little before or after 6AM, in Middlebury Vermont, I was preparing my first cup of coffee.   From under the bread box, a small white-ish spider emerged.

For a few seconds I thought about the spider.  He's not bothering me.  Generally, insects and bugs don't, unless they are mosquitos biting me or gnats in my eyes.  I could easily enough have ignored the spider.

But I also know there are billions of insects and spiders.   Compassion for the spider can be mistaken.  If he were a roach, I'd surely have killed him without thought.  For that matter, if it were a black widow, or brown recluse, I would have captured it and put it in an alcohol jar, or otherwise killed it, per my life training.

As a father with kids still living in the house, I made a decision.  I grabbed a nearby napkin.  Between my hand and the spider, the napkin enveloped it, and with a sudden light crush I felt its innards smash into the napkin.  When I picked up the napkin, the spider's body fell out like a little clenched baby fist, its legs contracted inward.   I thought about having wasted the napkin, as I picked it and the spider up and threw it in the trash.   How many spiders lived in the trees we cut down and smashed to make the napkins?  How many animals were poisoned by the bleach in the water we use to turn the napkin a brighter white?  

Possibly, wasting the napkin represented more insect carnage than the decision to waste the white spider.

In these moments, I was balancing compassion, empathy, and ethical decision making.   I'd overcome much of the fear that others I know experience in reaction to a spider.   I felt certain I could check off the box that I wasn't killing an endangered species, or otherwise morally crossing the 50,000 year rule.

Predators like spiders kill too.   We want to believe they kill only out of hunger, only what they need.  But that's really not true in many cases.   It may be true for fish like sharks, I don't really know.   But even a shark will probably kill a larger animal than they need, like a person ordering a super-size drink because it's the same price as a small.   And lions and other cats definitely kill for sport, without the moral debate I describe in executing the decision to napkin-grab the spider.

These moral decisions I rehearse every time I take an action.  It's like there are few things I do by habit.  Yet I know that's not true, because I use napkins and toilet papers, bleached white as snow, without thinking each time of the consumption tax I'm placing on the planet, or its impact on other humans and species.   I wrote about the sinister trap of rich-people guilt, when we set up an "eco-box" of thought which makes us superior to people who cannot afford the choice.  Yes, I can buy tofu at the Co-op and eat less red meat.  But if I tell myself I'm a better person than a little Fulani girl, whose parents raise the cattle, and feed her enough protein for her to grow to the tallest of Africans, I've written my own rules.   When the Fulani girl excretes poop in the woods, she doesn't use forests to wipe herself.  She does have an impact, if she washes her hands in a stream, or if she doesn't, and carries disease to the family.

The mantras are getting tired.  Not tired, really, but routine and familiar.   I think of myself as a thinking person, because I've weighed the decision to kill the spider.   But I'm not better, in any significant way, than someone who killed the spider without thinking about it... at least not in that moment.  Having a conscience gives us the potential to be better, but if our actions are the same, feeling guilty about them has no more measure in the infinite universe than a spider with the Frankenstein's Cat gene which makes it feel human guilt over the poison it spews into the neck of an aphid.

The transcendental moment, or realization, is this.

I can imagine an intelligence as much greater than my own as I have over the spider.

If that intelligence can be imagined, it may exist.  Now, in the future, in this place, or light years away.  I can imagine almost infinite intelligence, derivative by derivative, exponentially increasing insight and knowledge differences between human and arachnid or insect.

When I dwell on a seemingly infinite wisdom, which I could no more comprehend than a spider comprehends a novel on a bookcase, it puts human morality in a different context.   I start to see that our morality is a system maintained between humans, a currency we use, like ants with chemical markers that dictate which hive to bring leaves to.

Transcendental meditation didn't appeal to me so much when I was a teenager, because it made us all equal. No matter how morally sharp we might be, we were ants in a hive imagining a God who cares how big a chunk of leaf we can carry.  Why try if infinity is the denominator?  Or zero?

I guess I truly believe that infinity, and not zero, as the denominator, and that makes a difference to me. It's a difference between wonder and fear.   Division by zero scares me, division by infinity makes me feel super intelligent and full of potential insight.  We are all numerators, who by meditating peer over the division into the yaw of the denominator, an infinite universe.

I imagine this caring to matter.  I imagine the comfort and resolution to bring something.   It's something which, by use of language, I can tell A) myself, B) other humans who understand and take time to read it, and C) an infinite higher power, one Whom I can imagine understands my compassion.

Like a king who falls in love with a peasant girl and must dress himself down to peasants clothing, so that they can experience the same kind of love as equals (thanks to Dr. Sipfle of Carleton)... the difference between a King and a peasant is a pretty small denominator / numerator ratio, but it gets us looking in that infinity direction, away from a zero.  Wonderment at something more intelligent, greater and larger understanding than we can ever conceive of or hold in our minds.   Like staring into the sun, we are blinded by the concept of a source of knowledge, compassion, and understanding, a source of logic which like gravity puts truth and order into a dark chaos of infinite space, gravity on which we build our rules.

Even if that Sun supernovas one day, or sends a scorching solar flare at us like a toxic napkins, crushing us in an instant of time, making Earth extinct of all creatures for all remaining time... it's still good, I think, to know our place.

By meditating, transcendentally, I'd tell my kids they are more likely to relate to other near-species, humans and mammals and birds, and their habitats, in proportion to our importance.   We'll be less likely, I think, to kill and maim with our surgical tools.  The insights into gravity and logic, faith and light, will make us reach our highest potential.    And the highest moral potential is a great power we are blessed with.

Ultimately, understanding is conveyed in a human language, even English, like a painting of the sky.  It's two dimensional, it won't survive the solar flare.  The ultimate higher intelligence may take eternity just to complete an infinite thought.

It has made Arjuna a warrior.  Arjuna has chosen to war against the posers.  The high and mighty church which blesses love like some third party regulator.  The environmental watchdog who poses as a fair arbitrager of trade between rich and poor.  It has made someone willing to push the envelop on popularity, a Huck Finn who accepts his society's judgement of hell.

Thinking transcendentally and ethically prepares us to take moral positions, which help us to engineer our society the way the infinity of math and physics is brought down to earth by engineers designing a bridge.  By knowing math and metrics, I can properly size the cut of tissue for the waste basket coffin of the pale white spider.

And return to my work, and my coffee, and to be dad for a little while longer, and to appreciate my luck and fortune.

The trick is to look at the sun just long enough, and no longer, to give an idea of what infinite light will look like, without blinding or disorienting or obscuring the vision.  The sun gives warmth and direction, whether it cares about our individual souls or not.  If I choose to think it does, it matters if that belief improves my aim, and causes me to fire less in the dark.  

A Quiet Facebook Sermon

Cognitive risk, and marketing to leverage it. In the absence of really frightening things we have evolved to respect (lions, enemy tribes, hunger, virus), we have all of this evolved, inherited, innate "potential" to fear. At the same time, there is more and more "information", streams of data and marketing, aimed at us, trying to warn us of "dangers". 

We have to teach our kids two things. First, listen and learn... Faith is gravity, which we need for direction, but the truth is your light to see the way.  Don't be most afraid of the warning yelled by the loudest person. People get really obsessively afraid of really unimportant things. People still make up fairy tales to leverage our fears. I believe in God, but the God I know intimitely is way way way smarter than I am, and the people who yell loudest about what God wants are not (smarter). Statistically, there's a possibility that someone whose faith is very very loud really has the answer of what we should most be afraid of. But they can't ALL be right, all the loud people, with their different sects, focuses, and obsessions, no matter how talented.

Hell is certainly the thing to be most feared. I accept that. What I don't accept is that whoever screams loudest about it, or believes the hardest about it, is the most informed about it. The Almighty I know is extremely wise, way wiser than I am at my wisest, and I have faith will not burn children raised in the wrong neighborhoods who went to the wrong Synagogue, Mosque, Temple, etc.

Coincidentally, the people who make the entire Afterlife out to be about a very specific temple or type of prayer, tend to think that God is going to burn most people in a fire. Yet in my experience, most people are good. Most muslims are good, most jews are good, most christians are good, most hindus are good, most buddhists are good... etc. etc.

So I asked myself, at 16, how a religion (different from mine) which makes a person good or a better person could be apart from God? I was told by a loud evangelical on the University of Arkansas campus (where I worked), that it was Satan. Satan creates many other religions to distract us, and will do good works, but there was only One Way (his). I said that sounded like what the Scribes and Pharisees said when Jesus expelled the demon from the anguished man, and the evil spirits fled into a swine which ran and drowned itself (and the man was cured). The Scribes said that Jesus used the power of the Devil to do the good work. Jesus had a good answer, that a house divided against itself cannot stand.

This doesn't mean I have all the answers worked out. But the people who are trying to divide good people against each other are dividing the house of God. And the methods they use, cognitive dissonance, fear, and risk-perception, are the same methods used to sell us soaps, guns, drugs, and snake oil. I see it used in the name of the Environment, in the name of God, in the name of politics, in the name of unborn babies, in the name of real estate sales.

The best I can come up with is to take loud people with a grain of salt, and to err on the side of democracy. Because I've seen it... people around the world are getting smarter and smarter, they are getting more and more information, they are learning, there is less lead pollution dimming our neurons. And while we have other people as the biggest risk to us personally, we are going to be smart enough to see that the people who make money selling fear of other people are the money-changers. A democratic society where people are empowered to listen will see that a workplace of good people working with good people is better than a workplace of loud people surrounded by mignons, or loud people yelling at other loud people.

All the religions teach us not to be greedy, and not to covet possessions, and to find peace and love and happiness in a place which is not dependent upon a loud person controlling it or selling it to us. When the rich man gives all his possessions to the poor, he is not a better person than the poor who had nothing to give, but the poor man who greedily takes the rich man's money to become rich himself was nothing to begin with.

Study economics, study science, and learn to equate risks and fears with any other "sales tactic", figure out what the person is selling, and what they have to benefit from it. And if they really just believe and have no selfish motives, then accept their panicked prayers as caring and love, and be grateful you have met another good person.

Ok, that covers all my "memeing", and all the people who tell me I don't really believe or love God unless I do X in a certain number of minutes, or who want me to repost their liberal or conservative slogan, or "like" their cause. I do like them. I like them the way the Founding Fathers of the USA learned to like the mix of people they discovered moving into America. They gave every sect and religion its right to practice, knowing that most people are good and most people are better for whatever God they believe in, whether they call it "God" or call it "Good". There's really just one letter difference. I'm comfortable Pledging Allegiance to God, and I'm completely satisfied if my neighbor Pledges only to Good. The difference, if there is one, is something I'm not afraid of.

Not "sharing" your slogan, or not "liking" it, doesn't mean I don't agree with it. Dialog is great, belief is wonderful. I just think it's a little too loud in here (Facebook).

There's no attack, there's no emergency. My liberal friends can rest assured that my Christian brothers and sisters are Good, and my fellow Christians can relax about Allah and Muhammed and the rock music and rap music and everything. Learning not to be afraid of diversity, change, and difference, it's what the Faiths encourage which survive the decades and centuries. The religious factions who try to freeze diversity and progress and make it conform are completely outperformed by the Marketplace.

Somehow, really diverse nations, with lots of different races and beliefs and speeches, are outperforming nations which don't embrace different lifestyles. It's called "Peace on Earth" and it's catching on. For all the fear we have, violence is disappearing as a proportion of the net Risk we have to analyze. There was more violence 100 years ago than there is today. We just have more information, and we need to be educated to digest it when it's marketed at us to buy something, or buy into something.

Tolerance is quieter than intolerance. That's all.

End of sermon. Thanks for your prayers.

Dali Lama at Middlebury

I have already written a more public post this morning, but need to save it and go to work.

Transcending, tradition, respect for the past, vision of the future.  The DL has a really attractive way of making compassion seem transcendental.   You are having compassion for people you never met, not just your familiar crew.  You have compassion for those who mistreat you.

This is a familiar tune to a more Christian society, whose martyr transcended the brutality of Rome in the same way that Tibetan Buddhists must transcend the calculated cruelty of the Chinese military-wing of the Communist Party.

Is compassion our best?  Selflessness is a form of transcendance.  It's attractive.

Less attractive is the image of a meditating monk in a vegetative state, having transcended all earthly cares, who does not even feel for the death of a nearby child, or death of a brother.  We like to moderate our transcendance.  The analogy is the difference between "sacrifice" of money by giving to charity, vs. sacrificing wealth to a fire.  In each sacrifice, the holder of the wealth meets the definition.  But the crowd sees "nothing in it for us" if the wealth doesn't benefit something else.  It's seen as wasteful, as "a shame".

Reincarnation and God Theory

If we are going to die and go to heaven, will we still be autistic, or dumb, or ill informed?   I assume no, it's always described as "enlightenment", and "all will be revealed".   I'd feel ripped off if I entered everlasting life and still could not find the answers to life's persistent questions.

Assuming that there, with the Father-Mother-God, lots of stuff is clarified, we will have less dialectic and less need for argumentation.  If two of us meet and disagree about some event in history, I assume we'll either get the correct answer, or that some NEW perspective on the reality of heaven and everlasting eternity will make that historical argument superfluous.

I would hope that if I appear in heaven, I'll be way smarter than I am now.  I'll be a Robin with amped up perspectives and patience.  If a flaw is not bad enough to send me to hell (like, say, inability to do advanced calculus is a "flaw" of mine if my C- grades at Carleton are any indication), I hope that in heaven I'd be a whiz at calculus.   I hope I'd be smarter than Einstein, and that the deepest secrets would be revealed with just enough digging to make it interesting.

I know lots of really good, praying, holy, godlike people who are born again and if they aren't going to heaven, we are all in a lot of trouble.  But they don't know everything.  They don't speak every language, they are just as often weak in math and history and literature as anyone, and the point I guess is that the universe is infinite, there are infinite things we don't know, and so the basics (like say accepting Jesus as a personal savior) are all you really have to know.

So right now, I have a conversation with these people about Charlemagne or Immanual Kant [SIC] or Copernicus or Lao Tsu, and they are hopefully really kind and look at me like some all knowing monk, without knowing what I'm talking about they don't judge it as non-important, they put their pride in the correct gear, and they are happy in the love of God, and my "information" is neither a threat nor a distraction.

Let's say that they baptise me, and I'm in that moment as much in love with God as I've ever been, and if I'm ever going to be saved that's the perfect moment, and I have a heart attack and die on the spot.  Or a meteor hits us and  we all show up in heaven together a few gigaperiods later.

Now do they know what I'm talking about?  Is the dialectic, the debate, the socratic method of earth like swimming in heavy syrup, and in heaven we find we can walk around in the fluidity of air?   Does information appear "obvious" when it's correct, and "incredible" when it's false?  Is Einstein, Forest Gump, and Pat Robertson all in agreement?   Maybe we debate (for the challenge), and then it's all made clear (google God) and everyone is satisfied with the conclusion of every argument.

Or maybe there's no need to argue.

Maybe we realize in heaven a higher level of awareness and pure spiritual knowledge than we've ever dreamed of.   Maybe we see our days on the earth like an ancient memory of pre-school.  Maybe we feel as we've been reincarnated from an ant or insect into a college professor of insectology, each and every one of us in heaven.  Maybe our IQs jump from 120 to 9 billion, and we don't even resemble our pupated stage, our intellectual catepillar larvae stage here on earth when we thought we were Mensas.

If that's so, and If I would hope so, that we are smarter in heaven than we are here on earth, and that the conflicts of ignorance are seen as childish quarrels, then why hold that information back?  Why let someone who truly believes they are gay, or truly believes that infanticide or abortion or carpet bombing is the best call at that particular moment... why not let them into heaven, give them that knowledge, and let them repent?  Why burn them in hell for eternity?  Seems like a waste of celestial carbon emission.

I'm sure that if the Mormons and Muslims were right about drinking and naked beaches, and the Jews and Hindus were right about pork, that in heaven this will all be cleared up very quickly.  If a five year old child did everything his father and mother asked, and dies of malaria, whether the child was told Confucius or Buddha or Jesus or Muhammed songs, God will have an answer where the poor kid doesn't find relief from the fever of malaria even hotter in the pits of damnation and hell.

This view of a God and a Heaven who has more information and wisdom and knowledge than we have on earth, yet has love and personal savior and Atman Holy Ghost to sprinkle, is something that's as complex as the atom or quantum physics... we can accept things we cannot explain.  There's always going to be something smaller than a quark and bigger than the universe to ponder.

The analogy, if I were God or Jesus, would be to spoon feed the human larvae the right amount of information to ensure social peace and sustainability, and tell us about the complicated stuff when we are old enough.

I believe in logic, and I believe that God is logical.   I believe that God is fair.   I don't believe God just hands out a card saying "X = Y" and then the day you die says "HA!  X does not equal Y!  You go to hell!", which is what it must feel like for a five year old baptised into X and finds that heaven is Y.

I've read a lot of very 'great books' from which I was inspired to think this way.  Pretty often.   I love my faith and I love logic and I love God and I love existence.   I'm learning that I would have needed to be a monk and shun society if I was going to believe in only X, I'd have to shield myself from dialectic.   And that's probably from a fear of chaos and anarchy, which is probably what we fear now that the world's human population is growing so large and communicating so fast that the Xs, Ys, Z, As, Bs, and Thetas are banging together with velocity and force unseen in human history.

We are peeling out of our coccoon, and I hope we are a butterfly and not a cockroach... except I don't know how smart butterflies or cockroaches are.  I hope we are enlightened and smarter like a child is compared to a fetus.   I hope the revelation is harmonious, and the excitement we feel from change and disturbance is a change of enlightenment and discovery, and not fear and violence and subjugation to arrogance.

Religion,faith and arrogance don't mix well together.

Therefore, I submit, that my teenage dream of writing a prophetic work of international influence, a Bible or Aristotelean work of God, which brings the enlightenment I feel and the love and logic I embrace to others, who want it like "seconds" of a delicious and nourishing meal, would only be baby food.   For whether or not "I" get to the Mensa Heaven of Infinite IQ and revelation, I'm able to see that it's no more important than whether MY individual atoms in MY body recombine some day into a Savior.  If I'm eaten by fishes who are eaten by fishes and swallowed by a whale who grows so old he decomposes, and becomes compost for the lettuce that Jesus eats at the second coming, it really doesn't make me more important than you.  And my ideas and thoughts and insights are truly insignificant compared to the thoughts of the God I believe in.

And that is how I may, perhaps, conquer my arrogance.  It turns out I didn't need to be a Prophet.   I can be a ferryboat paddler, or a used electronics recycler, or an elementary school teacher.   By imagining a holy intelligence that I cannot understand or communicate with any more than a kitten translates between Nietsche and Plato and Gandhi, I have touched it in my mind, and it brings me peace.

The 'greatest' philosophical books and works are mothers milk to the intellect.  We are all children, but some day we will grow up and be in part what we were nourished with.

not equals, but you are always equals

Born equals, brothers.  Older or younger by a few years is overrated.

Once you are unequal by your own merits, e.g. one is alcoholic the other not, one is a degreed professional and the other not, it is hard to re-approach.

You are not equals, but you are always equals.

Atman, Brahmin, Jesus, Nirvana, XBox, Muhammed

The story of the Bhagavad-Gita, Hindu India's "new testament" (analogy, the Upanishads is the holy book which is much older, like the Old Testament), teaches the protagonist, Arjuna, not to take himself too seriously.

We are all reincarnated, each life we live has the same soul, the same perspective.  That inner mustard seed of sensitivity and awareness is the same in all beings.  It is the same as the Brahmin, which is One God, all knowing and everywhere.

Personally, I've always believed in higher intelligence.  I see no reason to believe that because mankind is the hot species at this particular millenium, that there will not be, is not, nor ever was something just as far above human intelligence as we are above jellyfish.

This morning I imagined that the Brahmin was a schoolboy with a video game, with different "avatars" and different game personas.  But unlike a human schoolboy, the Brahmin is able to multi-task, to be present in billions of games at once.  This is a kind of intelligence which we cannot easily imagine.  Like the human intelligence vs. an insect's intelligence, it is not inherently good or evil.  An insect's life is in days, a humans is in decades.  Brahmin's life is in billions of years, we may as well believe eternity.

When I play a video game, some outcomes make me frustrated, some glorious, some make me feel inspired or talented or intelligent, some episodes make me feel a dunce.  It's not really a different feeling between winning, or making progress, at Spider Solitaire than it is from Grand Theft Auto (I imagine,never having played it).   My analogy would probably go to Doom or Sim City, but those probably show how out of touch I am.   It's an analogy.  

Anyway, if each of us has/is Atman, an inner atomic God, which is at once the same as Brahmin (Imagine the entire universe is an atom or molecule in a larger existence), then it's a bit like our lives are an episode or a game... one we may wish to "save" or to "replay", but must be lived on and on in separate, similar episodes.

As we become more experienced with a video game, we get better and faster.  We remember shortcuts that work, and we can build on them.   In the same way, human technology is building in sophistication without humanity being or becoming "more intelligent".  Aristotle and Plato and Lao Tsu were more intelligent than I am, but I have the combined advantage and access to their knowledge, as Steve Jobs' techs had access to Edison's discoveries and could take the invention of copper (whoever refined it to electric grade is forgotten) for granted.

Becoming better and better with a video game doesn't make one "good".   But it makes one better.  And in my analogy, Brahmin is playing more and more games of Atman, with seven billion people now on the earth.

Being good at a video game does not make you healthy.  Playing too many hours, too obsessively, is

So Steve, I'm telling you we are not hardware.   If you loved your life enough, theoretically we could clone your hardware and recreate the same experiences, just like dealing an identical hand of Spider Solitaire.  But it would be pointless to go through that amount of effort and reach when the next randomly generated Solitaire hand is just as interesting, and is more interesting by being different.

Falling in love with one particular "game episode" is a feeling many of us can sheepishly admit to understanding.  Some episodes of XBox, everything goes our way, we have just enough difficulty to experience pride and heroic self-identity.  And some of our Atmans have it better than others, usually by our own self-determination combined with the assets and environment which we are dealt.  Some are playing a different game of Nintendo with different saved assets.

When the light goes out, this game is over.  But in the Hindu concept, the next game is the same player, and all games are the same player, a massive multi-tasking God who loves every game as if it was his own.  We want God to be aware of his overall health.  Winning at games is a schoolboy definition of zen.  Outside, in the yard, the health of our coral reefs, rain forests, prairies, and rivers does matter.  In this way, nirvana is seen in Buddhism as ending the cycle of reincarnation, the same meaningless games of recirculated, reincarnated Atman.

Humanity today is the result of a God who is a little too obsessed with Humanity's game.  We need to take a break, to play fewer games, and less intense games.  It is true that you "win" games the most by losing yourself in them completely.  But when the game is over, nothing of that passion remains.

Being one episode of God's game is an image or reflection of God, as per the Judeo-Christian view of the heavens.  But an all powerful, all seeing, omniscient God may be capable of doing other things, even better things, than this feverish episode of Human Playstation.   Atman may find itself present in something larger, something even more self-aware and more intelligent than mankind.  Jesus, and the miracle that saying his name and accepting him as a personal savior, is not incompatible with this view - we are thinking outside the herd, outside the box, and "saved games" may exist.   But for Christianity to mean something to me, personally, it has to be more than a divine "cheat code" (enter "personal savior accepted" and your bad scores are erased?) if it is to be more than an opiate for the people.  I have seen peoples lives changed by Jesus, and believe in those people and that change.  But I do not imagine that change is denied to someone who accepts Allah/Muhammed as a savior, and the act of contrition and surrender is the method that brings our souls closer to the mark, whichever bullseye we target.

My marijuana plan

Still catskill morning, I just have a tangent.

When I smoked pot in high school, I often did it alone, and often while meditating and writing in my journal.  I now have writing and journals which I'm not tied to marijuana to write.  I've written a screenplay without smoking pot, I've made some philosophical contributions "the hard way".

At 50, I've safely answered the fear I had that marijuana was a crutch.  I'm also able to say that I'm fatter, lazier, and make too many typos and have generally failed to meet my full potential.  Would I have been slightly better if I'd continued to smoke pot?  Or slightly worse?

What I'd like to do now is to smoke pot again for 3 months (or 2) and see whether I drink less.  I think that the pot made me hyper-cautious (paranoid), I never drank (practically never) while I was buzzed on pot (didn't like it if I did).   If I drink less, I know I will weigh less... I gave up drinking for 5-6 weeks in January and lost about 13 pounds.

When I did smoke pot, I was able to not smoke in social situations when it was offered to me and I didn't feel right about it.  Dave always defended me if I went on a one-month "marijuana-fast" and said he admired me for it.  I was troubled at the time that I was always motivated to QUIT at the TIME i was HIGH....  I'd get toasted and then "sacrifice my weed" in some kind of a ritual, and then feel sheepish and stick to it to prove that it wasn't just the marijuana.  Then I'd miss the insight feeling, but not miss being "high" or smoking, and I'd worry that the feeling of being insightful was perhaps a self-delusion (as described by Trungpa).

I just showered, I have miles to go, need to be on the road.

I'd rather use my idle time smoking and doing the artsy things I did than drinking.  If I lose weight, or just curtail my drinking in the return of paranoia rituals, that will be a blessing.  I can tell my kids I went without smoking pot for about 25 years, I have done my time and in smoking pot can admit to my 5 glasses of wine evenings which aren't every night (last one was on Sunday, today is Friday)... but which will kill me and make me worse and reduce the number of insightful mornings.

Or maybe I'll find the depressed morning-after-5-wines are part of the hypomania cycle, and I'll find I need them to reach my Friday creative springboards.   Or maybe I'll review those Friday morning contributions to the world and feel like, reading them on pot, they are crap to begin with.

Catskill Morning

I'm at a cheap hotel that charges expensive rates here in Catskill, NY, on my way back from a recycling meeting in DC.   Killing time so I avoid the Albany rush hour, and can make a meeting in Albany en route.

The mornings are when my mind is freshest, and some mornings it's like I'm thinking 3 times faster than I can type.   As if I'm voice recording into a transcription which cannot keep up, and I don't have time to edit the typos and mis-transcripts.   I have a feeling that I'm saying something really insightful, but when I proofread what I've written it's a mixed bag.

Much of it is actually brilliant when I read it later, and I accept the typos and guff as a cost of doing blogging.

The hypomania in the early mornings is something very valuable to me.   I don't know how much de Tocqueville threw out as rot, and I don't know how many things he thought brilliantly which he did not have time, pen, or ink to transcribe.

But the ability to transcribe our moments of brilliance or imagined brilliance is an evolutionary advantage of our society.   Cave men probably had brilliant ideas, but were limited by the cave walls.   My secret second blog (this one) is my cave wall where I can try to preserve these moments of mania and see whether, like Jonathan Livingston Seagull, I can control them, and see whether the next day they seem as fluidly insightful as they do at the moment.

I feel like I can solve USA marijuana policy.  I feel like I can solve immigration policy.  But I also see how people who seem sure of USA health care policy (like Ubel) have got some weaknesses in the foundation.  Watching Peter's youtube videos this AM, I admire his ability to transcribe in video at an understandable pace.   Society rewards good communicators.

I can be a very, very good communicator at times.  But I don't give up "bad communication" - speaking over peoples heads, making allusions to unconfirmed postulates, leaving people in the dust if they have a false premise.  I work at the derivatives of influence, hoping that a Big Think reader will see the point, and refute it intelligently (making me better), or translate it.

The health care policy is the train of thought I'm excited by today.

Here's the deal.

Mandatory car insurance works because we can put a declining value on high mileage and aged cars.  The insurance company can "total" a car with a rational valuation.   But we hold life in some kind of universal equal, society doesn't differentiate between values of different lives.  If every car was insured for the same amount, we'd have a problem.


This is why convincing young people, people who just need catostrophic insurance, the ten-foot-tall and bullet proof thin people, that they NEED insurance is a ploy by elderly people and fat people and smokers to get them into the system.   I have a 14 year old car, it may break down, and I want to insure it for enough that I can buy a brand new replacement car without borrowing money.   That is the way I look at a liver if mine goes out... my insurance should pay for the NEW liver, not for the value of my 50-year old liver.
I'm representative of wise older legislators and policy makers.

The problem is probably an evolutionary trigger to eat "when in doubt" (ancestors did not know when the next meal was coming), combined with convenience (we can eat faster than our bodies can tell us we are full, and we don't chase or grow the food). Probably the same root cause as high consumer debt.  At some point in evolution, people survived by gouging and borrowing.

That's a comment I was going to leave on Peter's youtube video about obesity.  I think there's enough in there (and what was edited out by the character limits on comments) to write a good thesis on.

It is as if I'm writing to generate thesis fodder for grad students, writing for other people to be inspired and follow up on things, which I'm not focused enough or disciplined enough to communicate clearly.  But I just don't care.  I've always been that way.  Sometimes I'm wrong.  Often I'm right.  I don't always convince.  But I've kind of given up on convincing half the people I'm communicating with.

Because I'm running out of time.

Religion, Philosophy, and The Art of Being Right

If I understand this correctly, You died as a sacrifice for our sins, but it's up to us?  We owe you one, and inherited a lien on our souls.

It sounds vaguely commercial.  Yet You were immortal, and never actually at risk of loss.

This is slightly different from the idea of mercy, where we are impossibly in debt to You and cannot ever hope to earn our way out and need to be completely humble.

My take is that there is something very good about the practicing people around me, in my life, in my family.  I am thankful to You that they are there in the world.  The world has, in the net, fewer jerks and bad people.

Yet it's not a 100% litmus test.  Some of the biggest jerks and bad people are some of Your biggest fans.  So I'm not ready to say it's causal, and I'm also not 100% sure of my own ability to sense out who is who and who deserves my trust.  I kind of think the monks are pretty good people, I tend to accept as a given that Mother Theresa and the Dali Lama are cool, and associate people who are better people than me with people who are more practicing than I am.

Here's the issue now.  If I post this kind of a conversation in my regular blog (the one people are likely to actually read), or if I twitter the top sentence (which I very nearly did, as it seemed both provocative yet readable and acceptable from any point of view)... My alarm bells go off.  I sense it's an unnecessary risk, that speaking truth and
 philosophy is "trouble".

Nothing new there.  As Socrates discovered, that risk pre-dates Christianity or Islam.

The ban on speaking openly and questioning beliefs is a serious sign of weakness and corruption.

I find that environmentalists, Fox News hounds, Christians and Goths, liberals and right-wingers, are all likely to be bullies when their opinions are threatened.

This is because a deeply held belief is a "fight or flight" trigger.  People will flee from the topic ("religion is controversial") or fight and argue from a defensive and emotional vantage point (strategically defensible - defense from change).

But what is attractive about religious enlightenment is the beautiful experience, the "born again", the "change", the revelation.

Someone who is "enlightened" but resists more light shed on the subject - ie. doesn't want to listen - seems almost like someone with an auto-immune disease, someone with idea-resistent bacteria.

I have not found all my religious friends to be like that.  Some are very open to religious discussion and environment.

But those who believe I'm going to burn in hell for eternity if they don't win the argument find themselves in a tough spot.

My Philosophy at 50:

When I back away and look at myself, as much as I'm able to, here's what I think I see.

I've changed from trying to craft my own soul and my own mind.  I see that now as somewhat fleeting.  If on my alzheimers-scented deathbed, I have a single revelation, or a single god-cursing fallout, I see it as a data point.  A legitimate datapoint, but a datapoint which is just a single high-note or low-note in my own life, and unlikely to have meaning for an eternity.  Why should that moment make the difference for hell or heaven in eternity?   If a meteor hit me and shortened my life a few minutes earlier, why should Robin's eternal soul be in opposite places according to the position of a piece of iron in the cluster of the milky way?

So... by writing as much as I do, I guess I recognize that I myself have been influenced by things I read, often many centuries after the author has passed.   I'm hoping at 50 that I can have some sort of spin on the enlightenment of our human culture.

It's unlikely that I'm going to influence people to suddenly stop the extinction of species in the rain forests.  That would require the ability to influence billions of people.  Not even Jesus or Mohammed or Budhha managed that in their lifetimes.

What they did do was to influence a cadre of people, and eventually to influence people of influence.  Even then, that was often not during their lives.

I'm trying to influence the collective understanding of facts about recycling, and in so doing, influence the policy.  If one person can swing public policy on a small (some would think inane) issue of discarded computers, then theoretically they could swing majorities of people, enlightening them on something that matters.

The concepts of "truth" and "faith" are derivative concepts, concepts which are the "ness"... the overall category of "ness" in "horseness", which is the ideal understanding of the "horse".

I find myself writing about the perceptions and use of truth.

I find myself writing about people who put themselves into positions of authority, especially moral authority, without disclosing their bias.

These are themes which have been echoed in liberal arts and conservative arts alike.

If I could manage to bottle it, for resale, it would be "The Art of Being Right".  That means being right about something, making sure you carry the correct vision forward, without either offending or being afraid to offend, and to allow your thinking to be corrected or re-aimed when you learn something more, or the wind or light changes.

To Sin is to miss the mark.  The Art of Being Right is about improving your aim.

L'il Davinci Cannibal Communism

This isn't about readership, here in this blog.  This here is keeping my journal.  Why keep one that's not private?

Because almost no one has time or interest to read it.

The only ones who would... well, it gets back to the journalism "half didn't read it..." dictum


Anyway I had some real insights into human thought this AM, but didn't have a place to write them down.  the pieces of paper in my office aren't very durably kept track of anyway, they tend to get recycled.

Here's the kernel I kept of the thought, which I'll try to write about as I have time...

"... while living beyond all your means.
and The man in the suit has just bought a new car,
with the profit he's made on your beans"

This began with a "safe investment" and "tax refund" argument I have over and over with my wife, who I love.  I recognize it's a pattern, an pattern of argument over income, which we've had since the 1991 paper recession when I was at Earthworm Recycling (and had to look for work, and found MA DEP).

In the past hour, the argument over my wife's "What I don't understand is ..." (I wrote my email about it following the argument, as the peace with two animals in my house trumps writing something Da Vinci may have said), triggered the song by Traffic in my head.

This concept of "underdog" vs. "the man" (in the suit) and profit over beans... and the article about world copper supplies and supply chain hedging, and the regulation of "profit making" businesses, I realized that profit and non-profit and income between humans is a huge underlying issue in politics and personal endeavors and relationships.

From democratic political processes to tax policy to regulation to revolution, jealousy and desire over consumption levels seems to be everywhere.  Marx wrote about it when Religion had stopped discussion of it (less emphasis on the red letter editions of Jesus and the eye of the needle - be rope or camel)... fairly recently.

The broader access to education and reading means that people can read Marx and Jesus and don't rely on translations of latin from priests, or ayatollahs, or Confusian elders.

As knowledge blends, we get into the nitty gritty... beans and cars and suits.

My investment (subject of the conversation with the wife) is entrepreneural and whether I get my money back or not makes a difference primarily to when we can hire a wallpaper man or get me a new car.   It's all about $50k.  My business is worth more than that.

Sometimes a divorce comes along which forces people to make different timelines for return on investment fit into a very small calendar box.   Taxes tend to pixelize our income in a 365 day window.  Accounting is all about digitizing wealth.

This is the problem with communism or selling revolution by jealousy.   A person who saves their money appears to look fat to a future generation who wasn't around while they were saving it.

And someone who inherits the fat cat's money has a distinct advantage in the laws of compound interest... they get a head start, either in college or entrepreneurship, and that has to leave a taste in the bean-eaters mouth.

Time is just a common measure.  All of us perceive time differently, from Dunbar to Warhol.  The time it takes for the earth to rotate on its axis is something we can all agree on, a gold standard.  But we could, in theory, all agree to accept a new galaxy calendar which changed the time of a year, and if everyone bought on, it would be as seamless as the transition to silver and then paper.   Gold and earths axis and trips around the sun are all arbitrary.

What society evolves away from is a completely subjective ruler who tries to change the rules we can all observe.  We have evolved to know that rulers die, and the ones who tend to be the "sun" tend to be lousy rulers to begin with, probably, serving more kool-aid than bean.

At some point, communism begins to look like cannibalism.  If all that matters is equalization of wealth, redivision, and equality, then compound interest be damned, the calendar and tax years don't matter.  We would evolve into shorter and shorter instances, someone richer a month from now would have to share their rice and beans with the majority who ate it today.   And those who have it today would have to share with someone who just swallowed the last mouthful a moment ago.

If all that matters is consuming the fat of the minority, a feeding frenzy could evolve which would leave bullies in charge.  And in fact, that's what has happened in Africa.  It is behind the resource curse.

The resource curse puts so much fat into so few hands so quickly, that society would evolve to try to share it as quickly as possible.   The gains of savings, investment, and compound interest look piddly compared to the payola for an oil garrik license fee tax certification thingy.  And the rapid evolution of sharing money that appears to come from nowwhere is an equal threat to those who come to it from saving, investing, and intelligence.

The policy over income, tax policy, has turned regulation of squares into bonzai kitten management.  WE are afraid to change it, because once you have a hundred million people paying into a system like social security, you don't want to panic the market.  Whether it's called a pyramid scheme, a bubble, or a market correction, panic sells in a bad bad way.

The Dowry Economy

In the _Sexual Revolution_ economist article

Old testament rules about stoning women, virginity, etc were formed when dowry - the ability to marry a daughter to another family - was a major part of the economy.  Agrarians had land, and daughters (sons were tied to the land).

In this economy, a philandering daughter was a financial cost to the family.  The dowry was lower, just like a car that is driven off the "new" lot and sold as "used".   It was a value crime.

If one family made "honor killing", and went nutso on a daughter, your own "investment" in the future value of your own daughter's virginity/dowry, benefitted.  In the same way as capital punishment is primarily a "deterrent" or negative marketing campaign against capital crimes, a society where your daughter was afraid to risk her dowry value made the family's dowry fortune safer.   It's good for me if a neighbor performs an honor killing because A) it serves a warning to an economic risk I have, and B) takes his daughter off the market, making mine more valuable.

None of this is really talked about in mainstream press, but I'm sure other people study it.  What I wonder is how the "dowry economy" exists today?  My theory is that it is alive and well, and explains the overly high tuitions at colleges and universities in the USA.

If a high percentage of higher income couples make the decision to marry someone at college or affiliated with their college, or someone at work in a place that hires people from those colleges and universities, then the university is kind of a "matchmaker" or "match.com" for college bound kids.

The univerisities which charge more are the same as wealthy families who negotiate lower dowries, because the family joining them has more to gain.

The lesser income families would also probably perform the majority of honor killings, since their dowry value was less and they had less to lose.

Of course this ignores other things like being educated might itself reduce honor killings, even if you do read by yourself in the library.  Literacy probably reduces honor killing, and probably increases dowry value, and also increases promiscuity.

Coffee Cups and Global Warming Theory

As evolutionary theory goes, there are gradual evolutions (weaker dying out) and sudden, cataclysmic events (quite rapid change in environment which would cause a spike in extinctions).

Examples of the latter are a comet or asteroid hitting the earth and wiping out the Jurassic critters.

Climate change researchers note that while it may seem like the earth has always been changing temperatures, and vacillation between ice ages and tropical ferns on Antarctica, that the current climate change is not during a period of tens of thousands of years.   A change over a couple of centuries is quite a spike, or bump, in terms of species evolution.

Imagine if all the species of the world were 100 humans, sitting in a Greyhound bus, holding piping hot cups of coffee.   One of the hundred  might just spill their cup of coffee at any time... it would be normal.

Now, imagine that the bus hits a literal bump in the road.  Some of the species get their coffee cups spilled which wouldn't normally have been outperformed.   If it's one big bump, it's bad, though it has happened before.

But what if human civilization is just a bumpy damn road?

It's not like belching carbon is the first thing we've done, or even the worst thing we are doing right now.

Cutting down tropical rain forests to get beef, sending recycled content mercury for alleuvial gold mining in the Amazon and Congo basins, mining coral reef islands for rare earth metals, using rhino horn as (stupid) aphrodisiac... we've done a lot of things over the past few hundred years.  And our population is growing, so even if one person's personal consumption or impact is lessened, the planet is going through a very bumpy ride.

It's like humanity is a big, lazy comet.  Rather than wreaking havoc in an instant, we are growing louder and badder over a couple of centuries.

How then to put climate, global warming, change, in perspective?  Is that really the one place to concentrate?  Or is it one of many bumps?

God Has a Use For Me

The single biggest challenge I can think of for a writer is to convey inspiration, to convey a feeling which comes from a greater perspective, as if outside your body.  Rather above your body.

Each one of us is in God's Inventory.   We can discuss what God is, we can agree to something simple and amorphous like a "higher power".   We may be agnostic about human's ability to correctly perceive something immense and Objective through our individual lenses of subjectivity, through our personal filters.   Nature and evolution have given us many filters to digest and synthesize the environment.

What I believe Soul is would be kind of like describing music, separate from the brittle cold wood of the fiddle, the silent alloy of the horn.  When all the intruments work together and make a tune, that tune has a single identity.   Some tunes are simple, some attempt to be identical.  Some are jazz.  Some split the eardrum.

I am seeing our brains, our habits, our livers, our lungs, our eyes and our nerves as "filters".  All of these filters emerged and evolved to adapt to situations and environments which were either constant or statistically likely.

A filter is a wonderful thing.   It regulates.  It allows something to pass through it.  But it also stops things from passing through it.  Whether fed passively like open eyes filtering light spectra, or actively like the heart-pump jetting hot red plasma at the liver, whether the lower intestine or the mouth, every process we carry out can be compared to a clam on the seabed.

Rebirth or awakening or enlightenment... baptism.   The moments of being "born again".  To me they were like I got a brand new filter, or had my filter cleaned of sludge.  Dirty thoughts and distractions keeping me from functioning clearly in my environment.

As you grow in childhood and adolescence, your filters change, and you become self aware.

Self-awareness.   That is what makes it difficult for a writer to convey inspiration, to convey the feeling of enlightenment.  The sensation and awareness of cleaning and rebirth are information to be processed through the filter of the human mind.   It's like changing a filter in a car that is still in use.  It's like heart surgery.

God has a use for me, I realized this morning.  I have an obligation to maintain myself.  Whether I am a broom handle God has set aside in case he needs an extra, or whether I'm a forklift, or a truck or a baler, I have some use.  Probably in society.

My usefulness is not my consumption.   Many days we may find ourselves kind of uselessly consuming, or pumping the same water already filtered through the same grundgy filter.   Day after day, we can lose ours sense of purpose and awareness becomes a curse of boredom.  It is sad to see consumption itself becoming like a "purpose" for people.   We consume in order to create jobs for other people to productively make what we consume?  This is a nightmare, a cancer on the earth, and it is our biggest challenge.

My purpose on this earth?  That is going to be as hard as describing a painting to a blind man, or describing harmony to a deaf child.  Every day, I need to thank God, as revealed to me in whatever tired blind-man-touches-elephant way, that I have this inner composition, like an artist creating song, sparking or pitching or gurgling out the back of my filters.   What I photosynthesize into Value is not really understood much more than the way a leaf turns light into sugars... the ultimate type of filter..

I believe in photosynthesis, even if I cannot explain it.   And I believe that I have a purpose on earth.  That purpose is not to consume, like a fake leaf.  It is not to hoard, like an umpteenth unhealthy fat cell.  But unlike Ghandi, I have put friction into bad gears with force and conviction that I'm unlikely to win friends by putting on a big white diaper and eating simply.

What I will try to do is compose.   I will try to record my sense that God has a use for me.  I will try to find a way to harmonize that revelation with other Gods and other Churches and other prayers and revelations.   Uniting them is no more a purpose for me than turning every musician in the Orchestra into a flute player.   We make better music using drums and xylophones and oboes and cellos.

I see skeptics asking the preacher, like the heretics out to stump Jesus or the hypocrites twisting the words of the peaceful Muhammed... how do you know?   And if you know, and you are a human, how do you know that I do not know, that MY interpretation of God is not equally right to yours?  How can you claim that my campaign to destroy the woodwinds is not also directed by God?   If I take away the musical instruments from every musician in the orchestra pit, and make them hold, bare-handed, balls of cold wet spaghetti, how do you know that mine is not the greater Art?

How do I know that music sounds better than 20 people holding wet spaghetti in their hands?   It's a matter of taste, perhaps.  Perhaps to someone, a choral of injured screaming infants is music.   We humans have evolved not to like the sound of screaming babies so much.  We deal with their screams differently, whether as native americans taking them out in the woods to cry-it-out, or by suckling and cuddling.   But we respond to filter their expressions of unpleasant sounds, or at least if we do so, we are recognized by the crowd as a bringer of justice.  Imagine a better hero than someone who magically touches and soothes a screaming pit of babies.   Imagine the popularity.

That is the image of a Savior, and I am not a savior nor do I promote waxen images of the Savior.  I believe that Organized religions and churches have, in some way, become a broken filter, a filter which provides centuries old dogmas and lectures as "revelations".   I believe that there is a karma for 'graven images', that an image of Jesus, Buddha, or other Prophet can become "graven" in word, graven in simplicity, handed out like crackers.   For many, the perfect Sunday sermon would be a bit like a Meth high, you go in, get inspired, feel saved and reborn, and go out and consume until the following Sunday.

The graven images are found everywhere in song, in sound, in dogma, in words.   God needs editors.  As more and more people land on the planet, looking for purpose, we'd be mistaken to let organized church machine complexes print out instructions like Chinese Cookie fortunes.   But within the elevated, highest and most aware group, how do we find the antidote?  How do we find a new Savior or inspirer?

I think my purpose is like a member of the choir.   I remember in sixth grade, singing so badly and off key, that the other boys sang louder to cover me up, and when I forgot the night of the performance (stayed home watching "Horton Hears a Who" special on analog TV), I was told that the chorus suffered in performance from light-singing-boys.   Who knows.  God may have made me off key in order to embolden others to sing more loudly.  People who are reporters, people who collect and synthesize repair, people who create positive fair trade between other peoples of the world, creating peace on earth through the miracle of vested interests in commerce.

This morning, I had a kind of epiphany that God has a use for me.  But it wasn't like an awareness of being special.  I felt like a forklift that needed be scrapped yet.  I did not feel the need to be immortal, or a sense that I will always have a use no matter how long I live.  It was a sense of infinite proportion, a sense of 50,000 feet, or 50,000 years of evolution.   I experienced a strange harmony of knowing my place as a piece of dust, able to see the desert.  And at the same time, like a discarded cell phone that's grabbed and used to place a saving TXT, in and unlikely miraculous deux-ex-machina "out of a jam" rescue by the hero of some Hollywood movie, I saw that I may still be of some use.

As I grow older and become less useful, I would like to die.  The alternative to death would be living forever.  It's not that "hell is others", but in the evolution of things, I hope that I don't leave a legacy that humans squeezed desperately at every last rag in fear.  I hope that the calm I felt this morning, that I might somehow find a way to convey it to others.

It was a moment of filtering Self.   It was a moment of seeing perspective as a way to filter the accumulated patterns, addictions, thoughts, habits, narcissism, and conflicts of interest in this particular human body.  It was a moment of seeing myself no more nor less important than any other piece of a puzzle, but feeling extreme gratitude at having the potential to SEE that puzzle as a greater image.

If a bunch of enlightened people learn to play in harmony, I think it is possible we will create a Wiki-Religion.  We will learn to play together, as violins and trumpets, and learn to incorporate the songs of birds and the swoosh of cuttlefish, to maintain all the instruments in the rain forest we haven't even ever listened to or seen yet.

My role, I thought, is to protect rain forests and create patterns of sustainable consumption for mankinds machines of explore-derive-smelt-manufacture-use-consume-waste.  But I have other roles... as a father, as a balancer of books, and just perhaps, as someone who cares how he is used by God, of my subjective place on God's chessboard.   I want to learn to listen and find the way that pianos and drums can sound good together, even if only when separated by commercials.  I want to find a way to use words to help someone see our quest for a net impact as a hunger or demand for good purpose, and to document how an Ozarks boy can pick up the Tao and pick up Lester Brown's State of the World and pray to both Jesus AND Krishna, can meditate and yell in some kind of appropriate balance, and through those purposes, filter or insulate or shock-absorb the incredible force of humans on the planet's diversity.  I want to preserve TYPES of life more than I want to preserve one life.   I want to preserve not "this here fiddle", but the violin as an instrument.   If I can find a way to mold myself just right before I return, as we all do, to the clay, I might just bring inspiration and science together into a kind of symphony or form of art.  Unlikely that mine will be listened to, especially if directed by the pumps of ego and self-righteousness, and contaminated by self promotion and packaged in dogmas.  But there have been too many centuries of graven image ideas and ideals by almost all traditional religions.    If you care, and you moderate your consumption, and you listen to the chorus, and keep an ear open for change, difference, diversity, as inspiration...

This is a life worth something.   I should take care of my health, and take care of my family.  Today at least.  And when my time comes, like a soldier, I'll consume not what I've earned, but what is appropriate for the value I can bring in future dividends.   I don't need to live forever, I need to live appropriately, and I need to stay as long as I have a purpose and sense of that purpose, and that my impacts - positive on science, negative on carbon, whatever - are accepted as Gods charity.

Thank you.   It's hard to write down exactly what the moment of inspiration was.  All I could ever really do writing journals was a jam session inspired by that moment, like a musician's "high".  I lost about all those journals, and almost never shared them with anyone.  Writing a blog is a recognition of mortality and letting loose of etiquette.   If my inspiration has had a positive effect on my own life, I can perhaps find a way to share without preaching, to lay it out like a product design for a life well led, or led in a very interesting, strange, unique and positive direction.  Take this and be done with it, for what it's worth, as it's intended to capture a moment of completed puzzle, a feeling of what I am worth, what my purpose might be, as part of Gods inventory in this room of the universe, as one of an exploding population of humans who are hitting Earth slowly like a big lazy comet, capturing purpose and beauty, even if it turns out to be in a supernova of erasure, plasma, and death of photosynthesis.  I don't think that's what God wants, and I suspect taking the time during my life to listen when God is saying something gave me some insights into the obvious.  Those moments of direction are most like... love.   I don't know if God is Love, or love is a god, but the moments of crystalline direction, humility and thanks feel a lot like mutual love.   You feel like you are running again on a clean filter after you have just almost forgotten what it feels like.  Reminded of great love, and re-experiencing it... it's what it felt like this morning.  But it also felt like being completely alone on the silence of a mountaintop in the wilderness, and it felt like being 50,000 years away from the present.   I am pretty damn sure other people have experienced this moment, and those, like the prophets or the priests or the apostles who took time to convey it to others, in song or in scripture, help me to recognize a good thing when I feel it.

Organic revolution in Libya...

It cannot be organic if the Gaddafi leadership is using arms and mercenaries.

I guess I shouldn't be posting things I haven't translated.  But I just hope it's not "Meet the new boss, same as the old boss".  I hope we won't get fooled again.

One of my posts from several years ago was an "open letter" to an unknown Iraqi, putting on record my aspiration and open mindedness that the overthrow in Iraq would lead to commerce and people power.  Now, the hard work is yet to be done following the overthrow of Mubarak.  But what gives me hope is that the way the Iranian revolution occurred, with speeches distributed by cassette tape, was open to a whole different type of collusion and perversion than a revolution distributed by twitter and facebook and cell phone texts.

Addendum to the Ethical "E-Waste", Fair Trade Recycling blog: 

... By the way, one secret with writing blogs that are too long for most people to read is that you can talk to the small group, the kind who read user comments and have long attention spans.  I want to confide that I know I've made both real and apparent mistakes sticking my finger in the eyes of Jim Puckett, Don Mayer, and other important investors and important collatoral decision makers.   What my experience at Mass DEP was is that to maximize effective change, you have to do all the homework, make sure your case is waterproof and airtight, work obsessively to make the best product as if you were not so much an environmentalist as a rocket scientist. 

When you have all the legal, logical, environmental lifecycle and other tools assembled, you will find ossified opinions which are difficult to turn into consensus for your approach.  At this point, you can hope for the attention of a benevolent power above you.  Or like a career suicide bomber, you have to take hits with reprecussions on your family finances, your career, your stamina, and prestige.   Those approaches are contrary.   So you recruit someone who does have the charisma to meet with the power that be, and you take the suicide approach, drawing fire to get your recruit the attention they need when the pieces begin to fall.

Before a career suicide mission, you must check yourself free of spiritual materialism, of ego-driven reactions to doing the same thing, of pride and of profit motive.  When you are sure it's really the best thing to do, you have to go directly head to head against the bureaucrat or feedback-loop environmnental group, conflict of interested business model steward, etc., and make inflammation.  You just hope that for every people who attribute it to your stubbornness, ego, or inability to "work with people", there are a few antibodies who understand the method to your madness, and can see you created a path and that it was courage, not stupidity, which planned your steps.



If you attract enough good people, you will then have to have a plan in place to take the fall and go away and leave the successful model you've opened to people who have not blistered and calloused their social network.  This is how I took the Massachusetts DEP budget from $1M per year and 6 staff to $9M per year and 20 staff in a four year period.    I made enemies, I made survivor-like allegiances (e.g. with former Senator Bulger's UMass or Stan Rosenberg's ways and means department), and if they tried to take the project afterwards in a way that defied the rocket-science blueprint, you had to make an enemy and keep the money.


It was brutal, and it was not sustainable as a career.  I eventually would have had to get a promotion in the bureaucracy to another department, or leave state government.   But what you do is maintain your integrity and transparency and honesty, and then with your momentum, you recruit intelligent people who either understand or are capable of eventually understanding how the pieces you've won fit together into an iron man costume that can accomplish great good.  Then you go away and leave behind:



1) broken ossified walls
2) good smart people with the right agenda


And some people understand what you did and give you some credit, some think you are an asshole.  I did the exact same routine, by the way, unperfected, at Carleton College as a food service employee (leaving 5 great upperclass food service student manager recruits.. though Jane BeeGee Tornatore also helped  recruit there and I don't get all that credit), and at Carleton Student Government (CSA) where I recruited Peter Ubels and Sarge Woods etc. into faculty-student-administration committees.  I rubbed a lot of fur the wrong way in both cases.  Then, at Peace Corps, I got hired to be Peace Corps staff trainer for cross culture and when the opportunity to move the training program from Mbalmayo came up, I used all I had to get it moved to Ngaoundere, where I got jobs for my dearest friends Yadji and Ateh Suzanne and others from my home town of Ngaoundal.


Some believe that another more talented social person could have accomplished the same thing in the same amount of time with better social and consensus-building skills.   That may well be, but I've usually seen it accomplished the easy way with lots of money... If I had Shakira's budget, maybe I could hire Bill Clinton to be my secretary of best e-waste policy.



But I got little of that, I had to build my own small business and, during a recession, keep that business alive while using it to support my way to conferences and meetings.  So I have to set ten year goals and meet the goals even if it requires career hari-kari, making myself not hireable within the conservative crowd.


I'm not afraid of that, it's part of the plan.  Part of what happens is that other people fall out of the influencial crowd over time, either of their own choice or by miscalculations in their own careers, or by simple retirement, or by moving on to their own promotions in other departments and fields.  For the truths I believe in and will fight for, I will have to recruit young like minded people from places like Net Impact, and make sure they are connected to the people I've met in Africa, Asia and Latin America, to build sustainable and common sense policy for another ten year period.  Then I can sit back and use my creative juices to set the next lofty goal... maybe trying something in software again, or some other alternative to bushmeat and mining.  I would really like to bring Edward Abbey "Monkeywrench Gang" methods to pygmies, for example.   But that isn't thought out yet, I'd have to have another rocket science blueprint to make me confident against unintended consequences.  And hopefully I'll get help defining the goals next time from another generation of proteges. 


Robert Duchesnay of Canada was someone I knew for just a few weeks but who I wrote to after the international work camp in Murren, Switzerland.  He advised me back then that my plans to make a difference and change the world would be ineffective, because whatever courage I supplied would be met by someone equally courageous trying to undo it - his examples were Bobby Kennedy and Martin Luther King.  He said his path was to "create", love art, create create create!  His letters were a fountain of enthusiasm for artistic paths to enlightenment.   One of his best quotes was "Babies are babies, Art is art".   I didn't really take his advice, but I have found more than enough ways to create paths in ossified societies.   Maybe my creative work is more "Rushmore" than "Rodan".  But plumes of cyanide from copper mines in Bornea are visible from space, and they are poisoning coral reefs which Jacques Cousteau showed me as a kid.  I cannnot create anything as beautiful as a coral reef.  And so I must, with every cell of my body, create a society and a lifestyle which preserves the planet long enough for the next generation of inspired protectors.   With Net Impact, I found there are other people who did what was unheard of when I did it - hippies earning and MBA, because you can accomplish good from the inside. 


This blog is hopefully about honing my direction so that the CRT device, which is finite in time, can become a step by step for other agents of conscience to courageously improve not just 'ewaste' or 'recycling', but to find connections to the best and brightest people in the developing world, which I learned are statistically significant among geeks.  Geeks aren't cheaters.  And cheating is what is holding Africans and South Americans down.

Cameras were handed out to Morgan (13), Gabrielle (13), Kristin (11), Jake (9), and Alex (6) (Laurie 8 is helping us judge). They could take as many photos as they wanted but were only allowed to choose 5 for the contest. The editor (moi) threw in a few more good ones from their photo sets and then mixed them up for the slide show below.

Vote, comment, label and enjoy

Seu Jorge is my favorite artist of the last year or two.



What a trip!

I saw Cranberries in Concert in Boston at the Orpheum the year my wife took the job in Middlebury but I hung back at the apartment in Eastie for the year. MAN!

I think I love this group so much in part because I was not using and LP. I think that's what killed Paul McCartney and Wings as much as the absence of Lennon... The Beatles albums I could listen to all the way through without running to pick up the LP needle. I am not sure all of Dolores songs would survive without the skip feature of CDs and youtube.

Kind of like me. I would suck as a writer if I had to handwrite everything. To get your thoughts down in an accessible way, you had to be king or pope or a close friend who could command a hundred quill-scroll monks to get your point across.