Only Moments

The first thing one has to look at as to where we are now, is how we’ve arrived here.  The frenzied pace of news, information, research, gaming, and other bytes funneling down the fibers at the speed of light are a culmination of technologies past, and those technologies were the result of human desire for expansion of our awareness, need for better survival and lifestyle upgrades as well as a longer life.  We seem to have reached a plateau of human ability to use these tools to further our personal “awareness” and technology is now on a global path that further enhances the differences between countries that will survive the depletion of traditional resources, of natural disasters, and of various other history-altering circumstances such as war, surprise obliterations, and the like.  Oh, you say, “but we’ve achieved such high standards of communication now, through our growth of technology.”  One should never confuse education with knowledge.  If you really want to know what it is like to be human, look at how we have taken incredible advances to kill each other will the most proficiency in human history.  In fact, technology is indeed linked directly with human history, from the first stoning to laser-tracked smart bombs.  Look at how we are now able to track anything or anyone on the planet, except those who have the power to not be tracked.  Our education system is in shambles brought down by the common denominator of “grading curves” so none be left behind.  We’ve completely allowed our institutions to promote and hand diplomas to those who cannot read or write, much less know what year our country was founded.  We have allowed this nation to be run by squawking heads of know-it-alls; political parties that care nothing but self-survival; bellowing blowhards that take themselves so seriously while proporting to be harmless.  These are the ”shards of intellect” of spun sound bytes that people support like their favorite football teams.  And finally, we have mindless fools with their hands on the big red button.

So, to get back on track somewhat- we have pocket cell phones that dial us in (funny how that term still exists even though I haven’t seen a dial phone in 25 years) to the world of information.  Phones that allow us to see each other, talk across the world with instant access.  And what is the biggest feature that our aware, educated kids use?  Texting.  Why?  There is no personal contact, just what looks like apparent secretive communication, because safety exists in the shadows.  Now, think about the big picture.  Forget kids and cell phones, think big kids with super-secret encoding devices and war machines that can annihilate at a moment’s notice.  The messages stay the same throughout history.  Humans do not become more emotionally mature from generation to generation, they do not learn to rationalize any easier or quicker than their forebearers.  The difference is that the rapid technology leaves less time to ponder and balance thoughts before acting and now with digitization of those emotions, those thoughts and actions can be cloned in nano-seconds  (Think about that email you sent that you wished you hadn’t).  Now, do we all feel safer in this world?  Combine this with the mass-educational standards at an all time low and you have a time bomb ticking.  Can you hear it as well as I?  The one solace is that struggling is part of the human condition, so as the strong survive, we may eventually get back to that Darwinian standard through no choice of our own.  That road may have us speaking a new mixture of languages as the victor counts the spoils, a lesson we let go by the wayside by funding our own enemies with the dollars of old technology allowing them the access to the big red button.  No one wants to think about it really.  They care not of our sense of fair play (at least the cultural principles that we say we have) and have grudges to settle and have been waiting patiently thousands of years. Note I’m not singling out any particular country, you can pick your own over-reacting one from a long list.

The end result is always good for some-bad for others and inevitably, it is what it will be.  Everyone is magnanimous until their lives are drasticallly affected.  Answers are not readily available and the high seas are fraught with danger.  There’s more booty than movies and music to be pirated.

I’m sure there is some quasi-goverment think-tank for understanding and promoting the positive global effects of these lightning-quick responses due to digitization and the responsibility that comes with it.  Hopefully, it does more that build a “War Games” WOPR super-computer to minimize the outcome.  It affects much more than just copyrights.

Next-The Copyright and Arts Issues

The surviving members of the sixties Bay area band, The Grateful Dead, are now in partnership with the University of Santa Cruz and will be giving them a warehouse full of memorabilia collected over 40 years for a permanent collection of what the university calls music and “social justice and tolerance and community spirit.”  Their music will not be part of the donation but will include backdrops from concerts, photos, and many other items that the university is calling “Dead Central.”  Considering that Santa Cruz has alway maintained a gestalt of the “the land that time forgot” throughout the 80’s and to present day, it is fitting to have this pop culture memorabilia on display there. 

For more go to: http://www.santacruzsentinel.com/ci_9036864 AND http://www.santacruzsentinel.com/ci_9050818

Today’s is a pissy day and in this one everyone’s is pissed!

http://www.tmz.com/2008/04/15/nanny-says-rob-lowe-exposed-himself/

I knew it was coming sooner or later.  Publicity abounds in the YouTube world so why not try this stunt?  This woman is pissed-off big time.  Her husband shouldn’t have steamed her clams so badly but it might not have mattered.  She even says she didn’t consumate the marriage, and that is grounds for an annulment.  She can then forget about the additional cash she’s trying to squeeze out of him.

Check it out it is strange.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hx_WKxqQF2o

I wanted to share this writer’s plan to get unpublished authors not only published, but to change the entire world.  He’s got a plan and he’s pissed!

http://web.mac.com/edtoolis/TheHumorOfEdToolis/Blog/Entries/2008/4/15_Unpublished_%26_Pissed.html

The World Trade Towers were the focus of an attack in 1993 by Muslim “extremists.”  I was working in Puerto Rico at the time and the shock of that attempt was hard to describe, but the reasoning was clear.  It was an attempt to bring down financial markets in the Western world by misguided so-called religious zealots that wouldn’t know the basis of any religion if they swallowed it with a cup of oil.  It was a mostly failed attempt, one that we as a country did not take as a warning and prepare for further attempts.  Obviously the second attempt was successful beyond their wildest dreams in terms of destruction and media attention, but what it did not do was destroy either the world’s or our economy.  No, the destruction of our dollar, our trade deficit, our home values, our industrial production, and our consumer confidence to spend has been destroyed by the purveyors of disaster-investment banks and the policies of the Federal Reserve and Federal Government.  They have wrought far more damage to this country than the heart-wrenching destruction and loss of life in the World Trade Towers disaster and I say this will the utmost respect and sympathy to all those who were affected by that horrible day.  The American government, and by default the American people have allowed themselves to be put at risk internally by the tacit approval of corporate manipulation to strangle the economy and the future of our children and their children.  Our Treasury Secretary, Henry Paulson was the head of Goldman Sachs who invented the mortgage-backed sub-prime bonds but don’t blame him.  Alan Greenspan, the former head of the Federal Reserve who engineered this recession, now says he stands behind all he did, don’t blame him.  We have spent over a trillion dollars on a war in a country that has untold trillions of oil reserves that could easily pay us back or finance their own reconstruction, but don’t blame our President.  Congress and the President have sat on their asses for eight years watching the price of oil skyrocket, but have yet to formulate a solid energy-independence plan for the future, but don’t blame them.  The Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) has over 70 billon dollars of oil and our government (we) are still buying it at these high prices adding to the demand and further driving up prices, but don’t open that tap to control the speculators that use hedge funds to drive up the price of futures contracts, don’t blame them. 

So then, who do we blame?  There is only one entity left to blame.  You-you and I are to blame for allowing these morons to govern us without the threat of losing their jobs.  We have become fat and secure and until we reach the subsistence level and have no choice but to rail against the “empire” we will remain shorn sheep, allowing the abuse of those with whom we’ve entrusted power to keep abusing us.

We give those who would kill us the financial ability to do so by creating their wealth for them and of course we don’t think some of that money will come back to destroy our way of life.  Our leaders take the money back that we the American public spend for oil in the form of “contributions” to ensure the money keeps flowing right on to them.  Just ask Colin Powell how he got a brand new Jaguar days after he resigned from office.   Go ahead and ask him or google Colin Powell, Jaguar -and see for yourself.

“Prudence, indeed, will dictate that governments long established, should not be changed for light and transient causes; and, accordingly, all experience [has] shown that mankind are more disposed to suffer while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But, when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same object, evinces a design to reduce [the people] under absolute despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such government, and to provide new guards for their future security.”

“Rebellion to tyrants is obedience to God.”

-Thomas Jefferson

Thomas Jefferson is rolling over in his grave right now.

This is a post from one of my writer’s groups from JD Webb:

This is from Authors Guild written to members about Amazon.com’s recent action:

Last week Amazon announced that it would be requiring that all books that it sells that are produced through on-demand means be printed by BookSurge, their in-house on-demand printer/publisher. Amazon pitched this as a customer service matter, a means for more speedily delivering print-on-demand books and allowing for the bundling of shipments with other items purchased at the same time from Amazon.
It also put a bit of an environmental spin on the move — claiming less transportation fuel is used (this is unlikely, but that’s another story) when all items are shipped directly from Amazon.

We, and many others, think something else is afoot. Ingram Industries’ Lightning Source is currently the dominant printer for on-demand titles, and they appear to be quite efficient at their task. They ship on-demand titles shortly after they are ordered through Amazon directly to the customer. It’s a nice business for Ingram, since they get a percentage of the sales and a printing fee for every on-demand book they ship. Amazon would be foolish not to covet that business.

What’s the rub? Once Amazon owns the supply chain, it has effective control of much of the “long tail” of publishing — the enormous number of titles that sell in low volumes but which, in aggregate, make a lot of money for the aggregator. Since Amazon has a firm grip on the retailing of these books (it’s uneconomic for physical book stores to stock many of these titles), owning the supply chain would allow it to easily increase its profit margins on these books: it need only insist on buying at a deeper discount — or it can choose to charge more for its printing of the books — to increase its profits. Most publishers could do little but grumble and comply.

We suspect this maneuver by Amazon is far more about profit margin than it is about customer service or fossil fuels. The potential big losers (other than Ingram) if Amazon does impose greater discounts on the industry, are authors — since many are paid for on-demand sales based on the publisher’s gross revenues — and publishers.

We’re reviewing the antitrust and other legal implications of Amazon’s bold move. If you have any information on this matter that you think could be helpful to us, please call us at (212) 563-5904 and ask for the legal services department, or send an e-mail to <mailto:staff@authorsguild.

Feel free to post or forward this message in its entirety.

    Any way of life that involves spiritual thinking or should I say metaphysical thought can be termed some sort of a religion if there is a Deity or Deities that are venerated or worshiped.  The root of the word “religion” can be found as the Latin word religare (re: back, and ligare: to bind), so that one is tied to or bound to that ritual that makes up that school of thought. The word relic comes from a similar root as well as it means “from the past.”  Living with different points of view results in different “dogma” whether it is “religious” or a life experience.  Zen is nothingness….to be in a Zen state is to be a state of nothingness.  Buddhism is more of a way of life as no “god” is venerated so I think the word “organized” is the source of confusion of terms that most get tripped up on.  All religions have source points from older religions and all life experiences that constitute a “metaphysical belief” system or disciplined regimen have common threads so to say that sticking with “one” religion or philosophy is a moot point as they are all merged versions of each other in some sense.

     Christianity itself is a composite of older religions and the schism of Martin Luther in the year 1517 along with the not so coincidental widespread use of the Guttenberg printing press, began the different directions of “protesting religion” hence Protestantism.  Catholicism itself is rooted and it’s holidays based on the god with the “halo” or Helios also known as Ra the Egyptian Sun God that was the basis of worship in King Constantine’s Empire in 312 AD when the Holy Roman Catholic Church merged with the Paganism of Constantine to reform the entire European Empire.  Although howls of protest continue on to this day from theologians entrenched in Catholicism, ancient Mithraism was an influence as well and much of the old legends coincide with many of the precepts of Christianity.  Acceptance of new religions required morphing of past rituals in order for any new religion to prosper and this is precisely how Catholicism did spread with little resistance other than the Jewish order that knew Judaism was the basis from whence the schism developed in the first place.  Until persecutions began after overzealous fanatics convinced the faithful to resort to bloody violence, Jews paid little mind to the lifting of their holy words of the Old Testament because of this morphed transition.

     One can believe in Buddhist principles and not be Buddhist.  The acceptance of Christ defines one as Christian.  To be honest I don’t split hairs as billions of beings on this earth all believe in something different than the person next to them and that includes those of the same faith.  One’s mind decides what image their god is, not an organized religion and that is the point.  The rest is just debate over semantics of, why, where, who, and when.  Here’s the secret-No One Knows.  The interpretation of that quote itself is in the Rig Veda one of the oldest religious texts in the world, predating the “Bible” by thousands of years.  What you think and feel is totally different than the guy next to you no matter if you both are indoctrinated in the same religion.  The abstract image that your brain produces is unique to you.  Gods are creations of man and to begin to separate and get totally technical over the four ‘w’s is mentally exhausting for me.  It doesn’t matter.  Even Christianity, (that would be the new members that were converted to Judaism without circumcision or dietary laws) had over 17 sects by 100 AD all of which were radically different from each other.
 

     In the end, you have the choice to believe in the self and your ability to draw on the energy inside and that is the essence of the metaphysical and hence religion’s essence as well, it just that we externalize those wants and feelings to solidify our security factor in numbers and the manipulative power mongers and opportunists take advantage of it as they have throughout history.  Is there a God?  I think so, therefore there is.  Atheists may cringe at that thought but again, there is no absolute proof either way and to reduce the debate to the usual Spaghetti Monster tactic doesn’t prove or probe what is deep seated in our human psyche. God? In what form? The answer is the form I choose as I can only think for me.  Only I can live my life and die when the time comes. No matter what your choice, your brain decides what imagery you choose, it is the only thing you have, you are the only person that can be in your reality of life on earth to think. I have no use for man-made ditherings of belief so I believe in the energy of life (God) and myself as the two are inseparable. 

     It takes conviction and the path is only for those who are strong as it is the road not taken and it is the one path that gets the most abuse from both devout believers and atheists (believe me).  I don’t really care, my life is full and my worries few.  I’ve died and gone over and as beautiful as the experience was, it is much better to be alive than absorbed by eternity. 

     Live life fully and don’t question it’s why, where, who, and when’s.”