Al Gore's Oct 29 We Campaign Webcast

I RSVPed to the webcast : http://www.wecansolveit.org/page/s/gorepowervote .

Here are some of the questions I submitted. ( I hope they get asked ).

- Do you think that developing China and India, as they are entering booms that America has experienced decades back, emitting a great share of the world's carbon, should be held to the same standards as the US today, or should they be allowed the same number of decades as the U.S. to stabilize its emissions as must soon start to?

- How should America react to OPEC cutting down on oil production when prices started to fall?

- Some estimates say that a hundred square miles of solar panels in high sun intensity areas such as Arizona could offset most of America's home and business energy needs when technology reduces energy lost during transportation. How do you foresee America's Big Coal and Big Oil giants letting go of their Helm?

- Both of the Presidential candidates have agreed to support off shore drilling. Obama does however argue that this is a transitional compromise that needs to be attached to a decision that adds more dependence on renewables. Do you think this is a wise compromise?

This American Life Explaining Wall Street crumblings in narrative form

If you don't know Chicago Public Radio's This American Life and you want to learn about our American economy, then hey, this podcast episode is a one a two a one to three for you!

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?sched=1263

I got to learn about Credit Default Swaps and Netting and Commercial Paper and how it affects you ( um excuse me I mean 'me', heh. well you too, okay ).

My own 2 cents on a comparison of 'money' in our economies with the Internets and their linking inklings
So one thing I learned from this podcast is that because Credit Default Swaps weren't regulated ( I can't cite the law, but they referred to 1998 or 2000 legislation ), financiers were NOT required to hold reserves on them. So several hedgies ( affectionately speaking ) formed a non-transparent chain ( its members could only see one lender deep along this chain ), in which each bough Credit Default Swaps from one and sold off the risk to another. So the This American Life people made it sound dramatic, but talk about transfer of fluff and making money off of thin air!

Okay, now here's the comparison to the 'world wide web': So the gosh darn truth is that not all content on the 'net' is original. Many many blogs and even newspapers basically link off to sources and write their 2 cents about it, without really adding what they think ( yes I do that too sometimes but I try not to ). There are even some websites which are created purely to add page rank to target websites. ( Yes, when a search engine crawls/trawls the web, those sites with more 'in-links' pointing to them have 'relatively' higher Page Rank scores, hence google bombs

And there was this really complex plagiarism reported on On The Media, where Jody Rosen, a music critic at slate.com 's work was almost completely copied by a newspaper in Texas that had been copying for a while. Listen to a snippet if ye likes:



So on to my point! Isn't news aggregation so similar to the transfer of money between our banking institutions ? It's all fluff. Real estate deals re-packaging homes for other buyers to make a quick coupl'a thou? Fluff dunk. So, Goldman Sachs is supposed to become a 'non-financial' bank now right? So, yea, what exactly happens to all the asset shufflers ( selling things they don't own ) ( pardon the half-reference to Fight Club's 'buying things we don't need' but it applies t00 ). We need to get back to an economy based on stuff. And interestingly enough 'stuff' is actually a word which doesn't mean anything, contradicting the meaning here. So, we need an economy that 's based on manufactured goods, real services and advice and arts and crafts.

Gambling? Yep that's fluff too.

Strange how this Google CSRF story wasn't picked up earlier

Here's the link: http://digg.com/security/Google_CSRF_exploit.

I didn't search Digg enough I guess; maybe someone had dugg this before. The only thing anywhere close to this was from Google owns the world! Worth1k, amazing! @news-world.us.

Here's an example of what's in that 'second' link:



Check out the story at digg for more.

My message to ABC on Behalf of wecansolveit.org

When you finish reading what I wrote, please help pressure ABC to air ads other than for Big Oil, go to http://www.wecansolveit.org/page/s/ABC .

So if you saw recent Belmont University-hosted Presidential Debate recently and if you saw it on ABC, CBS or CNN, you would see commercials for Chevron, Exxon and those lobbying for Coal. Well, wecansolveit.org tried to push for a green energy ad to ABC, but it wouldn't budge.

Even though the ad isn't exceptionally great ( read next paragraph ), day time television needs to give opponents of Big Oil and Big Coal a chance. Otherwise, they really do people a disservice. Yes, unfortunately many people get educated by the TV these days and those ads make up some part of what people "know". That's sad, I know.



Well, I think the ad is only 30 seconds, sure, and it doesn't do enough of a service to showcase green energy. I don't think Wind and Solar by themselves are enough by themselves ( especially since Wind => coastal and the further energy is transported, the more if it is lost ) . Though, solar technology has gotten cheaper recently. Check out powerfilmsolar.com . One of their resellers, Jameco.com, offers their paper-thin and roll-able material for roughly around $100/ square foot. ( Of course you need to spend money on collecting and connecting the energy to your home's grid ). What's the power output you ask? ( if you have an 550 sq ft roof and live in NY, then I think you can get around 4 Peak Sun Hours a day and about 7kWh of energy on an average day. These people say the average home needs 8900 kWh a year, so this roof contraption can give you maybe 25-28% of your power needs? I'm using Jameco's $100/sq foot @3W panels in the numbers by the way. So yea, spend $ 55K on panels plus. And solar4power.com says even 25% of power can be lost through transfer/storage, so hmm, that 25-28% I gave may turn out to be 19% instead )

Here's what I sent ABC by the way:

To Whom it May Concern @ABC

You agree to air the Debate for as serious position as the Office of the President of the United States, where the issues surrounding how America will fulfill its Energy needs are discussed. Both Candidates plan to support Alternative Energy sources, but YOU, ABC, have decided to block the Alliance for Climate Protection's Repower America ad and instead gave BIG OIL the Spotlight.

You don't deserve to showcase another debate unless you support this ad.
-Michal

28 Days Later: Why anarchy flows to authoritarianism ( don't read before you see movie!! )

(tried to put this on hulu.com too )

I just happened to be reading about the Spanish Revolution of the 1930s this week, where the government was overthrown. I don't know too many of the details, though strict control followed right after the take over. I think you could say this movie may help offer why authoritarian rule takes place after overthrow of government.

In 28, there's no more 'order', but the military has its own established order which survives the end of politics. Yea they get killed off by three survivors, okay, but that doesn't usually happen, so maybe the authoritarianism of the army becomes the new Law of the Land.

That's basically all I have to add. Spain has elected leaders today, but it was a dictatorship for I don't know how long, so the other question is how did 'that' happen?

Some Oil Math

I really don't like deceptive political math. I just have one number to talk about that I saw on John McCain's website within the area where the Lexington Project is discussed. Though it's not exactly clear how much oil we have in US territory from the numbers presented, one is given.

We have trillions of dollars worth of oil and gas reserves in the U.S. at a time we are exporting hundreds of billions of dollars a year overseas to buy energy.

If we use $4 / gallon, with 31 US gallons / oil barrel , 3 trillion dollars, say, is around 24 billion barrels of oil. $2 / gallon gives 48 billion barrels. How many billion barrels does the US consume every year you ask? Well in 1971 the US produced around 14 billion barrels ( according to hubbertpeak.com ) And the world production has been leveling off around 60 billion bbl / year over the past few decades. And by "produced", I believe I also mean "used", since country reserves are not what's being raised, the consumption is rising. So our reserves aren't all that much. Do they even give us a full year?



So why are these numbers selectively not provided(?) :
- how much oil in the untapped Alaskan land ?

- what about off the coast of Florida ?

- or the Gulf of Mexico ?



Anyway, of course the hubbertpeak.com numbers should be confirmed. But If you look there, you'll see that M. King Hubbert's numbers about oil production have been accurate in the past as far as prediction matching verification.

You know what, I forgot to reference Dr. Albert A. Bartlett from the University of Colorado at Boulder 's presentation on oil math, as seen on wonderingmind42 's YouTube page.

why is Conversation Difficult? Can We Find the Perfect Thing to Talk About to Make Everyone Happy?

I've been thinking that probably like many others, I have two kinds of problems when connecting with people: talking to those who love themselves and talking to people with whom you just can't find a common topic of interest. The first challenge is easy to describe but difficult to explain. There are people out there who love nothing other than talking about who they are and what they do. You meet them and if you happen to work or go to school with them, you soon begin to realize that they will either never ask anything about you or if they do, they'll interrupt your answer to talk about themselves again. If you're reading this, maybe you'll think that I feel this way because I have nothing interesting anyone would want to ask about me, but I'll just say that simply when I talk to anyone else, I'll almost always get a reciprocal conversation. The difficulty is wondering why. I've discussed this with another friend, so we don't have much research, but we've found that very often only sons or only daughters tend to be these types of people--attention seeking and self-oriented. But of course I've met some people who do have brothers/sisters and also like to talk about themselves and I know those without siblings who are less self-centered. So it's just a personal observation.

But who cares anyway? So I've been wondering if the near opposite of this is true. That is, maybe some people including myself just find it tough to talk to some people because of the second problem I stated: it's tough to find a common ground. Or without being that extreme, what if we acknowledge that some people love themselves, but maybe you can still find some topic out there that you can still enjoy talking about. Maybe briefly. Maybe not.

But on to the other point and more specifically, do we find talking to some people a waste of time? I've found in life, that I like talking to basically everyone as long as it's eventually in my information gaining interest. To me, more information is good and the more sources of information is all the more useful, so your perspective increases with the more types of opinions you become aware of. But if for one of two reasons I don't get heard, I can't talk to that person anymore. One, if they talk about themselves too much or two, too little. When people throw words at you without listening to your feedback, there's no satisfaction, because it's as if you're talking to ... a talking wall. But if someone is so secretive that they don't want to tell you anything personal or similarly they only ask you questions without answering the ones you pose, then you gain nothing. So there has to be a balance.

I once read a long time ago that the three golden rules to conversations are to 1. Ask questions 2. Listen and 3. Listen. I think that so far this has worked. If both people follow this method, you won't just be giving an interview, because you'll get asked about your opinions too: finally a balanced conversation. But not everyone follows this protocol. Does that mean stop talking to those people? Maybe some will. Well, I don't really have a solution to that so I'm just going to have to hope I meet someone who does.

humanity

First I want to say that I realized that in order to write without restraint, you should more concentrate on the content of what you want to say than how it will sound to someone reading it. I think one of the large goals of writing or communicating is resolving you entering a state where you notice that a condition of what is around you is not what you had once thought it to be. Observations don't stay in your mind for long, so you have to get them out, but when something really important starts to leave you, you feel with eminence that you should interact to make others notice it too. The depth of your notice will determine how far you can touch someone's mind, but the breadth and clarity will be what actually increases the chance of someone choosing to test their attention on what you have to say.

It's still unclear and should be said that there will be many who will never fully agree with you no matter how hard you try and dependent on this, some will even be fully offended in what they think you are saying.


With that said, I fully feel that people today deserve to have clarified the events and reasonings leading up to today's dissatisfactions, mislabeling, misunderstanding, hate, inequality and also calm.

Today, no one flinches when you say you believe all people are equal, but over a hundred years ago, then well respected scientists wrote hundreds of pages placing the black man, just newly being free of slavery as a sub-species of humans menacing our lands that will soon probably die out naturally by Darwinian survival of the fittest [2].

Today, it's considered inappropriate to merely exhale the word 'nigger' for fear that someone will call you a racist. People will misinterpret your text no matter the context, but just a few decades ago, 'people of color' were 'the colored', the 'Negroes' and even earlier those 'negroids' having diverged from our man long ago. I think it's amazing how much change and transformation we've gone through over the generations. Thinking about how so much has changed is very difficult. Elridge Cleaver, writing from prison some forty years ago, said the baby boomers ( the hippies? ) were the ones who rose up to challenge their parents' civil-rights-less-ness [4]. But he doesn't quite identify why.

As of now, it's quite unseemly to deny people jobs or even an education based on what you think of them, but only 80 years ago, your ability to reproduce could be legally taken away from you--by sterilization--if your mom was a prostitute, for fear that you may have children that are "morons" like you, based on how unfit for society your mom was [3].

Today, there will be a public protest if you hang a noose over a black Professor's door, but if you hung a black man in Springfield, Illinois in 1909, the mocking the birthplace and one hundredth anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's birth, you and your hundreds of friends would walk the streets a hundred times over without any fear [1]. The distinctions are shocking.

A lot has changed, but it's difficult to notice unless you happen to be a bicenterian. But there is still so much more work to be done. I'm wondering which generation will it be that will truly be color blind. Even Malcolm Gladwell, son of parents of very different origins has identified that Harvard's Implicit Association Race Test noticed his instinctual blink of an eye race bias [5][6]. So the idea is that if you talk to people openly about race today, they will say they're liberal and they try to treat everyone the same, but many people will not admit that they have some racist-like signals going off in their brains. Barrack Obama's now famous Race Speech [7] too identifies lots of ironies. I don't want someone to take things out of context ( listen to his entire speech ), but he does identify, for example, his white grandmother's fears of black men.

I'm happy for all the open dialog out there. The more honesty that's out there, the better. When Lenny Bruce and Richard Pryor started with their expletives on stage, the world started to hear what they didn't want to hear, but they knew they wanted to hear. We need to keep talking and keep listening.


- - -

[1] DuBois, W.E.B. , Dusk of Dawn. reference to the anti-Negro riot in Springfield (223).

[2] Gould, Stephen Jay, Mismeasure of Man.

[3] Black, Edwin, War against the Weak. reference to Carrie Buck 's case in the Supreme Court (120).

[4] Cleaver, Elridge, Soul on Ice.

[5] Gladwell, Malcolm, Blink.

[6] http://implicit.harvard.edu/

[7] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWe7wTVbLUU&feature=related

the push to achievement among schools had a positive intention, but it has created many leaders and not to many follower-wannabes

When your friends are competing for who will be the first to organize a group birthday present, you know motivation is formally a disease. Our school system has been encouraging leadership roles by telling us over and over again that management is hot, management is big bucks. It's actually true; I can't remember going to an interview where I wasn't asked about past management experience. But this all means that we start to think not being a leader is being a loser. Well, most of the time you just might not be the best at everything and failing sucks. Especially thinking about how you just failed at something, that sucks. This is perfectly shown in the movie, American Beauty [1], where we see Carolyn ( Annette Bening), the wife in the movie's perfect family, after not making a real estate sale, shuts the blinds so no one can see, completely beats herself up, shuts up her crying and goes on with her life.

Ambition has modified our speech. We don't say things like "I want to get an A next time, I hope I do better" to "I'll be working to make sure I get a better grade next time", or not making judgments on our spotty records at all.

Although I like what I've recently learned from the Deception episode of Radio Lab [2], that lying to yourself in the long run, makes you a happier person. They cite a study about a swim team with people who have lots of people at the same skill level, but those who did high on the do-you-lie-to-yourself test did better in the long swim. I think the whole positive thinking movement out there takes this a bit too far. I don't know much about it, but there, people say you should be a positive thinker and say things like " I am a winner" all the time. I did read a story in Time magazine about this 'new science of happiness' though [3] and they say not all of it is just hype. For example, just writing down all the things you were able to get done in the day or thinking them helped people avoid depression in a study they cite.

Speaking of doing things, this was one of the main points in David Allen's book, Getting Things Done [4]. I read this one because I wanted to find a way to manage all the things I have to do and he believes that all the positivity crap is ... crap. To feel good, you need control of your life, by managing what you have to do, lowering your expectations and preventing yourself from feeling like a failure by doing what you need to do and not planning on saving the world every day.


[1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0169547/

[2] http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/episodes/2008/02/29

[3] http://www.reflectivehappiness.com/AboutUs/TimeMagazine/

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Allen_(author)

Group think and Time slotted sub efforts

Ever since I can remember, I've been bombarded with ideas on how decisions are made in life--personal or group. This is a large topic, but personal side is roughly about ambition versus personal freedoms. On a larger scale, people behave very differently when functioning in groups.

Many of Bob Marley's lyrics have been about taking aspects of life into your control, "I know you don't know what life is really worth...; Get Up, Stand Up, stand up for your right". But there are also philosophies out there which say that you should rather try to obtain peace in your life and enjoy it. Life is short after all. This is also to communicate that you can't do much to change your status, that you are one person among billions, and that you can't change much; you will be put down. Roughly, this is hard for us to imagine these days, because being active is in, but I've seen it best captured in Dostoevsky's The Idiot.

Dostoevsky takes time to describe that there are many people in the world whose imaginations will take them everywhere, but they will go nowhere in reality. I look at this as a sort of an ineffective ambition. To me, this is very much in conflict with the idea that if you put your heart into it, anything is possible. The author I mention, does make a good point though, that everyone in the world can't possibly cause revolutionary change, nor can everyone be heard. Put this in any way that you can, but some were not meant for anything. Read that again, it's such a depressing thought, but it seems that way, because we have all been motivated to do our best for so many years, nurtured to perfection. Life is competition, but could it be said that we could have otherwise lived happier lives, numb about our failures if we weren't brought up to believe ultimate failure is not even trying. Now put all of those individuals together and make them into a group.

You have lots of time to think running in the somewhat known nyrr half marathons going on every now and then. Everyone starts off in one big clump, thousands of people, ready to release. Then people start right off at the alarm and advance ahead. As time goes on, the average distance between people gets larger, but eventually many many little groups of people start to form, each having roughly the same pace. Each one behaves almost like an organism, moving as one mass, but every so often, there are individuals who separate to go ahead or join in from the rear. The most devastating event is when the group slowly splits in the middle when peoples' paces differ too much. It really takes lots of ambition and personal push to keep with the front group, but there are always some who make up the group in the rear. Contrary to personal fortitude, it is much easier to continue with a group at its pace rather than try to advance ahead. This concept of groupthink is then in my experience, a very powerful connective tissue, mentally bonding people together.

The point I'm attemping to make here, is that there our success-driven upbringings are causing personal conflicts as well as personal-group conflicts.

More on the few vs the group here., in Washington Post's "The Top Pickers vs. the Pack" by Alan Sipress.

...

In another type of issue, I find that peoples' efforts are often scattered among devoted and nondevoted events. That is, we can spend short bursts of time handling problems, or we can arrange periods within which to address them. The conflict here is between which is more successful. When The task is idea generation, for example, it's easy to point to how people often get bursts of great ideas, randomly throughout the day. However, we accept meetings as the standard way of generating ideas by brainstorming. Maybe these two ideas simply go hand in hand and don't even need to be discussed, only to say that they are two types, each reviewing and contributing to the other.

JaeRok Lee and Google's Future

12:22 AM 8/30/2006

Mayor Bloomberg was in Ireland a week ago to help unveil a statue in recognition of Michael Corcoran and his 69th Regiment; he died in service during the US Civil War. In an excerpt, he mentioned that there happened to be some people on the side protesting the US involvement in the Middle East, but that he respected their freedom to do this and that his presence in Ireland was still more so to celebrate a regiment that fought to uphold other such freedoms. I find it significant that he addressed them, because I find that sometimes you can't give protesters themselves as much credit.

A few weeks ago arriving into Penn Station, 34th Street, one of the big hubs of manhattan, I saw a different kind of demonstration. It was a roughly rectangular shaped segmented block of mainly South Koreans singing about Christianity, the true love of Jesus, and the bad love of Jae Rok Lee. Their words were very limited as far as protesters go. They had no clever convincing words or even a coherent way to educate passerbys like me about what they were about. All I got was that they didn't like some guy named JaeRok, because he didn't represent the true love of Jesus. I later read on from sites like this one, which say he's a cultist and false healer, but also a Reverend, none of which the protesters mentioned. I don't know, maybe JaeRok doesn't represent the truth, but I felt that most people didn't understand the group's bantering, because they weren't clear on their issues.

A week or so later, I was at Union Square and saw the beginning of one of those street performance skits that starts off with a huge crowd of observers and lots of hype. The announcer was buttering everyone up for a couple of minutes until the completely motionless volunteer-like group of people that had everyone's attention, standing in the middle, began to move to some neat choreography. They did some hip moves and then the man with the mike said that they were part of a travelling Christian group (from China I believe) and that they weren't looking for money, but that they wanted soley to pass on their words of wisdom and such. Needless to say, suddenly most people watching walked away at that point.

In a sense they really reminded me of the Christian missionaries I've learned about who visited African countries, and some of the south east asian islands (including the Phillipines). They were there to offer their help, but their positions were that they were visiting uncivilized lands that needed some good white education and that no other substitute would suffice. Okay that sounds harsh. They were biased and believed that the native people didn't and couldn't know any better, and instead needed to be led by the hand, away from their pagan ways. I feel that some religious groups can be too imposing sometimes. Actually, let's diverge to quite an influential (in my opinion) non-religious (not yet anyway) group.


I've been thinking about you lately, Google.com and local.google.com, your Picassa, your wonderful email service, and all the other Google gems you have provided for us. It was even close to two years or so now that I remember that hype of being one of those invited to use gmail. If you didn't have it, then you were a nobody. When you finally did get it you scrambled to find people who didn't have it yet so you could invite them and be one of those who participated in expanding the selfmade google brand's webmail. If you haven't experienced similar sensations then please don't laugh at my geekiness but continue to read objectively. Lesser known google Analytics and Writely were also made as products that were much vied for, with access distributed on a FCFS (first come first serve) basis. This is a very intelligent strategy, but I think the master plan of google has eluded us all (many of us) long since the name was growing up as an aspiring 'verb' of the information age. It feels even very Orwellian to be writing this with the risk of losing my gmail, because of that greater google presence, a sort of a Big Search Engine back there in the background.

I've signed up for the Blogspot Google AdSense recently and I was reading the Terms and Conditions...

You will send any and all queries (without editing, modifying, or filtering such queries individually or in the aggregate) to Google and Google will use commercially reasonable efforts to provide You with corresponding Search Results and/or Ads, as applicable and as available. Search Results and any accompanying Ads will be displayed on Web pages hosted by Google (each, a "Search Results Page"), the format, look and feel of which may be modified by Google from time to time.

I realize it's like any other fine print, but it feels odd, because they are words of control coming as if from an old friend, making you surprised to hear them. The last line is a message that you should not affect the "look and feel" that Google maintains of its services. Later, you must also "further agree not to display on any Serviced Page any non-Google content-targeted advertisement(s). " Fine, they are protecting their interests; they want exclusive rights. But, I'm going after this notion that over the years I grew to feel very comfortable trusting Google. It's not that reading this service agreement completely changed my line of thought, it's just that it added to my other suspicions. My current feelings about Google are still of overwhelming awe, but there are spots of, wait, what's going on here, this is a company, not just some cool service any more.

There are lots of the Microsoft stereotypes about poor coding, but the biggest ones, I think, are about its monopolistic tendencies. Microsoft had previously managed to dominate services offered by other companies to 'monopolize' the market. One of the most prominent examples I can remember is the toils with Internet Explorer. There was a huge court case charging Microsoft 's bundling IE with Windows gave other browsers an unfair chance at the market (wikipedia has an okay summary). Well, nobody is really talking about the implications of the giant strides Google is making (or maybe they are but I don't know about what they're saying yet) in doing similar things.

Google doesn't quite have a monopoly over one sort of resource, but it's doing a lot of moving and shaking of competitors' products and services that is getting several layers of companies nervous, including Microsoft. Not to mention, it has also played the buyout game, lifting several independent services almost off the shelf and integrating them into their "Google Image". Let's go through a mish mash list of tools, services and ownerships. (actually wow wikipedia has a much larger collection than what's below, but it doesn't have the same goal of showing who the previous owner was).

Google Tool - previous owner - Google's buyout date - big competitor
Google AdSense - ? - ? - ?
Picassa - ? - ? - ?
Froogle - ? - ? - ?
Google Checkout - ? - August 06 - PayPal
Google Analytics- Urchin Software Corporation - April 05 - ?
Google Groups - Usenet newsgroups - ? - YahooGroups!
Google Earth - Keyhole - July 05? - MSN Virtual Earth
Google Writely - Upstartle - March 06 - ?
Google OS? - ? - ? - ?
Google Browser? - ? - ? - ?
Dodgeball


* I can't resist, I found this Starbucks center of gravity analysis while looking for google data and I have to post it too.*




Alas thoughts from that movie, The Corporation are moderately calming me down. Google is an IPO; it is publicly owned. Maybe its dreams were begun by Sergey Brin and Larry Page, and cultivated as honestly as they possibly could. But the future of the company does lie in the hands of its owners. Just like there are people who took advantage of 9/11 financially, betting stock money backwards on companies who would be moving out of wall street and the rest of downtown or dropping notes into the recovery process, I can't not see the same grim future for big G. It is the fault of the stock institution that works for the good of the company as an organism and not for the benefit, necessarily, of the people whom it serves. Sure we enjoy its free services, but at what cost? The same is the cost of television since half a century back. TV is free, but the commercials are not only annoying but they make up the ad culture that rocks our minds. They are the reason I can recite lines from McDonald's and Nike commercials better than say what I learned in chemistry.

Advertising is one of those demons of our times that we've learned to live with and have become accustomed to. It's also probably one of those most noticable changes, apart from new buildings, to the landscape of many European countries not so used to the ads before. When I went back to Warsaw a few years back, I saw the large story tall posters covering historic and celebrated buildings and I learned that it pissed off many people ( I wasn't so affected since I was used to it in NYC). I see Google as slowly (or actually very quickly) making its way into our subconciousness (if you believe that advertising affects you subliminally) in much the same way except they are finding ways to put those ads where you didn't really see them before. Sure, at first Google Ads were awesome, because they were just text and you don't so readily get distracted with plain text, but they now have image ads too. I've heard about ideas of TV ads even coming to a tube (or HD Tube ) near you.

 

NIN concert in Madison Sq Garden 11/04/05

 

sunset in The Bronx

 

internal war

I went to hear and see the Dalai Lama at Rutgers University last sunday. Some 15 or 20 thousand must have filled their stadium, leaving Tenzin Gyatso to speak to us through the jumbo screen. I believe the university director must have introduced him as the '14th Dalai Lama' nearly ten times, as though we would forget.

He was talking about how he is outright against the death penalty and commented on how we still employ it. However, diplomatically, he wishes to stay aside only as a commentator, saying "i will not interfere in your law."

Many of Tenzin Gyatso's subject matter is about war and killing. He mentioned that some kill at war, and of those, "some are called heroes." This is to suggest that we are not being honest with ourselves, honoring those who serve in Iraq, continually saying that none died in vain. Our war has not been a perfectly honest one. The Administration has been taking many blows in terms of its Homeland Security hierarchy (FEMA director Brown's Katrina response), its campaigning (Tom Delay's indictment), and very importantly to its work in 'timeline-less' work in Iraq.

He also expressed that globally, we countries depend on each other and that "destruction of your enemy is outdated." Whoever hears him may think him to be naïve, but it's important to remember that he has been in exhile in India for over forty years, because bordering China has not wanted to cooperate or even normally meet to discuss relations with Tibet.

As a goal, Gyatso believes in "internal disarmament" before external disarmament. Ultimately he sees the world will abolish nukes in a hundred years, two hundred, or more. It's not clear when, but any sort of physical agreements require people to change their mindsets. We must resolve to pull our minds from waging war. It does make sense that, the "mind cannot function" when the host is clouded with anger and rage. The Dalai Lama was posed, if given the chance, what he would say to a terrorist leader such as Al-Zarqawi. He said that his anger prevents his goals from being fulfilled and that "hatred brings more suffering to [himself]."

These past weeks have literally taken education away from New Orleans, affecting thousands of students. Last week I actually saw one student at my college that was adopted in a policy shared by many institutions to take on the burden of some of the many who need to continue their schooling elsewhere. We have our troubles in the US, but at least we have a responsive education system. It's true that one of the biggest issues raised in this year's NYC Mayoral Election debates was the sickening status our schools; the teachers have rare or unfair contracts and the schools are overpopulated. But at least we have schools. I can't really imagine what kids in Iraq are doing. I know the choice for a few thousand has been to enlist with training camps for suicide bombers.

Intelligent Spaghetti

from NY Times article, "In perfect deadpan he wrote that although he agreed that science students should "hear multiple viewpoints" of how the universe came to be, he was worried that they would be hearing only one theory of intelligent design"

Bobby Henderson, a 25-year-old with a physics degree from Oregon State University has presented us with that alternative, the Flying Spaghetti Monster. (venganza.org)

The site above includes many responses Bobby has received. Here's one:

"As both a minister and a scientist, I agree with you that there is no place in the science curriculum for ID or related pseudo-scientific theories of how humans came to be. Evolution is the scientific explanation for life on earth. If schools are going to include "alternative theories" in the curriculum that are not based upon the systematic study of the structure and behavior of the physical and natural world through observation and experiment, then FSMism is as good ID, so I support efforts 100%." (Rev. E. Wayne Ross, Ph.D.)

chocolate, NASA, war manipulation

The new TIME magazine (Aug 1, 2005) has a tiny article about Bill Clinton increasing efforts to cut down the fast food industry's influence on chlidhood obesity. A statistic Clinton points out is that new generations are to have an actually lower life expectancy than prior ones. It's scary to imagine that our culture machine is giving us more and more evidence that it's killing us (forget fast food, what about high decibel capable music fanaticism And, has anyone ever studied the health risks of all the wireless tech we're being exposed to these days? Wi-fi for the office and the home; blue-tooth for the headsets; XM satellite radio anyone?; television signal broadcasts; and of course our mobiles we can't live without But that's another topic all together...).

Clinton forecasts necessary changes in the entire menu-creation-planning of fast fooders, saying that unfortunately his ideas are, "easy to state and hard to achieve." I like the hold-backs, unlike Bush's Jan 2004 'pre-state of the union' Mars speech, where he says, " This will be a great and unifying mission for NASA, and we know that you'll achieve it. I have directed Administrator O'Keefe to review all of NASA's current space flight and exploration activities and direct them toward the goals I have outlined." So the mars mission will be achieved then. I don't quiet understand why we must often base our future goals on tragedies of our past. The two big goals I have on my mind are fighting terrorism and going to space. In the same speech from above, the President says that we must aim to our country's space goals in order to commemorate those who lost their lives in the Columbia crash. Am I a terrible person to say that he's squeezing everything possible from their deaths? Here's an excerpt:

The loss of the Space Shuttle Columbia was less than one year ago. Since the beginning of our space program, America has lost 23 astronauts, and one astronaut from an allied nation -- men and women who believed in their mission and accepted the dangers. As one family member said, "The legacy of Columbia must carry on -- for the benefit of our children and yours." The Columbia's crew did not turn away from the challenge, and neither will we.

The legacy must carry on. After some three more sentences, that's the end of the speech, so we see that he uses one of our nation's devastations in order to bring us to action for the future. The example which overshadows the Columbia crash is of course 9-11. We are often directed to look proudly into the wind whenever we.... see someone with a 'Remember 9-11' bumper sticker or t-shirt. What better way to go through your day than by dipping our thoughts back four years every time we see a piece of manufactured mass-distributed mass-disturbing piece of memorabilia-tear-jerker-media? Are we expected to look back every time? Do you gain a little bit of strength whenever you walk past 9-11 hats on the tourist shops of 34th street? We are living in a culture that makes money at the expectation that we should submit to sorrow. It's mass manipulation.

I find it moral to pay tribute to those who have passed on, sure, but why try to, not only make money off of it, forget that for now. The bigger question is, why use it to plan out a course for our future? Over a thousand US soldiers have now lost their lives to the war in Iraq, but we can't say that, we must say that they have given their lives for the effort of the Iraq war. Moving on, ... we are to use this now to continue to accept the lack of deadline setting by the Administration. Let's even forget for now that we're in a bit of a tough situation with this war and that it is a very tough issue to resolve however way you look at it. Why, beyond all this, can't we build our future based on re-enforcing successes of say, world cooperation initiatives, though few, or even US achievements. Not accepting this is trusting that we don't need another tragedy to take us yet farther


Going back to the Clinton article though, he also says he'll start a partnership with the AHA by talking to kids, but that just talking won't do much, becaus the food industry must make the changes that will have any sort of effect. Sure, it'll be a long process.

bombs away

It is old news, but the context today has North Korea with live nuclear weapons, as North Korea's Vice Foreign Minister Kim Gye Gwan from North Korea admitted, as on a pbs.org show transcript on US- North Korean affairs. The UN had devoted the month of May of this year to try to come to an agreement on policies concerning disarmament and existing nuclear programs, as part of the "Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty Review Conference". The Secretary General, Kofi Annan must have known how hard it would be to see his vision through of a "system of collective security for the 21st century" when he started the conference off, at one point remarking that "the consequences of failure are too great to aim for anything less" (from a transcript of his speech). The US' administration would not reaffirm previous claims to disarmament, but still attacked North Korea and Iran's nuclear arms programs.

We're living in an extension of the Cold War, except now, nuclear fears live with more and more countries joining the nuke race. You have to stop and consider the world's states, from a Martian point of view, to ask why the bigger countries who have the WMDs feel they are so much better at controlling their use than those countries that are just beginning to harvest them. A mid May UN press briefing raised the issue of how the US could possibly pressure start-ups like Iran to quit their nuclear programs after what they have done in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The US has been using its non-nuclear WMDs in Iraq, making its people's lives a living hell since the very day the war officially started, March 20th 2003. The war's mission had the perfect title, ''Operation Iraqi Freedom,' telling the US people that the goal in bombing Baghdad was to free its people. The Iraqis obviously did not understand that in order to be free they must first die (or maybe we are warping another Islamic premise here? Hey aren't terrorists just Muslims who want to serve Allah by killing us so that they may quickly ascend to paradise? How could they do that? Let's bomb them). The point is that despite 9 - 11, the USS Cole bombing of 2000, the US Embassy bombings of 1998 (which didn't happen on US soil anyway), or even the anthrax scare, we still do not really know what it must be like to live in a true war zone. We can only see snapshots of people dying in Iraq, see the daily body counts of daily 'insurgency labeled' bombings, or witness the names of our own deceased soldiers as they pass down our television screens when our networks feel like making us cry.

That other world is full of terrorists who simply want to kill us and no one knows why. As our Commander in Chief has stated in his 2002 State of the Union address,

Iraq continues to flaunt its hostility toward America and to support terror. The Iraqi regime has plotted to develop anthrax, and nerve gas, and nuclear weapons for over a decade. This is a regime that has already used poison gas to murder thousands of its own citizens -- leaving the bodies of mothers huddled over their dead children. This is a regime that agreed to international inspections -- then kicked out the inspectors. This is a regime that has something to hide from the civilized world.

States like these, and their terrorist allies, constitute an axis of evil, arming to threaten the peace of the world. By seeking weapons of mass destruction, these regimes pose a grave and growing danger. They could provide these arms to terrorists, giving them the means to match their hatred. They could attack our allies or attempt to blackmail the United States. In any of these cases, the price of indifference would be catastrophic.

We must stop them because they threaten world peace. They should have listened to him then, three years ago. They should have known we had to prove ourselves in combat. I truly believe that we are the agressors and that we have allowed countries such as Iraq or Afghanistan to aggregate too much resentment towards us. It is blowing up in our faces, and we can only have speeches like the last reference to put a positive (?) front on our actions. (It doesn't end here, and it did not start with Iraq or the Persian Gulf wars. Historians will tell you the story of 19th and 20th c colonialism, of Euro-US domination of the rest of the globe, as well as the world wars that shaped our times and the political angsts that shaped the times of the world wars. There are no easy solutions. What we have today is an accumulation of way too many issues to be blamed on one president. But we must live in the now, stop ignoring continents like Africa where disease is still a killer threat, and stop creating a US public that is fed by simple speeches that represent our world as a good/evil dichotomy.)

Kinsey, the documentary

This movie answers questions that were asked in the 1920s as a documentary should, but also points to what has yet to be developed on. It shows how uninformed people were about their own biologies, about what knowing we take for granted today, but also begs questions in today's times about when homosexuality will be accepted. Only last year, after all, our president supported the outrageous Marriage Protection Amendment which attempted to mar the efforts of states like Vermont where gay marriage civil unions have been legalized. I think any amendment that limits as opposed to expands peoples rights is outrageous. But our politics were put to shame when former New Jersey governor James McGreevey resigned after he announced that he was gay. I do understand that this is similar to Clinton's adultery, since McGreevey had an affair with one of his employees, but it remains that as the only publicly gay US governor to date, by resigning he has only made gay people look bad, unfit for politics at least.

Eighty years ago the movie depicts that married couples thought cunnilingus caused cancer. But it also includes the story of a man who was a sexaholic and also a pedophile, suggesting that this man who has had sex with some 600 pre-adolescent boys is pushing the understanding of the man who has been pushing everyone elses'. In this sense, (being slightly biased here), a common morality is addressed that says that because pedophilia includes actions that are against other people's wills, it just isn't acceptable behavior.

But that doesn't mean there is any definition of normal. People Kinsey's team interviews ask,
"do you find my answers typical...am I normal?" We cannot pretend to be the same, putting the ones who are different to shame. No matter how hard you may try to explain outloud that you are not biased, you will fail quickly if you had to answer the questions about your feelings immediately, such as on the IAT. That's understandable, because broadcast networks still find it necessary to enforce ratios in the races we see on tv. There are movies that explicitly mock the idea of the tocken black guy or the stupid fat guy such as Not Another Teen Movie (haven't seen it yet, but the idea is there). But the truth is we are different. Time has an article in the July 4th issue, "Suspicious Minds" by Paul Coates, that presents Centers for Disease Control's findings from Jan 2004 that blacks accounted for about half of new AIDS cases in the US while only representing 13% of the population. That may be a bit random, but it says that yes we cannot be treated for diseases the same way. We are medically different, and it's also common sense to say we are different in all other aspects such as the Kinsey movie's people's individual sexuality.

At one point Kinsey says, '...everyone is different, but people want to be the same and in trying to be part of the group, they are willing to betray their own natures.' This is like suggesting that actions are more powerful when done in groups. If you don't want to stand out, you agree with the general consensus. Even in the movie itself you see how finger votes of only a few (see Law of the few section from Gladwell's Tipping Point) of the Rockefeller Foundation board members quickly convince the remaining members to complete the unanimity. So in real life, when nobody is talking about issues of women who are frigid and can never orgasm (which Kinsey believed was a falsity) or premarital sex, you don't want to even think of suggesting a digression.

I found love to be left open ended in this movie. Kinsey says, 'the only way to study sex...is to strip away everything but its physiological functions,' but then the movie later leaves Kinsey presenting his thoughts about love, saying that though it cannot be measured, but it is very involved in the threads of our relationships, that it is an (aptly) immeasurably significant binding force between people. Make of that what you will yourself, because I saw no good suggestions in the movie. Today orgies or less inhibited multiple partner sex relations are still taboo, but I think Kinsey really was suggesting that monogomy is sexually boring and lovers can still be (note hypocritical word usage) FAITHful to their partners if they love each other. Well, in my mind we are not free chimps, but our society tends to stamp marriage or further, having children, as an action that ends the two partners' freedoms. They are unconditionally bound to their spouses. I don't have a real say in this yet, but I can guess that marriage is a tough decision to make and that's why, Henry VIII worked so hard to separate from the Roman Catholic Church to get divorces legal, I think (although for him it was a royal thing and it was a bit more problematic if you wanted an heir, but thats not the point).

I see, again, the broad aim of this movie to weed out common behaviors among people that aren't so common in the public eye. Sure this movie is about common problems in the bedroom, but when Kinsey says, "everyone's crime is no crime at all," this reaches much farther for me. You cannot be judged as wrong if say such and such number of people believe the fighting in Iraq is not a purely idealistic democratization campaign. More issues later.

I just have to point out a piece of humor in how I think the writers of the movie are mocking current trend of making documentary-style films such as the complain-a-lot variety of the McDonald's Supersize Me film or Moore's Fahrenheit, or the more tributary Ray, Cinderella Man, or the Kinsey movie itself. Kinsey said to reporters in the hallway, when they asked him if he had plans for making his first book into a movie, that it was a very stupid idea. Well I don't think this movie was a stupid idea, and if it spreads his ideas far enough, the real Kinsey probably wouldn't think so either.

What to do with money and judicial nominations scuffle

Berkshire Hathaway Inc owner Warren Buffett doesn't quite know what to do with his 46.7 billion dollars, reported by Reuters today. Well I didn't know before that British based ScottishPower actually owned US based PacifiCorp. Now it seems the tables have turned, with the $ 5.1 G sac, PacifiCorp child MidAmerican Energy already owns CE Electric UK. It's a very strange concept to me for a billionaire from one country to be able to turn off another country's lights.

The Washington Post says that the US Senate 's committee of compromise has come to allow filibustering on some judicial nominees (William G. Myers III of Idaho and Henry Saad of Michigan ) , but not others (Owen, of Texas, Brown, of California, and Pryor, of Alabama).

Senate Majority Leader Frist from Tennessee has said that this is a mix of "some good news, and it has some disappointing news." No kidding. Some people are just never happy with the monopoly their political party has; they just have to prevent the other side from doing something about it as well.

The senate Minority Leader, Reid from Nevada, speaks of the vote to ban filibustering of judicial nominee selection, "Abuse of power will not be tolerated, and attempts to trample the Constitution and grab absolute control are over. We are a separate and equal branch of government. That is our Founding Fathers' vision, and one we hold dear." The point raised here is about the apparent take over of the government. The Bush Administration is attempting to gain complete control, using its majority in the Senate to pave over the minority, and at the same time trying to secure convenient appellate judicial positions. Granted, the GOP is acting naturally, spreading as far as possible until the other side says stop.