Even in absurdity, sacrament. Even in hardship, holiness. Even in doubt, faith. Even in chaos, realization. Even in paradox, blessedness
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"Life expands or shrinks in proportion to one's courage." ~Anain Nin
The Blog is going to have a massage Bird on the Moon is taking Friday off of regular blogging duties and will return rested and ready on Monday. jaybird found this for you @ 12:15 in Blogosphere, Tech & Internet | | permalink
In all fairness, a critique of transhumanism: The Age of Batshit Crazy Machines One problem: The biosphere did not gain its complexity by destroying the universe, as their system has gained complexity by destroying the biosphere. They always claim to represent "evolution," or a "new evolutionary level." But evolution doesn't have levels. Video games have levels. Evolution is a biological process in which the totality of life grows more diverse and complex, and then apparently gets cut down by some catastrophe every 60 million years, and then rebuilds itself, maybe better than the time before, maybe not. Evolution is not about one life form pushing out another, or we wouldn't still have algae and bacteria and 350,000 known species of beetles. It's not about "survival of the fittest" unless fitness is defined as the ability to add to the harmonious diversity and abundance of the whole. (And one has to wonder: Since there's no biological basis to imagine that new life forms will replace or destroy old ones, how did they come to imagine that?) This article has salient points, whether or not I agree with them. I'm not actually decided on transhumanism, and the greatest thing I come back to is the inequity of transhumanist technology. It ought to be as available to me as it would an Indian untouchable. Otherwise, given that the technology worked, it's another awful form of cultural elitism. Additionally, can the world support more codgers hanging 'round, greedy for more life? But there are great things we can learn from this way of looking at technology, and it does seem that the biological processes of Earth are in complete peril, so this coin most definitely has two sides. jaybird found this for you @ 14:05 in Consciousness, Psychology & Philosophy | | permalink
It's getting hot in here: Arctic Ice Cap on the Melt The floating cap of sea ice on the Arctic Ocean shrank this summer to what is probably its smallest size in a century, continuing a trend toward less summer ice that is hard to explain without attributing it in part to human-caused global warming, various experts on the region said today. The findings are consistent with recent computer simulations showing that a buildup of smokestack and tailpipe emissions of greenhouse gases could lead to a profoundly transformed Arctic later this century in which much of the once ice-locked ocean is routinely open water in summers. It also appears that the change is becoming self sustaining, with the increased open water absorbing solar energy that would be reflected back into space by bright white ice... "Feedbacks in the system are starting to take hold," Dr. Scambos said. "The consecutive record-low extents make it pretty certain a long-term decline is underway." jaybird found this for you @ 08:01 in Environment, Ecology & Nature | | permalink
...Dreams will always remain difficult to elucidate because, though they are physical phenomena, they are important to us as mental experiences and sensations. ''The dream body,'' he says, ''is sensual but unphysical. It's also primeval. Curiously, we don't dream about writing, for example, because it's a relatively recent skill we've acquired; but we frequently dream about overcoming difficulty or danger because that's a human experience that goes back thousands of years.'' LaBerge is not concerned by the prospect that psychology or evolutionary science may never elucidate the significance of dreams. Even if dreams are some sort of biological side product or accident, he argues, they are still experiences. For us, dreams are narratives, which gives them emotional power, despite (or perhaps because of) the fact that they are often cryptic or puzzling. jaybird found this for you @ 21:58 in Consciousness, Psychology & Philosophy | | permalink
Don't shoot the mesenger: Societies worse off 'when they have God on their side' It compares the social peformance of relatively secular countries, such as Britain, with the US, where the majority believes in a creator rather than the theory of evolution. Many conservative evangelicals in the US consider Darwinism to be a social evil, believing that it inspires atheism and amorality. My take? It really depends on the society in question and the dominant religious values at the time. That could certainly be applied to this country in a way that supports the article. It's all a part of the paradigm that spirituality is necessery for the emerging human but religion should be entered into with great care and personally... not as a society. jaybird found this for you @ 14:34 in Spirituality, Religion & Mythos | | permalink
 jaybird found this for you @ 08:30 in Forteana, Phenomena & the Bizarre | | permalink
The discovery of what is almost certainly his tomb reveals that crafty Odysseus, known as Ulysses in many English renditions of Homer’s “Iliad” and “Odyssey,” was no mere myth, but a real person. Plus, passages in the “Odyssey” itself suggest that modern Ithaca and its main town of Vathi probably were not the city and island of which Homer wrote. Rather, this small village of Poros on the southeast coast of Kefalonia now occupies part of a site that most likely was the much larger city which served as capital of the multi-island kingdom ruled by Odysseus and his father Laertes. Archeologists have long and often times looked for evidence of Odysseus on modern Ithaca, but never found anything significant from the Bronze Age. This led many scholars to dismiss Homer’s version of Ionian island geography as strictly a literary creation. jaybird found this for you @ 22:18 in History, Civilization & Anthropology | | permalink
Hopscotch or hula-hoops: Esoteric planes of existence The idea of a vertical world-axis, a cosmic mountain or tree or pole, is in fact a common archetype, and the theosophical planes are just one particular version or interpretation of that. Another is the Tantric theme of chakras, which are asosciated with an ascending series of states of consciousness, culminating in the Absolute Reality located either at or above the Crown. From this perspective then, the Cosmos can be divided "vertically" into a number of worlds or states or gradations of being. Unless, of course, you dig holistic cosmology. jaybird found this for you @ 16:08 in Spirituality, Religion & Mythos | | permalink
*Moblogging is posting from a cellphone or other wireless device- if a picture, it's taken from the phone. jaybird found this for you @ 13:03 in Local- Western North Carolina | | permalink
HUH?: The basic laws of human stupidity Cultural trends now fashionable in the West favour an egalitarian approach to life. People like to think of human beings as the output of a perfectly engineered mass production machine. Geneticists and sociologists especially go out of their way to prove, with an impressive apparatus of scientific data and formulations that all men are naturally equal and if some are more equal than others, this is attributable to nurture and not to nature. I take an exception to this general view. It is my firm conviction, supported by years of observation and experimentation, that men are not equal, that some are stupid and others are not, and that the difference is determined by nature and not by cultural forces or factors. One is stupid in the same way one is red-haired; one belongs to the stupid set as one belongs to a blood group. A stupid man is born a stupid man by an act of Providence. Although convinced that fraction of human beings are stupid and that they are so because of genetic traits, I am not a reactionary trying to reintroduce surreptitiously class or race discrimination. I firmly believe that stupidity is an indiscriminate privilege of all human groups and is uniformly distributed according to a constant proportion. [via mefi] jaybird found this for you @ 09:47 in Consciousness, Psychology & Philosophy | | permalink
Key 23: Emerging from Fear Within a community of practice, individual take on differing roles based on their skills and interests. A “community of practice"* (CoP) is a collection of individuals with a set of established theories and praxis, working within this shared framework toward common goals. The membership of such a community changes over time as individuals join and leave. At any time, a group of core-participants largely determine the operant models and actions pursued by the group. Also, peripheral participants seek to establish and legitimize their own interpretations within the larger CoP. The dialogue between core and peripheral participants acts to bring the periphery closer to the center, but at the same time changes the established praxis and direction of the community. I see my own ultracultural participation as largely on the periphery. I have yet to establish a strong personal sense of role-idenity within the larger scope of task differentiation. This in part because I have yet to grasp toward what desires and dreams I seek to actualize in my own life, nevertheless within a CoP, or the world at large. Why? What do I fear? jaybird found this for you @ 20:29 in Consciousness, Psychology & Philosophy | | permalink
 jaybird found this for you @ 14:22 in Spirituality, Religion & Mythos | | permalink
Letter from Louisiana: High Water Kalamu ya Salaam told me that he thought the suffering was far from over. Hurricane Rita has made recovery even more difficult. For the moment, people are focussed on the grace of their own survival, and are grateful for the small and large acts of compassion that have come their way. And yet, he said, “you are going to see a lot of suicides this winter. A lot of poor people depend entirely on their extended family and their friends who share their condition to be a buffer against the pain of that condition. By winter, a lot of the generosity and aid that’s been so palpable lately will begin to slow down and the reality of not going home again will hit people hard. They will be very alone. “People forget how important all those Social Aid and Pleasure Clubs are for people. It’s a community for a lot of folks who have nothing. Some people have never left New Orleans. Some have never seen snow. So you wake up and you find yourself beyond the reach of friends, beyond the reach of members of your family, and you are working in a fast-food restaurant in Utah somewhere and there is no conceivable way for you to get back to the city you love. How are you going to feel?” jaybird found this for you @ 08:02 in News, Opinion & Politique | | permalink
mary chapin carpenter
I'm not running I saw you this morning I'm not running jaybird found this for you @ 22:17 in Art, Music, Theater & Film | | permalink
Oy. Hello. Just a short missive from the front. Let's rate the weekend, shall we? Amount of time spent not under pressure: the past 10 minutes. Amount of time not spent on the on-call phone dealing with major crises: about an hour. Amount of time contemplating the vagaries of the cosmos, the underbellies of serpents, sundogs and archaic glyphs: zip. So, who is very rarely in a bitchy mood and is now stewing ever so slightly over the random chance that he is on-call on a weekend when the entire social services system of WNC collapses into a big, frothy pile of objectionable goo? That'd be me. At the same time, who's the guy out of the deck, wind in his hair, in awe of the stars and the first cool breaths of autumn? C'est moi. I'm trying to be optimistic here... there's so much raging beauty going on right now despite the mounds of paperwork that I now have to fill out that I'm happy just knowing that. To be in it, well, that'll come. On another note, I had my first consultation for sleep apnea. Looks like I've got it, as I have very think inoperable tissue in my throat and palette that are likely complicating things when I sleep. Oddly, I'm relieved that I'm a step closer to getting this resolved, as the eventual fix (a C-PAP machine) may help ensure that I regain focus and concentration lost due to the apnea activity. I'll have a full sleep study in November. So, (clink), here's to tomorrow. jaybird found this for you @ 21:41 in Journaling the Infinite | | permalink
Extracting Video from the Brain  jaybird found this for you @ 19:02 in Science, Quantum & Space | | permalink
Happy Friday: One blooming big bunny  A controversial Viennese art group, Gelatin, has erected a giant pink rabbit on the side of a mountain where they plan for it to stay until 2025. jaybird found this for you @ 12:49 in Art, Music, Theater & Film | | permalink
Rita: This is global warming Super-powerful hurricanes now hitting the United States are the "smoking gun" of global warming, one of Britain's leading scientists believes. The growing violence of storms such as Katrina, which wrecked New Orleans, and Rita, now threatening Texas, is very probably caused by climate change, said Sir John Lawton, chairman of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution. Hurricanes were getting more intense, just as computer models predicted they would, because of the rising temperature of the sea, he said. "The increased intensity of these kinds of extreme storms is very likely to be due to global warming." In a series of outspoken comments - a thinly veiled attack on the Bush administration, Sir John hit out at neoconservatives in the US who still deny the reality of climate change. Referring to the arrival of Hurricane Rita he said: "If this makes the climate loonies in the States realise we've got a problem, some good will come out of a truly awful situation." jaybird found this for you @ 08:40 in Environment, Ecology & Nature | | permalink
Yoism: an open source religion in coming to understand The Way of Yo, it is important that folks who are uncomfortable with religion do not assume that the word "Yo" refers to what most of us have been taught to think of when we hear the word "God." The standard, local, divisive illusions structured around the word-concept "God"—which is what most people think of as religion—have (in addition to whatever good they may have brought into the world) proven to be dangerous and, at times, terribly destructive. Note that this danger is acknowledged by virtually all religious believers; they just claim that it is the religious ideas held by (or religiously motivated actions of) others that cause such problems. If you are one of those made uncomfortable by religion and want to learn about Yoism, it appears necessary that you suspend judgment until you understand what we mean by "Yo." You will then see that there is no contradiction between enlightened, rational thought and Yoism. If then, you still find yourself feeling that Yoism would be more interesting to you without Yo, keep in mind that you are not alone; there are more than a few Yoans for whom Yo is irrelevant. For those Yoans who have a mystical sense of Yo, it is not a problem that others do not believe. The "God" we believe in would rather have you not believe in Yo, if you are happier that way, and—like those Yoans for whom Yo is irrelevant—you choose to join us and follow The Way of Yo without being a "believer." (See "How can Yo be irrelevant?") Indeed, some folks just refer to "The Way of Yo" as "The Way," or "The Heaven on Earth Movement." In another contrast to religions that are familiar to most of us—religions that are built on truths received from special, long-dead authorities who witnessed or participated in miracles—The Way of Yo teaches us that our knowledge, our Truths, must be based on what people everywhere can directly experience for themselves, today. Despite the repeated claims that there is "overwhelming evidence" for traditional beliefs, the poor, contradictory quality of such evidence inevitably results in appeals to blind faith, i.e., belief that must be accepted without evidence. Indeed, such faith is often taken to indicate piety. So in a major contrast with the standard religions, the existence of Yo, not only can be proven, it has been proven by modern science! The "Face of Yo," so to speak, is our experience of the Infinite Unknowable Essence that is "turned toward us," that manifests as our experience. Yo "manifests" Yoself to us as the universe and everything within the universe: the trees and bugs and animals, the rocks and rivers, the stars and galaxies. This is similar to some mystical versions of the more traditional religions. Yo, Itself, is the Divine Mystery that lies behind (is the source of, generates, manifests as) the paradoxical, mind-boggling facts of existence. You can know that Yo exists through your feelings, thoughts, and direct experience. For many Yoans, a feeling of reverence toward (or spiritual union with) this Divine Mystery—or an immediate, awe-inspiring awareness of The Infinity that manifests as the Universe—can be a profound source of comfort, strength, and meaning. jaybird found this for you @ 21:58 in Spirituality, Religion & Mythos | | permalink
Typical of this Gov't: National Archives Indian Records Discarded Federal officials are investigating how National Archives documents of interest to Indians suing the Interior Department were found discarded in a trash bin and a wastebasket. The discovery came to light on Sept. 1, when Archives staff noticed federal records in one of the trash bins behind the National Archives Building near the Capitol. They notified the Archives' inspector general, Paul Brachfeld, whose staff recovered the documents. They found at least a portion of the documents were Bureau of Indian Affairs records dating to the 1950s... in a letter last week to an Interior Department official. Brachfeld's office began investigating, and ``what appear to be Indian records were discovered in a waste basket in the stack areas at Main Archives,'' Baron wrote. Taken together, the two dumping incidents ``may be intentional acts aimed at unlawfully removing or disposing of permanent records from the Interior Department,'' he wrote. jaybird found this for you @ 12:52 in News, Opinion & Politique | | permalink
ZZZZZZZZZZ I'm going to a doctor's appointment in a few hours for an evaluation for sleep apnea, and I'm a little nervous, honestly. I've got a fair amount of evidence that apnea is happening, and to determine if it is, I've got to do an overnight sleep study, and without medical insurance, I'm looking at some big bills ahead. But I s'pose I'm willing to take that on if this will improve my quality of life and potentially extend it. I spend much of the day very tired, despite caffeine and activity, which I want to obviously stop. So, hopefully this morning I'm making the first step toward that. jaybird found this for you @ 07:44 in Journaling the Infinite | | permalink
Oral Histories of Katrina Survivors  Babies were floating on a mattress, and the baby fell off the mattress. And nobody couldn’t find him., and they had a bunch of men trying help find him. I come up with the baby. It feels good, you know, to save lives, because I have seen people get killed and die, but I have not seen that many people at one time. What I went through, I never thought I feel the way I feel about life. Living, you know, is beautiful, and God sent us to a place that we never been. I even saved a dog. That’s how intimate this thing wa. It was intense, it was scary, it was a situation you’ll never forget. I heard the dog screaming. The dog was trapped in the twines where a tree had fallen. He was standing up on his hind legs trying to keep his head above water. He was trembling. But the dog was real friendly to me. He must have known I was the onliest person going to save him. I held him in my arms and brought him to this porch. jaybird found this for you @ 16:02 in News, Opinion & Politique | | permalink
Frank Rich on Bush: I Care About the Black Folks Taking responsibility, as opposed to paying lip service to doing so, is not in this administration's gene pool. It was particularly shameful that Laura Bush was sent among the storm's dispossessed to try to scapegoat the news media for her husband's ineptitude. When she complained of seeing "a lot of the same footage over and over that isn't necessarily representative of what really happened," the first lady sounded just like Donald Rumsfeld shirking responsibility for the looting of Baghdad. The defense secretary, too, griped about seeing the same picture "over and over" on television (a looter with a vase) to hide the reality that the Pentagon had no plan to secure Iraq, a catastrophic failure being paid for in Iraqi and American blood to this day. This White House doesn't hate all pictures, of course. It loves those by Karl Rove's Imagineers, from the spectacularly lighted Statue of Liberty backdrop of Mr. Bush's first 9/11 anniversary speech to his "Top Gun" stunt to Thursday's laughably stagy stride across the lawn to his lectern in Jackson Square. (Message: I am a leader, not that vacationing slacker who first surveyed the hurricane damage from my presidential jet.) The most odious image-mongering, however, has been Mr. Bush's repeated deployment of African-Americans as dress extras to advertise his "compassion." In 2000, the Republican convention filled the stage with break dancers and gospel singers, trying to dispel the memory of Mr. Bush's craven appearance at Bob Jones University when it forbade interracial dating. (The few blacks in the convention hall itself were positioned near celebrities so they'd show up in TV shots.) In 2004, the Bush-Cheney campaign Web site had a page titled "Compassion" devoted mainly to photos of the president with black people, Colin Powell included. Some of these poses are re-enacted in the "Hurricane Relief" photo gallery currently on display on the White House Web site. But this time the old magic isn't working. The "compassion" photos are outweighed by the cinéma vérité of poor people screaming for their lives. The government effort to keep body recovery efforts in New Orleans as invisible as the coffins from Iraq was abandoned when challenged in court by CNN. jaybird found this for you @ 11:52 in News, Opinion & Politique | | permalink
Secret of Delphi Found in Ancient Text Researchers... have unravelled a 2,700 year old mystery concerning The Oracle of Delphi – by consulting an ancient farmer’s manual. The researchers... sought to explain how people from across Greece came to consult with the Oracle – a hotline to the god Apollo- on a particular day of the year even though there was no common calendar. Now their findings... suggests celestial signs observed by farmers could also have determined the rituals associated with Apollo Delphinios. jaybird found this for you @ 07:45 in History, Civilization & Anthropology | | permalink
The man who wakes up in a ditch... then goes to work at Sotheby's At 6am Hugh Sawyer wakes up to the persistent ring of his alarm clock. He rolls over with a grimace and flicks on Radio 4's Today programme. He gets up, has a wash and a shave, grabs some breakfast and rushes down to the bus stop to commute to London. When he gets to work in the bids department of Sotheby's he is always spotlessly turned out in a Gieves & Hawkes suit, a stylish tie and polished shoes. The Oxford law graduate is a regular at the gym and often meets friends for drinks in the capital's bars. In short, Sawyer leads the archetypal city life - with one exception. When his counterparts return home to their Shoreditch loft conversions or Notting Hill maisonettes, Sawyer heads to a ditch in the woods near Oxford. jaybird found this for you @ 20:55 in Interesting People | | permalink
...Utopia—a word that has come to represent a hope that the future could surpass the present—persists. "As long as necessity is socially dreamed," Guy Debord says in his 1973 film The Society of the Spectacle, "dreaming will remain a social necessity." Debord meant that in conditions of inequality and injustice, people will always imagine a better place. What constitutes "better" is, however, a matter of much dispute. We dream our fears as well as hopes, reflecting all the agonies and contradictions of the waking world; in dreams, demons rise from our darkest places. This is the dangerous element in utopian aspiration, the monster behind the smiling face. Utopias can embody the highest hopes of humankind and frameworks for continuous evolution, but they can also reflect our worst fears and sickest appetites—not to mention a mania for power and control that is latent in every person. "What a strange scene you describe and what strange prisoners," says Glaucon, Socrates' disciple, in Plato's Republic, the template for the stupid utopia. "They are just like us," answers the master. jaybird found this for you @ 16:53 in Consciousness, Psychology & Philosophy | | permalink
Calvino's belief in the transforming powers of literature runs in harness with his hesitations over the newly extrovert role of the writer in society. His instinct was to let the work speak for itself and to seek anonymity for himself. There is a slight awkwardness therefore, in publishing and reading pieces which Calvino made no effort to publish himself, outside of their original moment in newspapers, or as prefaces, journalism and letters. [via mefi] jaybird found this for you @ 12:45 in Authors, Books & Words | | permalink
Power-dressing man leaves trail of destruction An Australian man built up a 40,000-volt charge of static electricity in his clothes as he walked, leaving a trail of scorched carpet and molten plastic and forcing firefighters to evacuate a building. Frank Clewer, who was wearing a woolen shirt and a synthetic nylon jacket, was oblivious to the growing electrical current that was building up as his clothes rubbed together. When he walked into a building in the country town of Warrnambool in the southern state of Victoria Thursday, the electrical charge ignited the carpet. "It sounded almost like a firecracker," Clewer told Australian radio Friday. jaybird found this for you @ 09:16 in Forteana, Phenomena & the Bizarre | | permalink
Cognitive science’s search for a common morality How far have these technologies come in teaching us new truths about our moral selves? How far could they go? And what will be the implications of a new biopsychological science of natural morality? “The truth, if it exists, is in the details,” wrote Wilson, and therefore I will concentrate on the details of three sets of very recent experiments, each of which approaches the problem using a different method: an Internet survey, a cognitive study of infants, and a study of brain imaging. Each is at the cutting edge of moral psychology, each is promising but flawed, and each should be greeted with a mix of enthusiasm and interpretative caution. jaybird found this for you @ 20:00 in Consciousness, Psychology & Philosophy | | permalink
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