A moderate roundup…
May 16th, 2007It is good that there are people out there actually thinking about things like this: the future of the United States. There are a lot of excellent and interesting ideas in this one document. THIS is what national security is all about…
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I love LOLcats…LOLtrek isn’t bad either…
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You miss the end of The Office cause NBC hates your TiVo? Guess what, you can (illegally yet safely) watch TV and movies from the comfort of your own computer workstation: here and here. (FWIT, Jim spent the ride home staring out the window).
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Existential angst. I’ve shed most of my bitterness and despise for my fellow humans and their hypocracy over the past ten years…but for a while there, from say 17 to 19…I was a full fledged semi-psychotic who viewed the shallow understanding of my fellow human beings as living proof of their crippled viewpoints and inferior, hypocritical society. Well…I guess I still feel the same way, but without the marijuana the injustice and ‘fucked-up-ness’ feels less pressing. I no longer feel compelled to take psychology courses in the hope of mapping out a set of rules by which people can wake the fuck up…I’ve gazed into the void and accepted it. My urgent idealism has been replaced with a dogged tenacity to slowly chip away at that mountain as best as I can, in the hope that some day, hundreds or thousands of years in the future, we’ll have quarried the imposing mountain of impossibility into a smooth gravel road…
“Because gifted children are able to consider the possibilities of how things might be, they tend to be idealists. However, they are simultaneously able to see that the world is falling short of how it might be. Because they are intense, gifted children feel keenly the disappointment and frustration which occurs when ideals are not reached. Similarly, these youngsters quickly spot the inconsistencies, arbitrariness and absurdities in society and in the behaviors of those around them. Traditions are questioned or challenged. For example, why do we put such tight sex-role or age-role restrictions on people? Why do people engage in hypocritical behaviors in which they say one thing and then do another? Why do people say things they really do not mean at all? Why are so many people so unthinking and uncaring in their dealings with others? How much difference in the world can one person’s life make?”
Growing up is hard to do…I personally recommend avoiding it altogether. Especially when you begin to answer those questions with the phrase “Don’t know, don’t care.”. Gazing into the abyss does not always cause the abyss to gaze into you…the common fecklessness can grow within you just as easily when you deny it’s existence…fight the monster…
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An organism which evolved to withstand the intense radiation within a nuclear waste dump…it survives through the unique and still unknown mechanism which constantly reassembles its DNA from damage which would irreversibly destroy any other organism.
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Did you read about this email scandal (I know it is hard to keep track of them all)? The Bush Administration illegally using a second email server to keep their primary server clean of incriminating evidence? Guess what…someone is going to end up swimming with the fishes due to a sudden noble impulse: around 500 emails got forwarded to an Bush hater. I guess the plausibile deniablity this staffer will pull is that the domain the messages were forwarded to was georgewbush.org instead of georgewbush.com…
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Apparently Al Gore is releasing some cool book next week. You know another cool book? The Truth (with jokes) by Al Franken. Excellent, excellent source of information on all the shithead things Bush Co, Inc. and the Republican Congress has done over the past dozen odd years…
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Why is the White House even trying to justify/build a war with Iran? Don’t they know that they can do whatever they want and we are powerless to stop them? Unless…wait…it couldn’t be…we aren’t powerless to stop them? We could just round those fuckers up and haul them off to Guantanamo?
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Things change so fast…the ball we’ve set arollin is so large, so swift and so heavy that it is probably going to crush millions upon millions under its impartial and unswerving course. The links embedded in that article are pretty good too…
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Polycarbonate…don’t drink warm milk out of it…
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The ascendency and decline of the Middle Class:
“The ‘Great Leveling’ of incomes became, after a brief interregnum from 1974-1978, a ‘Great Reversal’. From the mid-1970s until the present a widening income gap began to open up, as it once had in the decade leading up to the Great Depression after 1929. Income inequality grew as income shifted from working class families to the wealthiest households and corporations. From the early 1980s on income inequality widened, deepened, and accelerated until today well over $1 trillion in income is being transferred every year from the roughly 90 million working class families in America to corporations and the wealthiest non-working class households.”
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I agree, the government should serve the common good. If that means that those who make $25 million or more a year have to pay a little more in taxes…I believe the phrase is ‘boo fucking hoo’. Must be nice to make so much you have to pay millions of dollars in taxes…I’d say, if they are good people, they’d be less concerned with how much they pay and more concerned with how the government is spending it. Is the government fiscally responsible? Socially concious? Geared and aimed solidly at improving human existence?
“UC Berkeley economist Brad DeLong once wrote that “sometimes government failures are greater than the market failures for which they purport to compensate. Sometimes they are not.” The trick is knowing which is which. But if, like the Bush administration, you are blithely unconcerned with running an efficient, effective government, funding its necessary elements, presenting honest choices to the American people between tax cuts and social investment and staffing the whole enterprise with skilled professionals, you never need make those judgments as you have neither the resources nor the personnel to effectively deploy the central organizing structure of modern societies. And that’s a shame.”
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I’m no prophet, but occasionally I have very disturbing dreams caused by I guess anxiety…knowing how fragile our house of cards really is sorta unsettles the calm waters deep in my mind. And shit like this doesn’t help.
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How bout something a little lighter? Like exploring the childhood joy of the first time you had sex with a donkey…
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I have also shed my bitterness and despise for (most of) my fellow humans and their hypocrisy but I have problems dealing with some of the 4 existential issues the article talks about: death, freedom, isolation and meaninglessness. “Death is an inevitable occurrence. Freedom, in an existential sense, refers to the absence of external structure. That is, humans do not enter a world which is inherently structured. We must give the world a structure which we ourselves create. Isolation recognizes that no matter how close we become to another person, a gap always remains, and we are nonetheless alone. Meaninglessness stems from the first three. If we must die, if we construct our own world, and if each of us is ultimately alone, then what meaning does life have?” For me, it’s the isolation and meaninglessness that is worrisome. Those make me not worry so much about the death part. But we can all leave a legacy: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ni0xnIlgwgY
Those crazy Colombians and their donkey-fucking.
Thanks for the link! I hope you found some good ideas in our Renewal Program. I know there are lots of things in there that I find very inspiring.
@ gwennie: A fundamental aspect of reality is impermanence. Until we get ‘comfortable’ with the idea that everything is temporary, life is going to be much less than satisfying for all involved…
I think you would be well served by reading some of the fundamental tenets of Buddhism. There are enough flavors that some of the more secular and less mythical flavors have a lot of really good things to say on the nature of reality which help redirect our viewpoints…
A good secular primer which you could borrow if you like: http://www.amazon.com/Buddhism-Plain-Simple-Steve-Hagen/dp/0767903323
@ J–Ro, you have a pretty damn fine site there!
Temporary is fine. I don’t even like permanence. But the question still remains…what is the point of all of this?
Why is everyone so caught up in this idea that there has to be “meaning” behind life, or this or that or every damn little thing?????
People live their lives trying to figure out what their purpose is or why they are here or what they are “meant” to do while here on Earth. And that their life only has meaning when and if they ever figure out what it is they are meant to do, then follow through down that path…..does this even make sense?
I had these thoughts growing up and I am so glad that I let go of them, moved on and realized that there is no underlying meaning to my life. I understand hat I was not put on this planet for the specific purpose of this or that. (I am here because my parents had sex and decided no to abort.) There is no set path for me to uncover beneath all the fallen leaves. There is no mysterious plan which I must figure out and adjust my life accordingly…
A path has not been created for me to find…I am creating my own path as I move through life…and I’m not going to try to convince myself that the path I create must have meaning or must conform to this or that or whatever.
Meaning to who anyway? Conform to which set of ideas anyway? Someone’s supposed “meaning” in life may not mean crap to Joe Blow down the street, and it’s impossible to please everyone. So is there a minimum amount of people who have to be effected by this so-called “meaning” for it to be ligit???? for a person to be satisfied that he/she has indeed found their “meaning” in life?
I don’t know…Meaning shmeening…..
Like I said, I am here because I was not aborted, I survived birth and I have not killed myself, I have not passed away in an accident or been murdered by a lover….or whatever. I am here, I am alive, I am healthy and for the most part I am finally happy.
I’ve spent a “life wasted” (or at least half my life) on depression and I don’t plan on “going back again”. I am going to try to live my life being happy, being free and being meaningful to myself and those I care about. I am going to try to be a good role model and try not to create misery for others. I am going to try to live my life in a way that is respectful to the environment and always keep future generations in mind while I make choices which may effect them.
This is meaningful to me. It is not my “meaning” in life but if it somehow effects people in a good way, that’s great. If it is all just for me, I’m okay with that too. I have to be, it is what it is.
I don’t need a “purpose”. I’ve found things that make me feel as though my life is productive. I try, as you do, to do things that will make the world a better place for others and that seems enough “purpose” for me. There is no “meaning” to life. I guess I’ve seen so much misery in my work, and knowing that it is just the tip of the iceberg, it makes me wonder why so many people even go through the shit that is life. I like to fix things and I’m a person who likes to take action when I see a problem. So seeing how massive and out of control the world’s problems seem makes me feel helpless. Why should people living in impoverished nations not just plan a mass suicide? What reason do they have to keep going through it? There isn’t a reason and that to me is sad.
That sentence in the article about isolation gets to me too: “no matter how close we become to another person, a gap always remains, and we are nonetheless alone”.
I completely understand what you mean and I wonder the same things sometimes. Whenever I start thinking about all the injustices in the world and how awful people’s or animals circumstances are…I just find myself slipping down a very steep path to despair.
I mean there are so many miserable things going on in the world, it’s just all so depressing… But that’s just part of life and as much as I hate to pretend that I don’t care or do my best to just not think about it…it is still there, it still happens whether I acknowledge it or not. I sucks, it just sucks! But I would seriously drive myself insane if I let myself think about it, and if I let myself believe that there is something that can be done to fix it all.
These issues will always exist in varying degrees, and there may be a way to make a small difference but I don’t believe that humans (as a whole) are able to step outside of themselves enough to care about the world, to care about others, to care about animals…to put others ahead of themselves and not be such greedy self-centered egotistical assholes.
Humans aren’t capable of fixing this mess we live in….that is clearly obvious. We are in it for ourselves…and we’ve dug ourselves a huge hole, huge.
Nobody really wants to lay down in that hole though… And people go on and they endure probably due to the simple fact that they have a dream of what life should be like, they know what it could be and they aren’t willing to let go of that dream. They hang on until the bitter end…that dream wrapped throughout their brain as they lay dying in a third world impoverished nation, dying of AIDS and Malaria, starving and diseased…the dream persists and the will to live, the will to experience that dream…the thought of sheer joy and happiness keeps them going.
This, of course, is only my general opinion…I’m sure there are psychobabble explanations or whatever but I think it comes down to the fact that we are all seeking the same thing out of life…happiness. And we all have a vision of how we think we may achieve that happiness…at any moment it could be just around the corner…