A brave new world . . .

of censorship.


My own lovely ISP has apparently been engaged in both political and technological censorship. Comcast has been caught filtering e-mails that contain the URL http://www.afterdowningstreet.org/ In addition they are interfering with a variety of applications such as P2P, FTP, VoIP etc that their customers use. I personally find this highly disturbing.

Recently Truthout.org reported that their e-mails were being blocked by AOL, Yahoo, and Microsoft.



But wait, there's more. Apparently Clear Channel stations are being told not to play any songs from Bruce Springsteen's new album Magic. This is the same Clear Channel that dropped Howard Stern for "obscenity" shortly after Stern came out in favor of John Kerry in '04. As if that wasn't bad enough they were also the sponsors of the idiot Glenn Beck when he toured the country drumming up support for the Iraq War.



And who could forget AT&T censoring Pearl Jam's political comments.



What ever happened to freedom of speach?

The Core of Gurdjieff's Teaching

Taken from the website of the Gurdjieff International Review:

"ONE OF MAN’S IMPORTANT MISTAKES, one which must be remembered, is his illusion in regard to his I. Man such as we know him, the ‘man-machine,’ the man who cannot ‘do,’ and with whom and through whom everything ‘happens,’ cannot have a permanent and single I. His I changes as quickly as his thoughts, feelings and moods, and he makes a profound mistake in considering himself always one and the same person; in reality he is always a different person, not the one he was a moment ago. Man has no permanent and unchangeable I. Every thought, every mood, every desire, every sensation, says ‘I.’ And in each case it seems to be taken for granted that this I belongs to the Whole, to the whole man, and that a thought, a desire, or an aversion is expressed by this Whole. In actual fact there is no foundation whatsoever for this assumption. Man’s every thought and desire appears and lives quite separately and independently of the Whole. And the Whole never expresses itself, for the simple reason that it exists, as such, only physically as a thing, and in the abstract as a concept. Man has no individual I. But there are, instead, hundreds and thousands of separate small I’s, very often entirely unknown to one another, never coming into contact, or, on the contrary, hostile to each other, mutually exclusive and incompatible. Each minute, each moment, man is saying or thinking, ‘I.’ And each time his I is different. Just now it was a thought, now it is a desire, now a sensation, now another thought, and so on, endlessly. Man is a plurality. Man’s name is legion."

Fuck the "homeland"!

You know the word, homeland. The Nazis had the "Fatherland", the Soviets had the "Motherland" and now we have the "Homeland". Do you see a pattern here? I still can't help but shudder to hear people use that word and not make these connections each time they do. Perhaps it was done as a sort of litmus test, a brazen trial balloon to see how much "freedom loving" Americans would accept. Would we accept referring to our country in a way that was SO reminiscent of some of the most despotic regimes ever known? If we accept this we are opening ourselves conceptually to the same horrors, or at least signalling our willingness to look away as those horrors are meted out in our name.

There is no "homeland". There is only the United States of America, and the USA is nothing more or less than the Constitution of the United States of America. If you aren't with the Constitution then you are with proto-fascists of "the Homeland".

Turn on the TV right now, I bet you can see one of those screaming little beasties!

Fuck the homeland!

At the End with Mr. Gurdjieff

Just received this brief story via e-mail from the good people at http://www.gurdjieff-legacy.org/:

"AU REVOIR, TOUT LE MONDE!"

His departure was typical.
The ambulance men brought the stretcher to his room, but he wouldn't have this, and walked out into the hall and got on to the stretcher there, sitting back, saying, "Oy!" as he always does.
He did not dress, but wore pajamas, and his red fez on his head. He sat upright on the stretcher, and was carried away like a royal prince! All the family was clustered at the street door (the crusty old concierge was in tears!) and as they carried him across the pavement he made a little gesture, a sort of wave, with his hand and said, "Au revoir, tout le monde!"
The last sight of him was as he was carried into the ambulance, sitting very upright, with his head up, his fez at a rakish angle and his cigarette between his lips.

Make America Stronger

Coach Scott Sonnon and RMAX Interantional are making one of their foundational (and innovative) training programs available free of charge:



In light of the unprecedented political situation, it's imperative to keep America Strong.
RMAX International has been donating to the US Military and supporting its heroes on active duty as well as veterans.
Today RMAX International is proud to offer the same benefit to EVERY AMERICAN. Its best-seller, the FlowFit fitness and conditioning program, has been used by the US Military, Law Enforcement, Firefighters, government agencies, private organizations, professional coaches, elite athletes, and fitness enthusiasts around the world.
It's time for Americans to lose weight, get in shape, and gain power.
Order Your Free Copy of FlowFit at
http://www.makeamericastronger.us/
Spread the Word while this campaign is still ongoing, and help
MAKE AMERICA STRONGER!

I just ordered a copy. You have to pay $6.95 for shipping but it is still a bargain. Trust me, this guy and his team are at the cutting edge of fitness and conditioning training. Coach Sonnon is also training a UFC fighter and blogging about it here.

Truly fascinating stuff and I am looking forward to getting my own copy of FlowFit soon.

World War 3

President Bush, in a recent speech, said the following: "we got a leader in Iran who has announced that he wants to destroy Israel. So I've told people that if you're interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing them from have the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon"

The funny thing is that the leader of Iran never said he wants to destroy Israel. That was a mistranslation. Dr. Juan Cole, professor of History at the University of Michigan, made that point:

The phrase he then used as I read it is "The Imam said that this regime occupying Jerusalem (een rezhim-e ishghalgar-e qods) must [vanish from] from the page of time (bayad az safheh-ye ruzgar mahv shavad)." Ahmadinejad was not making a threat, he was quoting a saying of Khomeini and urging that pro-Palestinian activists in Iran not give up hope-- that the occupation of Jerusalem was no more a continued inevitability than had been the hegemony of the Shah's government.

Whatever this quotation from a decades-old speech of Khomeini may have meant, Ahmadinejad did not say that "Israel must be wiped off the map" with the implication that phrase has of Nazi-style extermination of a people. He said that the occupation regime over Jerusalem must be erased from the page of time.

To me the fact that the President of the United States would make such a provocative statement based on a mistranslation says that he is either an idiot or that he has a hard on for World War III. Knowing what we know about him it is likely that both are true.

The most ironic thing is that the United States is the country claiming the right to use nuclear weapons preemptively. We are also actively supporting nuclear proliferation through our latest deal with India. We must also never forget that Iran is a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. This treaty allows them to develop nuclear energy for peaceful uses under the supervision of the International Atomic Energy Agency. The IAEA has found no evidence of a program to develop nuclear weapons by Iran.

It is also interesting to note that Israel is widely known to possess nuclear weapons along with the means to deliver them. Israel in not a signatory to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.

Russian Martial Arts

I have been studying the Russian martial art known as Systema for a little while now. Apparently the two main instructors are going to give a demonstration at the UN. Here is the info from their e-mail update:

Systema Founders Mikhail Ryabko and Vladimir Vasiliev have been invited to present Russian Martial Art at the United Nations Headquarters in Manhattan on Wednesday, October 24th, 2007. Celebrating the United Nations’ Commitment to Peace on its 62nd Anniversary, three or four of the world Martial Art have been selected to present their styles to the Untied Nations Assembly.

After the presentation, the Systema masters will be filmed for the new Discovery Channel program. The filming will take place on Thursday October 25th And then… Mikhail Ryabko and Vladimir Vasiliev will stay in Manhattan, New York to teach special workshops at Fighthouse on Friday October 26th from 6:30 pm – 9:30 pm and on Saturday October 27th from 11:00 am to 5:00 pm.For more details and to register for the workshops contact Edgar at: 212-807-9202 or systema@fighthouse.com

Scott Sonnon of RMAX International also has some updates. He is an expert in the Russian martial arts (although not the same as Ryabko/Vasiliev above) and is currently involved in training an MMA fighter for the UFC. Anyway it looks like you'll be able to see him on TV soon as well:

If you're waiting for the highly anticipated History Channel's HUMAN WEAPON Episode on Russian Sambo, featuring Scott Sonnon's Coach Alexander Retuinskih, here is the information we've received:

HUMAN WEAPON Episode on Russian Sambo will run on Nov. 9 on the History Channel at 10 p.m. EST.


Meantime please check:

Coach Sonnon's new blog - www.ScottSonnonLive.com
(Follow a UFC Fighter's Weekly Training)

Scientific concensus

Just read an interesting NYT article about the origina of the "fat is bad" school of thought that has been so prevalent in America until recently.

It is interesting not just because of its subject matter but because of the principles of human behavior it discusses. After reading it it makes you wonder about lots of other "facts". The most obvious example of a similar scientific and popular concensus today is global warming.

More on this later . ..

GRRR!

My feed at the right doesn't seem to be updating as it should. Maybe it only updates when I make a new post. I guess I'll find out.

August was really sick over the weekend with an ear infection. He has been better for the last couple of days since we started him on antibiotics.

Anabelle is loving kindergarten. She spent 10 or 15 minutes last night just writing out her letters. We got into numbers somewhat she wrote them out up to 20. I tried to start explaining the decimal system to her but she wasn't having any of that.

Also, our digital camera is broken or else I would have posted some pictures.

Some geopolitical context . . .

A couple of articles I found interesting today. The first gives some insight into what is really happening in Myanmar/Burma. Probably more useful information for understanding the context of this situation than everything else that has been written so far. You can read the article here.

After you read it maybe you should ask yourself why this all of the sudden became a REALLY hot news item, and why our government is so concerned about the dictatorship there.

The other article reports on the meetings between Bob Gates, Condoleeza Rice and Vladimir Putin in regards to the proposed missile defense shield in Eastern Europe. President Vlad is playing hardball but maybe if more of us understood what was really at stake we wouldn't be so surprised, or so susceptible to the propganda of our own homemade Pravdas.

Oh, by the way if you have no idea what the Shanghai Cooperation Organization is this might be a good time to eductate yourself.

Stephen Colbert -- Columnist!?!

The New York Times let Stephen Colbert write an op-ed piece. Read it and bask in its opulent gloriousness:

I Am an Op-Ed Columnist (And So Can You!)
By STEPHEN COLBERT

Surprised to see my byline here, aren’t you? I would be too, if I read The New York Times. But I don’t. So I’ll just have to take your word that this was published. Frankly, I prefer emoticons to the written word, and if you disagree :(


For the rest click here.

Gotta love that guy. I'd vote for him.

The future of the Middle East?

The above map quite possibly represents the desired outcome of the current Middle East conflict(s), at least from the perspective of the United States.

To quote from the article:

The map of the “New Middle East” was a key element in the retired Lieutenant-Colonel’s book, Never Quit the Fight, which was released to the public on July 10, 2006. This map of a redrawn Middle East was also published, under the title of Blood Borders: How a better Middle East would look, in the U.S. military’s Armed Forces Journal with commentary from Ralph Peters.5

It should be noted that Lieutenant-Colonel Peters was last posted to the Office of the Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence, within the U.S. Defence Department, and has been one of the Pentagon’s foremost authors with numerous essays on strategy for military journals and U.S. foreign policy.

It has been written that Ralph Peters’ “four previous books on strategy have been highly influential in government and military circles,” but one can be pardoned for asking if in fact quite the opposite could be taking place. Could it be Lieutenant-Colonel Peters is revealing and putting forward what Washington D.C. and its strategic planners have anticipated for the Middle East?

It is also interesting to note the extension of the Shia state into territory currently a part of Iran and Saudi Arabia. It is my understanding that those particular bits of real estate are heavy with oil.

A taste of Jed McKenna

Here is an article by Jed McKenna. It gives the flavor of his books quite nicely:

The Bottom Line
By Jed McKenna

Cogito ergo sum: I think, therefore I am.That is all ye know on earth; And all ye need to know.

Whadda ya know?

Seriously. With absolute certainty, what do you know? Put aside all opinions, beliefs and theories for a moment and address this one straight question: What do you know for sure? Or, as Thoreau put it:

Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward through the mud and slush of opinion, and prejudice, and tradition, and delusion, and appearance, that alluvion which covers the globe... through church and state, through poetry and philosophy and religion, till we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality, and say, This is, and no mistake; and then begin...

In other words, let's cut the crap and figure out what's real. The cogito does exactly that, and it's very simple. The question is: What do you know?
The answer is: I Am.
All other so-called facts are really non-facts and belong in the category of consensual reality and relative truth, i.e., unreal reality and untrue truth.

Cogito Ergo Sum

Cogito ergo sum is the equation that proves the fact. But first, before we go on, let's ask what else we know. What else can be said for certain? Nothing. We don't know anything else. And that's the real point of the cogito. The importance of I Am isn't that it's a fact, but that it's the only fact. I Am is the only thing anyone has ever known or will ever know. Everything else, all religion and philosophy and science, is nothing more than dream interpretation. There is no other fact than I Am. The cogito is the seed of the thought that destroys the universe. Beyond the cogito, nothing is known. Beyond the cogito, nothing can be known. Except I Am, no one knows anything. No man or god can claim to know more. No God or array of gods can exist or be imagined that know more than this one thing: I Am.

We can't avoid letting this topic drift briefly into the Christian realm. When Moses asked God His name, God answered, "I am that I am." The name God gives for Himself is I Am.
Note that I Am is unconjugatible. It allows of no variation. God doesn't say, "My name is I Am, but you can call me You Are, or He Is." The cogito, the I Am equation, does not extend beyond one's own subjective knowing. I can say I Am and know it as truth, but I can't say you are, he is, she is, we are, they are, it is, etc. I know I exist and nothing else. Understood thusly, I Am, aka God, truly is the Alpha and the Omega; the entirety of being, of knowledge, of the known universe, of you.

The Line Is Drawn

The cogito is the line between fantasy and reality. On one side of the cogito is a universe of beliefs and ideas and theories. To cross the line is to leave all that behind. No theory, concept, belief, opinion or debate can have any possible basis in reality once the ramifications of the cogito have fully saturated the mind. No dialogue can take place across that line because nothing that makes sense on either side makes sense on the other. We all think we know what the cogito means; this is an invitation to challenge that assumption. If professors of philosophy truly understood it, they wouldn't be professors of philosophy. Alfred North Whitehead said that all philosophy is a footnote to Plato, but all philosophy, Plato included, is rendered obsolete and irrelevant by Descartes. Nothing but the subjective I Am is true, so what's the point of prattling on?

The cogito isn't a mere thought or an idea, it is an ego-eating virus that, properly incubated and nurtured, will eventually devour all illusion. Once we know the cogito, we can begin systematically unknowing everything we think we know, and unraveling the self we think we are.

Life is but a Dream

There is no such thing as objective reality. Two cannot be proven. Nothing can be shown to exist. Time and space, love and hate, good and evil, cause and effect, are all just ideas. Anyone who says they know anything is really saying they don't know the only thing. The greatest religious and philosophical thoughts and ideas in the history of man contain no more truth than the bleating of sheep. The greatest books are no more authoritative than the greatest luncheon meats.

No one knows anything.
Disprove it for Yourself

Anyone wishing to deny these statements about the meaning of the cogito need merely prove that something, anything, is true. By all means, give it a try, dash your head upon it, but it can't be done. Cogito ergo sum, however, isn't the endpoint of inquiry, it's the starting point; it's a tool that helps us see, without intermediaries, exactly what is true and what isn't, and that puts it right up there with fire and the wheel.

About the Author: Jed McKenna is the author of The Enlightenment Trilogy — Spiritual Enlightenment: The Damnedest Thing, Spiritually Incorrect Enlightenment, and Spiritual Warfare — published by Wisefool Press. Articles, books and more at our website: http://www.WisefoolPress.com

Blog is a funny word

I was just thinking what a funny word "blog" is, as you can see from the new title. Here are some other potential uses for the word blog:

1. Blog off!
2. Blog me!
3. I'll blog you!
4. Thank blog!
5. Blogalicious
6. Blogula
7. Blog it!

The possibilities are truly infinite!

Spiritual Autolysis

Spiritual Autolysis is the name given by Jed McKenna to the process that results in spiritual enlightenment. Autolysis means self digestion, or digesting the self. Pretty apt. The method is simple and he described it as "journalling on steroids". The method is this:

Try to write something true, and keep at it until you can

What I am reading now . ..

The Spiritual Enlightenment Trilogy by Jed McKenna. A good friend was nice enough to give me the first two on audio book.

Here is the publisher's website: http://www.wisefoolpress.com

J