"UCS (Union of Concerned Scientists) found that 46% of the
scientists who responded to the survey “perceived or personally experienced pressure to
eliminate the words ‘climate change,’ ‘global warming,’ or other similar terms from a
variety of communications.”111 37% of the scientists “perceived or personally
experienced statements by officials at their agencies that misrepresented scientists’
findings.”112 Moreover, 38% of the scientists “perceived or personally experienced the
disappearance or unusual delay of websites, reports, or other science-based materials
related to climate.”"
-Committee on Oversight and Government Reform
http://webct.bard.edu/PS260_2007/house-clip.pdf
Wednesday, December 12, 2007
Tuesday, December 4, 2007
words and sound
The creation of new words must arise from the abstract expression of emotion through sound. Music is constantly inventing new words, language doesn't do this anywhere near as frequently because forms of vocal experimentation and/or expression other than words are generally viewed as eccentric or childish forms of expression. It can also be challenging to transcribe such sounds into writing... Communication is such an important part of life, make yours as rich as possible by pushing the boundaries with sound daily. What are people's reactions? Are you understood?
Tuesday, November 6, 2007
An emotional experiment
I went for a walk today, like I do every day, just to get my dog a little exercise. Today though, I was feeling different; It had something to do with how she tore up the couch last night while I was at work, and it had something to do with my house mates complaining about her demolishing their food and clothing. Of course my feelings can't be separated from the fact that I am financially responsible for all the nonsense she un-does, and I'm supposed to be keeping up with my school work. So when we got to the field I let her off the leash like I always do and watched her tear around for a while, then I riled her up once she had settled down some, just to get as much energy out of her as possible. Then I decided not to put her back on the leash. I just walked away. I called her a bunch and she didn't respond, she never does. But this time I was sick of it. If she didn't come then I was just going to leave her there. And I did. It was much more difficult than I had imagined it would be.
I walked across the field and out to the road, trying not to look back too often, and stopping myself from calling her every five steps. Finally I was out of sight and she hadn't budged. I stopped to wait for five minutes and then told myself to keep going after that. She didn't come. I was very sad... I was angry. I felt let down. Dogs are supposed to be loyal, never leave your side blah blah blah all that bullshit. Well she was no good. She deserved to stay out there. She'd probably come back by nightfall anyway, although I wouldn't be home then. So I kept walking. I thought about telling my friends what I'd done, I thought about calling someone who would tell me to go back and get her, and then I realized that I didn't want anyone's advice. I didn't know why I was doing this either. I didn't know if it would make me any happier or any less in debt. I tried to imagine how I would feel if I saw her in a week being led around by someone else... would I say something? Would she recognize me? Or what if I found her smashed in the road... then I'd be sad. I'd feel guilty. But if she came home at night I'd feed her, and then what? Nothing. So why leave her? Because maybe it doesn't matter that much if she never comes back. I decided finally that if she didn't come back the worst I'd have to face is seeing her as road-kill, and the best would be no more bills. So I kept walking, but I didn't feel any better. I kept turning around and looking behind me. I kept looking across people's backyards and through brush to the field where I'd left her.
A few tears escaped and I sent a message about it to someone who might be my friend, but I didn't feel any better then either. I thought about how I should feel - and decided that I should be relieved. At that moment I had no obligations, I could walk freely back to my house, make myself some food, and get ready to leave for class. I didn't need to go to the store and buy a new collar (unless she showed up), or worry about finding a trainer. At that moment, I should feel happy. It worked for a few seconds while I was thinking about those things, but the feeling didn't linger.
I heard jingling and little feet flying, I looked behind me, and there she was! Running down the street toward me. I was more startled than happy. She ran right past me, but she stayed close. I didn't even try to pat her or say anything to her... I was suspended. She took off into someone's yard and I just kept walking. So she did feel some attachment to me, so what? She's still crazy, she's still destroying my life, she's still not coming when I call her, but she's here now because she wants to be. Then I felt a little better. I still didn't feel happy... though I decided I felt contented.
It was weird, how I was thinking about my feelings instead of feeling them. But contentment seemed like the right way to describe the steady feeling in my stomach. Or did I just mistake euphoria for happiness and contentment for sadness and have no concept of a level mediocrity? Did I just feel unhappy with contentment before because I thought happiness could be maintained constantly? Happiness is a momentary state like sadness or excitement, or any other emotion - but the baseline is contentment, perhaps. And if so, then maybe I've just been sad because I my expectation was happiness. What's wrong with settling for mediocrity? It's easier, more attainable...
Is that all?
I walked across the field and out to the road, trying not to look back too often, and stopping myself from calling her every five steps. Finally I was out of sight and she hadn't budged. I stopped to wait for five minutes and then told myself to keep going after that. She didn't come. I was very sad... I was angry. I felt let down. Dogs are supposed to be loyal, never leave your side blah blah blah all that bullshit. Well she was no good. She deserved to stay out there. She'd probably come back by nightfall anyway, although I wouldn't be home then. So I kept walking. I thought about telling my friends what I'd done, I thought about calling someone who would tell me to go back and get her, and then I realized that I didn't want anyone's advice. I didn't know why I was doing this either. I didn't know if it would make me any happier or any less in debt. I tried to imagine how I would feel if I saw her in a week being led around by someone else... would I say something? Would she recognize me? Or what if I found her smashed in the road... then I'd be sad. I'd feel guilty. But if she came home at night I'd feed her, and then what? Nothing. So why leave her? Because maybe it doesn't matter that much if she never comes back. I decided finally that if she didn't come back the worst I'd have to face is seeing her as road-kill, and the best would be no more bills. So I kept walking, but I didn't feel any better. I kept turning around and looking behind me. I kept looking across people's backyards and through brush to the field where I'd left her.
A few tears escaped and I sent a message about it to someone who might be my friend, but I didn't feel any better then either. I thought about how I should feel - and decided that I should be relieved. At that moment I had no obligations, I could walk freely back to my house, make myself some food, and get ready to leave for class. I didn't need to go to the store and buy a new collar (unless she showed up), or worry about finding a trainer. At that moment, I should feel happy. It worked for a few seconds while I was thinking about those things, but the feeling didn't linger.
I heard jingling and little feet flying, I looked behind me, and there she was! Running down the street toward me. I was more startled than happy. She ran right past me, but she stayed close. I didn't even try to pat her or say anything to her... I was suspended. She took off into someone's yard and I just kept walking. So she did feel some attachment to me, so what? She's still crazy, she's still destroying my life, she's still not coming when I call her, but she's here now because she wants to be. Then I felt a little better. I still didn't feel happy... though I decided I felt contented.
It was weird, how I was thinking about my feelings instead of feeling them. But contentment seemed like the right way to describe the steady feeling in my stomach. Or did I just mistake euphoria for happiness and contentment for sadness and have no concept of a level mediocrity? Did I just feel unhappy with contentment before because I thought happiness could be maintained constantly? Happiness is a momentary state like sadness or excitement, or any other emotion - but the baseline is contentment, perhaps. And if so, then maybe I've just been sad because I my expectation was happiness. What's wrong with settling for mediocrity? It's easier, more attainable...
Is that all?
Sunday, October 7, 2007
...maybe too brightly
It's October and I'm thinking about power. Power in my life and in my college and town and county and state and country and continent and world. Power is in every little facet of life. And power can be so ugly, mutant. Transforms one's conception of oneself, of one's world, of one's relationship to the world. Power manifest through action, word, and culture. Control. Fear of losing control, of losing power of losing influence and meaning. Fear. Scare tactics. Powerful scare tactics - used since the beginning of time by the weak, by the fearful, by the ignorant. Influential on the weak, the fearful and the ignorant, causing regression, crippling society. Fear designates power to the feared, the fearful beware.
More personally; the desire for power can seize unawares, cause you to interact in ways you had never dreamed could be driven by that molten force. Such a detested filth could never be part of your own cleansed constitution and yet it's there. Discovered. Putrid fumes rising from the chest and the breath of the very person you thought could escape it. Yourself. What for? When did it arrive there? Has it been more positively expressed or have you been governed by it, making an undetected mess, for years upon years? How many interactions were tainted, stained and permanently drained of value due to an irrational desire to become mired in the minds of people somehow perceived to be higher? Though equality is professed somehow you didn't manage to manifest that belief in living action. Somehow you were able to deny the true meaning of the word on a fundamental level - power still seemed like something one could be entitled to, had a right to fight for; but power is not a goal, it is a punishment and a tool for repression. If equality exists than power as we know it can not be the way I understand it to be... because we would all have it and it would lose it's value. There would be no power. No struggle for power. Power over what? Over whom? Is this too encompassing? Equality may not equal utopian communities based on sharing and the meeting of basic needs. But power definitely doesn't, and power doesn't promote equality, it promotes subordination. Could the climate crisis release the world focus on power and link it to a collective challenge based on survival? No, we compete to survive. Competition is a way to determine a power-scheme. Power. Fear. Humanity?
More personally; the desire for power can seize unawares, cause you to interact in ways you had never dreamed could be driven by that molten force. Such a detested filth could never be part of your own cleansed constitution and yet it's there. Discovered. Putrid fumes rising from the chest and the breath of the very person you thought could escape it. Yourself. What for? When did it arrive there? Has it been more positively expressed or have you been governed by it, making an undetected mess, for years upon years? How many interactions were tainted, stained and permanently drained of value due to an irrational desire to become mired in the minds of people somehow perceived to be higher? Though equality is professed somehow you didn't manage to manifest that belief in living action. Somehow you were able to deny the true meaning of the word on a fundamental level - power still seemed like something one could be entitled to, had a right to fight for; but power is not a goal, it is a punishment and a tool for repression. If equality exists than power as we know it can not be the way I understand it to be... because we would all have it and it would lose it's value. There would be no power. No struggle for power. Power over what? Over whom? Is this too encompassing? Equality may not equal utopian communities based on sharing and the meeting of basic needs. But power definitely doesn't, and power doesn't promote equality, it promotes subordination. Could the climate crisis release the world focus on power and link it to a collective challenge based on survival? No, we compete to survive. Competition is a way to determine a power-scheme. Power. Fear. Humanity?
Tuesday, August 14, 2007
The sun still shines.
I'm sitting on the floor in front of my computer; dreads flopped over my head, calves resting on bare feet and my bottom against the floor boards, but I'm not cold. I wish I had a pen. Then I remember that just the other day I was wishing I had a database of all my journals. Why not just write them on the computer? Hand-writing is out-dated anyway. Nobody does that anymore except in impromptu circumstances and out in the boonies. You know, writing is an art now. Calligraphy. Tagging. It's not old fashioned or out of date, it's not something only some people know how to do, but it is more of an art now. Everything can be done on portable electronic databases. Writing is for scribbling a note to someone when they won't have their cell phone out (i.e. at work), or reminding yourself on your skin in case the alarm fails to drive you into action.
I do like that there are still no gimmicks with writing by hand though. Maybe some flashy pens and disappearing ink, but there's no short cut. No long cut either, it just goes straight from brain through instrument to paper. The computer route is a little more abstract. Brain to many different buttons to screen which can't be accessed except by way of one particular machine and perhaps user on that machine... if you aren't online or at an internet cafe chances are slim that anyone might stumble upon your work in five minutes, forget in twenty years when you're dead or lost or mad. And what about paper? Well yes of course you can put it on paper but to do so you need another machine with a power supply and ink, and paper. Then if it prints properly somebody might stumble upon it some day.
So do I write to be remembered, or to sort out my thoughts? Do I think my sortings might be valuable to society some day? Maybe if I actually wrote about the real things that are bothering me they would. But do I try too hard to define reality? I live. I'm real, that's reality isn't it? Computer games and fiction, movies and imagination – they're real. Why do I need to be remembered? I'm afraid of dying, of just being gone from Earth. No one ever knew I was here. No one ever needed to know. I was here and then I wasn't, just like the deer down the road. It was alive one day and then it wasn't, and it didn't matter that it died sooner than it might have. It still died, and it still lived, and not a thing changed. Except for me and Chooli and everyone in the house I live in because I mentioned seeing the dead deer, and the man who stopped his car and got out of it to look and spoke to me about it. Everyone was affected a little bit by that. Opinions changed. Not necessarily opinions about the deer or its life or the deer's effect on my life or the world or anything – but our reactions to the deer told us something about each other. About humanity? Is it important to understand humanity? Is it important why we live this way? Do we need to change the way we live? Do I need to change the way we live for other human beings? Because the changes I affect may make me feel better but will they make the next generation any happier? Is this generation unhappy? Does the next generation need to be happier? Is it perfectly fine just the way it is... the world turning. Some people happy, some people not. Some people wealthy, some people in love, some people sad... some people working some people stealing... isn't that fine? People. Just people surviving. Do I need to change that? I couldn't. Should I want to? Do I want to? I just want to make enough money to be happy. What does that mean? I want to have a dog and a horse and I want to travel. I only want enough money to have a dog and a horse and be able to travel with them. Travel how? How ever! All I want is to have them and to be able to move around when I feel like it. I want to be able to keep in touch with my friends and to be warm in the winter. Does life really cost so much? My dog has to go to the vet. Has to have operations and antibiotics. Has to? There is a law about when you can give your puppies away. You have to wait until you've had them 8 weeks. Why is there a law about that? You can't just let some puppies suffer and die or suffer and survive? Why are we protecting everything? It will die anyway. Maybe we're not protecting it right and it will die sooner, or worse, kill something else, kill many other things. We often damage in our attempts to correct foreseen injury. Injury that did not yet occur and may possibly not occur at all, even without our intervention. Did the Mayans predict the end of the world in the distant future so that they could live peacefully; doing their best to live well while knowing all the while that the world would end without them?
Why do we live so far in the past that we think about what the Mayans thought about the world? Isn't it what it is today? Does it matter what it will be tomorrow? I do still care about keeping it clean. It's just not pleasant to live in a dirty place... I would like to keep the world clean right now for me and you today not for our children tomorrow. Don't be silly I'm not trying to preserve it I just want to use it and enjoy it at the same time. It's hard to enjoy when you watch it rot around you. Beauty. Trust. Community. Where are they? Aren't they as ancient as the world and don't they still exist and why are they sometimes so hard to find, buried under society and law and mis-interpreted expectations?
Tomorrow. The weather still dictates what I'll do tomorrow, to some degree. Technology be damned, the world is still as it was. Tsunami, hail, frozen roads and slushy hill. Hurricane, rain, all remain.
Friday, July 6, 2007
3.. 2..1.. GO!
The gun fires, ten people rush forward in a burst of adrenaline-fed speed. Two in the back of the pack get too close together - first elbows fly, then one foot gets in front of the other sending two bodies sprawling. On the way down one of them reaches out to break the fall and catches the back of a shirt on his little finger. The gun fires a second time. They will all have to start again.
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