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8.18.2005
TUESDAY, AUGUST 23, 2005
The End of AIDS
In order to end AIDS, it is more important for us to know something about the technology of accomplishment than it is for us to know about the intricacies of the immune system. Instead of examining T-cells, we have to start examining some of the great accomplishments of human history. There are consistent threads that run through great human accomplishments. The end of AIDS will be an accomplishment without peer - perhaps the greatest human accomplishment of this century. It is important that we understand how things at this level of significance get accomplished, and why some things at this level do get accomplished and others don’t.
Why were we able to cure polio but not cancer? Why have we been able to build a great military machine but not a great public education system? It is important for us to know these things in order to bring an end to AIDS. Why were we able to put human beings on the moon, less than eight years after the first manned space flight, but, 26 years later, have we still not landed a human being on Mars? Why is a 72-year old man able to run a marathon, while a 21-year old in perfect physical condition is not?
These are the important questions.
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MONDAY, AUGUST 22, 2005
Common Sense
Why do so many just accept the world as it is? Because it would take too much struggle to create the world as we wish it could be? If we all decided to create the world as we wish it could be it wouldn't be a struggle to create. It would be a joy. To live in the world as it is, that is the ultimate struggle. I refuse to give up on the world as it could be. It is not a pipe dream. It is not silly. It is the ultimate common sense. To accept this world as it is is the ultimate insanity. And anyone who tells you you must is as insane as the idea.
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SUNDAY, AUGUST 21, 2005
 Non-Violence
God is truth. The way to truth is through shimsa (non-violence).
MK Gandhi, March 13, 1927
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SATURDAY, AUGUST 20, 2005
Courage, Again
In 1807 Thomas Jefferson called for an embargo against the British for firing upon an American frigate. John Quincy Adams supported him, because he could see that it was in the interest of the public good to put a stop to British aggression. His state and his party turned against him because of the economic impact it would have on them. John Kennedy recounted in "Profiles in Courage," that he wrote to his mother, "Most completely I was deserted by my friends, in Boston and in the state legislature,...I can never be sufficiently grateful to Providence that my father and mother did not join in this general desertion." His father, John Adams, said to him:
You are supported by no party; you have too honest a heart, too independent a mind, and too brilliant talents, to be sincerely and confidentially trusted by any man who is under the domination of party maxims or party feelings...You may depend upon it then that your fate is decided...You ought to know and respect this and by no means regret it. My advice to you is to pursue the course you are in, with moderation and caution however, because I think it is the path of justice.
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FRIDAY, AUGUST 19, 2005
Courage
Courage is in short supply. It always has been. But like I keep saying, it's the only thing that ultimately matters. And so you don't have to be a genius or politically connected or Harvard-educated to change the world - literally. One act of courage will blow over a hundred thousand professional degrees and a million expert opinions and a thousand Washington think tanks to show the world a new way to the future. This is exactly what Cindy Sheehan is doing. It's not her credentials or her strategizing that are making the difference. It's just her courage. The courage to imagine. The courage to act. When you act with courage a million things come forth to help you that you could never have known would have come and that all the experts who advised you on how stupid you were being could never in their tiny little imaginations have ever seen.
Courageous people come seemingly from out of nowhere. The establishment can't understand them because they never crossed them on their career paths. They wonder how a nobody could get so far ahead of them so quickly. This is because they think that to have credentials is to be somebody and to be without them is to be nobody. But everybody has a somebody in them waiting to be born. And when that somebody shows up, the real nobodys can't comprehend it.
You have courage inside you. And so you have everything.
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THURSDAY, AUGUST 18, 2005
Cindy Sheehan
What's remarkable to me about the Cindy Sheehan story is not the fact that she had the courage to camp out at the President's ranch after her son died. It's that hundreds of Moms before her didn't do the same thing.
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8.17.2005
WEDNESDAY, AUGUST 16, 2005
Solar Prius
An engineer in Canada named Steve Lapp has modified a Prius by adding solar panels to the roof, improving its fuel efficiency by 10%, or about 4 - 6 miles per gallon. Several California engineers have modified the Prius by adding a plug-in feature and additional batteries, and are getting upwards of 80 miles per gallon that way. If you combined these two technologies you could be getting close to 90 miles per gallon. If you don't want to plug it in, you don't have to. If you do, you'll get 90 mpg. It's the best of both worlds. If this is what a few grassroots engineers are able to do, does anyone seriously doubt that we could cut national fuel consumption in half in the next tens years?
You used to hear these mythical stories about cars that the big 5 were hiding that could get 100 mpg. But you never saw evidence of anything like it and it was probably all fiction anyway. But this stuff is real.
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8.16.2005
TUESDAY, AUGUST 16, 2005
 Night and Day
I look at a picture like this an realize that love is the only answer. More and more I feel myself getting sucked in to the establishment's pragmatic approach to everything, which is of course, war and nuclear bunker busters and competition and achievement and survival of the fittest. It's work - constant work - to pull yourself out of that mindset and back to your heart and your dreams. In the end, I think that the things we call our dreams are just a fraction of the first step in God's imagination, and that ultimately we have no idea the magnitude of what is possible on this planet of ours.
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8.15.2005
MONDAY, AUGUST 15, 2005
Three Movies
Saw three really amazing movies over the weekend - "Junebug" - a heartbreaking story about love and communication - about a bound-up kind of expression of love - the best a person with no skills and little self-awareness can do, but still the best they can do. Peoples' expressions of love toward us may not always be what we want, but sometimes they may be the best those people can do. Sometimes what hardly seems like even a gesture to us may be the most powerful expression of love another human being has ever mustered. In that sense, it can be as meaningful as the most eloquent expression of someone else. It can still be full of grace. It can still move us to tears, if we will open our perspective and allow it to.
The second was "Grizzly Man," a fascinating documentary on a man who spent years living with wild bears in Alaska - more a look at complex human psychological issues than a wildlife movie about bears, but also has amazing wildlife footage.
The third was "Secuestro Express" (Kidnap Express) - set in Caracas about gang kidnappings of the children of wealthy families, and about issues of poverty, abundance, equality, and right and wrong.
For those of us genuinely interested in issues of personal growth and transformation, I think each of these three offers valuable insight.
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