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Saturday, December 10, 2005
Power
 The Democrats are saying that corruption is all you're going to hear about in the news over the coming year and they're going to make sure of it. It's their new strategy. They don't seem to see the irony of the fact that this was the same thing Republicans did five years ago with the issue of morality and character. And so it goes. One side gets power until the other side has sufficiently damaged their reputations so they lose it. And then the other side has power until the other side sufficiently damages their reputations so that they lose it. And so on and so on and nothing ever makes a difference. Not really. Within this system it doesn't matter who has the power, because power is all that matters, and it's a broken record that repeats itself ad nauseum, while cancer remains uncured, the hungry remain unfed, the air remains unbreathable, and the world remains in despair.
Our political system is broken, and more and more I am convinced that it is not the place from which real change will come. Real change will come from the outside. Politicians think they have power. In fact, they only have force. Power is a thing of the spirit. You don't get power from an election, or from having your picture on the cover of Time magazine. You get power from your soul, and you don't have any power when you deny your soul. There are starving children in Africa who have more power than Bill Clinton ever did.
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Friday, December 09, 2005
Headlines
 It appears that the "Submit" buttons on the site have not been properly forwarding e-mails to us, so, if you've submitted anything, like a blog or a quote or an action item or a book or a film or a website, we haven't been getting them. They will be fixed today. Please re-send if you would - we'd love to add some of your content to the site.
As we search for headlines throughout the day of stories that fall into the realm of transformative, or paradigm-shifting, what we find is a bounty of stuff out there about emerging computer technologies and environmental/ecological products and ideas, but a real lack of compelling news about advances on the poverty front, or on curbing violence, or on issues of war and peace. This stands to reason. It is much easier to develop a new solar panel than it is to tackle global poverty. Still, it is stunning to see the imbalance. This is one of the things we hope to change with CThings when it launches next month.
If you come across stories about transformative approaches to the more difficult challenges that confront humanity, please send them along. It will help not only with this site, but in opening up new sources to help us make CThings the best it can possibly be.
What are your thoughts on the headlines we've been posting to the site lately? Do the stories interest you? Which ones interest you the most? Click on the "Add Comment" button below to let us know, if you would...
Thanks!
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Thursday, December 08, 2005
Torture
 OK, serious blog today. I almost deleted it in favor of something lighter, something more on its face about possibility - some rousing rhetoric about imagination - but ugly issues like torture are part of what keep us from great possibility, and to ignore them is to keep us stuck, so, on we go. Forgive me for the length of it. Like Lincoln said, "If I had more time I'd have written a shorter letter."
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On the subject of torture, which is much in the news these days, it seems to me that what incenses a hawk is the condemnation a liberal is able to manage toward the military without any equivalent condemnation for the terrorist that might kill and maim. When pressed, the liberal will say that, of course they feel contempt for the terrorist, but it has to be dragged out of them. Their contempt for the military, on the other hand, is offered readily and without invitation, much less coercion. How can this be, that one would feel more ready contempt for one who causes pain than for one who causes death? That one would feel more sympathy for one who may have murdered than for one who may be keeping that person from murdering again? It is fascinating how much more contempt a liberal can generate for George Bush than for Osama Bin Laden. Surely a true pacifist would feel an equivalent contempt for both - would criticize both equally. But you don't see people putting "Capture Bin Laden" bumper stickers next to their "Impeach Bush" bumper stickers. The contempt is all lopsided.
This tells me that it's not really about pacifism or principal, but that it's about some kind of psychological projection. A person who feels psychologically oppressed will sympathize - even relate to - another who they feel is being oppressed - Osama Bin Laden, or a suicide bomber, for instance, and this will obscure the whole of the truth. The only explanation for a person who says they care about human rights but sympathizes with a person who has murdered other innocent people is that it is not a true concern for human rights.
I only can say all of this because I, of course, play host to all of these same projections myself.
There is a reciprocal hypocrisy to all of this on the right, of course, and that is the use of a military that abuses human rights in order to insure human rights. It is simply a disdain for the weak instead of a disdain for the powerful, but it is all still projection.
The trouble with this mislabeling of motivation is two-fold. It lacks integrity and authenticity, first, and it lacks any morally persuasive power because it is coming from a place of hate, not from a place of love. You cannot use your hatred for the military as an expression of your love for a victim of torture. You cannot rely on the example Jesus. You have forfeitied his allegiance. You cannot claim that you embody his sense of principal because you feel compassion for the victim of torture, or because you stand on the side of human rights for a prisoner of war, while you seethe with hatred for his captor, and abandon all feeling for his victim. You cannot lead the charge of a moral argument with your own psychological baggage. Let us be against torture, for sure, but let us also be against a festering hatred for the torturer or his commander, or his nation, for that will, in the end, only lead to more torture, and at some level, it will be at our own hand. Until we can see that a torturer suffers in his spirit at least as much as his victim, or that the one who murdered is as sick in his heart as the one who seeks revenge upon him, we can make no progress. Until we can see that torture is but a manifestation of a sickness of spirit in all humanity then we will never get beyond it.
This was the brilliance of Martin Luther King and Gandhi. These people derived their power from their love. They never led with the agenda of their personal psychology. They led with the greatness of their spirits. And until the liberals, or the conservatives, can lead with the greatness of their spirits, there will be no hope for the prisoners of war or the victims of it, no hope for the torturers or the ones whom they torture.
These are the kinds of things you're not supposed to say if you're a true liberal. The system says you're not supposed to breach the party line, even as it claims to be for freedom of speech, and of thought. But if we are not permitted to engage in the most rigorous inquiry into the hipocrisies on our own side then how can we ever expect the other side to behave any differently? It is this fear of the truth that has given rise to torturers and torturees, to prisoners of war and to war itself, in the first place.
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Post 2 / Coolest Tree House in the World
 This one deserved its own blog. And they've started selling them! It's called the Free Spirit Sphere and comes in two sizes. I might start writing my blogs in one.
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Tuesday, December 06, 2005
Questions Whose Time Have Come
 What happened to America? What happened to the invitation to "bring us your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free?" What happened to the brave spirit that had us flying by the seat of our pants to the moon, with the whole of humanity watching black and white television sets in storefronts around the world, their eyes locked in wonderment at what this great nation had achieved, and at the door it had opened for the human imagination? What happened to the eloquence of Lincoln? What happened to the courage of Martin Luther King, who spoke his mind instead of his pollster's script? What happened to the transformers like Jefferson? What happened to our enthusiasm for real leadership around the world? Why do we covet the seat of power over the earth if we plan not to use it? What happened to our enthusiasm for leadership? What happened to the great dreams we had for all the world? Where is the next great force that will break us through to the next paradigm. I have a haunting photo by Dorothea Lange of a dustbowl mother and her two impoverished children. Underneath, a question - "Why, in every age, must mother and child wait, wondering why the wise men are so long in coming?
Surely these must have been the kinds of questions in the hearts of a small group of men and women in Montgomery just before the bus boycotts, and in Boston just before the tea party. These questions only surface when they are yearning to be answered, and not a generation sooner. Victor Hugo spoke of the power of an idea whose time has come. These ideas are always preceded by questions whose time have come, and the time for these questions has arrived.
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Monday, December 05, 2005
The Loneliness of God
 I have this theory that God started out as this entity all by itself in infinity (I don't know where the infinity came from) and the loneliness of it was so deep and unbearable that it shattered itself into a google pieces ( a google is a 1 with 100 zeros after it) so as to shatter the unthinkable loneliness and create the illusion that it was part of a community of other beings and planets and things. This would account for the common feeling that people describe of being completely alone in the universe, i.e. while God did a damned good job with the illusion, even God could not completely obscure the truth.
These days, I watch how rapidly the internet is developing and improving itself. The progress is quantum. It has always felt to me like a central nervous system for humanity, and we are all little cells, and the more the central nervous system develops the more we can all operate from a common understanding. We can do things together in unison - like make the whole body walk, for instance, that no one cell could ever possibly make happen on its own, or would ever even have dreamed would be possible. This union feels like God returning to itself. Everything else in life is cyclical. Why wouldn't God be? - expanding and contracting - shattering into a google pieces and coming back together, shattering into a google pieces and coming back together, on and on and on - and we get to go along for the amazing ride.
This is the point at which my mother would say, "why can't you just think about the same things the other kids think about?"
What do you think?
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Expedition 360 Update
 Got an e-mail from Jason Lewis of Expedition 360 over the weekend. He says they are currently in Singapore, expecting to finish the circumnavigation in early spring 2007, and that their next leg is through Southeast Asia.
According to the E360 wesbite, "the Southeast Asian leg will entail biking from Singapore up through Malaysia, Thailand, Laos and into China. The route will make a big loop to avoid Burma and the Thanglha Mountains in China's SW corner before climbing the Tibetan Plateau to the foothills of the Himalayas. A hiking segment is planned to take the expedition over the Himalayas into Nepal and N. India, at which point bikes will again be employed for the long southward descent through India to the coastal port of Cochin. Subject to funding being in place, we expect this leg to start early 2006."
Expedition 360 describes their effort as "a vehicle for young people to explore the world, an educational tool for the classroom and a way for children from different cultures to make connections with each other." What an amazing vision. I find these guys to be totally inspiring. Anyone who can break free of the herd mentality and do something that no one has done before - with no special gifts, but just using the sheer power of their persons - to me that is genius. In the end, genius is courage.
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Sunday, December 04, 2005
CThings
 The mainstream media gives us such a skewed view of our world. To watch mainstream news you'd think that the only human beings on the planet live in Washington and Hollywood and all that matters are approval ratings and box office figures. Yet every day, there are thousands of people using their creativity and compassion to challenge convention, create the future, and change the world. People are doing the most unbelievable things to help humanity succeed, but more often than not, we never hear about them. In early January we will be launching a new website called CThings. Its purpose will be to bring you constantly updated stories of the amazing things that people are doing to fundamentally alter life as we know it. And it will go far beyond some of the great websites that report on new green technology or new web technology. CThings will report on transformative stories across all sectors - politics, spirituality, heroism, science, the environment, the great social issues of our time like hunger, poverty and AIDS, and the larger issues like war, peace and conflict resolution. We will report on everything from kids setting up lemonade stands to raise money for a cure for cancer to efforts to bring people together in the Middle East to the latest solar technology. CThings will aggregate all the news related to changing our world. That's why our slogan will be "Change the World News."
I will keep you posted on the exact launch date. We'd love to hear what you think about CThings and any ideas you have for making it the best that it can be.
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The Democrats are saying that corruption is all you're going to hear about in the news over the coming year and they're going to make sure of it. It's their new strategy. They don't seem to see the irony of the fact that this was the same thing Republicans did five years ago with the issue of morality and character. And so it goes. One side gets power until the other side has sufficiently damaged their reputations so they lose it. And then the other side has power until the other side sufficiently damages their reputations so that they lose it. And so on and so on and nothing ever makes a difference. Not really. Within this system it doesn't matter who has the power, because power is all that matters, and it's a broken record that repeats itself ad nauseum, while cancer remains uncured, the hungry remain unfed, the air remains unbreathable, and the world remains in despair.
