Abraham & pineapple

Jed's A Millionaire - "View Through a Window"

2010-04-16T10:40:00.008-07:00

Deliberate Intent and Hidden Messages in Water

2008-07-14T22:48:00.000-07:00

:)

2008-07-13T22:19:00.001-07:00

Sex on television can't hurt you unless you fall off.
Anonymous

Remember, if you smoke after sex you're doing it too fast.
Woody Allen

Ducking for apples - change one letter and it's the story of my life.
Dorothy Parker

There is nothing wrong with going to bed with someone of your own sex. People should be very free with sex, they should draw the line at goats.
Elton John

No Smoking Allowed, Unless it's Marijuana

2008-06-28T18:07:00.005-07:00

Tobacco ban wafts into Amsterdam pot shops — but joints still legal
By Jeffrey Stinson
USA TODAY

AMSTERDAM — Starting next week, you'll still be able to legally smoke a joint in the famously relaxed coffee shops of Amsterdam — but for a cigarette, you'll have to step outside.

A tobacco ban that goes into effect Tuesday in the Netherlands has both tourists and shop owners, like, totally confused, man.

"It's crazy," says Jon Foster, 36, an American who owns the popular Grey Area coffee shop in the gentrified Jordaan area of central Amsterdam. "It seems totally illogical to have a business that specializes in smoking and you ban tobacco."

The new law prohibits smoking in bars, cafes, restaurants and clubs to protect people from secondhand tobacco smoke. It is similar to bans that have swept across Europe since Ireland made pubs smoke-free in 2004, as well as restrictions across the USA.

The contradiction here is that the ban extends to coffee shops in the Netherlands that are renowned since 1976 for letting people buy and smoke marijuana or hashish without being arrested.

Starting Tuesday, customers can still legally buy up to 5 grams of cannabis a day at a coffee shop and smoke it on the premises. But they cannot smoke a regular cigarette — or mix the pot with tobacco, as many Europeans prefer — without the risk of being cited by Dutch health inspectors.

"I will have to ask, 'What's in that joint?' " says Ludo Bossaert, 49, owner of the Paradox, another well-known shop. "What's the difference if there's a little bit of tobacco in there? It's going to make it pretty difficult to enforce."

Saskia Hommes, a spokeswoman for the Dutch health ministry, acknowledges that banning tobacco smoking and allowing dope smoking may seem "a bit odd."

"Under our system, these are two different things," she says.

Amsterdam has 236 of the country's 720 coffee shops, says Mark Jacobsen, chairman of the Amsterdam Union of Coffee Shops.

Foster, from North Kingstown, R.I., who has lived here since 1996, predicts more people will take the cannabis home or outside to smoke it mixed with tobacco.

He worries that will ruin the "excellent social atmosphere" of his coffee shop, where neighbors, students and tourists come to drink coffee, smoke, chat and read.

The cozy place is decorated with street signs, bumper stickers and signed photos of singer Willie Nelson and actor Woody Harrelson, both marijuana advocates. Customers drop in to the Grey Area for a quick purchase from a menu of more than a dozen varieties of cannabis that range in price from $13a gram to $95 for 5 grams.

Michael Veling of the Cannabis Retailers Association says there's a risk that more people could end up smoking cannabis on the streets if they don't want to smoke at home. In the long run, he predicts, the coffee shops will continue just fine.

"We get hundreds of thousands of Americans who come to our coffee house, and I've never seen an American smoke tobacco in my 30 years in the business," he says.

Pat Doherty, 54, a tourist from Wales, says he hopes the shops survive the ban: "It's all cool."

http://www.usatoday.com/printedition/news/20080627/a_pot27.art.htm

Forbidden Love

2008-06-27T22:26:00.001-07:00

George Carlin: American Radical

2008-06-24T11:35:00.006-07:00

Published on Tuesday, June 24, 2008 by The Nation

by John Nichols

I think it's the duty of the comedian to find out where the line is drawn and cross it deliberately.
– George Carlin

The last vote that George Carlin said he cast in a presidential race was for George McGovern in 1972.

When Richard Nixon, who Carlin described as a member of a sub-species of humanity, overwhelmingly defeated McGovern, the comedian gave up on the political process.

"Now, there's one thing you might have noticed I don't complain about: politicians," he explained in a routine that challenged all the premises of today's half-a-loaf reformers. "Everybody complains about politicians. Everybody says they suck. Well, where do people think these politicians come from? They don't fall out of the sky. They don't pass through a membrane from another reality. They come from American parents and American families, American homes, American schools, American churches, American businesses and American universities, and they are elected by American citizens. This is the best we can do folks. This is what we have to offer. It's what our system produces: Garbage in, garbage out.

If you have selfish, ignorant citizens, you're going to get selfish, ignorant leaders. Term limits ain't going to do any good; you're just going to end up with a brand new bunch of selfish, ignorant Americans. So, maybe, maybe, maybe, it's not the politicians who suck. Maybe something else sucks around here… like, the public. Yeah, the public sucks. There's a nice campaign slogan for somebody: 'The Public Sucks. Fuck Hope.'"

Needless to say, George Carlin was not on message for 2008's "change we can believe in" election season.

His was a darker and more serious take on the crisis - and the change of consciousness, sweeping in scope and revolutionary in character, that was required to address it.

Carlin may have stopped voting in 1972. But America's most consistently savage social commentator for the best part of a half century, who has died at age 71, did not give up on politics.

In recent years, in front of audiences that were not always liberal, he tore apart the neo-conservative assault on liberty with a clarity rarely evidenced in the popular culture. Recalling George Bush's ranting about how the endless "war on terror" is a battle for freedom, Carlin echoed James Madison's thinking with a simple question: "Well, if crime fighters fight crime and fire fighters fight fire, what do freedom fighters fight? They never mention that part to us, do they?"

Carlin gave the Christian right - and the Christian left - no quarter. "I'm completely in favor of the separation of Church and State," Carlin said. "My idea is that these two institutions screw us up enough on their own, so both of them together is certain death."

Carlin's take on the Ronald Reagan administration is the best antidote to the counterfactual romanticization of the former president - in which even Barack Obama has engaged - remains the single finest assessment of Reagan and his inner circle. While Carlin did not complain much about politicians, he made an exception with regard to the great communicator. Recorded in 1988 at the Park Theater in Union City, New Jersey, and later released as an album — What Am I Doing in New Jersey? - his savage recollection of the then-concluding Reagan-Bush years opened with the line: "I really haven't seen this many people in one place since they took the group photograph of all the criminals and lawbreakers in the Ronald Reagan administration."

But there was no nostalgia for past fights, no resting on laurels, for this topical comedian. He read the papers, he followed the news, he asked questions - the interviews I did with Carlin over the years were more conversations than traditional Q & A's - and he turned it all into a running commentary that focused not so much on politics as on the ugly intersection of power and economics.

No one, not Obama, not Hillary Clinton and certainly not John McCain, caught the zeitgeist of the vanishing American dream so well as Carlin. "The owners of this country know the truth: It's called the American dream because you have to be asleep to believe it."

Not just aware of but steeped in the traditions of American populism - more William Jennings Bryan and Eugene Victor Debs than Bill Clinton or John Kerry - Carlin preached against the consolidation of wealth and power with a fire-and-brimstone rage that betrayed a deep moral sense that could never quite be cloaked with four-letter words.

"The real owners are the big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions. Forget the politicians, they're an irrelevancy. The politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don't. You have no choice. You have owners. They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They've long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the statehouses, the city halls. They've got the judges in their back pockets. And they own all the big media companies, so that they control just about all of the news and information you hear. They've got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying - lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want; they want more for themselves and less for everybody else," ranted the comedian whose routines were studied in graduate schools.

"But I'll tell you what they don't want," Carlin continued. "They don't want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don't want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They're not interested in that. That doesn't help them. That's against their interests. They don't want people who are smart enough to sit around the kitchen table and figure out how badly they're getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago. You know what they want? Obedient workers - people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork but just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it.

And, now, they're coming for your Social Security. They want your fucking retirement money. They want it back, so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street. And you know something? They'll get it. They'll get it all, sooner or later, because they own this fucking place. It's a big club, and you ain't in it. You and I are not in the big club."

Carlin did not want Americans to get involved with the system.

He wanted citizens to get angry enough to remake the system.

Carlin was a leveler of the old, old school. And no one who had so public a platform - as the first host of NBC's Saturday Night Live, a regular on broadcast and cable televisions shows, a best-selling author and a favorite character actor in films (he was even the narrator of the American version of the children's show Thomas the Tank Engine & Friends) - did more to challenge accepted wisdom regarding our political economy.

"Let's suppose we all just materialized on Earth and there was a bunch of potatoes on the ground, okay? There's just six of us. Only six humans. We come into a clearing and there's potatoes on the ground. Now, my instinct would be, let's everybody get some potatoes. "Everybody got a potato? Joey didn't get a potato! He's small, he can't hold as many potatoes. Give Joey some of your potatoes." "No, these are my potatoes!" That's the Republicans. "I collected more of them, I got a bigger pile of potatoes, they're mine. If you want some of them, you're going to have to give me something." "But look at Joey, he's only got a couple, they won't last two days." That's the fuckin' difference! And I'm more inclined to want to share and even out," he explained in an interview several years ago with The Onion.

"I understand the marketplace, but government is supposed to be here to redress the inequities of the marketplace," Carlin continued. "That's one of its functions. Not just to protect the nation, secure our security and all that shit. And not just to take care of great problems that are trans-state problems, that are national, but also to make sure that the inequalities of the marketplace are redressed by the acts of government. That's what welfare was about. There are people who really just don't have the tools, for whatever reason. Yes, there are lazy people. Yes, there are slackers. Yes, there's all of that. But there are also people who can't cut it, for any given reason, whether it's racism, or an educational opportunity, or poverty, or a fuckin' horrible home life, or a history of a horrible family life going back three generations, or whatever it is. They're crippled and they can't make it, and they deserve to rest at the commonweal. That's where my fuckin' passion lies."

Like the radicals of the early years of the 20th century, whose politics he knew and respected, Carlin understood that free-speech fights had to come first. And always pushed the limit - happily choosing an offensive word when a more polite one might have sufficed. By 1972, the year he won the first of four Grammys for best comedy album, he had developed his most famous routine: "Seven Words (You Can't Say on Television)."

That summer, at a huge outdoor show in Milwaukee, he uttered all seven of them in public - and was promptly arrested for disturbing the peace.

When a version of the routine was aired in 1973 on WBAI, the Pacifica Foundation radio station in New York,. Pacifica received a citation from the FCC. Pacifica was ordered to pay a fine for violating federal regulations prohibiting the broadcast of "obscene" language. The ensuing free-speech fight made its way to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled 5-4 against the First Amendment to the Constitution, Pacifica and Carlin.

Amusingly, especially to the comedian, a full transcript of the routine ended up in court documents associated with the case, F.C.C. v. Pacifica Foundation, 438 U.S. 726 (1978).

"So my name is a footnote in American legal history, which I'm perversely kind of proud of," recalled Carlin. Proud enough that you can find the court records on the comedian's website: www.georgecarlin.com

There will, of course, be those who dismiss Carlin as a remnant of the sixties who introduced obscenity to the public discourse - just as there will be those who misread his critique of the American political and economic systems as little more than verbal nihilism.

In fact, George Carlin was, like the radicals of an earlier age, an idealist - and a patriot –of a deeper sort than is encountered very often these days.

Carlin explained himself best in one of his last interviews. "There is a certain amount of righteous indignation I hold for this culture, because to get back to the real root of it, to get broader about it, my opinion that is my species–and my culture in America specifically–have let me down and betrayed me. I think this species had great, great promise, with this great upper brain that we have, and I think we squandered it on God and Mammon. And I think this culture of ours has such promise, with the promise of real, true freedom, and then everyone has been shackled by ownership and possessions and acquisition and status and power," he said.

"And perhaps it's just a human weakness and an inevitable human story that these things happen. But there's disillusionment and some discontent in me about it. I don't consider myself a cynic. I think of myself as a skeptic and a realist. But I understand the word 'cynic' has more than one meaning, and I see how I could be seen as cynical. 'George, you're cynical.' Well, you know, they say if you scratch a cynic you find a disappointed idealist. And perhaps the flame still flickers a little, you know?"

John Nichols, a pioneering political blogger, has written The Beat since 1999. His posts have been circulated internationally, quoted in numerous books and mentioned in debates on the floor of Congress.

The Irish Voted. The Treaty Lost. That’s Democracy.

2008-06-21T14:32:00.003-07:00

-
Safehouse
-

Distrust of Politicians and EU Agenda?

LETTERS

Published: June 21, 2008

To the Editor:

Ireland has indeed benefited greatly from the European Union. But as a full member of the union, Ireland is entitled to judge the Lisbon Treaty on its merits and to reject it if necessary.

During the referendum campaign, the political class in Ireland did not propose one positive reason why voters should accept this treaty, repeating only that “the Lisbon Treaty is essential.”

As for using the referendum to kick “unresponsive politicians,” it is reasonable to do this when leading politicians were recommending a treaty that they admitted they had not read completely themselves.

If it is unconscionable for the Irish to exercise their sovereign legal and political rights, then Mr. Cohen’s claim that Europe is “whole and free” must ring hollow.

Joseph Keogh
Balbriggan, Ireland, June 19, 2008

•

To the Editor:

An American resident in Ireland for eight years, I, too, voted “no” on the Lisbon Treaty because the treaty was the most turgid, opaque, endless and incomprehensible sheaf of bureaucratic gobbledygook I have every attempted to read — the antithesis of the American Bill of Rights.

Does Roger Cohen want the European Union to have reduced representation for smaller states and ramped-up regulatory powers? Why?

And why aren’t other countries in the European Union allowing their citizens to enjoy a referendum on this turkey that has nothing to do with Turkey?

The prime minister of Ireland, Brian Cowen, who supported the treaty, confessed he had not read all of this miserably written document.

The Irish voted with proud thoughtfulness and independence of spirit. If an equivalent document had been proffered as the cornerstone of the United States, there would be no United States.

David Monagan
Cork, Ireland, June 19, 2008

•

To the Editor:

The failure of the Lisbon Treaty is hardly the fault of the more than 862,000 Irish voters who exercised their democratic right in rejecting the treaty through a popular referendum.

European Union leaders are trending down a path where national sovereignty becomes subservient to a hyperstate that has the potential to create laws that run counter to the legal and constitutional traditions of a significant number of member states.

The “no” vote in Ireland should not be any more of a surprise than the rejection of a European constitution by Dutch and French voters in 2005 or the Czech Senate’s postponement of a vote on the Lisbon Treaty pending an opinion from the Czech Constitutional Court.

Given these trends, I wonder how many European Union member states would “ratify” the treaty if they allowed it to be put to a popular referendum.

Frank Costello
Washington, June 19, 2008

•

To the Editor:

The Irish are very much in favor of the European Union, but the latest treaty would have taken substantial power away from smaller states like Ireland and concentrated more power in Brussels.

And while the political leadership of Ireland favored the treaty, many of those leaders admitted they had never read the treaty in full.

The people of Ireland are not the only ones who are against this treaty. The Irish just happen to be lucky enough to be the only nation in the European Union that allows its people to vote on such matters.

Until Europe’s leaders hear the voice of the people, the mission of true integration and democracy will forever be stalled.

Guthrie Alberts
Woodside, Queens, June 19, 2008

•

To the Editor:

As one whose family originated in Ireland’s “beer-soaked backwater,” let me remind Roger Cohen that this tiny nation twice before refused invitations to join larger unions.

First, the Roman Empire. When it fell and Europe descended into darkness, Irish monks rose from the “muck” long enough to preserve the continent’s heritage in manuscripts of unsurpassed beauty.

Centuries later, Oliver Cromwell extended his bloody invitation to join the British Empire. Once again, the Celts were “ungrateful” enough to demur.

Ignoring all but the most recent past, Mr. Cohen upbraids the Irish for “narrow insularity” in rejecting a treaty that he himself describes as “impenetrable.” Perhaps this time Ireland should defer to the judgment of its betters?

If Mr. Cohen’s response to the Irish reflects the attitude of Europe at large, then let me answer the European Union with a phrase from America’s own policy toward my ancestors: “No Irish need apply.”

Rick Topper
Glenside, Pa., June 19, 2008

•

To the Editor:

As a New Yorker living in Ireland, I disagree with Roger Cohen’s column criticizing the Irish “no” vote on the Lisbon Treaty. He suggests that the vote failed because of fear of “Polish plumbers,” Turkish membership in the European Union and a union “without borders and limits.”

The “Polish plumbers” comment is offensive to both Poles and Irish.

Mr. Cohen might at least have mentioned that the “no” campaign was very well organized and effective, while the government-backed “yes” campaign was vague, confusing and overconfident.

This vote was as much a referendum on the increasing power of the European Union as it was on the general level of trust the Irish people hold for their politicians.

Carol Ann Conlon
Dublin, June 19, 2008

•

To the Editor:

Roger Cohen suggests that Ireland, a “beer-soaked backwater,” owes its recent success mainly to participation in the European Union project.

Ireland owes its success to several factors, among which are its low rate of corporate taxes, well-managed labor relations, an educated work force and, of course, its membership in the European Union.

Ireland joined the European Economic Community in 1973, 15 years after it began a visionary program for economic expansion that radically altered Ireland’s global economic posture and laid the foundation for its recent success.

The rejection of the Lisbon Treaty was not an example of “narrow insularity” nor a demonstration of “the worst of little-Englandism.” The reasons the Irish people rejected the treaty do not include some perverse post-colonial neurosis.

Patrick Mair
New York, June 19, 2008

•

To the Editor:

Roger Cohen’s column did not change my views on the Lisbon Treaty. I am still completely confused.

Mr. Cohen offered no convincing argument for why Irish voters should have approved the treaty, but instead attacked their character, portraying the electorate as isolationist ingrates who don’t know what’s good for them.

I am British, with Irish roots. I know that Europeans feel conflicted about an empowered European Union, because they see the best and worst of American federalism.

When the United States protects minority rights and local laboratories of democracy, Europe envies America. When it tramples the rights of states to innovate freely within their borders, Europe justly recoils.

Whenever my faith in the American union recedes, I read the Federalist Papers and marvel at the possibilities for your form of government, and the persuasive power of Alexander Hamilton and James Madison that helped create it. Europeans need a similarly convincing masterpiece to make this leap into the unknown.

Tom Cowell
Brooklyn, June 19, 2008

•

To the Editor:

I agree with most of what Roger Cohen wrote in his June 19 column. As someone who has traveled to Ireland repeatedly since the 1970s, I have witnessed firsthand what participation in the European Union did for that country.

I object, however, to Mr. Cohen’s description of Ireland as a former “beer-soaked backwater.” Depiction of the Irish as drunks was a racist weapon of the English. His use of these words plays into the worst of anti-Irish stereotypes.

Stephen Casey
Ossining, N.Y., June 19, 2008

•

To the Editor:

Even were I not of Irish heritage, I would be deeply offended by Roger Cohen’s characterization of the Irish as residents of a former “beer-soaked backwater” who are “ungrateful” for “enormous E.U. farm subsidies, access for foreign investors to the E.U. market, and the liberation from a Britain complex.”

Wherever the European Union has brought its farm subsidies and other illusory benefits, it has eradicated local, unique, diverse cultures in favor of an imposed lock-step conformity.

In the arena of agriculture, Poland, a new member state, is the latest victim of the union’s rigid, top-down dictates.

As reported by The Times, Poland’s 1.5 million small traditional farms are now threatened by the European Union-enabled expansion of industrial-agriculture giants like the pork producer Smithfield Farms (“Old Ways, New Pain for Farms in Poland,” news article, April 4).

Rather than being, as Mr. Cohen calls them, “ungrateful” for the European Union’s debilitating subsidies, perhaps the Irish are in the vanguard of a hopeful wresting of local control back from a distant, parasitic, tax-financed bureaucracy.

Mary-Louise Zanoni
Canton, N.Y., June 19, 2008

-
beer now
-

Utah Town May Revise Ban on Bikinis at City Pool

2008-06-12T11:51:00.006-07:00

"...But town probably won't allow 'thongs or string bikinis,"

KANAB, Utah - A ban on bikinis at the city pool is expected to be revised, ending a short-lived prohibition on the popular two-piece pool attire. But that does not mean that lifting the G-rating is going to lead to poolside G-strings.

"My recommendation is going to be no thongs or string bikinis," said City Councilwoman Nina Laycook, who called the original dress code an oversight.

Laycook said the policy will probably be revised at the council's meeting June 24, bringing Kanab back in line with city pools even in the state's most conservative communities.

"We were so engrossed with safety and health issues we overlooked the wording," Laycook said. "We are addressing that now by amending the policy."

Bikinis that don't reveal too much will be allowed, as will Speedos for men when the new public pool — known as the Cowboy Water'n Hole — opens July 4 in the community just north of the Arizona state line.

Laycook said council members discussed revising the policy Tuesday night.
She does not expect any problems making the change.

But the publicity that the ban received may linger for the city like a bad sunburn.

The restrictions were not popular, even in the community where the council passed a resolution in 2006 to favor the "natural family" consisting of a working husband, a stay-at-home wife and a "full quiver of children."

Victor Cooper, owner of the Rocking-V Cafe, said customers in the restaurant joked about the ban and expected them to be glad when it was lifted.

"They reacted to the (ban) with comical disbelief more than anything," Cooper said.

Deliberate Intent

2008-05-11T23:25:00.001-07:00

baby1moretime

2008-04-26T14:45:00.002-07:00

GUEST: My question is how to participate as a citizen in a country in a way that would be positive rather than negative.

During the war in Viet Nam, I was in silent vigils that some people and I started.
And I felt good about that.

But I also realize that it’s very easy to get caught up in resisting and being negative.

So, I wanted to ask you what your thoughts are on that?

ABRAHAM: The ideal citizen, ... one who contributes enormously to the Well-being of the whole,
... is one who focuses so specifically on life giving projects that you act as a vortex that summons life into this dimension through you.

Some would say, “Well, you mean she shouldn’t get involved in bigger issues?”

And we say, “She can choose any issue she wants to be one of those life giving issues.”

It’s about choosing something and focusing upon it with the sheer intent of letting it summon to itself through you.

GUEST: I don’t want to see society become like those countries where women would be kept at home and not allowed to leave.

I would like to operate in my society in a way where I see to it that more freedoms in that way are preserved or enhanced.

ABRAHAM: What do you see as you look around you in this society?

You see mostly freedom.

And so, as you focus here, you can feel, as you observe, an environment that is a vibrational match to your desire.
You feel better.

As you observe another society that is not a vibrational match to your desire, you don’t feel so good.

Your role, as a productive citizen,
is to choose from those two perspectives
the one that you can feel the Energy flowing the strongest.

And, it’s not hard to figure out which one that is, is it?
You can tell by the way you feel.

Many people believe that if there are not protests, that nothing ever gets better.
And we say, well, there is accuracy to a degree.

If you don’t know what you don’t want, you could not know what you do want.

And so, it is the contrast or the diversity that helps you to formulate your decision.
And often the strongest decisions come out of the worst situations.
It’s those unbearable or deplorable things that often give the rocket of desire the greatest thrust.

But what goes wrong with so many people is, once the desire is born, then they keep looking back and trying to justify the desire by pointing out how bad things are.

And, when they look back, they just include that vibration which makes them a muted, clutter filter.

They are not a vortex that is doing any summoning toward what they want.

If you let a negative situation build that rocket of desire within you,
and you focus upon the way you want it to be,
and then you imagine that.
You dream that.

You amplify that. You look for evidence of that.
You talk about that. You script that.
You find the feeling place of that.
You imagine that.
You dream that.
You hold yourself in that vibration and you create that.

You open the vortex, single-handedly, that hundreds of thousands, millions,
then benefit from, because of your attention to the subject.

Most of you do not believe that you have that kind of power of focus.

So you gather all over the place, and then you feel crabby because you know,
from your Non-physical Perspective, the extraordinary power and value and reason that you have come here to focus.

You did not say, “I’ll come forth, but clean up everything that might bother me,
and then I’ll come.”

Instead, you said, “I’ll go forth into this contrast,
and out of it I’ll feel new desire born in me.”

When we tell you that you are on the leading edge of thought, we are not kidding you.

Here is the way it works:
So, you examine the contrast.
We are not talking about conflict.
But contrast might be conflict.
You examine the stuff, ... all the stuff.
You observe it, and out of it is born a desire,
and when that desire comes within you,
you feel it.

And as you feel that desire, then you talk about it,
and you think about it, and you think about it,
and you imagine it and you offer a vibration about it,
and then the Universe responds.

And, now you stand in a new place with a whole different set of contrasting experiences
giving birth to another desire that you then focus upon and think about
and find a feeling place of
until you are standing in a different place with a whole different set of contrasting experiences.

Sometimes we think you think that the work is to get it done.
You think the work is to get it all cleaned up.

And we say, you did not ever intend to come forth and get everything checked off the list.
You came forth to get more things on the list.
You never get it done.

Now you’re beginning to understand why we want you to enjoy the journey.
Because there is no end to this journey.
You could desire and it could be painful to you,
and you could stop desiring and you could croak.

But we promise you, that won’t be the end of you.

In your physical withdrawal from this experience,
all you get is a whole new lease on life from which you want to come forth into another physically focused environment,
so that you can begin the process again.

It is so satisfying once you begin to understand the rhythm of all of this,
and you begin to understand that the contrast is a good thing
... because the contrast gives you a new desire,
and then, as you fantasize and find the feeling place of it,
then everything in the Universe begins to respond to your vibrational output.

And then, from that new vantage point,
new contrasting experiences give birth to more desire.

And so, the fun of it is not getting to the place where the Universe yields it to you.
Although that can be fun.

But the fun of it is the birth of the desire to begin with, and then the bringing yourself into an alignment with the desire.

There is nothing more delicious than the Creative endeavor.

Friends, you have in your hands the Energy that creates worlds.
And you said, “I would like to take that powerful Energy,
and I would like to focus it through my specific physical human vortex.
So I will be a citizen in this environment,
and I will conclude as best I can from my vantage point.

And when that conclusion builds within me as that rocket of desire and I feel it,
I will revel in what this contrasting experience has produced,
because I’m on the leading edge again.

I’ve just given birth to a new desire.

I am going to focus on the desire.
I’m going to find the feeling of the desire.
I’m going to explain the desire.
I’m going to become familiar with the desire.

I’m going to become desire.

I am going to become the embodiment, ... the vibrational embodiment,
... of this desire.

I am going to radiate that desire.
It’s going to express through me so that anyone that comes into contact will feel a piece of that desire.
And, sure, Law of Attraction will manifest the heck out of it all around me,
but that’s not why I’m here.

I’m here for the experience of the Energy flowing through.

-

-Abraham-Hicks-

2008-04-14T16:35:00.024-07:00

Elections in America: Millionaires Accusing Each Other of Elitism
By Brad Reed, AlterNet. Posted April 14, 2008

This country can't afford to have another election decided by the idea that a member of the ruling class is "genuine" and others are "elitist."

Millionaire lawyers, politicians and journalists are all savaging Barack Obama for being an elitist.

Obama's particular crime in this case was saying that Democrats have done a lousy job of dealing with the concerns of working-class Americans, thus allowing the Republicans to swoop in with their God-Guns-n-Gays brand of politics that scapegoats homosexuals, illegal immigrants and George Clooney as the prime culprits behind blue-collar woes.

This is not a particularly new argument, and has been a popular theme in mainstream discourse ever since author Thomas Frank published his excellent book What's the Matter With Kansas? in 2004.

Nevertheless, both the media and the rival candidates pounced on Obama's statements and accused him of making "outrageous San Francisco remarks" and of "offending small town America." Worst of all, Obama's words rendered him an "elitist" in the eyes of his critics, which in American political discourse is akin to being a child molester or a Frenchman.

But is Barack Obama really an elitist as his opponents claim? Well of course he is -- he's running for president of the United States! He wouldn't have gotten this far in life if he'd spent the past 20 years driving a truck or moonlighting as a fry cook at Arby's. Like every other successful politician in the United States, Obama is a member of America's political ruling class, which means that like every other presidential candidate in recent memory, he is typically insulated from the lives of ordinary people.

Does Obama really have any idea what it's like to live like a "Real American?" Of course he doesn't, and neither do John McCain and Hillary Clinton! Does any rational person out there believe that Obama, Clinton and McCain spend their free time away from the campaign trail hanging out at Jimmy Ray's Chicken'n'Beer Depot playing darts with the common folk?

In theory, this point should be fairly obvious. Even before getting elected, most politicians made a good deal of money in their careers as lawyers, doctors, actors or oil tycoons -- you know, real salt-of-the-earth sort of work. But for reasons that have long confounded sane people everywhere, our national millionaire press corps gives positive coverage to political candidates who are the most adept at lying about their ability to connect with regular folks.

And because it apparently takes too much work for our press corps to sift through the candidates' policy positions to figure out what each of them is actually offering blue-collar voters, we don't even get rational assessments of politicians' working-class cred. Instead, we get piles and piles of anecdotal evidence.

For instance, any rational observer should be able to discern that George W. Bush has not been a particularly good president for blue-collar people. From the bankruptcy bill that made it harder for Americans to escape debt, to the tax cuts that were tilted heavily toward the uber-rich, to his mercifully-botched scheme to privatize social security, all of Bush's major economic initiatives have been tailored specifically to shaft working-class people in order to benefit really, really, really, really, really rich people.

While some major media figures, most notably Paul Krugman, tirelessly pointed this out, the vast majority of our bonehead millionaire pundit class declared Bush to be more in touch with the average American than elitist snobs such as John Kerry and Al Gore.

What were Bush's qualifications for being the Voice of the Common Man, you ask? For one thing, he cleared brush.

As the Washington Post reported in 2005, "President Bush's idea of paradise is to hop in his white Ford pickup truck in jeans and work boots, drive to a stand of cedars, and whack the trees to the ground." Cue up the Toby Keith CD, baby, we got a real workin' man on our hands! Also: Bush wore a flight suit. Even though Bush had never actually seen combat of any kind, merely donning a flight suit made him "a high-flying jet star," who was "virile, sexy and powerful" and whose clothing made "the best of his manly characteristic."

And finally: President Bush did, in fact, have a pair of testicles, as Peggy Noonan expounded upon rapturously in a 2004 column that she titillating titled "He's Got Two of 'Em."

Which brings us back the recent troubles that Obama has had lying to convince our press corps that he's in touch with the average American. You see, Obama's problems in this area aren't merely confined to his statements about white working-class voters being bitter.

For one thing, Obama decided not to wolf down artery-clogging piles of meat-flavored goo when he visited Philadelphia. After all, what could be more authentically American than eating your way to an early death?

Also, Obama isn't very good at bowling. Bloomberg columnist Margaret Colson said that Obama's low bowling score was a "doozy" of a mistake, since voters apparently want someone who's good at "looking, acting, or sounding like the locals, eating homemade specialties, even if it's funnel cake and smoked meat products, or wearing a Teamsters or Yankees cap for the first time."

Yeah, Barack, come on -- you don't want these people to know that your life is a billion times more interesting than theirs! You're running for president!

These phony proclamations of "elitism" are not unique to Barack Obama, of course. John Kerry got pounded for his Brahmin ways after having the gall to windsurf. Al Gore got trashed in the press corps for sighing during a 2000 debate. Mitt Romney got pummeled for the way he ate pizza, Bush I for ordering a "splash" of coffee.

John Edwards? Paid too much for a haircut. Hillary Clinton? Has a phony laugh. And on and on and on and on.

Why is our millionaire pundit class so gosh-darned interested in finding allegedly "genuine" ruling-class politicians to champion as tried'n'true representatives of Real America?

Without subjecting them to intense psychological treatment (not a half-bad idea), I have no way of knowing. But I do know that this seems to be a uniquely American phenomenon in the industrialized world.

Most politicians in Europe, Canada and Asia, from what I've seen, are a bunch of technocratic dweebs who spend their campaigns arguing over which of their dweeby technocratic proposals would make their countries better marginally places to live.

In other words, they base their campaigns on actual politics rather than bowling scores.

But can you imagine what would happen if Gordon Brown or Nicolas Sarkozy or Angela Merkel tried to show how they were rugged and in-touch with the common man by dressing up in a flight suit or speeding around the countryside in a pickup truck clearing brush? They'd be justifiably laughed out of office, because sane people in other parts of the world don't care whether or not their political leaders drink lager or enjoy watching football on the telly.

Heck, just look at Sarkozy! Do you really expect him to pretend that he enjoys hanging out in the countryside with a bunch of dull old grape farmers when he'd obviously rather be going on fancy vacations with his international supermodel wife? And can you blame the guy?

What is so depressing about our press corps' bizarre penchant for picking and choosing which members of the ruling class are "genuine" and which ones are not is that the United States simply cannot afford to have another election decided by this trivial nonsense.

For the past eight years, sane people have watched in horror as George W. Bush chain-sawed the country's coffers with tax cuts, trampled over both international and domestic law and inexplicably got us involved in an endless bloody war in Iraq.

While I can't claim to speak for Real Americans -- after all, I don't eat cheese steak or clear brush on a regular basis -- I can speak for myself when I say that I don't want my political leaders to be my friends; I only ask that they not actively try to destroy the country and the rest of the world.

And at this point, I don't care if our next president is the unholy love spawn of Richie Rich, Thurston Howell and Charles Emerson Winchester III. As long as they can end the Iraq war, provide national health insurance and generally make life in this country stink less than it has under Bush, then they've got my vote.

-
beer now
---

Anthem for the New Millenium Generation

2008-04-09T22:48:00.004-07:00

We stand against every lie they tell.
We fight!
They lie!

Cause if we fall for the spin they sell.
We fight!
We die!

Orwellesque headlines; we have heard it all before.
As the 21st century becomes 1984.

The new millennium generation will kick down their locked doors.
You're going to hear us sing:

We won't go
We won't answer the call
We won't go
We won't answer the call
We know that you're lying;
That you never tell the truth
So we won't go
So we won't go
So we won't go
Anymore
Because we don't believe
No we don't believe

We can't repeat the mistakes of the past
March Off!
To die!
But we can take back control of the world
Take back our lives.
Why should it be the poor to die in combat zones?
While congress and their children sits safe in lavish homes?

The new millennium generation will kick down their locked doors.
They're going to hear us sing:

We won't go
We won't answer the call
We won't go
We won't answer the call
We know that you're lying;
That you never tell the truth
So we won't go
So we won't go
So we won't go
Anymore
No!

We'll stand as one! We'll say
"We will not go!" [x2]
We'll stand as one

We won't go
We won't answer the call
We won't go
We won't answer the call
We know that you're lying;
That you never tell the truth

So we won't go
So we won't go
So we won't go
So we won't go
So we won't go
So we won't go
So we won't go
So we won't go
So we won't go

-

Anti-flag

Bomb It or Vote It?

2008-04-09T22:43:00.002-07:00

It is a very confounding place, for most humans, to stand in a sea of contrast, much of which they disapprove of, in fact, much of which they greatly fear, and to recognize they have no control over it. And then they attempt, with their puny vote or their puny bomb, or their puny influence of a physical action nature, to control the circumstances that surround, hoping that they can hack away, that they can obliterate, in some small measure, part of the scourge of the planet, so that maybe they can then relax a little, for a little while, in their belief that they have gotten rid of something unwanted, and now, they can live in a wanted space.

We cannot control what others choose.

We can control our vibrational participation with it.

--Abraham-Hicks--

Do Not Face Reality

2008-04-09T22:27:00.006-07:00

Do not face reality unless it is a reality you want to create---for any “reality” only exists because someone has focused it into being.

Someone will say, “But this is a true thing, and therefore it deserves my attention.” And we say that you make whatever you give your attention to…your Truth. And so, it is extremely beneficial for you to focus primarily on the way you feel while giving only scant attention to the manifestations as they are unfolding, for whenever you are giving your primary attention to things as they are, you are hindering the expansion of what-is.

All those statistics that are gathered about your own experiences and about others---are only about how somebody has already flowed Energy. They are not about any hard-and-fast now reality.

Within your current society, there are many who gather the statistics of human experience. Their lives have become more about labeling the behavior or experiences of those with whom they share their planet than about their own creating.

And so, they find themselves in a very uncomfortable position as they come to believe that their happiness or Well-Being depends upon the behavior of others. They point to people, behaviors, or beliefs and call them inappropriate, saying no to them, without realizing that they are including into their experience the vibration of the very thing they do not want. And so without the knowledge of how it is that those unwanted things are making their way into their experience, they become increasingly guarded and fearful.

Freedom from the fear of unwanted experiences will never be achieved by trying to control the behavior or desires of others. Your freedom can only be allowed by adjusting your own vibrational point of attraction.

Abraham-Hicks

Facilitating Awakening Online

2008-04-03T20:20:00.004-07:00

-

Safehouse

-

Because each new phase of evolving intelligence
takes place in a fraction of the time
of the previous phase,
...
we can expect the dawning of a Wisdom Age to take place
in years rather than decades.

It will be standing on the shoulders of the Information Age.

Never before have we been able to access so much spiritual wisdom.

A century ago, the only spiritual tradition available to most people was the one that was indigenous to their own culture.

Moreover, with rare exceptions, they did not have the benefit of learning
from a truly enlightened being.

Today, we can access teachings from many different traditions and cultures,
discover their common underlying truths,
and translate that perennial philosophy into the language and terms
of our own time.

Something completely new is emerging: a single spiritual teaching
that is a distillation of the world's wisdom traditions.

This is coalescing and being disseminated globally through a variety of information technologies: books, tapes, Web pages, online forums, and Internet broadcasts.

At the same time, a growing number of people are becoming fully awake,
and proving themselves
to be excellent teachers.

Many are using the Internet to share their wisdom and help awaken others.

Instruction in practices that facilitate awakening
are appearing online,
and could become much more sophisticated.

It may even turn out that darshan,
the Indian word for a direct transfer of higher consciousness,
can be transmitted via the net.

Awakening is often a sudden event.

Once a person is ready
—the necessary groundwork done,
the circumstances propitious—
the shift can happen more or less instantaneously.

It's possible that research into the neurological correlates
of spiritual awakening
will lead us to methods of promoting the process directly.

There will likely be other unforeseen discoveries
or developments
that help us free our minds.

Whatever they may be,
the more we learn how to facilitate a shift in consciousness,
the faster it will happen.

As this becomes a mainstream phenomenon,
...
humanity will relate to the world in wiser,
more compassionate ways.

-

A Singularity in Time; a chapter by Peter Russell
...from the book, "The Mystery of 2012."

-

Turduvadove

Barney Frank, The Daily Show, ... & Liberty

2008-03-24T00:09:00.000-07:00

New Cycles Will Begin

2008-03-10T19:00:00.006-07:00

A Tale of Two Transformations

“We are in the midst of a collective transformation,
at least at this level of perception,
although I don’t believe it’s the one the New Age and others
talk about.

I would suggest there are actually two ‘transformations’ and one is a fake designed to mislead us.

The year 2012 would appear very significant to the Illuminati and this is also the point at which the Mayan Calendar says there will be a transformation to a new world.

The ancient Mayans, in what is now Central America, developed their own measurement of time and observed repeating cycles that they detailed in the calendar.

They said that a Great Cycle began on August 11th, 3114 B.C. and would end on the winter solstice, December 21st, 2012, the point when a ‘Great, Great Cycle’ of 26,000 years would also
come to a conclusion.

It relates to the New Age belief about moving from the astrological Age of Pisces to the ‘enlightened’ Age of Aquarius.

This is the moment when new cycles will begin, it is said, and humanity will be infused with love and light.

A Mayan Calendar website summarized this basic theme:

‘There is no reason not to take a leap of faith into imagining what may be in store. We may trust that it is time for humanity to awaken in to a true partnership with each other, with the earth, and the Cosmos. By accepting this partnership we may claim our birthright and become Galactic Citizens who care for and sustain the planet, thus sustaining ourselves. This is clearly the challenge of our times. Yet, arriving just in time and on schedule is the Winter Solstice dawn on the day we may remember that we are truly Children of the World.’

At the risk of upsetting many in the New Age,
I say this is the fake transformation.

I have no problem with the fact that 2012 is
significant in Time Loop terms,
nor that the Mayans clearly had a remarkable grasp
on the planetary and cosmic cycles they related to time.

I just say they were measuring the computer program,
the cosmic planetarium,
and that the predicted transformation is as illusory
as the rest of this holographic reality.
It is another part of the DVD, another diversionary subplot.

There is no time.

And, anything that identifies with it is not a transformation to Oneness.

We are not ‘truly Children of the World’, we are truly Infinite Consciousness.
Identifying self with the ‘world’ is identifying with the Matrix.
It is a belief system that still relates to form,
with being ‘human’, ‘Galactic Citizens’,
and sustaining a holographic illusion we call ‘earth’.
Millions are caught by the Matrix in the fake transformation.
The Mayan Calendar is one example…”

(David Icke)

New Conclusions

2008-03-09T15:12:00.000-07:00

Most of you are creating your own reality by observing anything and everything that comes along, because most of you are not keenly aware that everything is about attraction.

There is no assertion.

Everything is about Law of Attraction, which means,
“Whatever I, as a perceiver, perceive, by my attention to it,
I am including it in my vibration.”

Everything is vibrating.
So when you observe it or remember it or ponder it or imagine it,
whenever you focus upon it, by your focused attention,
whatever its vibration is, becomes a part of your vibration.
And so, the more often you visit it,
the more a part of your habit of vibration it is.

Everything is vibrating and so, whenever you give attention to anything—it then becomes a part of your Vibration.

When you see something you want, by your attention to it, you are including it and inviting it.
When you see something you don’t want, by your attention to it, you are including it and inviting it.
So the key is to examine with an eye to choosing what you do want.

Little by little, be one who consistently finds what is most pleasing,
to be most familiar, to you.
Make a decision that nothing is more important than the way you feel,
since the way you feel is the indicator of what you are including in your vibration.

You have creative control.
When you begin to notice the correlation between what you’re thinking and what you are feeling,
and then what the consequential corresponding absolute matching manifestation is, then you finally get it that you do have control over your own experience.

There is nothing that we are wanting to guide you toward or away from.
It is not our job or anyone else’s to choose for you.
Our work, as we see it, is to assist you in understanding that you are Creators
and to help you in aligning your Energy
so that you may attract unto you anything that you choose,
and that it is not possible for you to choose outside of the realm
of that which is intended as you come forth.
You said, “Let’s go forth into this balanced environment,
bang around together,
come to eternally new conclusions,
and have a very good time in the process.

-Abraham-Hicks-

Sitting Pretty, Thinking Picky

2008-02-20T16:13:00.002-07:00

You're picky about the car you drive.

You're picky about what you wear.

You're picky about what you put in your mouth.

We want you to be pickier about what you think.

Abraham-Hicks

Alexx Calise

2008-02-20T16:05:00.001-07:00

Nature's Price

2008-02-20T15:57:00.003-07:00

Nature cannot be tricked or cheated.

She will give up to you the object of your struggles only after you have paid her price.

-
(Napoleon Hill)
-

-
painting by
Marc Moss
-

Sand Rubies are a band from Tucson, AZ

Year Long Disaster

2008-02-20T15:52:00.002-07:00

Reacting to You

2008-02-20T15:34:00.002-07:00

If you change the way
you look at things,
...
the things you look at change.

-Wayne W. Dyer-

Unconscious Ego Investments

2008-02-20T15:30:00.002-07:00

The problems of the mind cannot be solved on the level of the mind,
...
just as the study of madness isn't enough to create sanity.

The ego's needs are endless.

It feels vulnerable and threatened and so lives in a state of fear and want.

Once you know how the basic dysfunction operates,
there is no need to explore all its countless manifestations,
no need to make it into a complex personal problem.

The ego, of course, loves that.

It is always seeking for something to attach itself to in order to uphold and strengthen its illusory sense of self,
and it will readily attach itself to your problems.

This is why, for so many people,
a large part of their sense of self is intimately connected with their problems.

Once this has happened,
the last thing they want is to become free of them;
that would mean loss of self.

There can be a great deal of unconscious ego investment in pain and suffering.

...from the book, "The Power of NOW," by Eckhart Tolle

There is No Out There

2008-02-20T15:28:00.001-07:00

by Joe Vitale

Two years ago, I heard about a therapist in Hawaii who cured a complete ward of criminally insane patients--without ever seeing any of them. The psychologist would study an inmate's chart and then look within himself to see how he created that person's illness. As he improved himself, the patient improved.

When I first heard this story, I thought it was an urban legend. How could anyone heal anyone else by healing himself? How could even the best self-improvement master cure the criminally insane? It didn't make any sense. It wasn't logical, so I dismissed the story.

However, I heard it again a year later. I heard that the therapist had used a Hawaiian healing process called ho'oponopono. I had never heard of it, yet I couldn't let it leave my mind. If the story was at all true, I had to know more. I had always understood "total responsibility" to mean that I am responsible for what I think and do. Beyond that, it's out of my hands. I think that most people think of total responsibility that way. We're responsible for what we do, not what anyone else does--but that's wrong.

The Hawaiian therapist who healed those mentally ill people would teach me an advanced new perspective about total responsibility. His name is Dr. Ihaleakala Hew Len. We probably spent an hour talking on our first phone call. I asked him to tell me the complete story of his work as a therapist.

He explained that he worked at Hawaii State Hospital for four years. That ward where they kept the criminally insane was dangerous. Psychologists quit on a monthly basis. The staff called in sick a lot or simply quit. People would walk through that ward with their backs against the wall, afraid of being attacked by patients. It was not a pleasant place to live, work, or visit.

Dr. Len told me that he never saw patients. He agreed to have an office and to review their files. While he looked at those files, he would work on himself. As he worked on himself, patients began to heal. "'After a few months, patients that had to be shackled were being allowed to walk freely,' he told me. 'Others who had to be heavily medicated were getting off their medications. And those who had no chance of ever being released were being freed.' I was in awe. 'Not only that,' he went on, 'but the staff began to enjoy coming to work.Absenteeism and turnover disappeared. We ended up with more staff than we needed because patients were being released, and all the staff was showing up to work. Today, that ward is closed.'

This is where I had to ask the million dollar question: 'What were you doing within yourself that caused those people to change?'

'I was simply healing the part of me that created them,' he said. I didn't understand. Dr. Len explained that total responsibility for your life means that everything in your life - simply because it is in your life -- is your responsibility. In a literal sense the entire world is your creation.

Whew. This is tough to swallow. Being responsible for what I say or do is one thing. Being responsible for what everyone in my life says or does is quite another.

Yet, the truth is this: if you take complete responsibility for your life, then everything you see, hear, taste, touch, or in any way experience is your responsibility because it is in your life. This means that terrorist activity, the president, the economy or anything you experience and don't like--is up for you to heal. They don't exist, in a manner of speaking, except as projections from inside you.

The problem isn't with them, it's with you, and to change them, you have to change you. "I know this is tough to grasp, let alone accept or actually live. Blame is far easier than total responsibility, but as I spoke with Dr. Len, I began to realize that healing for him and in ho 'oponopono means loving yourself.

If you want to improve your life, you have to heal your life. If you want to cure anyone, even a mentally ill criminal you do it by healing you. I asked Dr. Len how he went about healing himself. What was he doing, exactly, when he looked at those patients' files?

'"I just kept saying, 'I'm sorry' and 'I love you' over and over again," he explained. "That's it?" That's it.

Turns out that loving yourself is the greatest way to improve yourself, and as you improve yourself, you improve your world. Let me give you a quick example of how this works: one day, someone sent me an email that upset me. In the past I would have handled it by working on my emotional hot buttons or by trying to reason with the person who sent the nasty message.

This time, I decided to try Dr. Len's method. I kept silently saying, 'I'm sorry' and 'I love you,' I didn't say it to anyone in particular. I was simply evoking the spirit of love to heal within me what was creating the outer circumstance. Within an hour I got an e-mail from the same person. He apologized for his previous message. Keep in mind that I didn't take any outward action to get that apology. I didn't even write him back. Yet, by saying 'I love you,' I somehow healed within me what was creating him.

I later attended a ho 'oponopono workshop run by Dr. Len. He's now 70 years old, considered a grandfatherly shaman, and is somewhat reclusive. He praised my book, The Attractor Factor. He told me that as I improve myself, my book's vibration will raise, and everyone will feel it when they read it. In short, as I improve, my readers will improve. "What about the books that are already sold and out there?" I asked. "'They aren't out there," he explained, once again blowing my mind with his mystic wisdom. "They are still in you".

In short, there is no out there. It would take a whole book to explain this advanced technique with the depth it deserves. Suffice It to say that whenever you want to improve anything in your life, there's only one place to look: inside you. When you look, do it with love.

“Forgiveness is the fragrance left by the violet on the heel that crushed it.” ... Mark Twain

Changing Things for the Better

2008-02-20T15:24:00.000-07:00

You cannot change things
for the better
by acknowledging things
that need to be changed.

You only change things
for the better
when you turn your attention
to what feels better to you
in the attention of it.

Abraham-Hicks

Guitar Speed Lesson

2008-02-13T23:09:00.001-07:00

Have You Been High Today?

2008-02-13T22:59:00.001-07:00

Positive Ralph

2008-02-13T22:57:00.000-07:00

A Piece of Britney

2008-02-13T22:46:00.001-07:00

Amen Kid Rock

2008-01-30T11:01:00.000-07:00

Microtrends

2007-12-31T01:01:00.000-07:00

-

In 1960, Volkswagen shook up the car world with a full-page ad
that had just two words on it: Think Small.

It was a revolutionary idea
-- a call for the shrinking of perspective, ambition, and scale
in an era
when success was all about accumulation and territorial gain,
even when you were just driving down the street.

At the same time, as America was becoming the world’s superpower,
growing the dominant economy and setting the pace for global markets,
the Beetle took off as a counter-culture rockstar –
representing exploding individuality
in reaction to the conformity of the 1950s.

America never quite got used to small when it came to cars.
But ask two-thirds of America,
and they will tell you they work for small business.

Americans overwhelmingly favor small, reasonable ideas
over big, grandiose schemes.

And they yearn for the lifestyles of small-town America.

Many of the biggest movements in America today are small
-- often hidden for but a few to see.

Microtrends is based on the idea
that the most powerful forces in our society
are the emerging, counterintuitive trends
that are shaping tomorrow right before us.

...

The power of individual choice has never been greater,
and the reasons and patterns for those choices
never harder to understand and analyze.

The skill of microtargeting
– identifying small, intense subgroups
and communicating with them
about their individual needs and wants
-- has never been more critical
in marketing or in political campaigns.

The one-size-fits-all approach to the world is dead.

Thirty years ago sitting in Harvard’s Lamont Library,
I read a book that started out,
“The perverse and unorthodox thesis of this little book
is that the voters are not fools.”

Its author, V. O. Key, Jr., made an argument
that since that day has guided how I think
not just about voters,
but consumers,
corporations,
governments,
and the world at large.

If you use the right tools and look at the facts,
it turns out that the average Joe is pretty smart,
and making very rational choices.

Yet almost every day,
I hear experts say
that voters and consumers
are misguided scatterbrains,
making decisions
on the basis of the color of a tie.

That’s why politicians pay consultants
to tell them
to wear earth-tone suits.

That’s why many commercials feature pointless stories
with no relation to the products.

Too often, candidates and marketers don’t believe
the facts or the issues matter that much.

Oftentimes, it is they who are the fools.

...One could reasonably estimate that
2/3 of all communications
are wasted
with messages and images
that only their creators understood.

...The perspective I'm presenting is that
thirty years later,
V. O. Key, Jr.’s observation
is not only sound,
but should be the guiding principle
of understanding the trends
we see in America and around the world.

People have never been more sophisticated,
more individualistic,
or more knowledgeable
about the choices they make in their daily lives.

Yet, as Key observed, it takes intensive, scientific study
to find the logical patterns that underlie those choices.

When faced with people’s seemingly contradictory choices,
it can be a lot easier to chalk them up to brown suits and Botox.

And indeed, the contradictions today are striking.

While people are eating more healthy foods than ever,
Big Mac sales have never been higher.

While Fox News is number one in the ratings,
the antiwar movement dominates most news coverage.

While America is growing older,
most of what we see in advertising and entertainment
has been created with youth in mind.

While people are dating as never before,
they have never been more interested
in deeper, longer-lasting relationships.

While more people than ever before
are drinking clear, natural water,
more people are also drinking “monster” energy drinks
loaded with chemicals and caffeine.

In fact, the whole idea that there are a few huge trends
which determine how America and the world work
is breaking down.

There are no longer a couple of megaforces sweeping us all along.

Instead, America and the world
are being pulled apart
by an intricate maze of choices,
accumulating in “microtrends”
– small, under-the-radar forces
that can involve as little as 1 percent
of the population,
but which are powerfully shaping our society.

It’s not just that small is the new big.

It’s that in order to truly know
what’s going on,
we need better tools
than just the naked eye
and an eloquent tongue.

We need the equivalent of magnifying glasses and microscopes,
which in sociological terms are polls, surveys, and statistics.

They take a slice of the matter being studied
and lay it open
-- bigger and clearer --
for examination.

And inside, you will find yourself,
your friends,
your clients,
your customers,
and your competition
clearer than you ever thought you might.

Working for President Bill Clinton in 1996,
I identified the under-the-radar group
that became known as the Soccer Moms.

(I like to think I did something for the youth soccer movement,
although I really didn’t mean to.

The phrase was just meant to get at
busy suburban women
devoted to their jobs and their kids,
who had real concerns about real presidential policies.)

Until that campaign, it was generally thought
that politics was dominated by men,
who decided how their households would vote.

But the truth was, in 1996, most male voters
had already made up their minds by the campaign.

The people left to influence
were the new group of independent Moms,
devoted to both work and their kids,
who had not yet firmly decided
which party would be good
for their families.

They, not their husbands, were the critical swing voters.

To win them over, President Clinton initiated a campaign
to give them a helping hand in raising their kids
– drug-testing in schools,
measures against teen-smoking,
limits on violence in the media,
and school uniforms.

These Moms did not want more government in their lives,
but they were quite happy to have
a little more government in their kids’ lives
to keep them on the straight and narrow.

In retrospect, a profound political change was spawned
by this bit of trend-spotting.

Previously, almost all Democrats had targeted downscale, noncollege workers,
particularly in the manufacturing sector.

But union membership and manufacturing jobs were shrinking,
more people were going to college,
and almost the entire electorate in the U.S.
was calling itself middle-class.

If Democrats missed the key trends, they would miss the boat.

Now candidates enthusiastically target Soccer Moms
– although someone may want to let them know that trends move fast,
and Soccer Moms, too, have moved on.

Now, a decade later, their kids are getting ready for college,
many of them have been through a divorce,
and their own financial security
has become as big an issue for them
as raising their children was ten years ago.

And with all of the attention being paid to those Moms,
Dads – suburban-based, family-focused, office-park-working Dads
– are all but neglected in politics, advertising and the media.

In the twenty-first century, Dads spend more time with their children
than ever in history.

Has Madison Avenue adjusted?
Are Dads ever the target of back-to-school campaigns?

There could be as big a shift ahead in marketing
as 1996 saw in Democratic politics.

The art of trend-spotting, through polls,
is to find groups that are pursuing common activities and desires,
and that have either started to come together or can be brought together
by the right appeal that crystallizes their needs
.

Soccer Moms had been there for a decade or more
– but they became a political class
only when they were recognized
as a remarkably powerful voting bloc in America.

Today, changing lifestyles, the Internet,
the balkanization of communications,
and the global economy
are all coming together
to create a new sense of individualism
that is powerfully transforming our society.

The world may be getting flatter, in terms of globalization,
but it is occupied by 6 billion little bumps
who do not have to follow the herd to be heard.

No matter how offbeat their choices,
they can now find 100,000 people or more
who share their taste for deep-fried yak on a stick.

In fact, by the time a trend hits 1 percent,
it is ready to spawn a hit movie, best-selling book,
or new political movement.

The power of individual choice is increasingly influencing politics,
religion, entertainment, and even war.

In today’s mass societies, it takes only 1 percent of people
making a dedicated choice -- contrary to the mainstream’s choice
-- to create a movement that can change the world.

Just look at what has happened in the U.S. to illegal immigrants.

A few years ago, they were the forgotten Americans,
hiding from daylight and the authorities.

Today they are holding political rallies,
and given where they and their legal, voting relatives live,
they may turn out to be the new Soccer Moms.

Militant immigrants fed up with a broken immigration system
just may be
the most important voters
in the next presidential election,
distributed in the key Southwest states
that are becoming the new battleground areas.

It’s the same in business, too,
since the Internet has made it so easy to
link people together.

In the past, it was almost impossible
to market to small groups
who were spread around the country.

Now it’s a virtual piece of cake
to find 1 million people
who want to try your grapefruit diet,
or who can’t get their kids to sleep at night.

...

This is the power of small groups that come together today.

The power of choice is especially evident
as more and more Americans
make decisions about their own lives.

For example, the population growth in America
has slowed to .9 percent,
but the number of households has exploded.

Between people getting divorced,
staying single longer, living longer,
and never marrying at all,
we are experiencing an explosion
in the number of people
who are heads of households
– almost 115 million in 2006
compared to about 80 million in 1980.

The percentage of households consisting of one person living alone
increased from 17 percent in 1970 to 26 percent in 2005.

The proportion of married-with-kids households
has fallen to less than 25 percent.

All these people out there living a more single, independent life
are slivering America into hundreds of small niches.

Single people, and people without kids at home,
have more time to follow their interests,
pick up hobbies, get on the Internet,
have a political debate, or go out to movies.

By all rights, no one should even go to the movies anymore
– you can get movies practically as fast by downloading them
or using pay-per-view
– but for people with a free Saturday night,
movies are such a solid preference
that theaters are raising their prices,
not lowering them.

More people have more disposable resources
(including money, time, and energy)
than ever before.

They are deploying them in pursuit of personal satisfaction
like never before.

And as a result, we’re getting a clearer picture
of who people are and what they want.

And in business, politics, and social-problem-solving,
having that information can make all the difference.

...I am talking about the niching of America..
...And how there is no One America anymore,
or Two, or Three, or Eight.

In fact, there are hundreds of Americas,
hundreds of new niches made up of people
drawn together by common interests.

Nor is niching just confined to America.

It is a global phenomenon
that is making it extremely difficult
to unify people in the twenty-first century.

Just when we thought that, thanks to the Internet,
the world would be not only connected
but ultimately unified around shared values
favoring democracy, peace, and security,
exactly the opposite is happening.

We are flying apart at a record pace.

I recently went bowling
and, contrary to another popular but misguided idea,
no one was there alone.

But actually, the people hurling the balls down the lanes
weren’t the clichéd potbellied, beer-drinking bowlers, either.

In fact, there appeared to be no similarity at all from one group to another.

In one lane was a family of Indian immigrants, including the grandparents.

In another lane was a black Mom with two adolescent kids.

In a third lane were four white teens, some with tattoos, some with polo shirts.

And two lanes down, a Spanish-speaking man and woman
were clearly on a bowling date, smooching between spares.

With the rise in freedom of choice has come a rise in individuality.

And with the rise of individuality has come a rise in the power of choice.

The more choices people have,
the more they segregate themselves
into smaller and smaller niches in society.

The Explosion of Choice

At the Boston Tea Party in 1773,
there was probably only one kind of tea hurled overboard
– English Breakfast.

Today, if Americans staged that rebellion,
there would be hundreds of different teas flying into the harbor,
from caffeine-free jasmine rose to Moroccan mint to sweet Thai delight.

You can’t even buy a potato chip anymore
without having to pick baked, fried, rippled, fat-reduced, salted, or flavored
– with flavor subcategories including barbecue, sweet potato,
onion and chive, and Monterey Pepper Jack.

We live in a world with a deluge of choices.

In almost every area of life,
Americans have wider freedom of choice today
than ever in history,
including new kinds of jobs,
new foods, new religions,
new technologies,
and new forms of communication and interaction.

In some sense, it’s the triumph of the Starbucks economy
over the Ford economy.

In the early 1900s, Henry Ford created the assembly line
so that mass consumerism could take place
-- uniformly.

Thousands of workers turned out one black car,
millions and millions of times.

Today, few products still exist like that.

(One that does, ironically, is the personal computer,
which has made it to every desk in every home
in essentially the same form.
There is some customization around the edges,
but if you go to a typical CompUSA to buy a computer,
you’ll have fewer options than you do
choosing lettuce in the supermarket.)

By contrast, Starbucks is governed by the idea that people make choices
– in their coffee, their milk, their sweetener –
and that the more choices people have,
the greater satisfaction they feel.

(And in just those simple choices,
you can see the unpredictability of the consumers
– some are avoiding caffeine, fat, or sugar,
and others are happily ordering them all.)

Starbucks is successful because it can be all things to all people
– it makes no bets on one set of choices over another.

Whereas in the Ford economy,
the masses were served by many people
working to make one, uniform product;
in the Starbucks economy,
the masses are served by a few people
working to make thousands of customized,
personalized products.

The Starbucks model seems to be winning.

iPods are popular not because we can carry around music
– we could do that with the WalkMan in the 1980s.
They are popular because they let us pick and choose our own songs.

Personal technology has become personalized technology,
and now we can have exactly what we want
in almost every consumer area.

You can even have a made-to-order car delivered
in less than a month
-- longer than it takes to get a pizza,
but still an amazing feat made possible by technology.

The triumph of personalization and choice
is a boon for coffee-drinkers and car-buyers,
but it’s a nightmare for trend-spotters.

As choices get more and more finely sliced,
you have to look all the harder to see how choices change.

...Realize that the best-selling car in America
is bought by barely 300,000 people.

Unlike any other time in history,
small trends can make a big difference.

So while it is harder than ever to spot trends,
it is also more important.

Small groups, drawn together by shared needs,
habits, and preferences,
are on the rise.

They are powerful, and they are hard to find.

...I'm going to pin some of them down.

The Power of Numbers

There have been some very good books in recent years
that claim that America is moving
in a couple of big directions.

... I contend the opposite.

America is moving in hundreds of small directions.
At once.
Quickly.

It’s part of our great energy and part of our looming challenge.
Because small trends pay very little deference to one another.

For every high-profile group of young, urban chic in America,
there is another group of older, old-fashioned churchgoers.

For every group of Gadget Geeks,
there are the people who say turn the technology off.

Americans are dieting more than ever,
but the steak houses have never been more full.

Politics is split to the extremes with “red states” and “blue states,”
but there have never been more voters who call themselves Independent.

For thirty years since reading V. O. Key,
I have used the most reliable device I know of to spot trends,
or the shifts and evolutions in these groups: numbers.

Americans claim to be a “gut” nation
– which is kind of a bodily metaphor
for what we roughly term our “values.”

How many times do you hear
that the right thing to do
is to follow your gut?

Most of the time, though, that advice is pretty lousy.

If you want the safest form of transportation, get on a plane;
don’t go near a car.

If you want to lose weight, count calories;
forget the cranberry juice and flax seed.

Numbers will almost always take you where you want to go
if you know how to read them.

In general we love numbers
– a hit TV show these days is even called “Numb3rs.”
But we also fear them.

In part because we’re less well-trained in math and science,
a fact which is exacerbated
by our culture placing more emphasis
on language and literature
than quantitative science.

As a country, we suspect we’re not that good at numbers.
They scare us, almost as much as public-speaking.

At the same time they fascinate us.

Many of us also have a healthy mistrust of numbers,
because some people, in an effort to advance an agenda, misuse them.

Do you remember the Y2K scare?

Every computer-user on earth worried that their files were in jeopardy
as the millennium turned over.

In fact, only one-third of the world’s computers
were ever even susceptible to Y2K errors
– and in those, hardly any problems materialized.

Or avian flu.

In late 2005, it sped around the world
that out of 140 or so human cases of avian flu
reported in Southeast Asia,
more than half had resulted in death.

Reporters somberly concluded
that the mortality rate for avian flu
is more than 50 percent.
Terrifying!

But in fact the sample those numbers came from
was only the very sickest people.
People who contracted the flu and never went to the hospital
never even made it into the calculations.

I call these reported numbers “scarestistics.”

My job, in thirty years as a pollster,
has been to separate the wheat from the chaff
when it comes to numbers.

In working for different kinds of clients,
from Bill Clinton to Bill Gates to Tony Blair,
I have learned to pierce through remarkably stubborn conventional wisdom,
finding counterintuitive trends in society
that can help solve substantial challenges.

Imagine for a moment that you are a powerful leader.

Eloquent advocates tug at you every day,
and the press gives you its opinions.
Your advisers chime in.

It becomes hard to make the right choice
unless you also have the missing ingredient
– the numbers.

My job was to wade through all the opinions
and offer a solid, quantitative view of reality
based on the numbers, so that leaders had a true picture
when they made their decisions.

In my view, words without numbers
are as meaningless as numbers without words
– you need the right balance,
so that eloquent arguments are backed up
by reality as depicted by numbers.

...

In my role as pollster and strategist,
I have helped generate winning counterintuitive strategies
that follow the numbers.

Going after the Soccer Moms in 1996.

Helping soon-to-be Senator Hillary Clinton in 2000
look for votes in upstate New York,
where Democrats had not traditionally found many.

Breaking the mold on advertising for companies
by having them pitch their ads to older people,
not young ones.

Advising the winners of fifteen foreign presidential elections
in languages I could not even pronounce,
let alone understand,
because I stuck to the numbers
and not local biases
.

Often, people are just too close to the situation
to see the real facts
– and it takes an objective look
to tell them what is really going on.

Leaders can be even more isolated,
often the captive of their staffs,
hearing only what local journalists say what is going on.

Numbers can cut to the chase in any language.

...

Rarely are things what they seem on the surface,
and nonquantitative, conventional wisdom
is usually not wisdom at all.

Hidden right in front of us
are powerful counterintuitive trends
that can be used to drive a new business,
run a campaign,
start a movement,
or guide your investment strategy.

Even though they are staring us in the face,
we often don’t really see them.

Trend Spotters in Context

I am part of a proud line of trend-spotters.

Alvin Toffler, who wrote the Future Shock series,
and John Naisbitt, who wrote Megatrends,
were some of the first thinkers in the modern era
to look at the huge, changing world of human behavior
and try to make sense of it
with facts and data.

They got it right
that the Information Age
would change everything.

But one thing in particular that it changed
was the nature of looking at trends themselves.

As we’ll see,...
you can’t understand the world anymore
only in terms of “megatrends,”
or universal experiences.

In today’s splintered society,
if you want to operate successfully,
you have to understand the intense identity groups
that are growing
and moving,
fast and furious in crisscrossing directions.

These are microtrends.

It is very different, however, from what most people do
when they “spot trends”
--which is itself a growing trend.

Lately there has been something of a cottage industry
of marketers and sociologists
who will tell you the Ten or Fifteen Things You Must Know
to get through the next two or five or ten years.

They define and refine the world around them
with ever cuter and cleverer names
for the consumer,
cultural,
and personal changes
going on in society.

...
A trend is not merely a “development,”
like the declining use of cash.

It is not simply a “shift” in how people do things,
like more women taking their husband’s name.

It is not just an evolving “preference” for a product or activity,
like the growing use of GPS systems.

A microtrend is an intense identity group that is growing,
and that has needs and wants
unmet by the current crop of companies,
marketers,
policymakers,
and others who would influence society’s behavior.

Diving in

In Microtrends,
we will look at 75 groups who
,
by virtue of their daily decisions,
are forging the shape of America and the world
both today and tomorrow.

While some groups are larger than others,
what they have in common is that they are relatively unseen
-- either because their actual numbers are small,
or because conventional wisdom hides their potential in the shadows,
sometimes even emphasizing their exact opposite.

In some of the groups, you will see yourself or your friends,
your clients or your constituents.

Some groups will seem wildly remote.
Some funny. Others tragic.

Occasionally, I have documented diametrically opposing trends.

Taken together, they are a kind of impressionist painting of America
and the world.

At the end, we’ll take a step back
and look at the portrait.

No longer the sum of a few master strokes,
America and the world
are now a collection of fine dots,
to be examined one by one.

We’ll see what image emerges at the end, and what it means for our future.

-

...from the book, "Microtrends," by Mark J. Penn

Girls Gone Weed

2007-12-27T22:50:00.001-07:00

An Observation From Tucson

2007-11-19T09:06:00.000-07:00

Well, things seem to be getting interesting,...

Kid Rock put out a classic album,...

The new album by
The New Westerns
finally arrived on my doorstep
a couple days ago, ...
(highly impressive stuff)

Wallace Wattles and Charles Haanel's writings have been republished,...
("The Science of Getting Rich" ... & ... "The Master Key System"),...

I survived to see 40,...

Joseph Stiglitz's book, "Making Globalization Work," came out in paperback, finally,...

I'm still waiting for Paul Krugman's new book, "The Conscience of a Liberal," to come out in paperback,... (I'm not a big fan of hard-cover books.)

Alice turned 41,...

The Sam Seder Show blog is alive and cranking,... (www.samsedershow.com)

Also,...radiofreedoghouse...is now in charge of the Canal sexy restaurant,... (where it all goes down in Scottsdale)

The Sand Rubies new album is coming out,...
(might have finally just come out)

The bootleg live CD from the reunited Van Halen,
with Diamond Dave,
...is really good,...

Thanks, Eric.
Thanks, Mike.

And, alas,...

I've a feeling,...

...

As the ground swells, there's a love in the air.

...

Yours truly,

Sir Real

The Shamanic Journey: Spirit Helpers

2007-10-16T00:12:00.000-07:00

Cross-culturally, there is a common belief in spiritual help that is witnessed as an intervention from a non-physical realm into the physical realm that transcends, changes, or heals. This non-physical realm is where the spirits dwell.

I was taught that the Lakota people believe there are 405 helping spirits that you are born with that are literally assigned to you: A small army of helpers whose main function is to be of service to you and your human experience. You may choose to use this help throughout your life, or not. There is no judgment if you don't. But why wouldn't you? Whether it's 405 or 1, their help can bring sensational results---magical, miraculous, profound, guiding, transformative, informative, and fun.

You can use your spirit helpers for minor things or gain insight and direction for the major decisions of your life. You can heal yourself and your loved ones. You can learn to direct energy in such a way that you can change the past and look into the future. The non-physical doesn't follow the same physical laws that you have been taught. There are no limits to this realm except those from your own perspective.

One of the most effective ways to access help from the spirit helpers is the shamanic journey. The shamanic journey is filled with mystery, and despite its ancient history, is little understood in Western culture. The altered state of consciousness achieved in a journey allows you to transcend the limitations of the rational world and connect with a non-ordinary reality. The shamanic journey is common to all cultures (even European) and the nature of the journey is remarkably similar, even in cultures widely separated by era and geography. In the spirit world, both time and place are illusions. The lessons from the other worlds are universally true, drawing from a collective consciousness that is accessible to all.

Learning how to journey successfully takes time and practice. Journeying requires you to tune in to all of your senses. It is vital to activate as many of the senses as possible to stimulate your powers of observation beyond the visual. Many people depend too much on the visual in journeying, and fail to access the total information contained in the journey. Often, the information will come through a sense of "knowingness," a kind of sixth sense that is beyond seeing or any of the other single senses.

To practice stimulating your senses, try this simple exercise:

Close your eyes and imagine a red rubber ball. Bounce the ball and hear its bounce. Throw the ball up against the wall. Squeeze the ball; feel its texture. Bring the ball up to your nose and smell it. Stick your tongue out and taste it.

Now open your eyes. Could you see the ball? Could you hear the ball and notice the difference in sound qualities from bouncing the ball close to your feet and throwing it against a distant wall? Could you feel the elasticity of the ball and its texture? Could you smell it and taste it? Notice which of your senses was the strongest. If you close your eyes and it is totally black, then tune into your knowingness and "see" with that sense. Many people have absolutely no visual sense in a journey, yet the detail of the journey is exceptional.

This exercise will help you become more attuned to your senses and discover which ones are more vivid for you. The goal of the ball exercise is to literally activate your senses to a reality (the ball) that is not currently in your ordinary reality. In a journey, you will do the same thing. Through your senses you will activate a non-ordinary reality and journey through a place unfamiliar to your ordinary reality.

I have taught several hundreds of people how to journey, most with remarkable success. The journey method empowers and enriches their lives. They develop a modality through journeying that is useful to everyday life. They can reach and communicate with their spirit helpers in a constructive and accurate way.

Remember that your spirit helpers and power animals are magical and they can do anything, they do not follow physical law. Birds can swim under water, whales can fly, and tigers can talk. They are your protectors and guardians. They do not lie, that is only a human trait-you can trust them.

Each journey will be different; some will be more powerfully realized than others. There is much to learn about the spiritual realm. In each journey I gather information concerning my intention, but I also listen openly for what the spirits may want to tell me. I have found the shamanic journey to be one of my most profound ways of connecting with the spirits and one of the richest sources of understanding and awareness. It has literally healed me and keeps my mind curious and reaching.

To me, imagination is the gateway into the spiritual realm. It is not the spiritual realm; the spiritual realm is real, not imaginary. However, imagination can be used as the way in to the realm.

Imagination is a tool that we are given as children, but often forget how to use. Children usually have a profound awareness of the spiritual realm; they have wonderful vivid imaginations, and many have imaginary friends. Children become completely entranced with other realities; they easily talk to trees, sing to flowers, see magical kingdoms in sparkling sand, and physically "see" spirits. Kids see and communicate with spirit beings quite naturally.

Unfortunately, these fabulous encounters with the spirit realm are categorized as imaginations and are often stifled as children grow up and conform to society. Family, school, church, and other external forces of the culture shape their beliefs and responses. Mothers lovingly but with authority, say, "Now honey, you should not lie. There really is not anyone sitting next to you. Rocks do not have mouths and they cannot really talk." The fabulous, magical, fun, mystical connections are lost or blocked. What the spirits have taught me about imagination is that it is actually a gift from Spirit, it is how we as humans create and that Spirit is providing us with an avenue to creation and connection that our psyche will accept.

Imagination connects you back into the magical, mystical worlds of Spirit you once knew as a child. When I work with people in journeying they will often say, "I feel like I am making the whole thing up, like it is just my imagination."

And I say, "Good." Trust it and let's see what happens.

Imagination is the portal in. It gives permission to the psyche (your limited mind) to experience something that is out of the realm of what you would call an ordinary experience, or real. Because of conditioning, you are extremely limited by your own perception of what you define as real. If the imagination can travel further into the realm of the unknown than your belief system allows, then by all means travel on the imagination. What you will find is that you are not making it up at all. The spirits are alive and well, existing in other realities that you probably cannot see with your physical eyes, but are real just the same. The imagination provides the avenue to get there.

So use your imagination, develop it, and allow it to expand, create, grow, and become. Open the door and get out of the box that society has placed around you. You will find that the shamanic journey and your spirit helpers continually provide you with ideas, information, possibilities, and potentials for your own growth and development.

Article Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/self-improvement-articles/the-shamanic-journey-spirit-helpers-228309.html

About the Author:
Jan Engels-Smith promotes self-healing, empowerment, better communities, a healthy world and conducts workshops in shamanism & journeying.
Her book, Becoming Yourself is at http://www.lightsong.net/

-
White Light Black Light

Thanks Alice.

Harmlessly Simple Molehills

2007-10-14T13:43:00.000-07:00

The Ten Commandments
of
Goal Setting

1. Conceive it, believe it and achieve it.
2. Make the goal specific.
3. List your goal activities. (Every goal has three parts.)

1. Main Goal
A. Subgoal
1. Minigoal
2. Minigoal

B. Subgoal
3. Minigoal
4. Minigoal

When you start working on the goal, you start at the bottom and work your way up.

4. Establish the order (in which subgoals will be worked on).

5. What resources do you need?
Know what the goal is going to cost you in terms of time and money.

6. Give yourself a deadline.
Decide when you’d like each subgoal to be completed and jot down the dates.
Then, starting at the bottom of your outline, assign completion dates to each minigoal.

7. Use a handy form.

Example: GOAL: Finish the basement.
Subgoal: Plan the layout.

Minigoals ... Completion ... Resources
Date ... Time ... Money

Call bldg. inspector to find out codes ... 5-19 ... 15 min.
Sketch rough layout ... 5-25 ... 3 days
Buy new tape measure ... 5-25 ... $5.95
Plan wiring layout ... 5-30 ... 2 hours
City Hall-bldg. permit ... 6-1 ... 1 hour ... $50.00

Subgoal Totals: 6-1 ... 3 days, 3.25 hours ... $55.95

8. Be flexible. Sometimes things beyond your control can affect your program.
9. Be enthusiastic. Enthusiasm releases energy.
10. Reward yourself. Be proud of every little accomplishment.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Re: Eliminating Clutter… Use 4 containers. Label them.
Give Away … Put Away … I Don’t Know … Trash

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

...from the book, "Confessions of a Happily Organized Family," by Deniece Schofield.

My Little Protein Princess

2007-10-14T00:36:00.003-07:00

-

The essence of Venus.

She really loves to
drink from my penis.

Protein for my princess.

Face cream for my
dairy queen.

Semen drips from her lips,
chin, tits & fingertips.

She spit shines clean
my THICK 13.

Said she wanted some HOt white cum
and she got her some.

-

For Extended Dance Mix Version,
-
Click HERE

The Thought That Feels Better

2007-09-15T12:24:00.001-07:00

Don't do anything that
you don't really want to do.

Keep yourself
in a place
of feeling good.

Reach for the thought
that feels better
...
-- and watch
what happens.

Abraham-Hicks

The Seed of an Equivalent Benefit

2007-09-15T11:40:00.001-07:00

How Do U Want It?

2007-09-05T23:53:00.001-07:00

The Bigger Picture

2007-09-01T09:51:00.000-07:00

Your desires are eternally yours,
and they will come to you at the very best time.

You can influence the very best time
by saying things like,
"The Universe knows the bigger picture."

"I'm going to let it deal with the timing of this.
Meanwhile, I'll just do everything I can
to keep moving happily along."

Abraham-Hicks

What We Did Last Summer

2007-08-23T12:00:00.001-07:00

Kudlow Gets Hit Crying Over Wingnut Welfare For Wall Street

2007-08-17T23:32:00.000-07:00

Click link above to watch video.

Hardy: Corporate Welfare.

... When it comes to working people the government should get out of the way, but when it comes to the Wall Street people they should be the love monkeys…

Quentin Hardy, Forbes Silicon Valley, calling so called free market capitalist Kudlow on his hypocrisy in demanding a federal government bailout in the current credit/mortgage crisis essentially saying that when millionaires get in trouble it’s time for the government to help.

The look on Kudlow’s face was priceless and he had absolutely no reply.

The government should only help out the rich and powerful—that’s the Kudlow way…

http://www.crooksandliars.com/2007/08/17/kudlow-gets-hit-crying-over-wingnut-welfare-for-wall-street/

Too Busy For Sex?

2007-08-13T18:10:00.001-07:00

Friday June 22, 2007
The Guardian

Fear not! The latest clutch of sex guides are full of advice for people with no time to Do It. But who has the time to even read about sex these days? To save you the trouble, Lucy Mangan sifts through Mating in Captivity et al for some top tips.

The Kama Sutra could blithely assume a readership with sufficient time and resources to allow installation of the rope-and-pulley system required to lower a woman into the Crippled Starfish on a Spike position. But times have, alas, changed. The latest fashion in publishing, spreading faster than chlamydia at a mixed comprehensive, is for sex manuals aimed at people who don't have time to Do It any more.

According to the likes of Urban Tantra, Mating in Captivity and Quickies: Sex for Busy People, the pressures of modern living are taking their toll on our willingness and ability to bump uglies, and we need to find new ways to combat our sexual anomie. But of course, who has time to read an entire book to find out how? Fortunately, the Guardian can offer you 10 top tips, distilled from the latest publications.

1. Embrace technology.

Mobile phones and email can alienate us from each other in a manner wholly antithetical to eroticism, or they can be pressed into useful sexual service. Tracey Cox's Quickies advocates sx txtng yr lvr throughout the day so that by the time you fall through the door, you are a panting, lubricious heap of pulsating desire. Remember, however, that sex texting only works if your abbreviations remain comprehensible throughout. Nothing kills the erotic mood like having to request clarification ("Darling, do you mean you want me to do this once a year or an ... I see.") or call colleagues over to decipher "I wnt 2 pt yr flm n my dblbg".

And don't ignore the possibilities offered by more primitive technology either. According to the photo on page 39, you can still have fun utilising the relatively low-concept wheelbarrow and a set of wedge heels. Don't, however, run away from the spiritual aspect of sex. Esther Perel's Mating in Captivity has much sensible advice on creating intimacy and reconnecting with your partner, but for a more direct connection, look to Barbara Carrellas's words in Urban Tantra on gently awakening your "chakras". Particularly Muladhara, located between the anus and the genitals. If you've found that, I would say that reconnection has occurred on a grand scale.

2. Embrace a philosophical approach.

Recognise that love is an elevated state of being that promises that "with you and through you I will become that which I long to be". According to Perel, a New York couples and family therapist, remembering this can help to recapture the essence of the relationship. The author of Quickies, on the other hand, is a disciple of mind-body dualism, though admittedly Descartes himself might have some trouble reconciling the demands of "You might not feel like frequent sex, but your body sure as hell does!" in practice.

3. Embrace a different perspective.

Either by entangling yourself in the Split the Whisker, Crouching Tiger or Staging Post positions recommended by psychologist (and woman presumably blessed with a preternaturally robust lumbar region) Dr Pam Spurr in Sensational Sex, or by buying Rubess and Moerbeek's Pop-Up Book of Sex, which does exactly what it says on the tin.

4. The non-talking cure.

Talking, all the authors agree, is good. Or, as Mating in Captivity puts it: "Open and honest dialogue provides the resources necessary to meet the demands of modern relationships." But too much talking, the authors also agree, is bad: partly because "the capacity to express feelings is not a prized attribute in the making of manhood", so men suffer from "a chronic intimacy deficiency that needs ongoing repair" that leaves their ladyfriends feeling uncherished; and partly because - well, who wants to listen to anyone yammering on all bloody day?

The power of eye contact is lauded by everyone, but once again, Urban Tantra takes a basic principle and buffs it up until it can take its place in the Museum of Borderline Insanity with the exhortation to look only in your lover's non-dominant eye, because this is the gateway to the soul. "You don't have to worry about accidentally glimpsing their soul without their permission or allowing the unintentional access to yours," the author adds kindly. "The gateway stays firmly shut unless you really want to open it up." Sex doesn't come much safer than that.

5. Location, location, location.

Head to the countryside, says Quickies, and have lots of sex in barns and stables that throb with Lawrentian promise. Of course, the property market being what it is, next time you look up from fellating your horny-handed son of toil, you'll probably find an 18-flat conversion has been built over your activities.

You could, alternatively, move to Australia. It worked for our Barbara: "I began using several of my favourite tantric techniques to circulate sexual energy between me and Sydney. Before I knew it, a little blissgasm shivered up my spine, followed by an actual clitoral orgasm ... I was so amazed, I had to stop and lean against a wall." The tantric beginner is advised to start off slowly, perhaps with a short walk through Filey and a good cough.

6. The kids aren't all right.

Get rid of them, says Mating in Captivity. Put them into care, boarding school or a cupboard, but get rid of them. "Happy parents mean happy kids means you shouldn't feel the slightest bit guilty for stealing frequent 'Mummy Daddy alone' moments," says Cox, proving that deathless prose need be no barrier to arousal provided you shove it in between lots of pictures of pouting women in nice knickers and vest tops.

7. Take your ideology and shove it.

Everything western society tells you is wrong. Take the traditional norms - "the cultural mandate of self reliance", consumerism, "open and honest communication", individualism, democracy, personal autonomy, egalitarianism - and smash them to pieces. They are all anathema to good sex, which for reasons best known to our deepest, most primitive brain centres, depends on large doses of secrecy, power imbalances and vulnerability for its success. You don't like it, I don't like it, and neither do any of the authors, but our nether regions do, so tough. Bring out the gimp.

8. Be practical.

Everyone is very insistent that you keep your sex toys clean, your fingernails filed and your condoms in date. But don't forget other helpful hints, ie: "Keep the ends of cotton clothesline rope from fraying by dipping in glue or nail polish, or wrapping with duct tape or twine." (The Big Bang) and "Leave tubes of lubricant in secret hiding places (the side of the sofa, the glovebox of the car, in the office). You can also buy little sachets of travel-size lubricant to carry with you, for whenever and wherever." (Quickies)

9. Role play.

Loosens inhibitions, adds excitement. The pretend forbidden fruit (be it delivery men, nuns, nannies, celebrities) can be almost as good as the real thing. All the authors, however, neglect to mention the number one fantasy of all women - hot monkey sex with someone who can close a door quietly and not smash the toilet seat into the cistern every time he lifts it as if it has done him some great personal wrong, thus calling into question the validity of the entire canon.

10. Be guided by your star sign.

If, say, you are role playing being a pair of total idiots, why not believe that you can restore your libido by having sex according to your innate zodiacal needs? You will require a copy of Sextrology: the Astrology of Sex and the Sexes and a pre-frontal lobotomy. Enjoy.

No One Knows Where Anything Is

2007-08-13T13:05:00.000-07:00

by
Alan
Farago

Used to be, when you bought a home your mortgage was owned by a local bank.

They were called savings and loans.

The bank held the loan until maturity.
Maybe you did or maybe you didn’t know the loan officer.

In time, the local savings and loan became a branch office of a bigger bank. But they held your mortgage. You knew where it was, and it was a plain vanilla matter knowing the return to expect if you invested in a share of a savings and loan.

By charter, savings and loans were conservative institutions. That is because real estate, traditionally, is a conservative investment. “Real”, as in tangible. “estate”, as in property.

In the past decade, Congress and Wall Street benefactors turned everything inside out: it was no longer enough for real estate to represent the most significant asset in most people’s lives.

Under loosened regulatory controls and the intent of “diversifying risk”, the Federal Reserve allowed credit to proliferate the way a genie conjures smoke from a bottle. Today your home mortgage is a data point to investors in mortgage backed securities or the synthetic instruments derived thereof.

The investors—who could be from Kalamazoo or Katmandu—have only a semi-tangible link to you: a rating agency.

Who knew the mortgage you owe disappeared into the ether of financial derivatives?
...

Who are these investors?

No one knows. Is the landscape we live in, meant to serve foreign governments, or wealthy investors, or pension funds or insurance companies’ tolerance for risk?

...

Does anyone know where anything is?

...

Here’s the part that is the new epiphany: the financial press is as bewildered as anyone else about the phenomenon now called the “subprime mortgage meltdown”.

...

The nature of the credit crisis is hard to grasp precisely because no one knows who owns the debt on the secondary market for residential mortgage backed securities, CDO’s, and other financial derivatives with names that could mean anything.

Today, we are hearing words of reassurance from the titans of Wall Street.
This too shall pass.

To me, the Wall Street titans seem like synchronized swimmers, the dancers you see in the swimming pool in the Summer Olympics: heads all moving in unison, arms lifting out of the water with the grace of birds while underneath their legs churn like madmen.

So far it’s an impressive performance, depending on your point of view.

http://alanfarago.wordpress.com/2007/08/08/counterpunch-no-one-knows-where-anything-is/

Law of Deliberate Creation

2007-08-08T12:14:00.000-07:00

2007-07-16T10:45:00.000-07:00

Never Mind Reality

2007-06-24T22:45:00.001-07:00

Metabolism is vibrational response
to your moment in time.

Metabolism is the way the Energy
is moving through your body.

And so, everything is in response
to the way you feel
--everything is.

Everything is mind over matter.

Every disease is mental first.

Everything is about thought.

Everything is about vibration.

Everything is about the way you feel.

Practice scenarios that feel good
--and never mind reality.

Reality is only a brief moment in time that you keep repeating.

-Abraham-Hicks-

Triumph the Insult Comic Dog: "I Keed"

2007-06-13T23:48:00.001-07:00

Yes Yes

2007-06-09T10:51:00.000-07:00

when God created love he didn't help most

when God created dogs He didn't help dogs

when God created plants that was average

when God created hate we had a standard utility

when God created me He created me

when God created the monkey He was asleep

when He created the giraffe He was drunk

when He created narcotics He was high

and when He created suicide He was low

when He created you lying in bed

He knew what He was doing

He was drunk and He was high

and He created the mountains and the sea and fire at the same time

He made some mistakes

but when He created you lying in bed

He came all over His Blessed Universe.

-Charles Bukowski-

Thanks for showing me this poem, Alice.

The Ghost of WOOLYTOOTH

2007-06-06T10:55:00.000-07:00

The band. The idea.

WOOLYTOOTH

word on the web is that more archives have been found and there is soon to be some more cool stuff coming to this site
the new westerns
well it jus gets cooler
the love dealer, Sir Real
- WOOLYTOOTH !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! -
the love dealer, Sir Real
- fixed up the photos on news blip on yer band at free the poets sleeping planet live song kicks ass so do others -

radiofreedoghouse little song i havent been gone that long have i?
Hollywood Lightweights
Oh ya this band...I think I use to play guitar for these rippers!! Nice to see that it is still around. John Gone-Hollywood-Ripper
The Linchpins
Hey, I remember this band... Such smooth skin... Such piss and vinegar... Taught me to take on the world... Taught me to bend and twist... To catch the big waves. Woolytooth for Life!! John Williams (the four stringer)
radiofreedoghouse
radiofreedoghouse
the introduction in koan is by andrew pardo
the new westerns
what the crap!
the love dealer, Sir Real
- wow, look what the cat dragged in -

The Secret: 1st 20 minutes

2007-04-12T10:34:00.001-07:00

Regarding My Relatives

2007-04-07T22:23:00.000-07:00

"They all have the same disability.
An important ability not to have."

It reminds me of the story
of the king and the villagers.

In the story, the villagers
all drink from a well
at the bottom of the hill.

It's become poisoned,
and they all go insane.

The king lives at the top
of the hill
and drinks from
a different well
that is safe and clean.

Eventually, all the villagers
start to notice that the king
has been acting differently,
acting kinda crazy.

They demand
that the king
stop acting crazy,
or else.

The king soon figures out
that the only way to survive
is to go to the bottom
of the hill
and drink the water
from the villagers' well.

He drinks the water.

He goes insane.

And, the villagers
then all celebrate
the king having come
to his senses.

(Editor's Note:........) It reminds me
of my relatives.

... see Emily Long play ...

2007-03-21T14:59:00.000-07:00

"The Truth" video

Shaolin Kung Fu

2007-03-12T09:31:00.001-07:00

-
(Wing Chun's 1st Form: Siu Lim Tao)
-
(Wing Chun's Chi Sao: sticky hands)
-

2007-02-13T09:44:00.000-07:00

What Would Abe Do?

Right Now You Have A Choice

2007-01-26T21:23:00.000-07:00

Let's review.

Like frequencies attract like frequencies.
Thoughts are vibrational;
...
therefore thoughts attract
similar vibrational circumstances
to themselves.

If you're wondering what you are vibrating,
observe your life.
It's a perfect match.

What you are living is what you are vibrating,
without exception.

Your feelings result
from your inner
guidance system.

It signals whether you're thinking
positive or negative thoughts,
thus attracting positively or negatively.

If you feel poor,
you attract poor circumstances.

If you feel wealthy,
you attract wealthy circumstances.

If you feel loved, you attract love from others.

If you feel unloved,
you attract not feeling loved from others.

The list goes on and on.

The outer world is neutral
and reflects the
predominant vibrations you emit.

When you look in a mirror,
you don't praise
or blame the mirror
for what you see.

The mirror reflects the image you project.

It is the same with the entire Universe.

Until we fully embrace responsibility
for what we attract into our lives,
we tend to feel like victims.

This is no different than blaming the mirror
for the image it reflects.

How can we tip the scale
toward vibrational frequencies
that attract circumstances we enjoy?

Paradoxically, we have to stop waiting
for the outside world to change.

Abraham Lincoln said,
"People are about
as happy as they
make up their minds
to be."

Right now you have a choice.

You can focus on all
that is already wonderful in your life
...
or you can focus on all that isn't working.

The choice you make will determine what you attract.

If you choose to look at, analyze, observe, emote,
and thus vibrate at
what is wrong,
...
you will attract more of that.

It's okay to get angry, sad, depressed,
hurt or frustrated
...
if you listen to these emotions
as inner guidance signals
and work on thinking
more uplifting thoughts.

Or you may go through something
that will eventually make you feel better,
...
like a good cry.

But if you feel stuck in these emotions,
...
you're not listening to them.

Probably, you are
in a habitual thought pattern
that is wreaking havoc
on your circumstances.

If you choose to look at, analyze, observe,
emote and vibrate
at what's going
right in your life,
...
you will begin to attract more of that.

Once this happens,
it gets easier and easier to feel good.

Don't get fooled
into thinking
the outer good
caused the inner feelings.

It is always
the inner feelings
creating the outer good.

That's what spiritual teachers mean
when they say, "Don't be attached to things."

Those things are just results
of how you flow your energy.

If it all fell apart tomorrow,
you could recreate it in an instant
through your vibrational power.

That's why so many millionaires
who lose all their money get it back again.

It's a familiar vibration to feel rich.

They know it's the consciousness
that makes them
feel wealthy,
and not anything
outside of them.

To recap,...
the most important aspect
of the Law of Attraction
is getting into the feeling place
of already having your desires.

If you can vibrate just fifty-one percent
at the following frequencies,
...
your entire life will transform.

1. love

2. gratitude

3. appreciation

4. wonder

5. laughter and fun

6. joy and bliss

7. peace

8. enthusiasm

9. passion

10. creativity

11. acceptance

12. serenity

13. generosity/contribution

14. abundance and wealth

15. energy/health

THESE ARE THE
REAL RICHES IN LIFE.

THESE EMOTIONS ARE
THE KEYS TO THE KINGDOM.

NOTHING IN THE
PHYSICAL WORLD
WILL EVER GIVE YOU
WHAT TRAINING YOURSELF
TO FEEL THESE THINGS
ON A REGULAR BASIS
WILL GIVE YOU.

When you feel
these 15 emotions,
watch the mirror
of your life
reflect circumstances matching them.

Above is ...
the conclusion to the book,
"Feel It Real,"
... by Denise Coates

Survivorguy with Dave Mordal

2007-01-19T00:09:00.000-07:00

This is a spoof I did
for The Discovery Channel.
...
They never got back to me
so I'm putting it
HERE.

Some animals were hurt during filming
as they wouldn't leave their helmets on.

(Dave Mordal)

2007-01-18T22:00:00.000-07:00

Triumph
the
Insult Comic Dog's
"I Keed"
video.

Click
HERE
to watch.

2007-01-18T16:56:00.000-07:00

What Would Abe Do?

2007-01-09T00:51:00.000-07:00

What Would Abe Do?

2007-01-05T16:30:00.000-07:00

"Take the time
To make some sense
Of what you want to say.
And cast your words away
Upon the waves.

Sail them home with acquiesce
On a ship of hope today.
And as they land upon the shore
Tell them not to fear no more.

Say it loud
And sing it proud today..."

2006-12-20T23:28:00.000-07:00

What Would Abe Do?