Market Forces

Market Forces or Market Forces?

Make up your mind. I finished reading Market Forces the day before I read this essay by Naomi Klein, one of the faces of the anti-globalisation movement.

The irony was striking. On the one hand, we've got a mad max future where account directors hit the road for some promotion, and Naomi's polemic. My favourite Kleinism is:

a government devoted to perpetual pre-emptive deconstruction now has a standing office of perpetual pre-emptive reconstruction.

Richard Morgan's book took me a while to get into, but in the end I loved it just as much as I did his earlier Altered Carbon and Broken Angel, the books about Takeshi Kovacs, a reluctant mercenary in a world where you can download your consciousness into empty sleeves and travel between the stars by this manner.

It's funny, when I wrote the previous sentence, I put Broken Carbon and Fallen Angel down. Where did that come from? In any case, he wrote an interesting diatribe against the word loser.

Just don't go calling anyone a Loser.

Oh, and here is a review of Phallos that wasn't so good... I thought he was unfair, Phallos is more of a literary in-joke, a lively story about a fabled phallos that was stolen. It's more of an annotated essay about a book. I like how its also a play on the "Sacred Image of the Masculine". It's a lovely little book.

returning to a daily sadhana

i still wake every morning as sunlight comes over the edge of the planet. time glows the hour, 5:12, in a cluster of large red LEDs next to my head. i look at the stars through mosquito netting. the sea breeze rises in the open windows. i slide my legs out beneath the white diamonds, and pad over the painted wood to the bathroom. my face greets me as I splash my face seven times with water, blessing the new day, and scrape the excreted toxins of the night off my tongue. i am still yet riddled with indigestible sugar and other processed _foods_. A smile at the growing hair on my chin and a look at the dark ring around my blue irises, then i go to my seat, pull around the blue check duvet because it's cold, and the eastern horizon is lightening. O Master! Thou art the real goal of human life. I am yet a slave to my desires, putting bar to my advancement! You are the only real God and power to raise me up to thy stage. Amen. Sitting upright, gross energy churns through my back and i itch between my shoulder blades. my crown tickles and warms. i gaze with my eyes into the blue diamond, and my i plunges and listens to each beat of my heart and i watch the light to see what it does. i become absorbed, the churn lessens and becomes fine and subtle: the gentlest sensation, a sensation without sensation, a nothingness overflowing. The space inside me feels incredibly vast, and my sense of i is no longer up top, but down here. twenty minutes pass and i witness. my eyes open before it is time, and I sit and look at the light as it falls on the trees across from me. Tomorrow, perhaps I will sit longer, be more absorbed, be more focused and one-pointed, craving ever more the release from the bondage of my ego's desires, wishing to harness its power and plough with mastery for humanity and not the winds of my selfish fancy. nightly, i sit on my bed and watch the accumulated impressions of the day pass from me as if i were a sooty factory chimney. Molten gold fills my chest as the smoke leaves, pulsing with my breath and heartbeat. But really, nothing is what happens to you, and meditation is a journey of discovery that no book can teach.

Diane Foreman - The Emerald Group

I just read this inspiring speech given by Diane Foreman as she gave an award to Michael Whittaker as the 2001 Entrepreneur of the Year.

Here are some bites:

o what makes an Entrepreneur?

Is it brains? Maybe. Is it the ability to take risks? Definitely. Is it education - certainly not according to the examples I have just given? Is it gender, definitely not. I think it’s about the nature and mind set of the individual - thinking innovatively, recognising opportunities that other don’t see and having a tenacious optimism that manages stress more easily, delights in tackling tough challenges and smashing through barriers others see as insurmountable.

What it is not about, is a singular desire to make money. The evidence is fairly clear that money by itself is too shallow a goal to motivate. Money is the score card on which we are all judged, not the reason for playing the game. I have never met a truly successful businessperson who’s sole focus was to make money. Every successful person I know set out to find a better mouse trap, to grow a business, to give their people bigger opportunities and customers a better quality product, but above all else to fulfil their dream.

Now read the rest. Damn. Inspiring: From the Spirt.

Peak Oil, dear reader, is Coming.

Most people who personally know me, know that Peak Oil and a resulting Die-Off has been a concern for the last five years.

I published a flawed article in Re:Mix magazine in December 2002 before the second Gulf War. Flawed because it was far too short to fully back itself up, but it was a good primer. If I can find it in my backup CDs I'll post it here.

It looks like the peak will be this year.

In the light of all that, I'm looking towards living local, which is why I moved to Waiheke after all, a couple years back. For survival.

I'm putting this up mainly because I want to highlight this article: "Retrofitting the suburbs for sustainability" by David Holmgren. In it he outlines the problems facing sustainable living in Australian suburbs, and offers some solutions. The bit I was most taken with was:

...create our own small neighbourhoods. ‘Suburban sprawl’ in fact give us an advantage. Detached houses are easy to retrofit, and the space around them allows for solar access and space for food production. A water supply is already in place, our pampered, unproductive ornamental gardens have fertile soils and ready access to nutrients, and we live in ideal areas with mild climates, access to the sea, the city and inland country.

So what do we have to do to make it work? Basically, the answer is “Just do it!” Use whatever space is available and get producing. Involve the kids – and their friends. Make contact with neighbours and start to barter. Review your material needs and reduce consumption. Share your home – by bringing a family member back or taking in a lodger, for example. Creatively and positively work around regulatory impediments, aiming to help change them in the longer term. Pay off your debts. Work from home. And above all, retrofit your home for your own sustainable future, not for speculative monetary gain.

Check it.

By the way, I have a new computer, and it rocks. Though, its the same 256DDRAM as my old computer so I'm like, "I want MORE RAM!!"

I so want to get juicing

What a wonderful looking juicer! Why, oh why, does Amazon not ship this juicer to NZ? Why, oh why, is it not available retail in NZ? Does the market want us to die?

things that made me go "hmmmm" - Synchrony & Group Cohesion

"It should be clear by now that it is impossible to synchronize two events unless a rhythm is present. Rhythm is basic to synchrony. This principle is illustrated by a film of children on a playground. Who would think that widely scattered groups of children in a school playground could be in sync? Yet this is precisely the case (reported here in slightly revised form from _Beyond Culture_). One of my students selected as a project exercise in what can be learned from film. Hiding in an abandoned automobile, which he used as blind, he filmed children playing in an adjacent school yard during recess. As he viewed the film, his first impression was the obvious one: a film of children playing in different parts of the school playground. Then watching the film several times at different speeds - a practice I urge all my students to use - he began to notice one very active little girl who seemed to stand out from the rest. She was all over the place. Concentrating on that little girl, my student noticed that when she was near a cluster of children the members of the group were in sync not only with each other but with her. Many viewings later, he realised that this girl, with her skipping and dancing and twirling, was actually orchestrating movements of the entire playground! There was something about the pattern of movement which translated into a beat - like a silent movie of people dancing. Furthermore, the beat of this playground was familiar! There was a rhythm he had encountered before. He went to a friend who was a rock music aficionado, and the two of them began to search for the beat. It wasn't long until the friend reached out to a nearby shelf, took down a cassette and slipped it into a tape deck. That was it! It took a while to synchronize the beginning of the film with the recording - a piece of contemporary rock music - but once started, the entire three and a half minutes of the film clip stayed in sync with the taped music! Not a beat or a frame of the film was out of sync."

_The Dance of Life : The Other Dimension of Time_ by Edward T. Hall. pp154-5. Doubleday: New York, 1983.