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 I occasionally have jokingly said that I'm a "Libertarian Socialist", to sort of put a stick in the wheel of political categorization. But now I realize that there actually IS something called Libertarian Socialism, so that doesn't work so well any more. But .. looking at it, maybe it is not too far off from what I believe in. I believe in freedom AND community. I believe that people should in principle be free to do the things they believe are right, and I believe that a truly free market might provide the synergy necessary to make society work. And I believe that hugely centralized power, like in governments and mega-corporations and centralized banks, are obstacles to achieving a free market, and to allowing people to work together freely. But it is also always risky to try to subscribe to any labels that comes with a lot baggage and implied meanings.
Europe now has more Internet users than the U.S.
Art of Living Coalition lists me as an "artist of life". That's nice. I'm in good company. I had a good long discussion with Frankie Lee Slater about artists of living this evening.
Solara's Surf Report for September: "Diving for the Pearl". Spot on as usual, I think.
[ Diary | 2002-09-10 14:12 | | PermaLink ] More >
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 4 days till the next New Civ Salon in L.A. The phone is usually ringing off the hook those few days with people RSVPing or asking what the heck it is.
When I was driving around Denmark with my family, after not having been there for a decade, one of the most striking differences is the thousands of windmills that now dot the landscape. Denmark had a plan of covering 50% of the national energy needs with wind by 2030. However, I wouldn't be very surprised if that goal is close to being met. Anybody knows? Here's an article from Wired about various ambitious wind projects in northern Europe. The picture to the right is of the 40Megawatt windmill park "Middelgrunden" at the entrance to the Copenhagen harbor.
A Skull & Bones Broadcast by Connie Chung scheduled for September 4th on CNN was cancelled without explanation. That shouldn't be any big surprise, as the current U.S. president and his dad are amongst the prominent members of this secret society, picked from seniors at Yale University. The best researched document about the Skull & Bones Society is the book "America's Secret Establishment" by Anthony Sutton, who at the time was a Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University. I couldn't put it down when I was reading it a number of years ago. The list of members is quite chilling.
I've been out looking for a new house to live in with my family this past week. Just another rental at this point, but the current house is really too small for us and our stuff. Not that I have the money or that I'm ready, but it seems to be time to move.
"I will not die an unlived life. I will not live in fear of falling or catching fire. I choose to inhabit my days, to allow my living to open me, to make me less afraid, more accessible, to loosen my heart until it becomes a wing, a torch, a promise. I choose to risk my significance; to live so that which comes to me as seed goes to the next as blossom and that which comes to me as blossom, goes on as fruit." --Dawna Markova, Author of Open Mind.
[ Diary | 2002-09-09 18:55 | | PermaLink ] More >
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 John Ashbaugh is talking about his experience with NewsLogs. Music to my ears.
As to my own experiment with using my newslog differently, I think I'm happy with it. I didn't make any new features to the program yet to support it, but even if I didn't, it is still perfectly feasible to do a daily post with various sub-postings to it, like this one.
I write my newslog entries for myself and sort of addressed to the world. Meaning, I think of it as a place on the web people come by to see what I'm up to, or what I'm interested in, or what I'm like. And, secondarily, I'm interested in the synergy and community that forms amongst people who do the same sort of thing.
My friend Raymond Powers has released his new CD.
Controversy about some alleged pictures from Mars. See MSNBC Story 6 Sept. In brief, processing of the infrared pictures show the remnants of a large city. But, the origin of the pictures is disputed.
[ Diary | 2002-09-06 21:25 | | PermaLink ] More >
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 From Danish Radio: The Earth Summit ended on Wednesday with green campaigners heckling U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell and decrying the outcome as a major letdown for the poor and the planet. At a closing session in Johannesburg, speaker after speaker attacked as too weak a plan meant to tackle global problems from AIDS to depleted fish stocks. "We should never have such shameful summits again," said Ricardo Navarro, chairman of Friends of the Earth International. "We feel anger and despair because world leaders have sold out to the World Trade Organisation and big business".
I've sent around 32,000 e-mail messages since 1994. I've kept all of them. I had e-mail since 1983, but most of the time I didn't know anybody else who did.
Madonna is said to be dropping the material girl image, for a more wholesome spiritual image, getting scenes left out of her latest movie that are too risque. Hey, why can't she both be nude and spiritual? I don't see any problem. Oh, all the power to her.
So, are these the news items most important to me right this moment? Oh, I don't know, but it is obviously very subjective what people choose to consider important or news worthy.
In 1997 Reuters reported that the death of Princess Diana got more coverage in the British press -- measured in column inches of copy -- than did the major events of World War II. The figures were released by Durrants Press Cuttings, a 117-year-old press clipping service in London. "There is no other subject in our archives to compare with the volume of newspaper coverage devoted to Diana's death, funeral and subsequent stories," said the agency. For weeks after Diana's death on August 31, 1997, British newspapers devoted an average of 35 percent of their coverage to that and related stories. By comparison, the most dramatic moments of World War II merited only 26 to 27 percent of total news coverage.
I just realized that the free RealOne Player easily picks up a whole bunch of radio shows over the net, including some that I otherwise usually miss. Such as Democracy Now with Amy Goodman, which currently has a lot of coverage from the Earth Summit. I'm listening to it right now.
There are only two ways to live your life.
One is as though nothing is a miracle.
The other is as if everything is. -- Albert Einstein
[ Diary | 2002-09-04 14:55 | | PermaLink ] More >
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 Chirac proposes a globalization tax to fight world poverty. Well, I generally don't believe in taxes, and most of the suggestions for how to carry it out are unfair, but it isn't entirely unreasonable to make the people pay for it who make the most profit from exploiting poor countries. Actually I'd be perfect happy if all taxes were being paid only by large corporations, and not by individuals. Governments have no right to tax individuals, but they have all right to tax corporations, as they invented them.
A pedal powered wireless network is providing Internet access to villagers in Laos.
Greek government bans all computer games. Yeah, that's really smart. Maybe I'll send my son to Greece and he'll take up collecting stamps.
Somebody is patenting technology for an invisibility cloak, sort of.
Bob Hiltner mentions BookCrossing. It is a very cool concept of registering books you own and have read, and then "releasing" them into the wild by giving them away, leaving them in a coffee shop or something. And then others will leave a history of journal notes about what happened with the book, what they thought about it, and what they did with it. Very intriguing, that idea of recording the history of an item which is passed from person to person.
[ Diary | 2002-09-03 11:54 | | PermaLink ] More >
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 George Bush Jr. wants his own personal war against Iraq, and most of the rest of the world thinks its a stupid idea. Which it is. Nelson Mandela says "We are really appalled by any country, whether a superpower or a small country, that goes outside the U.N. and attacks independent countries". And, thankfully, there's disagreement in the Republican party on this. And there's growing public sentiment against the war plans.
World Summit Agrees on Poverty Plan
I read an article about Quantum physics and free will, despite knowing that I usually end up really frustrated with somebody attempting a "scientific" discussion of something like free will. Usually doesn't have anything to do with scientific method, but rather some hapless person trying to reason himself logically towards what he already believes, without having much clue about what logic is or where it comes from. Just the scenario of human beings discussing whether they have free will or not, or whether they are really aware, or they just think they are - all of it easily ends up being humorously idiotic. The only thing useful to me in that article is that somebody quotes Stephen Hawking as saying that Free Will is a theory that allows us better prediction of human behavior than does any other available theory. And that he had a similar argument for the existence of God.
Couch potato lifestyle is worse for your health than smoking
"Discovery consists of seeing what everybody has seen and thinking what nobody has thought." --Albert von Scent-Gyorgyi
[ Diary | 2002-09-02 19:34 | | PermaLink ] More >
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 A new newciv.org website layout has been in progress since the last couple of months. Quite a considerable amount of work that is, as there are several hundred pages, as it needs to end up considerably more simple and usable than today. But it is looking very promising. Danny Caudillo is doing the graphical design.
Fuel-cell batteries are taking a bit longer to come to market than expected, but apparently around 2004 they would enter normal use. A fuel cell converts hydrogen to electricity without burning it, just by letting it go through a certain kind of mebrance. Sounds like magic, and it should produce batteries with 10 times the capacity of what is available today.
Meanwhile, Ford apparently [link] their electrical car project. Most car makers seem to focus on hybrid cars, rather than purely electrical cars, in the near future.
Yesterday I spent at a seminar with Al Joy called "Beyond the Matrix". Rather mind blowing, and very personal, and I can't really say much about it. Other than that I meet very, very few people who recognize what I'm about, even after knowing me for years, and it is marvelous to meet a stranger who's capable of figuring you out right away.
Don't ask yourself what the world needs;
ask yourself what makes you come alive.
And then go and do that.
Because what the world needs
is people who have come alive.
--Harold Whitman
[ Diary | 2002-09-01 18:38 | | PermaLink ] More >
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 When talking with regular Americans, like my neighbors, about how it might be to live in different places, people here will always bring up how there are all these "freedoms" here and how it is a really "free" country. And people who haven't actually traveled much will tend to believe that story, and have weird ideas about what it might mean to live in a place that isn't "free". The truth is that the only thing here I can think of that makes it feel free is that, if you live in a very populous place like California, there are so many people that nobody's particularly watching you. The government doesn't bother much to keep track of you, unless you particularly stick out. And the general mindset of people is that you don't worry much about what your neighbors are doing. When it comes to it, there are more restrictive laws and morals here than in most places I know in Europe. You are much less free here to stand up and speak your truth. But you're more able here to hide and do your own thing, if you don't make too much noise about it. But if you're really successful and make a lot of money, then you will be allowed to bend the rules more. Which is pretty much the opposite to how it works in Denmark where I'm from.
Some of my good friends in the Bay area, specifically Allan Saxon, have created votery.org, which is a way of having a structured conversation where everything gets rated by the participants. The idea is that the most valuable or the most agreed-upon stuff will float to the top. I've been searching for good ways of doing that as well. Ways for collective intelligence to emerge while confusion is kept at a minimum. I'm not sure yet if this thing does it, but I think it is useful. You can see it as a guest, but to participate you need to be sponsored into Friendly Favors.
The government of Venezuela has adopted a policy of using Open Source software whereever possible.
The future has arrived. My cable TV has Video-on-Demand now. Except for that it already had about 300 channels that I'm not watching, so I don't really care. What'll make a difference is when it is like Napster and anything anybody could imagine watching would be readily available, from multiple sources.
"There is enough for everyone's need, but not enough for everyone's greed." --Gandhi
[ Diary | 2002-08-30 15:40 | | PermaLink ] More >
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 When I was in Denmark, the cars we were renting were running on miljø (environment) diesel. Nothing special we did. It is just something that is very common there. That is, oil that either is made from some kind of local vegetable source for the purpose, or leftover or re-used oil from other sources. And once in a while the exhaust gave it away - I was driving a car running on former deepfry oil from McDonalds or some such place. And note that not only did the car have excellent acceleration and milage, the diesel was also cheaper than any other kind of fuel, and it hardly pollutes. ...But now I'm back in the U.S., and here there would only be a few eco freaks who had even heard of the possibility, or who had pursued converting their cars. But over there I'm talking about the TDI engine in completely standard Volkswagen car models, and standard rentals from Avis. Not Woody Harrelson's bus. And you buy it from any local gas station chain, such as Q8 - Kuwait Petroleum. See their specs. (in Danish)
Bruce Baumrucker puts my attention on Communities of Practice (CoP). "They may be a great 'Force Multiplier' to bring about the kind of open, exploring approaches we need to bring our world in line with our values. Below are some references." [link] [link] [link] [link]. I don't completely get it yet, but I think it is about a community defined by shared activity and knowledge, but cutting across any artificial ways of dividing things, like the departments in a company. Hm, so where's my Community of Practice? I want one.
I was teaching a Dahn class today. I do that only occasionally to help out in the local center. It is also kind of a nice boost to do so, from seeing a room full of people get really energized. DahnHak is a Korean system which is like a combination of Yoga, Tai-Chi, meditation and energetic healing.
"I think that people want peace so much that one of these days government had better get out of their way and let them have it". --Dwight Eisenhower
[ Diary | 2002-08-29 20:43 | | PermaLink ] More >
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 Days are all different it seems. Today everything was up in the air for me, not having a handle on anything. Until I went to my Dahn (Korean yoga kind of thing) class and did chakra exercises. Made me stop thinking, I guess. Which is often a good thing.
Did you know that quite a number of apparently quite normal people have been found to have no brain in their skull? It is a medical curiosity that is apparently well known, but little mentioned, amongst neurologists. It was studied intensively by the late Dr.John Lorber of Sheffield University in the 70s, who located hundreds of people with normal lives and intelligence, but with heads filled with liquid rather than grey matter. I'm not kidding.
There are more black men in Texas prisons than in college says a study. And, no, I don't think it is because prisons are better funded than colleges. I think it is because the U.S. government has worked so hard to make drug dealing a very lucrative, but unsafe, line of business to be in.
The website of RIAA, the music industry's mouthpiece was hacked today. I guess we can call that.. eh.. karma. The RIAA has bribed some U.S. congressmen (specifically Representative Howard Berman) to push legislation that would allow them to freely hack and sabotage anybody who might be copying music files they could have bought on CD.
A piece of tribal wisdom from the Dakota Indians:
"When you discover that you are riding a dead horse,
the best strategy is to dismount."
EFF, Electronic Frontier Foundation promotes the Open Audio License (OAL), which helps artists share their work more widely, and helps them take control over their own art and be compensated appropriately for their works.
Note to self: I need to read up on Friedrich Hayek's theories of economics and social order. But there's not enough hours in the day to read big books.
[ Diary | 2002-08-28 12:58 | | PermaLink ] More >
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 The NCN public News Log at [link] was accessed 143146 times in the past 5 weeks. That's the most popular place across newciv.org and worldtrans.org. 20% of all traffic. A big thank you to Richard Carlson who's the person who selects the postings that make it there.
Lotus Notes was the leading edge collaboration tool for corporations in the 80s. Steve Gillmor says that Notes is Dead. Well, the online world has changed. Ray Ozzie was the guy who created Notes. 15 years later he created Groove which is a very cool peer-to-peer collaboration platform. And, as you can see, he has a weblog, and encourages his employees to have weblogs too.
Tara Sue Grubb is the first candidate for U.S. Congress with a weblog. Libertarian from North Carolina. I think I like her.
Apparently Isaac Asimov's classic Foundation trilogy of science fiction books were translated into Arabic under the title "Al-Qaida" and there's some serious speculation that it might have been an inspiration for Bin-Laden's Al-Qaida. Farout, but rather intriguing.
[ Diary | 2002-08-27 01:46 | | PermaLink ] More >
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 Here's some excellent weblog coverage from the World Summit in Johannesburg. See also Quidnovi's NewsLog for comments.
Interesting interview with Naomi Klein, who says stuff like "At Rio, a deal with the devil was made. In many ways corporations funded the summit, but they funded with strings attached. And the strings were, you canÂ’t regulate us, weÂ’re going to have this voluntary partnership model. Now, corporate involvement in the summit has vastly escalated. So success for this summit is failure. When you have a failed model, its failure is a succes."
I noticed a link to Openflows. "Openflows provides news, analysis, network facilities, and the tools of Open Source Intelligence to support group, organization and community development". That sounds good. I still don't quite understand what it is.
Article at CNN about "machinima". That means that you use similar software and hardware as you would for playing Quake games, and you use it for shooting your own real-time realistic animated 3-D movies. Anybody can play.
"The next Danish prime minister will have a weblog" says Thomas Madsen-Mygdal. Sure. Denmark would be the place for that.
Father Guido Sarducci is the founder of the Five-Minute University. You know, since most of what one learns during college is eventually forgotten, courses should be reduced to key points that can be taught quickly. For example, a business course is basically about "buying stuff and selling it for more." Economics is just "supply and demand." Using this approach, the entire four-year curriculum could be trimmed down to five minutes. ... I think that's about right.
[ Diary | 2002-08-26 01:05 | | PermaLink ] More >
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 My NewsLog appears in these places: http://www.worldtrans.org/flemming.html http://flemmingfunch.com http://www.newciv.org/nl/newslog.php/_v10/
and in the NCN member area of [link] They contain the same articles, but there's an extra sidebar in the first two places, and one can only comment and see the comments from the NCN member area.
Scott Johnson writes about "Goofballs in service of corporate capitalism", about how well-meaning, but self-deluded new age people inadvertently play into the hands of the corporate status quo, because their obvious incompentence and ignorance sort of spoils the chances of those with viable functional alternative information and solutions to ever succeed in selling their ideas to the public. Rather harsh, but I agree to a great extent. A lot of the weird stuff I believe in and that I do is very new age. But I think it is much more important to gather workable solutions for the world than it is for everybody to feel warm and fuzzy about everything.
One of the RSVPs for the next L.A. NewCiv Salon has a project of starting a new country and there I found an interesting link about Micronationalism which is, in short, the idea of just imagining a country and then making it more and more real, by consistently acting as if it already exists. And I kind of like that approach.
Thomas Friedman in "Drowning Freedom in Oil" says a few good words about how US foreign policy is all based on oil. (NY Times requires a registration to look at articles).
Quote for today: "Creation of physical reality is an activity of your consciusness. Then, Why not make it consciously? That is : Why not be aware that you are doing it and control it consciously?" -- from del caribe.net
Oh, and there's this excellent piece from the same place: The Gospel According to Saint Tony about how we construct our reality.
[ Diary | 2002-08-25 12:25 | 0 comments | PermaLink ] More >
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 Hm, I think I know how this should work. An easy way of making little mini-postings, which get gathered up till the end of the day, and then I hit a Publish button, and they all show grouped together in a posting of the miscellaneous news tidbits for the day. Each mini-posting could maybe have a little picture, optionally, but no subject. I'm not sure if there should be separate comments allowed for a mini-posting.
McDonalds introduces a McAfrika Burger in Norway. Eh, hmm, yeah, that's probably not such a great idea.
Damn, somebody highjacked my ICQ account. Or, rather, one of them I hadn't used recently, with an attractive low number. I fell for a scam I should have been wise enough to see through. I got an e-mail from ICQ support (I thought) which told me I hadn't used my account for a while (true) and to keep my account active I needed to log into a certain form with my ID and password, to demonstrate that I was still there. Sounded reasonably enough at first glance, so I did so. Without realizing that the e-mail wasn't really from ICQ, but from some people in Turkey pretending to be ICQ. I should have noticed from the bad spelling, or I should have double-checked where the form was being submitted to, but I didn't. Anyway, the guy who took over my account changed the profile, password and everything. And then he sent me a message on my other ICQ account, and we had a conversation of sorts, limited by the fact that his English wasn't much better than my Turkish. And as soon as I brought up the subject of why he might have stolen my account, he excused his bad English and disappeared. ... But, after pulling out my hair and trying a bunch of things, I managed to get the "Lost your password?" facility on ICQ to send me his new password, because the account still had my basic control information, even if everything else was different. So, sorry Mr. Zeybek Soner of Aydyn, I will be taking it from here.
Just saw xXx (triple-X) at the movies this evening. Woo-hoo, what a ride! Good to get a little adrenaline flowing once in a while. And, good clean fun, really. Nothing overly violent. Favorite quote:
"If you're gonna send somebody to save the world, you've better check that they like it the way it is".
[ Diary | 2002-08-24 12:08 | | PermaLink ] More >
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 I will try to do more postings where I gather different things together. More like what little tidbits I run into in a day. Even though I made this piece of software myself, I'm sort of missing something that makes that easy, so I'm going to experiment a little, and maybe add some features. I'm looking for a natural way of posting little items without it having to be any full article or anything. Just like in some other weblogs.
A mainstream columnist I always respect is Thomas Friedman. Like, here's a piece from New York Times about the Palestinian situation. However much I think Israel is out of control, it is of course very curious why Arafat rejected the best offer that was ever on the table a few years ago, leading to the much worse situation right now.
U.S. Congressman Dennis Kucinich is on the cover of Whole Life Times. "Visionary Congressman" is the title. He's the one who introduced a bill calling for a Department of Peace. Very sensible guy. Eh, maybe the only sensible person in the U.S. Congress that I'm aware of.
My next New Civilization Salon is scheduled for Friday 9/13 in L.A. It is always a fun gathering of fascinating people who're making a difference. It will again be at Malibu Phoenix in Malibu.
Based on a glowing recommendation from Frankie Lee Slater I signed up for a "Beyond the Matrix" workshop with Al Joy next weekend. I don't know what exactly to expect, but I could really use some transformational jolt right now.
Apple Mac OSX version 10.2, codenamed "Jaguar", is being released here at midnight under much fanfare. My copy should arrive Monday. I think I'm going to switch back to Mac for my main machine rather soon. OSX is the best of all worlds.
[ Diary | 2002-08-24 01:39 | | PermaLink ] More >
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 I just came back from a very enjoyable vacation in Denmark for a month with my family. Well, I'd sort of have preferred to post a bunch of updates along the way, but I didn't really have the excess energy for that. I can't really just take vaction for a month, so I had to keep my main computer work going, and I had various headaches just getting my computers connected, etc. But at some point I hope to be so comfortably connected that I can report on things as they happen.
We spent quite some time re-discovering our home country, driving around and playing tourists and stuff. But for me it is really the little nostalgic things that make a difference. Walking through a street I haven't seen since I was a kid. Picking up bread from the bakery in the morning. Hearing people talk Danish on the street.
And I ate way too much. But it was worth it I think.
[ Diary | 2002-08-17 09:19 | | PermaLink ] More >
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 My friend Peter Rosen left a message that he's in town, and having a concert event thing tomorrow. He's an extremely talented and creative person, and the prime mover behind the Creativity Cafe. Anyway, while I was browsing his site I noticed this picture from last year, which is me and Greg Wright, extreme idea person, at a meteor shower gazing event, having fun with glowsticks.
[ Diary | 2002-07-10 04:59 | | PermaLink ] More >
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 Wired has a story about biodegradable plastic. Better than just biodegradable - it is made from corn starch, and when it has been used it will melt rapidly when exposed to moisture and microorganisms in soil, and it turns into carbon dioxide and water.
[ Diary | 2002-06-28 00:07 | | PermaLink ] More >
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I try to go to some conference every month or two, to stay in touch with what is out there, and to connect with real people. The conference I just went to,
Structures for Change in Seattle, represents what I most enjoy when I go. The focus was on the people who came, not on any presenters, because there largely weren't any. And it was run by Open Space principles.
[ Diary | 2002-06-12 22:10 | | PermaLink ] More >
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I'm off to Seattle for a couple of days for Structures for Change with a bunch of old and new friends from many different groups dedicated to social change, to work on what kind of structures might best support linking things together. Any suggestions?
[ Diary | 2002-06-07 04:31 | | PermaLink ] More >
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