"Though in the course of my lifetime I have encountered many of the most venerable progenitors of the Tathagata's teaching, never have I met one so skilled at awakening others to their intrinsic Buddhahood as this wonderful fool Wu-ming. His spiritual non-sequiturs were as sparks, lighting the flame of illuminating wisdom in the minds of many who engaged him in dialogue.

Once a monk approached Wu-ming and asked in all earnestness, "In the whole universe, what is it that is most wonderful?" Without hesitation Wu-ming stuck a cucumber before the monks face and exclaimed, "There is nothing more wonderful than this!" At that the monk crashed through the dualism of subject and object, "The whole universe is pickled cucumber; a pickled cucumber is the whole universe!" Wu-ming simply chuckled and said, "Stop talking nonsense. A cucumber is a cucumber; the whole universe is the whole universe. What could be more obvious?" The monk, penetrating the perfect phenomenal manifestation of Absolute Truth, clapped his hands and laughed, saying, "Throughout infinite space, everything is deliciously sour!"

On another occasion a monk asked Wu-ming, "The Third Patriarch said, "The Great Way is without difficulty, just cease having preferences." How can you then delight in eating cucumbers, yet refuse to even take one bit of a carrot?" Wu-ming said, "I love cucumbers; I hate carrots!" The monk lurched back as though struck by a thunderbolt. Then laughing and sobbing and dancing about he exclaimed, "Liking cucumbers and hating carrots is without difficulty, just cease preferring the Great Way!""

"The conventional wisdom, during the Tech Boom, was that what drove innovation was the lure of giant piles of cash. That idea now rubs shoulders with the Berlin Wall. What makes creative people tingle are interesting problems, the chance to impress their friends and caffeine. Freed from the pursuit of paper millions, geeks are doing what geeks, by nature, really want to be doing: making cool stuff.

Not just making it, but giving it away. Saying the Tech Bloom is not commercially driven is like saying Mother Teresa had an interest in the poor.

Which may be why the media haven't quite gotten the magnitude of what's happening here: It's not about investments. If the Tech Boom had a graven image, it was the bull on Wall Street. The Tech Bloom is more likely to be found dancing around the desert at Burning Man, the annual festival where money is taboo, everything's a gift and creative participation is synonymous with cool."

With Chandler, users will be able to organize diverse kinds of information for their own convenience -- not the computer's convenience. Chandler will have a rich ability not only to associate and interconnect items, but also to gather and collect related items in a single place creating a context sensitive "view" of many types of data, mixing-and-matching email, mailing lists, instant messages, appointments, contacts, tasks, free-form notes, blogs, web pages, documents, spreadsheets, slide shows, bookmarks, photos, MP3's, and so on (and on). Data in Chandler is stored on repositories on the user's local machine, on others' machines, and on shared resources such as servers.

This is a very different approach from that of today's common PIMs. For example, users can usually only view a given email message in one specific folder, grouped only with other email messages. In the user-centric world of Chandler, the basis of the ‘relatedness’ of items is completely at the users discretion and is merely facilitated, rather than imposed by the software.

Chandler lets the user keep track of lots of concurrent, ongoing activities. Managing activity extending over time requires the ability to collect just the right sets of related items. Too much information and the user the can't find what's relevant. Too little information and the needed item goes missing. This ability to gather relevant information from disparate sources is at the heart of Chandler's design. A Chandler user could, for example, relate a variety of emails, contacts, documents, and calendar events into an ad-hoc collection related to a specific project.

Chandler will provide unified search over all of the user's information, both on her own personal computer(s) and stored in other Chandler repositories across the network. It will allow searches to be saved for re-use.

Chandler will give non-programming users the ability to customize and extend the program in all sorts of ways, for instance, providing ways to automatically manage complex, asynchronous tasks like organizing a meeting and to automatically respond to events as they arise.

The truth of the matter is that there's nothing you can't accomplish if:
(1) You clearly decide what it is that you're absolutely committed to achieving,
(2) You're willing to take massive action,
(3) You notice what's working or not, and
(4) You continue to change your approach until you achieve what you want, using whatever life gives you along the way."

September 3, 2003. A file from Diebold software examined by activist J. March seems to be from a real election, and it contains real votes. This file is from the 2002 primary election in San Luis Obispo, California - SLOanalyze. This file was saved as a “backup file” at exactly 3:31 p.m. on election day (March 5, 2002), about five hours before the polls closed. This file contains a tabulation taken from 57 precincts. The votes in the file correspond with the final vote tally, which can be found on the San Luis Obispo County web site for that election (but only about 40 percent of the votes had come in by 3:31 in the afternoon). This file appears to be problematic for Diebold, because it is illegal to count the votes before the polls close. Furthermore, it raises the question of how the votes went from 57 polling places into a central tally in the middle of the afternoon.

"I need some answers! Our department is being audited by the County. I have been waiting for someone to give me an explanation as to why Precinct 216 gave Al Gore a minus 16022 when it was uploaded. Will someone please explain this so that I have the information to give the auditor instead of standing here "looking dumb".”

How do you actively promote starting a war, when most people want peace? How do you convince the peaceful majority of a nation's populace that unprovoked aggression is rational? How can you sell death and destruction, in the name of peace? This is the systematic practice of WarMarketing.

Definition: WarMarketing -- Promoting fear, uncertainty and doubt (FUD), by spin-doctoring known false information with the deliberate intent to justify otherwise irrational acts of aggression. The skillful productization of premeditated acts of mass-violence that is inflicted upon many innocent people, with the ulterior motive to license "officially approved" personal financial gain for a few guilty people.

Definition: WarMarketer -- One who enables a warmonger to package, position and promote the plan to stir up war. One who conceives of and evolves the deceptive re-branding of the government entity previously known as the "War Department," into the more palatable "Department of Defense."

"In the book by simple and accessible language are thoroughly revealed the principles, technology and the practice of psychological consultation. Its author, being based on the rich practical experience, proposes to the attention of the readers the effective and flexible system of psychological aid, which absorbed into himself the newest achievements in this region. With the aid of this book it is possible not only to be introduced to the theory of psychological consultation, but also to study it in practice, using the proposed exercises; and also to become acquainted with the philosophical bases of the described approaches and technician.

Because of the consistency of construction and the living metaphorical style of the author, this book will interest professionals in psychological consultation, and all those, who are interested in personal development, psychological aid to itself and their close one. In the formulation of the book the figures of the author are used."

"They told us that we were in Vietnam to make sure everyone there could vote.

What they didn't tell me was that before I got there in 1970, the American armed forces had been burning villages, killing livestock, poisoning farmlands and forests, killing civilians for sport, bombing whole villages, and committing rapes and massacres, and the people who were grieving and raging over that weren't in a position to figure out the difference between me 'just in country' and the people who had done those things to them.

What they didn't tell you is that over a million and a half Iraqis died between 1991 and 2003 from malnutrition, medical neglect, and bad sanitation. Over half a million of those who died were the weakest: the children, especially very young children.

My son who is over there now has a baby. We visit with our grandson every chance we get. He is eleven months old now. Lots of you have children, so you know how easy it is to really love them, and love them so hard you just know your entire world would collapse if anything happened to them. Iraqis feel that way about their babies, too. And they are not going to forget that the United States government was largely responsible for the deaths of half a million kids. ..."

"This entire globe, this star, not being subject to death, and dissolution and annihilation being impossible anywhere in Nature, from time to time renews itself by changing and altering all its parts. There is no absolute up or down, as Aristotle taught; no absolute position in space; but the position of a body is relative to that of other bodies. Everywhere there is incessant relative change in position throughout the universe, and the observer is always at the center of things."

"The universe comprises all being in a totality; for nothing that exists is outside or beyond infinite being, as the latter has no outside or beyond."

"Libertes philosophica"

"Cougaar is a Java-based architecture for the construction of large-scale distributed agent-based applications. It is a product of two consecutive, multi-year DARPA research programs into large-scale agent systems spanning eight years of effort. The first program conclusively demonstrated the feasibility of using advanced agent-based technology to conduct rapid, large scale, distributed logistics planning and replanning. The second program is developing information technologies to enhance the survivability of these distributed agent-based systems operating in extremely chaotic environments. The resultant architecture, Cougaar, provides developers with a framework to implement large-scale distributed agent applications with minimal consideration for the underlying architecture and infrastructure. The Cougaar architecture uses the latest in agent-oriented component-based design and has a long list of powerful features."

"A flexible assembly of bloggers who are interested in finding and selecting from the blogosphere or from any other source - including their own thoughts - feasible solutions to current problems in the world. Members of Bloggers Parliament can be thought of as talent scouts, finding those elusive needles - solutions which can get right to the point of a problem - in the daunting haystack of information.

This is not a chat room, discussion forum, soap-box or fund-raising scheme, nor can it be used to advertise or sell any products or services. Our focus is only on the collection or creation of specific imaginative, relevant, informed, constructive and perhaps unorthodox solutions which could, if applied, really solve specific problems."

"Cendant is…

one of the foremost providers of travel and real estate services in the world;

the world’s largest hotel franchisor, the world’s largest vacation ownership organization, and one of the world’s largest car rental operators;

the world’s largest real estate brokerage franchisor, one of the largest retail mortgage originators in the U.S., and the world’s largest provider of outsourced corporate employee relocation services;

the franchisor of the second-largest tax preparation service in the U.S. and leading providers of travel information processing services worldwide.

"For youth culture Japan - "cool" and "cute"- Harajuku, just north of Shibuya, is the number one fashionable, fun, faddish, ridiculous, crazy "crib" to "chill out". Come along on a Sunday and you'll see it all!"

"Harajuku is weird central," says a Japanese friend of mine. Youth in Harajuku exhibit anime-style, gravity defying, Technicolor hair and wear elaborate makeup and costume-like clothing. Japanese visual rock bands are probably the greatest influence on this urban sub-cultural style. In these bands, the visual image projected by their clothes style and makeup is as important as the music they produce. Band members create onstage personas that extend far offstage. I present Japanese visual bands as an extreme of using fashion to "fabricate" an identity.

So how do these bands identify themselves? I would argue that the extremist style was developed to distinguish themselves from the mainstream music industry, largely occupied by corporate factory line, "idol school," produced singers. There is definitely shock value is this style of dress. The first thing you probably notice when looking at the photo of the band Glay, are the bands members' Technicolor, gravity-defying hairstyles. Dying hair is an obvious rejection of the Asian confine of basic black. It is symbolic of breaking out of the mold of appearing "Oriental". But more so, I think, the eye-catching hairstyles allude to anime and manga, where hair color and style often becomes a distinguishing feature of the characters."

"We are living full of stress... Natural disasters, economical, political, social problems... My aim is to minimise this stress. Please let us communicate by smiling," he said. "Our slogan is 'laughter, love, peace for all human beings'."

On November 8–9 (depending on your location) a very rare and special global event will occur. Six planets and objects (Moon, Sun, Saturn, Chiron, Jupiter and Mars) will be aligned in a grand sextile or star pattern, a most unusual configuration.

Perfectly aligned for the first time in 2000 years to a Star of David configuration, these planets and objects will form a Grand Sextile of Earth and Water signs which is being called a Harmonic Concordance or the opening of the portal of Concordance (Concordance means Heart).

I believe that this celestial/astrological configuration will open a portal for a morphogenetic region of knowledge that will shift the morphogenetic patterns of all those who are exposed to it.

People will have an opportunity to be in alignment with divine knowledge and to live beyond the distorted perceptions of an evolving self whose instinctual, emotional, and physical perceptions and experiences have been overlaid by many different morphogenetic regions of knowledge on the planet.

For the last four decades, we have been experiencing strong outer planetary influences that have led to a dissolvement of our human self to merge with machines, chemicals, and devices. We have also experienced an ability to remote view and process extraterrestrial information. The complex psychological and ethereal environments that these influences have created are pushing us at speeds that we as humans can’t understand nor do we feel grounded or nurtured within. That’s because we’re having to take in and process data that is outside the realm of our physical and emotional expression. You can see the discrepancy that this creates when you compare certain parts of the globe that are still using human interaction vs. those that are using machines, chemicals, and devices to organize the world around them. By dissolving our human self, we end up removing humanism as the centerpiece of what our lives revolve around.

The Grand Sextile of Earth and Water signs that we are about to experience will awaken and bring a resurgence of female energy and passivity on the planet, balancing the male energy and reduced sense of humanism that has been dominating this time period.

The Earth and Water signs, as conduits for female energy, will allow us to integrate our physical and emotional interactions as we merge and dissolve with the radical, transforming knowledge that is being dispensed. Operating at a much slower speed, the Earth and Water signs bring structure and nurturing, giving us time to absorb and retain what is taking place around us.

"The war, therefore, if we judge it by the standards of previous wars, is merely an imposture. It is like the battles between certain ruminant animals whose horns are set at such an angle that they are incapable of hurting one another. But though it is unreal it is not meaningless. It eats up the surplus of consumable goods, and it helps to preserve the special mental atmosphere that a hierarchical society needs. War, it will be seen, is now a purely internal affair. In the past, the ruling groups of all countries, although they might recognize their common interest and therefore limit the destructiveness of war, did fight against one another, and the victor always plundered the vanquished. In our own day they are not fighting against one another at all. The war is waged by each ruling group against its own subjects, and the object of the war is not to make or prevent conquests of territory, but to keep the structure of society intact. The very word "war," therefore, has become misleading. It would probably be accurate to say that by becoming continuous war has ceased to exist. The peculiar pressure that it exerted on human beings between the Neolithic Age and the early twentieth century has disappeared and has been replaced by something quite different. The effect would be much the same if the three superstates, instead of fighting one another, should agree to live in perpetual peace, each inviolate within its own boundaries. For in that case each would still be a self-contained universe, freed forever from the sobering influence of external danger. A peace that was truly permanent would be the same as a permanent war. This -- although the vast majority of Party members understand it only in a shallower sense -- is the inner meaning of the Party slogan: WAR IS PEACE."