We ourselves are a labor of love. Even our material bodies, the least part of us, are fashioned from living stardust. The same energy that pulses in the hearts of stars pulsates quietly in our own wrists. The same unimaginably creative dynamo spinning out galaxies, spins out in our own thoughts. The Milky Way itself flows through our veins, eddies in our muscles, and spills over in our conscious acts. And not a single particle of this vastness has been found in isolation, somehow separated from the whole. It is all working together, unceasingly in a single multidimensional connectedness. Each human being then is an investment in the future, backed by the entire cosmos.

We bright specks, self-aware god-sparkles, here on our exquisite floating mote in the dazzling sea: can we do less than honor this with our life s work? By means of our labors, we can consciously participate in this vast ongoing act of creation and perfection. The work of creation is still unfinished, because we are born. That we are here at all implies a work to be accomplished, and a love meant to be let loose in a new way. What then shall we turn our hands to?

Read the rest here and read more by Diane Harvey.

If you cannot find Osama, bomb Iraq.
If the markets are a drama, bomb Iraq.
If the terrorists are Saudi,
And your alibi is shoddy,
And your tastes remain quite gaudy,
Bomb Iraq.

Read the rest here.

We've been having some technical difficulties in the US, please forgive us.

It's nice to know your President watches good Sci-Fi. But it's not good when he gets his ideas for running the country from the bad guys.

The Free Land of Hypocratia is a tiny, environmentally stunning nation, renowned for its absence of drug laws. Its compassionate, intelligent population of 5 million are free to do what they want with their own bodies, and vote for whoever they like in elections; if they go into business, however, they are regulated to within an inch of their lives.

It is difficult to tell where the omnipresent, corrupt, liberal, socially-minded government stops and the rest of society begins, but it devotes most of its attentions to Social Welfare, with areas such as Defence and Law & Order receiving almost no funds by comparison. The average income tax rate is 51%, and even higher for the wealthy. The private sector is almost wholly made up of enterprising fourteen-year-old boys selling lemonade on the sidewalk, although the government is looking at stamping this out.

Crime is relatively low. Hypocratia's national animal is the penguin, which frolics freely in the nation's many lush forests, and its currency is the wang.

Here's a cool flash animation of Billy Joel's We Didn't Start The Fire. Definitely one cool tune and one cool piece of flash.

I know you’ve been thinking it. And if you haven’t, you probably haven’t been paying attention. The art we once called hip hop has been dead for some time now. But because its rotting carcass has been draped in platinum and propped against a Gucci print car, many of us have missed its demise.
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All one needs to do is watch cribs and notice none of these people showing off their heated indoor pools or the PlayStation Two consoles installed in all twelve of their luxury cars have a library in their home. Or display a bookshelf, for that matter. No rapper on cribs has ever been quoted saying: “Yeah, this is the room where I do all my reading, nahmean?”
.......
Question: Why haven’t these so-called “ballers” gotten together and bought a farm, a prison, a super market chain, or chartered a school? But they all have clothing lines. Smells like a sucker to me. The lack of social responsibility from people who claim to ‘rep the streets’ is stunning.

Last week it was tent cities on freeways and barter economies. This week 1,715 miles of phone cables have been stolen.

A report from the National Statistics and Census Institute indicates that copper exports grew 16.5 percent in the first six months of 2002 compared with same period last year. The increase occurred despite the fact that Argentina has almost no copper production of its own -- it imports most of the metal to produce the cables.

So where does the copper come from? Eduardo Mirabelli, chief of external communications at Telefónica, another regional telephone company, said the answer has to be the stolen cables. "That's almost 700 tons of metal, and 500,000 people without phone service," he said.

Cable theft has always existed in Argentina, telephone company officials say, but in the past it was generally done as a prank. With the economic crisis now gripping the country, stealing cables has become a serious business, particularly in poor neighborhoods outside Buenos Aires, where the telephone companies have not invested in underground cabling.

"Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence -- economic, political, even spiritual -- is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.

In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.

We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together."

That's a little snippet from Dwight D. Eisenhower's Farewell Address given Jan. 17, 1961, three days before JFK took office.

Thanks to Joel Wendt for the link and as he said: "It is a very special look at the USA by a President who was/is much deeper than he was frequently given credit for."

Joel Wendt has posted part two of Hacking Politics:

The main psychological element then is habit. Things are done because they were done that way in the past. It is easy to just do the habitual. Those who benefit from the way things are can hardly be expected to want to change them.

So, if we are going to hack politics, then we have to deal with habit. Habit is like the Windows OS, kludge upon kludge that only runs because we are used to it. Now we need the open source ethic in politics, where everything gets done in a transparent way - visible to everyone.

Kind of reminds me of Rick Klau's story about Five Apes in a Cage.

My father who is running for president, has posted Hacking Politics, Part One.

If you can't wait for part two to learn more check out "The Plan":

"Some months ago my son (age 18) wanted to know how to take over the world. So I gave it some thought.

One of the things that I eventually concluded was that while I could not take over the world, we could. Think about it.

Some of those who read this may have had the following experience. We are sitting in the bathtub, with it about half full. We move our torso back and forth a bit, causing the water to move. We find that if we get in sync with the wave travelling through the water, we can get the wave to become bigger and bigger just by adding small amounts of energy just at that moment the wave passes us by. Just a little effort at the right instance can cause a very powerful action.

Is such a situation possible in the realm of politics and social life?

Yes."

My father, Joel A. Wendt (bio) is running for president! (campaign website) Watch his weblog for updates