Zen Agnostic

Rules for Living 3

2011-09-13T14:38:00.001-07:00

Looking for an elegant way of saying this: Prepare for the unexpected/prepare multiple contingency plans and then prepare for those plans to not go as expected.

Rules for Living, 2 - Inspiration

2011-09-13T07:36:00.000-07:00

Ben Franklin's 13 Virtues:

"Temperance. Eat not to dullness; drink not to elevation."
"Silence. Speak not but what may benefit others or yourself; avoid trifling conversation."
"Order. Let all your things have their places; let each part of your business have its time."
"Resolution. Resolve to perform what you ought; perform without fail what you resolve."
"Frugality. Make no expense but to do good to others or yourself; i.e., waste nothing."
"Industry. Lose no time; be always employ'd in something useful; cut off all unnecessary actions."
"Sincerity. Use no hurtful deceit; think innocently and justly, and, if you speak, speak accordingly."
"Justice. Wrong none by doing injuries, or omitting the benefits that are your duty."
"Moderation. Avoid extremes; forbear resenting injuries so much as you think they deserve."
"Cleanliness. Tolerate no uncleanliness in body, cloaths, or habitation."
"Tranquility. Be not disturbed at trifles, or at accidents common or unavoidable."
"Chastity. Rarely use venery but for health or offspring, never to dullness, weakness, or the injury of your own or another's peace or reputation."
"Humility. Imitate Jesus and Socrates."

See also the discussion in this ask.metafilter.com thread.

Miyamoto Musashi's 9 rules (from the Book of Five Rings):

1. Do not think dishonestly.

2. The Way is in training.

3. Become acquainted with every art.

4. Know the Ways of all professions.

5. Distinguish between gain and loss in worldly matters.

6. Develop intuitive judgement and understanding for everything.

7. Perceive those things which cannot be seen.

8. Pay attention even to trifles.

9. Do nothing which is of no use.

Rules for Living - 1

2011-09-13T07:26:00.000-07:00

Since this is ostensibly a journal, I figured I'd use for the entirely personal purpose of cataloging the rules for living that I've evolved over the years, as well as the new rules I come up with as I experience new things.

The first rule to be thus chronicled is:

Lead, follow, or get out of the way.

New Tumblr for me

2011-09-03T08:15:00.000-07:00

I've started a new blog on Tumblr. I'll still be posting the long wordy stuff here, but Tumblr is much easier for posting quick links and photos. I've been thinking of abandoning facebook (although I probably never will) , and tumblr looks like a good, easy to use substitute for quick sharing.

How the Media Can Distort Your Message

2011-09-01T13:52:00.000-07:00

How the media can distort your message. Exhibit One

I'm not sure how much longer the video will be up but if you can watch it you'll see that they made the entire story about Hydrofracking. This is interesting - because I wasn't there to talk about hydrofracking at all.

Below is the statement that I prepared for the media. Note that I am a better writer than public speaker. Note also the number of times I mentioned hydrofracking. In fact, I'm don't even remember saying "hydrofracking" in the interview, but there I am on the tube, saying it.

I don't think the reporter intended to distort anything. But I am a little sad that the news coverage barely scrapes the surface of the story.

Hi, I'm William Wilson, representingUnited Mountain Defense. We called this press conference todaybecause we feel like TDEC has ignored the public.

Back in the spring there were 2 publichearings on oil and gas regulations. My organization and othersworked hard to turn out nearly 200 people to these hearings. Practically every single one of the speakers at those hearings askedfor stronger regulations on oil and gas drilling.

Today the Oil and Gas board is going tovote on the regulations that we commented on in those hearings. Most of our requests wereignored by TDEC. I have provided a list of some examples in the press packet.

The regulations that we have areseriously lacking. The revised regulations, which the Oil and Gas Board will vote on today, are a slightimprovement but still not enough to protect Tennesseans.

Let me give you just one example of thecomplete inadequacy of these regulations: land application ofproduced water.

Produced water is the water that comesup from the well along with the oil and gas. This water can containbenzene, xylene, toluene, and other toxic chemicals. It can containheavy metals like selenium, arsenic, lead, mercury – and this isbefore they add the chemicals they use for fracking.

I have been told by industry reps andby TDEC inspectors that the current preferred method for disposing of produced water is landapplication - they spray it around with a garden hose and say they disposed of it. Where do you imaginethat benzene and arsenic is going to end up if you spray it onto the ground?

So, the regulations are weak. But theindustry is still going to show up today and protest them. They are going to say that they can't affordmore regulations.

They will be lying.

Tenngasco just posted a million dollarprofit for the past quarter.

Scott Boruff, the CEO of Miller Energy,recently paid 9 million dollars to buy Villa Collina, one of the mostexpensive mansions in Knoxville. It has two swimming pools, oneindoor and one outdoors. It has an elevator, a 7 car garage, and a3000 square foot wine cellar.

I'll bet you 5 bucks someone fromMiller Energy will be in there today, protesting these regulationsand saying they can't afford to pay more for stronger protections.

Listen. The industry should bear thecosts of safe operation in Tennessee. If they can't afford to do business safely in Tennessee, theyshould not be operating in Tennessee. The public should not pay formore regulation. That is the industry's responsibility.

Now, I'm not going to make any morebets or predictions about what is going to happen in here today. But let me tell you a few things aboutthe people who are going to be voting on these regulations.

The Oil and Gas Board is made up of 6members. 3 of those members are appointed by the Governor. Sitting on the board is Jim Washburn. Jim is a geologist and a consultant to the oil and gas industry. He is also the President ofthe Tennessee Oil and Gas Association which has been fighting increased regulations every step of theway.

Derek Gernt was recently also appointedto the board. He serves to represent land owners. I
believe that Derek is associated withthe Allardt Land Company and the Estate of Bruno Gernt. Thesecompanies are not small land owners. They are land companies thatmake money from oil and gas drilling on their property.

Now, I want to be crystal clear rightnow. I am not questioning the character of these men. I am notaccusing them of anything. I've met Jim a few times and he's a nice,reasonable and intelligent guy. .

But it seems like a kindergartner couldsee that people who are actively involved in making money from gasdrilling shouldn't be regulating it.

I am told that Betsy Child, formercommissioner of TDEC, once said that the industry is TDEC's client. Not the public. The industry.

That doesn't surprise me given what Ihave seen from TDEC this past year. TDEC actually reached out to theindustry and asked them to write these new rules - I have somethingin the press packet about that. But when the public spoke up thisspring and asked for stronger regulations, they were all but ignored.

I hope I've given you some things tothink about. I invite you to go inside at 9 o'clock and observe how this meeting goes today.

Let me leave you with three things.

1. The existing regulations on Oil andGas activity in Tennessee are severely lacking in protections for Tennessee's communities andenvironment.

2. The makeup and authority of the Oiland Gas board is questionable at best. I would like to see some regular folks get some representation.

3. The operators should pay the costsof safety and environmental protection. If they want to make a profit, they need to operate safely -period.

Thank you for coming out.

I learned some lessons from this event. For one thing, I wrote a statement that was to be delivered orally, but it would really be better as a written statement (I think). I also learned to prepare for anything when it comes to the media - I actually intended to read this statement and didn't, instead doing an informal Q&A with the reporters who came out. I was able to get out my three main points, but I hadn't prepared specifically for that scenario and I missed a few things.

Finally I think I learned that the media needs one big thing that they can lock onto. Three main points is too many main points. That's sad, because there's a lot of stuff going on.

Zombies, Bureaucrats, Democracy, and Effective Action

2011-08-18T18:50:00.000-07:00

A few things have happened over the past week.

First: A friend came down from a 30 day treesit in West Virginia to stop a surface coal mine at Coal River Mountain.

MacDougal explains that the apparent ineffectiveness of other strategies for citizens to have their concerns with strip mining taken seriously motivated her to take direct action: “I have written letters, tried to educate others, lobbied and volunteered. Yet throughout all of these things, I have felt the frustration of being up against the outrageous power of the coal industry. We do not live within a democracy but within a plutocracy—a government increasingly controlled by economic interests, by state and multi-national corporations.” Indeed, the results of a poll conducted by Lake Research Partners and Bellwether Research & Consulting and released earlier this week found that West Virginians actually oppose mountaintop removal mining by a margin of 45:31. ¹

Second: The Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation (TDEC) released revised regulations governing oil and gas drilling in the state. This has been a big part of my life for the past 10 months. TDEC actually went on a weekend retreat with the Tennessee Oil and Gas Association (the Industry's lobbying group) to write the regulations. At two public hearings about the regulations, United Mountain Defense and several other environmental groups worked hard to turn out nearly 200 people - all of whom spoke in favor of increased regulation.

After reviewing the comments, TDEC actually weakened the proposed rules.

Third: The Board of the Tennessee Valley Authority, which provides electric power to much of the Southeast, voted to begin working on a nuclear plant in Alabama, Bellefonte, which was started and then abandoned in the 1970s. Public opposition made not a dent.

3 days before the board meeting (which was today) TVA declared that they would not allow protesters wearing costumes into the meeting. This was a reaction to two public protests in Chattanooga, TN, and Knoxville, TN in which protesters dressed up like zombies to protest the resurrection of this "zombie reactor".

Well. Of course United Mountain Defense went out in costume and got turned away. The press ate it up.

The question of the day is, what does successful activism look like? Take a look at the comments in this news article.

I'll repost my own reply in the comments section below:

The only people who are taken seriously in our system are the people with money. If you don't have money, it doesn't matter how nicely you dress, you are just an obstacle to the bureaucrats and pencil pushers.

TVA wanted to restart Bellefonte. A whole bunch of folks dressed nicely and commented at their board meetings to express their opposition. TVA thanked them for their comments, then wadded them up and threw them in the trash and voted to restart Bellefonte.

Don't deceive yourself. No amount of public protest was going to stop TVA from doing this, whether the protesters were dressed in suits and ties or kinky leather lingerie.

What the zombies *did* achieve was to get a lot of press, which is about the best you can hope for this day and age if you aren't one of the 1 percenters.

Power is the key. Money = power.

Those who have no power have to either subvert the power structure, or find their own ways to build power.

Deepak Chopra on the End of the World

2011-06-07T06:03:00.003-07:00

Thinking About the End

Apocalypse and why Disasters are not Natural

2011-06-06T08:54:00.000-07:00

I found this essay today: Apocalypse,What Disasters Reveal, by Junot Diaz. The author observes:

...disasters don’t just happen. They are always made possible by a series of often-invisible societal choices that implicate more than just those being drowned or buried in rubble.This is why we call them social disasters.The Asian tsunami of 2004 was a social disaster. The waves were so lethal because the coral reefs that might have protected the vulnerable coasts had been dynamited to facilitate shipping. And the regions that suffered most were those like Nagapattinam, in India, where hotel construction and industrial shrimp farming had already systematically devastated the natural mangrove forests, which are the world’s best tsunami-protectors.

If you're looking for more thinking on my "Freudian Thanatos" interpretation of our future, this would be worth your time.

Just Don't Think About It

2011-05-24T11:58:00.000-07:00

Above: a tree knocked down by Hurricane Ike in Louisville.

A brilliant little bit of writing from Bill McKibben here: Caution: It is vitally important not to make connections.

I spent the first 35 years of my life without experiencing a truly severe weather event. Sure, I saw some pretty crazy thunderstorms, missed school and work because of snow - but nothing like what I have experienced in the past 4 years.

In September of 2008, Hurricane Ike hit the Gulf Coast. The hurricane winds traveled up the Mississippi river all the way to Chicago. At the time I lived in Louisville Kentucky, and those winds slammed us. Trees snapped all over the city, and falling branches closed roads, smashed houses, and brought down powerlines. I lived without electricity for a week and a half after that storm, and some people had no power for longer than that. Some side roads were closed for days until the fallen trees could be removed.

A few months later, in January, a huge ice storm hit. As I fell asleep that night I could hear tree branches, laden with ice, snapping and hitting the roof of my house. When I woke up, the power was out. And it was 20 degrees outside.
Again, the power was out for about a week and a half. Things were a little harder that time because I had to stay warm.

Yet again that summer, heavy rains flooded the Ohio river, and water poured through the floodwalls and into downtown Louisville, damaging the library, many businesses downtown, and many of the beautiful historic houses in that part of town.

This spring I have seen multiple big storms here in Knoxville. About a month ago some parts of town were hit by baseball sized hailstones. A tree fell in my backyard. Some people in town lost power for a few days, and my neighborhood looked like a small scale version of Louisville after hurricane Ike.

The damage was about a tenth of what happened in Louisville that September - but still significant, with damaged roofs, trees, and cars. The craziest thing I saw was a car on a main road downtown (Cumberland Avenue) that looked like it had been driving down the road when a huge tree fell on it. I don't know what happened to the driver but I do imagine that if they are still alive they were cleaning out their shorts immediately after, and they're probably still counting their blessings.

It wasn't long after that a mile wide tornado hit Tuscaloosa Alabama. Then one hit Joplin, Missouri. Something hit the town of Big Rock Tennessee last night.

After 2010 saw the most severe weather events ever recorded in a single year I have to wonder what's coming next.

If this isn't climate change in action, what is it? What's the rational alternative hypothesis to explain what's going on?

What We Really Need to Survive this Century (Am I Crazy, or is Everyone Else Crazy?)

2011-05-16T18:52:00.000-07:00

Above is a map of ocean deadzones across the world.

I feel very far removed from our society. My perspective on life has always set me apart. This was true as a young boy when my family moved into a small, isolated, deeply religious town and my assumptions and values took me into direct conflict with the people there.

It is even more true now, as I look around at the world around me and see that I live in a culture that is destroying itself.

I have my beliefs, my understanding of reality, and my expectations of the future. I'm pretty certain about them. But I don't share these beliefs very often, because I get the feeling that most people would just think I was crazy, or just too pessimistic, or warped, or morbid.

I believe that we are at the apex of our civilization. I believe that all the progress we have seen in the past 250 years is about to disappear.

I have reasons for believing these things. Global warming. Ocean overfishing, acidification, and dead zones. Soil depletion. Deforestation. Peak Oil. Extinction.

The more I read about these things, the more I see an inevitably dark future. If we stop global warming, we still have all these other things to worry about. How will we feed 8 billion people? 9 billion? 10 billion?

I am, from time to time, an environmental activist and organizer. Lately I've been thinking about starting some sort of transition project. There are many different ways to go about doing it, and I'm already working with some different folks who are working on economic and energy transition.

I like transition because it's something that you can present to people without scaring the hell out of them. Everyone knows that we need cleaner energy and a more responsible and sane economy. Everyone loves local food. Everyone loves local business. Everyone wants to be green. Transition provides a unique opportunity (unique for someone with my experience and mindset anyway) to work on concrete, positive changes that will also make a difference in the larger picture.

But the problem is, everyone seems to think that we can buy ourselves out of this situation. If you buy a hybrid car or an energy star refrigerator, everything will be alright. Corporations have jumped right on the bandwagon - Wal Mart sources some of its food locally now and advertises that fact. Natural gas is supposed to be the clean fuel that saves us from Arab dictatorships and global warming. Etc.

And here's where I'm afraid most people will think I'm crazy: we are seriously fucked.

We cannot buy ourselves out of this situation. We can't go back to the land and save ourselves that way. Finding new energy sources might help us carry on for a few more decades, but it won't solve the problem. We are fucked.

We are in the middle of a full scale ecological crash. The life support systems that have nurtured life on this planet are failing.

This is why I think we must work on transition, but it's also what makes it seem so overwhelming. Sure, I can work on helping local small businesses get off the ground. I can work with local farmers. I can work for better environmental regulations in my state. But all of this is not enough. What I really want to do is scream it from the rooftops: "We're all fucked! Stop this crap now and let's all get to work. Stop working all day so you can buy useless plastic shit for your kids. Stop thinking that all you have to do is buy a more fuel efficient car and recycle."

But that's crazy talk. To reach people you have to give them something that's actionable and also relevant to their lives, and frankly climate change and ocean deadzones aren't all that relevant. If I say what I'm really thinking, I'm going to lose my audience.

I don't know what to do really, except keep on grinding ahead. Working to change one set of regulations, or save one stream, or to cut my own carbon footprint, well, at least it's something. Action is the antidote to despair, as they say.

But I'm becoming more convinced that what we need is a huge shift in our entire social consciousness. Dave Pollard's been hinting at it for years. Derrick Jensen has done a fabulous job exposing the pathology of Western Civilization. Vinay Gupta gets at it in this post. And the folks over at the Oil Drum have it figured out.

What we really need is to change our ways of life, our ways of seeing the world, and our ways of relating to each other.

How do we get there in time?

A Riff on communication, learning and understanding

2011-05-09T18:41:00.000-07:00

How do I present information in a way that will convince people? Compel them to act? Change their minds?

The way we process information is changing. A book requires a long period of time thinking about and wrestling with a concept from the author's point of view. The internet allows us to research a concept or subject from many different points of view, via many small snippets of information. Now I am interested in learning about the Battle of Blair MOuntain - I go to Wikipedia to learn about it. That leads me to learn more about Sid Hatfield, and that leads me to learn more about Matewan. My research can lead me in many different directions - whereas, a book is more linear.

The internet is changing the way we take in information. Lately, my attempts to make my writing more accessible has led me to explore infographics and video. I'm beginning to think that presenting many small snippets of information is a very effective way of presenting ideas. No more long paragraphs and essays = instead, timelines, rapid bursts of bits in succession. e.g. Harper's index, etc.

Learning and thinking today seems more immediate, more visceral, than it was only 20 years ago when books were still the primary means of communicating complex ideas. The art of presenting information has evolved. Sentences are getting shorter, paragraphs simpler. A graph or a series of graphs, properly displayed, can transmit a tremendous amount of information in a second - of course we need to look at the data used to create that chart in order to fully understand the chart.

excellent example.

This changes the way we perceive the world - which then changes the way we interact with it.

This fits in with my ideas that:

1st thesis:

An accurate understanding of reality is paramount.

While logic has proven useful in understanding reality, recent research shows that our brains are incapable of pure logic. Human thought is inextricably bound to emotion.

our primary means of understanding the world (as human animals) is through metaphor and story. These metaphors and stories allow others, and us, to control our understanding of the world.
How we gather information determines how we interact with the world. In other words, our brains and our body define our reality. Our understanding of reality is inextricable from our bodies.
Thus, our instincts and drives play a huge role in determining how we perceive and understand reality.
Much of how we interact with and understand reality is beyond our conscious understanding or control. We act and understand based on patterns that we learned as infants and from our DNA.

What I'm getting at here is that the way we transmit and take in information is changing. This will change the structure of our brains, and in turn change the way we interact with the world.

See also my writing on the spiritual crisis affecting humanity, here and here. Basically - the problems we have are a result of our inability to understand, much less deal with, reality without lots of other things (emotions, unconscious narratives, etc) getting in the way.

2nd Thesis:

Once we have an accurate understanding of reality (actually part and parcel of this accurate understanding) the next step is to understand the reality of our personal power. All politics is about power.

3rd thesis:

The world is headed in the wrong direction. Collapse is coming in some shape or form.

Rule:

Every one has a slightly different story. Even though all English speakers speak the same language, the same word can have wildly different meanings from person to person. For this reason it is vital to identify the important terms in any discussion and be sure that both parties are using the same definition.

Because I haven't posted in a while

2011-04-10T12:49:00.000-07:00

I've been around, doing what I do, just not writing about it on here. Most of my "hey cool look at this link" posting goes on facebook. I only generally post here when I have something longer to say and it won't fit in at Hubpages.

But I've been working. Most of my extra time is now taken up by volunteer work for a local environmental nonprofit.

I figured, since this is a blog, I am justified posting a video of myself, even though for some reason it feels weird, kind of self congratulatory. But I fguess it's no different from something I'd write and post on here, it's just a different medium. So here's a video. Context below.

Too many "ums!"

Anyway, the context is a public hearing for the Office of Surface Mining (OSM). The former Governor of Tennessee submitted a petition to OSM to have ridgetops within a certain area declared unsuitable for surface coal mining. Some more info is available at this link.

So that was my testimony. My friend Chris also testified and pretty much outdid himself - he's always been a great public speaker but I really loved what he had to say at this hearing.

Egypt, Tunisia, Yemen, France, Britain - 20 reasons Why it's Kicking off Everywhere

2011-02-06T10:46:00.000-08:00

I think this article is spot on in describing some of the factors leading to social change around the world:

Twenty reasons why it's kicking off everywhere

Some good essays by Scott Berkun

2011-02-05T16:57:00.000-08:00

I'm happy to have found these short essays by Scott Berkun today as I was googling around and trying to find grist for my writing mill. He's an enjoyable writer, and he writes about things I want to read about.

How to Make a Difference

How to Detect Bullshit

Writing Hacks

Enjoy!

Why I Believe in Transition

2011-01-22T17:03:00.000-08:00

Something I wrote in '09 and just found again recently.

I would use different language today but the sentiments are basically the same.

Why I believe in Transition

Hydrofracking: What is it and why should you care?

2011-01-17T15:28:00.000-08:00

Hydrofracking: What is it and why should you care?

43 Things, Motivation, and the Subconscious

2011-01-13T12:48:00.000-08:00

I have been using 43Things for a couple of years now. If you're not familiar with it, it's a website that sends automatic emails out to you reminding you of goals that you've defined for yourself.

Of course we all want a way to keep ourselves motivated, right? So when I established my most recent goals, I worded them in the form of tasks to complete. This seems to be the common way to do things on the site. Some examples: "be less arrogant", "write a play", "learn to play golf".

My tasks, then, included the following: "don't waste a breath", "practice qigong before bed", and a few others. Admirable goals, I guess. But the problem was, I waste plenty of breaths, and I certainly don't practice qigong every night before bed.

So last night I was reading The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why, by Amanda Ripley. It's part of a series of books I'm reading lately about the psychology of survival. Anyway, she interviewed the famous NYPD gunfighter and firearms instructor Jim Cirillo.

Before his first gunfight, Cirillo was highly trained. He was a firearms instructor and had fired his gun thousands of times on the range. When the time came to use his skills, his conscious brain stopped, and his subconscious took over. "He felt the revolver buck in his hand several times. And his conscious mind said, 'Who the hell is shooting my gun?'"

After he experienced repeated gunfights, Cirillo began to think of ways to train himself and his officers more effectively. "He started training himself with only positive imagery, to clear his mind of any self doubting conscious thoughts.... Cirillo began training other officers with positive visualization exercises. Instead of telling them, 'If you jerk the trigger, you will miss the target,' he would say 'As you focus on the sights while compressing the trigger smoothly, you will easily achieve a good shot.'"

So I don't plan on getting in any gunfights anytime soon, but I would like to practice my qigong more often. Therefore I'm rewriting my 43things tasks in the form of positive statements. "Don't waste a breath" becomes "I use my time efficiently." "Practice qigong before bed" becomes "Every night I practice qigong."

We'll see how it works.

The Mind of the Strategist

2010-12-23T14:27:00.000-08:00

I spent some time rereading The Mind of the Strategist, by Kenichi Ohmae and wanted to save some interesting quotes here.

p. 12 - 13: "Analysis is the critical starting point of strategic thinking. Faced with problems, trends, events or situations that appear to constitute a harmonius whole or come packaged as a whole by the common sense of the day, the strategic thinker dissects them into their constituent parts. Then... he reassembles them in a way calculated to maximize his advantage.

In strategic thinking, one first seeks a clear understanding of the particular character of each element of a situation and then makes the fullest possible use of human brainpower to restructure the elements in the most advantageous way.... True strategic thinking... contrasts sharply with the conventional mechanical systems approach based on linear thinking. But it also contrasts with the approach that stakes everything on intuition, reaching conclusions without any real breakdown or analysis."

P. 14: "The first stage in strategic thinking is to pinpoint the critical issue in the situation.... it is vital at the start to formulate the question in a way that will facilitate the discovery of a solution."

In other words, ask the right question to get the right answers. The example in the text is of a series of questions that seek answers to symptoms, rather than attacking the cause of the problem.

p. 15 "It is hard to overstate the importance of formulating the question correctly. People who are trained and motivated to formulate the right questions will not offer vague suggestions for 'improvements,'.... They will come up with concrete, practical ideas."

Ohmae offers one method: first, concrete problems/phenomena are listed/brainstormed. They are then grouped into appropriate categories. The categories are then examined to determine the critical issues they illustrate. Ohmae names this step 'Abstraction'. Finally, concrete solutions are proposed to deal with the root causes of the problems.

The next chapters are more specific to business, dealing with competition (not a consideration for many nonprofits or other situations). He gives 4 basic methods:

1. What are the key factors for success?

2. Where can we build on relative superiority/exploit opponents weakness?

3. How can we innovate/"pursue aggressive initiatives"? (asking why!)

p. 57: "The strategist's method is very simply to challenge the prevailing assumptions with a single question: Why? and to put the same question relentlessly to those responsible for the current way of doing things until they are sick of it. This way bottlenecks to fundamental improvement are identified, and major breakthroughs in achieving the objectives of the business become possible."

4. What are our strategic degrees of freedom (SDF) and how can we exploit them? In other words, what routes can we actually take to acheive our objectives, and of these, which one(s) is/are the most effective for our goals?

p. 64: "A critical element in the SDF concept is that of the objective function, the value or variable we wish to maximize. A manufacturer's objective function, for example, might well be profit.... An individual executive's objective function might be achievement.... In any case, the objective function is critically influenced by a number of independent factors, or degrees of strategic freedom. The SDF concept is therefore both the starting point and driving force of this kind of strategic thinking."

For an environmental group, the objective function (goal) would be to halt a certain kind of environmental destruction. So what are the factors influencing the goal?

Am I the Only One?

2010-12-22T20:28:00.000-08:00

Last month I wrote this post.

Really it only skirted the edges of what I really wanted to say.

And every time I sit down and try to put out some words that describe what I'm feeling and thinking, the sentences and paragraphs don't match what I set out to say.

So perhaps I should just say it directly: I'm scared, and sad, and most days I don't know what to do.

The planet that I grew up on is gone. The country I grew up in is in serious trouble.

I don't see a bright future of endless economic growth, a good job that I can believe in followed by a happy, secure retirement.

Global warming is real, and it will probably not be pretty. It's likely that the current deep freeze in Europe is a direct result of the melting arctic ice cap - the most obvious of many feedbacks that will accelerate global climate disruption.

Our economic crash, predicted years ago, is looking less like a recession and more like the new normal.

Ocean fisheries are predicted to collapse by 2050. That's food for a lot of people. Then there's fracking. Mountain Top Removal. The Alberta Tar Sands. The BP oil spill.

I could go on with the litany, but I think we are well on our way to an ecological crash. Almost 40 years ago, this crash was predicted in the book Limits to Growth, but the warnings were dismissed as quackery and scaremongering. 30 years on, we're right on schedule with those predictions.

How to deal with this? Don't I have enough to worry about in my day to day life? I have responsibilities that I take seriously, people I care about that need my support. I have my own future to think about, just like everyone else. I should be planning for retirement, saving, working, buying a house, investing.... but what I really want to do is throw myself in front of the machines that are destroying mountains and fight the system with my whole being.

That's not something I can do without abandoning my real responsibilities. So I spend a lot of time just feeling overwhelmed with all that I have to achieve. I'm not a young man anymore (not too old yet, but I'm closer to 50 than to 20).

That's what I was trying to get at in my earlier post about the Opportunity to Die.

There are a few sayings that I've found useful as mantras. "Action is the antidote to despair," which I've always heard credited to Ed Abbey but which google tells me came from Joan Baez. Either way, moving forward is the way.

The other is something I found on a fortune cookie, and keep coming back to: "One cannot do everything at once, but one can do something at once."

Just do something. And keep doing it.

I recently started a new blog on Urban Sustainability and Survival. It's intended as a place for me to put down some of my knowledge and experience on living a sustainable life wherever you might find yourself, and preparing for the collapse. Check it out if you're interested in that sort of thing...

And I close with a question: am I the only one who feels this way?

How to Change the System:

2010-12-16T15:13:00.000-08:00

...keep pointing at the anomalies and failures in the old paradigm... keep speaking louder and with assurance from the new one... insert people with the new paradigm in places of public visibility and power. You don't waste time with reactionaries; rather you work with active change agents and with the vast middle ground of people who are open minded.

-Donella Meadows

Limits to Growth

2010-12-12T10:51:00.000-08:00

Reading for the day: A Comparison of the Limits to Growth with Thirty Years of Reality by Graham Turner.

See also: Revisiting the Limits to Growth and Beyond the Limits to Growth.

All links pdf.

In which a quick post and video about systems inspires a scribble about systems thinking

2010-12-09T11:05:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I came across this post over at Dropout Nation.

It's a pretty simple way to think about something that's very complex, and it sparked some thoughts in a new direction for me.

Basically, we can think about almost everything as a system. If you haven't read Donella Meadows' paper, Leverage Points: Places to Intervene in a System, you should check it out, now if possible. I'll wait.

She also has a book called Thinking In Systems. If I happened to get this book for Christmas I would be very happy.... You could buy it here.

If you're wondering exactly what I mean by "system", here's a quote from the book:

A system is a set of things, people, cells, molecules, or whatever, interconnected in such a way that they produce their own internal dynamics. The system may be buffeted, constricted, triggered, or driven by outside forces. But the system's response to these forces is characteristic of itself, and that response is seldom simple in the real world.

When it comes to Slinkies, this idea is easy enough to understand. When it comes to
individuals, companies, cities, economies, it can be heretical. The system, to a large extent, causes its own behavior! An outside event may unleash that behavior, but the same outside event applied to a different system is likely to produce a different result.

Think for a moment about the implications of that idea:

- Political leaders don't cause recessions or economic booms. Ups and downs are inherent in the structure of the market economy.
- Competitors rarely cause a company to lose market share. They may be there to scoop up the advantage, but the losing company creates its losses at least in part through its own business structure.
- The OPEC oil cartel in the 1970s was not solely responsible for oil price rises. Its actions alone could not have triggered global price rises and economic chaos if the oil consumption, production, pricing, and investment policies of the Western nations had not built economies that were vulnerable to supply interruptions.
- The flu virus does not attack you; you set up the conditions for it to flourish within you.
- No single person, no matter how tough, no matter how loving, can cure a drug addict, not even the addict. (Most treatment programs begin with this precept, which is, strangely enough, the first step toward recovery.)

I have been thinking a lot lately about an organization that I am working with, about its strengths, weaknesses, and how well it's accomplishing its strategic goals (or if the strategic goals are even well articulated and understood). But I was reminded today that just about everything in our lives is a system, and we can analyze it through that lens.

So perhaps you want to analyze your own day to day life.

Some questions to ask:

What are the inputs of the system? In your daily life, this could be things like, nutrition, exercise, money earned, home environment, medical difficulties, etc.

What are the outputs (i.e. results)? Happiness? Security? Stress?

What are the goals? If you're like most people, more happiness and less stress, I assume.

Do the actual outputs match the goals?

What processes do the inputs go through to get to the outputs?

What are the resources available (similar to but not exactly inputs)?

What are the limitations? Again, this is a subcategory of inputs.

leak it baby

2010-12-09T10:51:00.000-08:00

If we can only live once, then let it be a daring adventure that draws on all our powers. Let it be with similar types whose hearts and heads we may be proud of. Let our grandchildren delight to find the start of our stories in their ears but the endings all around in their wandering eyes.

-Julian Assange

Hydrofracking by the numbers

2010-12-08T14:41:00.000-08:00

A typical frac, according to Wikipedia, uses 15,000 cubic meters of water

One cubic meter equals 264 gallons

One frac uses almost 4 million gallons of water.

Gallons of water in a typical olympic sized swimming pool: 600,000

Gallons of water the average American uses in a year: 29,200

A well might be fracked more than 300 times, according to Wikipedia. Gasland says a well is fracked about 18 times.

If each frac used fresh water, each well would use this many cubic meters of water: 4,500,000

One cubic meter equals 264 gallons.

Each well would thus require 1.18 billion gallons of fresh water.

Gallons of water that New York City uses in a day: 1.3 billion

According to a fact sheet prepared by the industry front group, Energy in Depth, fracking solution is 99.5% water, with the rest of the solution comprised of a variety of chemicals.

Percentage of Glutaraldehyde in fracking solution, according to the fact sheet (given as a decimal, not a percentage): 0.00001

This equals 10 ppm.

NIOSH recommended exposure limit to glutaraldehyde (.2 ppm): 0.0000002

American Conference of Governmental Industrial Hygienists (ACGIH)recommended exposure limit (.05 ppm): 0.00000005

If Glutaraldehyde is .00001 of a typical fracking solution, that means there are 40 gallons of it in one typical frac.

"Health effects of Glutaraldehyde exposure: Short term (acute) effects: Contact with liquid and vapor can severely irritate the eyes, and at higher concentrations burns the skin. Breathing glutaraldehyde can irritate the nose, throat, and respiratory tract, causing coughing and wheezing. Exposure to glutaraldehyde can cause nausea, headaches, drowsiness, and dizziness. Long-term (chronic) effects: Glutaraldehyde is a sensitizer. This means some workers will become very sensitive to glutaraldehyde and have strong reactions if they are exposed to even small amounts. Workers may get sudden asthma attacks with difficult breathing, wheezing, coughing, and tightness in the chest. Prolonged exposure can cause a skin allergy and chronic eczema, and afterwards, exposure to small amounts produces severe itching and skin rashes. "

Glutaraldehyde info from AFSCME.

And that's just one of thousands of nasty chemicals in fracking fluid.

Interdependence: Hanging Together

2010-12-03T09:48:00.001-08:00

Just a quick lunchtime thought that I'd like to put out there:

Interdependence is essential to resiliency. Right wing thought doesn't see this fact, and that is its downfall. Conversely, top down hierarchical management is not resilient - and this is the downfall of the American Democratic point of view.

There must be a way to build interdependence while maintaining autonomy. Change and control should come from the bottom up.

I like the word "interdependence". Inter means through (sort of): interstate, international, while pend means hanging: pendant, pendulous....

It's like the old saying: if we don't all hang together, we'll all hang separately.

CO2 per mile: How can we become carbon neutral?

2010-11-30T05:22:00.000-08:00

How about a new way to think about fuel efficiency - CO2 per mile instead of miles per gallon?

Average MPG for new vehicles sold in the US:

24.7 according to the NHTSA in 2004 - commentary here.

One gallon of gas produces about 19 pounds of CO2.

This means the average car produces about .77 (=19/24.7) pounds of CO2 per mile.

It's not that hard to figure out - you can figure your car's MPG relatively simply - or just go by the manufacturer's numbers. Once you've figured this number out, simply divide 19 by the miles per gallon. Then you've got a number that you can use to figure some things out.

How far do you drive to work each day? 10 miles? Then you produce 7.7 pounds of CO2 for each trip (if your car is average).

Hopefully a trip to the corner store will acquire a different urgency when we start to think in these sorts of figures.

Something similar can be done with the electricity that your home uses. Simply look at your power bill, figure out how much coal must be burned to provide this amount of power, etc.

Once we have a solid number in place, it is easier to start to imagine how you might shrink that number, or how much of a mitigation strategy you might need.

How much carbon sequestration technology (e.g. tree planting!) would you need to use to become carbon neutral? A generally accepted figure number is: trees absorb 13 pounds of carbon per year - which means you'd have to plant 1.3 trees for every gallon of gas you use to even things out. Another number, which I need to investigate, is 2.6 tons of carbon absorbed per forested acre. These numbers aren't exact - but it's the beginning of a new way of thinking about our daily lives.

Of course it wouldn't be practical to plant enough trees to counter a typical household's electricity consumption. But there are ways to cut the consumption - some of which are synergistic. Plant that tree next to your house, for example, and it will provide shade in the summer and cut your electricity bill.

If an entire city wanted to use this simple sort of arithmetic, they could set their sights on becoming carbon neutral. Imagine that - an entirely carbon neutral city!

How would a city go about doing this?

The Opportunity to Die

2010-11-28T09:37:00.001-08:00

Supposedly, the Samurai of ancient Japan had a motto: shinu kikai o motomo: "looking for the opportunity to die."

This can be seen as a denial of life, a perverted morality that sees life as subservient to duty.

Or it can be seen as an empowering acceptance of death and our own mortality.

If you accept that you will die, you look at life in a different way. Priorities are reordered. What would you do today if you knew you were going to die tomorrow?

Our culture cannot last. It is headed for a collapse. Whether this collapse brings out the most vicious human behavior and greed, or whether we (normal humans, not the sociopaths in power) take some control of the ship as it goes down, whichever happens, our way of life is unsustainable. Right now, I am typing these thoughts on a computer in a heated house. The electric power that I am using to do these things most likely came from burning coal, coal that came at least partly from a blasted mountain in Wise County, Virginia, or near Kayford Mountain, or Zeb mountain, or some other Appalachian mountain.

Aside from the biodiversity that is being destroyed by Mountain Top Removal coal mining, and aside from the global warming created by coal combustion, we are destroying the headwater streams that feed our major rivers and provide drinking water for our cities.

A stream at the base of an active MTR site in Wise County, Virginia

Global warming is real, and very dangerous, but the proposed remedies for climate change are possibly worse than the problem.

Natural gas is one such solution - supposedly a cleaner burning fuel source with less greenhouse gas emissions than coal.

As I write, test drills are extracting natural gas from the Chattanooga shale under the mountains where I live. This will be done by what the gas drillers call "Horizontal Drilling", or "Hydraulic Fracturing". It's better known as "hydrofracking". Fracking requires millions of gallons of water for each operation. One well can be fracked between 20 - 300 or more times. The water is mixed with an unknown blend of chemicals. The chemical recipes are proprietary and exempt from environmental regulations by a Bush-era bit of legal wizardry, but they are known to contain neurotoxins and carcinogens.

The industry claims that hydrofracking is safe and that regulations would only get in the way and drive up prices.

The system, as currently set up, offers no built-in regulatory mechanism. Profits and massive, ongoing economic growth are the only drivers. Environmental protection and public health are not desired ends, but barriers to profit.

Basically we are exchanging forests, biodiversity, the global climate system, and clean drinking water for economic growth and a few more hours of cheap energy - and this is the logical result of the system we have set up for ourselves.

We are destroying the basic survival system of our planet.

What do we do in the limited time we have left?

Hydrofracking is coming to Tennessee

2010-11-27T08:36:00.001-08:00

I've been researching the troubling rise of hydrofracking, preparing for the inevitable wave that is coming to Tennessee. Chevron recently acquired 120,000 acres in Tennessee that had been owned by Atlas Energy, for the purpose of natural gas drilling.

Natural gas is a cleaner burning fuel than coal (by which I mean it produces less C02 when it is burned), and there is a movement, driven by the realities of global climate disruption, to replace much of our national energy production with natural gas.

But the problem, as usual, is not so simple.

What Makes a Good Life?

2010-11-14T08:12:00.001-08:00

What makes a good life? That is the single most important question we should be asking ourselves and each other, according to this post by Dave Pollard, "An Existential Approach to Bringing About Change."

His post asks why the big movements for change, like Transition, haven't been gaining popular acceptance even though it is vital for our survival as a species that they do so. He suggests that we work to change the paradigm that we all live in. Instead of cajoling people with logical arguments, or appealing to their emotions of fear and anger, we should be asking existential questions.

As usual, I am amazed at how much I think like Dave, or how much he thinks like me. I'm not sure if this is because we've been reading the same authors, thinking the same thoughts, seeing the same realities, or simply because I've been reading his blog for years now.

Among other things, he points out that "we need to become more functional, healthy, connected individuals first, before we can hope to be part of any viable and sustainable change process."

2010-09-06T13:13:00.000-07:00

I came across this article today: Life vs. Productivity.

So in my last post about the Nazis I wondered if Knoxvillians could summon enthusiasm and energy to meet some real problems that face our city, our state, and our planet. What are the real problems? My picks for the biggest baddest bugaboos would be climate change, ocean overfishing, Mountain Top Removal coal mining in Appalachia, the automobile economy...

In the article I posted here, the writer does a good job naming these problems - and asking the difficult questions we need to ask ourselves if we are going to meet these problems in a realistic way.

It is almost overwhelming. There are no easy answers.

Easy Enemies

2010-08-17T08:46:00.000-07:00

Nazis are dumb.... Image by Eric Loftis, Break A Leg Photography. All rights reserved, used by permission. www.flickr.com/elo_001

Hitler came to power by demonizing one particular, easily identified group of Germans. Weimar Germany was in shambles, and people were looking for simple answers. Hitler gave them someone to blame. The details didn't matter because the Jews were taking power through a secret conspiracy, so of course all the facts couldn't be known.

On August 14th, Nazis came to Knoxville preaching an age old message: our enemies are hiding in the shadows, poised to destroy all we hold dear. This time, their message was not too far off from what some Tennessee politicians are saying: illegal immigrants are destroying America.

Like the Jews in Germany, "illegal" immigrants in America are easily identified by their looks, their language, and their culture. They are supposedly taking jobs from Americans during our "Jobless Recovery." And they have the added bonus of being powerless to fight back.

The Nazis are just as easily identified - and any rational American can explain to you why they are evil. It was easy for people to protest them - almost a no brainer.

It was fun and easy to mock the Nazis. It was easy for the Germans to hate the Jews. And it's easy for politicians to go after illegal immigrants. It makes them look like they are doing something to help Americans - without having to tackle the real, very difficult problems we face. Why bother with those complicated trade agreements when we can just make a certain group of people criminals by virtue of where they were born?

In the end, the real enemies of the German people turned out to be... the German people.

I was overjoyed to see so many people turn out to show the Nazis they weren't welcome here. But it was almost too easy.

I hope we can summon the same energy to meet our real problems.

Knoxville Hijacks Nazi Rally: Nazis Laughed out of Knoxville

2010-08-15T14:57:00.001-07:00

Here's a blow by blow account of the humiliation of the Detroit National Socialist Movement when they came to Knoxville, TN.

Nazis Get Laughed Out of Knoxville

2010-08-15T10:51:00.000-07:00

Highlights - Fabulous Hitler and the farewell song by Chef from Southpark starting around 3:12.

Dis - ease

2010-07-17T09:55:00.000-07:00

"You know that things aren’t going well for you when you can’t even tell people the simplest fact about your life, just because they’ll presume you’re asking them to feel sorry for you. I suppose it’s why you feel so far away from everyone, in the end; anything you can think of to tell them just ends up making them feel terrible. " -A Long Way Down, Nick Hornby

When I was married, during the first round of counseling, my ex told my family she thought I was suffering from depression.

She meant well, but at the time it felt to me like a way to invalidate my feelings about the marriage - "oh, there's nothing wrong, he's just depressed. Get him some prozac and he'll come around."

I don't know if I was truly suffering from "Depression" at that time. I do know that if I was capital "D" Depressed back then, I must be all caps "DEPRESSED" now. But even now I don't think I'm clinically depressed. If you're curious, go check out the DSM IV. That's not me.

But I am depressed. Sad. Heartbroken.

And here's the thing: no one can tell me that I don't have real reasons to be.

This is not a chemical imbalance.

I have real reasons to grieve, and to fear.

I feel sadness and guilt about the end of my marriage - and about the years of my life that I spent not really living as myself.

I feel fear and shame about my financial situation.

I feel fear and shame about the end of my most recent romantic relationship - even though I realize that we are both better off without each other.

I’d spent the previous couple of months looking up suicide inquests on the Internet, just out of curiosity. And nearly every single time, the coroner says the same thing: “He took his own life while the balance of his mind was disturbed”. And then you read the story about the poor bastard. His wife was sleeping with his best friend, he’d lost his job, his daughter had been killed in a road accident some months before… Hello, Mr. Coroner? Anyone at home? I’m sorry, but there’s no disturbed mental balance here, my friend. I’d say he got it just right. Bad thing upon bad thing upon bad thing until you can’t take any more, and then off to the nearest multistory car park in the family hatchback with a length of rubber tubing. Surely that’s fair enough? Surely the coroner’s report should read: “He took his own life after sober and careful contemplation of the fucking shambles it had become.” "-A Long Way Down, Nick Hornby

And I am scared to death of the future. As I'm writing this, oil is still spilling into the gulf. The Arctic ice cap is melting faster each year. Our nation is sliding towards magical thinking, racial scapegoating, and corporate fascism. I'm not sure if the Tea Party will win any significant gains in the 2010 elections, but if they do God help us.

And as I look at my own future, I see it only getting harder, for a variety of reasons that I won't go into here.

This is not the future I thought I was going to get.

***********************

I wrote the bulk of this back in May or June. Since then, things have improved for me. Action is the antidote to despair, and I found that putting one foot in front of the other for long enough eventually brought me to a better place. Yes, the world is still looking worse every day. But I feel more able to deal with it.

In 10 years of writing stuff and publishing it on the internet, I have not written about my personal life.

I am publishing this for two main reasons:

1. I think that most of what the doctors are calling mental illness, clinical depression, neurotic behavior - this is not illness. It is a natural reaction to an insane culture and a dying planet.

2. Part of the problem in this insane screwed up world is that people can't be open about their grief and anger. Our emotions - all of them - are natural and healthy - but society at large labels us as unhealthy if we don't put on a smile every day and joke about the weather and sports and the latest celebrity DUI arrest. Simply writing about it, naming it, not hiding from it, is an act of resistance.

Dave Pollard sums it up nicely here: we have Civilization Disease. And the cure won't come from a pill.

The Battle of Blair Mountain

2010-04-19T17:36:00.000-07:00

I am stunned by this video. The song is by an amazing band from West Virginia called Byzantine (I understand that not everyone shares my musical tastes). The song and the video recount the history of a bit of forgotten, amazing American history - the Battle of Blair Mountain.

Note: the youtube video is disabled. Here is a link to a myspace page with the video. If this link breaks, try googling Byzantine Redneck War.

During the battle, US warplanes were called in to bomb the miners - probably the only time that the US military has bombed American citizens.

I've been researching labor history, and recently published a couple of articles at hubpages:

A History of Some Communist Activity in America

A History of Some Communist Activity in America: the Ludlow Massacre

I'm researching the Matewan Massacre and the Battle of Blair Mountain right now. I find that the more I learn, the more questions I have, so it might take a while but I hope to publish an article about those two events soon.

Why Mow?

2010-04-12T16:40:00.000-07:00

Derrick Jensen has a book called The Culture of Make Believe.

I don't recommend it if you are just getting started with Jensen - start with Endgameor A Language Older Than Words.

While the book's not at the top of my list, I am regularly reminded of the truth contained in the title.

Mowing the lawn is a perfect example of the fantasy land that is middle class life in America.

Every week millions of Americans trudge along behind their pushmowers, breathing carbon monoxide and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. Each year we spill 17 million gallons of gasoline as we refuel our mowers. These mowers, loud obnoxious spewers of stench, emit at least 4 times as much air pollution as the average car. We spend lots of time and money to prevent "weeds" (that is, native plants that have evolved to fit the local ecology) and maintain turf (non native grasses that offer minimal ecological benefit and require endless watering, fertilizer, chemicals, and mowing).

I won't say too much more about it here, I'm still reading and researching. But I found an excellent essay by Michael Pollan, written 20 years ago for the New York Times Magazine, called Why Mow: The Case Against Lawns.

A quote: "Lawns are nature purged of sex and death. No wonder Americans like them so much."

Enjoy.

A Poor Basis for Morality

2010-01-16T07:39:00.000-08:00

A post at hubpages that looks at some of the problems with morality that is based in faith.

Christianity and Faith are a Poor Basis for Morality

Qigong - Does it Work?

2010-01-02T07:38:00.001-08:00

Wired Magazine writes about the placebo effect: Placebos Are Getting More Effective. Drugmakers Are Desperate to Know Why.

It's an interesting story, mostly because of the puzzle - why are placebos becoming more effective? And what does this say about our own bodies and brains?

It is especially interesting to me because I have practiced qigong for some years now. Qigong is a Traditional Chinese Medicine energy healing technique, using deep breathing, visualisation, relaxation, and sometimes movement like in Tai Chi. Proponents say it can help with martial arts by making the skin tougher, the bones and muscles stronger, etc. It is also supposed to promote healing.

I have practiced it without ever being truly convinced that there is much to it. Combine the placebo effect with deep relaxation and breathing and meditative focus and qigong is bound to have some beneficial effect. My question has always been, how much benefit is there, and is the time spent worth the payoff?

I have heard plenty of stories about tough old Asian martial art instructors getting teeth pulled without anesthesia, or competitive martial artists speeding their healing time through qigong. But stories don't really prove much. And many of the miraculous feats of martial artists who claim qi mastery are simple trickery.

But! I have felt real effects from it. I can actually feel energy moving through my body as I practice the techniques. It is a real sensation - usually a tingling of the skin or an orgasmic rush up the spine and over the top of the head. One time, I felt myself coming down with a cold, laid down for 5 minutes to do some energy work, and when I got up the cold was gone. I've cured a few headaches this way too.

But that's all. The sensations are real - but they don't really mean anything. It could be just my mind playing tricks on me. Maybe I'm wasting my time.

But maybe one day I'll be able to get my mind to trick me so well that I can get some teeth pulled with no anesthesia or something cool like that.

This is another repost from Makotokan.org

Is Agnosticism Even Possible?

2009-12-27T10:31:00.000-08:00

I'm a word nerd. So yesterday I was thinking about the origins of the word agnostic.

The word was coined by Thomas Huxley in 1860. But it comes from the greek:

a - without

gnostic - knowledge.

There is an important subtlety here. Agnostic is not the same as ignorant.

The distinction is similar to the difference between "immoral" and "amoral". Immoral behavior is that which goes against common morality, whereas amoral activity exists outside of the normal moral code. Probably both types of activities could have similar results, but there is a difference.

So, when I claim to be agnostic, I am claiming ignorance of the truth. I am also taking on a certain worldview. I attempt to meet the world without preconceptions.

That is, I try to remain "outside" of knowledge.

Not an easy feat for humans, since we are hardwired to find patterns and form opinions.

The fact is, we carefully edit our reality, searching for evidence that confirms what we already believe. Although we pretend we’re empiricists — our views dictated by nothing but the facts — we’re actually blinkered, especially when it comes to information that contradicts our theories.

That quote is from a Wired magazine article, Accept Defeat: The Neuroscience of Failure. There's an interesting description in there of how our brains work when we see things that don't fit our reality.

Basically, we delete those anomalies from our consciousness. This happens without our awareness.

In effect, our brains work against our ability to see reality as it really is. We are biased without even knowing it!

So - how can we be truly agnostic?

A Crisis of the Spirit

2009-12-19T13:49:00.000-08:00

The slums of Jakarta. Image by Jonathan McIntosh, used under Creative Commons Attribution License

This is a repost from my other blog, makotokan.org. I'm in the process of transferring my writing from there to here. If you haven't read it before, enjoy!

The world is in the midst of an unprecedented crisis.

I believe this current crisis is a spiritual crisis.

I don't mean this in a religious sense. I am not a religious person.

Rather, this crisis is tied into our very humanity. It is a crisis of our essential nature.

The slums of Jakarta. Image by Jonathan McIntosh, used under Creative Commons Attribution License

We are animals - but we are different from animals. Animals live in what Dave Pollard calls "now time". Humans exist on different levels of abstraction. We have language. We can think about the future, and the past.

In Zen Training Katsuki Sekida describes the self in terms of nen, or "thought impulse" (108). A) Nen or "thought impulse" is inseparable from action, and B) at the level of initial or first nen, there is no separation between mind and matter, self and world. There are degrees of reflection involved in this thought impulse or nen. In the "first nen," one simply manifests the nen, "It is sunny outside today." In the second nen, one thinks, "I wonder if it was sunny yesterday," or "I was not so aware of the weather yesterday." One might have yet another level of reflection, a third nen, "Why have I been thinking about the weather so much recently?"

According to Sekida, we can become lost in second and third nen and so have difficulty returning to the ever-present first nen, which he also calls "pure existence" (119).

In addition to the danger of getting lost in abstractions, we have other evolutionary holdovers that affect our lives - tools that were/are necessary to our survival, but are not always appropriate to our 21st century lives.

These include

The emotions - unconscious, and mostly out of our control. They are important to our survival, a gift of our evolutionary heritage. Fear keeps us from harm. Happiness bonds us to beneficial things.

Drives are also evolutionary gifts, related to our physical needs: the need to eat, or the need to reproduce. These manifest themselves in many indirect, subtle and not so subtle ways. Our desire for status is related to our drive to reproduce, to attract the best mate. The drives are also tied in with our emotions in complicated ways.

Rational thinking - a valuable skill, but one that can separate us from our reality, causing us to get lost in abstraction.

Pattern seeking - another valuable survival skill that allows us to learn - but can easily lead to superstition and irrational beliefs. This trait leads us to create stories about reality, about ourselves, and others.

Cultural conditioning - This includes much of our morality, although much recent scientific work seems to show that a great deal of morality is an evolutionary trait as well. Our cultural conditioning also affects what we value and how we live our lives.

Emotional conditioning - the events of our lives shape our behavior.

We humans are a mish mosh of all of these things - unconscious drives, nonrational emotions, cultural conditioning... Our morality and our character are partially inborn in us, and partially taught.

David Brooks, in a recent column in the New York Times, says this: "It is as if we all contain a multitude of characters and patterns of behavior, and these characters and patterns are bidden by cues we don't even hear. They take center stage in consciousness and decision-making in ways we can't even fathom."

He's referring to the Grant Study, a longitudinal study of 268 Harvard Students that began in the 1930s and continues today. The study is also examined by Joshua Shenk in an essay in The Atlantic Magazine,"What Makes Us Happy?"

How does this relate to the current crisis?

I see two ways: marketing and consumption and integration.

Percentage of Urban Population Living in Slums. Legend here. Image by Jonathan McIntosh, used under Creative Commons Attribution License

Consumption

Americans are the richest people on the planet. We make up five percent of the world's population, and we consume 25% of the world's resources. Meanwhile, something like three billion people live on less than two dollars per day.

This way of life is simply unsustainable. To bring the rest of the world up to our standard of living, we would need five Earths. Indeed, bringing the rest of the world up will actually destroy our way of life, since
our wealth depends on extracting resources from the rest of the world.

This consumption is driven largely by a long term project of consumer engineering. In the early 20th century, corporations began studying how science and psychology could be harnessed to increase profits - to get people to buy more things that they would "use up", and fewer things that they would "use".

Americans view the world through corporate sponsored glasses. Our natural drives and emotions have been harnessed, even enslaved, in the name of ever increasing quarterly profits.

I'll talk about integration in a later post.

Climategate and the Conspiracy to Force Everyone to Buy Compact Fluorescent Lightbulbs

2009-12-06T16:39:00.001-08:00

I wrote, and initially published here, a short post about climategate. And some other stuff. I decided it was good hubpages material, though, and moved it over there. If you want to read it, head on over to hubpages.

And, um... take my advice and go get some compact fluorescent lightbulbs on your way home from work tomorrow. Ok?

Skeptics and Deniers

2009-12-05T07:52:00.000-08:00

Do global warming skeptics deserve to be called deniers?

A few years ago, many people who write about global warming decided that a fitting term for those who don't believe in man made global warming is "denier" or "denialist." This term carries the baggage of the term "holocaust deniers" - those who continue to try to rewrite the facts to suit their own agenda, and ignore a huge, tragic injustice.

Recently I was attacked for using the term "denier" in the comments to an article I wrote for hubpages: Global Warming: Is it All Caused by Natural Cycles?. The commenter claimed that I should call such people skeptics.

This got me thinking.

Is there a difference between skeptics and deniers? Is everyone who is skeptical about the possibility of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) guilty of denialism? And is the term "denialist" warranted?

As a committed agnostic, I always try to remember that we humans can't really "know" anything. There is always more going on than meets the eye. Even seemingly bombproof theories, like those which led to Newton's laws of motion, have been superseded by Einstein's Theory of Relativity.

So skepticism is a vital part of thinking clearly and correctly. Blind faith can be fatal.

On the other hand, there is a clear line between skepticism and denial.

We can be skeptical of the reasons why Newton's Third Law of Motion works. But we would be foolish to ignore its predictions.

Similarly, any and all claims made by any scientist are worth examining. But there comes a point at which we must act on imperfect information.

That point is long past if we hope to stop man made global warming. We have known about greenhouse gases for more than a century, and the greenhouse effect has been recognized since the 1970s. Temperatures have been rising right in line with the predictions.

You wish to be skeptical? Please do. You want to deny the facts?

Then you deserve to be lumped in with Holocaust deniers and the other nutcases.

From Dollars to Death Panels

2009-11-28T06:13:00.000-08:00

A quick link - some ways the republicans distort policy debates:

here.

Links to Some of my Articles at Hubpages

2009-11-23T09:02:00.000-08:00

I've spent a lot of time recently writing at Hubpages.com. I enjoy writing there. I get a lot of comments and page views, and there is a chance to earn revenue (although I can see that the types of things I write will not earn me much).

I wrote two posts on ACORN:

The ACORN Scandal - A Former Organizer Speaks Out
and
The ACORN "Scandal"

And Joe Wilson's "You lie!" outburst was a popular topic, so I took a closer look at the house bill on health insurance reform in:

Did the President Lie? Illegal Aliens and HR 3200.

Fox News manufactured another crisis when a video surfaced of some elementary school kids singing a song about Barack Obama during black history month. I commented on that in:

Schoolkids Singing Obama's Praises: Mind Control or Politics as Usual?

I also took a look at Glenn Beck and Michael Savage, two of the most egregious examples of right wing misinformation and outright hate speech in the major media.

Michael Savage, Hate Speech, and Political Violence
and
Glenn Beck, Populist Demagogue.

I realized after publishing that "populist demagogue" is a bit redundant. But, after all, there's a place in Britain called Tor Hill.

The piece about Savage, and to a lesser extent, the one about Beck, was inspired by the murder of Bill Sparkman. He was a census worker found hanged in Eastern Kentucky with the word "Fed" written on his chest. I wrote about that in American Fascism is Coming.

Finally, I wrote a slightly more philosophical bit about The Problem with American Libertarians.

Enjoy, and comment if the mood strikes.

Hi

2009-11-19T15:47:00.000-08:00

Hello world!

I've been blogging for a while now all over the internet. You can see my writing at hubpages.com, makotokan.org, ehow.com, wordpress.com, and a few other places.

This is my personal blog. It's where I will be posting most of my writing from this point on.

While the name, Zen Agnostic, implies a heavy religious bent, I write about anything and everything. Zen and agnosticism both share a similar way of looking at the world - cool, rational yet open to the irrational, questioning, and present in the moment. This is how I strive to meet the world.

Thank you for stopping by - there's nothing I like more than a good conversation (not a shouting match). So please, leave a comment.