October 7 ... presidential debate ... got a Twitter account? Get one! (Here's mine ... even got got one that tweets LJ.)

Hack The Debate

I was trying to find his "Drumming" ... an amazing peice I lost when my laptop died a coupla years back ... and came cross this:

This is about "HamSphere, a software package that simulates high-frequency radio communications.
tinytrout's post is about how the creator threw up his hands and gave up. But he actually didn't.

Anyway tinytrout has his LJ set for Friend's only, so heh I couldn't talk to him. I think that's pretty ironic! So here's what I would have posted:

Reports of death are premature

;-)

Hi ... was googling for news about tomorrows contest and found this.
Good on you!

I've been licensed since '73, have done tons of contesting, but have been off the air for the past 4 years, since a cross-country move caused me to jettison all my gear.

So I've only been on HamSphere for 2 days, but have already had a few very fine chats, most of them with licensed hams, but not all.
Great stuff!

So this afternoon I set up another laptop to act as a keyer ("virtual sound cards" are actually more primitive / rare than they were with Win3.1 ... which I find odd) and am ready for tomorrow!

cheers
hfx_ben aka bentrem - VE6IU

... and in contrast to the fools who listen to and flatter those blithering idiots:

Virupa, Master of Dakinis I, who live in spontaneous reality Depend upon the Magnificent Symbol. I, who exist in things as they are, Without self, not thinking, not achieving, Am saved from the pit of nihilism by existential self-awareness, Am saved from an eternal heaven by absolute detachment. I live in consummate pure delight and perfect awareness.

Commenting on an LJ friend's post about having a hard time bearing up under the weight of compassion the subject of YouTube came up when I refered her to "Unbearable Compassion" by my dear Khenpo Tsultrim Gyamtso, Rinpoche.

Curious, I googled and (after happening upon http://dpr.info ... my own teacher's new site) found a great YouTube channel: http://www.youtube.com/user/tenam15

Here's the part 1 of 8, a talk by the Dzogchen Ponlop, Rinpoche on "Mind Beyond Death":
Rinpoche drew attention to this quote:

"The truth that many people never understand until it is too late is that the more that you try to avoid suffering, the more you suffer because smaller and more insignificant things begin to torture you in proportion to your fear of being hurt."
Thomas Merton [I'm guessing from "Zen and the Birds of Appetite"]

The only thing I don't understand is how I've kept going.

I know that selling out was never an option for me, not really. Anytime I experienced success that wasn't in some way tied in with the emancipation project (Just think "social justice" ... yaa, that stuff.) In those situations I just got more and more miserable, getting into increasingly theatrical self-destructive behaviour, a clumsy way of bumping myself out of that rut.

So it's an awful lot like being discouraged ... I think I could be broken-hearted if I let myself slip into it ... and yet I keep truckin' along, hours everyday surveying the field for systems that might encourage community activity (By The People" at PBS and also at McNeil Lehrer, produced by the Center for Deliberative Democracy; see also the Community Practices Network), hours everyday trying to get something started with my own stuff (see GroundPlane 101 - The Antenna is You).

But always the same thing: careerists and opportunists have their elbows up ... there not the slightest chance that I will ever get a hand of any sort.

Can't talk about the calamity of rush.rush.rush to busy people because they're too busy. Can't talk about the epidemic of closed-minded narcissism to people who are self-involved because, well, they're self-involved.

But over and over I notice one thing: the meanest and most wicked are open to innovation. Oh, yes they are ... they surely are.

I can't help thinking it was foolish for me to have left the monastery in order to carry on with my project. Just foolish.

snoozing while I watch TV

perched on the peak of the adjoining roof

I just tweeted this:

"that my cohort (fecklessly narcissistic sellouts that they are) have raised a buncha kidz who are as though brain-damaged. Just now, I found a book!"

"Mark Bauerlein thinks that young Americans are the dumbest generation ever, and he blames it all on the internet.  Specifically, he thinks teenagers are using the internet to communicate with other teenagers, as opposed to learning something.
I suspect that every generation thinks the next generation is a bunch of idiots, and blames it on something recent.  The internet, television, rock and roll, comic books… the technology changes but the story remains the same."
from ReGruntled.com

Radio Interview (MP3)

I found this in a "friend's" blog over at SnardFarker.Ning.com


By the Media Education Foundation ...
... this reminded me of Bill Moyers' "Is the Fourth Estate a Fifth Column?". And also of Harvey Arden. (I guess he's best know for his work on behalf of Leonard Peltier, but I connected with him through his National Geographic work in Afghanistan ... Masood.)

click for full size

Forest service staff roust outdoor RainbowFamily gathering

Get in touch with someone today

thanks to java_fiend for this

There are lotsa ways of depicting that ... "Train as though your hair is on fire", for example. Or "like a hot elephant towards a mud wallow".

Listening to Tom Harper on radio, talking about his "Seven Principles of Cosmic Spirituality" ... he just related this tale:

A student approaches his Guru saying that he needs advice on how to find god. The guru takes him down to the river, where he holds the student's under the water for a long, long, long time. Bursting back up through the surface, the student demanded to know WTF that was all about.
"When you want to find god as deeply as you wanted to find air just now, you will find god."

It's been a long time since I wrote regularly in LJ.
There was a time I posted frequently. And not just here ... I've usually had at least 3 blogs on the go.
All that's over.

Anatomy of Human Destructiveness by Erich Fromm ... Politics of Experience, by R. D. Laing ... M. Scott Peck's People of the Lie ... and finally Erich Neumann's Depth Psychology and a New Ethic ... years and years and years I've been working through those books, and more.

Bottom line?
Sloth ... the reluctance to do the good ... that's the bottom line.

Maybe folk are just scared. Or maybe it's more that they're cowards, ducking hard questions so they can get what they want.
Maybe folk are just, well, mediocre. Or maybe it's more that they cut corners for fun, or from laziness. "Incompetence is the thin edge of the wedge called corruption."

I've been an activist for over three decades. I understood right from the start that it wasn't about combating a gang of evil-doers ... that it was about actualizing democracy and the rule of law in the name of social justice.

But folk are lazy, and self-serving, and dishonest. "Just folk" enable the psychopaths and the oligarchs.

All those books? They taught me that there's reason for hope. And even today they remind me that there's still and always reason for hope.

But folk ... they bum me out.

Decades of work ... weekly, daily, hourly.

I'm just out of steam, is all.

So when I look at the reality I get grossed out.
Nobody can work with that.

So ... I didn't just fade away.
I burned out.
*shrug*

( The Whole Story )

Of SigInt on The Side of The Angels
A letter to a rare acquaintance

I'm sure your time is short: I'll get to the point. How would this army of 1 connect fine folk like your good self with the forensic IT tool he's spent 30 years devising?

"Is your truth the same as mine?" ... Pontias Pilate was a career diplomat. And his sophistry works as well today as when he spoke it.

But we've learned some. PoMo? Entirely problematic.
But how about historiography?
How about forensic accounting?
How about how civil society thrives on real discourse and shrivels without it?

How about "truth is dialectical in nature; facts are the raw material that fuel that mill".

Thing is: for me to blurt (after so many years on the web, so much pro bono work) is for me to loose my last grasp on survivability.

I turned 54 yesterday.
I've been on welfare since I broke both feet escaping from a home invasion.
I need some entity into which I can invest my work.

http://bentrem.sycks.net/gnodal/ or, less eccentric: http://groundplane.wordpress.org

with respect and appreciation
ben

p.s. I was in the Canadian Armed Forces "Communications Research" in September of 1973. I filed for release on the 14th of that month. They rolled out a red-carpet deal. I turned it down and got a job selling stereos.
Philippe Agee is/was a hero.

I write that as a socialist, knowing full well that "the republic" means the machinery in place to optimize exploitation. (The government is only the executive board put in place by the oligarchs.)

But it's an improvement over raw tyranny ... the alternative to democracy is slavery. We came out of slavery and serfdom, but that's where we're headed, so "fulfilling the bourgeois revolution" has always been my motto. You know, stuff like "rule of law". (Pressing for that brings to light just how corrupt things really are.)

But who will do the work?
Yuppies and their kids have learned that phony bullshit is how to make money, and that authenticity is most often subject to arbitrary punishment. (Most do-good organizations are headed by the most incompetent wannabes you can find.)
Who let Hurricane Katrina turn into an unmitigated catastrophe? Well-paid yuppies.
Who profited from corporations like Enron, and from financial schemes like phony low-interest mortgages? The same buncha yuppies.

So: the oligarchs are obviously sociopaths, and the yuppies are merely corrupt and hypocritical.

Who's left?

0_o

See, the thing about karma ... do you want to be like a piece of paper in the wind?
Oh sure, in the bad moments don't we all wish we could just check out.

But apart from that ...
... do you really want to be a mindless plug?!

I'm betting on "No".
So far I've only just barely managed to pay for food and warmth.
But I put that down to your compulsive need to project the asshole attitudes of those who came before you.
Which is exactly the point.

What's "responsibility"?
What's that mean?
What's "individual freedom" ... you gonna say that's a myth?

You gonna say none of us are free?
Bet yuh won't.

You gonna piss in my face?
You'd be pissin in your own face, if you did.
Quite the trick.
Neato ... but perverse, nae?
You want others to piss in your face?
Nope ...
... so STFU and get a grip.

You, me, all of us ... we're constantly subjected to *gee golly what to call it?!* thoughts.
Thoughts.
Thoughts.
Thoughts.

Is that too subtle a concept for you?
Nope.
Soooo, if that gives you an excuse to cop out ...
... precisely my point.

Thoughts are like ocean waves on the beach.
Are you a bit of drift-wood?
A wisp of paper?
Or do you have substance.

There is no other.
It really is that simple.

Of course you think this and that and the other.
Meanwhile the planet is dying.
Meanwhile people who'd been surviving on $2/day are now subjected to rising food costs.

Of course you think this and that and the other.
It's what you do next that counts.
"The Force" ... it's true.
Google "bodhicitta".
Or don't.
Duck.
Hide.
Get snotty.
Whatever.

But in that moment, you experience karma.
You either do what you do with intention ...
... or you're no more than a bit of paper in the wind.

That's it.
That's all.
There is no other.

Write yourself off?
Then you're sociopath ...
... if you write yourself off, you won't care about others. Or the planet.