My Blog

Rupert Murdoch Says Obama Will Win..Almost Endorses

comeplaywithtim — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 20:26:12 GMT

Wow, even this piece of shit thinks Obama will win! Carlsbad, CA -- Tonight at the "All Things Digital" conference sponsored by the Wall Street Journal, Rupert Murdoch -- Chairman of News Corp, new WSJ owner, and longtime torchbearer for conservative politics -- said this about Barack Obama: "He is a rock star. It's fantastic" "I love what he is saying about education." "I don't think he will win Florida.....but he will win in Ohio and the election". "I am anxious to meet him." "I want to see if he will walk the walk." About the presumptive Republican nominee, Murdoch said, "McCain is a friend of mine. He's a patriot. But he's unpredictable. Doesn't seem to know much about the economy. He has been in Congress a long time, and you have to make a lot of compromises. So what's he really stand for?... I think he has a lot of problems." Here is a brief video of Murdoch's appearance at the All Things Digital Conference: http://link.brightcove.com/services/link/bcpid452319854/bctid1579802959 Source of article: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/hilary-rosen/rupert-murdoch-says-obama_b_104018.html

Help stop more media consolidation

comeplaywithtim — Fri, 21 Dec 2007 21:19:40 GMT

I want you all to be aware that the Bush-appointed FCC voted Tuesday to loosen media ownership rules so huge media conglomerates like FOX and ABC can swallow up more local news outlets. Of course, these same news outlets are doing whatever they can to prevent you from finding out about what's going on....and they are of course doing a fine job since they have a large control over what you learn about. Please take a few minutes to educate yourself on this huge issue at hand. Maybe even sign one of the various online petitions, forward this message, or make a nice holiday season donation to the cause in honor of a loved one or something. Per MoveOn.org: "Congress has the power to reverse this rule change, and a bipartisan group of 26 Senators already announced they'll try. We need the rest of the Senate to know we're paying attention and we want action." More detailed info info, and sign petitions at freepress.net, stopbigmedia.com Make donation or sign petition at www.civic.moveon.org/mediaconsolidation These corporations are solely profit driven and have no interest in providing the information necessary for a healthy democracy; they instead focus on sensational and entertaining news and programming that will help their advertisers sell more products and services. Media consolidation gives more power to the wealthiest people in our society who have common interests and points of view. These new laws will continue to shatter the wide realm of independent voices needed to present us all with a plurality of viewpoints necessary for us to reach our own viewpoints about our lives and society. "If commercialism provides the logic for all speech, the commitment to public communication disintegrates under the obsession with material self-interest." Alexander Meiklejohn Thanks for caring enough to read this far...

Happy Independence Day….but……

comeplaywithtim — Wed, 05 Jul 2006 00:31:47 GMT

It’s great to celebrate our accomplishments of the past....we have come a long way to get where we are today. Yet, a new revolution must be addressed, a revolution to reconquer our own minds. As you all know, now more than ever before in history, we are being bombarded with relentless streams of media produced by the wealthiest, most powerful sector of our population. The majority of this upper-upper-class of people identify themselves with similar beliefs about the world, and want to maintain the “status-quo” so that their beliefs will remain justified. These beliefs are subtly portrayed (or sometimes more obviously portrayed) in all mainstream news, TV, movies, commercials, magazines, video games, websites.....and in the words of the people we directly associate with. If we truly desire to be “free”, it is up to each and every one of us to decipher the biases behind every media message we consume…...or, to wisely choose which media messages we want to allow into our unconscious. Lets face it, the facts are undeniable. The media we consume affects our life actions and attitudes to a degree beyond what we ever imagined possible. So the choice remains for you to make; The freedom to think for yourself. The freedom to be happy. The freedom to construct your life they way YOU want to. Do you really want your freedoms? It is all up to you. Hope that makes sense….or maybe it sounds too obvious to you already. Most certainly, I have over-simplified the matter. It is a complex issue and many other factors remain to be considered. Maybe you should take the time to understand the issue further? I would polish up my writing a bit more…but it is indeed Independence Day.

Twelve Ways to Think Differently by David Pollard

comeplaywithtim — Sat, 03 Jun 2006 21:45:57 GMT

This is a fun read...definitely worthy of YOUR time: Twelve Ways to Think Differently By Dave Pollard The Idea: Twelve methods that will exercise parts of your brain that rarely get it, and make you more creative and better able to understand the world. Our minds are like our bodies -- fail to exercise them and they atrophy and break down. We live in an age of specialization, where we are encouraged to narrow our interests and our activities, to focus and limit ourselves to doing things at which we are very competent. So parts of our brain get a lot of exercise and other parts very little. What's worse, this can actually narrow our comfort zone, the range of things we enjoy doing or thinking about and are competent in. Many of our cultural activities and artefacts: political debates, win/lose competitions, hierarchies, laws, religions, 'best practices', systematization, uniforms, and monolithic architecture and design -- all tend to reinforce 'one right answer' thinking that discourages and ultimately excludes and prevents us from thinking differently. Even the mental exercises we do as we get older are designed to stem the loss of analytical skills and memory rather than broadening our thinking or our thinking ability. We live in a world of stultifying sameness and uniformity: physically, ideologically, intellectually. There is little motivation, little day-to-day need, to exercise the parts and processes of our brain that rarely get a workout. So how can we learn to broaden our thinking, to think differently? This is not just a matter of critical thinking, creative thinking, 'outside the box' thinking. It is about opening up our minds to the world and all its possibilities. This is one of the essences of the Four Practices of Open Space, (opening, inviting, making room, acting/realizing). But it is not at all easy. Our brain structures are actually formed as we grow, to reflect and accommodate the analytical and 'one right answer' thinking that constitutes most of what we are taught when we are young. Broadening our thinking therefore requires us to consciously will ourselves to think about things, and think in ways, that we are not comfortable or familiar with. It is counter-cultural, more of an unlearning than a learning process. It is kind of like the agony that runners who do not regularly do 'loosening up' exercises must go through to stretch the muscles that have tightened (shortened, atrophied) in response to the running routine. From my own experience, some research and a couple of recent conversations, here are twelve mental 'stretching' techniques that can enable you to think differently. Before you consider them, you might want to ask yourself whether you need them. They are unlikely to make you happier, though they will probably make you more creative, and more understanding. Remember, I'm the guy who lives to foment dissatisfaction, so be forewarned. In no particular order, and with some likely overlap: Meditation: Or whatever 'stand still and look until you really see' attention techniques work for you. Anything that can still the noise of the machine in our heads, anything (like Getting Things Done) that can empty the detailed minutiae of your life from your memory and make room for something new. Because the better you are at paying attention, the more likely you are to be able to see and appreciate other perspectives. Reconnect With Your Senses: Do exercises that increase your awareness and the sensitivity of your senses. Most of what you learn is perceptual rather than conceptual, and you can learn an astonishing amount by just becoming more aware of nature, and of yourself, and of the connection between your senses and the senses of all life on Earth. Reconnect With Your Intuition: We are taught to distrust it, but for three million years it informed us about the world and how to deal with it successfully and happily. It's all there encoded in your DNA -- how to live, how to handle any situation, what to do. The perspective you can get when your intuition provides one viewpoint on a situation and your 'book learning' another is remarkable. It's like suddenly seeing stereo when all your life you've only seen with one eye. Instant depth perception. Analogies and Metaphors: "Science is Metaphor" said Timothy Leary. Analogies and metaphors allow you to 're-see' something abstract as something concrete, something conceptual as perceptual. Lakoff points out that "We cannot think just anything - only what our embodied brains permit", and analogies and metaphors permit us to think things we probably otherwise couldn't. My recent "If the Shoe Were On the Other Foot" article was an example of this. Conversations and Interviews: A wonderful enabler for thinking differently is the shared context that comes from conversations and interviews. Several of my most popular articles have been conversations with myself or with other people, because they help people understand my thought process much better than analytical discourse. Like everything natural, they are inefficient but extremely effective. Interviews work the same way. Face-to-face and recorded conversations and interviews, if they are natural and probing and improvisational, are even better, because you learn more of the participants' worldview from the vocal nuances and body language. Synthesis, Distillation and Restatement: When you recapitulate and condense what you've read or heard, you force yourself to use your own words to say what they had to say. You can learn as much from this about their way of thinking, and your own, as you can from the reading or listening experience itself. Reading (and Writing) Fiction: The most important character in stories is the narrator, not the protagonist. While empathy with the protagonist will keep you reading, it is from understanding the perspective of the narrator, and contrasting it with your own, that you learn the most. Here as an illustration is an excerpt from Mark Haddon's wonderful book The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (thank you to the reader who recommended this book to me) -- told from the point of view of an autistic child: And then I thought about how for a long time scientists were puzzled by the fact that the sky is dark at night, even though there are billions of stars in the universe and there must be stars in every direction you look, so that the sky should be full of starlight because there is very little in the way to stop the light from reaching Earth. Then they worked out that the universe was expanding, that the stars were all rushing away from one another after the Big Bang, and the further the stars were away from us, the faster they were moving, some of them nearly as fast as the speed of light, which is why their light never reached us. I like this fact. It is something you can work out in your own mind just by looking at the sky above your head at night and thinking without having to ask anyone. And when the universe has finished exploding, all the stars will slow down, like a ball that has been thrown into the air, and they will come to a halt and they will all begin to fall towards the centre of the universe again. And then there will be nothing to stop us from seeing all the stars in the world because they will all be moving towards us, gradually faster and faster, and we will know that the world is going to end soon because when we look up into the sky at night there will be no darkness, just the blazing light of billions and billions of stars, all falling. Except that no one will see this because there will be no people left on Earth to see it. They will probably have become extinct by then. And even if there are people still in existence, they will not see it because the light will be so bright and hot that everyone will be burned to death, even if they live in tunnels. Psychoactive and Other Drugs: They work for some people, and have for thousands of years. Nope, don't have any on me. Learning a New Language: Linguists say all human languages are so similar than an alien would see them as indistinguishable, but anyone who doesn't see how a language entrenches cultural preconceptions, ideas, and ways of thinking probably has never mastered a second one. The vocabulary, the syntax, the way in which it is ordered, the nuances of meaning, all push you to new ways of thinking. Learning Something Outside Your Comfort Zone: If you're an artist, learn about String Theory. If you're a scientist, learn about the aesthetics of music. The more novel and uncomfortable and strange it is, the more it will liberate your calcified brain. Do Impulsive and Serendipitous Things: Any activity that won't let you plan or anticipate, but which instead forces you to perceive and learn quickly and pay attention and react and live in the moment, will get you outside the centre of your own universe and help you see and think differently. And if you can't get yourself to do impulsive and serendipitous things, then at least read impulsively and serendipitously. Free the genie. Collaboration: Not just coordination or cooperation, true collaboration. When you have produced a truly collective work-product, you have in many ways got inside the heads of your fellow collaborators, and that will change you forever. Courses in lateral thinking try to teach you how to identify and set aside the obstacles in your own head (biases and preconceptions, inability to concentrate or imagine, entrenched ways of thinking, fear, conservatism, ignorance) that prevent you from thinking in truly novel ways. These courses offer more exercises to show you how to train yourself to think differently. But ultimately, like any difficult and important skill, the only way to achieve mastery is to practice, practice, practice. The twelve techniques above are, at least for most of us, fun and engaging ways to do that.

Do yourself a big favor

comeplaywithtim — Thu, 20 Apr 2006 17:30:03 GMT

Yes this means you…. take a 1/2 hour of your life…. Grab a pen and paper, list anything and everything you are grateful for in your life: experiences, parental influences, attitudes, personal attributes, material objects, people, places, things, ideas, life situations, natural resources, foods, hobbies, inspiring art and music, personal freedoms, natural abilities, books, inspirations in general, and on and on and on…brainstorm, brainstorm, brainstorm, there is no wrong way to affirm what you are grateful for in our life. Any determined person can easily come up with over 100 entries within a ½ hour. Or maybe it will be better for you to simply affirm 30 - 50 of the things you are most grateful for in your life. It’s your choice. Make it happen. That’s it. You’re done. Just keep the list and review it whenever you feel like you are forgetting all the reasons why you should be happy. The physical and mental benefits of this simple exercise are extraordinary. Any and all psychologists and sociologists will agree that recognizing what we are grateful for is key to a happy and healthy life. I think most of us have come to realize the obvious: As a result of societal pressure, it has become commonplace for most of us to consistently crave more for our lives. We have come to believe that happiness will come once we achieve certain life goals. It becomes so easy to forget how blessed we really are in the mist of all that we crave. We must correct this situation if we want to reach a true state of happiness. What better way to start then to simply make a list of all that you are grateful for….??? We are ultimately in control of our thoughts. It just takes a lot of motivation and responsibility on our part - thus many of us simply choose to ignore our ability to do so. “We are what we think. All that we are arises with our thoughts. With our thoughts we make the world.” Buddha

Fwd: FWD: a "United Nations of Religions"

comeplaywithtim — Wed, 19 Apr 2006 22:56:46 GMT

On Saturday, the Dalai Lama was in San Francisco at the invitation of Muslim leaders for a historic peace gathering, working towards a "United Nations of Religions". The concept was introduced less than a month ago at the Second World Congress of Imams and Rabbis for Peace. At that conference, Muslim and Jewish religious leaders discussed ways to create a dialogue between Jewish and Muslim religious leaders, create an opportunity for religious leaders to use their influence in conflict resolution in various regions of the world, and help religious leaders to challenge fanatics who are using religion to justify violence. At the Second Congress, the Chief Rabbi of Israel, Yona Metzger, called for the creation of a world body with representatives from the major religious groups, a "United Nations of religious groups". The Imam of Gaza, Imad al-Faluji, said politicians lied but religious leaders had a different objective - to work towards a higher good. The imams and rabbis at the conference said the world is in crisis and it is time they acted to restore justice, respect, and peace. The delegates made it very clear that now is the time for concrete initiatives. The landmark gathering this past weekend in San Francisco was the first assembly of a "religious parliament". The intent is for religious leaders to unite in dispelling misunderstanding and injustice that breed extremism. San Francisco was picked for the gathering because it was where the United Nations was founded. The Dalai Lama spontaneously cancelled his plans to join approximately 100 world-renowned scholars, teachers, and leaders of Muslim, Buddhist, Christian, Hindu, Jewish, and other faiths. The Organising Committee for the gathering said in a statement: "Never before have so many of the world's prominent and influential religious leaders come together at one time for such an imperative and specific purpose. The message of peace and understanding that will emanate from this conference and the solidarity powerfully represented by these great and compassionate thinkers speaking in unison will help heal the world." Mon, April 17, 2006 - 11:18 PM permalink - 2 comments