Well Scotty I must admit “I hear you”… Hence “challenging”. I can only imagine how he must come across in interviews to non-christians… We only got thru fifteen minutes last night and I was getting mad. And I personally like the guy. I find his sermons inspiring and innovative like many, and his attitude. But 2 things really bother me: he waffles on challenging issues as though he’s trying straddle both sides of the fence. And his staunch committment to what he calls “scripture” referring to the Torah and the “new testament”, keep his ideologies stuck in the BCE era. Only we no longer live in the BCE era. Thus he comes off super old fashioned, close minded, racist and sexist; using “scripture” as his ammunition. Just let me say this one serious thing before u bust out w a funny: I go to church regularly. I’m a practicing Judeo- Christian. But the pastors at my church do NOT say things like that nor do they act like that. They wrestle w how best to integrate the bible w modern times. They don’t beleive in capital punishment, they don’t believe that homosexuality is a sin; they aren’t praying for an armageddon or world war III so “the messiah will return.” etc etc. Much like reformed Judaism. So there are “intelligent” “Christians” out there. One just need look a bit. They’re out there. I try not to judge Joel because then I’m no different than he is or other extremists. But I know it’s tempting. Ok gotta run to church. ; > Later gator. Xoxo
The Real Origin of Thanksgiving…
Like several other American “holidays” — such as Columbus Day Christmas and Easter, Thanksgiving as it is celebrated today is barely recognizable when compared to the events that led to its formation many years ago. When taking the plight of the Native American people into consideration, Thanksgiving is an especially vexing and bitter pill to swallow for historians and students of fairness truth and justice studies. A human rights nightmare for a variety of complex reasons and issues, Thanksgiving poses many challenges for those who are familiar with the actual events that transpired during “the Pilgrim years”.
Even today it’s a challenging mission for those of us who long to participate in celebrating the noble values now associated with the newly revised national holiday and at the same time still want to honor the truth… and acknowledge the many who suffered and died through the centuries in respect to this particularly dark moment in American history.
Sometimes it may feel as if everything around us is myth and Matrix. And indeed in the end we may just discover that this is more fact than we could even imagine now at such an early stage in our evolution. This we do not yet know for certain. What we do know however is that our numbers are exponentially increasing, those who long for more fairness beauty truth art peace love liberty justice and freedom in the world. Very soon it will come and all will be well.
In that spirit, Happy Thanksgiving to all.
http://www.francesfarmersrevenge.com/stuff/archive/turkey/index.htm
The Occupy Wall Street Movement – Ths is NOT What Democracy Looks Like
It’s been ten years since I first joined the “movement.” The “activist movement.” I’m a newbie. I know. Back in the early nineties, when I was working for the Clinton/Gore campaign as a young teenager and became an official “Deputy Registrar” so I could qualify to register people to vote, I “thought” I was being an “activist.” But I was young and naive and just didn’t understand what “an activist” meant.
Today we only have 700 protestors in th
Gigrich
You are paid to
pay to play
cough up money to buy influence
Dana Milbank @milbank
jmaestas22 Tweeted yesterday that “Food and backpacks now being allowed in Zuccotti Park. People can come and go through security check points with ease. #OWS”
Nearly Meaningless Debate over Being a Centrist
The below is a “copy and paste” of a text conversation I had with Trotsky this morning. Of course now that the New York City Police Department has decided to arrest all the brave and beautiful people down in Zuccotti Park participating in the Occupy Wall Street movement, this is a nearly meaningless dialogue, truly. [We will deal with this most recent illegal attack on the Occupy Wall Street movement in another blog in a little later] But I did find this textual tet a tet between Trotsky and I interesting from my very moderate, smack dab in the middle Independent Voter’s perspective. I love Trotsky. He’s one of “my boys.” We’ve been friends for more than a decade. He’s one of the handful or two of the people I text with every morning and throughout the day. He’s a good guy. A really good guy. A decent fella is how I would sum him up. So no harm done. But the question that comes up for me
Morning, scoobie
The Coming Inevitable Irrelevance of Facebook
Mazzini it kinda sounds like you and ES don’t quite get what’s goin on. I don’t use Facebook Notes. News goes to our various websites and views go to our blogs. Normally they feed Facebook. Both our profiles and our fanpages. THRU the fb notes feature. But we never actually USE Notes. Why would we? Its not our real estate as one of u insightfully pointed out. But Fb is now dismantling this system. Forcing everyone to do one of either two things: add content directly to Facebook (which is what they are requesting/suggesting we do)… OR copying and pasting our website and blog links onto our Facebook pages and profiles every single day.
Theyre trying to get people and companies to spend more time on Fb specifically and directly rather than just “feeding” facebook from our own real estate. Dig? The problem is that people are just too busy for that. Small to large companies even busier. No one (person or company) is going to sacrifice their own website or blog to dedicate more time to “work Facebook”.
The truth is that the visionaries and early adapters are already migrating to Twitter like birds to the South in Winter and using Sensable to automate facebook content on a weekly basis, rendering facebook even less “real logged in time.” (This comment will post 14 hours after I actually wrote it. But no one will ever know that.) Only what Godin calls “the Laggards” who are always the last to adopt new tech and are still new to Fb are excited about it and attempting to “work it”. Good place to advertise, gain brand exposure and fans in order to steer those people to your own real estate. For sure. For now.
Just as rickipedia said, They got too greedy. Homogenized. Boxed inside their own shell. For some dumb reason they cant seem to see outside their own windows anymore. Monopolized as rickipedia says.
The moment they did away with boxes and tabs and that open architecture and friendliness to third party apps was the signal that they were on their way out and towards irrelevance. Like MySpace they’ll stick around for awhile. Well funded and plenty of capital. So they’ll keep trying to stick their heads in our fridges to see what weve got to eat; but they’re relevance is shrinking. Twitter is making sure of that.
In addition, as they INCREASE their demands on users, forcing users to post content directly in rather than “feeding”, and trying to get inside our mobile devices and cell phones, and email us all the time with their silly notifications, the public is entering an information overload phase and the pushback is frightening the hell out of the Zuckster.
I can’t quite yet tell you EXACTLY what’s going to happen or what it’s going to look like, but what I’m feeling is that it will have something to do with YouTube meets Twitter meets WordPress meets Google+ and Gmail. Especially if Google and WordPress maintain thier open ended architecture, and Twitter continues to allow users to use various third party apps to access the service they provide. And all of this happened really fast. Literally within weeks. Why? Because people want freedom. They only want to “Occupy” where they’re not allowed to. Now that’s funny. But unfortunately for Facebook it’s entirely true.
But hey, stay tuned because this all may change and be very five minutes ago by the time we wake up tomorrow. But to hammer the final death nail in the Fb coffin, we won’t hear about this change on Facebook. We’ll learn about it on Twitter. So see ya there manana. Ciao for now. Ambassador out.
The Coming Inevitable Irrelevance of Facebook
Mazzini it kinda sounds like you and ES don’t quite get what’s goin on. I don’t use Facebook Notes. News goes to our various websites and views go to our blogs. Normally they feed Facebook. Both our profiles and our fanpages. THRU the fb notes feature. But we never actually USE Notes. Why would we? Its not our real estate as one of u insightfully pointed out. But Fb is now dismantling this system. Forcing everyone to do one of either two things: add content directly to Facebook (which is what they are requesting/suggesting we do)… OR copying and pasting our website and blog links onto our Facebook pages and profiles every single day.
They’re trying to get people and companies to spend more time on Fb specifically and directly rather than just “feeding” facebook from our own real estate. Dig? The problem is that people are just too busy for that. Small to large companies even busier. No one (person or company) is going to sacrifice their own website or blog to dedicate more time to “work Facebook”.
The truth is that the visionaries and early adapters are already migrating to Twitter like birds to the South in Winter and using Sensable to automate facebook content on a weekly basis, rendering facebook even less “real logged in time.” (This comment will post 14 hours after I actually wrote it. But no one will ever know that.) Only what Godin calls “the Laggards” who are always the last to adopt new tech and are still new to Fb are excited about it and attempting to “work it”. Good place to advertise, gain brand exposure and fans in order to steer those people to your own real estate. For sure. For now.
Just as rickipedia said, They got too greedy. Homogenized. Boxed inside their own shell. For some dumb reason they cant seem to see outside their own windows anymore. Monopolized as rickipedia says.
The moment they did away with boxes and tabs and that open architecture and friendliness to third party apps was the signal that they were on their way out and towards irrelevance. Like MySpace they’ll stick around for awhile. Well funded and plenty of capital. So they’ll keep trying to stick their heads in our fridges to see what we’ve got to eat; but they’re relevance is shrinking. Twitter is making sure of that.
In addition, as they INCREASE their demands on users, forcing users to post content directly in rather than “feeding”, and trying to get inside our mobile devices and cell phones, and email us all the time with their silly notifications, the public is entering an information overload phase and the pushback is frightening the hell out of the Zuckster.
I can’t quite yet tell you EXACTLY what’s going to happen or what it’s going to look like, but what I’m feeling is that it will have something to do with YouTube meets Twitter meets WordPress meets Google+ and Gmail. Especially if Google and WordPress maintain their open ended architecture, and Twitter continues to allow users to use various third party apps to access the service they provide. And all of this happened really fast. Literally within weeks. Why? Because people want freedom. They only want to “Occupy” where they’re not allowed to. Now that’s funny. But unfortunately for Facebook it’s entirely true.
But hey, stay tuned because this all may change and be very five minutes ago by the time we wake up tomorrow. But to hammer the final death nail in the Fb coffin, we won’t hear about this change on Facebook. We’ll learn about it on Twitter. So see ya there manana. Ciao for now. Ambassador out.
The Occupy Revolution: Collateral Damage
I feel it is necessary to recount something that was spoken to me on Sunday. In of all places the food storage pantry of our church where we store all the canned goods for our “feed the homeless” program called Sharing Table. After my recent 6 week absence from nyc, a good friend passed me an arms full of canned green beans to shelve and looked me in the eyes; “I only have one thing to say about your newest activism Eddie… The more money that you all pull out of the banks in your ‘Occupy movement’, good people who work at those banks are losing their jobs: tellers and lower income earners who only make $20,000 to $25,000. That’s who’s being affected the most by your actions. You need to be aware of that.” Her comment took me by surprise. Indeed we do need to be aware of this. And now we are. Something for us all to be aware of. And to ponder. I found myself disturbed. But only for a breif moment, as I recalled that BECU the WA based credit union hired over 100 new employees last week in order to meet the demand created by how many of us who transferred our money to them from Bank of America and Wells Fargo. Of course there is so much more to this story…. And together we shall cover it all in our continuing dialogues. But at the least let us remember that where we are presently in our various ‘Occupy Revolution’ tactics there are going to be some innocents who get affected by our actions. And that surely is not our goal. To each of them we offer our apologies and hope that in the long run this will be a peaceful and successful shift for the better good for us all.
Interestingly about an hour later someone else said to me in response to this comment “Then they too will recognize that they are part of the 99% when they get laid off while the owners and officers and directors at these banks keep their jobs and continue to be paid tens of millions of dollars a year. It’s sad. But it’s true. And they will soon join the cause once they see that even they are not immune to the rampant greed of Wall Street and Big Banks.” Perhaps I thought this is the only way for all of the 99% to truly come together. When the only people left standing are the 1%, then we can begin the transformation to a more fair and equitable system for all 100% of us.
A Blueprint for Achievement
Believe while others are doubting.
Plan while others are playing.
Study while others are sleeping.
Decide while others are delaying.
Prepare while others are daydreaming.
Begin while others are procrastinating.
Work while others are wishing.
Save while others are spending.
Listen while others are talking.
Smile while others are pouting.
Commend while others are criticizing.
Persist while others are quitting.
“New Orleans Dreams” music video by Ed Hale
Music video for the song “New Orleans Dreams” by Ed Hale from the album Ballad On Third Avenue