The server was out for a wee bit there, but now it appears to be back, so whatever Jaeger and Scott did must have worked.

Lawyers for the Defense Department are refusing to cooperate with a federal judge's order to release secret photographs and videotapes related to the Abu Ghraib prison abuse scandal.

This is wrong on so many levels. First there's the acts documented in the photographs -- rape and torture of the innocent perpetrated by U.S. forces. (Are 8-year-old girls now also considered terrorists?)

Add to that the open defiance of a Federal judge's order by the military. So apparently the legal system is now meaningless.

Add to that the fact that most of the major news media appears to be ignoring this story. Sure, I can go on google news and find several local papers covering it, but nothing from the big ones like CNN or Fox.

After work today, I rode up to Omaha to listen to Gehlek Rimpoche's talk. I carpooled with two other people from the Jewel Heart group, both of whom provided fascinating conversation in both directions on the 1-hour ride.

Today's events, brief.

Today, after taking a rather scenic and winding route through the sun-heated city, I arrived at Open Harvest to perform my first volunteer shift.

Brought to us via the infamous Ran Prieur; Ivan Illich examines the true efficiency of a car-based society.

The model American male devotes more than 1600 hours a year to his car. He sits in it while it goes and while it stands idling. He parks it and searches for it. He earns the money to put down on it and to meet the monthly installments. He works to pay for gasoline, tolls, insurance, taxes, and tickets. He spends four of his sixteen waking hours on the road or gathering his resources for it. And this figure does not take into account the time consumed by other activities dictated by transport: time spent in hospitals, traffic courts, and garages; time spent watching automobile commercials or attending consumer education meetings to improve the quality of the next buy. The model American puts in 1600 hours to get 7500 miles: less than five miles per hour. In countries deprived of a transportation industry, people manage to do the same, walking wherever they want to go, and they allocate only 3 to 8 percent of their society's time budget to traffic instead of 28 percent. What distinguishes the traffic in rich countries from the traffic in poor countries is not more mileage per hour of lifetime for the majority, but more hours of compulsory consumption of high doses of energy, packaged and unequally distributed by the transportation industry.

Yeah. It took a few years of experience for me to figure out that for myself, economically speaking, my car was pretty much a waste. Originally, the primary reason I bought it was to get to work easier. Then, I spent so many of my money-hours paying it off that by the time I was almost done, I lost my salaried job and had very little savings to show for it! Even though I rarely drive it now (the last time I put gas in was the beginning of June), taxes and insurance fees continue to be a burden. There are "fun" aspects to owning a car, but they seem to get less and less fun with time.

Here we have another article about the ongoing criticisms Costco gets from Wall Street analysts. The company's problem isn't that it's not making money, because it is. Despite its profitability, financial houses are worried that the company treats its employees too well.

"He has been too benevolent," she said. "He's right that a happy employee is a productive long-term employee, but he could force employees to pick up a little more of the burden."

It's generally assumed that Wall Street treasures money above all else, but this case would seem to cast that axiom into doubt. Could it be that they value poverty (of others) over wealth? Is there any other way to interpret such a statement?

With eloquence and clarity, Jason Godesky dissects the true meaning of John Locke's concept of a "Right to Property", and the implications it brings.

What perfect weather! The morning sun shined on the ever-more green plant blooming around Lincoln, as I casually wound my way through the city.

The past few mornings, I seem to be remembering more dreams than usual, and being inspired by them too. So again, I'm taking what I can remember and recording it in words. Plus a few other thoughts.

A full blown epic. Unique and beautifully done.

Holy shit, I think my brain just blew a fuse. There's no way I can bring it all back now. And at no point was it lucid until the very final point of waking. But it did keep hitting me progressively deeper and deeper. Working back from the end. In spasms....

(continued from the previous mess of incoherence...)

Why does Artefact steadfastly keep refusing to release cds in the U.S.? I love pretty much everything I've heard from them, but that only amounts to a few tracks, because in order to buy any of it, one would not only need to pay in expensive Euros, but also add overseas shipping. (Addendum: Well, ok I see now they've added iTunes links, but that still doesn't help me. Why not take full advantage of this Internet thing, and offer real mp3/ogg/flac downloads of their albums? Like The Morrighan did; I bought their mixes album through Paypal in Euros last year, so I know it can be done.)

Bleeh. I'm feeling freakish, neurotic, and petty tonight. I choose to place the blame on the seething masses of endless customers, too many of whom are freakish, neurotic, and petty.

Having patched my latest flat last night, I put Serenity back together this morning, said Hi to Yalena who was arriving (and leaving) just before I departed, and took off on a couple of errands.

Having just completed my reading of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, a few thoughts.

Jeremy Puma of Fantastic Planet reflects on the nature of death. This point really struck a chord with me:

6. There is no need for a Hell. Hitler died and became every single one of his victims, had to experience every evil ever committed by his followers from the other end. They didn’t realize they were Hitler when it happened; does that make it any better, or even worse? Each of them was reborn within the consciousness of Hitler and perpetrated these crimes against themselves, who were, in turn, Hitler. There is one experiencer, one recipient of all the good and ill produced by the subjective realm, one objective consciousness that seeks to learn about itself by experiencing each and every subjective manifestation of itself.

[...]

Simply put, what you do unto even the least of humanity you do unto the Christ within because what you do unto even the least of humanity you do to yourself. Lie, cheat, steal, kill? You're lying to, cheating, stealing from and murdering yourself.

Somehow, I managed to miss this entry when it was first posted. (Maybe it was just before I started reading Anthropik.) In it, Jason Godesky chronicles the development of his own religious faith, and how reading Quinn's Ishmael triggered an entire cascade resulting in a new understanding of the Bible. Choice quote:

I can no longer understand how a civilized person can read the Bible and consider it "their" book. Civilization and agriculture is G-d's curse. He calls Abraham to leave civilization behind and found twelve tribes to be his chosen people. He must constantly rescue them from civilization -- the Egyptians, the Assyrians, the Babylonians, the Persians, the Greeks, the Romans, every successive, great civilization is G-d's implacable enemy. The Torah creates a subversive system that undercuts civilization at every turn; the prophets advance an incredibly liberal agenda that assaults the most fundamental tenets of civilization -- the concentration of wealth and power. The Hebrews demand a king, a state -- a civilization -- despite G-d's warnings, and their suffering for that mistake has yet to end.

The Gospels only underline this unremitting, brutal assault on civilization. Jesus incites his disciples to leave it all behind, move beyond civilization into small, cooperative tribes, for lack of a better word. The Romans kill him for it, and Paul inverts it for his own power (see John Dominic Crossan's The Historical Jesus). After all that, the Bible ends with a stark prophecy of a final battle between east and west, the emergence of a single, global empire, and how G-d will destroy civilization and return us to the idyllic, utopian existence of Eden, where we began, where G-d meant us to be -- in tribes.

Today, during my ritual escapade around Lincoln, everything seemed to be going well. I wandered around Southeast near the Humblik Zone, stopped in a park to read for a while, got some delicious french bread and a transfat-free brownie at Open Harvest for afternoon snacking, and then, right near the corner of 17th and K St, a minor disaster struck.

This link nabbed from Yanthor's site. I'm posting it because, well, I grew up Adventist, so I find the altered perspective interesting; I know several of my readers (even those who might not visit yanthor.net) also share this background.

At this point in my life, I consider both institutions to be rife with dogma which is somewhat silly at best, insidiously oppressive at worst. But I know good people who are members of both religions, and it seems to suit them, so to each their own.

Just woke up, so this is coming right out of the subconscious terrain. But I'm not going to narrate it in my usual style. I'll just throw out what seem to be the important points.

In what seems to have become a semi-yearly event for me, I just got through watching Waking Life again. It is still among the most spiritually intense films I've ever seen, even after so many repetitions. (For added interest, I turned on the text commentary through part of it, mostly to help me remember a few names to look for whenever I find myself in a library/bookstore.)

This is one of the most eloquent statements I've read on the challenge that faces the human race. Go read it. Now.

I just received an email from nanonation. The unedited text follows. No surprises (at least not at this late stage), but it was nice of them to get back to me.

A couple of interesting incidents to relate about today's session of wandering around Lincoln.

Ever since he posted the pseudo-recipe, I've been wanting to try to make my own implementation of Ran's nutbars. This afternoon, I made my first attempt.

Doesn't it just figure that the night I would agree to take someone else's shift and close the station, everything would go crazy? Alright, I admit that maybe that's overstating it just a little, but this was certainly the nuttiest time I've had so far there.

When Yanthor and Anya said they were going to go get some fireworks, I imagined it would be a few little zingers that we would go out in the yard for a couple of minutes and set off, much like what many of the neighbors were doing.

Unlike most Mondays, today I worked a full 8 hour shift. Bribed by the promise of 150% hourly pay, last week I agreed to take the extra work.

Some of the questions on there are kind of stupid, but...

You Are 34% American

America: You don't love it or want to leave it. But you wouldn't mind giving it an extreme make over. On the 4th of July, you'll fly a freak flag instead... And give Uncle Sam a sucker punch!

This article describes the up and coming trend of collectively run coops that operate through the consensus process, and explores the advantages and disadvantages of such a setup. I've been considering joining and/or volunteering at the local food coop here in Lincoln. (Though I'm quite certain the one here is not run by collective consensus; that's an even rarer bird. In fact they're still working on becoming officially restructured as a coop instead of a non-profit org, since the tax status of "coop" didn't exist back when it was founded.)

In the optimistic future, these (or something very much like them) will become the norm, while top-down "thou shalt do as I say because I am the manager" outfits will appear to our descendents as quaint as the British monarchy.