"Spirit, mind, heart -- this is the trinity that people seek to comprehend, to tend, to organize. Then their life will be sweet, will be serene, will be complete. .. .. " Why is this not so?" Because of what no one can bear to attend to. Because of what seems ‘beneath us’ as civilized persons. .. .. "Viscera. We ignore or disdain viscera to our implacable, even ferocious danger .. ..    more »

The time is Y0, the Year 0. (Not really Y0, of course, as there had been fabulous human history for more before the so-called Year Zero than after.) Still to come is the Inquisition, the Crusades. The manifestly destined wrecking of the Native Americans North & South from sea to shining sea. The importation of human chattel as slaves from Africa. The on-going oppression of women as a subtler chattel, or cattle. A myriad of ultimately aimless named-slaughters and unnamed dismemberments and indentures. A myriad is ten thousand so 4.9875 Stupid Slaughters a year is about right. The singed shuddering stench of the electric chair. Ah the glory of mankind .. .. .    more »

What a sweet night. Tuesday, November 15, 2005. A huge full moon floated in an indigo sky. The Mountain View CA City Council unanimously voted to lease light poles to Google to put up their synapse-devices to knowledge-cast the world’s information, the world’s eccentric and fascinating library, into people’s houses, apartments, schools, and parks .. .. .   more »

Standing ovations to Google for the farsighted gift of wifi to Mountain View. This is so smart and so urgently essential to a knowledge-enhanced future that I'm elated. Hurray and thank you! .. .. But -- in order to "make the world's information universally accessible and useful," we must collectively let the Other Shoe drop. We must get a cheap, tough laptop to every single Mountain View child K-12 so that all that knowledge brought by wifi can be received regardless of income. We must not have a digital divide, but rather a digital multiplication starting with the poorest children and rapidly expanding to all children .. ..   more »

The reason I like to use the allegorical essay rather than the strictly formal and putatively rational essay is that there is a part of the mind to which you as a reader get access if there are story elements. It engages all four quadrants of your brain and the collective unconscious. It?s a way of giving philosophy its juice and its irony back. .. .. I read linear essays with admiration, but I always feel like I need to have better posture when I read them. As if I were having tea with the Queen. .. .. I happen to have always had an inclination to the sort of Celti-sci-fi version of allegory because it makes an end-run around the reason I?ve never been so much of a devotee of post-Faulkner American Literature: neurosis. .. .. Pieces set in the semi-quasi-future obviate neurosis because they aren?t worming over one?s narcissistic melancholies with as confessional or thinly veiled confessional modes .. .. .    more »

“Well, Bill, next week starting Monday at 8am, we want you to teach five different seminars before 3pm.” .. .. “What!?” Bill expostulates, snorting like a startled stallion, “That’s absurd!” .. .. “Additionally,” you add, “each 58 minute seminar will have between 30-40 students, a different group each hour. Between most of the seminars, you will have no break whatsoever – one group will file in as the other files out.” .. .. .. “What?!” Bill’s eyes begin to bulge. A vein on his sweat-slicked forehead visibly pulses. “That’s absurd!”   more »

What BushCo & Ilk completely miss is that we win both allies and friends with spreading what you might call ‘practical love.’ Instead of multiplying vengeance, we would multiply affection. Train battalions of paramedics instead of soldiers – the same people, folks, the very same people. Train para-engineers instead of soldiers. The same recruits. The same team work, the same camaraderie. Minus the future nightmares that we bequeath to so many of them. We should use our massive strength (tho we’re owned by the Chinese banks & it’s hard to know when that bubble bursts?) to build for the downtrodden, champion the sick. The Earth is pleading for peace in broken people -- they are the runes, the hieroglyphs. You just have to have another tank -- and you let another sister go river blind? These things are connected. .. .. Is our legacy as America all this hell and hate? I don’t believe it. I believe that we can export engineering and education and medicine -- and movies and cruddy hamburgers . .. .    more »

So the Chinese are doing giga-green and SoKo is leading the unwired way. We have got to instantly get this nation to have universal hotspots – the whole damn nation, like the MoonShot. Why were we woken up by Sputnik and not by SoKo? This is an Emergency & it is not a Test. You should hear that noise of alarm This is an Emergency until you shout at your Representatives urgently and constantly. WiFi this Nation Now .. .. .    more »

“Well,” said Profounder, “the young on Planet Paisley have watched the middle-aged and old capitulate to gigaGreed, gigaCreed, and methed theoMilitoPatriotism. Who stands up? Who hollers? Silence of the Sheep – Obedient Americans is the longest running reality show they’ve seen. Who needs the SS? Malls, mortgages, football, and petty political bickering on cable tv quell the masses just fine .. .. ...    more »

The Burning Child .. Shifting from the Military Industrial Complex ($820,000 per minute) to the Education Instructional Complex. .. ..Child, child burning bright in the forests of delight. Every child has the civil right to a superb education. We shift the $820,000 per minute over to a Manhattan Project of funding to provide an explosion of education in our nation. .. .. .. Always look back from Y3000. Imagine where we are as our better angels in Y3000. How do we get there? That’s what pogblog wants to challenge and cajole you to think about. Not why we can’t. Because we do. So how do we get to the constructive, fruitful world? .. .. ..   more »

If we see consciousness vertically, a ladder to be climbed, we are falsely forced to see ourselves on the lower rungs staring up at the compassionate rump of the priest, guru, monk, shaman who precedes us to the heights. .. ..If, on the other hand, we rotate the axis of consciousness to be sideways, we can more correctly and coherently see the spectrum of our consciousness as including all the densities with no greater value implied. Just as in light, ultraviolet is not better than infrared, our less-dense experience is not better that our solid experience, only different .. .. .    more »

Great education is like putting a permanent IV in your arm renewing you with a plasma of fascination, with an ignited enthusiasm. Great education doesn’t teach you anything except how to learn, an earnest deftness of mind and heart which you can apply to the electric present. It’s splendid and lucky to be confidently curious all the time. .. .. .. This pro-peace plan needs the vision for construction and collaboration that the Manhattan Project brought to destruction and competition .. .. .    more »

When you look back from Y3000, it’s clear that what saved us from war, from state-sanctioned human sacrifice, was, as it is in Y3000, art and perception, an electric perception. Art-thirst replaces blood-thirst. Seeing art, doing art. And when we let loose all that art on the Planet, it shines pearlescent all the way to the FarStars . .. .. .    more »

What struck me about this September.24 pro-peace march was the pied beauty of all the people. You’ll recall Gerard Manley’s poem, Pied Beauty, “Glory be to God for dappled things … .” .. .. Each person and the whole crowd was pied, splotched, lovelily lumpy. Few people dress up for a pro-peace march. Now, they probably attire themselves very superstitiously and carefully, but it ain’t tuxedo time. People are adamantly comfortable. They are so loveably, splotchily human and humane that you find yourself besotted with the human race again . .. .. .. .. After news & news of KarlDickGeorgeDonaldCondi, you think the human race must be exterminated to prevent infestation of the galaxy, so foul are these folk in their damnable greed. But at the March, you see all the people of good will, aghast at what our beloved country has doriangrayily become .. .. .    more »

Note: This deceptively simple fable is what I paid my life, my fortune, and my sacred honor for. Learning the answer to the question of Whether we can have a just world ? not whether we will have a just world -- is one of the big questions of history, & I could only answer it with my sinew and blood .. ..   more »

First let's talk about improv for awhile. It would be the first class I'd put kids in -- outta the womb into improv. Improv teaches confidence, mischief, collaboration, glee. And a way of thinking intensely more useful than the default find-fault thinking that pollutes American thought patterns. The very first rule of improv is Yes-and. .. .. The fruitfulness and power of this approach has to be experienced to be believed. .. .. ..   more »

“You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” Bucky Fuller .. .. .. We cannot fix where we are. We cannot fix the gordian snarl we’re in. We must take the small but distinct quantum step to the Sane Fruitful Vision where we act in the gloryful, gleeful, liberating light of the fact of The Burning Child. .. .. .. Once you see that, as every bush burns, every child burns in the forests of delight, you will be honor-bound, duty-bound, future-bound to make complete superb K-College education for every child an emergency Manhattan-Project national priority beginning today .. .. ..   more »

It’s the education, stupid. Not these tame little underfunded tweaks reluctantly coughed up by a cowed Congress, but a massive Manhattan Project to quantum the human experience thru intense, delicious continuous continuous continuous education . .. .   more »