One day soon I'll fix the brokenness so that you can once again wander around in the good old pages where I've collected my notes on sex, drugs and philosophy. Since those pages are broken at the moment, I'm just reposting this because it feels relevant this morning:

Josh's Axioms Of Living

1. Life is Holy and Every Moment Precious
   Lifted from Kerouac. I believe in the essential worth of life and the time we have to experience it. Unless you accept this as basic, nothing else is worth bothering about. You have to first sit down and say, "Hey, my life is a real thing, and I want to make it the best it can be." This is the bedrock of everything else I believe in: the core assumption I make that experience is good. Common synonym: "Thou shalt not kill."
   
2. The Truth Always Feels Better
   Just a simple little reminder that holding it in or trying to cover for things is not a good way to run the ship. This revelation should share credit with Andrew, who helped me realize this when we were but College Sophomores. Common synonym: "Thou shalt not bear false witness."
   
3. The Most Important Thing is to Stop Struggling
   This doesn't mean you don't resist evil, or that you don't battle for the light, but that you accept what is and work with the flow of life and not against it. It's built on the core assumption (life is holy) that there's always something positive to be had in the flow of life. This was revealed to me by Robin vis-a-vis Mark and a big night of struggling. Common synonym: "Turn off your mind, relax and float down stream."
   
4. Presence is Perfection
   This is how I get out of my nit-pickey, perfectionist, self-critical, hyper-aware, out of body hell. Being "in the moment", as they say in acting school, is harder then you might think. But if you can manage that, you've got it made. Common synonym: "let your mind go and your body will follow."

I intend to revisit and renew a lot of this (and the other non-blog content) on this site as part of my summer project. But thse things still ring true to me five years later.

Stoller:

Ok, now the substance. The ad makes a couple of claims. One, that web site operators don't pay for the internet. That is a lie. They pay massive sums of money for bandwidth, on the order of $10 billion last year alone. So does the public in tax subsidies for telecom companies, perhaps as high as $200 billion over the years (though it's hard to tell with all the mergers and weird accounting).

Word. You don't get to put shit online for free. You pay out the ass to get a fat pipe, which is why most people co-locate their servers with someone else who's already done that.

It's a pretty good turnout here at Drupal Camp. Aaron and I got together last night and had seven beers and argued about the merits of Nuclear power, and managed to take at least a page of notes, so we should be cool to run the Advanced Development track.

It's a mixed group; should be pretty interesting.

The "real" Hummer, the H1, is going out of production:

The 2006 model year will be the last for the Hummer H1, the hulking, gas-guzzling status symbol that attracted celebrities and off-road enthusiasts but has drawn the ire of environmentalists.

That's sort of misleading. The much more popular H2 is also a gas guzzling pollution-machine, and it has the added bonus of just being an ultra-heavy Chevy Tahoe, so it can't, like, do anything special.

In light of that, I found this quote kind of illuminating:

"It's a great brand. There is a lot that can be done with that in terms of leveraging its ruggedness and toughness."

The brand contains the ideas of ruggedness and toughness, but the product itself does not. The H2 and H3 are not in any way extra-capable or able to acually do anything.

This is where we are as a civilization: so heavily invested in our own bullshit we don't know the difference between a tough vehicles and a "tough" brand. Like most hegemons in declines, we are militarily active, driven by signs and wonders.

Via Digby: Donald Rumsfeld and Dick Cheney, circa 1970:

That's right! Rummy and Big Time, at the height of everything. Meanwhile...

America's favorite Facist Sex Symbol keeps on truckin':

Why hasn't the former spokesman for the Taliban matriculating at Yale been beaten even more senseless than he already is? According to Hollywood, this nation is a cauldron of ethnic hatreds positively brimming with violent skinheads. Where are the skinheads when you need them? What does a girl have to do to get an angry, club- and torch-wielding mob on its feet?

David Neiwert has the background. He's a real journalist who's been covering right-wing extreemists for a while.

A Repost from the Atlantic Monthly:

The world of management theorists remains exempt from accountability. In my experience, for what it’s worth, consultants monitored the progress of former clients about as diligently as they checked up on ex-spouses (of which there were many). Unless there was some hope of renewing the relationship (or dating a sister company), it was Hasta la vista, baby. And why should they have cared? Consultants’ recommendations have the same semantic properties as campaign promises: it’s almost freakish if they are remembered in the following year.

Interesting article in all. I've long felt that the culture around managment and related consulting is a kind of voodoo. The paralells Stewart draws between these gestalts and traditional religion are apt.

Most organizations can probably benefit more from increasing transparently (if only internally) than from any passing management fad, but this is something bureaucracies will always resist. Why? Well, it actually does make it hard to hide inefficiencies, which leads to the inevitable question of "how much more productivity could we have?"

This is part and parcel of the perverse American relationship to work and productivity. WE work too long for too little, and we produce too little of real value as well. I know a lot of people (including myself) who will work needless 16 hour days or 80 hour weeks because we think this makes us herculean performers in our trade, when in fact if we were just to plan and focus a little more we could have been done much more quickly.

The problem is that getting all your work done quickly and then -- egad! -- clocking out to do non-work things is seen as a sign of slackerdom, while objectively spending twice as long to accomplish half as much is seen as heroic.

This starts with a work-style that develops in the college system (slack and cram, all while managing perceptions), and becomes embedded and ingraned over the course of years.

It gets worse in larger organizations, where that "perceptions management" part becomes more important than the actual products of your work, which are unlikely to be truly consequential.

And now I'm off to file my TPS reports...

The Telcos have a folksy piece of flash propaganda out as a paid ad on most of the major blogs that's hitting back against Net Neutrality. It features freaky ranters (me), corporate fatcats (google, yahoo and microsoft), and a balding bureaucrat (the g-man).

The ad is highly misleading overall (of course). One of the things it doesn't feature is any telecommunication company. Funny, that. But to me, the best part is this:

"Net Neutrality is about who controls the internet: the people, or the government."

Huh. I wonder where turning over all phone records to Homeland Security spooks fits into this equation?

This is market fundimentalism at its finest: the will of the people is expressed through (unregulated) markets and frustrated by things like democratic government. This sort of ideology has been roundly shown to be false in real-world situations, yet it remains a strong force within the culture of Corporate America, which dominates the mindset of Washington DC. It will be interesting to see how this plays out.

You wanna see a real video about Net Neutrality? Ask a motherfucking ninja:

There's more here.

Well, they certainly seem headed toward the ontoligical showdown. That's satisfying. Gets my brain all het up. Interesting that the girls who died were the same ones with DUIs.

Causality? I tend to think it's the reverse: actors get written out of a show, they have to stick around for a month or so more, they get careless, etc. Boom. Boozed up in Maui, why not do a little joyriding. Lord knows I've done the same just feeling reckless in Oregon.

Anywayn, out here it's thunderbolts and lightning. First big Spring rain. Smells pretty good.

It's come to this. Sublet my place!

UPDATE: Ok, I think I have like 20 unread emails now. That's enough!

UPDATE UPDATE: What's with all the "UPDATE"s lately?

Iraq is gonna be procesed by our culture very differently than any previous wars. Exhibit A -- The War Tapes:

You can get a sense of the whole project a little better from the trailer. This will be worth checking out I think.