into the dialectic

Google Co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin disparaging the commercialization of search engines said. “We expect that advertising-funded search engines will be inherently biased toward the advertisers and away from the needs of the consumers.” They had a vision of allowing unfettered access to the sum of all human knowledge on line.

However Google’s CEO Eric Schmidt recently explained in an interview with Charlie Rose, “now we are an advertising company!” Today 99% of Google’s revenue comes from the ads it strews on websites across the internet. Google has become the internet’s largest and most determined info-polluter – effectively killing the dream of a commercial-free internet.

This should cause us to consider the long-term cultural consequences of relying on an advertising company to organize the world’s information. For the first time in human history, a single company both controls our access and corrupts that same information through advertising. Continue reading »

Love the melodramatic ending at the end of this piece (“addicted to nonsense”) – The tragi-comic drama of reality!! It’s interesting to me that, whilst the picture is bleaker than we might care to acknowledge in our waking lives, the end isn’t necessarily nigh! On the contrary. Radical change is nigh – and the saviour is YOU, baby! [Yes, yes - like, Neo - WAKE UP - You are the One] – Hello…

… What really matters in our lives—the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the steady deterioration of the dollar, the mounting foreclosures, the climbing unemployment, the melting of the polar ice caps and the awful reality that once the billions in stimulus money run out next year we will be bereft and broke—doesn’t fit into the cheerful happy talk that we mainline into our brains. We are enraptured by the revels of a dying civilization. Once reality shatters the airy edifice, we will scream and yell like petulant children to be rescued, saved and restored to comfort and complacency. There will be no shortage of demagogues, including buffoons like Sarah Palin, who will oblige. We will either wake up to face our stark new limitations, to retreat from imperial projects and discover a new simplicity, as well as a new humility, or we will stumble blindly toward catastrophe and neofeudalism…

read the article

as above, so below

(underlying cultural influence on the theme of Christmas and New Year)

winter solstice is considered the strongest of the four main power points of the year. 
The light returns…
masculine sun gains strength from this day till summer solstice (when sun begins to wane again.)

Now…
is when we might ritually let go in our bodies, minds, hearts and spirit of what we don’t want to carry into the new cycle of increase. 

Celebrate, release, renew!

Continue reading »

Again, in spite of RAW’s advise “do not adjust your mind – it is reality that is malfunctioning”, after successfully returning from Black Rock City after the 7th (or 8th?) journey to that wild and glorious place, I find my neurones are just beginning to regroup and the synapses starting to fire in the correct order once more, to fit consensus reality, kind of. But, each time one’s perspective is broadened by some radical experience, it’s hard to squeeze the consciousness genie back in it’s bottle, … Continue reading »