Humanize the Earth!

Greyhound bus trip

It’s taken me a week after the trip to post this becasue I got pretty sick on the return and just haven’t been up to posting. I left Chicago on the 8:15pm Greyhound bus to Indianapolis on the 18th. We got in there after midnight sometime, in some time zone. I was suprised by the size of both Chicago and Indy stations. Both seemed huge to me. Bus was cram-packed, but on-time. One stop between Chicago and Indy. Seats are small, but not that uncomfortable. Certainly loads better than in Africa. Maybe that isn’t a good sign if that’s what I’m comparing it to, but hey. Really unhappy crying baby next to me much of the trip (with her mom, sometimes was across aisle with her dad). Didn’t bother me a bit, interestingly.

I had less than an hour to wait for the next bus, from Indy to Columbus. Wasn’t totally full, but nearly so. Seems that bus was from St. Louis to New York City. Before we left there was a fist-fight between a mother (protecting her children, it seemed) and a rather unreasonable man. The people on the bus gave him a hard time about taking his medication or going back to the mental hospital. He didn’t ride the bus with us to Columbus. Man in window seat with me didn’t want to move feet from under the seat in front of me. I was feeling agreeable so while my hackles raised a couple of times, I mostly just felt he must’ve needed the rest. Got to Columbus on time, around 4am. Unpacked by folding bike and off I went, without a map. I had looked at the map on Thursday so had a general sense of where I was going, was very glad that my friends lived north of the station so my orientation in space was the same as on the paper. Never would’ve made it otherwise.

The trip back started with an 11:30pm departure from Columbus, stopping in Dayton to let people off. Mostly full bus again. Then about an hour to change in Indy. Bought a soup in a cup and a hot tea for a total of $2.10 including tax. Good stuff. Bus to Chicago was mostly empty. The driver didn’t welcome us or turn on the lights or anything, just let the people sleep. Non-stop this time. Amazing to me that all 4 of my busses arrived on time or a bit early. Does that happen in the daytime as well or is this an overnight phenomenon?

Anyway, overall, I was happy with the experience. I’d prefer Amtrak, but the bus is good too. Not as good as a train, but good.

Category: transportation

Humanize the Earth: The Inner Look VII & VIII

This builds on chapters’s I, II & III and chapters IV, V & VI.

VII. Presence of the Force

The fifth day:

1. When I was truly awake I scaled from comprehension to comprehension.
2. When I was truly awake yet lacked the strength to continue the ascent, I was able to draw the Force from within myself. This Force was present throughout my body. All of the energy was present even in the smallest cells of my body, and it circulated more rapidly and more intensely than my blood.
3. I discovered that the energy concentrated in certain points of my body when they were active and was absent when they were not.
4. During illness the energy was either lacking or it accumulated precisely in the affected areas of my body. But if I was able to reestablish the normal flow of the energy, many illnesses began to recede.

Some peoples knew this, and through various procedures that seem strange to us to­day, they were able to reestablish the flow of the energy.
Some peoples knew this, and they were able to communicate this energy to others, pro­ducing “illuminations” of comprehension and even physical “miracles.”

VIII. Control of the Force

The sixth day:

1. There is a way of directing and concentrating the Force that circulates through the body.
2. In the body are points of control upon which depend what we know as movement, emo­tion, and idea. When the energy acts in these points, it gives rise to motor, emotional, and intellectual manifestations.
3. Depending on whether the energy acts more internally or superficially in the body, the states of deep sleep, semi-sleep, or wakefulness arise. Surely, the halos that surround the bodies or heads of the saints (or the great awakened ones) in religious paintings al­lude to this phenomenon of the energy which, on occasion, manifests more externally.
4. There is a point of control of being-truly-awake, and there is a way of bringing the Force to this point.
5. When the energy is led to this point, all the other points of control move in a new way.

Upon understanding this and hurling the Force to this superior point, my entire body felt the impact of an immense energy. This energy struck powerfully within my conscious­ness, and I ascended from comprehension to comprehension. But I also observed that if I lost control of the energy, I could descend to the depths of the mind. Then I remembered the legends of “heavens” and “hells,” and I saw the dividing line between these mental states.

categories: Humanist Movement personal work

cool baby names display

Via Notio: This is so cool on so many levels: http://babynamewizard.com/namevoyager/lnv0105.html

condo for sale by owner

2149WOhio1E.JPG

Selling my condo to move into the new co-op - here’s a photo of the outside of the building

• $195,000 listed at $200,000
• 2bd,2ba 1st floor
• in-unit washer/dryer and central air
• back deck
• 2003 taxes $1870.14
• assessments $137.50/mo
• for sale by owner

Update 7Mar05: I ended up listing with Steven Somlar @ Baird & Warner 773 697 5555. Please call him with questions or to make an appointment.
Update 10Mar05: I have verbally accepted an offer and expect to sign the contract tomorrow.
Update 11Mar05: I have a signed contract, now have to get through the attorney, inspection, and mortgage contigency periods. Expect to close around April 22nd.
Update 15Mar05: The inspection is scheduled for this Saturday.
Update 17Mar05: Inspection is finished. I tried to stay out of the way so I don’t know exactly what turned up, but I did hear the inspector advising about a few fixes (ever heard of sparking light switches?). We’ll see what we get from the lawyers on Monday.
Update 23Mar05: They asked for some credits to fix electrical, plumbing and back door, plus wanted a small escrow until it can be verified that A/C works, plus went back and forth on radon testing. Hopefully this will all be settled tomorrow and the inspection contingency can end.

May First Technology Collective

From their website:

May First Technology Collective is a nonprofit, worker-run collective, building a model for a healthy and just workplace. May First uses technology to strengthen the impact of social justice organizations. We are organizers and activists first, grounding our technology work and internal development within the vision of the larger social justice community.

Categories: resource, co-op

missed opportunity airport story

Humanize the Earth: The Inner Look IV, V & VI

This builds on last week’s chapters’s I, II & III.

IV. Dependence

The second day:

1. Nothing that I do, feel, or think depends on me.
2. I am mutable and depend on the action of my surroundings. When I want to change my environment or my “I,” it is my environment that ends up changing me. Then I seek the city or nature, social redemption or a new struggle in order to justify my existence. In every case it is my environment that leads me to choose one attitude or another. In this way, my interests and my surroundings leave me here.
3. I say, then, that it does not matter who or what decides. I say on these occasions that I have to live since I am in the situation of living. I say all this, but there is nothing that justifies it. I can make a decision, hesitate, or remain where I am. In any case, one thing is only provisionally better than another; ultimately there is no better or worse.
4. If someone tells me that those who do not eat die, I will answer that this is indeed so, and that, spurred by their needs, they are compelled to eat. But I will not add that the struggle to eat justifies one’s existence—nor will I say that this struggle is bad. I will simply say that all of this concerns an individual or collective fact related to the need for subsistence, but that it has no meaning in the moment that the last battle is lost.
5. I will say, moreover, that I feel solidarity with the struggle of the poor, the exploited, and the persecuted. I will say that I feel “fulfilled” in this identification, but I under­stand that these feelings do not justify anything.

V. Intimation of Meaning

The third day:

1. At times I have anticipated events that later took place.
2. At times I have grasped a distant thought.
3. At times I have described places I have never been.
4. At times I have recounted exactly what took place in my absence.
5. At times an immense joy has surprised me.
6. At times total comprehension has overwhelmed me.
7. At times a perfect communion with everything has filled me with ecstasy.
8. At times I have broken through my reveries and seen reality in a new way.
9. At times I have seen something for the first time yet recognized it as though I had seen it before.

And all this has made me think.

It is clear to me that without these experiences I could not have emerged from the non-meaning.

VI. Sleep and Awakening

The fourth day:

1. I cannot take as real what I see in my dreams, nor what I see in semi-sleep, nor what I see when I am awake but in reverie.
2. I can take as real what I see when I am awake and without reveries. Here I am not speaking of what my senses register, since naive and dubious “data” can arrive from my external and internal senses as well as from my memory. Rather, I am speaking of the activities of my mind as they relate to the “data” being thought. What is valid is that when my mind is awake it “knows” and when it is asleep it “believes.” Only rarely do I perceive reality in a new way, and it is then that I realize that what I nor­mally see resembles sleep or semi-sleep.

There is a real way of being awake, and it has led me to meditate profoundly on all that has been said so far. It has, moreover, opened the door for me to discover the mean­ing of all that exists.

categories: Humanist Movement personal work

technorati and delicious tagging

Thanks to Burningbird, I just learned that technorati tags do not need to actually link to technorati. This is important because for a while now I’ve been using delicious as a way to make categories on my blog posts. You’ll notice some of my posts have a “categories” line at the bottom and then links to my correstponding delicious tags. Delicious tages are shared, but they’re also tracked by user so you can see all of my tags by going to http://del.icio.us/tedernst whereas technorati pulls tags from delicious, flickr and blog entries to create their tag pages. On their site they ask you to put a link like technorati this in your post so that it is listed in their tag pages. So I started using this bookmarklet to write the code for me for whatever technorati tags I wanted on my posts (see my previous post for the way I linked to various words as technorati tags.

It’s much cleaner if I just use this Technorati Delicious Bookmarklet (blogger wordpress didn’t like putting it on this page, so clicking the link will give you the bookmarklet that you can bookmark or drag to you links toolbar. You will have to edit the properties after you’ve bookmarked it so your own delicious user name is there instead of mine.) that I wrote came up with by modifying the above bookmarklet.

Categories: blogging, tags, delicious, technorati, bookmarklet

edit: This post is by far the one with the most link-backs. Since those link-backs have been going to my old blogger blog, they’re not doing me much good. So I decided to edit the post at blogger to just point here and have also moved the location of the bookmarklet.

Be afraid, be very afraid

Is this fear-mongering to drive up membership renewals? Is there really something “emergency” going on here? Can we live in a state of emergency all the time?

Outraged that the Attorney-General nominee argued that prohibitions against torture were quaint? Concerned that police surveillance of anti-war groups has chilled speech opposing the war in Iraq? Worried that your neighbor’s son, or perhaps your own, will be interrogated by law enforcement because of his race or ethnicity? Fearful that your daughter may be stripped of the right to choose lawful - and safe - reproductive health services? Suspicious that all of our rights have been eroded by the government’s focus on “national security” at the expense of everything else?

If you answered “yes” to any of these questions, please join activists from around the state for an Emergency Summit of ACLU of Illinois Members Committed to Defending our Constitution.

• Efforts to impose criminal penalties against physicians who provide life saving reproductive health care to women patients;
• Government funding of religious organizations that discriminate against applicants for jobs and social services on the basis of religion, marital status, sexual orientation, gender, HIV status or any other characteristic that a religious organization finds objectionable;
• Broad authority for intrusive investigations of average Americans based on their religious and political beliefs, without any indication of criminal behavior - in contravention of the 4th Amendment to the United States Constitution.

Of course I’m glad the ACLU is working on all of these issues, but I’m concerned about the effects of using fear as a motivator. Comments?

New roads can cause congestion

New Scientist - New roads can cause congestion viaMeshForum

Traffic should flow best in cities when only a limited number of roads lead to the centre. This counter-intuitive finding could allow planners to prevent gridlock by closing roads rather than building new ones.

It’s not counter-intuitive to me. Seems totally clear to me that when there are more roads or more lanes, there’s more traffic and thus more congestion. I’d like to see Chicago close or narrow roads for cars but leave the pavement in place for bikes. Lakeshore drive would be a good place to start. Turn one lane each way into bike lanes and everyone would see the benefits nearly right away. Too bad they couldn’t have kept Wacker Drive closed to cars after it was closed for 2 years to be rebuilt. Traffic in the loop during that time showed that the road simply isn’t needed for cars. Let’s see a balanced transportation policy that works for all of us!

categories: bike transportation chicago