As someone who lived in "suburbia" all his life, except for some time spent in the far 'boonies', I have to say that, a GOOD dense neighborhood - where I can walk to pick up groceries, drycleaning, restuarants, esasy commute to work, etc - is a type of living that I much prefer over the typical "get in the car to do anything" life.
(Of course, it might be different if I owned some fabulous house in the boonies, but as a NON-house owner, it is preferable! )
Why the tool is great is, not just because of the score itself - which is an approximation, and as such, can be wrong. Example - where I last lived in San Francisco has a score of 88. But where I currently live has a score of 82. However, because I previously lived on one of Frisco's most steep hills - in the russian hill/nob hill area - it actually could be quite a pain to walk. (I still did it, most times very enjoyable, but it could be a pain.)
(In addition, where I live now though, is flatter (not flat), and as well is right along a main line of 4 SF buses and quick access to the underground. Previously, I was four blocks to a bus, rather than 30 steps, and then taking those buses took me through a very dense traffic area, so it almost took as long to bus as to walk.)
For anyone moving however, this tool is amazing. On the side layout, you see all types of things to do - groceries, bars, exercise, schools, libraries, etc - and how far your address (or the address you are contemplating) is from those structures/businesses.
This is what makes the tool so useful, for those thinking of moving.
But remember the caveats, as I pointed out earlier - no references to crime, or poverty, the quality of the neighborhood, or just how close you are to alternative transportation options.
A different style of video news - a longer piece, more thoughtful.
Staying with one Army company for a couple of days. Still brutal,
however. Really points out as well, how at this point many soldiers are
"captive" of their tour, with the stop loss order.
On a completely different tack - How Top Bloggers Earn Money. The 100 or so blogs that actually make some cash, rather than the 100,000,000 that languish in obscurity!
Saw this explanation of "writing funny" from The Dilbert Blog.
Made me wonder - how well do spirituality and being funny go together? If "being funny" is a skill - and thus has it's own line of development - can you be 2nd tier funny? Enlightened funny?
Dilbert points out six essential elements of humor:
Clever Cute Bizarre Cruel Naughty Recognizable
The cute, cruel and bizarre elements - a bunny with a bazooka, is the example. Not really apropos for spiritual discussion. (Prove me wrong here - someone write a deeply wise spiritual story about a bunny and a bazooka! Please?)
Most of the spiritual teachers I have met actually are good-hearted people who love laughing. But they weren't really that funny - cute and clever, at the best.
But the rip-roaring comedy seems to stem from two parts smart-@ss, mixed with the elements above.
And smart-@ssery isn't usually a very spiritual thing - usually it's the 'lesser developed' narcissistic aspects of one's personality that is the smart'@ass.
Stuart Davis seems to be the best representative of 2nd tier smart-@ssery we have so far -and he does it great, in my opinion. Of course, at the same time, he's a total narcissist exhibitionist. BUT - tt does seem most of the time though, he manages to be a total narcissistic exhibitionist, while being a fully relational human being and not a complete introvert, despite his claims. (you have to scroll down in this entry, past a lot to get to his frank admittance, but it's worth it, because it's a great blogpost.)
To be fully human, and fully enlightened, I do think "true" humor (not the fake stuff/fake laughs we do to paper over wounds) is one of the most valuable gifts we get from others, and one of the most integral/whole.
The FBI stated that evidence linking Al-Qaeda and bin Laden to the attacks of September 11 is clear and irrefutable.[63] The Government of the United Kingdom reached the same conclusion, regarding Al Qaeda and Osama bin Laden's culpability for the September 11, 2001 attacks.[64]
But so far, the U.S. Justice Department has not sought formal criminal
charges against bin Laden for the 9/11 attacks. This has provided what
some call "fodder for conspiracy theorists who think the U.S.
government or another power was behind the Sept. 11 hijackings." [65]
Is it lack of evidence?
Considering the old maxim - a prosecutor can get a Grand Jury to indict a ham sandwich - what is the reasoning to NOT indict Bin Laden?
A good article here, confronting the inane ways that the media analysts, personalities, and journalists, are handling Al Gore's book.
I'm not sure how much the confusing fuzz of media idiocy drives governmental policy.
Mainly, I think, the media dysfunction allows bad policy to be cloaked, camoflaged, and stood by, far past the obviousness of the policy's bad effects.
Secondly, the media dysfunction can act as a enabler of trivia to disqualify policy (whether that policy is good or bad, trivia "about" that policy can act to disqualify it).
Over the last week, I've been dealing with media shallowness, but one comment I found interesting on the Rorty article:
It's all fine and good to be a skeptic in the Rortian vein or
Stanley Fish-style and argue that metaphysics and foundationalism are
bunk and that democracy doesn't need any sort of philosophical
grounding.
The problem is that there is trickle-down of ideas: not directly
from academia to the average citizen, but from philosophers to the
media elite, who are mostly college-educated and whose views of reality
and discourse are a kind of cartoon version of the dominant trends in
academic thought.
You wonder then where the MSM gets this idea that empiricism doesn't
matter, that reality is just a construct, that public life is nothing
but a power-struggle in which the right thing to do is find out what
the daddy-party wants, and just obey that?
Look no further than Rorty, Fish, and the two-bit latter-day deconstructionists.
Ideas have consequences, and so does the weak-tea thesis that ideas
themselves are inconsequential. Without a strong commitment to truth,
empiricism, and foundationalism in ideas, all you have left is
tribalism on right, and triangulation on the left.
I've been making fun of the following Wilber quote:
"The single greatest problem was stated this way. When green attacks
orange, amber wins. And believe me, amber is winning, just ask Karl
Rove. Despite a democratic victory here or there, the ranks of voters
have downshifted towards amber, unmistakably and strongly. All of this
thanks to the likes of green Harvard, which has finally succeeded in
deconstructing it's own deconstructionists"
I think I may have to take back my fun-making. That quote above - coming from a completely different place than Wilber - essentially says the same thing.
Richard Rorty was, in many ways, the american postmodern. He rejects epistemology early on, and situated "truth" as, in his famous expression - ""Truth is what your contemporaries let you get away with saying."
You can't get more postmodern than that.
As the article points out though, he would review other philosophers works, and, to put it mildly, "misinterpret" what they have said:
These positions irritated many people. But what absolutely killed
philosophy professors was Rorty's interpretation of the great figures
of the Western tradition. The average philosophy professor may spend a
decade or a career trying to elucidate the works of Martin Heidegger or
W.V.O. Quine. Rorty lined up such figures in support of his own
positions in a fundamentally careless way. He quoted them out of
context and ignored everything he couldn't use.
This truly
enraged people. The Dewey scholars hated him, as did the Wittgenstein
scholars, the Davidson scholars, the Nietzsche scholars, the Derrida
scholars and so on. Every one of them thought they could prove that
Rorty was wrong about their particular boy, and that he'd have to
listen and take back all the things he had said. In this, they didn't
understand him at all.
Another example"
As Rorty spoke, Gadamer just shook his big, eminent, bereted head. When
it was over, Gadamer said, in German-accented English: "But Dick,
you've got me all wrong." Rorty gave the grin and the shrug and said:
"Yes, Hans. But that's what you should have said."
Wilber, of course, is coming from a different worldview. In his case, making room for transcendent truths, without negating the current truths of science and modernity. A version of perennialism, although one based on perceptual spaces.
Also interesting then, that so many Wilber scholars not associate with Wilber, share some of the concerns of misrepresentation of other scholars, that drove people crazy about Rorty.
Is now clearly on display. More silly Paris Hilton obsessions.
From Al Gore's book:
It is simply no longer possible to ignore the strangeness of our public
discourse. I know I'm not alone in feeling that something has gone
fundamentally wrong. In 2001, I had hopes it was an aberration when
polls showed that three-quarters of Americans believed that Saddam
Hussein was responsible for attacking us on September 11. More than
five years later, however, nearly half the American people still
believes that Saddam was connected to the attack.
At first I
thought the exhaustive, nonstop coverage of the O.J. Simpson trial was
just unfortunate excess --- an unwelcome departure from the normal good
sense and judgment of our news media. Now we know that it was merely an
early example of a new pattern of serial obsession that periodically
take over the airwaves for weeks at a time.
Late in the summer
of 2006, American news coverage was saturated with the bizarre false
confession of a man who claimed to have been present at the death of
JonBenet Ramsey --- the six-year-old beauty queen whose unsolved murder
eleven years before was responsible for another long-running obsession.
A few months prior to John Mark Karr's arrest in Bangkok, the
disappearance of a high school senior in Aruba and the intensive search
for her body and her presumed murderer consumed thousands of hours of
television coverage. Both cases remain unsolved as of this writing, and
neither had any appreciable impact on the fate of the Republic.
Like
JonBenet Ramsey, O.J. has recently been back at the center of another
fit of obsessive-compulsive news, when his hypothetical confession
wasn't published and his interviews on television wasn't aired. This
particular explosion of "news" was truncated only when a former
television sitcom star used racist insults in a night club. And before
that we focus on the "Runaway Bride" in Georgia. And before that there
was the Michael Jackson trial and the Robert Blake trial, the Laci
Peterson tragedy and the Chandra Levy tragedy. And of course we can't
forget Britney and KFed, and Lindsay and Paris and Nicole, Tom Cruise
jumped on Oprah's couch and married Katie Holmes, who gave birth to
Suri. And Russell Crowe apparently threw a phone at a hotel concierge.
In
early 2007, the wall-to-wall coverage of Anna Nicole Smith's death,
embalming, and funeral plans and the legal wrangling over the paternity
and custody of her child and disposition of her estate, served as yet
another particularly bizarre example of the new priorities in America's
news coverage.
And while American television watchers were
collectively devoting a hundred million hours of their lives each week
to these and other similar stories, our nation was in the process of
more quietly making what future historians will certainly describe as a
series of catastrophically mistaken decisions on issues of war and
peace, the global climate and human survival, freedom and barbarity,
justice and fairness.
But of course, Al Gore is somehow a green post-modernist, empowering Karl Rove,being a Harvard grad, and all that.
Now clearly, I'm making fun. I understand KW has a lot on his plate - he isn't an expert in a lot of fields.
But his Integral Politics is clearly deeply deficient - so are there other integal analyses that are worthwhile, of the media situation? The banality and obsessiveness of the 24/7 news networks, really isn't a left/right issue - it comes in for mutual condemnation.
So I biked into work today. At around 8 AM, went into the gym to shower, prepare for work, and noticed that on the cable news channels, reporting about Paris Hilton.
And just now, 3 hours later, I go into a corner store to get a snack - I look up at the TV, and what is being reported on?
Paris Hilton.
3 hours later.
(Oh, by the way, Paris Hilton is out of jail, in case you haven't heard. I didn't know she was in jail, but apparently she was, and now she is out.)
Which brings up, of course, the clear emptiness of current news reporting. Entertainment, rather than worthwhile news. What entertains, rather than what informs.
It would be interesting to see an integral analysis of this. The financial and economic analysis is straightforward - the news companies are focused on ratings, there is a ratings bump from entertainment related news, so the editors at the news channels allow 24/7 insipid coverage, dominated by corporate interests on substantial issues, and fluff the rest of the time. Whatever gets the ratings up, within reason.
The real question then, is where straight economic analysis is placed within the integral context?
Economic analysis focuses, interestingly enough, focuses on most everything BUT the I-dimension. Mainly this type of analysis is IT and ITS focused, with a bit of WE analysis thrown in, for cultural dimensions.
My one sentence analysis of the shallowness of news is mainly an "externalist" rendering of the situation, with rational actors in the news divisions acting in a behavioristic fashion, in pursuit of those ratings bumps. With the product then produced by that process being shallow tripe.
It would be great to see a bit more of this in integral-land, with a focus on the reciprocity between the individual and cultural factors, that move in interdependence with the IT economic "hard" factors (actual resources), and ITS legal and economic structures that are in place.
It seems to me that Wilber talks about the external factors, only to abandon them in "inner" cultural and personal factors, when push comes to shove.
"The single greatest problem was stated this way. When green attacks
orange, amber wins. And believe me, amber is winning, just ask Karl
Rove. Despite a democratic victory here or there, the ranks of voters
have downshifted towards amber, unmistakably and strongly. All of this
thanks to the likes of green Harvard, which has finally succeeded in
deconstructing it's own deconstructionists"
I would say that the hollowing out of news reporting, does downshift power towards amber. The prizing of vapid fame over important issues means, that in the main news world, important information doesn't get reported until it bites "the people" in the rear-end. Too late to do anything about it.
But how is that "green attacking orange?" The externalist factors I describe above - the search for ratings - account for the dumbing down of the news. That isn't green, correct?
This is why Wilber's analysis fails so badly - so incredibly, awfully badly - on this point. "Green" because a magic talisman of sorts, the boogieman, to not actually engage what is happening in the "real world".
The static-character research is typically
based on a definition of personality comprising five features, called
the five-factor model, including openness to experience,
conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism.
While
these factors are important to a person's character, Dweck argues they
aren't the definitive word, and results generated from the model could
be missing subtle, yet critical, aspects of personality. She will
present her research this week at an annual meeting of the Association
for Psychological Science in Washington, D.C.
"My
point is that there's a really big in-between area that they don't talk
about, and these are the crucial beliefs that people develop as they
grow and learn," Dweck told LiveScience in a telephone interview.
From the always must-read Integral Options. Bill is simply a monster (in a good way), both physically and in terms of his prodigious blog output, as well as his constantly valuable speedlinking.
The rest of us simply are not worthy. But I'm cool with that.
“The goal is to enable Google users to be able to ask the question such as ‘What shall I do tomorrow?’ and ‘What job shall I take?’ ”
This meshes of course, with Integral Practice. Once Google - or I-Google, the individualized version for me - has enough information about me - I can use google's handy little search box to ask:
a. What type of exercise is right for my body? (google will already have my DNA, height, weight, and medical history). b. What diet is right for me? (same as above) c. What job should I have? (google will already have, and be able to produce an analysis on, both my interests and my skills. In fact, I can hardly wait for "google portfolio"!) d. What spiritual path is right for me? (Google will have again, my interests, a fairly detailed psychological profile, with my various psychological types, whether I'm more of a mind or body person. e. Who should I marry? (Google will have a much cooler and complicated algorhythm to match me up with others whose profiles will be compatible. It will blow match.com out of the water! And then of course, will manage the introductions, through Google Twitter or Google Jabber.) f. What volunteering should I do? (Again, based on where I am, my psychological profile, and where I live, my social networks, this will be easy to calculate).
)