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Timothy M. Leonard's books on Goodreads
A Century Is Nothing A Century Is Nothing
ratings: 4 (avg rating 4.50)

The Language Company The Language Company
ratings: 2 (avg rating 5.00)

Subject to Change Subject to Change
ratings: 2 (avg rating 4.50)

Ice girl in Banlung Ice girl in Banlung
ratings: 2 (avg rating 4.50)

Finch's Cage Finch's Cage
ratings: 2 (avg rating 3.50)

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Sunday
Jun132010

Tools & Future Plans

Greetings,

After seeing a film The 11th Hour I've reposted this entry. Narrated by Leonardo DiCaprio, the film illustrates human greed, corporate power, and consumption habits. There are excellent commentaries by scientists regarding the scale of Earth being consumed.

Save the Earth is more like Earth doesn't need saving. Earth is a natural biosphere. It is a self generating ecosystem. Humans need to change their attitudes and behavior. 

Human animals developed tools. They have learned how to plan. They can visualize the future. Intelligent life on Earth is a rumor.

Earth is a property. It produces natural resources. As we know, humans have developed an insatiable appetite for: minerals, water, forests, fossil fuels, animals, and laughter.

The BP oil disaster in the Gulf is a perfect example of human stupidity based on corporate greed and power. This is compounded by lies, deceit and finger pointing. No one wants to take responsibility for the consequences.

Create the market for shampoo products. It's all petroleum based. Rinse your brain.

As Wade Davis says: "You are either a human or property." The property is being consumed. Greed. Market. As a speaker says, the means and the ends are distorted. Humans are creating their own extinction.

On Earth inside the Milky Way galaxy filled with 100 billion stars is a small town. In the town is a market where people meet, eat, drink, walk around, sleep, talk, gossip, sell, barter, trade, buy, cry, beg, laugh, and use tools to make things.

What are tools? Tools are things to make things. They make something and use it to make other things. This is called human activity. People once used stones to sharpen other stones to make tools.

Can you show us someone making something?

Ok. Here is a man using a mechanical tool to make a gold bracelet. His tool is made of iron, steel and other materials. It uses energy to work. A woman works, makes money and buys the shiny thing. Her friends see it and create a desire to have it so they create the market. Circle.

Where does the energy come from? The energy comes from machines converting sun, wind, ocean currents, burning coal and processing high grade uranium 235 isotopes into energy. 235 is capable of sustaining chain reactions producing energy to run machines called plants.

Do you mean a plant is a tool? Yes. A plant is a living organism and very valuable. As well, there are plants that kill humans, like hemlock. Plants collect energy from the sun to grow. Humans harvest plants for medicine and food and so on.

If a man and woman combine their tools can they make things grow like plants? Yes. More like weeds. This human activity is called procreation. Earth has about 6 billion examples and signs of intelligent life is rare.

Show us another tool. Ok, A woman's fingers are tools. She uses her tool to sew colorful objects on a piece of fabric with another tool. The tool is a metal needle. Humans evolved opposable thumbs enabling them to grasp objects. Her thumb is opposable to her forefinger allowing her to use the tool with precision.  

We have time for one more tool. Show us a good one.

This man lives in a poor rural village in Sichuan, China. He is a tool like the gold worker and the seamstress. They are controlled by others and used to perform unpleasant tasks for someone else. They are the means of production in a social and economic sense.

He is using a tool to make new tools. I said this at the beginning of today's story. The stone tools he makes will be used to make a wall, another tool. 

Why do they need to make another wall? They already have a famous wall.
The Chinese have been building walls for 5,000 years. It's in their genetic makeup. 
What is genetics?
A sledgehammer. 

Thank you for your attention.

Metta.

 

11th hour action site...

Metta.

Saturday
Jun122010

Labor

Greetings,

Welcome to another edition of: how to paint a curb in Cambodia.

Part 1. Get a plastic bucket. Throw in white language. Tie a blue and white checkered scarf around your neck. It's hotter than the mid-day sun on the Tropic of Cancer. South of the Equator. Slather it on with a broom. David Foster Wallace wrote: The Broom of The System.

DFW said: "what it feels like to live, to observe, to experience in absurd detail where others lack the self-scrutiny or courage to voice them."

2. Your four emaciated brothers walk past on their way to work. Three carry shovels. One carries a sledgehammer. They will transform the small sleepy river town into: (a) a hot tourist location (b) frozen ice inside the hard cold fact:  how necessities become luxuries which happens around Earth. Consider ice. Frozen water. Necessity. Yesterday it was water. Today it is white rice. Close as white on rice. Tomorrow it's Medicine. The day after tomorrow in the long now it's Education. Life's little luxuries. Plural.

They suck on life's plastic straw. They discard the plastic straw and cup on the ground. They walk. They paint. They shovel. They slam sledgehammers.

Their daily efforts will revitalize world economies. They will speak at G-20 economic forums. They will address important powerful people. They will speak to 5% of the world's richest people who control 98% of the total wealth.

They will have a voice. They will represent millions of peasants and poor people. Their labor will wear them down. They will lose the resolve, the focus the vision to alter history. They will be replaced by new workers.

They paint. They shovel dirt. They pound sledgehammers. They suck ice. They mill around. They watch the world pass by hearing inadequate impossible language. Their DAILY language is pure, raw labor. 

A Cambodian woman carries the world on her back. 

Metta.

  

 

Friday
Jun112010

Street 2

Greetings,

Summer's here and the time is write for dancing in the street. Hanoi style. You can't photograph a memory. The Ministry of Obfuscation welcomes you with open arms. I am an accident that can think. Celebrate your imagination.

Metta.

 

 

Wednesday
Jun092010

Street 5

Greetings,

On behalf of the Hanoi Department of Tourism and One Party Neighborhoods filled with millions of well adjusted content poetic calligraphic citizens, welcome to our fair city! Stroll through parks and gardens. Smell the roses.

Enjoy wandering around. See amazing historical and cultural mysteries. Our number is on the wall. Call now. Make new friends. Get lost. Explore. Discover.

Metta.


 

 

  

Tuesday
Jun082010

gadget man to the rescue!

Greetings,

Well before human fingers painted with blood, animal fat and ash on French and Spanish cave walls, and scratched images and dreams on sacred Aborigine sites; and well before humans in Mesopotamia etched Sumarian symbols on wet clay using sharp reeds and animal skins and dried parchment; and well before Gutenberg invented the printing press and well before paper, pencil, pen, illuminated vellum manuscripts, canvas and diverse materials there was THE GADGET!

Early humans were busy hunting and gathering. Survival was the game.  

To connect or not to connect, that is the question. Let's do the numbers. Text me baby. 140 characters dance.

Here is an image of a calculating machine gadget morphing into a super human computer capable of crunching millions of numbers, data and esoteric trivia. In REAL TIME.

 

 

...A portion of the brain acts as a control tower, helping a person focus and set priorities. More primitive parts of the brain, like those that process sight and sound, demand that it pay attention to new information, bombarding the control tower when they are stimulated...

In 2008, people consumed three times as much information each day as they did in 1960. And they are constantly shifting their attention. Computer users at work change windows or check e-mail or other programs nearly 37 times an hour, new research shows. Read the small print.

  Hooked on Gadgets...

Save my life! Save my marriage! Save me from electricity! Give me ash, blood, paper. Give me real time.

Give me a Cambodian man pedaling laboring a one gear gadget bike pulling a cart loaded with bags of cement. Give me two men pulling a cart loaded with discarded cardboard. One man squeezes an orange plastic toy - SQUEEK, SQUEEK telling residents to bring out their paper products. The plastic toy is his 21st Century gadget. 

Give me a man ringing a bell. Give me 221 seconds inside a time tunnel to cement a deal before I have a heart attack from the stress. My gadget addiction is killing me. Before we have sex my wife and mistress make me wear a gadget. This gadget nullifies the sensation of direct and immediate experience.

I'm a gadget. A living breathing, laughing gadget. I have a gadget son and a gadget daughter. They are artificial intelligence personified.

I have the precision of an umbrella and sewing machine on an operating table. 

Metta.

 

Asia's long now.