Tell-A-Vision = Why Not Try Love Again?
Bee Gees - Stayin' Alive
Bee Gees (Robin Gibb (1949-2012)) - Saturday Night Fever (1977) - You Should Be Dancing
ARPSN - Amateur Radio Public Seismic Network
ARPSN Seismic Heliplots - Seismic Activity and Cobb [Mountain] Weather
Boptime - Even Steven - Saturday - USA, 6 AM East - 3 AM West - Listen-On-Line - WVUD fm
Mike Wilhelm - Charlatans, Flamin' Groovies, Loose Gravel, and more
Podcast - MP3 music page
Rubbermaid - Women's Band from North Carolina
Ira Cohen - Poet/Artist/Film Maker
John Draper - Captain Crunch
Karl Cohen - Association International du Film d'Animation-SF Newsletter
Keith Lampe - Co-Founder of YIPPIE and Progressive Activist Groups
Paul Krassner - The Realist/Writer/Comic/Investigative Satirist
Steven Leech - Writer/Poet/D.J.
Alerts + Notes from ~@~ Listed Below:
Ken Schneider writes:
Hey Curtis,
I hope your recovery is going swimmingly, and that your smile, which probably never left for too long, is back in full form.
I'm writing with some good news and a little pitch. Our current film, Got Balz?, which weaves together baseball, Bar Mitzvah and Cuba, is rough cut and ready to finish. Thus the pitch:
After 20 years of assiduously avoiding filming our family, we are finishing a funny and personal documentary film about our son Mica’s efforts to send baseball gear to kids in Cuba—a project that started with his Bar Mitzvah and his love of baseball, and his wish to give thanks for his Grandpa’s refuge during the Holocaust. My dad, you see, was refused entry into the US in 1941, but accepted into Cuba.
Mica undergoes quite a journey--elation and despair, exuberance and wondering if it is even possible to do good in the world. We have 4 days left to reach our goal to raise $40K to help finish the film. We've made it to $33K using Kickstarter, the online fundraising site. If you have 4 minutes, please check out our trailer, help if you can, and share the info with your network. If you have any friends or loved ones who might have a special affinity with our project, a short personal note to them could do wonders for us. Key words: youth and social responsibility, re-framing the US-Cuba discussion (or lack thereof), 3rd-generation Holocaust stories, and baseball.
The trailer: http://kck.st/gotbalz
Got Balz? - a film by Ken Schneider & Marcia Jarmel
Got Balz? Documentary TrailerXO, Ken
PATCHWORKS FILMS, Marcia Jarmel & Ken Schneider, Filmmakers, http://www.patchworksfilms.net/
Ram Dass on Faith, Belief and Surviving a Stroke with Oprah via Wavy
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b30LSiFVxPM
Toward the Fun
A benefit for Camp Winnarainbow
Tuesday, May 22nd, Freight & Salvage Coffeehouse, 8:00 PM
http://www.campwinnarainbow.org/concert.htmlFeaturing:
Jonathan Richman, Barry Melton Band with Roy Blumenfield, Banana, Michael Hinton, Peter Albin & Brad Jenkins, with special guest Nick Gravenites.
Hosted by Wavy Gravy
Punk Rock Exhibit, May 11 - June 8, 2012
Punk Rock Photographs and Posters featuring the band CRIME by James Stark
1234Go Records, 420 40th Street, Oakland, California 510-985-0325
Amateur Radio - A hobby I was very fond of
Animation for the Appliance Challenged Gallery - Various forms of animation
Apple/Mac - FYI page with some GNU/Linux
Bitter - Nobody Cares What You're Doing Now
Brokedown Coffee - Roasting Coffee
CASHCPR - Citizens Against Second Hand Cellular Phone Radiation
Disclaimer - Intent behind FlyingSnail.com
Emmy - Tom Smothers
Gallery d'Ann - Currently showing clay sculpture
Gay Freedom Day 1977 - San Francisco, CA - June 26, 1977 - MP3 Audio
Grateful Deadhead - Grateful Dead
How To Fix A Broken World - A thought
Hunger and Shame - Dr. Mary Howard and Dr. Ann V. Millard
Links - via ~@~
Marliese's Corner - San Francisco Events
Missing BBS Files - Some of the first Bulletin Board Systems in the United States
Curtis Spangler - The CommuniTree's First FairwitnessLet's look at some of the earliest electronic virtual communities. This kinship chart shows the origins of the first computer bulletin boards (BBSs) that supported social interaction. Prior to this moment, BBSs messages were organized by alphabetical order, or by date. BBSs were metaphors for physical bulletin boards... objects for the exchange of simple messages, not conversations. Now, in 1978 a group of people in Northern California designed a BBS that used message attachment protocols that facilitated conversations. As a metaphor for this structure they used a tree, firstly because it was based on a principle of computer science called binary tree protocol, and secondly because Northern California near Silicon Valley was a land of hot tubs, Eastern mysticism, and computer hackers, and the organicity that the word "tree" suggested was important to those hackers' worldview.
The story of the life and death of the first CommuniTree tells us how and why the later virtual community systems were designed. The original CommuniTree was designed with the idea that the community it facilitated would be completely free. Anyone could enter any sort of message. In fact, censorship was completely prohibited at the level of the code, of the Tree's program. It worked this way: First, the system operator was prevented from reading messages as they arrived. Second, messages were hard to remove once they were entered. Third, anything could be entered into the system, including so-called control characters, which are not part of the standard alphanumeric set and which can be used to control the operation of the host computer. Lastly, to make sure that no system operator could tamper with the system, the code was written in language called Forth, and not documented. Now Forth is a religion unto itself, and if you know anything about Forth you recognize that this makes the system a total black box -- it's impossible to know anything about how the code works.
CommuniTree went online in 1978. The kinds of conversations they had in there were of a high intellectual and spiritual character. They talked about new philosophies and new religions for post-Enlightenment humanity, the first time such conversations had taken place online.
Now, at the same moment Apple Computer had reached an agreement with the U. S. Government that in return for a tax break, Apple put computers into primary and secondary schools in the U.S., and some of those computers had modems. This meant that quite suddenly a lot of kids could get online. At first both boys and girls had access, but the boys quickly elbowed the girls out of the way -- high tech was men's work. The boys quickly found out CommuniTree's phone number and logged on. They were clearly unimpressed with the high intellectual level of the discourse on CommuniTree, and they expressed their dissatisfaction in ways that were appropriate to their age and linguistic abilities. Now, the hardware of the Tree was the best that Apple had to offer in 1978, it had two floppy disk drives with a combined total of 300 kilobytes of storage. At the time, the folks who designed the Tree said "300K -- we can go on forever. We'll never fill this up." A common BBS today would have at least 100 megabytes of storage, many orders of magnitude greater than the Tree. So it didn't take long for the kids to fill every byte of disk space with every word they could think of that meant shitting or fucking, and then they'd add control characters on top of that, characters that could mess with the program or stop the floppy drives. The sysops couldn't see the messages arriving and couldn't remove them afterward. The Tree was doomed.
One of the participants in the Tree discourse said "Well, the barbarian hordes mowed us down." And the people who were on the Tree ran away, just like the population of a village during a sack. It was a kind of scattering of the tribes. Some of those people went off and designed BBSs of their own that had built into them the elements of control and surveillance that appeared to be necessary to ensure the BBS's survival in a real world that included roaming barbarians. That kind of surveillance and control continues to the present day, built right into the software; we don't think about it much any more. And that's how, back at the beginning of virtual time, the first virtual community left the Magic Garden and entered the "real" virtual world in which good had to find ways to coexist with evil.
Source: http://www.flyingsnail.com/missingbbs/CommuniTree.html
My Normandy Guitar - Made in Salem, Oregon, USA
Sailing - on Flying Snail
Sprung - Harley-Davidson Springer Enthusiast
They - Defining Them
United State Cafe - Historic Haight/Ashbury Coffee House, San Francisco, California
Video - Movies
Where Have All the Flowers Gone - Stuff ~@~ feels is important
Word Worlds -Where simplifying complexity becomes art.
Amestizo - BLOG
Bobby Kent - Gospel Music
Broken Turtle Books LLC - Bookstore
David Normal - Artist
Gomma TV - Punk TV Italy
H323.org - Free Open Source H.323 Video Conferencing
Jessica Jorgensen - Entertainment Professional
John Flores - Graphics
Mike Stickrod - Driving Slow BLOG
NCast - Sponsor - NCast Dancing Frogs at YouTube
Nobody for President = NONE OF THE ABOVE should be on voter ballots
PPRS - Pacific Packet Radio Society - Historic Wireless Digital Communication
Rainbow Puddle - Stellar Light Shows
Freedom of expression and freedom of speech aren't really important unless they're heard...It's hard for me to stay silent when I keep hearing that peace is only attainable through war. And there's nothing more scary than watching ignorance in action. So I dedicated this Emmy to all the people who feel compelled to speak out and not afraid to speak to power and won't shut up and refuse to be silenced. - Tommy Smothers
Expect A Bumpy Ride In the Future
Earth and the Human body both require lubricants, pores, and gas vents.
Earth's pores and vents are being closed or tapped, lubricants are constantly being depleted, and this is being done for profit without consideration or regard for consequence. - Know Your Earth: A Simple Start
So, you think reason guides your politics? Think again
I thought I could see tribal bigotry at 100 paces and fell it with a Socratic blow, but I was deluding myself - and so are you
Simon Jenkins, guardian.co.uk, Thursday 17 May 2012 20.15 BST, Article Source
Jonathan Haight's The Righteous Mind counters the idea that tribal bigotry can be
felled with a Socratic blow. Photograph: Araldo De Luca/Araldo de Luca/Corbis
Are you for growth or austerity? Do you sympathise with the Greeks, or regard them as getting what they deserve? If you disagree with something you read, do you ever change your mind, or do you shout rubbish and chuck it in the bin? Since the days of Socrates, civilisation has honed the art of reason to resolve conflict and deliver harmony. Yet people of like background and education can disagree about everything. Why?
I sometimes wonder that I write for the Guardian when what I say seems to anger so many readers. Most people buy a newspaper not to be prised from their settled opinion but to find it confirmed and comforted. They would not be dragged from it by wild horses, let alone the old nag of reason. A newspaper is their tribal notice board, their badge, their identity.
Nor is that all. Tribes of left and right tend to buy the shop. They take their politics table d'hôte, not à la carte. Those on the left are for more public spending, higher taxes, no war and a tolerance of scroungers, those on the right the exact reverse. Once they have opted for Labour or Conservative (or the obscure freemasonry of liberal democracy), they surrender their political virginity to the party line, lie back and enjoy it – usually for life.
I have a problem with this. I opposed the Iraq and Afghan wars, would abolish Trident, end prison for nonviolent offenders and legalise drugs. But I support the government on NHS reform, students fees and targeting social benefits. I am a UN-enthusiast, but an aid sceptic. Gays should enjoy full civil rights but I find ethnic minorities over-cosseted. All this I regard as a coherent political outlook.
Not many others do. Friends and acquaintances find my portfolio of views either mischievous or mad, and mutter darkly about my probable need of treatment. Dear Abby, are they right?
At last we have some help. It is from the American political scientist, Jonathan Haidt, and his fascinating voyage of discovery through the social psychology of politics, The Righteous Mind. Haidt, a lifelong liberal, was baffled at why so many poor and working-class voters kept supporting conservative politicians when it was clearly against their interest.
Haidt's answer is not just that politics is seldom purely about money. Conservatives are also more in touch with what he calls the "taste buds" of politics. They understand human intuition. They score on such emotions as loyalty to the nation or group, desire for security and authority and a concern for religious and moral purity. Liberals cover just two bases, a sense of fairness and compassion for strangers, thus missing out on a large chunk of human intuition and concern. Above all, they rely too much on an appeal to reason.
To Haidt, reason is not how people wrestle with a problem to find a path to the right answer. That was for the Greeks (the ancient ones). Reason is rather a weapon we deploy to persuade others that we are right, and they use to prove us wrong. It is not a coming together but a driving apart. As David Hume observed, reason is subordinate to the passions. It rides into battle on the elephant of intuition. Hence the advice of modern political tacticians, that politicians should always "talk to the elephant first". Conservatives are good at talking to elephants.
So what determines these dominant intuitions, that they are so resistant to reason? Psychologists now believe that we owe our political views not to any argued programme, but to some gene pool or acquired tribal loyalty, parental, territorial, educational or occupational. It is part nature, part nurture. Loyalty to a profession can be as fanatical as to a family: most lawyers, doctors, soldiers and scientists in my experience believe their profession can do no wrong (unlike, of course, journalists).
This may seem a mere updating of WS Gilbert's cry that "every boy and every gal" is delivered into the world "either a little liberal or a little conservative". But what to Gilbert may have seemed a random attractor of Victorian politics is, in modern America, leading to an increasingly furious polarisation. To many foreigners, America seems a land divided between hysterias, driven apart by round-the-clock news and opinion, in which information inflames rather than calms preconceived opinion.
Studies suggest these political divergences may lie far deeper than we think, in our neurological pathways. Even in mild-mannered Britain, such cross-border adventures as red Tories and blue Labour gain little traction. Opinions reflect insecurity and fear of the unknown: as when America lurched to the patriotic and illiberal right after 9/11. In some American cities, the sociologist Bill Bishop has noted (in The Big Sort) that polarisation is producing a "political ethnic cleansing" as people find they cannot live near others of different views. If political attitudes are becoming that neurotic, it is doubly tragic that people live apart. A cartoon shows a divorcing father explaining to his child, "It is because I want what is best for the country and your mother doesn't."
Yet Haidt offers me only limited help. Whatever intuition he thinks holds me in thrall remains a mystery to me. I believe – as do most people – that I approach any political issue with an open mind, driving towards it in the chariot of reason. I think I can see tribal bigotry at a hundred paces and can fell it with a Socratic blow. I can only assume that Haidt is roaring with laughter, that somewhere in his political anthropology he will unearth a tribe that laced my mother's milk with scepticism and programmed me to a contrarian view of life.
These debates always turn into pleas for liberal tolerance, for a respect for other people's opinions, drawing strength from Stephen Pinker's thesis that, whatever else is amiss, the world is becoming a less violent place. But tolerance is itself a privilege of security. Intellectually it is appeasement. I do not want to tolerate those who disagree with me, I want to persuade them they are wrong. Haidt may cry, "Why can't we all just get along?" The answer is we can't. The best we can do is not murder each other in the process.
The Owners of America
Nobody Brought Peace To Our Times
"None of the Above" Should Be On Voter Ballots
Oh, I hope that I see you again I never even caught your name As you looked through my window pane -- So I'm writing this message today I'm thinking that you'll have a way Of hearing the notes in my tune -- Where are you going? Where have you been? I can imagine other worlds you have seen -- Beautiful faces and music so serene -- So I do hope I see you again My universal citizen You went as quickly as you came -- You know the power Your love is right You have good reason To stay out of sight -- But break our illusions and help us Be the light -- Message by Michael Pinder
Without love in the dream, it will never come true. - Jerry Garcia/Robert Hunter
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