Fred rantings

CC = Climate change.  And 'sangha' is the Placerville Vipassana Buddhist group I'm part of.   Next week I'm  giving a talk on corrective actions for climate change.   I've been lamenting about this for weeks now.  It's bringing up a whole bunch of contradictory feelings, dukkha, conundrums, and a reluctance to speak my truth.   After a long talk with our sangha leader, I've been led to highlight a few things.   But first let me rant a little:  2005 was a pivotal year for me and it turned me away from popular views & opinions and led me to question most of our pop media's reporting on environmental, ecological and supposed 'solutions'.  I had taken my proceeds of a home sale, traveled the world (Asia, Everest, Europe, etc) l ooking for answers to unasked questions like: 'is it really that bad? are we all f***ed?, why not just party like it's 1999 ? ....  And then came the 2005 seminal paper 'the death of environm...

After reading the third article in the last month about the downsides of tiny homes - i have to join the mix. I think tiny homes are stupid - there, I said it.  Yes, people feel ungrounded in a tiny home - because they are - daaaaa.    Yes, people use other storage places for stuff that doesn't fit in their tiny home... daaaaa.   (and so do many other people) Yes, tiny homes are unattached to land and depreciate in value like a car or RV... double daaaaaadaaaaaa.  Yet everyone misses the big point: ...and now a brief pause for some light 'tiny home' humor:  In a recent contest for people to proclaim their smallest living space, one person said: "  A womb. I stayed there for 9 months and then got evicted - and on my birthday no less!  " -------------------------------------------------------------------- The real issue   is that tiny homes have   higher construction (eco, carbon, $/sf) footprints   than say.....

I spend a l ot of time contemplating and exploring AI (artificial intelligence).  I've recently gotten into Alexa and Google Assistant.  I find it fun, but also with some serious consequences.  I constantly game the algorithms in my news feeds and purposely will click on things to throw off AI trackers. i use duck-duck go for searching, and VPN's with changing locations to throw off harvesters and trackers.   But it's a losing game.  AI is now so ubiquitous and prevalent in our everyday lives that humans don't stand a chance.  Every location ( and almost every movement), every transaction, every search, every conversation and email, every text/twitter/instagram/FB posting is part of your DNA.  We are fast becoming cyborgs.   Elon Musk says we already are.    Our digital selves ( and decades of tracking/recordings of each of us) is way bigger than our physical selves.  In a NYT article about Silicon Valley's 'joda...

What does it mean to win?  Are you winning right now?  At what?    Or, are you losing right now?  How does that feel? Winning means different things to different people.  A lot of it depends on culture, age, background, profession, and ... well, your personal view  Defining winning in sports is easy.  As John Madden said   (or was it Vince Lombardi?)     'winning is everything' .  There's not a single sports team out there that doesn't want to win.  Rare, are teams that require maintaining their ethics, morality, kindness, etc over winning at all costs.  I can think of a few like the Chicago Bulls perhaps?  I can also think of the other extreme like the Baltimore Ravens or Dallas Cowboys or Oakland Raiders at certain points in their history that could care less about their teams members' off-field records like accomplices to murder, weapons & drug charges, domestic abuse, etc.   If winn...

This is a copy of an older posting I didn't want to lose... it's timing was March 2018. I'm starting on an 8 city, 24 day European adventure.  For those interested in following my adventures & ops... i'm keeping a blog at:    http://eurotrip33.blogspot.com.es/2018/02/barcelona-2018.html I've got a separate blog going for my 8 cities in 24 day tour of Europe... here's the link http://eurotrip33.blogspot.com/2018/02/barcelona-2018.html [caption id="" align="alignnone" width="1500"] Cologne Carnival[/caption]

The 2018 World Cup (WC) just concluded with well over 3 billion people watching worldwide (it was 3.2b in 2014). The USA viewership was down 44% from 2014.   The WC happens every four years with 32 countries competing in the world oldest sport. It used to be called the beautiful game and this year one team returned that moniker to some its former glory.  I have a lifetime of soccer behind me from NCAA and i n 1954 I tasted my first champagne and cigar in Germany when they won the World Cup. I also celebrated four years ago when Germany won it again. I was utterly sad this year when Germany failed to make it out of group play - for the first time ever. A 2:0 loss to South Korea did them in. South Korea? I didn't even know they played soccer :-)! kiddin'... I think the reason why 3+ billion people tuned in, is because most of them played soccer at least when they were a little kid. One can roll up a piece of paper and kick it around on any surface and make...