For the love of money is the root of all evil

which makes the critical distinction that it is
not money, but the love thereof, which is the sin,
and that such love begets consequent evil, as is
underscored by the many, many verses which remind
us, as does Exdous 20:5

Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor
serve them: for I the LORD thy God [am] a
jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the
fathers upon the children unto the third and
fourth [generation] of them that hate me;

that when the love of money supplants God as the
first and guiding love of our heart that that love
of money, just like terminally complexified
derivatives, wreaks damage not limited to the
sinner but to others innocent of that sin.

Again ironic that perhaps many who were angry about 9/11 might be the people cleaning their guns now....

Dawn enters with little feet
like a gilded Pavlova
And I am near my desire.
Nor has life in it aught better
Than this hour of clear coolness
the hour of waking together.

A friend, despairing over the heart of corruption beating visibly through the skin inside the current financial meltdown, wrote:

"And things will only get worse, not better. I don't even want to go on a rant regarding how Washington discourages me as a small businessperson while failures like AIG get huge tax breaks."

As someone who set up a small business of sorts fifteen years ago as a wrapper for professional speaking, the shock was how many obstacles, penalties, and general “screw you's” were embedded in the process. I asked an accountant if honest people had a chance. He said, not compared to his many clients whose evasive tactics stretched gray areas into black.

After my best year of income, he called on one fateful April 14th and told me to sit down. Every single penny of the surplus I had set aside on top of normal cash flow, he told me, was due in a single check for estimated state and federal tax, extra tax payments not calculated, and above all, both sides of social security which is a huge hit for entrepreneurs. I emptied my "extra" money market account and sent it to the state and federal governments. Every single penny.

I am so glad they have used it wisely.

The far right wing anti-foreigner anti-Arab and Jew (what's up with hating both?) political parties in Europe have gained strength in Austria, Flanders, Switzerland, Italy, even Spain where Jew-hating is a bias of 50% of the population (although Arab-hating is higher). In Russia and most Slavic countries, you don’t even have to take that pulse; it is always visibly throbbing in the vein. Even Japan, with a dearth of real Jews, registers anti-Semitism. The simplistic hatred and scapegoating of “the other” is apparently a very contagious meme.

When people feel out of control, as so many now do, the projection of false patterns onto incomplete data intensifies. They think they see causes, evil doers, bogeymen, behind the REAL evil doers, causes, and bogeymen, who in turn encourage them to see the mirage and not themselves. Cheney hides in a bunker and Bush does what he has done for eight long years. Then their cronies slouch away to the spa for a government sponsored retreat from anxiety and fear.

The rest of us are advised by news anchors to breathe deeply, take walks, and eat and drink moderately. The same advice applies when we listen to pundits, eight heads in a row, shouting at each other, shouting down all and any voice that contends with their own.

In light of a recent “this is the first-step” exercise to use the United States Army to ensure domestic order, the posse comitatus law is becoming as obsolete in practice as guarantees against search and seizure in a panoptic state that justifies vacuuming up all communications, foreign and domestic, at the source. I am always chagrined when my predictions of how societal structures will follow the contours of enabling technologies do in fact come true. What were scary stories of a haunted house told around the fire on a dark night have become the headlines and all of the stories inside, too, the wrapper of our lives.

As a former clergyman who has listened to the heights and depths of human experience, I know that if people can do something, they will, someone will, and then those who think they are good will respond with similar actions. You can not stare long into the abyss before the abyss in turn stares deeply into you, as Nietzsche said.

He ought to know.

Now I am not a violent guy. I read a lot, think, talk, write, listen, love energetic interaction with people of all kinds. I have a generosity of spirit that is generally ready to forgive and connect. I relish life and the people I love. But the dangerous options that occur to me now will also occur to people less inclined to be law-abiding. Somewhere in America, someone is listening to his television, feeling helpless and growing enraged, and cleaning his gun.

We are through the looking-glass. Those of us who saw that we built a house of cards have scant consolation from its tumbling. Knowing we were living an illusion, I still preferred knowing it and employing irony to illuminate it to this dark time which signals the end of irony altogether. As Tina Fey is showing on Saturday Night Life when she impersonates Sarah Palin, there is little difference between the thing itself and the caricature. The ironic commentary collapses, and the level of deceit by our leaders, political, economic, other kinds, begins to creep out of the shadows.

This is when I return to things I wrote years ago, trying to bootstrap my optimism and faith. Things like Ferg’s Law. Ferg said, “When things can go right, they will, and at the best possible moment.” I reread that Islands in the Clickstream and hope that he was right.

As the sheriff said in Fargo, contemplating how many people died for stupid reasons, "... and it's a beautiful day.” She looks at the bad guy who did much of the killing and adds, “And all for a little money. There's more to life than money, you know."

Now we get to find out what it is.

What is real in the psychedelic experience? What ideas has our culture provided to help us talk about these experiences? Is there more to these experiences than simply a brain malfunction triggered by a drug?

Contrasting religious experience with psychedelic experience is one way of trying to answer these questions.

There are many fruitful points of comparison between spontaneous religious experience and psychedelic experience, but there is also a tendency to explain one in terms of the other. It's a cliche within many contemplative circles that meditation can take you to the same place as psychedelics, but I wonder if anyone who belives this has tried smoking 50 mg of DMT. There are important similarities, but the differences are important, too.

Like a powerful religious epiphany or gnostic insight, psychedelics dislodge perception from the ordinary constraints of continuity and boundedness. We've known since Kant that these are the mechanics by which consciousness organizes experience into space, time, and the ego. The natural order of things is destabilized in a way that can be freeing, allowing people to reframe the relationship between self and world. In our ordinary lives, we probably think we know more than we actually do about who we are and what our place is in the world. Psychedelics help some people explore these issues.

As in religious visions, the mind relies on symbols to shape psychedelic experience -- archetypes which emerge from deep within. Associations of ideas, mediated through symbols, often become a primary ordering principle of psychedelic experience. Such an event is commonly experienced as a visionary crisis, but it is a crisis that generally resolves over the course of the drug experience, leading back to a re-integrated ego. There is a lot of possibility there for discovery.

Albert Hofmann, the discoverer of LSD, said it this way:

"Of greatest significance to me has been the insight that I attained as a fundamental understanding from all of my LSD experiments: what one commonly takes as 'the reality,' including the reality of one's own individual person, by no means signifies something fixed, but rather something that is ambiguous-that there is not only one, but that there are many realities, each comprising also a different consciousness of the ego."

There you have it.

I have used all sorts of modalities in my life to discover and ideally integrate various unconscious dimensions of my "Self." What religions designate as "spiritual tools or techniques" have generally persisted for so many centuries because they work. The tools are woven into the narrative of each religion but the narratives are cultural media that validate them and enable them to be remembered from generation to generation. In short, religious systems, whatever else they may be, are mnemonic devices fused with interpretations of life that provide meaning or the illusion of meaning (choose one), community, and stabilizing fins in rough winds or training wheels for a tyke learning to ride a two-wheeler - pick your metaphor.

The community part is not extraneous. As I note below, wiser companions are well advised. We do this alone, but we cannot do it alone. We need to do it alone, together.

What you described is one attempt to enter a meditative or altered state, to take the train to the alpha wave central station. It sounds as if it sometimes works. The trick with dissociative states (like what I do when the dentist drills without Novocain but I feel little discomfort) is to be able to return to the center of your own psyche. Otherwise, it's time for a therapist to get to work.

Over the years of my life, I have experienced - prayer, meditation in deeper and deeper states, guided meditations in group contexts (sometimes human potential movements and sometimes Buddhist and Christian communities), automatic writing, mediums, spiritualist trances, self-hypnosis, paranormal games (telepathy, clairvoyance, psychometry), even Ouija boards, in short, many orthodox and non-standard methodologies, and oh yes, the occasional "trip" on a hallucinogen (a recent study suggests that psilocybin delivers a religious experience which is subsequently designated by users as one of the most meaningful religious experience they ever had.. Before taking that trip, however, I suggest a major consult with the erowid web site.)

I don't recommend fringe activities like automatic writing or Ouija boards. What seem to be discarnate spirits or, these days, space brothers in UFOs, are aspects of self that flick off like floaters in our eyes and lead to dissociated states with no controls. Sometimes the doors back home are blocked by falling debris. That can be frightening and dangerous. In addition, channeling of all kinds generally results in bogus testimonies and simplistic spiritualities, seldom specific but often sharing similar vague descriptions of another plane, another life, or another psychic domain. In Christian terms, the routes they suggest are generally around the cross, i.e. reality. In the spiritual domain, there are detours but no short cuts, and there are definitely no free lunches.

All religious traditions state that these practices must be guided by someone more experienced and for good reason - we are playing with powerful and dangerous fire here and like dynamite it can be used to build or to destroy. "Spiritual guides" – real flesh-and-blood people, I mean, not discarnate entities : - ) - or directors are needed for more than the shallowest waters – and that introduces the additional task of finding a good one. It's like finding a good financial adviser - track record, maturity, word of mouth, due diligence all apply. Caveat emptor characterizes this marketplace too. Don't just use the yellow pages. And remember, if you meet the Buddha on the road, shoot him.

The rewards of this journey include hierarchical restructuring of the psyche in ways that include and transcend prior states and deliver spiritual power, and the ability to live with self-mastery, dignity, and resiliency regardless of circumstances. That hard-wired experience is generally contextualized by religious narratives in a particular way – Buddhists experience “a nightmare in daylight,” Christians are “born again,” etc. – but the pluralism of interpretations relativizes them all and suggests an innate predisposition to transformation or conversion that is prior to any story.

The downsides include the trip being interrupted, which secular analysts unfortunately diagnose as mental illness instead of a detour, and of course, grandiosity and inflation of the ego. Think of Alice in Wonderland eating the wafer and growing real big. That’s ego inflation. Then think of Alice eating another and getting real small. That’s humility.

Humility is better.

In the end, one discovers that these practices all lead to diminishing self importance, a manageable and appropriately sized ego, and more surpassing joy in living life than one dares to dream.

It sounds to me like it’s worth it.

The names of the stories, found by a search of the Combat site, are:

Outside the Door
Cliché
BRB
A Second Opinion
The Big O

They begin an exploration of the impact of torture on the people in a society that condones the practice. A single instance in “the room” in the war zone leads to other rooms until we arrive by a very circuitous route at “the room” where torture was authorized in the first place.

Fiction seems to be the right place to explore issues that once found their way into Islands in the Clickstream. I have published thirty stories in the past few years. Coming up next are: “The Man Who Hadn’t Disappeared” in Karamu, a literary magazine published at Eastern Illinois University (http://www.eiu.edu/~english/karamu/index.html), and “Silent Emergent, Doubly Dark,” in an anthology to be published in November in London, Subtle Edens: The Elastic Book of Slipstream. http://www.elasticpress.com/

Allen Ashley, the editor of Subtle Edens, wrote: “The story is gripping and fascinating. Your narrator's three off-world trips raise questions of science, philosophy, religion, consciousness, reality and much more.”

And did that ever delight me! Why? Because he got it! He knew what I was doing! What more can any writer want?

Well ... a writer might want to find a publisher interested in a collection of all this published short fiction called More Than a Dream: Stories of Flesh and the Spirit (many of which can be found at www.thiemeworks.com), or a writer might want to find a publisher interested in looking at The Room. If you happen to be one, married to one, live next door to one, or know one, let me know ... publishing in the digital age is a little tricky. We are all trying to figure out how best to get our writing, music, films, and other digital creations into the world. The old models are breaking down and the new ones are not yet clear. Maybe they’re slouching into outer space to be born. And more people seem to be writing these days than reading. The Indiana Review noted, “We receive more than 10,000 submissions a year, yet our subscriber list is less than 500.” Only subsidies keep them alive. The rest of us are heading to the Web.

Now Treister is updating HEXEN2039 and charting more of Brodsky's scientific research towards the development of new mind control technologies for the British Military. This work uncovers or constructs links between conspiracy theories, occult groups, Chernobyl, witchcraft, the US film industry, British Intelligence agencies, Soviet brainwashing, behavior control experiments of the US Army and recent practices of its Civil Affairs and Psychological Operations Command (PSYOP), in light of alarming new research in contemporary neuroscience.

The Science Museum of London sent Treister and art critic Richard Grayson to Milwaukee to videotape interviews with me on those subjects. She thought my book review of Jonathan Moreno’s “Mind War” indicated a kindred spirit. And it did. She uses the interviews to anchor her project in the (more or less) present day.

See www.hexen2039.net and http://ensemble.va.com.au/tableau/suzy/TT_ResearchProjects/index.html)

for more about Hexen

see http://www.kunstverein-langenhagen.de/treister/index.html - to see a gallery opening of some of Treister’s work in Germany that includes a fourteen minute video loop from our interviews.

There are other good talks at the google link, too, and Larry is at www.internetworkdefense.com.

Quiet American hosts discography, field recordings, and one minute vacations. It wins lots of recognition and people from all over the world come to find magical, mysterious, immersive sites of sound, precisely layered in unexpected wondrous ways.

No group labels itself “a minority.” The label comes from the dominant culture and is itself a way of establishing superiority.

Back when talks on diversity paid in CEUs (continuing education units), many corporations checked the diversity box by having speakers address the issue. Some invited me to talk on “The Difference It Makes Being Different.”

What, you may ask, does a “white middle aged male” know about diversity?

As I spoke, however, it became clear that while I looked like a “middle aged white male,” my insides had traveled a path more similar to the experience of women and African-Americans in the audience.

That’s because I have lived in five different ways as a “minority. I have been a religious minority twice, a racial minority once, and a foreigner twice. Each experience provided anecdotes about the ways a dominant culture socializes its members differently than it does the members of what it calls a “minority.”

One punch line in my talk is that the bigger shock came when I moved twenty years ago to Milwaukee. Arriving with a German name and a job (I was an Episcopal minister, then) that facilitated my identification with the dominant culture, I was treated for the first time in my life as if I belonged. The shock came with the discovery of how radically different members of a dominant culture treat someone who is perceived to be “one of us.”

Dominant cultures open doors in a million ways for those who belong. Through mentoring, the communication of intrinsic value, promotions, and other ways, members of dominant cultures are assisted, supported, and sustained in their personal and professional lives. Over time, they cease to see these privileges that come with membership and believe, as was said of George Bush, that they are born on third base and think they hit a triple.

Because the privileges of power are invisible, dominants also fail to see how “minorities” do not have them. Because they believe that their attainments are based on intrinsic merit, they genuinely can not understand why everyone can not simply do as they do and achieve the same level of success.

African Americans in Milwaukee frequently say they can not get traction in careers. They are startled when they go somewhere else – Chicago, Atlanta, Minneapolis – and get traction, find mentors, and advance. They are treated differently.

That refrain has been heard so often that a reasonable person might conclude that conditions here do not change for a simple reason – the leaders of the dominant culture do not want it to change.

We hear repeated calls for change in our economy, too, and they will probably happen, but not because our leaders have worked actively to bring them about.

Initiatives like regional branding by the Greater Milwaukee Committee or the Wisconsin Technology Council’s efforts to attract entrepreneurial technology companies are good approaches. They don’t try to change the heart first, a daunting task. Their good approaches because realists know: where money flows, the heart will follow.

We would like to believe that we will do the right thing and money will follow, but it doesn’t work that way. Anyone who is paying attention learns in the ministry that economics is the right hand of God. When real money is on the table, our prejudices will be checked at the door.

That brings us back to Michelle Obama.

I point out in my speech that blacks must understand whites, Jews must understand Christians, gays must understand straights, and women must understand men, because there is a price to be paid if they don’t. The reverse, however, is not true. It costs whites, for example, nothing not to understand blacks, which is why Obama’s statement was incomprehensible to many – they do not understand that the whole of her life was a different experience and led to that statement which popped out with such unselfconscious clarity. They do not know that what she has achieved was not achieved in the same way or with the same ease as the equivalent education or career by a white, Christian male.

Naming is powerful. Dominant cultures have pejorative terms for members of the minority, but you have to work to think of a similar term to denote members of the dominant culture. Think of a term for “an angry woman,” for example; one comes to mind at once, doesn’t it? Try to think of a similar term for “an angry man” and you’ll draw a blank.

If that’s news to you, and if you were upset when you heard what Michelle Obama said, my bet is that you’re a member of the “dominant culture” and have never been asked to look at the real difference it really does make to be different.

Sunday's Washington Post (February 18 2008) opinion section had two front-page articles on declining literacy in the US and on the general dumbing-down of the population. Certainly worth reading, but it also explains far more about the essentially issueless presidential campaigns that have been on-going -- viz., let's all hear it for CHANGE, whatever 'change' is meant to portend!

The results are dismal: reading of all forms is down significantly amongst the population, independent of educational level. The leisure reading score for the population has continued to go down over the last several decades. Here is a brief extract, but I'd recommend your looking at both this report and its 2004 predecessor. My extrapolated average indicates that the adult population (ages 15-34) puts in *8 MINUTES PER DAY* doing some form of weekday reading, rising to *10.5 minutes per day* on weekends. (Source, US Dept of Labor, Bureau of Labor Statistics.)

(My reply below is in two parts: (1) the politics of hope and change, and (2) what can we do about literacy? (I don’t mean sounding out simple words – I mean reading complex paragraphs with comprehension).

Americans are reading less - teens and young adults read less often and for shorter amounts of time compared with other age groups and with Americans of previous years.

Less than one-third of 13-year-olds are daily readers, a 14 percent decline from 20 years earlier. Among 17-year-olds, the percentage of non-readers doubled over a 20-year period, from nine percent in 1984 to 19 percent in 2004.1
On average, Americans ages 15 to 24 spend almost two hours a day watching TV, and only seven minutes of their daily leisure time on reading.
Americans are reading less well – reading scores continue to worsen, especially among teenagers and young males. By contrast, the average reading score of 9-year-olds has improved.

Reading scores for 12th-grade readers fell significantly from 1992 to 2005, with the sharpest declines among lower-level readers.
2005 reading scores for male 12th-graders are 13 points lower than for female 12th-graders, and that gender gap has widened since 1992.
Reading scores for American adults of almost all education levels have deteriorated, notably among the best-educated groups. From 1992 to 2003, the percentage of adults with graduate school experience who were rated proficient in prose reading dropped by 10 points, a 20 percent rate of decline.

As I said, my reply is in two parts: (1) the politics of hope and change, and (2) what can we do about literacy? (I don’t mean sounding out simple words – I mean reading complex paragraphs with comprehension).

The Politics of Hope and Change

(1) I understand your point, but as the younger people's posts about Obama we have been sharing suggest, they have NEVER had a president of whom they were proud. For eight years, one was a compulsive liar and getting blow jobs under his desk, and then, there is Mister Incoherent. Have you ever seen the film, The Great Escape? What is being pitched by “change” is a tunnel that makes it all the way to the trees, that there is a way out! That we CAN escape a nightmare of despair, shame, and depression. That's what "change" sells, something, anything, other than what the younger voters have known their whole lives long. If you heard the noise when Obama came through the curtain the other night (at the Democrats’ Founders Day Dinner n Milwaukee) , the depth of that yearning would be clear.

The editorial board of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel sat down with Obama and asked him serious questions and reported that the depth, intelligence, and realism of his answers led them to endorse him for the primary tomorrow (they saw Hillary's divisiveness as a deal-breaker).

A vote for Obama in tomorrow’s primary is a vote for possibility and potential. Everybody knows, as the song says, how detours ahead will inflect his and our best intentions. Thus has it always been, thus will it always be.

Mt friend adds: I realize this is probably old news to most of you, but the US National Endowment for the Arts has conducted a reading survey twice now (2004 and 2007) that can be found at http://www.nea.gov/news/news07/TRNR.html

The Real Decline in Reading, Writing and Thinking

(2) I have not read anything that contradicts this.

I did a keynote a few weeks ago for Deans and Provosts and profs of engineering schools on creativity and innovation at the Thunderbird School of Global Management. One of the profs said he is finding that his (college) students can understand words but often fail to comprehend the meaning of a whole paragraph. They can not easily discern, articulate or make useful the essence of a whole complex statement.

So, my question is this: what can we do? I mean that seriously, not we as individuals, but "we."

I have spoken at Def Con (The premiere Las Vegas hacker conference, paired with Black Hat Briefings) for 12 years now and from the very beginning, the subtext if not the explicit text was about doing research, thinking critically, being "good hackers" in the sense of doing everything necessary to see how something works, so one can access the deeper levels - not just of programs, machines, or code, but comprehensive and coherent bodies of thought. I always try to embed an "upward call" in the message, and some have gotten it, as well as my obvious commitment to them and equally obvious respect. That feedback loop of mutual energy sustains that particular dialog.

Yet ... when I see a feature on Ren, a Japanese girl who thumbs out little text "novels" on cell phones, and hear that she is now a millionaire because they brought out two of her little heart-throb tales in hardcover and they sold 400,000 copies each ... and I get one of a series of stories I am writing back from the Boston Review and the editor writes, this is "enthralling and so well written," but we just don't have room for it, and small press publishers send back the proposal because "we have no money, publish a very few titles/year" and mainstream foreign-owned as a rule publishers will not speak to you because publishing is 100% marketing and product delivery, as Bob Woodward said Simon and Schuster told him when they wanted a new topic before the ink was dry on his last book ... (he added, OK, my next book will be about the New York publishing industry, and his editor laughed and laughed, then said, great! and I have the title! ... “My Last Book” ... to which Woodward added, “and he wasn‘t kidding” ... and on and on ... so as a writer without an agent and a serious reader, it is difficult not to despair.

We discussed earlier how technology is often misused in school trying to be trendy at the expense of real teaching, how it is not integrated intelligently with critical skills of research and analysis. All of my talks to teachers at in-services have been about integrating technology so the world of reading and writing and the worlds of clicking and quick fluid visuals can cross-pollinate, so the digital world will recontextualize, not eliminate, reading and writing and discursive thinking ...

and what teachers often say, and what some of the professors at that conference said, and what people in government bureaucracies often say is always about the culture and how it inhibits them and beats down their best intentions, taking the life out of them, making them count the days until they die or retire. It's about cultures that assimilate them and generate feelings of powerless to do anything significant within their constraints.

I think of a keynote I did for executives from a bank for a planning retreat when the digital world was just coming. I interviewed a dozen top people at the bank and every single one spoke of "the bank" as something that was in the way of their creativity. When I had them off site, I asked them all, where is the bank? As they looked around they could see that the bank that constrained them was not something physical but "the bank in their heads," a paradigm of limited possibility that they had internalized. So the challenge was how to change the model of banking in their heads and the behaviors and actions it had determined. (the underlying subtext which I named, causing a deep silence, was, do you want the bank to succeed in its current form? Or do you want to maximize the value of your stock options so when you are bought, you can cash out? That, I said, will determine not what you say, but what you choose to do. The answer to that was signified by the silence - that bank was bought, and then THAT bank was bought in turn, and lots of employees are gone).

This was also the bank where a guy lingered after a different talk and tried to tell me what the culture was like. He had worn a blue shirt to his first meeting eight years earlier and everyone stared at him. He realized that everyone else wore a white shirt. He has never worn anything but white shirts for eight years, but in the bathroom stall the other day, he heard himself referred to as "the guy in the blue shirt."

Eight years. EIGHT YEARS.

So the question remains: assuming we don't want to be just a bunch of grumpy old white men (those of us who qualify for that club, that is) - what can we do? How can we contribute, how can we make a difference, however slight?

What can we do?

What, in short, is the essence of real communication?

After I posted my son’s reflections on Barak Obama, my friend wrote:

I've heard this same type of thinking from many people over the past 7 years.
I've heard you speak publicly many times, both formal and informal and I think you know that I also pattern some of my public speaking style around yours. (Sorry!)

So I wonder what a thinking speaker feels beyond Pres. Bush's obvious speaking skills.

The questions that come to mind:

1. How much does a political candidate's public speaking abilities (note: not skills) reflect on the public (you?) opinion of their ability to lead?

2. How much do we as public speakers place on a candidate's public speaking abilities and their opinion to lead?

1. How much does a political candidate's public speaking abilities (note: not skills) reflect on the public (you?) opinion of their ability to lead?

Speaking for myself, it's an important factor but not the only factor, and glibness can eclipse an inability to be effective in other areas. Reagan said he could not understand how anyone could be president if they had not been trained as an actor. In the ministry, I often said (after I had lots of experience) that if you could fake sincerity, you could do the job.

That was not a cynical or smart ass crack. It meant that you had to know how to access that part of yourself from which meaning came, where it was generated by intentionality, how it was communicated, how to hit that button, time and time again - regardless of how you felt. You had to short circuit your normal human emotions as expressed through body language and language and "come from" that deeper place, and know how to get to it when you did not want to go there or feel much like it. That's what I meant, not insincerity or hypocrisy.

Work like ministry is often a junior subset of politics (e.g. Mike Huckabee) and requires that one speak to the same audiences, often in the same words, with effectiveness and above all - high intentionality – over and over again. When one articulates every Sunday morning, as I did as an Episcopal priest, words that had to convey the nexus between this concrete everyday world and liminal worlds of ultimate meaning (really different dimensions of consciousness, "world" is a metaphor, let he who has ears, hear), and say the same things again and again - one could only do so by knowing how to be INTENTIONAL in how one spoke, that is, intending to communicate the deeper meaning of the words no matter how often one had said the same thing.

After hearing/seeing both Obama and Hillary Clinton last night, here in Milwaukee at the Democrat’s Founders Day Dinner, that same truth obviously applies. I had heard many of these "talking points," having listened to more debates and speeches this election than ever before, but you could know, feel, understand when they said something with meaning and it got communicated to you.

I did a lot of workshops outside the church setting that significantly enhanced my understanding of communication. Bottom line: communication is a function of intentionality. If you intend that someone get what it is you are communicating, they will. And at the same time, if you intend to get what someone is communicating, you will. You can disable communications coming in and blame it on the communicator or you can blame it on the listener when they don't get what you are saying, but it is always YOUR responsibility, as listener and speaker, to communicate or to get the communication, and you have to own that responsibility 100%.

In some exercises we used nonsense syllables, and that did not prevent the intention from being the driver of someone "getting it." This learning process was experiential, repetitive, and empowering. Once you knew how to do it, you could never not know that you knew, so it was always your responsibility and your choice whether to do it – or not.

So a leader by definition must communicate on several levels and in several modalities to be most effective. Speaking and listening is the province of "speech acts" in a formal way and there's lot of data out there on those. But also obviously, "leadership" in a functional way involves a lot more than that, too. You have to do know how to fund the enterprise, get the deals done, negotiate complexities, and remain the same person regardless of the role of the moment. You had to know who you were and what you intended, regardless of the variety of personae you had to use to be "all things" to a lot of people if not all of them. That’s true in ministry and political life and other areas, too.

But ... yes, often enough, complex, clear, even profound thinking and effective speaking do overlap. You can’t say what you can’t think, and you can’t think what you haven’t got words to express.
2. How much do we as public speakers place on a candidate's public speaking abilities and their opinion to lead?
One can look at Bush's reelection and say, obviously, not much. But there are many other factors there too, of course. I mean it when I say I think there is something amiss in Bush's brain that disables the ability for us to sync with his thinking. You try, as he speaks, to align with the rhythm and the meaning, but it’s like his brain stutters, then the connection is dropped, like a bad cell phone connection. It’s sometimes frightening, listening as he becomes incoherent, because that incoherence is about the ability to think clearly, not just “effective speaking.” I wish that people who know him well would contradict what I see, but so far, they have not. Greenspan said his lack of intellectual curiosity was extreme. Other “insiders” tell me of his short temper, his refusal to listen to opposing points of view, his rigidity – all signs I knew well in the ministry of someone who had been an addict for a long time. His prior life seems to have been that of an addict, a spoiled child. It was not gratifying to come to the unhappy conclusion that the cocaine and drinking had an effect. I wanted to believe that, like Prince Hal in Shakespeare's histories, he would leave his carousing companions behind and grow into a mature man. But I have not seen anything that would suggest it. And the lack of transparency in his government, his cronies’ obsession with secrecy, his violation of the constitution and insistence on a pardon in advance for companies (e.g. telecoms) that he got to go along with illegal eavesdropping on American citizens, his ability to talk the IC [intelligence community] into violating their charters and laws - what can one say? He was reelected. Is that "leadership?" Or a lapse in good judgment? Or something else?

When people in other countries asked me how he could be re-elected, I said, he wasn't. But in America, if you steal an election fair and square you get to keep it. Nixon knew 1960 was stolen but did not contest it. Gore made the same choice. That's our process.

You know the definition of a schlemiel? It's someone who, when they finally leave the room, it feels like someone you really like came in.

That will be the feeling of a lot of people when he finally leaves office.

I hope I answered your questions. I could write a book about all that but it would be outsold so quickly by Ren the Japanese phone text novelist, what would be the point? The sentences would be too long, the words too big (two, no more than three syllables, please, professional speakers used to advise), and it would be too dense ...

Because my wife and I are going to have dinner with Hillary and Barack
tonight (and 1700 of our closest friends at the Dems' Founder's Day
Dinner, Feb 16 2008) and we're the two who will vote in our primary
Tuesday, I took a family poll among our seven kids and five spousal
units. This is what my son Aaron wrote:

My own vote is for Obama, in fact I coughed up money for him for the
first time this week, not so much because of policy points -- I think
Edwards' health plan was better, and so on -- but because he clearly
has the same impact on others that he does on me: he inspires
something I had almost forgotten was possible, to have true pride in
and actual hope for our country.

My biggest concern is the open question of whether he would be able to
delegate matters beyond his ken appropriately, to assemble a functional
and healthy and honest team behind him.
That, more than the lack of specific personal experience, is what I would worry about.

It's not that I don't think there is a real risk of disappointment;
it's more the distinct but unshakable sense that I would never forgive
myself if I didn't take a chance on him. I kind of think that's the
sentiment in the nation, at least, among those energized by him.

As we discussed I was among those who dreamed that an Obama/Clinton
ticket could actually happen. Clinton would make the perfect
Cheney-analog -- and as I said only half in jest, with her as VP, any
nutcase who might be tempted to take a shot at Obama would be in a
true double bind... as someone said to this idea, he wouldn't even
need any secret service protection...

I would love to think that this was the beginning of the great
turnaround. With Clinton I'm pretty sure it wouldn't be. With Obama I
don't know... but I dare to hope.

On a list we share, an article from The Register - MayDay! MayDay! Ruskies reinvent cyber crime- was posted.

I am copying the article and Hobbit's wiser saner response. There is so much obfuscation and distortion in the field of computer security - so his intelligent reply is offered as a public service.

Not your father's botnet
By Dan Goodin in San Francisco
Published Wednesday 13th February 2008 23:42 GMT

Researchers have unearthed two previously undetected botnets that exhibit sophisticated new capabilities that could significantly advance the dark art of cyber crime.

One of them, dubbed MayDay by security firm Damballa, uses new ways to send and receive instructions to infected machines. One communication method uses standard HTTP that is sent through an organization's web proxy. That allows the malware to circumvent a common security measure employed by many large companies.

Indeed, Tripp Cox, vice president of engineering and operations at Damballa, says he's observed MayDay running inside some of the world's most elite organizations, including Fortune 50 companies, educational institutions and ISPs. (He declines to identify them by name.)

"Most malware doesn't go through the trouble of trying to discover a computer's web proxy settings and use that as a method for getting onto the internet," he says.

The botnet also uses two separate peer-to-peer technologies so zombies can stay in touch with each other, presumably as a back-up measure in case the central channel is disconnected. One protocol communicates using the internet control message protocol (ICMP) and the other uses the transmission control protocol. The ICMP traffic is obfuscated so it's indecipherable to the human eye. Damballa researchers are still working to figure out exactly what kind of information is being transported over the channel.

Up until now, the zombie army popularly known as Storm has been the 800-pound gorilla of the botnet underground. Having recently marked it's one-year birthday, it is believed to comprise about 85,000 infected machines. It was responsible for about 20 percent of the world's spam over the past six months, according to MessageLabs, which provides email and web filtering services to more than 16,000 business customers.

By comparison, MayDay and another newly discovered botnet called Mega-D have far fewer nodes, but they are worth watching for a couple reasons. For one, they are likely to get bigger over time. And for another, their increasing sophistication is a good indicator of the direction professional bot herders are headed.

MayDay has also done a good job of flying under the radar. Infected machines have a limited amount of time to connect to the command and control channel. If the time stamp is more than a few hours old, the server returns an error message, making it hard for white-hat researchers and rival bot masters to perform reconnaissance. And according Cox, the vast majority of the anti-virus products fail to detect at least some of the samples obtained by Damballa researchers. (Symantec and Sophos, in postings here and here, question Damballa on this issue.)

There's another reason why MayDay has managed to remain under cover until now: it is still relatively small. At any given time, there are only "several thousand victims" infected, according to Cox.

The other recent arrival on the botnet scene is Mega-D. It was discovered by security firm Marshall, which last week said it had dethroned Storm as the top source of spam.

Some of Marshall's peers in the research community aren't so sure about that, including Joe Stewart of SecureWorks. He says Mega-D consists of about 35,000 bots, less than half the size of Storm. Mega-D isn't propagating as fast or efficiently is Storm has, either. Finally, he suspects spam from Storm is being under-counted.

Referring to Mega-D he says: "This is a very strong botnet, but hardly a challenger to Storm."

Nonetheless, Mega-D boasts some advances that Stewart says aren't common in botnets. One of them allows it to avoid being "greylisted," a technique used by email servers to prevent spam by instructing unrecognized senders to retransmit the email later. Whereas most spam bots give up, Mega-D bots don't.

"This is the first time I've seen any bot have any type of code in it dealing with greylisting," Stewart says. "This is actually at the bot level."

Stewart says Mega-D is the work of Russian hackers and has its genesis in a little-known family of malware known as "Ozkok." It is detected by most anti-virus products, but usually is only flagged with generic labels such as "Pakes" or "Agent," which may partly explain why Mega-D has been able to grow into such a large army with seemingly no one noticing.

While the newcomers aren't as big as Storm and, depending on who's asked, aren't believed to be as big of a nuisance, they are a reminder that the development of malware is a growing business that places a high value on innovation. MayDay's ability to communicate within heavily fortified businesses shouldn't be taken lightly. Neither is Mega-D's anti-greylisting capability.

In its first year, Storm showed a preternatural ability to stop on a dime, morph and take on new capabilities. Here's wondering how soon its developers adopt some of these latest bells and whistles? ®

And Hobbit's response:

*Hobbit*

Breathless articles like this just piss me off. It isn't about whose botnet is bigger or more secretive or what its C2 protocol is. It's
really about the fact that they're permitted to exist at all, let alone successfully send huge volumes of spam.

If the ISPs would actually grow a pair one of these days and curtail
untrusted customer netblocks full of known-infested machines from
sending ANY direct SMTP traffic to anywhere but the ISP's own authorized and well-controlled egress relay, there would be no point in spam botnets. I wrote at length about this over two years ago and suggested some local [and arguably somewhat lame] mitigation strategies, in

http://www.usenix.org/publications/login/2005-10/openpdfs/hobbit.pdf

but how many people actually read Usenix papers, anyways. The point
here is that the ISPs are a very large percentage AT FAULT for the
continued existence and appeal of botnets. If you work for an ISP, go ahead, be as angry as you want at me for saying that, but you know how true it is. Have you ever spent *4 hours* on the phone with reps in the Phillipines for Verizon or Comcast [to pick on the big boys] trying to find someone who can even spell SMTP, let alone do anything to solve a problem or track spam? GFL.

How hard is it to add some anti-forgery header rules to the egress
dropoff mailservers that ALREADY exist, special-case a few people who
actually know what they're doing, and then hop on the edge routers and clamp down on any other TCP 25 noise emerging from subscriber clouds?

HOW HARD IS IT?? Don't give me that lame "common carrier, can't do it" excuse -- you wouldn't be blocking ingress CIFS and the like either if that held any water. If you're an ISP and continuing to let botnets work under your noses, you are an overt threat to the security of many nations at once. Get busy.

Oh, and you could try answering your abuse@ mailboxes once in a while.

_H*