ath3na's talking points

Ten quick steps to facism:

1. Invoke a terrifying internal and external enemy
2. Create a gulag
3. Develop a thug caste
4. Set up an internal surveillance system
5. Harass citizens’ groups
6. Engage in arbitrary detention and release
7. Target key individuals
8. Control the press
9. Dissent equals treason
10. Suspend the rule of law

Thank goodness we live in America, where none of this could ever happen.

(http://chris.pirillo.com/2007/10/21/how-to-close-an-open-society/)

I've been reading a blog lately called Zen Habits|Simple Productivity. I enjoy it immensely. It has all sorts of useful tips for simplifying your life and clearing your head. I would highly recommend it! Below is one of the guest posts that was posted on 10/17/2007. I thoroughly enjoy Leo's posts, but this one struck me as being some rules I'd like to begin following in my life. Please read:

9 Tips to Throw Off the Chains of Consumerism

Photo by fazen

Editor’s note: This is a guest post written by Scott Young.

You already have everything you need. Those of us lucky enough to have been born in this time period in the Western world are experiencing an abundance few of our ancestors could have claimed. Food, clean water, shelter, law and order are almost guaranteed.

Why doesn’t it feel this way? Despite this amazing abundance, why are so many people dissatisfied? Are we doomed to always want more than we have, even if it won’t bring us more happiness?

You Can’t Live in a Vacuum
As soon as basic needs are met, your focus immediately shifts onto creating new problems. Even if poverty, exile from the population or violence are remote threats, new problems fill their place. Our cultural obsession with consumption is a by-product of this need to seek out new problems.

The solution is to find something else to fill the vacuum. Instead of mindlessly adopting the quest for material perfection, look at it critically. You don’t need to sell all your worldly belongings and become a monk, but see what other things can fill the space consumption occupies in your mind.

Here are a few suggestions for how to escape the chains of consumerism:

1. Process over Results. Why are you trying to get rich? Is it simply to be wealthy, or is it because the process of making money interests you. When you focus on the process leading to a goal over the results, you can be satisfied regardless of whether you succeed or fail.

2. Eliminate Noise. Simplify your life. Stop spending money on things that add noise and distract you from meaningful aspects of life. Don’t use your paycheck as the determinant of how much you spend. Lifestyle expansion erodes the base it was founded on as buying new things fails to make you more satisfied.

3. Let Go of Dust. Don’t spend your life avoiding risks to protect what you have. If you aren’t able to let go of your possessions then those objects own you. Doing a job you hate to maintain a lifestyle you don’t need is insanity.

4. Relationships and Status Also Enslave. I’m using the theme of material consumption here, but it applies equally to seeking relationships, status or physical perfection. Anytime results dominate over process, it becomes easy to get trapped.

5. Trash Regularly. Regularly go through your belongings and trash the things you aren’t using. Having a high turn-over rate of physical possessions can mean you are buying too many things to begin with, but it is still better than simply racheting up the amount you own.

6. You Aren’t Possessions, Status or Employment. If you view your identity as being your job, social status or material wealth, these things will dominate your life. Defining yourself isn’t an easy task, but these are bad ways to start.

7. Avoid “I’ll Be Happy When…” Don’t view happiness as anything that exists beyond the present. When you start imagining that happiness exists in things outside yourself, you’ll always be at a loss when trying to find it. Focus on the now and processes over results.

8. Be Non-Competitive. Competition drives consumerism. The zero-sum game of who can have the most stuff before you die. Break the urge to compete with other people and you release the trap it puts you in. Competition can be useful as a driving force for improvement and change, but when winning becomes more important than playing you get caught in a trap.

9. Positions are Equal, Process is Not. Once basic needs are fulfilled, most positions are relatively equal given a brief time to adapt. This means you will be just as happy with a $30,000 per year as with $300,000. This seems counter-intuitive, but even new psychological research is beginning to find that positions have less influence on happiness than we believe. The difference is process. Some processes can be interesting, fun, challenging and stimulating and others dull, forced and painful. A focus on process is the best way I know to slide off the chains of consumerism.

Scott Young is a blogger on learning, productivity and habits. You can check out his website here.

Clearly, I didn't write this (since I am, in fact, an American who sometimes wishes was Canadian... I digress), but read it and enjoyed it and wanted to share. This is only an excerpt please follow the link at the bottom to read the entire article.

I'm not American. I'm Canadian.

So it's odd then that I write so much about America and I care so much about what happens in America. Part of it is practicality - Canada is a US client state and American politics affect Canadians. When you throw away your freedoms, ours will soon follow (our government just launched its own "no-fly list", for example and after you put out the Patriot Act we put out our own version.)

But part of it is just that I care about America and the American experiment.

Those of us who didn't grow up in America, but under the sway of America's media, imbibed a very pure form of the American mythos and civic religion. The American Civil Religion, with its secular saints such as Jefferson, Hamilton and Washington and its written Constitutional scripture is also a source of wonderment. Canada has no equivalent, no deep sense of history, no touchstone that is written back to to justify the present. Those words of your founders, those words that resound through history are words that inspire men and women who have never seen America and never will.

The Declaration of Independence spoke to all humans, with its assertion that all men are created equal and have unalienable rights. The US system of government, with its checks and balances, seemed unique and able to take shocks that might topple other democratic forms of government.

More...

Michael Moore's new documentary Sicko. Definitely worth a watch.


If you can't watch it, for whatever reason, it has probably been removed from Google Video due to it being placed on there in the first place (http://tinyurl.com/27q267). Sicko opens nationwide June 29, and can be found on DVD shortly thereafter. If you really want to see it now, I suggest you do a search on Google Video for "sicko movie" with the duration set to "long" and you just may find a version you can watch. For now I'll leave this one embedded, though I'm sure if it does play, it'll be removed soon. You should watch it though. It really makes you wonder exactly why do we choose to live in the United States. I say we pile a caravan of my best people (you are invited to join along... among those required though should know who you are) and move to Canada, Britain, France, or Germany (I'm not too picky, wherever the majority of you decide), not just for the health care, but for the amenities. And besides, who wouldn't love "becoming British" anyway? Lolz

I, rainbowCipher, on this cloudy 15th of June do proclaim this Zombie Reformation day.

Oh, what do I mean, you say? Well, a friend and I were discussing this morning, and I wanted to share...

The people of the United States are mostly a lazy people. In particular, the people of the Southern States are lazy. These people are, in my opinion, likened to Zombie's in that they do what they're told when they're told and don't think for themselves. I call them Zombie's because they walk around non-thinking, brainwashed, with no real opinions or reason. This is what got a non-thinking and stammering man re-elected for a second term to a position we call President. Ha! He played to the Zombie's. He commissioned the Southern Baptist Association to do his bidding and convince all the Zombie's who go to church mostly because of tradition rather than actual beliefs, that due to a few certain moral stances (i.e. abortion, homosexual marriage) he was the better candidate for President. I agree not! The Zombie's on the other hand go to church every Sunday because that's what they've always done, and that's what their parents did, and... well you get the point. They go for tradition. And while this is all well and good, they form no real opinions of their own. They simply go and listen to what the Preacher has to say, because as a good man of the Word, he knows what is right and wrong and can, of course, do no wrong therefore what he says goes. Since Kerry clearly is for the immoralization (not a word I'm sure) and separation of the United States divided, and believes in such things that will certainly ruin and destroy American civilization as we know it (though I agree he may not have been the best choice, he was indeed the better of the two), they must indeed vote for Bush.

And this boys and girls, is how our President elect, got elected a second time. /sigh
Now, while this is a very brief view of how I feel about the numerous subjects brought up in my rampage, I'm sure at some point in the not so distant future, there will be more to come.

As for the title of the post....
I think what our country needs is a little reformation. As Chad stated this morning (and I hope he doesn't mind my quoting him) "God didn't put us on this earth to be ruled by power hungry dictators." If there is a God, and I do believe there is, then he certainly would not have put us in this world to be ruled over. Now, the United States government is not meant to be a dictator or ruler. It's supposed to be By the people and for the people and all that good jazz. This is what our nation was founded on. Principles of equality and freedom and justice for all, right? Well, if indeed this is the case then why are people so dead set on segregation. Segregation not just in terms of race but also of sex, creed, sexual orientation, stature, wealth, power... almost anything that can divide us does. Instead of standing as one, we are a nation divided. This is why we need a bit of governmental reformation. Answers.com says:

re·form (rĭ-fôrm')

v., -formed, -form·ing, -forms. v.tr.

1. To improve by alteration, correction of error, or removal of defects; put into a better form or condition.
2. 1. To abolish abuse or malpractice in: reform the government.
   2. To put an end to (a wrong). See synonyms at correct.
3. To cause (a person) to give up harmful or immoral practices; persuade to adopt a better way of life.

v.intr.

To change for the better.

n.

1. A change for the better; an improvement.
2. Correction of evils, abuses, or errors.
3. Action to improve social or economic conditions without radical or revolutionary change.

To change for the better, to correct, improve, correct... this is what we need.
I'm done. That's all for now. I'll get off my soapbox. I didn't intend for this post to be quite so long but... I got a little carried away.

Comment. It makes my day.

Well, inevitably I would have gotten to this subject sooner or later, I guess I just figured later rather than sooner, but it's on my mind.

Until recently, and by recently I mean like the past year, I wasn't really, at all, interested in politics. Honestly, I asked my parents for their opinion and pretty much did what they did. This, I have learned, is one of the things I am most ashamed about. Due to their conservative opinions, I voted for Bush. I know, I know. But it was only the first time. Thank God! I apologize now, I recognize my mistakes at least.

So since then, I've developed my own opinions and become quite the liberal, or at least the progressive. I've got XM Radio in my car, so I've gotten to where I listen to AirAmerica radio a lot lately, specifically The Young Turks, and the Sam Sedar Show.

I could go on-and-on about my many opinions on the state our government is in, but I'll start slowly. One topic at a time I say. Else, I'll run out of things to say. The thing that I've thought about the most lately is the war. Isn't everyone? I'd like to preface my thoughts with an image I came across while stumbling yesterday:

I've been watching (in my not-so-spare time) a documentary I borrowed from Netflix called Why We Fight. The summary of the documentary is as follows (borrowed from the Internet Movie Database):

He may have been the ultimate icon of 1950s conformity and postwar complacency, but Dwight D. Eisenhower was an iconoclast, visionary, and the Cassandra of the New World Order. Upon departing his presidency, Eisenhower issued a stern, cogent warning about the burgeoning "military industrial complex," foretelling with ominous clarity the state of the world in 2004 with its incestuous entanglement of political, corporate, and Defense Department interests.

It seems to me that Bush has been pleading for war since he got into office. Every president wants to do something great, as if it isn't enough to be president of the most powerful nation on earth. While I agree that it is unfortunate that other nations live as they do, at least since we seem to have it all, maybe they don't want it all. Some people are happy living their lives as fisherman or farmers. Most of the world has learned that if you want change, you can have it. Why do we find ourselves policing the world? Is this really necessary? We have problems here in the state's that need attention, and yet we send our troops across the globe to be shot at for a seemingly civil war.

I'm just as angry as anyone about terrorists blowing up the beautiful city that is New York, but I'm much more of a peace oriented person rather than a vengeful Nazi (the very loose definition of the word). Bush, if you ask me, shouldn't have even been re-elected, but somehow, even now 30% of the public still supports him. How is that? He exploited the very meaning of election by using moral issues to high-five the conservatives, and particularly the Christians, into voting for him, even though these are things he hasn't even addressed since being in office (thank God!).

I'm to the point that if a Republican gets elected again I may have to move to Canada. HaHa!

Alright, this is enough, for now. I should definitely stop before I go overboard. I have much more thoughts on the matter, but now is not the time. I feel like I've been rather sporadic with my topic today, so I'll give it a break for now.

Please share your opinions, they are definitely welcome here.