This Little Light of Mine

This nation needs a rebirth. It has lost its soul. - Jim Flynn

Lost? Misplaced in my opinion. The soul of America is no longer to be found in the malls, in the megaconcerts, or even in a lot of town halls. It has retreated into the small places where neighbors are still helping neighbors, cleaning up after storms, taking children to school, singing in the church choirs, in short, to quote my wife, "choosing to be family".



Globally, economically and militarily we are mightily messed up at the moment. We did that to ourselves. Our fathers did it too. We almost recovered and then we let the city on the hill hawks lead us again and when we let the stupid rise to power, we pay because once in, they are tediously difficult to root out.

Choose your family. Choose to be with them. Watch the nefarious and don’t let your own need for significance blind you to the harm they do. Vote cautiously and often. Buy local. Read the lyrics to the songs your children listen to.



Give a damm but not a dime. Evolve your way. The nation is not due for rebirth. Our soul is intact. The universe sings to us. We quit listening.

Why? Someone trying to make a bigger buck told us we had to belong to a party, a cause or a hair club and we bought it.

Our soul is right where it’s always been in the small places where the chosen gather for the joy of being together, to be family.

This little light of mine, I'm gonna let it shine.

The Trickster

Photo Credit: Arlo Guthrie

Trickster is at one and the same time creator and destroyer, giver and negator, he who dupes others and who is always duped himself. He wills nothing consciously. At all times he is constrained to behave as he does from impulses over which he has no control. He knows neither good nor evil yet he is responsible for both. He possesses no values, moral or social, is at the mercy of his passions and appetites, yet through his actions all values come into being. - Paul Radin

Again, knowledge cannot be aggregated into a single ruling body." John Papola

That quote from Papola isn’t precisely true. It is actually a limit on tracking identified resources in real time, that is, kinds, types and precision converted to actionable intelligence. The entire focus of web/Internet design has been to increase the precision given real time feeds.

No, you can’t know what goes on inside a human mind but you can observe, record and analyze speech acts. So trying to use human purposefulness as a defense or offense is to hide behind the rat hole of intensionality. You can know enough to make locally rational decisions.

To provide investors and other control mavens such information, you’ve been steadily and eagerly giving up your privacy and submitting to a 365 x 24 x 7 surveillance society. You did it for your convenience, fun and need to increase your self-perceived significance. By the very same game rules for markets, you are now hostage to the business models of IBM, Oracle/Sun, Microsoft, Apple and so on where next year’s profits rely absolutely on increasing your use and submission to the very technologies that provide that transparency.

After almost two decades of crying in the wilderness about this, my best advice is find a little place full of good people where you are secure with whatever your ambitions are and adapt.

Feed the trolls whatever will cause them to evolve. You can use the greed of others to modify their behaviors. That is the role of The Trickster.

Eat more rabbits.