effort is brute force. It can only accomplish by means of pushing or pulling. It’s blunt and ineffectual against sophisticated reasoning or planning. But creativity is something else. It radiates backwards and makes the electrons of your brain spin erratically. It’s a cool frissioning through your gray matter, minus-a-million degrees celsius. The ultimate, ecstatic path.
Things happen because of love.
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Fear is the passive mood of love. If you love something, work to make it better. If you only fear to lose what you love, it’s already lost.
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Faith precedes knowledge.
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From the moment you’re born, you have all the energy you’ll ever need. Just add focus.
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Better to know you’re bad than believe you’re good.
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To move forward is to move through.
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If God is love, then love is the only real emotion and everything else is a version of the truth.
I’m a fan of Katie’s William Orbit stuff.
I’m a big fan of the iPhone (and a former employee of its primary ad agency) but I was a little weirded out by the idea of Apple’s iAds. I mean, who really wants more ads in their apps? But after seeing this execution by Nissan, I’m impressed. The branding message linking the car to a spectacular and progressive future could only be accomplished in the immersive visual way the iAd format provides. I look forward to more of these on my new 4. And who knows, maybe Apple’s notoriously opaque approval policies will result in a higher overall quality of ads than the standard mobile fare.
This is something that more kids aspiring to be in the music business need to hear and participate in. They need to understand the music business is pretty much identical to every business in that it requires extremely hard work and considerable know-how. Too many believe it’s a skate or a never ending party. Even with all the news about how mp3s and downloading have destroyed it, the image of the industry is one of boundless opportunity. There is opportunity, but it’s an opportunity only the most cunning, ruthless and charismatic get access to. I’m not saying the music business encourages cynicism and amorality–I’m saying at the deep end of the pool, all of them do.
Study hard kids.
[My father sent a mass email forward claiming to explain the methodology of Islamic infiltration and eventual establishment of Shariah law in Western nations. It was xenophobic, racist and completely devoid of true analysis. I love and respect my father, who is not a racist or hateful person, but sometimes falls prey to fearful sentiment like anyone else. Normally I just let his forwards slide, but in this case I felt compelled to respond. I am not the greatest champion of Islam, but the faith has given me a lot of emotional stability and insight, and I'm not partial to it being maligned for the sake of an embittered and irrational minority. My final response is to his question whether I believed certain Muslims wanted me and my kind dead for no good reason.]
The answer is no. I do not believe there are people of the Muslim faith who would kill me and all people who look like me for no good reason. Someone who would be capable and willing to do that is not someone of the Muslim faith, no more so than a Christian claiming to execute the will of Christ with a machine gun is practicing that religion. You can call yourself anything and perform any act you wish in the name of anyone or anything you wish. It makes no sense to demonize a majority for the sins of a minority–if that is the test, then humanity itself is damned and the point is moot.
I can’t compare how I grew up to how you grew up. I can’t go tit for tat with how much freer I am or less free you were. Those are subjective claims. Just as it’s subjective and nearly mythological to say that MLK Jr. changed our country. At best, MLK represented the will of millions who were willing to change. But no one person changes things–they must be reciprocated by the will of the times. Or else we would have been entirely liberated as a people by Harriet Tubman or Frederick Douglas. Can you honestly say that MLK was a better man that those people? Essentially what you seem to be saying is I have it better than you do, and that I disagree with. I don’t believe it is possible for any human to escape suffering. Period. You can be born on high or down low and life will at times be pleasant, at times neutral and at times painful. It is the person who looks back and makes a judgement on “this was a bad time” or “this was a good time.”
My essential belief is that humans are free. Not countries, not nations, not sweepstakes. Only people are free to choose anything. You can choose to attempt to change the system. You can choose to rebel against it. You can choose to criticize it even in face of destruction. But these are choices, not mystical “rights” granted by imaginary entities called nation-states. I can spend my entire life trying to alter the system I find myself in, but I don’t choose to. I’m OK with the way it’s screwed up. I benefit from those inequalities to some extent. When the system no longer supports my livelihood, I may come to different conclusions. This is where change happens. When people are pushed beyond tolerance. When there is nothing else to do but change, that’s when it happens.
I don’t think I have all the answers, but in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. Getting older and acquiring experiences does not automatically give you insight into everything. Unless you go into the heart of everything, which is the appearance and disappearance of form, everything remains shifting and dark. A good breeding ground for fear and mistrust.
Existence is a supernatural fact.
It’s not that God’s existence can’t be proven; it’s that it can’t be proven to anyone else.
