Day 7 - Tea Party

I've now officially published one of my ideas. http://www.teapartisan.org

It's a news site concerning topics often not discussed in mainstream media, a column sphere, in the near future an internet radio, a social network, and a video site all in one. Basically it's a community media portal so they can organize and spread the word, wake people up.



Today I'll ignore the big bad world and write about happy things. It's been such a good day that I can voluntarily stop ranting today. Most people choose to go to sleep. That's another thing. I'm not going to forget the useless state where our world is, but I have to recognize that there's hope. In fact a lot of hope. Things somehow become the way we secretly intend them to. The world is full of miracles and the greatest of them all is love.



I feel lazy suddenly. I know I should be filling those application forms, reading those studybooks, doing some code, stretching and fixing a publishing plan for my ideas. But i feel like staying in the bed for a while. Coincidence: My childhood friends, who yet haven't been reading this blog, called me to drop by on the beach with them. Laziness disappeared. I guess it was just boredom. I'll read more Carl Jung this weekend.

So, where were we? What would the Internet be like if a few big corporations didn't set the paradigm for it? In 1990's some people were working on a whole new concept for internet communications at CERN: The World Wide Web. That's where we are right now. Of course the corporations at first resisted, then watched the open source community develop a browser, went on to try to dominate the browser market, watched the open source community develop better servers and better media and better apps, and followed by taking over critical business and communications applications. The intent was all along if it has to exist let's turn it commercial and corporate.



Even IBM has had to embrace Linux to stay in the marketplace.

Corporations control a surprisingly small part of the Internet, and of the Web. It's quite well for a former US military network opened to the public such as the Internet. But the corporations have taken over the critical applications. That's what they're really good at. The corporate agenda dictates us HOW WE USE the Internet. The Average John or Jenny simply doesn't have the marketing dollar, even if Linus from Finland or Mark from South Africa had made an app much better than what the corporations offer. Even if someone had made fusion, the corporations would still set the paradigm. Why?

Because they control what you can see. They got the mediaz. They got the tabloidz. They got the Newz. They make the Moviez and the Muzik behind the mp3z. And they hates the Torrentz. Corporations run basic services like Google, Altavista (anyone remember?), MSN, Yahoo, Facebook, etc. The Internet is filled with information, but the way it disseminates through the net is filtered. There's hosts out there for all programs, you can even control a robot across the Internet, but these things aren't pop because everyone's busy updating their Myspace.

Everyone's listening to Spice Girls when they could make their own music, or listen to a really good indie artist. Anyway. I'm ranting again.

I guess today I'll go on the beach, in fact I should be on my way already. But no alcohol. No tobacco. No coffee. Maybe a bottle of soda. Really. I mean it. OK. Pics or it doesn't exist.

Day 6 - Exercise?

Day 6

Today I thought of writing a short post. It's because the fine weather (31 C) still continues and I've not been outside yet. I've for the whole day adjusted my computer, made notes, studied, filled applications which takes a lot of time, organized code for upload, etc. They have roses in the corner store. The roses are from Kenya. I also found juice that tastes almost like Pick&Peel, my favourite brand back in Kenya. Anyway.. I had to fight against the urge of buying snacks. Another addiction. "They might put dog in those sausages".

I'm in control of my mind, not the habitual robot. For some reason, I've not craved for cigarettes or beer at all. I guess it's the alignment that makes the decision that makes the emotional response that makes up the way of life. Language lacks words to describe certain things. Alignment is a better word than attitude, but it's still not a proper description for the process I'm looking forward to explain.

Here are some pictures in a reverse chronological order from summer to winter, depicting my backyard. Thank God there are places where the first picture would depict the whole year!









OK, the fourth picture isn't from my backyard.

I mentioned the Bilderberg Group in my last post. It's sort of Shakespeare's "as you like it". Even though the play itself has nothing to do with the title, Shakespeare told the theatre to name it as they liked it. So... the Bilderberg Group, which isn't the only such group out there, first convened in 1954 in the Bilderberg hotel in the Netherlands. It's a sort of gentlemens' club where you get by invitation only. It's of course about power. Since the members have all the money they ever could want, they're hooked on power. Seems there's never enough of it, right?

The conference is all about controlling the worlds of politics, industry and finance, and establishing a global governance - without asking from the people of course.

Is mankind inherently a race of cunning, powerhungry, wicked demons running amok on the world? Have we always been "like that" as popular science suggests? There must be an element of altruism, of love, of care, of concern in us, not just in mothers and teachers. Right?

In fact most civilizations were quite the opposite until a few thousand years ago. Then something happened in the greater Middle-East. The seven biblical plagues. Or at least an event of such scale, since the historical reference to the plagues prophesized by Moses is too late. The entire region from Senegal to China dried up in a couple centuries. It used to be a fertile forest-grassland. Quite the same we see in equatorial Africa, or continental Europe. At these times, about 5000 bC something happened to culture. People started to make weapons.



People started to build palaces in the centre of their villages. People started to make dedicated places of worship near the palaces. These cultures later invaded the peaceful neighbours, enslaved them, took their resources (today they take oil), and reduced them into poverty, starvation and extinction.



Systems of government were developed to keep different populations under tight control, so the fruit of their labour could be extracted by the selected few in the power elite.



A few thousand years later Rome invaded the "entire known world". Fast track... Americans, Russians, Europeans, Chinese, Robert Mugabe...

They learned that people rally around icons.



The above picture on another server. See? there's censorship already concerning expressions about popular icons.



"Something like that can't happen here." "[Your leader] is a decent person, how can you even suggest that..." exact quotes from Itzhak Stern, a survivor of the holocaust perpetrated on Jews, Gypsies, Russians, Ukrainians, sexual minorities and critics of the Nazi administration. Out of 20 000 000 Jews in Poland before the German invasion, only little more than 3000 are alive today. Think your charismatic leader can't do that? think they can't brainwash people to take part in the activity? think again. It's not so many years from the Rwandan genocide.





Sure. It can't happen here. Right.

So how do we stop "it" from "ever happening again". I mean really. Do we need UN to do it for us? a global government perhaps?



OK those strategies have always failed. Why? because that's exactly what the terrorists want. The power-hungry terrorists who never stop lusting for more power, even if they were kings of the world and they always operate through schemes of loyalty and chains of command. Then in the end they build monuments.



There's another way though it can never happen again. Take the power back to the average citizen. Install checks and balances in every public institution, and abolish the rest. Place armed forces under a strict control of the house of representatives. Abolish the State House, and instead of it, build a Parliament or something like that. Something that represents the PEOPLE. So that everyone gets heard. Make money by the people, for the people.



The kind of behaviour we see among our dictators, doesn't seem to be built in the human heart. It's not something you inherently are. It's a systematic tradition passed from one generation to another. Something that can disappear overnight if it isn't shoved constantly in our throats through mass media and advertising.



Want world peace?

First, turn off the TV.

Day 5 - A Bubble in the tarball of my mind

Day 5

It's still pleasantly warm ( 32 C ), and I'm still doing computerstuff for the fifth hour. Preparing for publishing some Web stuff. Now that I have a bit of time, and I'm organized thanks to a new software in my mind, I might just do some things I should have done a few months ago. The archives look great, many things aren't missing from there. The projects haven't been copied by other people yet since I've kept my mouth shut about them. The partners still seem interested - let's see if they still are after reading my blog or if I'll have to find even more fringe people to act with. Well... it's great to be in control of one's own mind. It takes a lot of hard work. A lot. More than the morning meditation on the yoga mat, which in my case is just the floor. I don't need to be comfortable, in fact it's better I feel some solid stone below my lazy joints.



If you're not a Bushie, you're a Taliban. Hegelian dialectic. Kenyan government is corrupt but Raila Odinga is genuine, or politician X for that matter. Doublespeak. Catholic church is disclosing pedo priests but still bribes the authorities. Hypocrisy. Iran is sanctioned for it's peaceful nuclear program by nations which possess and have used nuclear weapons against civilians. Deceit. Obfuscation. Manipulation. Business of grief. Pillaging of the most private human emotions for political purpose. Maybe there's something wrong with the general perception of things?



The relentless, absolute, endless, habitual unfairness of the world. What does loss mean to individuals, people, to whole cultures who have lived with it existentially as a constant companion? Do dreams die? Do they simply go to sleep to wait for a spark? Do dreams numb and slowly disappear never to be dreamt again? Do they? Do dreams endure hardship? What would a person in Kibera think? I know what a person in Kibera would think. Dreams never die. Dreams go to sleep and wake up when the time comes. When brother doesn't covet something from his brother. When people have vision. When they lead the way. What chances does a little girl out of the slum have in our world but the infinite strength, resilience and radiance of her spirit?



There's an island of plastic bigger than Texas floating in the Pacific. Bigger than France and Germany together. Bigger than Kenya and Tanzania together. All of it plastic from packages of consumer goods and food from the USA and East Asia. This raft of rubbish has rarely been photographed. It's huge. A testament to our modern culture. It's unthinkable collecting all these bottles and using the material to make other bottles right? It's completely out of boundaries to even think of washing and refilling packages by oneself. Right?



Memories fill my head, along with threads of logos. I'd better buy a rose. I'll try to find a jar rose. I'll plant it somewhere on my table, and try to take good care of it. There's someone in this world of ours who thinks I'm not a very professional gardener. But gardening is learning, and I already have a cactus. I can take care of the cactus...





Now, it's my turn to ask a question: Who is Google's biggest customer? The biggest customer of a company makes the decisions for it, along with the biggest shareholder and board interests. On whose terms does Google operate? What would the Internet look like if there were no multinational corporations providing for it's most popular services such as free email, this blog server, Facebook, Myspace, Friendster, Livejournal, Orkut, Badoo, Classmates, Cyworld, Flickr, Flixster, Youtube etc. What would we use the Internet for if multinational corporations didn't set the paradigm?

What did 120 most powerful people from the Western World do in Sitges, Spain over a weekend behind closed doors in an annual event called the Bilderberg meeting?

Day 4 - Finnish temperature record has been broken

Day 4

An act of fate, divine test of stubbornness, or pure coincidence. The same day I decided to become a ZeroHolic, I ended up in a battle against the ego of an old bureaucratic officerat for a woman, which quickly lead to me resigning from the workplace. That was yesterday. I simply cannot function in an environment where personal likes and dislikes override reason. I know I can be stubborn. Very stubborn. Giving stupid instructions to me is like telling that to a tree. But something that makes sense... oh yeah. That's totally OK.



Well, I know that I'm a great employee, and that company doesn't know what they lost. I'll simply go and work for someone else. After all it's not the only IT company in the country, and who knows maybe I'll come back with a vengeance after being successful somewhere else. But hey, it's Summer. Summer the season and Summer the five day event! The city of Jyväskylä is celebrating it's annual summer festival, culminating in a huge concert... well huge considering it's a local event. Also the weather is fine: The Sun that had been shining all night had heated my driveway enough to fry an egg on it!

The all-time temperature record in Finland was broken as I walked into the city. It's 36 Celsius! might be 37 but I'm not sure. Zero, Avoid the Beach. There are too many beautiful women out there. An innocent cup of tea, not coffee, could turn out to be a drink, or even worse, a date! now you don't want that do you?



So, in a nutshell it's a beautiful, free day in the middle of rare tropical weather. Considering only three months ago the lake which is now filled with swimming, boating, jetskiing people, was covered with an icing. And I'm not talking about sugar here. This weather almost reminds me of my dear Nairobi, where every day was warm, for me even July, and we would sometimes go to the pool, but not as often as I wanted. The sight of shirtless mzungu men was rare though, and they in fact looked a bit banana within a crowd of suit and tie. But here it's all casual and seeing people rollerskating in swimwear isn't rare. It'll change with the first rains though and we're back to normal jumpers, shirts and ties. I wonder what she would think if she were here. She would think this is some sort of a tourist destination, and in fact it looks like it.



I spent the morning in a rather unconventional activity. Organizing my hard drive, and testing PHP/MySQL code. If I intend to elaborate on my ideas, I'd better start from the easiest. The Web.

The Web is a wonderful platform: Anybody can publish anything on it - this article being a great example of it. Publishing software on the Web is easy: Most of the platforms are open source, and hosting is available. In other words, you don't need to buy a lot of hardware to begin with, and in many countries run the material from Costa Rica due to overt censorship and regulation. At least, at this point.

Censorship however is creeping in. China is notorious for it's tight content filtering and wiretapping, but Western countries aren't too far behind. The Patriot Act provided the US government with powers of warrantless wiretapping on the guise of terrorism, and soon similar legistlation was established in the UK, Germany, France and Italy, as well as in the form of a directive by the European Commission. Sweden has passed a secret wiretapping law, and telecom operators such as TeliaSonera, have to comply with the government to have all data within their networks recorded by the army intelligence bureau. This bureau then will share this data with other Western intelligence agencies, a common practice already across Europe, Middle-East and the United States.



Content filtering started from CP - Child Pornography, moved on to completely scholarly instructions for manufacturing weapons, explosives and stuff, and then critisizing Israel or the War on Terror was made illegal outside Germany. Then critisizing corporations such as British Petroleum ( here, here ), or Monsanto ( here ), or Nokia, had become borderline criminal. Publishing photographs of your own children playing ( here, here, here, here ) had long been a crime in Britain while the public servants go rampant on abusing children ( here, here, here, here, here ), and nowadays my dearest hobby - taking photos of "no photos" signs has been made a crime. It's dull. It's boring. It lacks imagination. The State is increasingly treating it's highest commander the people, like a wicked nanny treats children she doesn't really care about because if the heir of the house is dead, she's the next in line.

There's something profoundly wrong with this world of ours. I think we've been lied to. Big time.

What would be a civilization without free speech? would it's culture thrive into new heights if the artist had to constantly watch his back? or would we silently wither into normality? Art is a powerful way to express, in modern times especially cinema, and in the postmodern times popular media over the computer. But modernism was created in a rush on the top of the wave of the industrial revolution. By the 1920's it was all done. Picasso, Dali, Kahlo, you name it. Since then the mainstream of culture has been in a steady decline worldwide, accepting the norm of modernism, replacing tradition with it without asking questions, without creating anything new. Modern technology. Modern science. Modern medicine. It's a cultural paradigm, a language, a vision, an assumption. Everything is an assumption, even the Official Truth.



There was a bit of controversy lately about a Danish cartoonist publishing pictures of Mohammad the prophet in a newspaper. According to his critics, Islam bans pictures of God, prophet, or people. Therefore people confessing to other religions should also adhere to these restrictions. That's a bit rude. And incorrect. Only some branches of SUNNI islam have the ban of pictures of prophet Mohammad in place, and the Shiites, Sufis and Druzians happily depict prophet Mohammad in pictures, even in the pages of Quran. Most Western governments however, sued journalists over republishing the controversial pictures because they were slandering. At the same time however it's totally OK according to the same governments to slander Jesus Christ. Modernist hypocrisy at it's most obvious. I'd laugh at it if it was just a TV show.



I could go on ranting further about our global impotent lack of creativity and culture, but the day is so bright I'd better stop. Culture is your thoughts is your mind is the programs inside your mind is how you think, is the assumption we are not all alike and it's better be like that!

Time for some MANGOES! Goodbye beer, I really don't miss you!



Then it's time for some ingokho and kamatoore and editing some code!

ZeroHolic, Day 3.

Day 3.

A hot morning. I woke up at 5 AM to the soft rays of sun gently toasting my cheeks. My plans and visions for the past 10 years split my mind in threads - thousands of sparkling strings of pure thought opening from a knot solidified with self-inflicted stasis, petrified with inaction, bound with liquor. Oh, I've had great ideas since i went to college and before, and many people indeed have revered them - as ideas. Some of the ideas and projects i've had during the last ten years are still very much potential, you can't say that good ideas become obsolete. But every single one of my inventions has become but a dream because i've bound myself unable to turn them into reality.





Because i got drunk at the defining moment. I could even say i've lost a lot of money because of alcohol. A lot of time has gone to waste. I realize that the only way to guarantee a real future for me, my family and my peers is to "change the tape in the recorder".

I'm an addict. But now is the time to cut that finger off which leads me to sin.

I hereby pledge:

I will set up this blog, and from today onwards, become a ZeroHolic. A ZeroHolic is addicted to health, fitness and enlightenment. He will pursue becoming a greater person, a greater sportsman, and a greater mind. All destructive and childish ways are useless to him, and he shall avoid them like the Cholera.

A ZeroHolic shall NOT:

-Drink a single drop of alcohol, in any form, for alcohol leads to destruction of dreams and loss of force.

-Smoke or enjoy tobacco in any form, be it cigarettes, cigars, snus, pipe, peacepipe or anything containing tobacco or tobacco products.

-Enjoy coffee beverages. Coffee is the mother of all addiction. Think of a bright day like today, the cobalt blue sky without a cloud inviting you to breathe the fresh air outside, and being unable to start without that cup of hot, bitter, brown juice.

A ZeroHolic SHALL:

-Lead an active life of physical fitness, committing a form of exercise each morning, either in form of hatha yoga, jogging, stretching or otherwise. A ZeroHolic will actively engage in fun physical activities and encourage his peers and his family to do so as they will.

-Lead a healthy diet, of natural, balanced foods, building and maintaining the entire body. Focus on nutrients, detox, immunity, and performance.

-Lead a constructive spiritual life. Yoga, meditation, religious practice, studies of the Scriptures, self-analysis, being aware, and making conscious choices, are all of utmost importance.

Now, friends. I've made a calendar of 120 days I should keep these ways. I need your support. What should I do if I'm able to keep my word? and what should I do if I screw up?

I know, this is going to be something.