Monthly Archive for July, 2006

Nuclear energy?

Published on 31 July, 2006 in Science and technology and Social development. 0 Comments

Australia is sitting on a vast uranium mine. It is almost inevitable that we will mine uranium, much of which will be shipped straight to China and India to feed what will soon be their near inexhaustable demands. The question is what that means to us and what we should do about it… for example:

  • Should we have a nuclear programme?
    That we might supply uranium to other nations does not necessarily mean that we should use nuclear reactors for widespread power generation ourselves.
  • How can we manage this resource?
    Far more significantly in my view, with a similar gravitas in uranium as Saudi Arabia currently enjoys in oil, Australia could actually affect a structural shift in the way that uranium is used.

    What if, rather than ‘selling’ uranium, we leased it to users so that we then handled its safe disposal – mine, manufacture, sell and monitor it for its lifetime. While the ‘not in my backyard’ response comes quickly to mind, what if we could actually help make the world the way that it needs to be?

It is almost inevitable that Australia’s uranium will be converted into energy. We need to stop crying about it and move on… The only real question is how we can use that reality to best effect: For our benefit and for the benefit of the world.

Of course, if you want some real nuclear power, The Art of Happiness is my favourite place to start… here are a few reminders of the Dalai Lama’s Instructions for Life

Dangers of political parties

Published on 31 July, 2006 in Lifestyle and Social development. 0 Comments

I’ve been openly concerned about the nature of our political system for quite some time. While I’ve been disciplined in my avoidance of branch-level politics, I was a candidate at the last federal election, and I have seen more than enough mess to know what a dangerous game it can be. It hasn’t helped that I’ve dated the odd branch president and even the sister of a state president.

I was only ever involved in politics as a way to make a positive impact upon the world. To me, service should be the motivation – not the power over others. It is ironic that the very same objectivist capitalists that tend to be attracted to the right will then become the ‘ultimate secondhanders’ by pursuing power over others.

Perhaps we all strive to gain power to make up for our own inadequacies. Yet in doing so, in striving to ‘have’ so much, we just fall into another form of the idolotry that is also manifested in the pervasive and unsustainable affluenza that we face.

We all live strategically. We all pursue a purpose, working towards an objective. We aren’t always conscious of that objective, nor aware of the ultimate outcomes and ramifications inherent. Edward de Bono might encourage us to use a C&S (Consequences and Sequals) mental operation to gain insight as to where we’re headed…

What if you could take a minute… just a minute… and really think about where you’re headed. And, when you can envision that destination, what if you could ask yourself whether you really want to go there?

Sure, it’s hard to say what you really want… but surely you can see what you don’t want.

What’s the latest?

Published on 30 July, 2006 in Business and High performance. 0 Comments

I’ve loved Tom Peter’s work for a long time. I regularly check out his very cool blog – in my opinion, it’s filled with some of the best information around! A while back, I noticed that he’d launched a news wire service, but it was only just now that I really had a look at some of the information that he put on it… it’s amazing how much stuff is going on that we never really even notice!

  • One of the ones that stood out to me was about the Boston underground highway system. You can find the full article here, highlighting the dangers inherent in allowing an emasculated public service to abdicate its responsibility to oversee projects undertaken by the private sector. We can see the dangers in Sydney’s cross-city tunnel; while I love Lord Mayor Campbell Newman’s audacity and boldness, we also need to ensure that Brisbane doesn’t fall into the same mistakes. While I believe strongly in the involvement of the private sector, it is almost as irresponsible to throw money at a project through blank cheque style loose contracts (as in Sydney) as it is to undermine (no pun intended) public safety by inadequate supervision and cost-cutting.
  • Another one is about my old favourite topic, memory. Of course, you can see a few of my ideas at www.TheGeniusProject.com, but this story focuses upon some findings from a UCLA study showing that declarative learning is impaired by distraction. That means that if you’re trying to learn something that you can recall and use later, you need to focus. But if you’re training something to be habitual, you might even be better off distracting yourself while you’re learning. One of the other things about distracting yourself while you’re learning something is that you probably won’t find yourself able to remember how you learn what you learn – it may even seem ‘intuitive’ or like you ‘just know’ something, rather than being aware of how you learnt it. The findings were explained by looking at how the region of the brain involved with declarative learning (the medial temporal lobe) is also active during single-task learning, while the region of the brain involved with habit learning (the striatum) is more active during dual-task (or distracted) learning activity.

Then again, perhaps it’s just my head in the sand…

Online dating and relationship sites?

Published on 30 July, 2006 in relationships. 0 Comments

About a year ago, I signed up to faceparty.com. Belinda wanted it so that she could have her fictional (or fantasy?) bisexual and lesbian profiles send me kinky messages… it was fun for a while :)

Somewhere along the line, somebody decided that they’d actually contact this profile, and a week ago, I ended up with a message in my inbox… a message from a real (or at least real-looking) person. And if things couldn’t get any weirder, another profile on another site, a site that I didn’t even know existed, generated a message this week too!

I don’t know what’s in the air at the moment, but it seems that it is the time for endings and beginnings. It’s almost like people are clearing the past relationships and preparing for the coming spring.

The Game, Power and War

Published on 24 July, 2006 in relationships. 0 Comments

Amazingly, The Game has finally reached a degree of popularity. After reading it almost a year ago – I noted some of my early impressions back in November last year, much to the consternation of Belinda’s father – some of my friends have started talking about this interesting work of semi-fiction.

I thought that it was worth noting in this light the work of Robert Greene. If you haven’t come across his 48 Laws of Power or Art of Seduction, and you have an interest in the field, you will also want to know that his latest book, The 33 Strategies of War provides a similarly written modernised version of Sun Tsu’s Bing Fa and Musashi’s Five Rings, in the same way that the 48 Laws modernised Machiavelli’s The Prince. For a great start, check out his general website and blog here, which has some pretty interesting comments on the current Gulf War…

And if you really want to test how well you know the 48 Laws, you must check this out!

(By the way, after a weekend away with guys and tuxedos, I still think that you’ll look better in a shirt and suit from shirtsandsuits.com…)

Forgiveness vs Nonjudgment

Published on 14 July, 2006 in Lifestyle, Overcoming and Self-awareness. 0 Comments

The virtue of forgiveness was the topic of a heated debate that a friend had with his was-to-be mother-in-law. She argued that forgiving people and forgiving ourselves is the path to happiness and (in my words) reunion with God. While acknowledging that forgiveness is a better ‘place’ than remaining in judgment of another, that we should strive for nonjudgment as the ultimate virtue.

In my life, the only times that I have had to forgive others is when I had judged them in the first place. To judge another requires us to forget that we and they are sprung from the same stock, are partakers of the same hope and sharers of the same nature… to judge another we judge that part of ourselves that lies within them that is currently being manifested by the very thing that you condemn. We see the flaws in others most clearly when we hold them close to our heart ourselves.

Ironically, the ‘debate’ existed because she denied that we could suspend judgment! I was being told that it was impossible to not judge someone who wrongs us, and therefore forgiveness is the highest perfection to which we might aspire. To me (and this could be my narcissism), she was telling me that something that she chose to believe impossible for her was also impossible for me… instead of acknowledging and encouraging the pursuit of a higher purpose.

I find this habit worst amongst individuals who bury their ‘dark’ side rather than coming to a sense of peace and resolution through accepting and releasing that darkness, realising that the only antidote to darkness is light. Self-righteous Christians are amongst the worst.

Forgiving another requires us to judge… so it were better that we not judge in the first place.

When I met that friend’s friend earlier this week, the girl looking for love in all the wrong places, I could not judge her. While I could see where she was going and the pain that she was going through, I could only empathise with her plight, appreciating the pain that she goes through. It would be easy to make the mistake of me telling her that she is doing the ‘wrong’ thing by continuing to make her mistakes, and that she should learn from my mistakes… and there was a time when I would have tried to impose my experience on her! Yet I now know that our mistakes are our mistakes: they can’t be had by another.

I try to spend a little time each day in silence and a little time in nonjudgment… noticing and accepting that no matter how the world might appear, knowing that it is ‘perfect’ just the way it is, and being grateful that it is unfolding as it should. I’ll strive to spend days in nonjudgment.

Training and changing and loving

Published on 14 July, 2006 in Lifestyle and relationships. 0 Comments

There is a great deal of thought that goes into destroying most relationships. It takes time and energy to get close enough to another human being to actually separate at all, rather than just passing by each other.

While I continue to advocate ‘pure, passionate and perfect’ loving relationships, to my frustration and even disappointment at times, I still believe that it were better to have loved and lost…

One of the issues that often arises is about changing our partners. The ‘conventional’ wisdom is that we can’t change the people that we are with. Yet, without trying to save them, there are always things that we can do to help each other grow and expand and sometimes to let go of the things that hold us back. It can be dangerous of course to do such things… if they really do grow and change, you never quite know whether you’ll like what they become – or if they’ll like you once they have!

I know of a guy putting together “The Girlfriend Training Program” (which is really a boyfriend training program branded to be confrontational), yet when I read that the article in the NYTimes was the most read article in the last 30 days, it occurred to me that there are a lot of people who really want to do some fine tuning on their relationships.

It’s not just intimate relationships that we want and need to fine tune either. Social relationships are inevitably sources of conflict and misunderstanding; we need to learn to clearly communicate how we want and expect to be treated if we actually want to make things better.

I was speaking with a friend about their friend’s relationship. She’s a beautiful spirit, looking to give love and share love, wanting to connect deeply, intimately and profoundly. Yet her man ‘treats her mean and keeps her keen’, without ever really opening up to her or sharing a fraction of the love that she desperately craves. She is stopping herself from having the relationship that she purports to want by not communicating openly and honestly what she wants and needs – even if she does it verbally, surely that she ‘puts up’ with what she is given communicates far more powerfully that his current behaviour is acceptable.

Sometimes I wonder where the limits lie with our ‘training’ of those around us. While we can say that we can try to change the ‘little things’, how can we really tell the difference anyway. And with the majority of stress in our lives actually coming from the ‘minor’ annoyances, sometimes the little things are the big things.

Perhaps more significantly, how often do we try to change others instead of dealing with the real problem by by changing ourselves…

Great suit – want a better one?

Published on 7 July, 2006 in Business, Cool friends and ideas, High performance and Lifestyle. 0 Comments

I went to David Jones on Wednesday afternoon, anxious to compare the quality of shirts and suits available at our premium department store. I was staggered… I couldn’t believe how much better my company’s garments are!

Their ‘best’ suit was a $1195 Hugo Boss. It was a Super 100 wool, had pickstitching and was neatly finished. But it was obscenely mediocre. I’ve grown accustomed to wearing fine fabrics, bespoke tailored to my precise measurements, but I missed just how much better my company’s garments are. Their best, a grade of 100s, is at the bottom end of our range – you can have a suit that I think is as good or better than anything in the Department stores for $600 or even less.

And despite being from a German company, they were made in Turkey – we’re a 100% Australian owned company… go over and have a look if you haven’t already!

Korea and Ken

Published on 7 July, 2006 in Science and technology. 0 Comments

North Korea has test fired missiles capable of landing a nuclear warhead in Los Angeles. And when Australia protested, Kim Myong Chol said quite simply, “What are you gonna do about it?”
But what goes on the front page of the local newspaper? The State of Origin… Now I love how we won the game (Go Queenslander!!!), but nuclear war is a damned serious business! We have an aggressive and armed state that is now on our doorstop. Well, what are we going to do about it?

Former Enron Chairman, Kenneth Lay has died. Facing 165 years in jail, I feel great sympathy for his pain and sacrifice… He gave up between 20 and forty years of life for money. Admittedly it was a LOT of money. I suppose the world will give any price demanded of it.

The ego is a mask…

Published on 3 July, 2006 in Lifestyle, relationships and Self-awareness. 0 Comments

The ego is a mask that becomes a sarcophogus when you let your Self die.

How do arrogance and ego relate? A dear friend behaved in a manner towards her beloved that he would never have accepted as behaviour from himself, yet he continued to love with patience and determination. For him, his compassion and love for her allowed him to believe that whilst he would never do what she did, that her experiences meant that such behaviour was expected even if not acceptable. Was he arrogant?

Surely it is not arrogant to have unreasonable standards. But is it more arrogant to hold others accountable to those high standards, or to not hold them to those standards?

If she were to cheat on him, would it be arrogant for him to be willing to take her back knowing that an ordinary person might do the same, even if he never would?

In this sense, how can we reconcile compassion and arrogance?

Pursuing a nonjudgmental consciousness is part of almost every Great Path. Perhaps when we suspend judgment by the ego we can uphold our standards for ourselves while peacefully and compassionately seeking to understand the shortfalls of those around us. I wonder…

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