received this talk in person at CIIS a number of months ago. Briefly, Maté understands addiction as a biopsychosocial phenomenon. Our current medical model misdiagnosis disease because it fails to honor two essencial connections: 1) the connection of the mind and body and 2) the connection between the individual and the environment or society/culture. According to Maté the current medical model displays a “complete poverty of understanding,” resulting in the (mis) diagnosis of anti-psychotics drugs to over a half million US children. Now the US is witnessing the first great chemical experiment on our children. Congratulations America! And if that was not enough… the nature of capitalism systematically prevents healthy parenting.

Listen here:               http://www.kpfa.org/archive/id/75996

FIND ICONS @ http://findicons.com/

Welcome to the Desert of the Real:

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“When I dare to be powerful -to use my strength in the service of my vision- then it becomes less and less important whether I am afraid.” 

“When we speak we are afraid our words will not be heard or welcomed. But when we are silent, we are still afraid. So it is better to speak.”

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San Francisco – ‘the white castle’; a beacon of life for white, liberal, vegans; the climate: good; the people: healthy; the knowledge: refined; the wealth: affluent; the food: organic; the better: california.

At the corner of Gilman and sixth – here I am – coffee, wifi, solid progressive dub-step… I am good. Maybe I am better.

Often though… often… I am Triggered! Fucking Triggered… I struggle with this place, these people, their teeth – perfect smiles a reflection of their privileged livilihoods. How should places like Berekeley exist? In the city it is worse. I’ll travel to Noe Valley just to experience the emotional complex of paradox: one moment bliss/peace – the next resentment and anger. I bind myself between worlds. I like it. I am not interested in ‘one’ world. (‘Mono-theism’ met the complexity of conscious evolution many years ago in my psyche.) The reasons for my experience of bliss and peace are clear. Go to Noe Valley and tap in… it’s all there: presine wife’s, beautiful accomplished men, the babies well adorned, the sun shines, the humidity, perfect… old men chat on the side walk, dogs – well groomed. Isn’t the coffee better there anyway? The curious moments are the waves of resenment and anger. I experience the peace of Noe Valley as part of a social asymmetrical relation of access mediated across dimensions of race, class, gender, sex, religion, education, nation, genetics – especially race and class. I have spent time thinking my paradox – living my way through its multilayered expressions.

The problem as I see it: I have spent too much time with poor folk in the Tenderloin District of SF. I have spent to much time learning the why of hippies in the Haight. More specifically: I have conditioned my life to traverse as many experiences of deep resonant social conflict as possible. In my search for zones of reconciliation across worlds divided by race and class, I have assumed multiple identities that generally reject one another – or judge one another.

This is all I can say at this point.

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There is no ‘side’. Their are contending incarnate personalities, groupings of beings striving to be heard beyond the parameters of scripted discourse. To live beyond death… An inescapable transition of consciousness is upon us…

We bare witness to the fragility of authority, an exposure of light and erasure of constituted history…

Examples of contested expression wave across the human world and land in Oakland – a city bound in counter-cultural livelihoods, exiled from the white, wealth of San Francisco, it survives with the memory of rioted violence; it’s connection to the center of the world is both tunnel and bridge, flowing above and below the bay waters…

A concrescence of opportunity, of time and resource – planetary solidarity. We have no clue…

“So now instead of pledge, we pray.”

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The following letter is candid, vulnerable, resonant and implicated. Simply put: brilliant. It is brilliant because it is human. It confesses a relationship to authority, labor, duty, city, citizenship that blurs the lines of contestation and power. The Oakland Police are the 99%. Check it:

http://www.opoa.org/uncategorized/an-open-letter-to-the-citizens-of-oakland-from-the-oakland-police-officers%E2%80%99-association/

AN OPEN LETTER TO THE CITIZENS OF OAKLAND FROM THE OAKLAND POLICE OFFICERS’ ASSOCIATION

1 November 2011 – Oakland, Ca.

We represent the 645 police officers who work hard every day to protect the citizens of Oakland. We, too, are the 99% fighting for better working conditions, fair treatment and the ability to provide a living for our children and families. We are severely understaffed with many City beats remaining unprotected by police during the day and evening hours.

As your police officers, we are confused.

On Tuesday, October 25th, we were ordered by Mayor Quan to clear out the encampments at Frank Ogawa Plaza and to keep protesters out of the Plaza. We performed the job that the Mayor’s Administration asked us to do, being fully aware that past protests in Oakland have resulted in rioting, violence and destruction of property.

Then, on Wednesday, October 26th, the Mayor allowed protesters back in – to camp out at the very place they were evacuated from the day before.

To add to the confusion, the Administration issued a memo on Friday, October 28th to all City workers in support of the “Stop Work” strike scheduled for Wednesday, giving all employees, except for police officers, permission to take the day off.

That’s hundreds of City workers encouraged to take off work to participate in the protest against “the establishment.” But aren’t the Mayor and her Administration part of the establishment they are paying City employees to protest? Is it the City’s intention to have City employees on both sides of a skirmish line?

It is all very confusing to us.

Meanwhile, a message has been sent to all police officers: Everyone, including those who have the day off, must show up for work on Wednesday. This is also being paid for by Oakland taxpayers. Last week’s events alone cost Oakland taxpayers over $1 million.

The Mayor and her Administration are beefing up police presence for Wednesday’s work strike they are encouraging and even “staffing,” spending hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars for additional police presence – at a time when the Mayor is also asking Oakland residents to vote on an $80 parcel tax to bail out the City’s failing finances.

All of these mixed messages are confusing.

We love Oakland and just want to do our jobs to protect Oakland residents. We respectfully ask the citizens of Oakland to join us in demanding that our City officials, including Mayor Quan, make sound decisions and take responsibility for these decisions. Oakland is struggling – we need real leaders NOW who will step up and lead – not send mixed messages. Thank you for listening.

I remember watching Juan Enriquez’s Ted (Technology, Entertainment, Design) Talk a couple years ago. Even in 2007, this Ted talk is years ahead of everyone else:

 In the most current issue of Popular Science, Juan Enriquez’s article, The Glory of BIG DATA, discusses the ‘leap’ experienced within the realm of data. “In 2010 we played, swam, wallowed, and drowned in 1.2 zettabytes of the stuff, and in 2011 the volume is predicted to continue along its exponential growth curve to 1.8 zettabytes. (A zettabyte is a trillion gigabytes; that’s a 1 with 21 zeros trailing behind it.)” 

I remember reading Carl Sagan’s book, Billions and Billions. I was astonished by the vast proportions of perspectives available. Now “billions and billions” surrenders to “zettabytes”? Awesome? Google is booming: “The company has already gathered enough data–some 500 billion words from more than five million books–to plausibly claim the emergence of a new science, culturomics. Eventually the coinage, evolution and decline of every word and phrase could be traced across centuries… (Google’s) effort is to create as complete a census as possible of the published word since 1500.”  

Enriquez is clear and insistent: The massive amounts of digital data is being integrated with biology, “All digital data can be coded into life-forms, and all life-forms can be coded as digital data.” To think and act ecologically, the industrial practice of using brute force to extract concentrated sun-light from coal and oil must yield to processes of bio-power and biomimicry. In the present ecolution, energy is grown from synthetic life-forms and data is stored, “in the gene code of a few bacteria.” 

God Bless the Integral Age!  

hahaaaha!