OneMind

I was reminded today of this great quotation by the musicolosopher Jimi Hendrix:

When the power of love overcomes the love of power, the world will know peace.

One of my heroes on peace:

I am not only a pacifist but a militant pacifist. I am willing to fight for peace. Nothing will end war unless the people themselves refuse to go to war.

Seems strange to me and I’m not sure fighting is the way to get peace, but it’s nice to remind myself that smarter men than I have believed peace to be crucial.

It seems like every day or so I get an email from someone touting the latest and greatest Internet marketing opportunity of the century. Every one is crammed with secrets never before known to mankind. Every one is so simple you can do it even if you’re not a salesperson and have no interest in selling. Every one these days seems to be coupled with a greater cause of some sort.

And every one of them makes the same stupid mistake and loses, I’d guess, a huge percentage of people who might be willing to listen to the sales pitch but who aren’t willing to divulge their identity for the “privilege” of doing so.

It happened again today. A colleague of a good friend used his name to get me to read an email about this “opportunity.” I read his email and was mildly intrigued, so I clicked on his link. The page I went to said, “We’ll tell you all you want to know about this opportunity on the next page.” To get to that page, though, I had to be willing to part with my email address and my phone number.

Right. I’m going to give someone I’ve never met and never done business with my contact info so they can spam and telemarket me to death for the rest of my life without my being able to do anything because they can prove a business connection between us.

Needless to say, I closed that window, deleted the email and now not only will I never respond to email from this individual again, I’m also telling my friend what happened when he shared my email address with this numbskull.

You want my email address? Give me something of value to earn it. You want my phone number? The price of infopoker just went up.

Grab a clue, folks. Why do you think your MLM programs are in the crapper? Why do you suppose most of the people who sign up for your program turn out to be losers and whiners? Because you’re cutting out the potentially serious associates and colleagues at the front door, that’s why.

The Huffington Post is one of my favorite sites. Founder and host Ariana Huffington, a frequent guest on my favorite news show, MSNBC’s “Countdown With Keith Olbermann,” is witty and insightful most of the time.

This piece is particularly useful. In it, award-winning ad exec Rich Silverstein put together a poster-ad campaign for the Democrats that is hard-hitting, sound-bite-like and right on the money. There are three posters, each containing only NetCloud-like lists of names, slogans and events that have characterized the current Republican Reign of Error and Terror. Check ‘em out. HuffPost promises to publish full-sized versions of potentially edited copy in the near future.

This is the kind of stuff the Democrats need to do a lot more of in my view. I’ve been saying for years that the Democrats are too soft on the Republicans.

Go get ‘em, Ariana!

For all I know, I’m the last guy on Planet Earth to find out about this site, but I just read about it today in Mark Hurst’s newsletter, “Good Expperience” and I just had to share.

At Freerice.com, you answer multiple-choice vocabulary questions. For each right answer, you are responsible for donating 10 grains of rice to starving people in the world. Each time you get a word right, you pile up 10 grains and get a harder word. If you get a word wrong, you don’t add any grains of rice but you get an easier word next time.

I spent about 6 minutes there today, ultimately donating 300 grains of rice. And I learned a few new words in the process.

Check it out! Particularly relevant on Thanksgiving Day in the U.S.

Check out this delightful, uplifting prophetic video based on the teachings of Willy Whitefeather. It’s a little over 8 minutes long and is a wonderful juxtaposition of apparent reality and the hope of peace that lies within each of us.

It happens that this video is one of dozens in what I hope will be a rapidly growing collection of insightful, inspirational and beautifully produced short films at The Culture Collective.

It seems to me that specialized, focused video sites and communities like this one may emerge as very important social touchpoints in coming months and years. YouTube, Joost, Miro, Google Videos, and others are large-scale, general purpose video sites but finding something really worthwhile among the thousands and thousands of videos posted there is difficult. The Culture Collective points the way to a new way of “doing video community.” I think it has enormous potential.

Google has opened its maps to user editing, a move I view with mixed emotions.

On the one hand, I have occasionally found flaws in Google’s driving directions (though fewer than in other services I’ve used). Not all of them could be fixed by the kind of edit Google is allowing users to make now.

On the other hand, I can see unscrupulous users finding ways to take advantage of the ability to relocate a destination in such a way as to inconvenience or harm users and competitors. For example, if you own a liquor store and you have a nearby competitor, you could easily shift the Google Maps location of the other store and thus cause potential customers to be unable to find it. User-edited locations are clearly marked and the original location is preserved and available with a single click, but I suspect most users will assume the edit improved the accuracy of the map and use it without a second thought.

Wikipedia is of course the prototypical example of the dangers of providing user-editable content. Although I still use it as a resource, I never take it as the final word on a subject because uninformed and malicious reader-editors have frequently created erroneous entries. Some article topics on Wikipedia have become all but useless as “editors” with differing viewpoints edit and re-edit one anothers’ postings.

While I have always been a huge proponent of user-contributed content, it is probably necessary and important for information sources who wish to be viewed as somewhat authoritative to have a layer of control and quality assurance that Wikipedia essentially eschews.

Hopefully, editable Google maps (wikimaps? mapkis?) won’t suffer from some of the problems that have dogged Wikipedia in recent months.

I cannot remember a single day in which every single NFL game was such a klinker as we have on tap tomorrow for Thanksgiving. I bet NFL TV ratings will plummet from their usual lofty Turkey Day heights.

While there’s likely to be at least one upset, on paper these games are all between prohibitive favorites and duds.

Bet the NFL scheduler wishes he had a do-over.

I am blessed by having a lot of great friends in this world. One of my favorite people is Clay Cotton, a lovable, warm, intelligent, bright human being whose career as a giant of boogie-woogie was cut short by multiple sclerosis (MS).

Clay can no longer play piano, though he manages to find his way around computers well enough to be revered as one of the smartest Internet marketing guys on the planet.

You’ll be doing yourself, me and Clay a big favor if you’ll listen to this movie in which he plays one of his all-time-great original hits, “Cotton Balls” and then go buy his CD, “Rough Stuff” for yourself and several of your friends for Christmas.

Check out his other albums, too: Speechless and Do You Know What it Means…?. The guy’s amazing.

Just listen to this man…er…boogie!

My local newspaper, the Monterey County Herald, today published an editorial (free registration may be required) as well as a column by sports writer John Devine both of them escalating the attack on Barry Bonds. The recently indicted San Francisco Giants slugger was charged by a federal grand jury with four counts of perjury and one count of obstruction stemming from an investigation into steroid use in professional sports.

Since the paper’s reaction provided such a cogent example of the kind of media frenzy that often attaches to indictments of famous people, I felt it appropriate to dash off a quick letter to the editor. I’m sharing its contents here with you.

The Herald editorial writers and sports columnist John Devine should be ashamed of themselves. Following the herd mentality of a mass media frenzy that is unconcerned with the operation of the legal establishment, you rail against Barry Bonds over his indictment on perjury and obstruction charges, never pausing to explain that an indictment is not a conviction. Indeed, your sister paper, the San Jose Mercury-News, reported the same day that about 25% of people indicted who go to trial on perjury charges win acquittal.

There’s an old saw in the legal business that a grand jury will indict a ham sandwich if asked. The whole grand jury process is a joke. It’s run by the prosecution, the accused has no right to counsel and is never given an opportunity to present his or her side of the case. The grand jury hears only what the prosecutor wants it to hear and then votes. The surprise would have been if a grand jury, after four years of endless drumbeating, didn’t indict Bonds. Mr. Devine’s ridiculous allegation that, “The Feds don’t indict unless they have a case” is so naive and ill-informed as to qualify as a lie in its own right.

I’m not saying Bonds is innocent. But he’s certainly entitled to the same presumption of innocence that attaches to defendants who have been indicted other ways. You and your presumptuous sports columnist would do your readers a service by moderating your tone and tempering your language to suit the actual circumstances of a possibly trumped-up set of charges rather than sounding like he’s been convicted and should therefore suffer some consequences.

In particular, I take great offense at Devine saying to sports fans, “He lied to you. And maybe you don’t care. You should if you have any morals or dignity.” Mr. Devine, I have plenty of morals and dignity and I’m a life-long sports fan and former sportswriter. It is you, sir, who should draw the ire of true sports fans who are sufficiently awake to know that a grand jury indictment does not end the story regardless of your obviously earnest desire that it should end this man’s career.

The legal system is complex. Understanding it takes intelligence, effort and will. That’s no excuse for the media to continually mis-characterize grand jury indictments as convictions.