I just wrote to my Senators

This is what I sent to Amy Klobuchar:

Dear Senator,

I am writing because I am very concerned about the upcoming vote on the FISA legislation. I am urging you to support Senator Feingold in his defense of the 4th amendment. Please take a principled stand to defend the constitution and prevent another erosion of rights that are clearly labeled as inalienable in the constitution. This is not just about the immunity for telecoms, which is a slap in the face to every law-abiding citizen, but this is about defending the constitution itself.

Please do not be swayed by the fear-mongering going on. Most Americans are not fooled by the rhetoric. Please take a principled stand and make me proud to call you my Senator.

With regards

This is what I sent to Norm Coleman:

Dear Senator,

I am writing because I am very concerned about the upcoming vote on the FISA legislation. I am urging you to support Senator Specter in his defense of the 4th amendment. Please take a principled stand to defend the constitution and prevent another erosion of rights that are clearly labeled as inalienable in the constitution. This is not just about the immunity for telecoms, which is a slap in the face to every law-abiding citizen, but this is about defending the constitution itself.

Please do not be a part of the failed fear-mongering campaign that has already hurt the party enough. Most Americans are not fooled by the rhetoric anymore. Please take a principled stand and make me proud to call you my Senator. You will easily beat Al Franken if you stand up for our freedoms.

With regards

The 4 Day Win

Lisa and I have started reading The 4 Day Win by Martha Beck. The book has a different twist on dieting that I enjoy. Martha points out that we eat as a way to reward ourselves, so the key to weight-loss is finding other ways to reward ourselves. Martha has the reader set easy goals and a reward for accomplishing that goal on the first day, with a bigger reward for completing 4 days. This is to increase our ability to set and meet goals, and to learn to reward ourselves with rewards other than food. This helps us find new ways to meet our comfort needs without snacking.

This is how Martha explains the method:

"Adult development theorists know that significant change requires an "early win," evidence that our efforts are yielding success. It takes about four days of virtuous living to create a little weight loss. That also happens to be the time required to get used to eating less. In other words, if you can get past day three of a fitness regimen, things improve. I began to think about weight loss as a series of four-day wins.

Once you've started healing your brain with gentle, kind self-observation, you can lose weight by "sneaking up" your exercise and "sneaking down" your food intake in four-day increments. Sneaking is another way to prevent famine responses. If you're totally sedentary and eat 2,500 calories a day, don't instantly go to 1,200 calories and hours of aerobics—your weight loss will be sudden and violent, but also fleeting. Try dropping your intake by 100 to 300 calories and taking 500 more steps each day for four days. Then cut out another 100 to 300 calories, and add another 500 steps. Sustain for four days. Repeat until you see a weight loss. It will feel strangely easy to stay the course."

Lisa set a goal to drink more water, and I set a goal of eating a serving of fruit every day. Lisa's first day reward is new lipstick, and mine is an hour of computer games. Lisa's four day reward is a massage, and mine is an hour in a flotation (sensory deprivation) tank.

Frustrated with Obama

I know I made a goal to avoid national politics, but I have been unable. It has become increasingly difficult to let it go, and I think the biggest reason is that the issues seem incredibly important. The issue that has my attention right now is the capitulation by Democrats to the lawlessness of the Neoconservatives. What makes this episode especially painful is the way that Obama has decided to support the legislation that makes the 4th amendment all but a joke, and rewards those that ignored it in the past with immunity. While Obama has promised to oppose the immunity for telecommunications companies, it is doubtful that, at this stage, that provision can be stripped. When we needed principled leadership (while the bill was up for consideration in the House), Obama was nowhere to be found. I'm sure some Obama supporters will excuse him for this because he is not a member of the house, and that he will "try" to do something in the Senate, but what he demonstrated last Friday was a complete lack of leadership in the face of a full-out attack on our liberties.

Here is how Glenn Greenwald explains the issue:

In the past 24 hours, specifically beginning with the moment Barack Obama announced that he now supports the Cheney/Rockefeller/Hoyer House bill, there have magically arisen -- in places where one would never have expected to find them -- all sorts of claims about why this FISA "compromise" isn't really so bad after all. People who spent the week railing against Steny Hoyer as an evil, craven enabler of the Bush administration -- or who spent the last several months identically railing against Jay Rockefeller -- suddenly changed their minds completely when Barack Obama announced that he would do the same thing as they did. What had been a vicious assault on our Constitution, and corrupt complicity to conceal Bush lawbreaking, magically and instantaneously transformed into a perfectly understandable position, even a shrewd and commendable decision, that we should not only accept, but be grateful for as undertaken by Obama for our Own Good.

Accompanying those claims are a whole array of factually false statements about the bill, deployed in service of defending Obama's indefensible -- and deeply unprincipled -- support for this "compromise." Numerous individuals stepped forward to assure us that there was only one small bad part of this bill -- the part which immunizes lawbreaking telecoms -- and since Obama says that he opposes that part, there is no basis for criticizing him for what he did. Besides, even if Obama decided to support an imperfect bill, it's our duty to refrain from voicing any criticism of him, because the Only Thing That Matters is that Barack Obama be put in the Oval Office, and we must do anything and everything -- including remain silent when he embraces a full-scale assault on the Fourth Amendment and the rule of law -- because every goal is now subordinate to electing Barack Obama our new Leader.

It is absolutely false that the only unconstitutional and destructive provision of this "compromise" bill is the telecom amnesty part. It's true that most people working to defeat the Cheney/Rockefeller bill viewed opposition to telecom amnesty as the most politically potent way to defeat the bill, but the bill's expansion of warrantless eavesdropping powers vested in the President, and its evisceration of safeguards against abuses of those powers, is at least as long-lasting and destructive as the telecom amnesty provisions. The bill legalizes many of the warrantless eavesdropping activities George Bush secretly and illegally ordered in 2001. Those warrantless eavesdropping powers violate core Fourth Amendment protections. And Barack Obama now supports all of it, and will vote it into law. Those are just facts.

The ACLU specifically identifies the ways in which this bill destroys meaningful limits on the President's power to spy on our international calls and emails. Sen. Russ Feingold condemned the bill on the ground that it "fails to protect the privacy of law-abiding Americans at home" because "the government can still sweep up and keep the international communications of innocent Americans in the U.S. with no connection to suspected terrorists, with very few safeguards to protect against abuse of this power." Rep. Rush Holt -- who was actually denied time to speak by bill-supporter Silvestre Reyes only to be given time by bill-opponent John Conyers -- condemned the bill because it vests the power to decide who are the "bad guys" in the very people who do the spying.

This bill doesn't legalize every part of Bush's illegal warrantless eavesdropping program but it takes a large step beyond FISA towards what Bush did. There was absolutely no reason to destroy the FISA framework, which is already an extraordinarily pro-Executive instrument that vests vast eavesdropping powers in the President, in order to empower the President to spy on large parts of our international communications with no warrants at all. This was all done by invoking the scary spectre of Terrorism -- "you must give up your privacy and constitutional rights to us if you want us to keep you safe" -- and it is Obama's willingness to embrace that rancid framework, the defining mindset of the Bush years, that is most deserving of intense criticism here.

The Tao

While I have studied Taoism on and off for a couple years, I have recently renewed my interest in studying the philosophy. I heard Dr. Wayne Dyer on XM last week, and he was talking about his latest book Change Your Thoughts, Change your Life - Living the Wisdom of the Tao. Dr. Dyer spent an entire year focused on the Tao, and in that time he studied the life of Lao Tzu and read several translations of the Tao Te Ching. The book examines each of the 81 verses of the Tao, and puts each of them in a context that fits modern culture after explaining the meaning. I recommend the book to everyone.

Last night Lisa and I listened to the first five chapters of the audio version together. It was a very spiritual experience. I look forward to reading more.

All politics are local

I have noticed that I am spending far too much time reading sites like reddit and digg. I am fascinated by politics at the national and global level, and this has done two things. It has opened me up to the reality that big governments are very corrupt, and that the bigger and more powerful a government is, the harder it is to change. This causes me to flip between righteous indignation and impotent apathy.

Once I realized that I was caught in a catch-22 (both energized and disempowered by information), I realized that this is exactly the reason that we should focus our energy on what is happening in our own sphere, and do our best to stay out of partisan politics at the impersonal level. That doesn't mean I am giving up on important issues, but it does mean that I will focus on those issues at the personal level. This seems to make an end-run around the one thing that gets in the way of attempts to better society: I am not forcing my beliefs on others. I am merely behaving in a way that I feel others should behave. Instead of forcing a potential improvement on others, I will embrace the change myself, and allow my example (positive or negative) to speak for itself.

In order to improve in this area, I am going to set a few goals.

1. Stop viewing partisan web sites. This includes most news sites, and news aggregators like digg and reddit. Instead of wasting my time on those sites, I will spend the time I am online on sites that have inspiring stories and good self-help articles.

2. Get involved in learning more about friends and family, and helping them with whatever they need. See The Best Kind of Happiness

3. Expand my community by meetings others that act locally. I need to find a local non-profit, or some other existing community of like-minded people.

I am sure that I will think of more. For now those goals should be enough to get me started.

The best kind of happiness

A good friend asked me to give my philosophy in a nut shell. This seemed difficult at first. I have been influenced by many schools of thought, and some of them can be described in manners that would make them seem in opposition. I am influenced by Sufi Islam, Taoism, Christianity (the teachings of Yeshua), Judaism, Mormonism, Buddhism, Pantheism, and dozens of concepts embraced by modern spiritualists/teachers.

After a couple minutes I was able to agree to two basic concepts: (1) our experience is completely up to us, and (2) the best happiness we can experience comes from the happiness we share with those we love. This post is about (2).

Today I found an excellent post on The Huffington Post. While I find myself sharing less and less of my viewpoint with most of that site's bloggers, I have to admit that I enjoy some of the lifestyle articles that are either cross-posted or written for the site. Today's interesting article is called To Hell With Random Acts of Kindness.

It talks about why we should be actively kind to those we care about. We better our own lives when we better the lives of those around us. Literally, we are loving our neighbors.

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(I have reproduced the article below)

To Hell With Random Acts of Kindness

By Karen Salmansohn

Have I got your attention?

What I mean by the above: Try conscious acts of kindness with the people you already know and love!

One of the top secrets of happiness: developing heartfelt, loving, deep connections!

Here are the researched facts from Gallup:

* If you feel close to other people, you are four times as likely to feel good about yourself and life.

* People who claim to have five or more true friends with whom they can discuss important problems are 60% more likely to say that they are "very happy."

* People with a best-friend at work are seven times more likely to be engaged in their work! However, unfortunately, only 30% of employees report having a best friend at work!

* People with at least three close friends at work were 46% more likely to be extremely satisfied with their job -- and 88% more likely to be satisfied with their lives!

What's interesting about these career statistics is that many companies actually discourage workplace camaraderie. In fact, nearly one-third of the 80,000 managers and leaders interviewed by Gallup agreed with the statement that "familiarity breeds contempt."

But according to Gallup researcher, Tom Rath, these foolish companies who feel this way are only harming themselves.

"When we asked people if they would rather have a best friend at work or a 10% pay raise, having a friend clearly won," says Rath. "Friendships are among the most fundamental of human needs."

Your assignment:

Today decide to do more conscious acts of kindness for the important people in your life: your paramour, platonic buddies, colleagues, assorted and sordid family members. Remember what you love about each individual, then call them or write them to share your admiration directly. Better yet, invite them out to a dinner of their favorite food group. When sharing a conversation, really share it. Avoid conversation interruptus. Let people finish their thoughts. In fact, from here-on-in decide you're going to listen 50% more. Truly listening is one of the best ways to spoil someone you care about. Fran Leibowitz joked, "The opposite of talking isn't listening. It's waiting." Prove Fran wrong.