Sensationalist headline - but quite likely to happen in the event of an Asian bird flu pandemic. The contingency plan of the Australian Government involves banning mass gatherings, not a bad idea given the situation. The World Health Organisation (WHO) currently rates the probability of a worldwide bird flu pandemic at 10%.

It doesn’t matter how much medical advancement we make in treating different diseases, disease itself is unbeatable. It’s a fact of life in the material world.

What’s our contingency plan for that situation? We can do harinam, and we’ll keep personal cultivation going. We can use the time for more strategic planning, concentration (study), and resource generation. If it happens.

EXPERTS have warned a bird flu outbreak could hit Australia within a year, causing tens of thousands of deaths and, some say, a breakdown in social order.
As the US continues to counts the cost of Hurricane Katrina, Australian scientists fear a more lethal storm is brewing in the poultry farms and duck ponds of Asia, one that could spread worldwide and dwarf the fear, panic, social disruption and economic damage in New Orleans.

No, that could never happen… not here… could it?

“On global warming, I have spent an enormous amount of my time getting to understand the problem and getting to understand the solutions, and I think the Australian Government owes it to the public to tell it like it is — it is a very serious threat to Australia.”

- Australia’s Environment Minister, Ian Campbell

My personal contingency plan is to retreat to New Zealand as the coast of Australia turns to desert. I’m becoming acclimatised to living in hellish (for a lad bred in Aotearoa) tropical conditions, so I’ll be comfortable living in NZ once it becomes a tropical region.

Living in a “Mad Max - Beyond the Thunderdome”-style zone doesn’t really appeal to me, but hey, whatever the marching orders are - I’m there.

I was reading through the news today and came across this article in the Christian Science Monitor. I generally find this to be an insightful source of reporting from a mundane point of view, but this article: NASA discovers instellar ‘chocolate’ is a real shocker.

It begins by stating:

To solve the mystery of life’s origin, scientists can no longer focus solely on Earth. They must take the entire universe into account. Reason: the discovery of nitrogen-carrying aromatic hydrocarbons throughout the universe.

It then goes on to report, in a matter-of-fact tone, complete speculation. The words are all there: “This is complete speculation”, but the whole thing is reported in such a way that you are left with the impression that you are hearing about facts, rather than fantasy.

One example of this:

The finding has profound significance for the occurrence of organic life. These kinds of molecules are key ingredients in the primordial chemical soup from which scientists think organic life may have arisen.

I’m sorry, does it have profound significance, or do they think it has profound significance, or do they think it might have profound significance?

The first sentence is what sticks with you, because that’s the authoritative newspaper reporting right there, guiding you to the conclusion. The next sentence however, does not back that conclusion up.

The entire article is like that. The premises are all there, and all speculative, but they are juxtaposed with definite, concrete conclusions. It’s a mess.

In fact, you don’t even need a planet to get the organic-life game going.

says the CSM conclusively. The basis for this statement? Well it’s right there below:

“This new work shows that the early chemical steps believed to be important for the origin of life do not require a previously formed planet to occur,” the Ames announcement explains.

Speculation. No observation of life coming from inanimate matter. No reproducible lab experiments. Nothing more than speculation so far, from a scientific point of view.

The scientists themselves use terms like “may”, “believe”, “think”, but the CSM reports it with more conviction than they do. Does the CSM have a doctrinal axe to grind here?

Perhaps the article should have been entitled: “NASA discovers interstellar ‘chocolate’ - CSM discovers origin of life”

I’ve written a letter to the editor. Let’s see what they say.

OpenOffice.org (OOo) is an open source free office suite for producing word processor documents, slide presentations, spreadsheets, and now with version 2.0, databases. You get the drift.

Here are the reasons why we should be using it:

1. It has no licensing fee for its use. Many people are using an unlicensed copy of proprietary office suites, i.e: one they haven’t paid to license.
   • This is definitely illegal, and is ethically questionable. It is better to use one that we are legally licensed to use.
   • Using illegal software exposes you to the risk of having your premises raided and hefty fines imposed. Especially if you are an organization, rather than just an individual, the consequences are grave.
   • Using a legally licensed office suite that has no licensing cost rightly situates you legally and ethically, and saves you money in doing so.
2. It uses open formats for its documents
   Openoffice.org fully supports the Open Document Format (ODF) standard, recently adopted by the Massachusetts State Government as their document storage format. Your data, when saved using proprietary formats such as the .doc and .ppt formats used by Microsoft, is stored in a secret format that is not legally accessible using anything other the proprietary software that created it.
   • With proprietary formats, although you generated the documents, you are not free to open them without paying a licensing fee to use the proprietary software. You have legally ceded control of that information to the proprietary software vendor, as you cannot legally access that information without paying to use their software - forever.
   • You force anyone else with whom you might wish to share the information to either a) pay to license the proprietary software in order to access the document, or b) use an illegal copy of the proprietary software to access the information. Presently OpenOffice.org can view, edit, and save documents created in Microsoft Office. However, this functionality has been reverse-engineered and cannot be guaranteed to always be present.
3. OpenOffice.org is available on more platforms than proprietary office suites.
   OpenOffice.org is available for Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux. Microsoft Office is not available for Linux. Microsoft’s refusal to support the ODF (Open Document Format), claiming that “no customers want it” even though the State Government in Massachusetts has kicked out Microsoft Office from 80,000 machines because it doesn’t support it, and their refusal to a) provide Office for Linux, or b) allow their formats to be legally opened in Linux, are part of a strategy to limit people’s freedom of choice and maintain vendor lock-in at both the operating system and application level.

OpenOffice.org is technically equivalent to other proprietary office suites in terms of functionality for 95% of people who use it. Only very advanced users requiring highly specific functionality may find that it does not do exactly what they want. I have been using it since v.1.1 and it has done everything I need to do.

OpenOffice.org is free in terms of both cost, and in terms of free speech. I recommend that everyone download a copy and start to use it, and use the ODF formats for document interchange, rather than continuing to use proprietary office suites.

Thank you.

I’m going to Sydney on Friday afternoon for my god brother Svetadvipa’s wedding. Fly back Saturday night to start work at 8 am on Sunday morning. Woot!

I just got back from a feast cooked by my god brother Gopal Guru at the Brisbane temple. Vrajadhama claims it was “reciprocation with the devotees”, but right now it feels like it was more like a pre-emptive strike. We had something called “motzies” - two curd steaks wrapped around a slab of mozarella cheese and deep fried in batter. There was pizza to wrap around that if you were so inclined, along with two subjis, rice, salad, a coconut and pineapple drink, gulab jamuns and Jagannatha tongues.

Brutally old school, although we piked on the gulab contest. I mean I’m all about the 80’s n’all, but I don’t know how many of those I could sustain. Hehehe. Lots of jokes about it being “fully scripturally endorsed” and examination of the different preparations according to the standard of Bhagavad-gita. I thanked Gopal for taking a couple of years off my ’sentence, and he gave a nice philosophical discourse on predestination and the futility of struggling against your karmic destiny. It was good to see him again, and give him a hand in the kitchen. He’ll be down in Sydney for the wedding as well, along with Mangala Vaisnava from NZ.

A leader needs vision. They need a commitment to a cause that transcends themselves. An ISKCON leader once replied to my inquiry about leadership by saying: “Leadership? That’s easy: It’s simply your ability to inspire the men.” (in a bombastic American voice - this was a leader from the 80’s)

Every leader is dissatisfied with the status quo. They have within them a vision of a better future, but it is not that every visionary is a leader. A leader’s vision is accompanied by a moral imperative. It is not simply what could be, but what should be. It is not simply what should be, but what must be. It is not simply something what must be, but what will be. When a leader attains to total commitment to purpose, others will follow them.

Leadership, one person said, is a total commitment to purpose, accompanied by the persistence to carry it out.

The new series at the Sunday Feast, starting in November, is Live to SERVE. The theme is that Service brings Significance, and in addition to the series introduction there are five classes unpacking the elements of SERVE:

• See the Bigger Picture
• Engage with Detachment
• Rediscover Continuously
• Value Results and Relationships
• Embody the Values

Check out the promo over at the Sunday Feast website: www.sundayfeast.com.

We have a two week lead time on the start of the series. We are estimating 30 hours preparation time for each class, which makes a total of 180 hours of class preparation. We’ve re-geared our morning program class structure to do team preparation. We are also going to create some collateral, small laminated cards or fridge magnets, to promote the series, and the principles that we are discussing.

This series is aimed squarely at the existing attendees. New people come every week, but we’re pushing a heavy rock up a steep hill if we are presenting one message in the class, and people look around and see a different message communicated through the culture of the program. Active engagement in service is where it is at - without a doubt.

Flock - the “social web browser” - is the latest cutting edge of web browsing technology. It’s an open source derivative of the Mozilla browser, just as Firefox is, but with a lot more bling bling. The great thing about open source is that you can take whatever anyone else has done, and build something more on top of that.

There would be no commentaries of the acaryas if the scriptures were copyrighted. I chose the Creative Commons Licence for my literary output for this reason. Not because what I write is on the same level as the scriptures or the acaryas’ commentaries, but because that’s the Vedic culture - information is Free.

I’m posting this from the right-click blogging interface included in Flock. It has more RSS integration, support for social bookmarks (you share them via del.icio.us, which also means you can read them on different machines that have Flock on them), and I’d imagine more under the hood that I am yet to discover. Zero day warez. You heard it here first.

And on the “you heard it here first” thread, I can see the Krishna Linux distro that I blogged about a year ago becoming a reality too - things are definitely moving in that direction - slowly but surely. It won’t be 2006, but it will happen.

Kirtan on the radio within 5 years as well, remember.

Here’s an interesting article on television addiction.

It quotes from an article in Scientific American, and also presents evidence for how watching the news on television rots your brain.

Check it out if you have a television.

Our Sunday Feast website has been updated. It has the promo for the next series, “Live to SERVE” on it, as well as the pointers to the rest of the content. I would have liked to have launched the site fully developed, but incremental improvement will be the style that we’ll use there, in order to sustain momentum.

To create momentum, introduce something significantly new.
To sustain momentum, maintain a committment to continual improvement.

-Andy Stanley

So now that we’ve introduced the idea of Sunday Feast.com (and might I mention, the correct use of flash), we’ll keep the momentum up by continually tweaking it.

Although I might be hard at work on other projects, luckily the other team members are able to carry the flag. Props to Vrajadhama and Bhakticandrika for their work so far on this project.

I haven’t been blogging much here lately. At the moment, as mentioned previously, I’m focusing on some additional projects at work.

I’ve started a new blog at Live Journal for my technology related pastimes. You can check it out if you’re techno-inclined, or if you want to see what I do for the 40+ hours a week that I work, here.

You can see it in context of the Fedora Project, which I am a part of, here.

www.iskcon.com has had a facelift.

“They”–gay activists–”know if they make enough inroads into [schools], the same-sex-marriage battle will be moot.”

… last year’s big UCLA survey of college freshmen found that 57% favor same-sex marriage (only about 36% of all adults do). Even as adult activists bicker in court, young Americans–including many young conservatives–are becoming thoroughly, even nonchalantly, gay- positive.

From the October 10th issue of Time Magazine.

I previously presented my personal conclusion on preaching strategy in the post-Gay Marriage world here.

Echoing an analysis I made of how verbatim “gay bashing” preaching will be perceived, the article states:

Jennings believes a majority of GSA members are heterosexuals who find anti-gay rhetoric as offensive as racism. “We’re gonna win,” says Jennings, speaking expansively of the gay movement, “because of what’s happening in high schools right now … This is the generation that gets it.”

THE UK’s famous Priory rehab clinic is treating patients addicted to auction website eBay.
Doctors at the London hospital, who usually treat the rich and famous for drug and alcohol problems, say some people have found the “high” of securing a bargain impossible to resist.

“Just as people become alcoholics, there is a percentage of people who are predisposed to becoming dependent, even to something like eBay,” addiction expert David Nott said.

“Many are recovering drug or alcohol addicts looking for another way to get their high.”

From news.com.au

I bid on a server on eBay once, and missed out by $15. After that I never went back. It wasn’t a pleasant experience for me, because it did feel like gambling. I only like to gamble when I am guaranteed to win.

OK, off to the Sunday Feast. It’s raining here in Brisbane, a welcome statistical anomaly. We have so little experience with that that we don’t know how it will affect the attendance.

Anyway, one good outcome from that, however, is that Vrajadhama’s weekend catering event was cancelled, so he’ll be coming. He’s going to give the presentation: “What is Love?” as part of our ongoing series on Friendship, Community, and Love.

A few thoughts:

• There has to be consistent and clear communication through all mediums at the Sunday Feast what the next step is. If each speaker gives a different conclusion or conception of the path each week they will compete with each other, dilute the message, and confuse people. For each optional path forward you give, you dilute people’s ability to determine it, and their resolve to take it.
• People may not be ready to take the next step, but it is imperative that every single person must be aware of what it is, as soon as possible.
• The next step that you are promoting relentlessly has to be “doable” for as close to 100% of the people as possible. There’s no point making it “chant Hare Krishna” (as in japa), or “become vegetarian” or “come to the temple in the morning” unless you find that a sizable percentage of your audience are actually doing this as a result of your preaching.

  If you preach “Chant Hare Krishna” over and over again for years and you don’t have hundreds of people chanting as a result, change tack. If you repeatedly say: “Come to the temple!” and the place is not packing out as a result, give it up.

  Find out what most people can realistically do and preach that.

  Small, doable steps.

Make it:

1. Clear
2. As doable as possible
3. Strategic (make it take them to the next clear, doable step)

Get rid of the congregation by starting a movement.

Our focus at the moment:

The next step is to simply get involved. Go from being a passive observer to being an active participant. Simply start serving.

I was going through some old files from my time in Peru, and found this little joke I made up one day. It’s just a lot of free association of the current news of the time with my recent experiences travelling through LA that year. It would have been late 2001 or early 2002 when I wrote this.

There are also a lot of other files about values based education and preaching stategies - don’t worry, I wasn’t just day dreaming about wild movie plots while I was there.

The launch last Sunday of the “Hare Krishna Jihad” in the western world headquarters of the International Society for Krishna Consciousness (ISKCON) in Los Angeles went almost unnoticed, including by those present. When asked for his comment, Chris Alperton (53), a regular visitor to the Sunday feast, replied: “I didn’t pay much attention to the class, but this sweet rice sure is good. I just hope that they keep serving it out.”

According to Hare Krishna temple spokesman Nirantara Das, that’s exactly what they intend doing. “Hitler had it wrong,” he states emphatically, with the intense glare of a fanatic. “The true Aryan concept of warfare includes a half-time where the combatants get together for a sacred lunch.”

When questioned during the announcement by one member of the press how they can derive the instruction for their Jihad from the Bhagavad-gita, the same book that Gandhi based his non-violence movement of the 1930s on, temple spokesman Svarupa Das replied: “That just goes to show you how fanatics can screw any meaning out of a bonafide religious tradition,” referring to Gandhi. “That’s what happens when you study books without the guidance of a guru.”

The Hare Krishna Jihad is based on a self-described fundamentalist interpretation of the Bhagavad-gita, a “divine revelation” that the members of the Hare Krishna movement are the true Aryan race, and a secret message that some members claim to hear when recorded tapes of their guru are played backwards that says, “Secure your place in heaven, by sending an infidel to hell.”

And here lies the first problem with the Hare Krishna Jihad. Although temple members have indicated that they will travel to the Middle East as the logical place to carry out their holy war, they have been unable, as yet, to announce who they will be waging it against, because, as Das puts it, “Krishna loves ‘em all.” However, he adds, that’s the least of his worries right now, the foremost being the internal debate over whether a change from the order’s traditional orange robes to camouflage ones represents a break with the tradition.

The Hare Krishnas are not known as the most aggresive people, but Svarupa Das doesn’t see that as a problem as they are “prepared to do anything for Krishna.” Michel Miterrand (17), a young recruit who travelled from France by bus and boat to join the rapidly forming ISKCON International Coalition, describes his “battle ready” status: “The other day I stepped on a bug, and I felt very bad. But then I chanted Hare Krishna to it, and I felt better.”

Ready or not, Miterrand has joined the rest of the international movement’s would-be jihadis stranded in the Los Angeles temple. Having saved enough money from incense sales to participate in the bulk ticket sale that ISKCON has negotiated with Vaikuntha Airlines, as a member of the Hare Krishnas, he, along with other members of groups that solicit donations, is banned from entering the Los Angeles International Airport, a measure the airport put into place after September 11. Miterrand isn’t phased however. As he explains, with a dreamy gaze and a smile: “Krishna is all-powerful.”

A spokesman for the LAX Airport Authority said that the ban was a general measure, and was not a specific response to the recently launched Hare Krishna jihad. A source in the State Department confirmed that the Department would review the Hare Krishnas for inclusion in their list of terrorist organizations if it was warranted.

So far the response has been muted, and it appears that the Hare Krishnas have a little more work to do internally before they are truly ready to launch a coordinated holy war, but in the meantime, the after-dinner conversation in the Los Angeles temple has changed from whose guru is better to the more down-to-earth topic of the relative merits of the AK-47 over the M16.

A really great book is Brahmana and Vaisnava by Srila Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati Thakura. I don’t pretend that I understand any more than a few percent of what is in there, but I return to it time and time again because the construction of his argument is brilliant. It is a paragon of Vedic debate.

The encounter that the book arises from is the stuff of legends.

Srila Bhaktivinode Thakura, Bhaktisiddhanta Sarasvati’s father, had been invited to an expository debate with the Smarta Brahmana community (the hereditary priestly class in India), as a representative of the Vaisnavas.

Bhaktivinode Thakura begged off the encounter and sent his son in his stead.

First the Smarta Brahmanas spoke (think Pharisees for all those from a Christian background). They quoted many scriptures that proved that they were the representatives of God and the most holy.

The next day, Srila Bhaktisiddhanta spoke. He began by glorifying the brahmanas, and quoted even more verses, and made an even more compelling argument than the Smarta Brahmanas themselves had been able to make. In other words, he conclusively demonstrated to all present that no only did he understand the position of the Smarta Brahmanas, he understood it better than they did!

After gaining credibility and acceptance from all present, he then proceeded to present his own argument, that while brahmanas, the official priestly families, are undoubtedly holy and worthy of respect, the pure devotees of the Lord, regardless of their social class and the family they appear in, are holy and worthy of respect. And that one who is born into the family of brahmanas, but does manifest a character that is holy and worthy of respect, should be respected for his heritage, but should be understood to be off the mark.

The book is amazing because of the substance of the argument, which is the same argument that has been made by all teachers of spiritual essence, from Jesus Christ through Lord Caitanya, through to Srila Bhaktivinode Thakura, and also because of Srila Bhaktisiddhanta’s amazing depth of scholarship and prowess as a communicator.

It was declared a flawless victory, and this book was produced from the speech that he gave.

Krishna Premi devi dasi:

hearing, chanting, serving, praying, submissively obeying
your teachings never leaving
your grace i’ll be receiving

Prabhupada, it’s such a debt
i have to you
but i forget
oh how i’m put to shame
my lust to blame

in my helpless state i pray
bless me so i may
dedicate my life to you
your servant through and through

i’ll serve your servants who are pure
knowing then that i’ll be sure
to please you free from pride
my desires are put aside

loving service at your feet
i’m begging all i meet
to come and take your love
Krishna’s message from above

I took the opportunity to read Malcolm Gladwell’s The Tipping Point while I was at the hospital. Catalyst bloggers mentioned the book and Malcolm’s presentation at Catalyst, which drove me to it. Another of his books, Blink, seems to be on the executive reading list at work.

The book is very interesting, and it’s obvious that Andy Stanley and his leadership team have read it, as crucial concepts surface in the Drive 05 conference material.

Perhaps for me the biggest eye opener was reading about Sesame Street. Now I don’t know where I read about this, but I was laboring under the impression that research had shown that Sesame Street was actually counter-productive to children’s learning and literacy. The Tipping Point, however, tells exactly the opposite, and contains an exhaustive report on the show explaining the relationship between attention and learning, and how Sesame Street, rigorously designed to grab children’s attention, functions as an effective medium.

If you think about it, if grabbing people’s attention and entertaining them did not contribute to communicating your message, then television advertising would not be able to pay for all that programming that you get for free.

Gladwell then goes on to talk about the son of Sesame Street: Blue’s Clues. This was made by people who left Sesame Street to go even further. The format is a radical departure from Sesame Street, and shows a thirty year evolution of understanding of attention, engagment, and learning.

The points that are in there are all very good for helping to construct engaging environments for communicating Krishna Consciousness.

I’m in the emergency ward at Royal Brisbane Hospital. No, there is no wireless to blog with here, I’ve changed the post date. It’s the second time I’ve been here in a month, so it’s getting familiar.

Last time it was Param Satya, this time it’s Channell. She was riding her bike when a motorist opened their car door into her. She went head over heels and landed on her head on the road. Luckily her head was ok, but her leg was pretty banged up where the door hit her.

That was Thursday last week. Her leg swelled up and didn’t go down. On Friday she got an X-ray done and they told her that nothing was broken. Today her mother, who is visiting for a few days, brought her in and dropped her off at the emergency room, with Prahlad.

I was at work, working on a presentation that I have to give on Thursday on Public Key Infrastructure, and got to the Loft at 8 pm, just as Sukhanti Radha called with the phone number for the emergency ward, where Channell is. Alison flew out to Cairns this afternoon as she got a phone call that her sister is giving birth right now, and her family want her to be there. So Param was at the Loft cooking with Vraja Dhama, and Elliot was giving the class. I took a taxi to the hospital from the Loft.

As Vin Diesel would say: “I live for this stuff You don’t really know that you’re alive until there is a whole lot of smoke and confusion, and decisions that need to be made on the spot.

My supposed focus on work is taking a pounding right about now….

Postscript: It’s always exciting when a crisis happens. That’s the power of new. Sitting around for hours on end is another story however. We got home at 1.30 am.