When I set my sights on Silicon Valley in 1997 and left my comfortable 5-year job in San Francisco for the world of start-ups, little did I know how such a move would impact my life. I spent about 6 years working in the suburbs outside of San Francisco, although I had a brief 16-month stint in the middle of those sixe years working in China Basin, which was in 2000 the heart of the dotcom explosion in San Francisco.

Working outside the city changed me politically. I learned to take the middle road, and grew wary of extremism on both ends of the political spectrum. Outside the extreme left-wing politics of San Francisco, another world exists where political extremism has no place. People in suburbs aren't as politicized. They're working and trying to raise their families, and don't really have the time to indulge in the self indulgent political masturbation that city folks go through. And if you do have time for it, the extremism of the left and the right make no sense to a family just barely struggling to pay bills and survive.

There's also a negativity, a uncontrollable rage that exists on both extremes of the political spectrum. You can't raise a family and have that kind of extreme anger and rage, and not have it affect your family. The extreme anger and rage is so intense, I keep hearing Obewon Kanobi telling Luke "anger leads to the dark side of the force."

I don't understand that kind of rage, that kind of anger. It doesn't make sense to me to operate out of that kind emotion, because if you did, you wouldn't be able to make rational decisions. Politics like business is not about emotion. It's about making rational decisions for the good of the community, the corporation. If you're too full of emotion, you're not balanced and you make bad decisions.

Besides when you hate something that much, I think you're basically projecting. That what you actually hate is the shadow side of your personality that you see in the other person. This hatred of the shadow was responsible for holocaust, slavery, and any kind of bad thing that happened to any group.

I don't believe in that kind of hating. To hate like that would mean you have to make the other person less than human, and it's the root of Nazism, this is why Hitler was popular. How you can think of anyone as less than human, as an animal, because once you do that, the next step is slavery of people isn't it? These people are not human after all, so they can enslaved, they can chained, they can beaten and whipped, gassed, killed and burnt till the ground beneath the human ovens rises two inches because of all the human ash.

I will not take the walk towards anger and to the dark side of the force.

My post is incoherent I know. I just hate all this negativity and anger and rage. It's dangerous and it's scary.

Another link for the 9/11 conspiracy crowd, Inside Job - Unmasking the 9/11 Conspiracies by Jim Marrs.

I've heard this man in interviews; he's very, very interesting.

"There is also the fact that NORAD-Northeast was conducting war game exercises that morning, a fact that has been very little talked about and certainly not reported to the general public. What's also not been reported, according to the information that I have, at least one of the scenarios they were considering in their war game exercises concerned hijacked aircraft being crashed into buildings. Now, this could explain the lack of response when the air traffic controllers began to report that four planes were off course..."
- Jim Marrs, Author, Inside Job

For the 9/11 conspiracists, here's what The NY Post had to say about Alex Jones:

NOTHING NEW

MICHAEL Moore's anti-Bush film "Fahrenheit 9/11" isn't even original. Two years ago, "9/11: The Road to Tyranny," a real documentary by Alex Jones, had most of the "facts" Moore uses in his scatter-shot diatribe. Jones, who is less interested in making money than the self-aggrandizing Moore, released his film for free on his Web site www.infowars.com, where it drew legions of new fans, including producer Curt Johnson, who is hiring Jones as a consultant on a political action thriller titled "Wake Up.", NY Post on Alex Jones.

I've heard this guy speak over the years, and he's great! This is his website, Alex Jones. He's been harping on the 9/11 Bush Conspiracy for two years, long before Mr. Moore. Here's a link to his 9/11 conspiracy page, 911: THE ROAD TO TYRANNY. There's a link on the right where you can watch 40 minutes of his 9/11 Bush conspiracy film.

I think I've been depressed for primarily two reasons:

1) This month is the one-year anniversary of my grandma' death. I forgot about it and just remembered it today. It's not the kind of thing I ever wanted to have an anniversary for, but it's there. I smelled grandma smells in my living room today too. Usually if she's visiting me, my kitchen smells like her but today she was in the living room. How spooky is that!

2) I haven't been sleeping well lately. I fell asleep in an odd position a couple of weeks ago, and my upper back has been hurting. I tried switching pillows, but that didn't help. At my monthly acupuncture appointment on Saturday, I told my chinese doctor and he asked me if I snored and I said yes, it's an inherited bad trait. He said snoring meant that I never get enough sleep every night, so he did a treatment for snoring. I had needles in my throat, so scary! Aferwards he told me that my chi was stuck around my heart area, or my heart chakra, he did a massage on it and then gave massage on my upper back.

When I woke up this morning, I felt like a had my first good night of sleep in weeks, and my upper back stopped hurting. But then I decided I needed to sleep more, so I stayed in bed all day and listened to old shows of this radio program I subscribe to via streamlink.

Then I was thinking that the reason my upper back was hurting was because my chi was stuck in my heart chakra, which meant the chi couldn't escape out of my wing chakras on the back. I had my wing chakras (charkas 11 & 12) opened up at a seminar a couple of years ago. Most people have it but you have it have it opened by someone who knows how. Whatever. I'm just the doctor released me chi, although when I massage my heart center, it stil hurts and he said I needed to keep massaging that spot so the chi keeps flowing.

But as much I have physical problems, other people have it worse. While I was writing out my check at the acupuncture clinic, a woman came in and said her husband had so much back pain that he couldn't get out of bed. She asked the acupuncture doctor if he could see her husband. I could tell she had just walked right off the street and into the clinic because my doctor didn't even know her name, and neither did his wife. They were nice though, and gave the woman's husband a 3 pm appointment. Poor guy! He was in so much pain, he couldn't get out of bed. That's bad. My acupuncture guy is very good though and I almost felt like telling the woman that she picked a good clinic, but I didn't want to embarrass my doctor.