Sunday, June 4, 2017

Within..............................


All forms of loss are a confrontation to the ego, and its survival mechanisms.  All aspects of human life are transient, so to cling to any aspect eventually brings grief and loss.  Each incident, however, is an opportunity to search within for the source of life, which is ever present, unchanging, and not subject to loss or the ravages of time.

-David Hawkins

"I was keeping an eye on it"................






Source and back story here

Gone, but not forgotten.................


Johnny Winter.........................................Be Careful With A Fool

On dogmatism.......................


     Those who have a passion for quick returns and for an exact balance sheet of effort and reward may feel impatient of a study which cannot, in the present state of our knowledge, arrive at certainties, and which encourages what may be thought the time-wasting occupation of inconclusive meditation on insoluble problems.  To this view I cannot in any degree subscribe.  Some kind of philosophy is a necessity to all but the most thoughtless, and in the absence of knowledge it is almost sure to be  silly philosophy.  The result of this is that the human race becomes divided into rival groups of fanatics, each group firmly persuaded that is own brand of nonsense is sacred truth, while the other side's is damnable heresy.  Arians and Catholics, Crusaders and Moslems, Protestants and adherents of the Pope, Communists and Fascists, have filled large parts of the last 1,500 years with futile strife, when a little philosophy would have shown both sides in all these disputes that neither had any good reason to believe itself in the right.  Dogmatism is an enemy to peace, and an insuperable barrier to democracy.  In the present age, at least as much as in former times, it is the greatest of the mental obstacles to human happiness.

-Bertrand Russell, from his essay Philosophy For Laymen


Want a successful life?.................


...............The simplest, most effective plan would be to focus on each of these ideas - one new one per day for the next 1,111 days.  The three years will pass anyway, might as well put them to good use.

He does have a way with words............


"America, which is entertaining itself to inanition, has never experienced a scarcity of entertainment."

-George Will, as extracted from this WaPo column

My first reaction was it was a typo and he meant inattention, but this is George Will we are talking about.  His grasp of the language far and away exceeds mine.  Therefore, the Oracle Google was consulted:













Looks like his word usage is correct, again.

via Althouse

On emotional connection.......................or,


.........................................hoping computers stay unmotivated:

David Foster Wallace once said, "If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish."  In many ways, this is very true.  If you never get bored, you'd be a step closer to being a computer.  Computers do all kinds of boring things for us, and they do them quite well and very quickly.  Computers don't need game mechanics.  They don't get bored or unmotivated.  Yet we are designing offices as if we were machines - but we're not.  Jane McGonigal, a researcher and game designer, argues that by its very nature, efficiency entails removing game mechanics form the design of labor.  In other words, we're taking the fun out of it.
     Karl Marx was wrong about a lot of things in economics, but we're now realizing he was also right about some stuff.  When you remove people's emotional connection to their labor and treat them merely as machines that produce efforts, it's soul killing.

-Eric Barker,  Barking Up The Wrong Tree:  The Surprising Science Behind Why Everything You Know About Success Is (Mostly) Wrong

Fifty years ago............................


The Kinks........................................................Waterloo Sunset