Troilus & Cressida quote

"Fools on both sides, Helen must needs be fair, When with your blood you daily paint her thus." - Troilus & Cressida line 94

Personality Hereditary?

"roughly 50 percent of almost every personality trait turns out to be attributable to genetic inheritance" p.47 Authentic Happiness by Martin Seligman, Professor of Positive Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania

Thoughts?

What If Creation And Evolution Are Both False?

What if Aristotle (the father of numerous ancient sciences) was correct in believing that everything has always been here? What if there was no beginning? What if 'extinction' is merely that when a species isn't doing well in this world, some of its members go off into another world?

Cute Flash Video About Domestic Spying

http://www.motherjones.com/commentary/fiore/2008/02/spies-who-love-you.html

Two Short Poems

And everything is water
and everything is air
and there is a blue flame
at the base of his spine
which she draws with her finger
up one vertebre at a time.

Doesn't know she is ready
to be vulnerable
so she plans to write a song
so that shielded by quotes
she can open her heart.
Annie will help her
peel away the quotes
line by line.

My Other Blog

My other blog is at:
http://academicsanonymous.blogspot.com/

On the Virtue of Minimalism

If I can't make an item for my to-do list related to a thing that I own, then I give away or throw away that thing. This is something I have done for a long time, and here is, if nothing else, a good justification for it:

"'The casting away of things is symbolic, you know. Talismanic. When you cast away things, you're also casting away the self-related others that are symbolically related to those things. You start a cleaning-out process. You begin to empty the vessel.'

"...It's an emptying-out process and also a diminishing of the ego...

"'Now think of yourself as a battery. You really are, you know. Your brain runs on chemically converted electrical current... Everything you think, everything you do, it all has to run off the battery. Like the accessories in a car.'

"'Watching TV, reading books, talking with friends, eating a big dinner. . . all of it runs off the battery. A normal life... [is] like running a car with power windows, power brakes, power seats, all the goodies. But the more goodies you have, the less the battery can charge. True?'

"'Well, what we've done [by casting away things] is to strip off the accessories. We're on charge."

- Stephen King, The Stand p. 1028-1030

.


Eliminating what you can go without has its benefits--being a minimalist has its physical as well as spiritual perks.

If I am not going to use something, then I throw it away or give it away. The other thing I like to do is if it is something I am not certain I will use, or if it is something I will only use infrequently, then I will give it away to someone I can borrow it from, someone I know who I'm sure will keep it or someone who never throws away anything.

Here's to recharging!

Shapes of the Human Nose

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_nose#Shapes_of_the_human_nose

And it would seem that some people have a combination.

Anyone finds other things like this that differentiate the names of differences in human features, please send it along to me.

Prostituting for a Hug

One of the most heartbreaking moments I ever experienced with an ex-girlfriend while we were dating was her latenight confession to me one evening that many times she had given herself over to sex with the true aim of her behavior being the desire to have someone hold her--she just wanted to be held.

I held her, and just like so many women prostitute themselves for a fancy piece of jewelry or for a fancy dinner, and think they must reciprocate with sex, she thought she owed me sex for holding her. Nonsense! If anyone reading this has such rubbish ideas, then throw them out in your mental garbage bin.

If you only want someone to hold you or cuddle you, then there are plenty of people in this world who will give that at no cost, without expecting anything in return. To think that being held is of greater value than getting to hold someone, and therefore requires some kind of additional payment, is to greatly overvalue being held.

Ladies, if you want something, then you shouldn't have to remove your clothes to get it, and gentlemen, if you want something, then you shouldn't have to remove your wallet to get it.

Robert Anton Wilson on 9/11

"Pearl Harbor Redux?

"Sitting, literally, right next to some of the 'hijack suspects,' of AA Flight 11 was Daniel C. Lewin, an American citizen with dual Israeli citizenship, who was a former elite Israeli commando officer in a secret unit of the Israeli Defense Force called 'Sayeret Mat'Kal.'

"While a member of the IDF, Mr. Lewin apparently had received extensive 'anti-terrorism' training. Sayeret Mat'Kal was formed in 1957, and explicitly created to infiltrate enemy territories; members of this unit are trained on the finer points of 'looking and thinking like an Arab,' and have been charged with conducting numerous death-squad killings, disguised as civilians."

- Robert Anton Wilson


Does it make sense to anyone else that maybe the Israeli government arranged 9/11 as a false-flag attack, and the US government covered it up in order to protect our innocent American Jewry from the potential backlash?

Is it possible that getting away with their false-flag attack on the US Liberty made certain puppeteers of the Israeli Government bold enough to think they can get away with bigger and bigger false-flag attacks?

After all, if the public gets too close to the truth, the people who are really behind such things can simply blame it on the Jewish People, and the brainless common people will punish innocent Jews rather than those who hide behind them. Pearl Harbor Redux may lead to Holocaust Redux, absit omen.

Adolph Hitler's problem: He was unable to distinguish between innocent Jews and the guilty individuals who pretended to be Jewish in overthrowing Tsarist Russia. Either that or he saw no way of getting the common people of Germany to understand the complexity of infiltration and counter-infiltration--which may be exactly the position the US Government is currently in:

most people are too ill-educated to understand something like "British spies pretending to be Freemasons pretending to be Jewish pretending to be Arab" much less "British spies pretending to be Freemasons pretending to be Jewish pretending to be Arab in order to secretly unite Europe and North America under control of the British Crown" or whatever form the truth may actually have.

Call me a conspiracy theorist if you will, but making an epithet of the term "conspiracy" neither eliminates the phenomena nor makes the belief that 'major conspiracies do not exist' any less absurd and stupid to uphold.

What comes after?

"It's the fear of what comes after the doing that makes the doing hard to do."

The Game of Life

"This is the game of being alive. And you think you're what? You think you're above that? Above alive is what? Dead; in the clouds. You're on earth--plant a foot, stay a while." - Angels in America

Good Being

"Good Being is knowing who in fact we are; and in order to know who in fact we are, we must first know, moment by moment, who we think we are and what this bad habit of thought compels us to feel and do. A moment of clear and complete knowledge of what we think we are, but in fact are not, puts a stop, for the moment, to the Manichean charade. If we renew, until they become a continuity, these moments of the knowledge of what we are not, we may find ourselves, all of a sudden, knowing who in fact we are." - Huxley, Island page 42

Friedrick Nietzsche

"Power which no longer requires proving; which disdains to please; which is slow to answer; which is conscious of no witness around it; which lives oblivious of the existence of any opposition; which reposes in itself, fatalistic, a law among laws" p.85

I really like this quote. It reeks of something primal, something close to the divine.

Leary on Revolutions

"Cultural revolutions and neurogenetic mutations can exist gracefully underground in the form of elites and cults. But when they begin to surface they become democratized, bureaucratized, vulgarized, and, of course, co-opted by" the other side.

- Timothy Leary, What Does WoMan Want p.119

Low Bow to Morality

"Each of us will be well advised, on some suitable occasion, to make a low bow to the deeply moral nature of mankind; it will help us to be generally popular and much will be forgiven us for it."

p67 Civilization and its Discontents by Sigmund Freud

The Freudian Stumble

"The Roman who gave up an important undertaking if he saw an ill-omened flight of birds was therefore in a relative sense justified; his behavior was consistent with his premisses. But if he withdrew from the undertaking because he had stumbled on the threshold of his door he was also in an absolute sense superior to us unbelievers; he was a better psychologist than we are striving to be. For his stumbling must have revealed to him the existence of a doubt, a counter-current at work within him, whose force might at the moment of execution subtract from the force of his intention." - Sigmund Freud, Psychopathology of Everyday Life p. 259

Self-Knowledge

How many so-called educated people really know much about themselves? ...

I belong to What I Possess [a poem]

I belong to What I Possess

You, my griddle, you make me pancakes, I feel silly saying it, but, you make my day

And you, my radio, whisper to me through the night; the cashier tells me she thinks you may be broken, as if that could make me love listening to you any less

And you, my phone, I see your jacket on my floor; victim of my once and future negligence, forgive me

And you, my wooden box of valuables, veteran articles of my self-association, in you I store the best of what I love

You, the gritty tangerine from that poem the other night, now dripping alive and real, give yourself to me

You, my copal incense, when I blow on your hot charcoal you sizzle and glow

You, my copy of Ovid's Metamorphosis; remember when I found you in the vacant lot, and picked you up, and blew the dust off your rain-ruined covers--at night in bed feel my caress while the scent of your ink makes me delirious

And you, my writing dictionary, let me turn your trickling stream of life into a rushing river--move me

And you, my typewriter, orphaned, ward of my estate, between us there is nothing we need to justify, except perhaps a rare bad joke

You, my journal, I spill dreams between your pages when we awake, you claim these from me as I fill your pages

And you, my favorite blanket, make my skin comfortably warm as I draw you near; I care not, how tattered you may become

All of you, I try in vain to leave you--honestly, I can--yet really, I belong to what I possess.

The Epic of Myth [a poem]

Planted firmly in the bare earth,
is the true soldier of epic myth,
Who dances with the east wind
and in sorrows bows down low
under rains the west wind wept.

She wore a dandelion diadem helm
Gird a blade of grass for her sword
One shield only she has chosen:
a vast, unbending web of leaves.
Many summer passions burn down
And yet, an utter cool becomes her.

It shines brightly amber, her shadow
Where on purest bed of winter snow
she awakens to perpetually blossom.

Professors Who Don't Read The Books

Three university professors I have taken classes with (thankfully none of them in my current degree program) informed the class that Sigmund Freud had only one patient and based all of his work on just that one patient.

I really wish the professors would read the books before they try to tell us what is in them. Freud had more than one patient. Here is a quote from one of Freud's books I have read: "On my return from my holidays my thoughts immediately turned to the patients who were to claim my attention in the year's work that was just beginning." p. 256 of Psychopathology of Everyday Life. Wait! Is this a misprint? "Patients"? Plural? No, I am afraid it is not a misprint.

I don't think I want to know why three professors from three different universities have made that same mistake. What I do have to question is why I continue to patronize these people with my time when so many of them speak so ignorantly. Here are my reasons:

1. When I have a PhD nobody will tell me I have to go back to school (except that my degree is in Education, so they will tell me to go to school)

2. When I have a PhD then I can say that liberal arts professorships are obsolete without anyone being able to argue that I am only saying it because I was not capable of earning a PhD

3. When I have a PhD in Education, then I can unschool my children with far less interference from the people on the local schoolboard, and I can help others unschool or homeschool their children

4. When I have a PhD then I can read whatever I want and call it work and maybe even get paid for discussing it with people

5. When I have a PhD then people who have no internal way of discriminating smart from stupid will automatically assume I am smart

6. I have lots of school loans and right now the only thing surer than death and taxes is inflation--might as well pay them back later when the $s are easier to come by because they are worthless... er... a... worth less... than they are now

So, hey, if they don't want to read the books, then that's their problem. Besides, I haven't had to deal with any of that this year in my classes, so let's keep our fingers crossed.

The Salvation Racket

I don't like the way people use "Jesus died for you". They use it to imply that "therefore you owe him your life in return" (which isn't so bad) and the (hideous) hidden corollary "We are his representatives, and we will accept your life from you as His proxies."

It is the same ruse employed by the ruling class when they tell us the governments they own guard our lives against other governments, so we and our children therefore owe our lives to the State. In both cases it's racketeering, pure and simple. Both religion and government are (most but not all of the time) protection rackets.

Pay the U.S. Government mobsters and they will protect you from the Russian Government mobsters. Pay the mobsters of heaven and they will protect you from the mobsters of hell.

Not that the Churches are going to get RICO Acted any time soon, much less the U.S. Government, but the neat thing is as soon as you realize they are all-too-often racketeering, it sets you free because it makes it real easy to discern those who are practicing true religion from those who would die at the sight of God's shoelaces.

Skeletons On Thrones And Under Them

The Roman Catholic Church may tell us it doesn't have any more skeletons in its closet, but it is worth noting that the whole Vatican City is built atop a pre-existing cemetary.

Freud on Morality

"...morality is only a selfish regulation laid down by the few who are rich and powerful and who can satisfy their wishes at any time without any postponement... The decision in this conflict can only be reached by the roundabout path of fresh insight. One must bind one's own life to that of others so closely and be able to identify oneself with others so intimately that the brevity of one's own life can be overcome; and one must not fulfil the demands of one's own needs illegitimately, but must leave them unfulfilled, because only the continuance of so many unfulfilled demands can develop the power to change the order of society. But not every personal need can be postponed in this way and transferred to other people, and there is no general and final solution of the conflict." - Sigmund Freud, p.130 Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious

Thoughts?

Secrets of Pythagoras

"The Pythagoreans likewise said, that it is more necessary to pay attention to philosophy, than to parents and agriculture; for it is owing to the latter, indeed, that we live; but philosophers and preceptors are the causes of our living well, and becoming wise, in consequence of having discovered the right mode of discipline and instruction.

"Nor did they think fit either to speak or write in such a way, that their conceptions might be obvious to any casual person; but Pythagoras is said to have taught this in the first place to those that came to him, that, being purified from all incontinence, they should preserve in silence the doctrines they had heard.

"It is said, therefore, that he who first divulged the theory of commensurable and incommensurable quantities, to those who were unworthy to receive it, was so hated by the Pythagoreans that they not only expelled him from their common society, and from living with them, but also constructed a tomb for him and considered him as dead."

- Iamblicus, Life of Pythagoras

Seems sort of like Coca-Cola guarding their soft drink recipe, or maybe like Microsoft maintaining its monopoly. If they didn't, then customers might be better off going elsewhere.

Only eight people in the whole world know the Coca-Cola recipe and that's the way it must stay for the company to retain its value.

This is why we have Property law. It is both the reason why I cannot use Tony DiTerlizzi artwork on my website without permission, and the reason he can make a living producing that artwork I enjoy so much.

Anyway, the point my mind is racing to arrive at is this: just like iTunes licenses music to people to listen to on their computer, why not have a similar setup for licensing copyrighted artwork for people to use on their websites? Pay a few dollars per URL you want to use it on.

Does anything like this already exist or does someone who works for Apple want to recommend they create a new brand that parallels iTunes? You know, sort of an iTunes for pictures.

There are dozens of artists whose work I would buy a license to use.

Here's a list of such artists that I will periodically add to (especially when I find the long list I have put somewhere):
Sir William Fettes Douglas
Rob Alexander
Kev Walker
Jeremy Jarvis
Tsutomu Kawade
Ron Spears
Justin Sweet