One Stop Thought Shop

I have known many an eminent theoretical physicist who prays to a personal God; an old guy watching him from somewhere up there in the sky. I might mention that I have long known that prayer was a placebo; but upon learning recently of a study that showed that a drug works even when you know it is a placebo, I immediately started praying. There are two Ramachandrans—one an arch skeptic and the other a devout believer. Fortunately I enjoy this ambiguous state of mind, unlike Darwin who was tormented by it. It is not unlike my enjoyment of an Escher engraving.

Marketing statements influence us subliminally more than was ever assumed.

Even when you are not aware of being exposed to advertising material, it can still affect your actions.

The world was told that putting its money in the US was a low-risk, high-return investment. But like the victims of the Wall Street trader, now we are all learning the truth.

What comes next? The fallacy is punctured.

Globalization will be seen as what it is -- a game with risks that can't be wished away. And U.S. prosperity will depend on the success or failure of its ability to innovate -- not its ability to tell an implausible story to foreign investors...

The richest 1 percent of households owns nearly half of all individually owned investment assets (stocks and mutual funds, financial securities, business equity, trusts, non-home real estate). The bottom 90 percent of the population owns less than 15 percent; the bottom half of the population — 150 million Americans — own less than 1 percent.

If America’s vast wealth is mainly a gift of our common past, how, specifically, can such disparities be justified?

There's no visible other space. There's no liberated territory. It's like rebelling against a funhouse mirror because it makes you look so fat and stupid.

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But dude, this is not just a bad vibe happening. Merrill Lynch is gone. Enron is long gone. Madoff is a crook. The big boys are hurting. Cities are broke, states are broke, the feds are a laughingstock. The Congress and the former Administration have fully earned the public's contempt. You can't "blame the media" for that. Even the media's broke -- ESPECIALLY the media. You can't pull a Reagan, triple the national debt and pretend that everything's jolly.

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I agree that there's an irrational panic now. There are also a large crowd of severe, real-world, fully rational, deeply structural problems that have gone unconfronted for years. These problems are not directly responsible for the money panic, but the blatant neglect there has created an atmosphere of crisis.

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The Iraq War was a harebrained adventure that wrecked the international community. And to what end? The War on Terror is a bust: stateless terror is the new status quo.

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Huge demographic changes in the world have not been confronted. Why are the victors of World War II still the so-called Security Council? What real security are they providing most living people today?

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The planet's population is aging. Contemporary Italy looks like a Florida retirement city. And it's not just the rich white guys who forgot to have kids -- Mexico is also rapidly aging, and China has one-child families. We lack the financial capacity to allow retirement funds to run the world. We can't have ninety-year-olds who are rich when young people can't go to college. That doesn't compute.

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Then there's energy. I'm not a Peak Oil guy, but of course wild turbulence in energy prices is gonna put people on edge. How can any person of reasonable prudence invest, plan and build with that kind of uncertainty?

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Last, and slowest, and worst, there's the climate. The planet's entire atmosphere is polluted. Practically everything we do in our civilization is directly predicated on setting fire to dead stuff. Climate change is a major evil. It's vast in scope and it's everywhere.

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Communism, capitalism, socialism, whatever: we've never yet had any economic system that recognizes that we have to live on a living planet. Plankton and jungles make the air we breathe, but they have no place at our counting-house. National regulations do nothing much for that situation. New global regulations seem about as plausible as a new global religion.

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None of this a counsel of despair. Seriously. We dare not despair because in any real crisis, the pessimists die fast.

This is a frank recognition of the stakes.

It's aimed at the adults in the room.

Let me put it this way. People don't have to solve every problem in the world in order to be happy. People will always have problems. People ARE problems. People become happy when they have something coherent to be enthusiastic about. People need to LOOK AND FEEL they're solving some of mankind's many problems. People can't stumble around in public like blacked-out alcoholics, then have some jerk like Phil Gramm tell them to buck up.

When you can't imagine how things are going to change, that doesn't mean that nothing will change. It means that things will change in ways that are unimaginable.

I do want to stress, when we're saying how terrible things are, that actually there have been huge advances in the 20th century; increased output of food, more people being fed, wider range and availability, people being fed better and life expectancy rocketing in many countries for all sorts of complicated reasons, but within that, diet has been a critical factor.

Lets not forget that.

BUT. The environmental cost has been astronomic. The impact on public health, which is what my colleagues and I work on a lot, is immense.

Diet is now THE single, biggest factor in causing premature death worldwide.

A sustainable global food system in the 21st Century needs to be built on a series of "new fundamentals".

1. they prize freedom;
   
2. they want to customize things;
   
3. they enjoy collaboration;
   
4. they scrutinize everything;
   
5. they insist on integrity in institutions and corporations;
   
6. they want to have fun even at school or work;
   
7. they believe that speed in technology and all else is normal;
   
8. and they regard constant innovation as a fact of life.

You may be selling the bottles but the poets own the water.

You can manufacture all we say and package and wrap

All you want, more and more,

But unless it springs from the earth

It is not yours.

Labels: poetic

Labels: poetic

1. "we are descended from neutrinos"
   
   
2. The 'trick' of consciousness is that for the most part we are not conscious at all. We don't consciously operate our heart or our breath. We don't consciously regulate every aspect of our muscular motion. If that would be the case, life would be unlivable and unbearable. We would have a hard time even making one step with our foot or opening our mouth. So because we are for the most part automatic, we can be conscious.

But often, in the world's most crowded streets,
But often, in the din of strife,
There rises an unspeakable desire
After the knowledge of our buried life;
A thirst to spend our fire and restless force
In tracking out our true, original course;
A longing to inquire
Into the mystery of this heart which beats
So wild, so deep in us--to know
Whence our lives come and where they go.
And many a man in his own breast then delves,
But deep enough, alas! none ever mines.
And we have been on many thousand lines,
And we have shown, on each, spirit and power;
But hardly have we, for one little hour,
Been on our own line, have we been ourselves--
Hardly had skill to utter one of all
The nameless feelings that course through our breast,
But they course on for ever unexpress'd.
And long we try in vain to speak and act
Our hidden self, and what we say and do
Is eloquent, is well--but 'tis not true!
And then we will no more be rack'd
With inward striving, and demand
Of all the thousand nothings of the hour
Their stupefying power;
Ah yes, and they benumb us at our call!
Matthew Arnold, The Buried Life

Every reporter that has interviewed me has asked, “Why do you think your story has riveted so many, and such a diverse cross-section of people?”

I think it is because I do what I want and I do what I believe in.

This is not always the easiest route, not always the path of least resistance, but it is the only path I allow myself to take. I have refused to sacrifice my integrity as a person or the integrity of my art to appease anyone, and incidentally, have had story-book success because of it.

I find it a travesty that I am compelling because of this - that it is rare and therefore inspiring to come across stories of success (and I don’t just mean money) from following one’s own road. Such choices should be cultivated, honored, and rewarded wherever and whenever they are made!

Yet instead, our society seems to prefer the oppression of individual spirit; prefers fear-mongering by those in power, whether that power comes in the form of a boss or a military unit or a parent; prefers insecurity masquerading as 'informed intelligence' over talent or originality.

It is our right and our duty as individuals to stand up to all that - to stand up as the most honorable and most powerful version of ourselves and LIVE.

Live right, live true, live now, and help anyone and everyone to do this as well, alongside us.

Happy New Year.

Labels: poetic

“The bold efforts the present bank has made to control the government, the distress it has wantonly caused, are but premonitions of the fate which awaits the American people should they be deluded into a perpetuation of this institution or the establishment like it.

"You are a den of vipers. I intend to rout you out and by the eternal God I will rout you out.

"If the people only understood the rank injustice of our money and banking system, there would be a revolution before morning.”

Trust capitalism and shun government interference we were told.

But irresponsible bankers saw a chance to get rich quick and went for it.

Their failure has become ours -- and the promise of a common good has evaporated along with faith in democratic capitalism.

Local government will see its revenues wither and eventually insolvency will force a radical re-thinking of government revenues, expenses and services.

Why have state and local government budgets all climbed by 30%-50% in a mere decade?

"You know, you have such a stunningly superficial knowledge of what went on that it's almost embarrassing to listen to you."

"Whenever you approach someone, realize that you're bothering them.

"Whenever someone approaches you, act like they're bothering you.

"It's a fine line and there's a little dance you do in shops when you need assistance. First, you have to bother them, so they have to act bothered back.

"Then if they ask you a follow-up question, you need to act bothered back. Most of the time, even more so than they looked when you bothered them. You don't want them to think you're more important than they are, do you?

"So then they think that you being bothered by them is more important than them being bothered by you.

"Got that?"

Of course, a "sky-high, billowy Vanilla Soufflé served with a warm pitcher of salted butter caramel" is no bother whatsoever. Seems to be out and out bribery. You think?

If there was a single service that the news media could perform right now, it would be to take a more responsible and balanced approach rather than adopting scare tactics and sensationalist headlines.

The less people live in fear the more they will be able to achieve.

"I've never known an election to create so much interest and transform people's view of America again in a positive way."

"Young people out in the middle of nowhere in Palestine have said to me, 'They wouldn't really elect a black man to the presidency,' and I've said, 'Well, I think they would.' But they've been taught for so long that America is ... what it actually isn't. And that's why this is an enormous moment. It thrills America's friends and sort of confuses its enemies."

By the time I left work I had pages upon pages of ideas, notes and references; most of them scribbled down during sleepless nights, idle periods at my desk and on the train travelling to and from London. I also had a very simple idea – something so simple that it just had to be right:

In essence, it means that unless we are able to consciously experience something, then it doesn’t matter. That seems reckless, at best, but there was a mirror to this: because – and it became increasingly clear as I was writing the first part of the book – humans are being adversely affected, directly and indirectly by the actions of humanity.

If it could be made clear that it really was ourselves who matter most of all to us, it would be incontrovertible that we have to do something about the problems we have created.

It would entirely go against what it means to be human if we knowingly ignored what was happening.

In order to make it totally obvious that there was a lot more unsettling stuff going on than most of us realised, I then had to look into all sorts of different areas for evidence of the effects of our activities upon human beings: forget, for a moment, that species are being wiped out every day and that habitats are being destroyed; what was most astonishing of all was that almost everything we were doing was affecting something else at some scale or another, and it was coming back to bite us.

Whatever I read about, at every scale imaginable – bacteria, insects, birds, fish, trees, entire global ecosystems – it kept coming back with the same answer: we were causing our own demise.

The title was born: A Matter Of Scale.

"Could you, for the sake of storytelling, could you tell us a little bit about that moment, like, where you were, what you said to [your husband] about your decision, how that played out?"

NYT: "What do you have against women's magazines?"
CK: "Nothing at all, but I thought you were the crack political team here."

More people in this country are getting away with murder.

FBI figures show that the homicide clearance rate, as detectives call it, dropped from 91 percent in 1963 -- the first year records were kept in the manner they are now -- to 61 percent in 2007.

Jonathan Kozol, way back in his first or second book, in the '60s, noted that that those who believe USA schools are failures do not understand the true purpose of the schools. American schools function to ensure that as few children as humanly possible are able to escape the socio-economic niches for which they were born.

The true purpose of schooling in America is to imbue students with 'virtues' of obedience and passivity, while uprooting as completely as possible any inclination toward critique, skepticism or even mild curiosity.

As another noted education scholar, Joel Spring, put it (albeit somewhat harshly or indelicately) around the same time, USA schools are part of a national sorting system by which children are assessed according to their abilities to meet the needs of elites for manpower.

There's a world of literature about 'drop-outs', but that term blames the victim.