One Stop Thought Shop

Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light, not our darkness, that most frightens us. We ask ourselves, ‘Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented and fabulous?’ Actually, who are you not to be? Your playing small doesn’t serve the world. There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. It is not just in some of us it’s in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others. – Nelson Mandela.

Kaila Colbin discovers a ‘toon maker on the web.
And wouldn’t you know it?
She’s saying the same thing!

Britain has experienced much of what the United States is going through.

Prince Andrew is saying,

If you are looking at colonialism, if you are looking at operations on an international scale, if you are looking at understanding each other’s culture, understanding how to operate in a military insurgency campaign – we have been through them all.

We’ve won some, lost some, drawn some. The fact is there is quite a lot of experience over here which is valid and should be listened to.

Post-invasion chaos in Iraq could have been avoided if President George W. Bush’s administration had listened more….

In a rare Buckingham Palace interview, the prince described the United States as Britain’s No. 1 ally but conceded that relations were in a trough.

“There are, he added, “occasions when people in the U.K. would wish that those in responsible positions in the U.S. might listen and learn from our experiences.”

The UK’s Daily Telegraph points out that most of the health care budget is spent on the healthy.

The obese and smokers use less health care, cost taxpayers less, because, well, they die earlier from less complex disease.

While smokers and the overweight are often criticized for the financial impact of their unhealthy lifestyles, an obese person’s medical bills actually average 10 per cent less overall than those of a person of normal weight.

Smokers require even less treatment, say the researchers.

The reason is that the healthy tend to live longer and so, while they might not have to battle lung cancer, heart disease or diabetes in their fifties, they may need long-term care for illnesses of old age such as Alzheimer’s.

As a result, any “savings” made by them being healthy when young are more than offset by their being ill in old age.

…
The underlying mechanism is that there is a substitution of inexpensive, lethal diseases towards less lethal, and therefore more costly diseases.”

Among others, one stubborn medical worker cries foul, pointing out the study failed to account for the cost of buildings lost by fire caused by smokers.

JP at Confused of Calcutta found a fun twist of language where the meaning of the sentence shifts.

1. I Didn’t Say You Stole My Money.
2. I Didn’t Say You Stole My Money.
3. I Didn’t Say You Stole My Money.
4. I Didn’t Say You Stole My Money.
5. I Didn’t Say You Stole My Money.
6. I Didn’t Say You Stole My Money.
7. I Didn’t Say You Stole My Money.

From the Smithsonian,

Why does it seem we’re hard-wired to want to feel happy, over all the other emotions?

That’s a $64 million question. But I think the answer is something like: Happiness is the gauge the mind uses to know if it’s doing what’s right. When I say what’s right, I mean in the evolutionary sense, not in the moral sense.

Nature could have wired you up with knowing 10,000 rules about how to mate, when to eat, where to seek shelter and safety. Or it could simply have wired you with one prime directive: Be happy.

You’ve got a needle that can go from happy to unhappy, and your job in life is to get it as close to H as possible. As you’re walking through woods, when that needle starts going towards U, for unhappy, turn around, do something else, see if you can get it to go toward H. As it turns out, all the things that push the needle toward H—salt, fat, sugar, sex, warmth, security—are just the things you need to survive. I think of happiness as a kind of fitness-o-meter.

Worth repeating?

…when that needle starts going towards U, for unhappy,
turn around, do something else,
see if you can get it to go toward H.

I was almost blinded by it – this concept of Choice –
that on Earth I could have left this place I had known…
that I could have taken any day and made my life different…chosen another way…
that I could have gone anywhere I wanted to.
And I wondered then, was it the same in Heaven as on Earth?
Was what I had felt was missing in Heaven the wanderlust that came from letting go?

I realized then that what I had been doing by watching Earth was taking the time
to fall in love – in love with the sort of helplessness, not of death, but of being alive –
to feel as you go, groping in corners and opening your arms to light –
and I realize now that all of it, everywhere, is about navigating the unknown.”

“The Lovely Bones” by Alice Sebold, via Seeds for a Happy Planet

Iraq has the largest untapped reserves in the world.

Yet thanks in part to three wars, and the combination of international sanctions and a government that opposed foreign investments — and the technological improvements they bring — over the past couple of decades, Iraq has the lowest reserve-to-production ratio of all major oil-producing countries.

Norway and Russia can’t agree on borders in the northern sea. Pirates and border conflicts stall oil development in the South China Sea. But Libya has opened its doors. From a Geotimes summary report, ‘Oil Around the World‘

The bird on the moon writes how great is the right to love.

One for the nameless

It has been windy
Here in this valley of winter
Here in this fantasia of familiar turned skeletal
Here in this body, even, this weathervane of memories.
With the wind, much is scattered about
Reckless debris being driven to who-knows-where
And who-knows-why.
Among the leaves, the bottles, the crumpled rejects of some scribe,
I know that scraps of love, pure love, are on wanton trajectory.
Ownerless love, spent and used love, outgrown love, love beyond repair…
Blowing around as plentifully as any other careless thing
You wouldn’t know that there’s so much orphaned and stained love
Rambling about each time the wind picks up.
There may be a worried and passion-worn photograph
In a flurry with all our other forgotten nameless jetsam
Skittering across the road, and you’re lost in your own whirlwind,
You might not see that one scrap winging by,
You might not see your own face
Caught in an amber of momentary bliss
Now darkened, now sloughed off, now as common as twigs and paper bags.
With all this bluster,
Let there then be a madman…
One who chases fruitlessly after all the trailing bygones
Who stitches together the improbable random stories of love lost
Who collects the discarded tears of broken dreams
Who exalts the song of love from atop a heap of time’s rubble
Who, though sullied and calloused by dashing here and there,
Vindicates love even in its waste
And from his daft collecting,
Holds up one for the nameless, the forsaken, the broke,
Summoning light to again enter the trashed years
I’ve left thoughtlessly behind in the wake of desires untouched.
Let the madman’s work remind, no, exclaim,
How great is the right to love
And cruel we are to toss it out the window
Wheeling down the road
Done with it
Without passing it on.

Let us all be madmen.

---

And bird on the moon writes for all of us.

Written for Friends

Love is the force most mysterious
For it abides through dark and light
Above and below
Through the royal sky of day and the bejeweled canopy of night.
Love has infinite names and no definite place
Yet it is written in your own bones
It wakes you and dreams you
Crystallized in a clear moment which none can own.
Love compels us to know ourselves
When distraction and hullabaloo competes to win
Self knowledge is galactic
Through it, we propel forward, and give from within.
Love propagates from itself
And creates potential in its wake, a gypsy dancer
You cannot help but to jump and exalt
For the question of love is its own answer.
Love is the force most mysterious
Yet somehow, you can touch it now, here;
You chose it, love chooses you,
Just this once, trust its embrace, for as with all Creation
It is ever present, and yet you are the one who chooses to hold it near.

---

The bird on the moon combines,

Madness and Love, Perpetual

O Virtue of the starry night
In the affirm’d sanctuary of friendship
That carries aloft the tears to the clouds
To let the crazed proclamations of seers and sages
Rain down as love and goodness upon the drought-strick’n land
I raise to this the offering my own heart’s illogical celestial drumming
…that through the life-willingness of the Earth
Shall ever deeper love and faith sprout
From the smallest and hopeless of
Seeds.

Alexander Kjerulf clips from George Bernard Shaw:

This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of Nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.

And also the only real tragedy in life is the being used by personally minded men for purposes which you recognize to be base.

All the rest is at worst mere misfortune or mortality: this alone is misery, slavery, hell on earth; and the revolt against it is the only force that offers a man’s work to the poor artist, whom our personally minded rich people would so willingly employ as pandar, buffoon, beauty monger, sentimentalizer and the like.”

And Alexander says,

Oh man – that has got to be one of the most inspiring, uplifting things ever written.

The passage about “being used by personally minded men for purposes which you recognize to be base”… if that’s not unhappiness at work I don’t know what is, and yet that’s exactly how many people feel about work.

I’m with Shaw on this one – we must revolt against it and be artists of our own lives.

You have lived so many lifetimes thinking that you were a caterpillar but dreaming of flight and feeling cursed to crawl along on the ground with an inner knowing you were meant for something more. You are, but that is not because you are a grounded caterpillar. It is because the caterpillar was just a delusion. You are a butterfly.

Grieve your lost self identity. Grieve the pain of consciously facing the fact that everything you ever thought you were was actually the very prison you always hoped to one day walk out of a as a free being. Grieve the sun that will never shine on your free face, the dance of freedom you will never dance, the knowledge of your great self that will never be found. Grieve, for the only freedom that is real is the freedom from you.

Goodbye, caterpillar.

Just as the highest and the lowest notes are equally inaudible, so perhaps, is the greatest sense and the greatest nonsense equally unintelligible. – Alan Watts

In fact, everything we encounter in this world with our six senses is an inkblot test. You see what you are thinking and feeling, seldom what you are looking at. – Shiqin

[whiskey river]

Eliminate the presidency.
Divide the USA into a half dozen or so regions (northeast, mid-atlantic, etc), and have each set of states elect an executive representative to serve on the federal executive cabinet.

And related advice at nordic graceland:

Put prerequisites on almost all political offices:
Only state governors or senators can run for the executive cabinet, only county EO’s can run for governor, only mayors can run for county EO, etc. Work your way up.

Power without love is reckless and abusive, and love without power is sentimental and anemic. – Martin Luther King

Higher oil prices are driving up food prices.

We are witnessing the beginning of one of the great tragedies of history.

The United States, in a misguided effort to reduce its oil insecurity by converting grain into fuel for cars, is generating global food insecurity on a scale never seen before.

More at FuturePundit

---

Psalm 127, Chapter 1:

Unless the Lord builds a house,
the work of the builders is wasted.
Unless the Lord protects a city,
guarding it with sentries will do no good.

G. W. Bush would “rather talk about sex than God”.

From nine hours of secret audio tapes and from a close adviser to Bush:

“He has absolutely zero interest in anything theological – nothing.”

“We spent hours talking about sex . . . who on the campaign was doing what to whom – but nothing about God. And I tried many, many times.”

Since the 1980s, Doug Wead was a surrogate Bush family member playing various roles in Bush Jr’s life as counselor, political adviser and spiritual companion. The campaign had prepared state-by-state analysis of the electorate. “When he got the one on Texas, his eyes just bugged out.” Bush said: “This is just great! I can become governor of Texas just with the evangelical vote.”

As he and [Karl] Rove later mapped out his presidential bid, Bush faced a new problem: how to retain the support of the right-wing evangelical leaders that he privately called “wackos” ….

The answer was to expand his support for religiously based treatment for drug and alcohol abuse into “faith-based initiatives”, his signature social policy. The phrase he picked up from Wead that encapsulated this philosophy was “compassionate conservatism”.

Wead asks rhetorically, “Is it all politically calculated?”

To help Wead answer his own question, Jacob Weisberg is reviewing nine hours of secretly recorded tapes:

The tapes reveal how political the faith of George W. Bush is.

Wead said that during the countless hours the two spent talking about religion over a dozen years, they discussed endlessly the implications of attending services at different congregations, how Bush could position himself in relation to various tricky questions and how he should handle various ministers and evangelical leaders.

In Jacob Weisberg’s analysis of these audio tapes and public data about Bush – tacked in the Entertainment Section at The Times – it’s clear we’ve seen too little information about the man and his supporters.

[It]…comes at a tragic cost. A too crude religious understanding has limited Bush’s ability to comprehend the world. The habit of pious simplification has undermined the decider’s decision-making.

Major media hoodwinks us. The fibs that drew fundamentalists and too many others to vote for G. W. Bush were easy to unravel. These few years have shown us we do not receive adequate analysis of political candidates.

This AP story is a short and sorta lame update about lead pollution in our world.

Dust, Air, Water
(AP) — The dangers of lead in some toys are well-known, but there are plenty of other ways people can be exposed to the metal.

Reminds me how to describe a banker:

A banker has silver in their hair,
gold in their teeth
and lead in their ass.

And AP posted another story warning that as lead accumulates it damages the older brain too:

(AP) — Could it be that the “natural” mental decline that afflicts many older people is related to how much lead they absorbed decades before?

That’s the provocative idea emerging from some recent studies, part of a broader area of new research that suggests some pollutants can cause harm that shows up only years after someone is exposed.

Do not design great policies
I pointed out in a previous post that a banker has silver in their hair, gold in their teeth and lead in their ass. That’s cute but maybe way off the mark because sometimes I wonder if bankers deserve that much credit.

I’m surprised by these self-serving, trite and confusing remarks (perhaps I’m cynical and harsh) made in Davos by Jamie Dimon, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer of the renowned JP Morgan Chase and Company.

MR. DIMON: Thank you very much. First of all, I also appreciate being invited to Davos. And I was once asked, you know, what’s the most important thing to you personally, not as a corporate executive, and I answered that humanity is obviously the most important. So I really applaud Madame Secretary, Tony Blair, Henry Kissinger, for the work they’ve done, you know, trying to make this a better world, which I think is the most important thing we do.

You know, as a corporate executive, one of the things that I think most – I think I probably speak for most corporations here – they really do try hard to be great corporate citizens, whether it’s, you know, helping the disabled or getting jobs or the homeless or charities or after catastrophes being helpful. And climate change – I won’t go through a lot of it, but in terms of investing in technology, building green buildings, testing green branches.

But one of the things that is – I just think is so important it that – that’s helped this world a lot is globalization. And globalization itself is being attacked from the left, it’s being attacked from the right, and there are legitimate concerns and some legitimate losers in globalization that, you know, we should thoughtfully think about and talk about.

But if you talk about the poverty, you know, most economists say the last 20-30 years globalization has taken something like 2 billion people out of poverty. And this also brought the world closer. You know, most of us now – you know, a lot of people travel around the world. They have friends around the world. It’s made a big difference.

So I just urge that we continue to work not just as corporations but as individuals on things like globalization. And I think, Klaus, like you said, they are things that take collaboration, that it’s not going to be determined by, you know, a corporation or just even one country.

And the other – one last point is that there’s good policy and bad policy, and you know, the road to hell is paved with good intentions There are a lot of people, I always hear, have these fabulous values – which I believe in the values – but I think their policies may very well have the opposite effect. And so we have to be very careful at designing great policies.

AttentionMax lists 10 maxims from the wisdom of Albert Einstein.

Who? Albert Einstein, the German-born theoretical physicist, best known for his theory of relativity, and recipient of the Nobel Prize in Physics? Yes.

For all the brilliance, punditry and eloquence of today’s marketing pundits, the teachings of Albert Einstein offer far superior insights and lessons into business and marketing – even life, for that matter.

Over the years my favorite quote from Einstein is,

“Follow your curiosity. It’s the only thing that knows where you’re going.”

After a few hours ignoring annoyance and discomfort, it was clear from the start to this reporter that the Count von Backenforth Collection has been unfairly restrained or some say arrested in what the neighbors are calling a Tiffany Cacophony.

It’s common in these art and auction suburbs when declining mortgage values bring high value artifacts to the Saturday flea markets. There’s regal and there’s derelict. Goods are spooned like turkey stuffing from nearby public warehouse rentals to peddler stands under the white tents west of the pavement at First and Benedict Street.

If there are rich discoveries, it’s on the radio and the local public television, but everyone has a cover story like they found it near Tahiti or were guided by an inner way, and no, no Canadian cigarettes were in the back of the car since the dollar is in the basement.

A Backenforth attorney was found by this reporter to be in town. He said, ignoring the box of documents filed yesterday, that whether this is the way or that was, we should only bid during the Friday Sale please. He said to notice there was a reserve bid for four lots of the rolled way, the three are new and fortified, listed in the evening auction programme as New Tzu A, New Tzu AB, New Tzu A#3. These are the newest lots of Tzu since last October and are registered as revenue plus commission. He also said it doesn’t matter what they say later since the city’s cost and cashflow is included, he had a name for it he said, joking that he remembered the first time Ayn Rand called taxation “the squaring of the loop”, his words exactly.

I’ve also heard the Count von Backenforth offspring have filed eleven claims for property against the Huntingmen Archives in Santa Berra County Court on the 5th next month. At lunch the Clerk said they overheard the Bakenforth children say the Huntingmen’s authority isn’t valid and wasn’t in the Backenforth will and testament but scribbled on some cocktail bar brochure. The children say it’s a dilution of compensation, that’s what they wrote in the deposition, but he said it’s more along the lines of the missing automated deposits that were overdue Thursday.

Exclusive in this paper, you’ll be the first to hear the children settled the Count von Backenforth claims against Huntingmen Archives. They said the new Agreement about automated deposits would be increased by 14 per cent.

Later in the afternoon the judge said the details of the case were sealed but a new compensation award had been ordered by the Court. The deal gives the immediate von Backenforth survivors full rights to the old south county Bernard factory that has been held under another dubious Trust at the Huntingmen.

“It’s a fight to reverse global warming”, they said Tuesday, “By reducing rail, trucking, pipe and bottle tonnage weight and eliminating Schwarzenegger’s plan to expand the San Joaquin Irrigation Canal east of Phoenix, from here on out the von Backenforth’s New American Bernard Brand will soon will be the world’s top firm in dehydrated water.”

Coming to a subdivision near you is a small power plant with no emissions.

Hyperion Power Generation is promoting a new design for a small scale nuclear power system developed at Los Alamos National Laboratory that is a cleaner greener method of providing electrical power.

“The portable nuclear reactor is the size of a hot tub.

“It’s shaped like a cup, filled with a uranium hydride core and surrounded by a hydrogen atmosphere.

“Sealed in a buried concrete vault, refueled every five years, its steam turbine generates nonstop power for 25,000 homes.”

These are children’s views while learning science…

• The law of gravity says it’s not fair jumping up without coming back down.

• The earth knows its distance from the sun, but it’s really only centrificating.
• Someday we may discover how to make magnets that can point in any direction.
• They say our sun is a star, but it still knows how to change back into a sun in the daytime.
• A vibration is a motion that cannot make up its mind which way it wants to go.
• Rainbows are just to look at, not to really understand.

Clipped from European media:

John McCain, is being billed as the Republican liberals can live with. He is “a bipartisan progressive””, “a principled hard liberal”, “a decent man”…

He brags he would be happy for US troops to remain in Iraq for 100 years.

Don’t be fooled by the myth of John McCain. John McCain is to the right of George Bush across a whole range of subjects. He is the Republican candidate we should fear the most.

…
McCain is third-generation navy royalty, raised from a young age to be a senior figure in the Armed Forces, like his father and grandfather before him. He was sent to one of the most elite boarding schools in America, then to a naval academy where he ranked 894th out of 899 students in ability. He used nepotism to get ahead: when he was rejected by the National War College, he used his father’s contacts with the Secretary of the Navy to make them reconsider. He then swiftly married the heiress to a multi-million dollar fortune.

…
Right up to his twenties, he remained a strikingly violent man, “ready to fight at the drop of a hat”, according to his biographer Robert Timberg. This rage seems to be at the core of his personality: describing his own childhood, McCain has written: “At the smallest provocation I would go off into a mad frenzy, and then suddenly crash to the floor unconscious. When I got angry I held my breath until I blacked out.”

…
…he used his wife’s fortune to run to as a Republican senator.

He was a standard-issue Reaganite corporate Republican – until the Keating Five corruption scandal consumed him. [collapse of most USA Savings and Loans] In 1987, it was revealed that McCain, along with four other senators, had taken huge campaign donations from a fraudster called Charles Keating. …pressured government regulators not to look too hard into Keating’s affairs, allowing him to commit even more fraud. …turned the scandal into a debate about the political system, rather than his own personal corruption.

Oh, there’s more…an über-hawk on foreign policy:

To give a brief smorgasbord of his views: at a recent rally, he sang “Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran,” to the tune of the Beach Boys’ “Barbara Ann”. He says North Korea should be threatened with “extinction”.

Rules of Thumb intends to collect every rule of thumb on earth.

The website offers social voting to discard junk and promote tips and wisdom. Methinks it will be awhile before pearls float to the top. The new database is small. If you have a few sayings, truisms, shortcuts, tenets of ancient wisdom, stop by to populate the archive. In time, perhaps humanity can benefit from a library of distilled wisdom.

Current samples

You can think ahead half your age.
To get the most out of your car, treat it like a pet.
When the bird and the bird book disagree, believe the bird.
If your feet are cold, put on your hat.
If you’re thirsty, you’ve waited too long.
If an ad is well designed, it will look just as good upside down.
The moon rises 50 minutes later than it did the day before.
Never see a doctor whose office isn’t large enough to swing a cat.