Sometimes the current

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Is with you, and sometimes against;



Who keeps changing it?





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The Naked Sun

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It's the title of a 1957 sci-fi novel by Isaac Asimov. 😃

It was translated in French, as Face aux feux du soleil, by André-Yves Richard in 1961.



Good question!



Related Entry:


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Cognition

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There... I fixed it for you:





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For, isn't it the truth though?

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The unique character of the place does not lie so much in detail as in broad effects.

It's all part of the charm—the all-inclusive quality and unwitting self-reflective veracity of a random comment like this one:





For, isn't it true though?

People who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.





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Which One Doesn't Belong?

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This is Which One Doesn't Belong?, a website dedicated to providing thought-provoking puzzles for children and grown ups alike. There are no answers provided as there are many different, correct ways of choosing which one doesn't belong.



Birds of a feather...



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The Problem With Magic

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Contempt for the People

I didn't like it, then, when the Bush-Cheney administration was doing it.

And I don't like it, now, when the Obama administration does it.

Transactional Analysis calls it a Crossed Transaction:



A Crossed transaction is one in which the ego-state being responded to is not the ego-states that was addressing the respondent.

While usually not intentional (i.e. non-conscious), this state of things however can be deliberate where politics is concerned—and oftentimes carefully cultivated (the father figure still remains to this day a proven potent political archetype).

Happens all the time.

Especially in a system, where the relationship between a wealthy political elite and ordinary citizens is not unlike that between nobles and commoners.

Low levels of education and literacy and a debilitated media (subservient to the aforementioned elite) mean that many people are not fully informed about what matters to them. Their deliberate isolation from social, economical and ecological realities means that many do not even think of politics, other than the unexamined commonplace and misleading talking points of the day being served to them by the media (aka disinformation). There is a common feeling that the average person cannot affect the politics of the country, so there is no reason to try (other than once every few years—those who still have faith in the system—during election time).

As for those who try...



Except, that, as it turns out, the Republican caucus really does have nothing to do with it, does it, Mr. President?




Just as the Republican Caucus really had nothing to do either with the "no public option" backroom deal you made with the for-profit hospital lobby in Summer 2009 (I know what you did last Summer).

In a perfect modern representative democracy, of course, the ideal line of communication between the people and their political representatives would be the mature and rational "Adult-Adult" relationship:



Talking at the same level as the other person acts to create trust.

Don't hold your breath, though—it's not going to happen.

There is nothing that politicians fear most than an educated and informed population.

In politics, people are not to be "informed," they are to be "handled" (this is Machiavellianism-101, for you).

"Controlling-Parent" politicians invites their constituents into a Child state where they may conform with their demands. The Adaptive "naughty child" and rebel, of course, is, a natural byproduct of that kind of dynamic. The Adaptive Child reacts to the world around them, either changing themselves to fit in or rebelling against the forces they feel. But "naughty children" have always been so easy to marginalize—especially with the help of the compliant media. They can be manipulated and their anger and frustration channeled and redirected (e.g. Tea Party movement), or they can be ridiculed and dismissed as irrelevant (e.g. President Obama's most favored method in handling dissent from his progressive base).
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Strangers in a Strange Land

Come to think of it, there is something that strikes me as oddly familiar about Palobi and Mudeya.

Especially Palobi...



I think he reminds me of Jazzolog.

Anyway, it's just so nice to see that really true gem of a documentary aired on TV again.

I just so happened to catch it on TV5 Monde last Wednesday:



And the National Geographic will be airing it again next week, on Monday:



The central importance of entering into worlds other than our own—and hence of anthropology itself—lies in the fact that the experience leads us to understand that our own world is also a cultural construct.
~Walter Goldschmidt
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A Matter of Semantics - part two

BATTLE:LA
So why are these aliens coming to Earth in the first place?

Jonathan Liebesman explains: "Earth is 70 percent water. The aliens in our movie use water for many different things, so they are here for those natural resources."

Or as Winston Churchill would have put it:



People are accustomed to their birth culture, I guess. There is no way around it: people know what they know. One grows up absorbing the values and behaviors of one's own culture and develops patterns of thought reflecting the culture as normal.

This is, no doubt, one of the things that make it difficult for scriptwriters to imagine behaviors of entities from a different culture from the perspective of what a different culture could possibly be like rather than from their own.

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Everything is complicated or not

"For more than most films, Airbender is made for a 10-and-younger audience and a 10-and-younger audience alone...Airbender, whether intentionally or not, is pegged almost exclusively to a small-fry state of mind."
---Kenneth Turan

LOL



Here they go again...

It is a curious phenomenon, but there seems to be an uncommon consistency to it:

The Last Airbender has not even begun showing yet and already M. Night Shyamalan haters are all bent out of shape about it (pun intended).

They have been at it for months!

And it's like that any time the man releases a new movie.

In this line of business, negative attention is better than no attention at all, I suppose, and M. Night Shyamalan is in good company: witness the critics' vitriolic reviews of Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland. There are directors like that who leave no one indifferent.



What to say?

I think Scott Adams has it right:

"You've probably noticed that opinion pollsters go out of their way to include as many morons as possible in surveys ... I think it's dangerous to inform morons about what their fellow morons are thinking. It only reinforces their opinions. And the one thing worse than a moron with an opinion is lots of them."

Case in point:





In other words: Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups. (Has anyone here ever watched the Academy Awards or gotten involved in politics lately?)

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Knowledege alone is a poor primer

Cause and effect?

That's not it at all.


There's a hole in the bucket, dear Liza, dear Liza, there's a hole in the bucket.

A closed system lacks the ability to renew itself.

./.
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Every whisper . . .

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Black is the color

We have always been a little wary of religious zealots. You know, like Saint Gorgeous or the Holy Rollers.

Or The Really Righteous Atheist Brothers.

The Atheist Brothers can be downright boring, actually. If nothing else, there is some measure of entertainment value to Saint Gorgeous or the Holy Rollers. As I always say, if you're going to get religious on me, at least make it fun! I don't know, use your imagination. Ride a funny cubicle car, like the Pope does. Or go skyclad like The Sisters of La Vecchia Religione.

Kali Mystics are alright. As a matter of fact, the bartender fixed one for me, just last night.

I mean, the real thing. None of that Amaretto/Rum/7-up crap they serve in some places.

The bartender actually used black vodka. And while I do usually prefer my drinks on the dry side, I thought the hint of black raspberry liqueur was a nice touch.

This Martini comes with a black olive, of course! No maraschino cherry at The Wulfshead. No, sir.

Black will always be the color that defines style and sophistication. There is an undeniable mystic allure to it. As the bartender put it: "it definitely has a place in the world of spirits."


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It must be . . .

That's right . . .

. . . MARDI GRAS!

I have brought some beads . . .



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Sounds like . . .

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One translation, by Joji Hirota:

Kokiriko's length measures
Seven and a half suns
The long side reaches
To the kimono's sleeves cuff

The window frame sounds like
Dedereko den
That frame also sounds like
Dedereko den

In the mountain opposite
The Bulbuls are crying
They cry and fall
They cry and rise

The window frame sounds like...

In the mountain opposite
What is that thing that is shining?
Is it the stars, the fireflies or
the gold bugs glittering?

The window frame sounds like...

=================================================
The Kokiriko is an instrument made of old bamboo that was used on the roofs of old farmhouses. Its length is 7 and a half sun, a traditional measure (about 23 cm - any longer and it would catch in the kimono sleeves.) The Sasara consists of a succession of rectangular wooden slats strung together with a rope .


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We have a soul at times *

I value that little phrase "I don't know" so highly. It's small, but it flies on mighty wings. It expands our lives to include spaces within us as well as the outer expanses in which our tiny Earth hangs suspended.
---Wislawa Szymborska

In a debate that has all too often been contaminated with dogmatism and where political or "spiritual" leaders and wannabe gurus of all stripes parade before us and lecture us about "Truth" (whatever "Truth" is for whomever it is who happens to be "uttering" it at the time), it's a rare voice that has the courage to confess the limits of what we really know, and remind us instead that progress flows from uncertainty and doubt.

In her 1996 Nobel Prize lecture, Polish poet Szymborska commented that for people who know, "what they know is enough for them once and for all. They don't want to find out about anything else, since that might diminish the force of their arguments."

As for those who don't know..."their work becomes one continuous adventure ... A swarm of new questions emerge from every problem they solve. Whatever inspiration is, it's born from a continuous 'I don't know.'"

* A Few Words On The Soul by Wislawa Szymborska We have a soul at times. No one's got it non-stop, for keeps. Day after day, year after year may pass without it. Sometimes it will settle for awhile only in childhood's fears and raptures. Sometimes only in astonishment that we are old. It rarely lends a hand in uphill tasks, like moving furniture, or lifting luggage, or going miles in shoes that pinch. It usually steps out whenever meat needs chopping or forms have to be filled. For every thousand conversations it participates in one, if even that, since it prefers silence. Just when our body goes from ache to pain, it slips off-duty. It's picky: it doesn't like seeing us in crowds, our hustling for a dubious advantage and creaky machinations make it sick. Joy and sorrow aren't two different feelings for it. It attends us only when the two are joined. We can count on it when we're sure of nothing and curious about everything. Among the material objects it favors clocks with pendulums and mirrors, which keep on working even when no one is looking. It won't say where it comes from or when it's taking off again, though it's clearly expecting such questions. We need it but apparently it needs us for some reason too.

Translated from the Polish by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh. Strong relativism and openness are well known to be important dimensions in the temporal sphere at the basis of Wislawa Szymborska's poetry. The way in which she links the past with the present, the present with what is to come and the event/experience of a moment with the weightless dimension of eternity is what gives her poetry its greatest strength. ---Malgorzata Anna Packalén: A Domestication of Death: The Poetic Universe of Wislawa Szymborska

(Reprinted from a previous post, with Tlingel's permission)

© Illustration: from a "A Bit of Madness," by Mosdi and Civiello

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