Clipmarks | abailart's clips

Some Precepts of Engaged Buddhism

Fri, 06 Nov 2009 14:38:36 GMT

clipped by: abailart

Do not be idolatrous about or bound to any doctrine, theory, or ideology, even Buddhist ones.

Do not think the knowledge you presently possess is changeless, absolute truth. Avoid being narrow minded and bound to present views. Learn and practice nonattachment from views in order to be open to receive others' viewpoints. Truth is found in life and not merely in conceptual knowledge. Be ready to learn throughout your entire life and to observe reality in yourself and in the world at all times.

help others renounce fanaticism and narrow-mindedness.

Do not accumulate wealth while millions are hungry.

Do not spread news that you do not know to be certain. Do not criticize or condemn things of which you are not sure.

Do not kill. Do not let others kill.

Respect the property of others, but prevent others from profiting from human suffering or the suffering of other species on Earth.

From the book 'Interbeing': Fourteen Guidelines for Engaged Buddhism, revised edition: Oct. l993 by Thich Nhat Hanh

Tags: thich nhat hanh, engaged buddhism

Mediocrity

Tue, 03 Nov 2009 16:03:25 GMT

clipped by: abailart

Clip Source: quote.robertgenn.com

Normal is not something to aspire to, it's something to get away from. (Jodie Foster)

There is always a heavy demand for fresh mediocrity. In every generation the least cultivated taste has the largest appetite. (Paul Gauguin)

"Mediocrity" doesn't mean average intelligence, it means an average intelligence that resents and envies its betters. (Ayn Rand)

Certainly that sputterless little candleflame of the mediocre mind known as 'common sense' has never produced anything worth celebrating. (Tom Robbins)

Mediocre minds usually dismiss anything which reaches beyond their own understanding. (Francois de La Rochefoucauld)

Mediocrity knows nothing higher than itself, but talent instantly recognizes genius. (Sir Arthur Conan Doyle)

Great artists are people who find the way to be themselves in their art. Any sort of pretension induces mediocrity in art and life alike. (Margot Fonteyn)

Idleness is fatal only to the mediocre. (Albert Camus)

Tags: mediocrity

Is Intelligence Sexy?

Mon, 02 Nov 2009 22:22:39 GMT

clipped by: abailart
clipper's remarks: <<<Many traits in many species have evolved through sexual selection specifically to function as fitness indicators that reveal good genes and good health. Sexually selected fitness indicators typically show (1) higher coefficients of phenotypic and genetic variation than survival traits, (2) at least moderate genetic heritabilities and (3) positive correlations with many aspects of an animal's general condition, including body size, body symmetry, parasite resistance, longevity and freedom from deleterious mutations. These diagnostic criteria also appear to describe human intelligence (the g factor).>>> (from abstract).

So then, is there some sort of mirror neuron circuitry in the brain that excites a cortical g spot?

Clip Source: www3.interscience.wiley.com

during human evolution, mate choice by both sexes focused increasingly on intelligence as a major heritable component of biological fitness. Many human-specific behaviours (such as conversation, music production, artistic ability and humour) may have evolved principally to advertise intelligence during courtship. Though these mental adaptations may be modular at the level of psychological functioning, their efficiencies may be tightly intercorrelated because they still tap into common genetic and neurophysiological variables associated with fitness itself. Although the g factor (like the superordinate factor of fitness itself) probably exists in all animal species, humans evolved an unusually high degree of interest in assessing each other's intelligence during courtship and other social interactions

Tags: g factor, sex

The Reassurance of Magic

Tue, 27 Oct 2009 08:32:43 GMT

clipped by: abailart
clipper's remarks: A very straightforward polemic to chew over between the cornflakes and the coffee. (Certainly, almost anything is better than pop science).

Clip Source: newhumanist.org.uk

It could well be that religion is a better discipline than pop science, when it comes to shaping the rational intellect

Beliefs which fill the existential void are not scientific beliefs. We don’t arrive at them by the hypothetico-deductive method, or by observation of the empirical world. They are matters of faith – that is to say, of certainties that cannot be grounded by anything more certain than themselves. But these foundational beliefs perform their reassuring function only if they carry with them a message of love.

It is, to my way of thinking, a paradox of the new humanism, that it looks on human beings through the lens of evolution, but refuses to accept what evolution tells us. The need for foundations is quite clearly an adaptation, and these foundations must provide the promise of protection and love, if they are to fit the new organism for its brief time in the world.

Tags: knee-jerk reactions, thinking with the spinal cord, individuation, thinking skills

Defenders of Christianity

Wed, 21 Oct 2009 09:31:18 GMT

clipped by: abailart
clipper's remarks: Thank goodness it was all so long ago.

Clip Source: wapedia.mobi

'We shall not tolerate in our ranks anyone who hurts Christian ideas.'

Hitler

The Oxford Group was a Christian movement that had a following in Europe and America in the 1920s and 1930s. It was initiated by an American Lutheran pastor Dr. Frank Buchman,

Buchman referred to Himmler as "a great lad"

'He lets us have house-parties whenever we like.' He did not seem to think much of England or of Canada: England was in a terrible state — 'seething with Communism'; and so was Canada.

I thank Heaven for a man like Adolf Hitler, who built a front line of defense against the anti-Christ of Communism,

Through such a man God could control a nation overnight and solve every last, bewildering problem.

The world needs the dictatorship of the living spirit of God.

Human problems aren't economic. They're moral and they can't be solved by immoral measures.

they could be solved through a God-controlled Fascist dictatorship.

Tags: oxford group, national socialism

Ratzinger on his way to UK

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 18:06:47 GMT

clipped by: abailart

Clip Source: www.guardian.co.uk

Save us, O Lord, save us all. Save us from the Pope. Joseph Ratzinger is coming to Britain. Gordon Brown is "delighted". David Cameron is "delighted". I am "repelled". Let him come; I applaud freedom of speech. But no red carpets, please. No biscuits. No Queen.

Ratzinger's job to investigate the child abuse scandal that plagued the Catholic church for decades

investigations should be handled "in the most secretive way . . . restrained by a perpetual silence"

Aids, Ratzinger says, "cannot be overcome through the distribution of condoms, which even aggravates the problems". That is a lie. Not a fantasy, like the virgin birth and all the other magical, mystical nonsense, but a dangerous lie.

homosexuality is "an intrinsic moral evil".

sees the push for female priests as driven by "spokeswomen for radical feminists, especially lesbians".

suppression of Liberation Theology, a Latin American movement that insists that social justice is the central purpose of Christianity

Tags: ratzinger

Hard Times: facts

Tue, 29 Sep 2009 07:38:12 GMT

clipped by: abailart
clipper's remarks: Hrad Times, Charles Dickens (an English novelist. Bah!)

Clip Source: www.doceo.co.uk

"Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, sir!"

THOMAS GRADGRIND, sir. A man of realities. A man of facts and calculations. A man who proceeds upon the principle that two and two are four, and nothing over, and who is not to be talked into allowing for anything over. Thomas Gradgrind, sir-peremptorily Thomas-Thomas Gradgrind. With a rule and a pair of scales, and the multiplication table always in his pocket, sir, ready to weigh and measure any parcel of human nature, and tell you exactly what it comes to. It is a mere question of figures, a case of simple arithmetic.

Clip Source: 3.bp.blogspot.com

Clip Source: guncarryinglibrarian.files.wordpress.com

Tags: hard times

A Mind All Logic is Like a Knife All Blade.....

Mon, 28 Sep 2009 19:59:46 GMT

clipped by: abailart

Clip Source: allpoetry.com

A mind all logic is like a knife all blade. It makes the hand bleed that uses it.

Age considers; youth ventures.

Beauty is truth's smile when she beholds her own face in a perfect mirror.

Bigotry tries to keep truth safe in its hand with a grip that kills it.

Clouds come floating into my life, no longer to carry rain or usher storm, but to add color to my sunset sky.

Do not say, 'It is morning,' and dismiss it with a name of yesterday. See it for the first time as a newborn child that has no name.

Rabindranath Tagore (7 May 1861 – 7 August 1941),γ[›] sobriquet Gurudev,δ[›] was an Indian -Bengali polymath. As a poet, novelist, painter ,musician, and playwright, he reshaped Bengali literature and music in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. As author of Gitanjali and its "profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse",[1] he became Asia's first Nobel laureate by winning the 1913 Nobel Prize in Literature

Tags: rabindranath tagore

Metaphors We Live By

Mon, 28 Sep 2009 16:54:42 GMT

clipped by: abailart
clipper's remarks: A short step whence to seeing all language as metaphor and metaphor as the meeting of the body and consciousness. Hard to stomach for right-angled rationalists, those who carry tablets of stone truths, number crunchers and those who live in a bricked-up mind. Spot the metaphors.

Clip Source: www.boston.com

When we describe an issue as weighty, we have not actually used a scale to determine this. And when we say a piece of news is hard to swallow, no one assumes we have tried unsuccessfully to eat it.

whether they’re being deployed by poets, politicians, football coaches, or realtors, metaphors are primarily thought of as tools for talking and writing--out of inspiration or out of laziness, we distill emotions and thoughts into the language of the tangible world.

Friends in high places

"The abstract way we think is really grounded in the concrete, bodily world much more than we thought,”

the human body, in all its particularity, shapes the mind, suggesting that much of what we think of as abstract reasoning

Tags: lakoff and johnson, metaphor, embodied mind

Is the Internet melting our brains?

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 07:58:59 GMT

clipped by: abailart
clipper's remarks: I start with Plato's critique of writing where he says that if we depend on writing, we will lose the ability to remember things. Our memory will become weak. And he also criticizes writing because the written text is not interactive in the way spoken communication is. He also says that written words are essentially shadows of the things they represent. They're not the thing itself. Of course we remember all this because Plato wrote it down -- the ultimate irony.

We hear a thousand objections of this sort throughout history: Thoreau objecting to the telegraph, because even though it speeds things up, people won't have anything to say to one another. Then we have Samuel Morse, who invents the telegraph, objecting to the telephone because nothing important is ever going to be done over the telephone because there's no way to preserve or record a phone conversation.

Clip Source: www.salon.com

Sept. 19, 2009 | By now the arguments are familiar: Facebook is ruining our social relationships; Google is making us dumber; texting is destroying the English language as we know it. We're facing a crisis, one that could very well corrode the way humans have communicated since we first evolved from apes. What we need, so say these proud Luddites, is to turn our backs on technology and embrace not the keyboard, but the pencil.

Such sentiments, in the opinion of Dennis Baron, are nostalgic, uninformed hogwash. A professor of English and linguistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Baron seeks to provide the historical context that is often missing from debates about the way technology is transforming our lives in his new book, "A Better Pencil." His thesis is clear: Every communication advancement throughout human history, from the pencil to the typewriter to writing itself, has been met with fear, skepticism and a longing for the medium that's been displaced.

Tags: communication media

Anti-Science and Global Warming

Fri, 25 Sep 2009 07:53:36 GMT

clipped by: abailart
clipper's remarks: Interesting. Seems to imply that some people without any knowledge of science or any science training 'know' that smoking isn't bad for you etc. If a thousand cardiologists say you need a heart operation and ten scientists paid by a pharma company say you don't who'd you go for?

Clip Source: scienceblogs.com

Anti-Science and Who Does It
Anti-science (or agnotology), seeks to cover-up or obscure science considered inconvenient, or at least create doubt in the minds of public and decision-makers. It seeks to replace knowledge with ignorance, and has no resemblance to normal arguments within science, by scientists.

So, if you wonder how and why so many people, especially in North America, are confused about the current state of climate science, this is an excellent introduction to the key players and tactics.

Sample Chapters and Topics

Modern anti-science is most skilfully executed by a relatively small subset of lobbyists and PR agencies. Some of the most effective are actually "think tanks".

as is well-documented in the Tobacco Archives.

4 - The age of astroturfing P

8 - Denial by the pound

9 - Junk scientists

John Mashey's Amazon review of Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming by James Hoggan.

Tags: science

FDR: electric Power and Health Reform

Thu, 24 Sep 2009 09:11:57 GMT

clipped by: abailart
clipper's remarks: <<<The political anger was fierce and unrelenting at this and other Roosevelt initiatives. According to New Deal historian William Edward Leuchtenberg, one US Senator compared the President to the beast of the Apocalypse, "who sets his slimy mark on everything." One enraged citizen wrote to FDR, "If you were a good and honest man, Jesus Christ would not have crippled you."

The REA public option survived the frenzy. By the time the juice reached our neighborhood, more than 90 percent of American farms were electrified, nearly all of them by rural electric coops.

At the worst of the storm against Roosevelt's initiatives, it seemed there were no limits to incivility. >>>

Clip Source: www.newwest.net

It's intriguing to study FDR's fight with conservatives over public power, in the light of today's fury at health care reform. Unlike President Obama, Roosevelt showed no interest in being a uniter who would seek bipartisan consensus through compromise. None of that. He was proud to be a divider, and relished taunting his conservative enemies. "They are unanimous in their hatred of me," he told a 1936 radio audience, "and I welcome their hatred."

When he couldn't get what he wanted from Congress, Roosevelt winged it on his own. In creating REA by Executive Order 7037 in 1935, he consulted neither his Republican opposition nor the electrical utility giants who so furiously raged together. He did it without a Washington DC consensus and made it one of the most successful government programs ever.

Socialistic, un-American, undermining the very fabric of democracy.

editors all over the country railed at the specter of Big Government

Tags: health reform, us political history

Free Lectures and Courses...

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 19:48:27 GMT

clipped by: abailart
clipper's remarks: This was clipped some time ago by someone to whom I add thanks. Newer clippers may find it interesting. I've detailed the astronomy items as that is what I was searching for.

Clip Source: www.openculture.com

Free Lectures & Courses from Great Universities (Audio and Video)

Astronomy

Astrobiology and Space Exploration – iTunes – Lynn Rotschild, Stanford

Astronomy 101 – iTunes – Web Site – Scott Miller, Mercedes Richards & Stephen Redman, Penn State

Frontiers and Controversies in Astrophysics - Download Course – Charles Bailyn, Yale

Introduction to General Astronomy – iTunes – Feed – Alex Filippenko, UC Berkeley

Humanities & Social Sciences

Archaeology

Architecture

Art History

Cultural Studies

Economics

Geography

History

Literature

Philosophy

Political Science, International Relations and Law

Religion

Sociology

Urban Studies

Sciences Aeronautics

Biology

Chemistry

Computer Science & Artificial Intelligence

Earth Sciences

Engineering (Mechanical, Civil and Electrical)

Geology

Information Sciences

Mathematics

Natural Resources

Physics

Psychology & Cognitive Sciences

Business

General Open Course Collections

The best free cultural & educational media on the web

Tags: university lectures and courses

Madness and Civilisation

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 10:23:25 GMT

clipped by: abailart

Clip Source: www.hermitary.com

Foucault states: “In the fifteenth century the gryllos, image of human madness, becomes one of the preferred figures in the countless Temptations.”

The creatures depicted in church art as gryllos (half human, half fantastic animal) and the hybrid monsters of Bosch’s semi-religious paintings are projections of the psychology of a dying culture, a culture riddled with fear and madness.

Clip Source: www.ibiblio.org

Clip Source: www.hermitary.com

the dissolution of the spiritual is, as Foucault shows, the dissolution of reason (or reasonableness) and the ascent of madness in culture.

Fear and madness are the plagues of a culture that cannot tolerate solitude, silence, simplicity, harmony with nature

The end of the world is suggested not by anything real but because the minds and hearts of the people require it.

Tags: eremitism, foucault, madness and civilisation

Dark Mountain

Tue, 22 Sep 2009 09:19:17 GMT

clipped by: abailart

Clip Source: www.dark-mountain.net

These are precarious and unprecedented times. Our economies crumble, while beyond the chaos of markets, the ecological foundations of our way of living near collapse. Little that we have taken for granted is likely to come through this century intact.

As a society, we are all still hooked on a vision of the future as an upgraded version of the present. Somehow, technology or political agreements or ethical shopping or mass protest are meant to save our civilisation from self-destruction.

Deeper than oil, steel or bullets, a civilisation is built on stories: on the myths that shape it and the tales told of its origins and destiny. We have herded ourselves to the edge of a precipice with the stories we have told ourselves about who we are: the stories of ‘progress’, of the conquest of ‘nature’, of the centrality and supremacy of the human species.

It is time for new stories. The Dark Mountain Project intends to conjure into being new ways of seeing and writing about the world.

Tags: dark mountain project