As a self-rebuttal, or at least refinement, to yesterday's dour reflection on Perky Life Advice, I will refer to the 1/9/2017 New York Times article-ette, Stop and Acknowledge How Much Luck Has had to Do with Your Success.

It reads: I have a lucky friend. Chances are you know him. He has written several New York Times best sellers. By any outward ( Read more... )

I am trying to reassess myself and look more objectively at my attitudes and what I've been doing by habit that isn't currently useful. One horrid habit of mind that I have is rehearsing to myself the snotty little narrative "It's The Other Person's Fault." It's so transparent when I see someone else doing it, which means *gasps* my self-serving ( Read more... )

Had a dream which I suspicion is all Freudian and meaningful or possibly not. You tell me ( Read more... )

Pardon me while I work this out outloud. Sorry if you have heard this before from me: I am still working on it ( Read more... )

This is an addon to a previous post, where I said this:

I've heard some b*llsh*t wherein we leave ourselves some wiggle room to be actual free actors by saying, well, the brain works with chemicals, and the chemicals are made of objects small enough for quantum effects to throw on some randomosity, but on the average ...

and explodingbat asked if I had read ( Read more... )

How much do you conceptualize a task at hand, a goal, as an item separate and distinct from the people and machinery used to accomplish the task? Does the physical size or importance of the goal factor in?

Spent October 17th in a set of lectures on the history of the New Testament, as offered by Bart Ehrman via the Smithsonian. He's a prof at UNC Chapel Hill, and boy can he talk. He held my attention for nearly 3/4 of the day, leaving only the last lecture for me to squirm and snooze through.

The Smithsonian's S. Dillon Ripley Center looks like a ( Read more... )

Since we had a recent centi-thread here about religion, I have to comment on Chris Hitchens talking about how religion is poisonous for children ( Read more... )

At the "moment of lightning and thunder" I saw something even weirder than usual - I saw the structure of the universe on a small scale ( Read more... )

I checked out McLuhan, the Man and his Message. I figure, thinking being what it is, someone has a specialty under which the whole phenomenon of clusters of thought is explored ad nauseum, and I should find it and read it in case he had something to say about it. Plus someone recommended I read about McLuhan years ago ( Read more... )