It is as though the partners at my former dental practice believe that a black person who has made it to success in a white-dominated field like dentistry is expected to show gratitude and humility, and to “act white.”
– Dr. Misee Harris, Racial discrimination & resignation of Dr. Misee Harris – An Open Letter to media
Maybe “mindfulness,” at least as we conceive of it in the U.S. nowadays, has its drawbacks:
Humanity’s battle against its brain has, at least since written language commenced, been epic. Countless metaphysical fables and invasive therapies have been created to describe our place in existence and treat the neuroses that often follow. One of the most popular modern formats is the resurgence of Buddhist mindfulness, the practice of observing one’s thoughts as if watching passerby. As with prescriptions before it, there appears to be a danger involved.
Noticing your thoughts is much different than simply thinking. The neuronal firings that we term ‘thinking’ is so pervasive we hardly ever realize we’re doing it—until we attempt to stop (or, more realistically, slow) that rushing river of information. Only then do we realize that sitting in meditation has nothing to do with ‘doing nothing.’ As Buddhists are fond of saying, we are observing the observed.
The word literally means “no place,” so maybe it shouldn’t be surprising when a purported utopia—especially one built on an ideology that views selfishness as a virtue—turns out not to be one at all.
The world might have descended into nuclear catastrophe thirty-one years ago today, September 26, 1983, had someone other than Stanislav Petrov been in charge of the Soviet early-warning system at a key moment. Via BillMoyers.com:
On this date in 1983, a Soviet lieutenant colonel named Stanislav Petrov was the duty officer in the command center for the USSR’s early warning system when Russian satellites twice detected the launch of five ICBMs from the US. Had Petrov followed protocol and reported the “attack,” Moscow might have retaliated, bringing about a global nuclear war. But he didn’t trust the newly-installed system, and doubted a nuclear strike would begin with only handful of missiles. So, without any additional information, Petrov decided it was a false alarm and kept it to himself. The incident came to light after the fall of the USSR.
This was only three weeks after a Soviet plan shot down Korean Air Lines Flight 007, so there was already some tension.
Via Wikipedia:
Had Petrov reported incoming American missiles, his superiors might have launched an assault against the United States, precipitating a corresponding nuclear response from the United States. Petrov declared the system’s indication a false alarm. Later, it was apparent that he was right: no missiles were approaching and the computer detection system was malfunctioning. It was subsequently determined that the false alarm had been created by a rare alignment of sunlight on high-altitude clouds and the satellites’ Molniya orbits, an error later corrected by cross-referencing a geostationary satellite. Continue reading
– Do I, uh, lick the frosting first?: Even if it’s a hoax, the story of the mom who made vagina cookies for her kid’s second-grade class, then got mad when the teacher wouldn’t let the kids have them, is comedy gold.
– “We seem to be experiencing turbulence due to—DEAR SWEET BABY JESUS!!!”: If you thought singing Dolly Parton/Whitney Houston incessantly was a f****d up reason for an emergency plane landing, I present to you the flight that had to land in Omaha, en route from Boston to L.A., because of a “frenzied, masturbating passenger.” Mind you, it wasn’t just that he was masturbating openly. He also allegedly tried to open one of the exit doors mid-flight. Which would you choose as the lede?
– With great power comes great…….damage claims: A woman’s $250 million lawsuit against Disney claims that the company stole her life story to make the movie Frozen. Continue reading
![By Karen Carr (http://www.karencarr.com/tmpl1.php?CID=196) [CC-BY-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons](http://crypticphilosopher.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/VMNH_megalodon.jpg "By Karen Carr (http://www.karencarr.com/tmpl1.php?CID=196) [CC-BY-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0)], via Wikimedia Commons")
The Megalodon (i.e. Carcharodon megalodon, the great-great white shark) was once the most fearsome predator of the sea, but is now pretty much relegated to paleontology and so-bad-it-sailed-past-good-into-really-bad movie territory. If it were alive today, would it be terrorizing the high seas, or would it be fetching $600,000 per dorsal fin on the shark-fin soup market?
Some scientists, when called upon by nerds to offer a scientific take on B-movies, believe it is the latter.
Photo credit: By Karen Carr [CC-BY-3.0], via Wikimedia Commons.
Multiples of ten in Russian, for the most part, have a common suffix, sort of like “-ty” in English (i.e. twenty, thirty, etc.) “Twenty” and “thirty” in Russian are “двадцать” and “тридцать” (pronounced “dvadtsat” and “treedtsat,” basically).
Note that they both end in “-цать.” “Forty” is different, though. (The words for “fifty” through “eighty” have a different suffix in common. “Ninety” is different, too, but that’s for another day.) I find this sort of thing interesting, and it’s my blog, so nyah.
The word for “forty” in Russian is “сорок” (pronounced “sorok.”) This threw us for a loop in Russian class back in college, and the professor’s explanation was interesting. I thought I’d share it today. I don’t remember exactly what he said, but Google helped me find the same basic linguistic theory.
A post by Joseph F. Foster, a University of Cincinnati anthropologist, at the website The Linguist List cites A.G. Preobrazhensky’s “Etymological Dictionary of the Russian Language,” which suggests that the Russian word for forty “is related to this Russian form: sorochka = ‘shirt, blouse. shift (sack dress)’.” Foster explains: Continue reading
The atheist libertarian lie: Ayn Rand, income inequality and the fantasy of the “free market”, CJ Werleman, Salon, September 14, 2014
Robert Reich says that one of the most deceptive ideas embraced by the Ayn Rand-inspired libertarian movement is that the free market is natural, and exists outside and beyond government. In other words, the “free market” is a constructed supernatural myth.
There is much to cover here, but a jumping-off point is the fact that corporations are a government construct, and that fact alone refutes any case for economic libertarianism. Corporations, which are designed to protect shareholders insofar as mitigating risk beyond the amount of their investment, are created and maintained only via government action. “Statutes, passed by the government, allow for the creation of corporations, and anyone wishing to form one must fill out the necessary government paperwork and utilize the apparatus of the state in numerous ways. Thus, the corporate entity is by definition a government-created obstruction to the free marketplace, so the entire concept should be appalling to libertarians,” says David Niose, an atheist and legal director of the American Humanist Association.
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Reich says rules that define the playing field of today’s capitalism don’t exist in nature; they are human creations. Governments don’t “intrude” on free markets; governments organize and maintain them. Markets aren’t “free” of rules; the rules define them. “In reality, the ‘free market’ is a bunch of rules about 1) what can be owned and traded (the genome? slaves? nuclear materials? babies? votes?); 2) on what terms (equal access to the Internet? the right to organize unions? corporate monopolies? the length of patent protections?); 3) under what conditions (poisonous drugs? unsafe foods? deceptive Ponzi schemes? uninsured derivatives? dangerous workplaces?); 4) what’s private and what’s public (police? roads? clean air and clean water? healthcare? good schools? parks and playgrounds?); 5) how to pay for what (taxes, user fees, individual pricing?). And so on.”
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That awkward pause that inevitably follows asking a libertarian how it is that unrestricted corporate power, particularly for Big Oil, helps solve our existential crisis, climate change, is always enjoyable. “Corporations will harm you, or even kill you, if it is profitable to do so and they can get away with it … recall the infamous case of the Ford Pinto, where in the 1970s the automaker did a cost-benefit analysis and decided not to remedy a defective gas tank design because doing so would be more expensive than simply allowing the inevitable deaths and injuries to occur and then paying the anticipated settlements,” warns Niose.
Spanking is a euphemism. For assault. Chocolate, Pomp, and Circumstance, Medium, September 17, 2014 Continue reading
