liveonearth: (Default)
 
Even those too lazy to vote feel it their birthright to blast our elected representatives from every direction.  We complain bitterly when we do not get all we want as if it were possible to have more services with lower taxes, broader health care coverage with no federal involvement, a cleaner environment without regulations, security from terrorists with no infringement on privacy, and cheaper consumer goods made locally by workers with higher wages.  In short, we crave all the benefits of change without the costs.  When we are disappointed, our response is to retreat into cynicism, then start thinking about whether there might be a quicker, easier, and less democratic way to satisfy our wants.

--Madeline Albright on page 116 of Fascism, A Warning.  This quote comes on the heels of a section about globalism and about the manipulation of public opinion using the internet.  The first part of this book was the best short history of Europe I have ever read--for once it made sense.  Excellent read: recommend.
 
liveonearth: (Default)
 
"If you look throughout history, all the great changes have come from the people. We are being betrayed by those in power and they are failing us. But we will not back down...And if you feel threatened by that, I have some very bad news for you. We will not be silenced. Because we are the change. And change is coming. Whether you like it or not."
--Greta Thunberg at youth strike for climate February 2020, Bristol UK
Source: https://theecologist.org/2020/feb/28/we-are-change-and-change-coming
 
liveonearth: (Default)
What is success?  To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and endure the betrayal of false friends; to appreciate the beauty; to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better, whether by a healthy child, a garden patch or a redeemed social condition; to know even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded!
--
Ralph Waldo Emerson
liveonearth: (Default)

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness,
and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts.
Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things
cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth
all one's lifetime.
–Mark Twain


liveonearth: (Default)
"A single dot on a canvas is not a painting and a single bet cannot resolve a complex theoretical dispute.  This will take many questions and question clusters.  Of course it's possible that if large numbers of questions are asked, each side may be right on some forecasts but wrong on others and the final outcome won't generate the banner headlines that celebrity bets sometimes do.  But as software engineers say, that's a feature, not a bug.  A major point of view rarely has zero merit, and if a forecasting contest produces a split decisions we will have learned that the reality is more mixed than either side thought.  If learning, not gloating, is the goal, that is progress."
--Tetlock, Philip and Gardner, Dan, in p269 in Superforecasting; The Art and Science of Prediction 2015.

QotD: Act

Jan. 12th, 2018 11:34 am
liveonearth: (Default)
"Do not wait
for leaders;
do it alone, 
person to person."

--Mother Teresa
liveonearth: (Default)
 “Acceptance looks like a passive state, but in reality it brings something entirely new into this world. That peace, a subtle energy vibration, is consciousness.”
-- Eckhart Tolle
liveonearth: (Default)
 "I thought scientists were going to find out exactly how everything worked, and then make it work better. I fully expected that by the time I was twenty-one, some scientist would have taken a color photograph of God Almighty and sold it to Popular Mechanics magazine... What actually happened when I was twenty-one was that we dropped scientific truth on Hiroshima."

—Kurt Vonnegut

liveonearth: (Default)
Out on the edge
you see all kinds of things
you can’t see from the center.
Big, undreamed-of things -
the people on the edge
see them first.

~ Kurt Vonnegut
liveonearth: (Default)
"Mr. Trump, you appear to be laboring under the delusion that you have the necessary qualifications to be president. The manifest failure of almost everything you have attempted during your first six months, coupled with the anarchic chaos that pervades your White House, should give you pause--or would give pause to any person of normal sensitivity...

Get all your news, not from FOX but from all the sources available to a president, many of them not available to the rest of us. Announce your decisions after due consideration and consultation, not impulsively on Twitter. Cultivate common good manners when dealing with people. Do no be misled by the crowds thatcheer your boorish rudeness: they are a minority of the American people.

Listen to experts better qualified than you are. Especially scientists. Be guided by evidence and reason, not gut feeling. By far the best way to assess evidence is the scientific method. Indeed, it is the only way if we interpret "scientific" broadly. In particular--since the matter is so urgent and it may already be too late--listen to scientists when they tell you about the looming catastophe of climate change."

--Richard Dawkins, when asked by John Horgan in interview, "What would you say to Trump if you had his ear"?
liveonearth: (Default)
"Times are difficult globally;
awakening is no longer a luxury or an ideal.
It’s becoming critical.
We don’t need to add more depression,
more discouragement,
or more anger to what’s already here.
It’s becoming essential that we learn
how to relate sanely with difficult times.
The earth seems to be beseeching us
to connect with joy
and discover our innermost essence.
This is the best way
that we can benefit others."
~ Pema Chodron
liveonearth: (Default)
You are never dedicated to something you have complete confidence in. No one is fanatically shouting that the sun is going to rise tomorrow. They know it's going to rise tomorrow. When people are fanatically dedicated to political or religious faiths or any other kinds of dogmas or goals, it's always because these dogmas or goals are in doubt.
~ Robert M. Pirsig, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

About Pirsig and his book: I was made to read this book at approximately age 18, when I first started working at the Nantahala Outdoor Center in North Carolina. I was quite moldable, impressionable, unformed at that age. Payson Kennedy was in charge of training and orienting all new staff, and reading this book was his one requirement. What it taught me was a lesson that took many years to sink in, that small details deserve our full attention, that doing your best it the only way to do anything right. Thank you Payson for requiring us to read this book, for it has helped form my perspective for over 30 years since then. I think it may be time to reread it.

This of course was all brought up because Pirsig has died at the age of 88. It's encouraging to note that his book was rejected by 121 publishing houses before someone decided to print it.

http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/04/24/525443040/-zen-and-the-art-of-motorcycle-maintenance-author-robert-m-pirsig-dies-at-88
liveonearth: (Default)
The morning question: What good shall I do today?
The evening question: What good have I done today?
~ Ben Franklin
liveonearth: (Default)
What I Have Learned So Far

Meditation is old and honorable, so why should I
not sit, every morning of my life, on the hillside,
looking into the shining world? Because, properly
attended to, delight, as well as havoc, is suggestion.

Can one be passionate about the just, the
ideal, the sublime, and the holy, and yet commit
to no labor in its cause? I don’t think so.

All summations have a beginning, all effect has a
story, all kindness begins with the sown seed.
Thought buds toward radiance. The gospel of
light is the crossroads of — indolence, or action.
Be ignited, or be gone.

~ Mary Oliver
liveonearth: (looks like house to me)
It is far better to grasp the universe
as it really is
than to persist in delusion,
however satisfying
and reassuring.

-Carl Sagan
liveonearth: (stone face)

If you cannot

explain it

in simple terms,

you do not

understand it fully.

~Albert Einstein

liveonearth: (blue skinned alien)

Hating people
because of their color
is wrong

and it doesn't matter

what color

does the hating.

It's just plain wrong.

-Muhammad Ali

liveonearth: (old books)

I have been increasingly conscious, for the last 10 years or so, of deaths among my contemporaries. My generation is on the way out, and each death I have felt as an abruption, a tearing away of part of myself. There will be no one like us when we are gone, but then there is no one like anyone else, ever. When people die, they cannot be replaced. They leave holes that cannot be filled, for it is the fate — the genetic and neural fate — of every human being to be a unique individual, to find his own path, to live his own life, to die his own death.
--Oliver Sachs
(New York Times, Opinion, “Oliver Sacks on Learning He Has Terminal Cancer,” Feb. 19, 2015)


This from the FFRF blog: )

*Created tags for reason and humanism.

SOURCE
http://ffrf.org/news/blog/item/23735-remembering-oliver-sacks

liveonearth: (Homer Simpson "D'oh!")
You can’t escape that much of what we do in medicine doesn’t make patients better. We work in a system that is driven by perverse incentives: we get paid more for doing more to patients. It’s got to stop.
--Dr Steve Nissen
liveonearth: (moon)
I used to think
the worst thing in life
is to end up alone.
The worst thing in life
is to end up with people
who make you feel alone.

--Robin Williams

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