So time has come to get down to the serious business…
Better late than never!
Archives for posts with tag: Long time survival.
“The owners “didn’t know what they were doing” “?!?
Who prevented them from researching the matter before proceeding?
Somehow I feel this makes a powerful case against “forcing ideologies” on anybody, not just on pets.
I received a message containing this picture in my mail, accompanied by some text extolling Truman’s actions after he left the White House. Whenever I want to check something found in the Internet I use Snopes.com. This was one of those rare occasions when the verdict was ‘mostly true’.
What happened to us in such a short period of time?
Have we lost the good habit of telling bedtime stories to our children and this has already changed us?
“”Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.” — Harry S. Truman
After President Truman retired from office in 1952, he was left with an income consisting of basically just a U.S. Army pension, reported to have been only $13,507.72 a year. Congress, noting that he was paying for his stamps and personally licking them, granted him an “allowance” and, later, a retroactive pension of $25,000 per year. When offered corporate positions at large salaries, he declined, stating, “You don’t want me. You want the office of the president, and that doesn’t belong to me. It belongs to the American people and it’s not for sale.”
Even later, on May 6, 1971, when Congress was preparing to award him the Medal of Honor on his 87th birthday, he refused to accept it, writing, “I don’t consider that I have done anything which should be the reason for any award, Congressional or otherwise.”
We now see that other past presidents, have found a new level of success in cashing in on the presidency, resulting in untold wealth. Today, many in Congress also have found a way to become quite wealthy while enjoying the fruits of their offices. Obviously, political offices are now for sale.
Good old Harry Truman could have been correct when he observed, “My choice early in life was either to be a piano player in a whorehouse or a politician. And to tell the truth, there’s hardly any difference. I, for one, believe the piano player job to be much more honorable than current politicians.” “
Read more at http://www.snopes.com/quotes/truman/truman.asp#QXuDo347lVhWWO1F.99
The world is turning on its head and he’s spinning fairy tales…
Besides that, what on Earth does Putin have to do with anything?
Bear with me and your curiosity will be satisfied.
Most of us believe that bed time stories come from the ancient past, that they were passed on across generations by the regular folks, from the ancient equivalent of you and me to our nephews.
Lets give this idea a second thought.
First of all there weren’t so many ‘you and me’-s readily available until recently. No more than 50 years ago very few people had enough free time, or energy, to spend on such frivolous topics. In those times most people worked/fought hard to make a living and a small minority was rich/powerful enough to live somewhat insulated from the daily worries of the commoners – ‘what will I be eating/feeding my kids tomorrow’. The rich and powerful had their own set of worries, even if of a different kind: how to rule efficiently enough as to maintain/enhance their power and how to pass on to their heirs the skills they needed in order to ‘keep the show in working order’.
In those times the commoners, and their children, worked so hard that they usually fell asleep while eating ‘dinner’, thus having no use for any bed time stories.
Meanwhile the rich and powerful were so busy with their daily business/routine that they didn’t have time to spend with their children so they hired teachers and helpers to raise their offspring. Oftentimes this entire ‘nursery crew’ was under the authority of a spinster aunt or something similar but regardless of that almost none of them had the guts to contradict and chastise the ‘young princes’ directly. The deadlock was at least partially solved through the use of bed-time stories and fables.
Seems far-fetched? I must remind you of two things. Not so long ago, Europe, and the Arab world, were choke full of story tellers. Remember the minstrels who spread out the story about Tristan and Isolde or Scheherazade, the world’s first spin doctor? So there were plenty of stories waiting to be reshaped into learning materiel for the offspring of the ruling class. And the second thing was that the ruling class had enough means to hire the best teachers available. So sharp minds plus plenty of raw material equals a lot of excellent ‘bed time’ stories that actually started as lessons for future rulers.
And when did all this come to an end?
When the rulers had became careless and/or unable to maintain the entire kingdom in working order?
When the entire situation had became complicated enough so no individual ruler, no matter how capable, was no longer able to remain on top of things?
When the commoners, enticed by the incessant humming of the minstrels who kept distributing to the general public the same stories which were originally meant to the future rulers and somewhat empowered by the technological advances which had made even their humble lives a little easier and a little safer, became emboldened in their natural quest for autonomy? When all these three conditions/developments ‘merged’ into the explosive situation commonly known as pre-Revolutionary France or, in other circles, as the Enlightenment?
The point I’m trying to make here is that ‘bedtime stories’ are extremely important.
The next generation needs to be initiated in the mores of the old one.
Each new generation needs to understand and keep alive the traditions which have helped to build the society which had borne and educated its members.
Simultaneously, the young must maintain enough independence to understand that traditions are only guidelines and that they can be fine-tuned in order to fit each particular situation
If, for no matter what reason, the flow of information that needs to run from one generation to another is perturbed in any way the ‘train’ is in great danger. If the flow is too strong and the manner in which the information is presented becomes too imposing the ‘education process’ becomes a ‘training session’, the next generation looses it’s ability to think for itself and to solve by its own the smallest of crises, The whole thing eventually ends up in a catastrophe.
If the flow is too weak, either because the ‘teachers’ have lost heart or ‘the pupils’ were allowed to become too cocky – or both – the situation starts to resemble a railway with no rails: the train simply has no clue as to where ‘the way’ is and either grinds to a halt or ends up in a ravine.
OK but …”what on Earth does Putin have to do with anything?”
Well, my favorite story is the one about the emperor who, at the advice of two of his courtiers (his ‘esteemed couturiers’ actually) started to walk naked through the main square of his capital city.
Do you remember that story?
http://www.andersen.sdu.dk/vaerk/hersholt/TheEmperorsNewClothes_e.html
Well… the fact that we’ll indeed never completely get rid of bullying shouldn’t stop us from trying.
As to what we should be teaching our children… How about both?
Standing up for themselves will teach them how many things are within their grasp and that some are indeed outside that grasp. It will also teach them that they need to try in order to determine which thing lies where.
Standing up for others will help them, all of them, live in a better world than we did. And that will be a world of victors, not victims. ‘Cause bullies don’t stand a chance if enough of us stand up when needed.
Wearing pink shirts and passing bylaws doesn’t turn us into victims. Refusal to stand up for someone else does. The bullies love that, they would just take us down one by one while the rest of us turn their heads ‘it’s not my business, let that pussy fend for himself’!
And yes, there is a second way by which we can become a society of victims. A short cut of the first one. Let somebody else take care of the situation. Instead of standing up ourselves, together, to let/expect somebody else do that for us.
That would be akin to inviting a bully to ‘take us under his wing’!
A friend of mine shared this on FB. Thanks Sheeja!
It was then that I realized that I do sometimes worry.
Only I don’t worry for tomorrow. I worry for me.
Worrying ‘for tomorrow’, per se, is indeed ludicrous but wondering what I’ll be doing tomorrow seems only natural for a sensible person.
After all it’s me who is going to live that day so how about living it to my liking, not somebody else’s?
Provided that I don’t hurt anybody in the process, of course.
Really? So we found a dead dog’s skull with a piece of mammoth bone between its teeth and we jump to the conclusion that men ‘may have used dogs to hunt mammoths’?
In fact the only certain thing that can be inferred for sure from this is that dogs, then as now, used to chew on bones.
And if we go on assuming things that might have happened what can stop us from asking ‘were mammoths bones toxic for ancient dogs, so poisonous in fact as to provoke instant death’?
Have you stopped laughing yet?
‘Cause this is no laughing matter. This is exactly how science works. Some people jump to conclusions, sometimes farfetched, and then try for decades to muster enough proof for their conclusions to be accepted by the ‘scientific community’ while others – earnestly, jokingly or sometimes even disrespectfully – try to prove them wrong.
The truth is that it doesn’t matter who’s right and who’s wrong, both sides are doing the excellent job of keeping alight the flame of knowledge.
Had one side, no matter which, given up its efforts, science as we know it – a dynamic process that churns out continuously vast quantities of new information only to be proven false or at least incomplete at a later time – would grind to a halt.
If the ‘enthusiasts’ would get the upper hand in no time they would drive ‘science’ so far away from the hard reality that what they would eventually propose as a ‘corpus of knowledge’ would be absolutely useless.
If the naysayers would be as ‘aggressive’ as I was in the beginning, get things out of context, just as I did, and then criticize the ‘findings’ grounded on a seemingly logical failure then the whole process would stop altogether. In these conditions further improvement in our understanding of the world would become practically impossible.
So let’s keep going as we are already used to, only a little less emphatically.
After all nobody is exactly right in the long time, right?
For those of you who want to learn more about how ancient people might have been using dogs to hunt mammoth, you have here a link to the article that inspired this post. It appeared in the Science magazine.
OK so people have understood that what sets us apart from the other animals is our ability “to make an intentional and independent choice“.
But don’t you think we need to exercise in order to maintain that ‘capacity’? “Use it or loose it”, remember?
Yet everyday we give up some of our autonomy. Sometime in the name of safety, as in this case, other times in the name of increased efficiency/smaller prices.
No, I’m not exaggerating and no, I don’t think Google does it on purpose.
You see, so many of us have boring jobs where we don’t have anything else to do but to almost blindly follow procedures. This way we slowly become automata. We work (‘operate’?!?) like one, we eat standardized food, we learn the same ‘common core’, we watch the same bland and undemanding TV shows. A considerable proportion of the modern day people exercise their free will and ability to ‘fend off on their own’ only when driving, mostly to and from the workplace. Now we are going to give this up, too.
I don’t think Google is part of a worldwide conspiracy meant to transform most of us in dumb consumers/lame but highly productive workers, it’s just that they happen to have at their disposal what it takes to implement this technology and the rational incentive to do it. What else for the people being transported to do during this ‘freed’ time but to happily Google away on the interactive touch screen those ‘cars’ will come adorned with? Now who would have thought of a thing like that?!?
But I repeat and the study I cited from above proves me right. We should not blame ‘the technology’! It can not choose so it cannot be at fault for anything. It is only us that can decide how to use whatever technology lies in wait under our fingertips.
We are sole responsible for our fate.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not against this concept, as such. Wonderful things can be achieved using this technology, just watch the video below. But please use every opportunity you have to exercise your ability to decide for yourself.
There are two sides of this.
1. Be frugal and use only the least disruptive tools at your disposal, even if it means subjecting yourself to increased personal danger.
2. Kill everything in sight, move over when done and repeat…
nicichiarasa 