We're now on Daylight Saving which is for all those who believe that they can cut a foot off the bottom of a blanket, sew it to the top, and have a longer blanket.
Tuesday, October 6, 2015
Sunday, October 4, 2015
The Gentleman in the Parlour
The most fundamental delight which literature can offer has something to do with the perception or discovery of truth, not necessarily a profound or complex or earthshaking truth, but a particular truth of some order. This "epiphany" comes at the moment of recognition when the reader's experience is reflected back at him.
Which is what happened to me when I picked up W. Somerset Maugham's The Gentleman in the Parlour, a classic travel book of the Far East in the 1920s, and read,
"Though I have travelled much I am a bad traveller. The good traveller has the gift of surprise. He is perpetually interested by the differences he finds between what he knows at home and what he sees abroad. If he has a keen sense of the absured he finds constant matter for laughter in the fact that the people among whom he is do not wear the same clothes as he does, and he can never get over his astonishment that men may eat with chop-sticks instead of forks or write with a brush instead of with a pen. Since everything is strange to him he notices everything, and according to his humour can be amusing or instructive. But I take things for granted so quickly that I cease to see anything unusual in my new surroundings. It seems to me so obvious for a Burman to wear a coloured paso that only by a deliberate effort can I make the observation that he is not dresses as I am. It seems to me just as natural to ride in a rickshaw as in a car, and to sit on the floor as on a chair, so that I forget that I am doing something odd and out-of-the-way. I travel because I like to move from place to place, I enjoy the sense of freedom it gives me, it pleases me to be rid of ties, responsibilities, duties, I like the unknown; I meet odd people who amuse me for a moment and sometimes suggest a theme for a composition; I am often tired of myself and I have a notion that by travel I can add to my personality and so change myself a little. I do not bring back from a journey quite the same self that I took."
read another sample
Having lived and worked in Burma in the mid-70s, and having been a bad traveller who took too much too quickly for granted, it is only now, forty years later, that I relish my memories of this "Golden Land" of which Maugham wrote so evocatively in this charming little book.
"A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us", wrote Kafka. For me this book fits this description. And, being a book, when you have finished it, you can, if you wish, go back to the beginning, read it again, so as to try to understand your own life that little bit better.
Saturday, October 3, 2015
How religion poisons everything
I'm just reading Christopher Hitchens' God is Not Great - How religion poisons everything, a lucid and condensed evaluation of Islam. You can join me by listening to chapter 9 in the above clip.
As Hitchens wrote, "One must state it plainly. Religion comes from the period of human prehistory where nobody — not even the mighty Democritus who concluded that all matter was made from atoms — had the smallest idea what was going on. It comes from the bawling and fearful infancy of our species, and is a babyish attempt to meet our inescapable demand for knowledge (as well as for comfort, reassurance and other infantile needs). Today the least educated of my children knows much more about the natural order than any of the founders of religion, and one would like to think — though the connection is not a fully demonstrable one — that this is why they seem so uninterested in sending fellow humans to hell."
To give you a taste of what awaits you, here's an excerpt.
And this quote from Heinrich Heine, someone closer to my heart, in his "Gedanken und Einfälle": "In dark ages people are best guided by religion, as in a pitch-black night a blind man is the best guide; he knows the roads and paths better than a man who can see. When daylight comes, however, it is foolish to use blind old men as guides."
Philosophy begins where religion ends, just as by analogy chemistry begins where alchemy runs out, and astronomy takes the place of astrology. Religion has run out of justifications. Thanks to the telescope and the microscope, it no longer offers an explanation of anything important.
Friday, October 2, 2015
A tour of Riverbend
...
Courtesy of a slideshow software which, if not used for business, is freely available from www.cincopa.com.
It certainly saved me a lot of fancy coding.
Thursday, October 1, 2015
Are we all insane?
Remember "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest"? Well, the powerful documentary The Marketing of Madness is far more frightening!
It weighs in at nearly three hours, but if you have ever taken or are likely to take psychiatric drugs, you should watch it all the way to the end. I've never taken a pep pills or anything of that kind in my life and I certainly never will after having watched this documentary!
Life's problems are NOT medical disorders; they're just that: life's problems which we were told to "cure" with bleeding, then by having certain organs cut out, later by having our brain functions altered, but now we are told by Big Pharma to simply pop a pill.
Are you feeling shy? You are suffering from a social anxiety disorder. Pop a pill!
Feeling a bit slack and listless? You've got it bad, you know, because you have a motivational deficiency disorder. Pop a pill!
Homesick? Sorry but you have a separation anxiety disorder. Pop a pill!
Feeling suspicious? You have paranoid personality disorder. Pop a pill!
And feeling just a bit up and down about life's ups and downs? Sorry, old bean, but you're bipolar. Pop a pill!
This film includes massive documentation that cannot be refuted, and covers everything from road rage (a crime dressed up as a mental disorder) to nonsense like compulsive shopping disorder (invented by a drug company shill) to Internet addiction disorder (originally a joke), fraudulent clinical trials, placebo washout, and the Rosenhan experiment.
It tackles the dangerous lunacy of medicating the young, branding them as suffering from all manner of imaginary disorders, explains how often mental disorders, so-called, are linked to real problems in our lives, and finally gives a short overview of treating disturbed people without frying their brains with dangerous drugs that can shorten their lives, drive them to despair, suicide, or even to mass murder.
To go by the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM, aka 'Diagnostic Source of Money' by your friendly psychiatrist), every single person in the world could be said to have some sort of mental disorder. After all, homosexuality was listed as a “sociopathic personality disorder” when the DSM was first published in 1952, and remained so until 1973.
Hoarding has been added to its latest edition, the DSM-5, which makes me as mad as the next person because I love my books and I have hoarded thousands of them! ☺\
Big Pharma now has a pill for every ill. Is there one for hoarding?
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