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The beaten track is the beaten track because it goes past all the best attractions. The season is the season because that’s the best time to go. Maybe you don’t like crowds. Maybe you don’t want to be a sheep. But don’t put yourself through hell to avoid them both on principle… just get up earlier than everyone else.
Don’t you drink? I notice you speak slightingly of the bottle. I have drunk since I was fifteen and few things have given me more pleasure. When you work hard all day with your head and know you must work again the next day what else can change your ideas and make them run on a different plane like whisky?
Source: americandrink
Let’s face it, the UK general election is going to be a travesty, and social media is to blame for much of the foolishness. It’s now guaranteed to be a triumph of marketing over actual policies, with the crucial vote of the lethargic young hanging on stupid and misleading impressions of each Party’s intentions, perpetrated by Twitter or amusing Facebook groups extolling negatives like “Not Voting For… X” At the moment David Cameron seems to be coming in for most of the hatred on Fbook, presumably because the young, the unemployed and terminally lazy on the interweb feel that he represents the interests of the rich rather than their own. Which is strange, because I haven’t ever been able to divine what, if anything, the post-Thatcher Conservative Party does represent. And also, I would have thought that the vast swathes of British people who are messing about online at the office rather than doing any actual work would rather like to keep their clearly pointless jobs for a bit longer yet… but the Cons are not going to get in, because they aren’t doing what the poor people think is required. And that’s a pity, because government is essentially an exercise in economics. So doing what poor people want isn’t a very good idea? Because I don’t think I’m being unkind in saying economics might not be their strong suit…
The LibDems have, as I see it, never had any policies apart from the “Keeping quiet so that you don’t make a dick of yourself” strategy, at which they excel, and this in combination with the two other main Parties’ stunning ability to make dicks of themselves at every turn, is probably the reason why the LibDems actually garner most of the votes. Bit unfair really, as I think everyone agrees, but since Britain’s not a democracy it doesn’t matter what most people think, does it? Otherwise motorway speed limits would be 85mph for cars, and there’d be no traffic wardens, and very possibly capital punishment for smackheads.
Labour on the other hand… Eighteen years in Opposition made these clowns so worried about being perceived as Communists that once they did accede to government, every time banks, big business and hedge fund managers asked for deregulation and growth incentives, they gave it, and now we live in a society where the rich are super-rich, the rest feel like second class citizens, your parents’ pensions are worthless and people actually get paid to have children in a feeble anti-crisis manoeuvre - you don’t need to be an economist to see that it’s glossing over the problem for the lifetime of our current politicians, and then it’s going to be suddenly even worse. If ever a policy glaringly highlighted human greed, that one does…
So, vote for the politician with the best haircut or the name of your favourite uncle. It’s a tried and tested strategy for not losing too much on the horses - if you don’t know what you’re doing, you may as well just guess…
Moral judgments can be altered by magnets
MIT scientists applied magnetic fields to the right temporo-parietal junction, which has been shown with fMRI imaging to be involved in thinking about “judgements involving other people’s intentions,” and how those intentions alter the morality of their actions. In their experiments…
…the researchers found that when the right TPJ was disrupted, subjects were more likely to judge failed attempts to harm as morally permissible. Therefore, the researchers believe that [magnetic stimulation] interfered with subjects’ ability to interpret others’ intentions, forcing them to rely more on outcome information to make their judgments.”While fascinating, it’s worth noting that the magnetic stimulation affects just this single aspect of morality, the weighing of intention, a limitation the scientists admit. Indeed, the extremely narrow scope of the experiment problematizes any conclusions one might wish to draw about morality, its sources or bases, and how it functions.
It’s hardly novel that physical interference with the brain can produce exceptional mental phenomena, as discussed by Julian Jaynes and Oliver Sacks and scores of others. It remains to be seen what -if anything- such experiments say about the nature of mind or its reducibility.
Source: mills
http://bit.ly/bLMHZC
Our real environmental disaster, I have always suspected, may be that we are surrounded by plastic - check out the link above. I’ve re-written and reposted this btw.
I’m sure this issue is just the tip of the iceberg - and as I intimated in my eco-rant on the old Blogger blog, it’s not really the things we are all encouraged to do - like turn off the TV instead of leaving in on standby, or bicycle to work - that are going to make a difference. Imagine we all got up tomorrow morning and decided not to buy any more plastic. It’s doable… no one would die of it… I might have to spend a fair few notes on surgery so that I don’t have to buy contact lenses any more… but I’m pretty sure we could do it. The fluffy bunny lovers are going to hate this ;) but I suspect that wearing leather and fur is a bit more environmentally friendly than PVC, PE and even the most organic of cotton.
I made a New Year’s resolution this year. I resolved not to make any more stupid New Year’s resolutions until I’d done at least some of the things I resolved to do in 2007. But now I have realised (because I revisited my old Blogger blog) that actually I have achieved some of them, and so I am faced with a dilemma, which always sounds to me like an animal with an improbable number of legs. Should I call that a success (the achieving not the dilemma) and start thinking up NYR’s for 2011, or should I attempt to complete the rest of the ‘07 stuff, and put any of that on the list that hasn’t yet been done at that juncture? Or just blunder along for the rest of the year, unencumbered by goals, and decide at the eleventh hour to give up drinking for the whole of January or some equally implausible and pointless thing?
thebetteroftwoevils: (via whenskiesaregrey)
Ah hahaha. Found this funny. Am totally using it now.
love it…
Source: whenskiesaregrey
