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“WAR ON TERROR” – what are we doing in Afghanistan?
I’m going to post my thoughts on this issue tomorrow. I was going to do it today, but didn’t have the chance to get it all presentable. Funny how you can spend all day on the computer and not get anything done. What with ebay, Facebook, trying to fix computer settings, and what-not, how can I be expected to? 🙂
Add comment December 6, 2009
My book review: “The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell”
This is news?
For example, the chapter on why teenagers still start smoking even after decades of health warnings, etc., provided no new insight. Basically, the reason provided was that kids don’t start smoking because the action of smoking is cool; they start smoking because the SMOKERS are cool. In other words, cool people smoke, just like they do other things. So to be cool, you’ll emulate the cool people. And smoking is one thing you can do to be like them.
Also, the author states that genetics is the reason why certain smokers become addicted (every-day smoking of several cigarettes per day, with great difficulty in quitting including withdrawal symptoms) and why other people can smoke very few cigarettes in a week, every week, for example, and easily stop doing that with no problem. Since the concept of “social smokers” is quite well known now, I don’t think this was any revelation. Just like not every social drinker becomes an alcoholic, not every social smoker becomes a hard-core nicotine fiend. And doesn’t genetics cause pretty much everything? I’ve heard a figure of 80% of our behavior, traits, intelligence, etc. is genetic. This may or may not be true, but the proposition that nature, rather than nurture, is controlling us is not a new idea either. The “masses” won’t be impressed with his ideas on genes.
This book was also very short. I would have appreciated much more substance, and just more MATERIAL in general. Thankfully I got this from the library so I didn’t waste my money on a short, dissatisfying book that states the obvious and expects the public to be wowed by the “insight.”
The author seems to have rattled off this book in one sitting, perhaps as an afterthought, for what reason, I don’t know. I also sensed a patronizing tone throughout. I get the impression by reading it that he wrote this first as an outline for some high school sociology class, and then tried to expand it to something that the great “unwashed masses” would take as a serious, scholarly work. Well, I’m sure that even the “masses” aren’t that easily impressed.
So I do not recommend wasting your time on this one!
Add comment December 2, 2009
Well here’s my avatar- joining the bandwagon. If I do say so myself, I think it’s hot :).
Add comment November 24, 2009
Two Articles by George Will on Afghanistan
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/08/31/AR2009083102912.html
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/11/03/AR2009110302925.html
I really could not agree more. What are we doing over there? why? What national interest is being served?
When will we see that we can’t cure the world’s ills, and that sometimes to quit while we can is the way to go instead of squandering more of our military, lives, and money on a thankless, practically impossible task…
Add comment November 22, 2009
OK, new blog
I have switched my blog to WordPress- and will start posting some stuff ASAP. Feel free to post or comment or whatever- please!
Add comment October 1, 2009
Doing Something Different
I’m going to start (hopefully tomorrow) doing reviews for awhile- of books, articles, columns, etc. There’s so much I want to write- but never seem to get around to it! Well, here’s to trying again!
Add comment August 28, 2009
What have I become??
Well, I haven’t written forever! I have not been feeling very creative lately. But I HAVE been following current events, etc., and now have joined the ranks of those addicted to social networking sites….in fact, for awhile, I was so addicted to Mafia Wars on Facebook that it was all I was doing for 16 hours a day (no, not really, but you get the idea….).
Then I just got really sick of Facebook and didn’t go on it for months. During that time, the longer I stayed away, the more phobic I got about trying to get back on it again. I figured it would be overwhelming. Well, this past month I did get on it again, and it IS overwhelming, and they of course have changed things….but, I am going to use it in moderation.
Twitter is another story. I am on that as an inside joke, mostly with myself :). I find it absolutely useless and silly. And God help us if that’s a news source for people! But, anyway, I’m on that occasionally, writing some twaddle for some reason or another.
But it’s crazy. Social networking is totally out of control. People are forming backlash groups. What would happen if we just picked up this new invention called the TELEPHONE???? And actually talked to real friends?
Calling to talk to someone is 9 times out 10 faster, more direct, and to the point, than texting, Facebooking, Twittering, emailing, etc.
But then it’s not really cool, is it?
However, when your 90 year old grandma is on Facebook, and you are getting friend requests from friends’ parents, the thing is not cool anymore anyway. I thought that when my generation (GenX) started joining Facebook in droves that we were all too old for that. Little did I know. But I do know that once Facebook becomes as non-controversial as Elvis did years after his debut, and that once your parents start loving using it just like how their parents started to love Elvis, well, it’s just not cutting edge or cool or rebellious or any of those things anymore….maybe going back to a pen and paper, or a telephone, or, if we still can, having a real conversation in person, will become the “New trendy way to socially network…” I think that would be a good idea!
Add comment August 7, 2009
From a letter by writer Norman Mailer in 1957
I thought this was profound writing:
“…somehow I just don’t believe in myself the way I used to, and indeed, worst of all, it doesn’t even seem terribly important. I’m beginning to have the tolerance of the defeated – people I would have despised a few years ago now seem bearable – after all, I say to myself, I haven’t done very well with all the luck I had, and perhaps I do wrong to judge them. Naturally these states proliferate. The desire to work recedes, and as it recedes one welcomes the depression of not working which increases the difficullty to begin work again, and it gets to be a drag. You know I think of these miserable years since the war and how everyone I know has been diminished by it, their rebellion tempered, their caution swollen to cowardice, their malice to hatred, until the worse of all is that I get close at times to thinking that perhaps we have overrated the possibilities of people, and then life becomes dreary indeed. Forgive the tirade. You have your depression, I have mine (I too am smoking again)…”
Having been unemployed for awhile, and fancying myself a writer and yet never writing anything decent, I can totally relate…:)
Add comment November 3, 2008
Interesting Article on Consciousness
Add comment November 2, 2008
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Conscious Zombie 