Have you ever lived with, or worked for, an Emotional Terrorist?
I call those people “Incredible Hulks” because their mantra for keeping peace in their lives is to terrorize your with this reminder: “Don’t make me angry! You wouldn’t like me when I’m angry!”
Continue reading → Behavior Control Through Conditional Explosion
President Bush decided we’re going to surge 20,000 more troops into the abyss of Iraq and one can’t think he’s doing anything more than tossing more bodies into the volcano.
The perversion of the historical accuracy of how our ancestors lived, and how we currently live, is created by preserving only expensive possessions — tokens, icons, valuables – and in the purposeful construction of indestructible architectural monuments used by the privileged few.
History is skewed by this preservation technique because it only pretends to tell future generations how people actually lived. When we visit museums we are only seeing what the powerful majority of the culture of that time deemed important enough to save and pass down.
We only get to know what they thought was worth saving and inevitably those things are the expensive, the pretty, the unique and the tokens of the wealthy. Even pioneer and Native American museum dioramas are idealized with hardy items and the most beautiful things. The ordinary is forsaken for the power of the inherent value in the preservation of the perceived best.
Only the rich could afford to be photographed. Poor and middle class cultures were not worth preserving because they lived temporary lives where none of the iconic resonances of the environment and the neighborhood were able to live on because Ghettos were gutted; middle class valuables wore out under reasonable, everyday, use and were thrown away. A disposable culture creates forgotten people.
Continue reading → Worthy of History: Only Expensive Things Survive
There is nothing quite like a Power Nap to heal the mind and refresh the body. However, in America, napping during the day is reserved only for infants and the retired. If you’re young or successful in your middle-age you are required — by presupposition of your citizenry — to remain awake during the daylight hours even though there is strong medical research suggesting a Power Nap during the day can make you an even more efficient worker. Here’s the research as reported in a 2002 National Institutes of Health report entitled “Power Nap” Prevents Burnout; Morning Sleep Perfects a Skill:
“Burnout” — irritation, frustration and poorer performance on a mental task — sets in as a day of training wears on. Subjects performed a visual task, reporting the horizontal or vertical orientation of three diagonal bars against a background of horizontal bars in the lower left corner of a computer screen. Their scores on the task worsened over the course of four daily practice sessions. Allowing subjects a 30-minute nap after the second session prevented any further deterioration, while a 1-hour nap actually boosted performance in the third and fourth sessions back to morning levels.
A month ago, sitting on the uptown train, the lights suddenly went out in Penn Station, followed by the emergency lights, and then the lights on the train. After a Dalek-like voice asked us to exit the building, I began to suspect a local blackout. It turned out to be a little bit more complicated than that – surely also suspect to a number of conspiracy theories, though I am inclined to doubt it was anything that serious.
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