1. WHAT’S THIS?
2. AND THIS??
3. AND THIS?
ANSWERS:
2. A pillow of Sigmund Freud for sale at Amazon
3. The couch in Feud’s office where patients reported dreams.
TO YOU
Sweet dreams…,
It’s amazing how many postings Google has about the difference between empathy and sympathy. So if I struggle to understand the humanity of members of the new super rich super exclusive super expensive social clubs in, say, New York City, which should I be? If I feel sympathy I might think “poor–” no, I couldn’t say “Poor.” I couldn’t say “heartless,” “alienated” or “greedy,” for that would not be true sympathy. So, for me, sympathy would not be possible. Empathy…will be a challenge.
We’re all born to a “blooming, buzzing confusion,’ wrote William James, and we are, too. Entirely innocent. And then…Money and prestige, maybe power, became the most important existence in the world. Is it their fault that Mommy and Daddy and friends enjoyed the greatest posessions and status possible? Probably not their immediate fault that the unclean hordes were…inconvenienced, homeless, hungry. My way or the highway? Stop! That’s not empathy.
So…growing up without empathy, basking in perks, setting the styles, feeling entitled, envied by many, reinforced by parents, a glory in the mirror, what’s the problem, Bozo?
What is my struggle with being emphatic…I mean empathic? Jealousy! That’s it! If I had it would I want to spend money on building homes for the homeless or pay the initial $20,000 fee plus an annual fee of, say, $5,000— an exclusive members-only social club in New York City? Or being able to buy a table, immediately, in any exclusive restaurant for anywhere between $100 – $1,ooo, say? Or a purse from Louis Vuitton for $3,400? …but wait, delivery is free.
Today’s Quotation: What is the meaning of “there but for the grace of God go I”? However it is expressed, “there but for the grace of God go I” is a statement of humility and gratitude that acknowledges one’s own sinful nature …
I thought perhaps re=fashioning my post would better describe its current form. Ergo: TODAY’S JOURNAL….Friday…
HO HUM…In France, teacher Samuel Paty was beheaded by an 18-year-old after showing caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad to his students to illustrate free speech.
Just completed an enjoyable detective novel with far too much sex in it but engrossing plot: A 2013 novel by Linda Howard. (The library’s serendipitous discards continue to entrap me).
Believe me, no matter how old, it’s Polar Express for the holidays. It kept my spoon in the air for minutes while I watched, charmed.
I can’t understand why so many people are blase about A.I.: Altman and his prepper household with guns, water, food, etc. Duh, what does that suggest re A.I.’s safety?
Meghan Bobrowsky Thu, December 7, 2023 — The OpenAI Board Member Who Clashed With Sam Altman Shares Her Side
In an interview, Helen Toner, an AI academic from Australia, explains her posture in the power struggle at OpenAI. I’ll just refer readers to her:
From <https://finance.yahoo.com/m/f9b17c5b-5700-37cd-9710-7a5ffc14d022/the-openai-board-member-who.html>
Texas Nationalist Movement: BE WARM While you secede from the USA: “Allow yourself to be enveloped in comfort and style with the TNM Logo Hooded Sweatshirt. Made of a blend of 50% pre-shrunk cotton and 50% polyester, this hoodie provides both comfort and durability. Air-jet spun yarn gives this hoodie a soft feel and reduced pilling, while the double-lined hood with matching drawcord ensures a secure fit. The rib-knit cuffs and waistband with spandex, as well as the front pouch pocket, add optimal style and function. The double-needle-stitched collar, shoulders, armholes, cuffs, and hem ensure that this hoodie will stand the test of time. Get ready to stay warm and stylish in this TNM Logo Hooded Sweatshirt.”
QUOTE FOR THE DAY: Advice for Transgenders? : Polonius’ advice is summed up with the lines: ‘This above all: to thine own self be true, And it must follow, as the night the day, Thou canst not then be false to any man.’ (And advice for all)
Alongside some cutthroat actions by humans upon humans, it is refreshing to hear about kindness being given to guilt-free animals. Two instances came across my desk recently: a vetrinarian caring for pets of the homeless and, earlier, a behavoral scientist teaching a migration path to birds extinct in the wild.
Dr. Kwane Stewart’s outreach on the streets started more than a decade ago as a personal mission that he kept to himself. “It was my way to heal,” said Stewart, a veterinarian whose nonprofit, Project Street Vet, provides medical care to the pets of people experiencing homelessness. “Maybe some of it was guilt. Maybe some of it was I just wanted my own little crusade.”https://www.cnn.com/2023/04/14/us/california-street-veterinary-medicine-pets-cnnheroes/index.html>
Separately, Johhannes Fritz, a behavioral scientist, built an aircraft and learned to fly in order to teach the bald Ibis, a bird extinct in the wild for 300 years, how to fly a 3-week migration path south from Germany through the alps by following his ultra light aircraft. Fritz founded the Waldrapp team to better understand the Ibis’s requirements, and began a bond with these species, which turned into a passion to save them. Granted, this was in 2001, but the team Fritz initiated appears to still be operative. https://www.waldrappteam.eu/en/
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THANKS!
Many thanks to friend Sallie for directing me to the following related to Christians for Judaism, discussed in my Nov. 30 post. You can check it out, but here ‘s part of it, from Wikipedia via Google:
Christian Zionism is an ideology that, in a Christian context, espouses the return of the Jewish people to the Holy Land. Likewise, it holds that the founding of the State of Israel in 1948 was in accordance with Bible prophecy: that the re-establishment of Jewish sovereignty in the Levant — the eschatological “Gathering of Israel” — is a prerequisite for the Second Coming of Jesus Christ.[1][2] The term began to be used in the mid-20th century, in place of Christian restorationism, as proponents of the ideology rallied behind Zionists in support of a Jewish national homeland.[3][4]
Advocacy on the part of Christians for a Jewish restoration grew after the Reformation, and is rooted in 17th-century England.[1] Contemporary Israeli historian Anita Shapira suggests that England’s Zionist evangelical Christians “passed this notion on to Jewish circles” around the 1840s,[5] while Jewish nationalism in the early 19th century was largely met with hostility from British Jews.[6]
Christian pro-Zionist ideals have generally been common among Protestants since the Reformation. While supporting a mass Jewish return to the Land of Israel, Christian Zionism asserts a parallel idea that the returnees ought to be encouraged to reject Judaism and adopt Christianity as a means of fulfilling biblical prophecies.[7][8][9][10] Polling has suggested a trend of widespread distrust among Jews towards the motives of evangelical Christians.[11]
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GRIM
“My favorite ‘Twilight Zone’episode is the one where aliens land and, in a sign of their peaceful intentions, give world leaders a book. Government cryptographers work to translate the alien language. They decipher the title — ‘To Serve Man’ — and that’s reassuring, so interplanetary shuttles are set up.
“But as the cryptographers proceed, they realize — too late — that it’s a cookbook.
“That, dear reader, is the story of OpenAI.”…. much more
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SOMETIMES
I wonder, did I write my life?
If so, I was clever and did
A good job. So many dear things
Were included. Best of all was a
Sterling sense of humor. I laugh
At myself for spilling my soup
Or getting into the wrong car
(That was a hoot) or taking a
Year of French but not learning the
Word for potty when needed in
Calais. The black and yellow writing
Spiders at the farm, the fig tree,
Even the scupernong arbor, too.
Red tomatoes warm from the sun–
Patrol girl in the sixth grade and
Best of all, a grandmother with
a soft lap and dimpled elbows.
A questionable serendipity at the library brought me in contact with Naomi Wolf’s first big seller, but just to be sure I Googled her and had to back off. (Maybe I’ve learned my lesson? About time!)
What I did stumble across possibly makes a lot of sense. Read this and tell me what you think:
The reason the Hamas-Israel war can be hard for outsiders to understand is that three wars are going on at the same time: a war between Israeli Jews and the Palestinians exacerbated by a terrorist group, a war within Israeli and Palestinian societies over the future and a war between Iran and its proxies and America and its allies.
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Very accidentally I came across a post that said climate change will wipe us out and nothing can help, so we’d best give up our efforts. I surmise that that: 1.the author is sadistic 2.the author is backed by the fossil fuel industry 3.the author is dangerously depressed or 4.the author is correct. At any rate, I’m not referring him to you.
Deep breath. Tryin’ to do better.
Frustrated that some of the Times’ columns are off limits to non-subscribers. I’ll test the waters for education’s sake:
“In 2024, it’s not the economy. It’s the democracy. It’s the decency. It’s the truth.
I’m not talking about what will influence voters most. I’m talking about what should.”
From Frank Bruni’s opinion column in the New York Times today.
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I’m still trying to find out why George W. Bush signed into law a bill requiring the State Department to monitor global anti-Semitism and rate countries annually on their treatment of Jews, over the US State Department’s opposition, saying it was unnecessary as the department already compiles such information in its annual reports on human rights and religious freedom. True, Bush announced this when he addressed a crowd in the battleground state of Florida, which has the world’s largest Jewish population in the world after Israel and New York, [Rense.com] so maybe it was just to get the Jewish vote. The rapidity with which we backed the current Israeli war made me wonder some more. Was it oil? A friend suggested it was due to guilt, because the U.S. had turned away a boatload of refugees from Hitler times, but I read up on that and that situation was unclear.
I’m not truly superstitious, but I used to buy books in thrift shops in order to open myself to serendipitous unread books. Now my serendipity with books is limited to the overflow book shelves in the public library. My last visit to the library matched me with Diane Ravitch’s 2020 Slaying Goliath (The Passionate Resistance to Privatization and the Fight to Save America’s Public Schools) and Kevin Phillips’ American Theocracy 2006. (I follow Ravitch’s blog but don’t reblog it ’cause I suspect she doesn’t like to be re-blogged. (I love it!).
Re Phillips’ book, it made me wonder if our favoritism could be that “U.S. Protestant theology has now refocused itself on the biblical holy lands as a battlefield is just another of the extraordinary transformations taking place on account of the influence of religion on American politics and war.” Christian Nationalism sprang forth after the book was published, I figure, because it is not listed in his large Index.
Phillips writes that “many in the Christian Right appear to have a larger purpose, perhaps related to preparation for the rapture, the tribulation, and Armageddon. Some 40 percent of Americans…believe that the antichrist is alive and already on the earth.” He refers to Paul Boyer, who dates evangelical preoccupation with the Middle East back half a century, stirred by the creation of Israel in 1948, then by the expansion of Jewish settlements in Gaza and the West Bank, all key end times signs. “Islam’s evil role, says Boyer, is an ancient view in Christian eschatology.”
I’ve mentioned my lack of some important education in the past, and this is where I am ignorant, also. I’m not sure how merging Christian Evangelism with the Jewish holy land go together. If I’m missing something obvious, please tell me.
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ASHAMED….
to be an American? I never thought I would be, but how else can I respond to the huge Republican push to re-elect such a man? I have no words for any justification. I won’t think further on it, but there it is.
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QUOTATION
“Be yourself; everyone else is already taken.” —Oscar Wilde via Google
Have I finally learned my lesson? What lesson? If it looks pretty and smells nice, don’t believe it?
Sigh. Yesterday I sang praises for Sikhism. Today I learn that Sikh separatism has a bloody history, that Sikhs assassinated Indira Gandhi in 1984 and in 1985 a Sikh terrorist blew up Air India Flight 182 from Montreal to London, killing 129 people. The lesson, I guess: Don’t believe everything you read..including me, I guess.
The world’s faithful account for 83% of the global population; the great majority of these fall under twelve classical religions–Baha’i, Buddhism, Christianity, Confucianism, Hinduism, Islam, Jainism, Judaism, Shinto, Sikhism, Taoism, and Zoroastrianism.<https://www.google.com/search?q=World+religions&sca_
Sikhism – Founded by the Guru Nanak (born 1469), Sikhism believes in a non-anthropomorphic, supreme, eternal, creator God; centering one’s devotion to God is seen as a means of escaping the cycle of rebirth. Sikhs follow the teachings of Nanak and nine subsequent gurus. Their scripture, the Guru Granth Sahib – also known as the Adi Granth – is considered the living Guru, or final authority of Sikh faith and theology. Sikhism emphasizes equality of humankind and disavows caste, class, or gender discrimination. From <https://www.cia.gov/the-world-factbook/field/religions/>
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“Beginning on some winter night the snow will fall steadily for a thousand years and hush in its falling the spore cities whose seed has flown. The delicate traceries of the frost will slowly dim the glass in observatories and all will be as it has been before the virus wakened. The long trail of Halley’s comet. once more returning will pass like a ghostly matchflame over the unwatched grave of the cities. This has always been their end, whether in the snow or in the sand.” — Loren Eisley
A.I. Oh my. I’ll cry!
We were gifted somehow
As caretakers of life
On Earth. Toss a penny.
Save or destroy was
The question–what would
We do with all our power:
Make or shake or desecrate.
We lost control and as the
nasty pus of greed triumphed
Now steaming toward 2050
What will be will be. Nan
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