• The Last Psychiatrist: Those Five Days Matter More Than Anything, Except The Other Days
  Who you are is a product of your experience, and also a product of the experiences you did not have. You didn’t talk to that girl, now that’s part of you– you are the guy who was too scared/angry/self-absorbed/whatever to talk to her, and that is an entirely different guy then the guy who does talk to her and it works; and an entirely different guy from the one who gets maced. That was one of the most important days of your life, and you didn’t even know it. Which brings me to the real point: every day is the most important day of your life, and you don’t even know it.

  there are worse things than
  being Alone
  but it often takes decades
  to realize this
  and most often
  when you do
  it’s too late
  and there’s nothing worse
  than
  too late.

  – Charles Bukowski

  (tags: mind)
• Are We Cheating Our Boys Out Of An Education? | steve-olson.com
  Let’s explore the dysfunction of our education system.

  The Last Psychiatrist writes about the lengthening of childhood and the damage it is causing our children and our society. The Last Psychiatrist specifically addresses the phenomenon of “Redshirting Kindergartners” which means starting them at 6 instead of 5. This gives them advantages in sports and in academics. It is especially popular with upper income white parents. “Kindergarten Redshirting” happens far more often with boys than girls.

  I’m glad The Last Psychiatrist writes anonymously, she speaks heresy. From the post:

  Why boys?

  It’s obvious to anyone who has ever seen a boy that they appear, as compared to a similarly aged girl, completely retarded.

  (tags: men skool)

• The Distributist Review: The Crying Need
  The Government of England, at the moment I write these lines, are racking their brains to find a way of raising money to balance the budget… the majority of us are bound to be the poorer. Why not sow our poverty on soil which cannot fail to give increase, not of poverty, but of wealth? For the peasant possesses real wealth, whereas the stock-and-share millionaire often has little and never produces any.

  We shall have to be content to forgo many luxuries to which we have become accustomed. Our manner of life, and still more the trappings of it, will have to change. But is it such a disadvantage to be rid of the slavery of the office and the factory, and the aching worry of 'keeping up appearances'?

  Happiness has been long absent from England. We bid her depart nearly four hundred years ago when we flung aside the Truth for money. And money since then has built up the toppling tower of industrialism. Let us invite her back under the only conditions in which she can live.

  (tags: economy environment)
• for God’s sake, let people think « servant’s thoughts
  The British Humanist Association has been running a fund raising drive to get the needed money to run an advertising campaign on buses in the U.K. The aim is to have the following slogan running on London buses:

  THERE’S PROBABLY NO GOD. NOW STOP WORRYING AND ENJOY YOUR LIFE

  The aim was to raise £5,500 via small public donations, with an ultimate target of £11,000. Richard Dawkins has come to the party and matched the public donations enabling the ultimate target to be hit.

  The campaign is due to start in January and is in part, a response to the ads running on buses right now advertising the Alpha Course.

  I’ve got to say, I think this is fabulous.

  (tags: mind gospel)

Danyl at Dim-Post has republished a brilliant letter that crucifies the US government and financial system. Go read the whole thing!

• Dear Investor « The Dim-Post
  Andrew Lahde, 37 year old California based Hedge Fund manager, last year took a speculative position that the sub-prime mortgage market was a catastrophe waiting to happen and invested heavily on that premise… now he bids farewell with a classic “so long, suckers” letter.

  I was in this game for the money. The low hanging fruit, i.e. idiots whose parents paid for prep school, Yale, and then the Harvard MBA, was there for the taking. These people who were (often) truly not worthy of the education they received (or supposedly received) rose to the top of companies such as AIG, Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers and all levels of our government. All of this behavior supporting the Aristocracy, only ended up making it easier for me to find people stupid enough to take the other side of my trades. God bless America.

  (tags: economy)

• Times Online: John Polkinghorne: Shining a light where science and theology meet
  Why literal creationists are abusing and misinterpreting scripture…

  [Literal creationism] involves many scientific errors, but is also the result of a bad theological mistake. When we read any kind of deep literature, if we are to give it the respect that it deserves we must make sure we understand the genre of what is written. Mistaking poetry for prose can lead to false conclusions. When Robert Burns tell us his love “is like a red, red rose”, we know that we are not meant to think that his girlfriend has green leaves and prickles. Reading Genesis 1 as if it were a divinely dictated scientific text is to make a similar kind of error… it is actually a piece of deep theological writing whose purpose, through the eight-times reiterated phrase “And God said, ‘Let there be . . .”, is to assert that everything that exists does so because of the will of the Creator. Thus literal creationists actually abuse scripture by the mistaken interpretation that they impose upon it.

  (tags: evolution bible)

• False Apology Syndrome – I’m sorry for your sins. By Theodore Dalrymple
  The False Apology Syndrome flourishes wherever there has been a shift in the traditional locus of moral concern. At one time, a man probably felt most morally responsible for his own actions. He was adjudged (and judged himself) good or bad by how he conducted himself toward those in his immediate circle. From its center rippled circles of ever-decreasing moral concern, of which he was also increasingly ignorant. Now, however, it is the other way round. Under the influence of the media of mass communication and the spread of sociological ways of thinking, a man is most likely to judge himself and others by the opinions he and they hold on political, social, and economic questions that are far distant from his immediate circle. A man may be an irresponsible father, but that is more than compensated for by his deep concern about global warming, or foreign policy, or the food situation in Africa.
  (tags: self society)
• How the fate of the US economy rests on a Dell workstation • The Register
  Uncle Sam has dedicated several petaflops of computing power to redesigning nuclear war heads and simulating nuclear explosions (thereby getting around the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, which forbids actually blowing up a real new nuke design to test it). You'd think at least one central bank (most likely the Federal Reserve Bank, given the central nature of the US economy since the end of World War II) would have a supercomputer cranking through scenarios right now. After all, the big banks and brokerages are doing Monte Carlo simulations to assess the risks of buying and selling securities using more or less real-time stock data [...]

  When I asked how the Financial Accelerator was implemented, Gertler said: "The model is a set of non-linear equations. We take a loglinear approximation around the steady-state, which gives us a set of difference equations. We then solve using software such as Matlab" [On a desktop PC !]
  [some pithy comments follow the article too..]

  (tags: economy)
• Slate Magazine: The prescient politics of The Big Lebowski, by David Haglund
  Just released for a third time on DVD, The Big Lebowski has, in a decade, inspired a cinematic cult with websites, festivals, and teachings to live by. At the heart of this denomination is the Dude, brilliantly incarnated by Jeff Bridges as a Zen slob whose three great loves are weed, white Russians, and bowling. And the Dude is indeed a fantastic character. Ten years on, though, the movie's most striking role belongs to John Goodman as Walter Sobchak: a hawkish, slightly unhinged Vietnam vet and the Dude's best friend and bowling partner. Watching The Big Lebowski in 2008, it becomes clear that Walter is essential to the Coen brothers' message in this movie, which is slyer, more political, and more prescient than many of its fans have recognized. Perhaps that's because Walter, with his bellowing, Old Testament righteousness and his deeply entrenched militarism, is an American type that barely registered on the pop-culture landscape 10 years ago. He's a neocon.
  (tags: fun society cosmos)

• The Distributist Review: Blaming the Poor
  Money is created by the banks (not, as the myth has it, by the government), who must keep creating money, even when there is no need for it. … Median wages have been stagnant for the last 30 years and have actually shrunk since the start of the Cheney-Bush administration. The banks had to find borrowers, and the pool of prime quality borrowers was insufficient. So they went to subprime borrowers.

  This actually worked pretty well. One thing must be clearly understood: the subprime market did not fail; … Most subprime borrowers are paying their notes, and will likely continue to do so until the economy collapses … They are not the cause of the problem. Rather, the problem is caused by the vast market for “derivatives,” a series of side bets on the mortgage markets.

  But even more importantly, this myth-making breaks the solidarity with the poor, and solidarity should guide all of our policy decisions.

  (tags: economy)