The View From Outside

From my location outside the prison of faith I look within and see a whole range of beliefs. Some of these beliefs hold your soul prisoner. others encourage the good life lived. Here is one such thread:

Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.
Where there is hatred, let me sow love.
Where there is injury, pardon.
Where there is doubt, faith.
Where there is despair, hope.
Where there is darkness, light.
Where there is sadness, joy.
O Divine Master,
grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled, as to console;
to be understood, as to understand;
to be loved, as to love.
For it is in giving that we receive.
It is in pardoning that we are pardoned,
and it is in dying that we are born to Eternal Life.

Saint Francis of Assisi

All major religious traditions carry basically the same message, that is love, compassion and forgiveness the important thing is they should be part of our daily lives.

Dalai Lama

Both paintings are by Edward Hicks a Quaker from Pennsylvania.

El Viejo y el Gato

                            

El viejo:       "Hola cat cómo se usted?"                                                El Gato:                     "Meow"
"    "            "Te he echado ayer por la noche. ¿Qué estaba haciendo?    "      "                       "Meow!"
"    "             "Ustedes no estaban jugando con Brunto tenías?"                "   "                           "Purrr"

"    "             "No más bebés, oiga! No más!, ni nada,más!"                      "    "                         "Hissss!"  

St. Emidio, the divine protector against earthquakes.

St. Emidio, the divine protector against earthquakes

Glass Work

Daniel Goleman on compassion | Video on TED.com

Daniel Goleman on compassion | Video on TED.com

Flowers from the Front of My House

Glass Objects by Cardew Evans August 21, 2011

The Thinking That IQ Tests Miss

eatures | Mind & Brain

See Inside

Rational and Irrational Thought: The Thinking That IQ Tests Miss

We assume intelligence and rationality go together. But we shouldn't be surprised when smart people do foolish things.

By Keith E. Stanovich  | October 30, 2009 | 28

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Image: ISTOCKPHOTO

In Brief

• Traditional IQ tests miss some of the most important aspects of real-world intelligence. It is possible to test high in IQ yet to suffer from the logical-thought defect known as dysrationalia.
• One cause of dysrationalia is that people tend to be cognitive misers, meaning that they take the easy way out when trying to solve problems, often leading to solutions that are illogical and wrong.
• Another cause of dysrationalia is the mindware gap, which occurs when people lack the specific knowledge, rules and strategies needed to think rationally.
• Tests do exist that can measure dysrationalia, and they should be given more often to pick up the deficiencies that IQ tests miss.

No doubt you know several folks with perfectly respectable IQs who just don’t seem all that sharp. The behavior of such people tells us that we are missing something important by treating intelligence as if it encompassed all cognitive abilities. I coined the term “dysrationalia” (analogous to “dyslexia”), meaning the inability to think and behave rationally despite having adequate intelligence, to draw attention to a large domain of cognitive life that intelligence tests fail to assess. Although most people recognize that IQ tests do not measure important mental faculties, we behave as if they do. We have an implicit assumption that intelligence and rationality go together—or else why would we be so surprised when smart people do foolish things?

It is useful to get a handle on dysrationalia and its causes because we are beset by problems that require increasingly more accurate, rational responses. In the 21st century, shallow processing can lead physicians to choose less effective medical treatments, can cause people to fail to adequately assess risks in their environment, can lead to the misuse of information in legal proceedings, and can make parents resist vaccinating their children. Millions of dollars are spent on unneeded projects by government and private industry when decision makers are dysrationalic, billions are wasted on quack remedies, unnecessary surgery is performed and costly financial misjudgments are made.

Me And My Kiddos

The Fellow Got the Spelling Wrong But He Got the Thought Right

Colonial Baltimore

How Big is Big? Can There Be Something Bigger Then ? Can You Have The Biggest Number There Is And Add One To It? How About Two?

The Oil Painting By Julian's Cousin Joe was lost to the painter after he painted it and Julian and I located it today at St. Leo Abbey in Florida

Father David, OSB  and the picture of Jesus by Joe Testa Secca

Father David and my good friend since grade school Julian Simon

A Letter To The Editor Of The New York Times From A Reader In Pittsburgh

 

 

 

The Republican party was the problem in 1936 and they are the problem today. There is no practicality in their philosophy. Keynesian theory makes sense. You prime the pump in times of economic decline by increasing government spending and you raise taxes in prosperous times to control inflation. Together they provide for aeveryone's benefit. But Republicans, who have always been beholding to the rich, are never willing to raise taxes.

 

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Untitled Oil Painting by Jane Wynn Completed in July

Untitled For Now by Jane Wynn

The Old Man and The Cat

Picture taken from photoradar.com

Old Man: Did you know, cat, the truth is that there are moments that I mistake you for a boot in the hallway.

Cat: (meow)

Old Man: No, not any boot. You are not of a size that I should take you for a parade boot. You are too large. Nor would I say that you are of sufficient size that I would spy a garrison boot leaning against the wall and offer it a cat treat.

Cat: (meow)

Old Man: In fact it is likely that I would mistake you for a boot of intermediate size, such as a twelve-eyelet Doc Marten.

Cat: (purr)

Old Man: Oh, definitely a matte leather, since the glint of patent leather caps on the toe would reveal instantly which was the boot, which cat.

Cat: (meow)

Old Man: You have nailed the very problem. We have no twelve-eyelet Doc Marten boot of any colour, nor any boot to match the size of your body. So what is that I am seeing that I mistake for you?

Cat: (huff)

Old Man: Possible, but not likely. It's most likely that I am hallucinating a boot in the darkened hallway, and that it is actually you that I am seeing. Therefore I ask that you take care in an emergency to avoid the hallway, lest I try to put you on my foot in my panic, using your limbs and tail as laces and your belly as my sole. Your head would be fine fancy toecaps.

Cat: (meow)

Old Man: I would hobble outside and all the neighbours would want to know why my boot was so ungainly, why my fine fancy toecaps were biting my toes and my laces were clawing at my ankles.

Cat: ---

Old Man: Don't you walk away from me! They would have a right to know!

(Door opens)

Schmutzie: It's cold out there. What have you been doing?

Old Man: Talking with the cat.

Schmutzie: Uh-huh. I bet.

Posted by palinode

I Remember When Country Was Good

 Hank Williams (September 17, 1923 – January 1, 1953)

  born Hiram King Williams, was an American singer-songwriter and musician regarded as one of the most important country music artists of all time. In the short period from 1947 until his death, at 29, on the first day of 1953, Williams recorded 35 singles (five of which were released posthumously) that would place in the Top 10 of the Billboard Country & Western Best Sellers chart, including 11 that ranked number one.

 

Buckwheat zydeco jambalaya french

 

 but what you dont understand is that Le Vacher Creole ran cows through that area to texas. There are plains among the bayous and lakes. mon papa et mon taton's are horse trainers and cattlemen. Once when i was about 10 years old we ran cattle from Vinton, La to Orange for a dude who was too scared to come in La to get them because a cajun girl he fucked over was going to have her brothers kill him if he came back into Louisiana. So he got our crazy creole asses to run'em.

Reverie Never Rests

David Evans

Reisterstown, MD

August 8th, 2011

8:53 pm

Between the sweetness of being

And the pain of thinking
Between sleep that is opaque to itself

And the blindness of one who can’t see the stars because of daylight

Lies the talent to glimpse what escapes us

The equivalent of the dawn that threatens at every instant

To evaporate into dream or condense into knowing

But in that interval (and pen in hand)

Replaces something impenetrable with something immaterial

And reveals the imaginary foundations of reality

Reverie never rests

Between the idea

And the reality

Between the motion

And the act

Falls the Shadow

For Thine is the Kingdom

Between the conception

And the creation

Between the emotion

And the response

Falls the Shadow

Life is very long

Between the desire

And the spasm

Between the potency

And the existence

Between the essence

And the descent

Falls the Shadow

For Thine is the Kingdom

For Thine is

Life is

For Thine is the

This is the way the world ends

This is the way the world ends 

Taken from an Opt Ed in the NYT August 6, 2011

On Reverie

By RAPHAëL ENTHOVEN

Turning it into a poem

Then adding a second stanza by T. S. Eliot

Makes Something Else 

"I Was Hungary And You Failed Me " Somolia, August 2011

Every morning, emaciated parents with emaciated children stagger into Banadir Hospital, a shell of a building with floors that stink of diesel fuel because that is all the nurses have to fight off the flies. Babies are dying because of the lack of equipment and medicine. Some get hooked up to adult-size intravenous drips — pediatric versions are hard to find — and their compromised bodies cannot handle the volume of fluid. 

Most parents do not have money for medicine, so entire families sit on old-fashioned cholera beds, with basketball-size holes cut out of the middle, taking turns going to the bathroom as diarrhea streams out of them.