OVERPOPULATION is at the root of many problems

THE WORLD is facing a series of interlinked crises which threatens billions of people and could cause the collapse of civilization.

Climate change, pollution, food shortages, diseases, wars, disasters, crime and recessions are all conspiring to ravage the globe and threaten the future of humanity.

Democracy, human rights and press freedom are also suffering.


OVERPOPULATION is at the root of these problems

Information Overload is the Bane of my Life

My daily struggle is to understand what is important, to my situation, in the constant barrage of information on the Internet.  

What can and should be ignored?  

Is my purpose to seek distraction, novelty and entertainment? 

Or is the goal and purpose to my Net Surfing to gain valuable knowledge?  

What do I hope to accomplish?

“There are things that attract human attention, and there is often a huge gap between what is important and what is attractive and interesting."

- Yuval Noah Harari   

  

And Donald Trump has not helped make being informed easy with all his mixed messages.

“If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things thro' narrow chinks of his cavern.”

― William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell

What explains the rise of humans? - Yuval Noah Harari

Yuval Noah Harari
|
TEDGlobalLondon

What explains the rise of human

Seventy thousand years ago, our human ancestors were insignificant animals, just minding their own business in a corner of Africa with all the other animals. 

But now, few would disagree that humans dominate planet Earth; we've spread to every continent, and our actions determine the fate of other animals (and possibly Earth itself).

 How did we get from there to here? 

Historian Yuval Noah Harari suggests a surprising reason for the rise of humanity.

This talk was presented at an official TED conference, and was featured by our editors on the home page.

 Link: https://www.ted.com/talks/yuval_noah_harari_what_explains_the_rise_of_humans?utm_campaign=tedspread&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=tedcomshare

Be Happy

Uploaded on Jul 1, 2011

Is happiness a skill? Modern neuroscientific research and the wisdom of ancient contemplative traditions converge in suggesting that happiness is the product of skills that can be enhanced through training and such training exemplifies how transforming the mind can change the brain. 

Kent Berridge, Richie Davidson, and Daniel Gilbert speak at the Aspen Ideas Festival

.

• Music

  • "I've Got My Love to Keep Me Warm" by Dick Hyman (iTunes • eMusic)

• Category

  • Science & Technology

• License

  • Standard YouTube License

Link: https://youtu.be/MDTi2_PHiiM

Leonard Cohen: Hallelujah

Leonard Cohen Credit Dominique Issermann

  Leonard Cohen: Darkness and Praise

By LEON WIESELTIER 
 NOV. 14, 2016 

The email from the boy began: “Did anything inspire you to create Hallelujah?"

Later that same winter day the reply arrived: 
“I wanted to stand with those who clearly see God’s holy broken world for what it is, and still find the courage or the heart to praise it. You don’t always get what you want. You’re not always up for the challenge. But in this case — it was given to me. For which I am deeply grateful.”

The question came from the author's son, who was preparing to present the hymn to his fifth-grade class. The boy required a clarification about its meaning. The answer came from the author of the song, Leonard Cohen.

Cohen lived in a weather of wisdom, which he created by seeking it rather than by finding it. He swam in beauty, because in its transience he aspired to discern a glimpse of eternity.
There was always a trace of philosophy in his sensuality.
He managed to combine a sense of absurdity with a sense of significance, a genuine feat.
He was a friend of melancholy but an enemy of gloom, and a renegade enamored of tradition.

Leonard was, above all, in his music and in his poems and in his tone of life, the lyrical advocate of the finite and the flawed.

Leonard sang always as a sinner. He refused to describe sin as a failure or a disqualification. Sin was a condition of life. 

“Even though it all went wrong/ I’ll stand before the Lord of song/ With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah!”

The singer’s faults do not expel him from the divine presence. Instead they confer a mortal integrity upon his exclamation of praise. 

He is the inadequate man, the lowly man, the hurt man who has given hurt, insisting modestly but stubbornly upon his right to a sacred exaltation.

“There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in.”  

He once told an interviewer that those words were the closest he came to a credo.  

The teaching could not be more plain: fix the crack, lose the light.

  

Here is a passage on frivolity by a great rabbi in Prague at the end of the 16th century:

“Man was born for toil, since his perfection is always being actualized but is never actual,” 
he observed in an essay on frivolity.
“And insofar as he attains perfection, something is missing in him.  In such a being, 
perfection is a shortcoming and a lack.”

Leonard Cohen was the poet laureate of the lack, the psalmist of the privation, who made imperfection gorgeous.

Link: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/14/opinion/my-friend-leonard-cohen-darkness-and-praise.html?ribbon-ad-idx=3&src=trending

Living with a sense of purpose in life

Conclusion:

A sense of purpose in life also gives you this considerable advantage:

"People with a sense of purpose in life have a lower risk of death and cardiovascular disease."

The conclusions come from over 136,000 people who took part in 10 different studies.

Participants in the studies were mostly from the US and Japan.


The US studies asked people:

• how useful they felt to others,
• about their sense of purpose, and
• the meaning they got out of life.

The Japanese studies asked people about ‘ikigai’ or whether their life was worth living.
The participants, whose average age was 67, were tracked for around 7 years.

During that time almost 20,000 died. 
But, amongst those with a strong sense of purpose or high ‘ikigai’, the risk of death was one-fifth lower.

Despite the link between sense of purpose and health being so intuitive, scientists are not sure of the mechanism.

Sense of purpose is likely to improve health by strengthening the body against stress.

It is also likely to be linked to healthier behaviours.

Dr. Alan Rozanski, one of the study’s authors, said:

“Of note, having a strong sense of life purpose has long been postulated to be an important dimension of life, providing people with a sense of vitality motivation and resilience.

Nevertheless, the medical implications of living with a high or low sense of life purpose have only recently caught the attention of investigators.

The current findings are important because they may open up new potential interventions for helping people to promote their health and sense of well-being.”

This research on links between sense of purpose in life and longevity is getting stronger all the time:

• “A 2009 study of 1,238 elderly people found that those with a sense of purpose lived longer.
• A 2010 study of 900 older adults found that those with a greater sense of purpose were much less likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease.
• Survey data often links a sense of purpose in life with increased happiness.

No matter what your age, then, it’s worth thinking about what gives your life meaning.”



Read More:

Find out what kinds of things people say give their lives meaning.

Here’s an exercise for increasing meaningfulness

And a study finding that feeling you belong increases the sense of meaning.

The study was published in the journal Psychosomatic Medicine (Cohen et al., 2015).




A sense of purpose in life
Link: http://www.spring.org.uk/2015/12/here-is-why-a-sense-of-purpose-in-life-is-important-for-health

Happy Days in a British Slum

Who needs a PlayStation? Incredible pictures from the 1960s capture the last days of the slums - and an era before health and safety ruled our children 

 
Photographer Sheila Baker spent almost two decades documenting the changing street life around Manchester 

 
She photographed ordinary street scenes and captured a valuable insight into the transformation from the 1960s 

Ms Baker's streetscapes showed women and children standing outside their slums homes before demolition 

The artwork is being featured in a major exhibition in London until September 20/15 at the Photographers' Gallery 



These are the haunting pictures of the last days of Manchester slum-land when houses built during the 19th century to home workers were finally demolished.


Photographer Sheila Baker was the only female photographer documenting British street scenes between the 1960s and the 1980s.

Her work featured urban areas in Manchester and Salford at a time of major social change, catching the dying days of a previous era.

Here Shirley Baker captures a shot of a young boy in 1967, wearing a old-fashioned jacket


Ms Baker captured images of people living in the densely-packed terraced houses in inner-city Manchester - similar type places to that depicted in Coronation Street.

The photographs showed youngsters at play and their mothers standing outside talking in communal groups, something that would appear very strange to modern society.

Children were forced to improvise to find ways to amuse themselves. Instead of expensive toys and games, they used bits of rope and even a Second World War surplus gas masks.

Here a group of children play cricket on the pavement outside their house which seems to have peeling paint on its walls

 Children exploring places that would be unacceptable to today's parents

 Man feeding pigeons

                             Makeshift swing

Boys wearing gas masks  

  1960s London slum




By DARREN BOYLE FOR MAILONLINE
PUBLISHED: 20:44 GMT, 18 August 2015 

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3202723/Who-needs-PlayStation-Incredible-pictures-1960s-capture-days-slums-era-health-safety-ruled-children.html 

The Law of Terror

QUOTATION OF THE DAY

"It seems that humanity is incapable of putting a halt to the shedding of innocent blood. It seems that the human family has refused to learn from its mistakes caused by the law of terror, so that today, too, there are those who attempt to eliminate others with the help of a few, and with the complicit silence of others who simply stand by."

POPE FRANCIS, describing the mass killing of Armenians by the Ottoman Turks as the first genocide of the 20th century.

Source: NYTimes.com

Chronic Pain

DelanceyPlace retweeted
Medical News Today @mnt · Mar 30


Scientists have identified a brain mechanism they believe is responsible for chronic pain: http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/291647.php … 

Telephone Love- Shabba Ranks & JC Lodge

Link:https://youtu.be/SSqVLLtDdCY?list=PL-7N_vqZjHt2_OLbgmxPGwhqazPSwsPbO

Shabba Ranks - None A Dem {Pepper Riddim} [Di Genius Records] April 2011 ©

Link:https://youtu.be/M2VxB9bpFcU?list=PL-7N_vqZjHt2_OLbgmxPGwhqazPSwsPbO

Quotes

Deep within man dwell those slumbering powers; powers that would astonish him, that he never dreamed of possessing; forces that would revolutionize his life if aroused and put into action.

Orison Swett Marden

I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on the seashore, and diverting myself in now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.
Isaac Newton

If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants.
Isaac Newton

A good memory is one trained to forget the trivial.
Clifton Fadiman

The latter part of a wise man's life is taken up in curing the follies, prejudices, and false opinions he had contracted in the former.
Jonathan Swift

Natural wealth is limited and easily obtained; the wealth defined by vain fancies is always beyond .
reach
Epicurus

The moral flabbiness born of the bitch-goddess Success, that - with the squalid cash interpretation put on the word success - is our national disease.
William James
1906

Sob, heavy world,
Sob as you spin,
Mantled in mist,
remote from the happy.
W.H. Auden
The Age of Anxiety
1947

We need some imaginative stimulus, some impossible ideal such as may shape vague hope, and transform it into effective desire, to carry us year after year, without disgust, through the routine work which is so large a part of life.
Walter Pater
1885

To avoid criticism, do nothing, say nothing, be nothing.
Elbert Hubbard

In the factory we make cosmetics; in the store we sell hpe.
Charles Revson

Statistically, the probability of any of us being here is so small that you'd think the mere fact of existing would keep us all in a contented dazzlement of surprise.
Lewis Thomas


In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.
Albert Camus

Every situation - nay, every moment - is of infinite worth; for it is the representative of a whole eternity.
Goethe


I am in the present.  I cannot know what tomorrow will bring forth.  I can know only what the truth is for me today.That is what I am called upon to serve, and I serve it in all lucidity.
Igor Stravinsky
1936


To the dull mind nature is leaden.  To the illumined mind the whole world sparkles with light.
Emerson


Thunder is good, thunder is impressive; but it is lightning that does the work.
Mark Twain

A short saying often contains much wisdom.
Sophocles

Worth begets in base minds, envy; in great souls, emulation.
Henry Fielding
1707 - 1754

Wise men appreciate all men, for they see the good in each and know how hard it is to make anything good.
Baltasar Gracian
1647

Got no  check books, got no banks.
Still I'd like to express my thanks--
I got the sun in the mornin'
and the moon at night.
Irving Berlin

Let us be thankful for the fools; but for them the rest of us could not succeed.
Mark Twain

Believe nothing, no matter where you read it - even if I have said it - unless it agrees with your own reason and your own common sense.
Buddha

To see a world in a grain of sand
And heaven in a wild flower,
To hold infinity
in the palm of your hand,
And Eternity in an hour.
William Blake


Be not simply good; be good for something.
Thoreau

Great minds have purposes, others have wishes.
Washington Irving

In life, as in football, you won't go far unless you know where the goalposts are.
Arnold Glasow

The highest prize of  life, the crowning fortune of a man, is to be born with a bias to some pursuit which  finds him in employment and happiness.

Emerson

Whatever you can do or dream you can, begin it. Boldness has genius,power and magic in it.

Goethe

Forget goals. Value the process.

Jim Bouton

Faith is the bird that feels the light and sings when the dawn is still dark.

R. Tagore

He is his own best friend, and takes delight bin privacy; whereas the man of no virtue or ability is his own worst enemy and is afraid of solitude.

Aristotle 

For anything worth having one must pay the price; and the price is always work, patience, love, self-sacrifice.

John Burroughs 

Study: concentration of the mind on whatever will ultimately put something in your pocket.

Elbert Hubbard

The successful people are the ones who can think up things for the rest of the world to keep buy at.

Don Marquis

First, have a definite, clear, practical ideal - a goal, an objective.  Second, have the necessary means to achieve your ends - wisdom, money, materials and methods.  Third, adjust all your means to that end.

Aristotle

It is only the farmer who faithfully plants seeds in the Spring, who reaps a harvest in the Autumn.

B.C. Forbes

Gardens are not made by singing "Oh, how beautiful," and sitting in the shade.

Rudyard Kipling

Success is to be measured not so much by the position that one has reached in life as by the obstacles which she or he has overcome while trying to succeed.

Booker T. Washington

If have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants.

Isaac Newton