Source:

Sebastião Salgado Photojournalist,
Gourma-Rharous
Mali, 1985

Monday, May 13, 2019

Sugaray Rayford & The Italian Royal Family - Take Me Back [ OFFICIAL VID...

  

Sugaray Rayford and The Italian Royal Family - Take Me Back [ OFFICIAL VIDEO ]








SUBSCRIBE 435
Sugaray Rayford - Take Me Back
Backing band: The Italian Royal Family

Director : Federico Catalano
Director of Photography: Marco Capriotti
Colorist: Federico Catalano
Art Direction: Luca Sapio & Olga Ribichini

Barman: Christian Angelo Valdez
Produced by Blind Faith Records
Special Thanks to: Francesco Gatti, The Building Hotel, Matteo Sapio

Taken from Sugaray Rayford album "The World That We Live In"
pre-order available here:
https://sugarayrayford.bandcamp.com
Follow Blind Faith Records:
https://www.facebook.com/blindfaithre...












Thursday, May 2, 2019

What differentiates hopes, wishes, dreams and goals?

Dreams are the ideas that we wish to become true, but without the effort of us. 

While goals are targets that we seek to reach by planning and effort. 

The difference is in planning and taking actions: "A dream becomes a goal when action is taken toward its achievement."



Every person wishes to be realized his wishes and live a happy life. 

Some people dream to achieve Wishlist, others makes them a goal to achieve his aspirations. What is the difference between them?

"A dream becomes a goal when action is taken toward its achievement."


The big difference between a goal and a dream is a timeline and accountability.  One can dream about something but until s/he specifically defines it and puts it on a timeline by setting specific deadlines, s/he 'll never really start making movement.


"If wishes were horses, beggars would ride" is a proverb and nursery rhyme, first recorded about 1628 in a collection of Scottish proverbs.[1], which suggests if wishing could make things happen, then even the most destitute people would have everything they wanted.


Common newer versions include:

If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.
If turnips were watches, I'd wear one by my side.
If "if's" and "and's" were pots and pans,
There'd be no work for tinkers' hands.


... and a shorter version:
If wishes were horses, beggars would ride.
If turnips were bayonets, I'd wear one by my side.











Do magpies really steal shiny things?





Do magpies really steal shiny things? An experiment shows that, in reality, these birds are more likely to grab your sandwich than your silver: 

http://ow.ly/HeRi50qkoeS 


Audubon Society‏Verified account @audubonsociety May 1




Friday, April 26, 2019

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


Wednesday, April 24, 2019

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

Sunday, April 14, 2019

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




Wednesday, November 23, 2016

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
.



Leonard Cohen: Hallelujah


Leonard Cohen Credit Dominique Issermann

  Leonard Cohen: Darkness and Praise

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



Tuesday, November 22, 2016

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

Tuesday, August 18, 2015

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  




Monday, April 13, 2015

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