[idrilhelyanwe]

monday 4/5/2021

https://www.calnewport.com/blog/2021/03/31/in-defense-of-thinking/

https://www.ssense.com/en-us/editorial/culture/sacred-waves-with-surfer-haa-keaulana

nietzsche

[idrilhelyanwe]

They have proof, a hundred times a day, that everything happens mechanically, that the world obeys fixed, unchangeable laws. In a vacuum all bodies fall at the same rate of speed, the public park is closed at 4 p.m. in winter, at 6 p.m. in summer, lead melts at 335 degrees centigrade, the last streetcar leaves the Hotel de Ville at 11.05 p.m... And all this time, great, vague nature has slipped into their city, it has infiltrated everywhere, in their house, in their office, in themselves... I see it, I see this nature... I know that its obedience is idleness, I know it has no laws: what they take for constancy is only habit and it can change tomorrow. 

[idrilhelyanwe]

NO JUSTICE , NO PEACE

[idrilhelyanwe]

The cool, grey city of love

[idrilhelyanwe]

Couple with Their Heads Full of Clouds

[idrilhelyanwe]

7.

Midnight settles on the curved rooftops like a heavy layer of dust. It quells the slow chatter exuding from the homes, their inhabitants unwinding after the long hump day. The houses heave a collective sigh of relief at the completion of half the week… trees on the demesne waving their branches in sleepy agreement. 

A picturesque locality, apparently not to be enjoyed tonight—he speeds past, blurring the scene. Cruising down the familiar street I roll down the window and inhale the stimulating night air.

We’re parked on a sloping street off of Skyline with the stars on full display. Eyeing the automatic sensory light of a neighbor’s house silently... it extinguishes, and he rolls the window back up…

now the reason we’re here glares at me in flashing neon. I suppress my disappointment as I kiss him back.

[idrilhelyanwe]

trailblazing abstraction... or bathroom tile? 

[idrilhelyanwe]

Montag said nothing but stood looking at the women’s faces as he had once looked at the faces of saints in a strange church he had entered when he was a child. The faces of those enameled creatures meant nothing to him, though he talked to them and stood in that church for a long time, trying to be of that religion, trying to know what that religion was, trying to get enough of the raw incense and special dust of the place into his lungs and thus into his blood to feel touched and concerned by the meaning of the colorful men and women with the porcelain eyes and the blood-ruby lips. But there was nothing, nothing, it was a stroll through another store, and his currency strange and unusable there, and his passion cold, even when he touched the wood and plaster and clay.

Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

[zachsgay]

l is that a lowercase L or an uppercase i youll never know

[idrilhelyanwe]

thank u ascii 

[idrilhelyanwe]

Tiger got to hunt, bird got to fly; Man got to sit and wonder ‘why, why, why?’ Tiger got to sleep, bird got to land; Man got to tell himself he understand.

 Kurt Vonnegut

[idrilhelyanwe]

“Happiness is not to be achieved at the command of emotional whims. Happiness is not the satisfaction of whatever irrational wishes you might blindly attempt to indulge. Happiness is a state of non-contradictory joy—a joy without penalty or guilt, a joy that does not clash with any of your values and does not work for your own destruction, not the joy of escaping from your mind, but of using your mind’s fullest power, not the joy of faking reality, but of achieving values that are real, not the joy of a drunkard, but of a producer. Happiness is possible only to a rational man, the man who desires nothing but rational goals, seeks nothing but rational values and finds his joy in nothing but rational actions.”

AYN RAND, ATLAS SHRUGGED

[idrilhelyanwe]

of course, you only live one life, and you make all your mistakes, and learn what not to do, and that’s the end of you.

feynman

[idrilhelyanwe]

Carl Sagan on abortion

On the opposite side of the discussion, the phrase "right to life" is an excellent example of a "buzz word," designed to inflame rather than illuminate. There is no right to life in any society on Earth today, nor has there been at any former time (with a few rare exceptions, such as among the Jains of India). We raise farm animals for slaughter; destroy forests; pollute rivers and lakes until no fish can live there; hunt deer and elk for sport, leopards for their pelts, and whales for dog food; entwine dolphins, gasping and writhing, in great tuna nets; and club seal pups to death for "population management." All these beasts and vegetables are as alive as we. What is protected in many human societies is not life, but human life. And even with this protection, we wage "modern" wars on civilian populations with a toll so terrible we are, most of us, afraid to consider it very deeply. Often such mass murders are justified by racial or nationalistic redefinitions of our opponents as less than human. 

In the same way, the argument about the "potential" to be human seems to me particularly weak. Any human egg or sperm under appropriate circumstances has the potential to become a human being. Yet male masturbation and nocturnal emissions are generally considered natural acts and not cause for murder indictments. In a single ejaculation there are enough spermatozoa for the generation of hundreds of millions of human beings. In addition, it is possible that in the not-too-distant future we may be able to clone a whole human being from a single cell taken from essentially anywhere in the donor's body. If so, any cell in my body has the potential to become a human being if properly preserved until the time of a practical cloning technology. Am i committing mass murder if I prick my finger and lose a drop of blood? 

[idrilhelyanwe]

As he watched the eyeless face with the jaw moving rapidly up and down, Winston had a curious feeling that this was not a real human being but some kind of dummy. It was not the man's brain that was speaking; it was his larynx. The stuff that was coming out of him consisted of words, but it was not speech in the true sense: it was a noise uttered in unconsciousness, like the quacking of a duck.

[idrilhelyanwe]

Once I retire, I'm retiring. I'm done.

-Michael Phelps

[idrilhelyanwe]

"we are like butterflies who flutter for a day and think it is forever."

-carl sagan

[idrilhelyanwe]

C. Blair, 86,

of Millbrae

Died of an unnamed illness in the town hospital. She left as quickly and unnoticed as she came. Born on November 19th, 1996, she developed a romanticized view of her world to come through overconfident parents and a knack for reading hero-centric novels. She drew comparisons from Dagny, Jane, and the fisherman, to herself. Her unfettered childhood allowed her to conceive opulent pipe dreams of a future in Shangri-la, and an esteemed personage.

Consequently she was unfazed by the prospect of an undistinguished future. 

She graduated high school in 2014, carrying the same aplomb that her parents had in her too. She went on to double major in political science and physics, unable to decide between the two. 

In her middle age she became tired. She abandoned her dreams in favor of a cookie cutter life. Her protests as a child against this sort of forgettable lifestyle were all but forgotten as she watered the pathetic plants in her front yard, littered with bright plastic scoops and buckets and mini playhouse.

Shortly before her death she recollected the books she had read in her childhood. She found them dusty and pushed into the corner of the basement. It was then that she realized that she had not been courageous simply dreaming. She lacked the determination of her heroes. There was no difference between her and the billions who have doubtlessly dreamed but lived like one another.

And then she died.