PCH

What I'd do if I win tomorrow's prize

Yes, I admit I've been assiduously entering the Publisher's Clearing House lottery every day for awhile now...

The prize is 5000 a week for life.  That's more than 700 dollars a day.

I've got 7 categories of how I'd spend my winnings: ("heaven's sevens", lol)
1)Buy stuff:
e.g. House, Car, Technological Gadgets
(I'd like to wire my place like Bill Gates' futuristic pad)

2)Eat at restaurants
I have my own "pivot" to Asia: I like stic: Sushi, Thai, Indian, & Chinese
(and Ethiopian, Mexican, Pizza, and Burgers, too)

3)Travel the world, learn new languages...

4)Publish my blog (edited, and cleaned up, for Book form)
(they ARE called "publishers" clearing house)

5)(maybe) go back to school, get / earn a master's or doctorate...
earn and learn
I like everything, and am happy now just going to the library...
it would be hard to choose a field/discipline..
maybe psychology, anthropology, sociology, theology, history, geography, or philosophy.
or all of the above!  And, of course, literature.
Degrees are ways to acquire status and become an "expert" or "authority"
I consider them exercises in puffery and vanity, though
but the bible does say "all is vanity" (so why not, really)
really, though, any high school dropout can just go to the library and read alot
and I think that's probably just as good.

6)Raise a family (!)
This project got sidetracked for me, when Sara and I split.
It's in the genes, it's my evolutionary purpose (and, I like kids)
I'm 41 years old.
And crazy, although I'm trying my damnedist to be / get sane.
But if Dave Letterman and Steve Martin can be older dads...
the pool of women gets smaller each day, I suppose-
but if I've got 700 bucks a day to spend, that would probably change the picture.
okcupid has been a complete fiasco, by the way

7)Give to charity, with whatever's left.
I'm thinking Unicef & Kiva
if 3 billion people really are scraping by, like half of humanity, on less than 2 dollars a day-
it's only human.

Scar

Strength, Clarity & Resolve

an acronym to describe making good of the bad in your life...
that's all I wanted to say (!)

actually,
also,
no one, with a period, can become No. 1

Does this mean no one is #1?
Or does it mean, for example, that "no one loves me" actually means "Number One loves me!"

food for thought
no woman can become pope
pussy means cat, so a catholic is a pussyholic (!)

Conscious-Light

some thoughts from the shower

The guru Adi Da Samraj said he was the "incarnation of conscious-light" (I think).
I still plan to read his Aletheon.
Anyway,
If we live in a holographic universe, in which everything is light, (which, then, only SEEMS to be different from mass or matter), then consciousness is light, too, which is a bit hard for me to wrap my head around, as they say.  (New meaning to feeling 'light-headed')

Maybe there is some reality to both the Star Wars depiction of Obi Won turning into light upon being struck by darth vader's lightsaber,
and
Jesus saying I am the way, the truth, and the light/ light of the world.

Also,
what does a cold (the illness) have to do with low temperature?
Maybe light (which is associated with heat) can be used in healing,
and conscious-light (the mind)
can cure sickness, like the christian scientists say.
 Battle/War/Fighting/Combat is GOOD, when used versus SID (sickness, illness, disease) vicious.  

-If society is a hive mind, and the body is permeated with "the force" from other members of society (if not animals, too),
as well as
-the entire ecosystem of fauna/flora in our gut,
and (for example) the apparent independence of each sperm.

I think it is safe to say we are not what we seem.

Doom

a few thoughts on the subject

Vivian, a sophomore psychology student at Cal I met at the Berkeley musical drama about a female buddha, "The fourth messenger", said she learned (in high school) that humanity is doomed because of human nature, as described by 5 psychological studies, which I found online at this site:

http://www.cracked.com/article_16239_5-psychological-experiments-that-prove-humanity-doomed.html

Which brought up the video game, Doom, and first person shooter games in general, in the context of the recent Adam Lanza shooting.  I mentioned how the military actually has video games of their own, as simulations to train their personnel.  And how I thought I read somewhere about videogames actually being cathartic and therapeutic, and therefore less likely to cause violence.  She told me how friends of hers said that, actually, these games get them worked up, amped, and stressed, more than relaxed.   Hmm.

I thought the conformity experiment had implications for democracy.
And it also made me think of 'memes'.

Anyway,
We ARE doomed, of course.  The sun will expand and engulf the earth, probably in the distant future.   Maybe mankind will have figured out space travel and which exoplanet to engineer a habitable environment on,  by then.  'terraform' is the word I was looking for.

Also, I just read about the 'God particle', which a poorly (in my opinion) written yahoo article reported that scientists who plugged in the new data provided by the (LHC? large hadron collider?) on the Higgs boson (measuring it's mass in electron-volts, because mass is energy, e=mc2) indicated that the results show the entire universe is doomed, (!)  This particle is said to impart mass to everything else, I think.
-but we don't have to worry, because "it is coming at us at the speed of light."  I wish I knew specifically what they are talking about.  I mentioned to Vivian that I read a book by physicist Leonard Susskind, who threw out a line in passing, that he thinks we live in a "holographic universe", which I guess makes sense if we think of all mass as energy as light, which I suppose a physicist thinking abstractly might do to understand the big U.  But I'm not sure he's right.

Anyway, I read about space aliens, and there seems to be evidence they can teleport, which maybe lends credence to the holographic universe concept.  And some Russian scientists, explaining the recent meteorite event that coincided with the near-miss of another meteoroid (am I getting the terminology correct?), proffered the view that a spaceship prevented a much worse impact by getting involved and saving the earth/humanity.   I think I like this explanation.   Someone out there is looking out for us?   Maybe we aren't doomed.  Or not for awhile yet, anyway.

Threats

in just two categories: transnational, and nuclear-

transnational:
terrorism, piracy, organized crime, climate change, and pandemics

nuclear:
illicit transfers, irrational decisions, accidents, unforeseen crises

(I think these are both gleaned from the magazine Foreign Affairs)

healthy america

eating right, exercise, and good healthcare

a mediteranean diet (med, it?) is good, says the NY Times, which includes:
olive oil, nuts, beans, fish (3x/week), fruit/vegetable (2+ servings/day), wine, dark chocolate (over 50% cocoa), whole grain cereals, lowfat cheese, white meat (chicken or turkey -vs. red meat), tomatoes/onions/garlic...

Beatiful weather in Berkeley today.  A good day to swim.  I didn't swim at the Y, but I did work up a sweat for like 40 minutes doing cardio on the elliptical and exercise bike.

From the NY Times:
In 2010, the U.S. spent 17.6% of it's GDP on healthcare.
But 48 million people (16%) lack health insurance.

undead

a quote from the NY Times, quoting somebody in Kenya

This was in the Daily Nation:
"All the tribal prejudice, all the ancient grudges and feuds, all the real and imagined slights, all the dislikes and hatreds, everything is out walking the streets like hordes of thirsty undeads looking for innocents to devour."

what I say-
I get angry, myself, mostly with the voice in my head (enraged, actually -sometimes)...it's hard to be alive and not be undead, I guess.  Again, please leave me alone, David.

a few more quotes I like

quoth the ravenous

1) It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge -Albert Einstein

2)If you can't explain it to a 6 year old, you don't understand it yourself -Einstein

3)I have decided to stick with love.  Hate is too great a burden to bear. -MLK, jr.

4)Every saint has a past, and every sinner has a future. -Oscar Wilde

5)If you judge people, you have no time to love them. -Mother Theresa

6)Nothing is impossible.  The word itself says I'm possible! -Audrey Hepburn

7)Choose a job you love, and you will never work a day in your life. -Confucius

8)The question isn't who is going to let me.  It's who is going to stop me. -Ayn Rand

9)Here's to books, the cheapest vacation you can buy. -Charlaine Harris

10)The harder you work, the luckier you get. -Gary Player

11)Make it a rule never to give a child a book you would not read  yourself. -George Bernard Shaw

12)If we couldn't laugh, we would all go insane. -Robert Frost

13)You have not failed until you have quit trying. -Gordon B. Hinckley

14)For every minute you are angry, you lose 60 seconds of happiness. -Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ignant

a ridiculous okcupid exchange

(after reading that my okcupid profile lists me as catholic, AJ said:)
Thanks for the message. Although OKcupid may match us highly, I think we would not be a good match, not least because I am Jewish and you are Catholic, and I couldn't date someone who thought I'm going to hell, and who held me responsible for killing his savior.


(my response)

I don't believe in hell (or heaven, for that matter), aside from what we make of our planet and ourselves, while we're alive. My birthfather is jewish. I look jewish. I've read the old testament. I believe jesus was delusional. I am only nominally catholic. Even if I believed, I wouldn't have held you responsible for what other jews did 2000 years ago (and what jesus apparently accepted as the will of his father). I don't even believe in sin. Hell is a village in Norway. You can go there. -Jesse

aside-

As for "savior", does that mean

saved from dying,

saved from hell,

saved from suffering (in this context, either the

consequences of my own sin,

or the consequences of the sin of others)

I don't know what the word even means, and I also don't believe in any of the above theorized possiblities of the meaning of the word:

Everyone dies, there is no eternal punishment (what most people mean by 'hell'), jesus can't do anything now (he's dead) to alleviate suffering (although christians I suppose think they are the "body of christ" now, who definitely do good works to lessen suffering and increase happiness, which can be done of course by anyone of any or no faith), and belief in him might even cause suffering  (such as giving up all your possessions).

Sin doesn't exist objectively

But it DOES exist subjectively- if you defy:

1)your conscience

2)others' preferences

3)the will of the Flying Spaghetti Monster.

God's law is the totality of everyone's personal preferences, in my opinion. And I'm always right, lol. And because there are so many different people in the world, this means you can do whatever you want, or alternatively, you're a sinner no matter what you do.  So maybe you should just forget about religion altogether, and concentrate on the Law.

And AJ is seriously ignorant, if she thinks ALL catholics hate jews.

Of course, she probably thinks Jews are "God's chosen people", which is equally stupid.