In December, long-time comrade-in-(non-aggressive)-arms Mac the Knife revealed his latest endeavor: The
Category: Mind and Spirit
Spirituality, moods, feelings, and thinking free to live free.
I’m reading The Sociopath Next Door by Martha Stout. The book is about how to recognize and deal with the sort of everyday monster who won’t stab you with a knife but will stab you in the back at work, cut you off at the knees in your endeavors, or be a murderously awful family member or neighbor. Having gotten close to way too many sociopaths in my younger and dumber years, I’m well armored against the type (knock wood). Still, Stout’s book does have some good information, including reports on recent brain studies of sociopaths. Perhaps the most useful…
… the jerking of knees. Friends of mine have two very bright teenagers — the kind of kids every parent would love — honor roll students, top athletes, well-spoken, and pretty straight shooters, as well. Their mom told me this story this morning. One boy, a freshman in high school, mentioned in his English class that he was reading Atlas Shrugged. The teacher promptly flew into a frenzy. The book is trash, she insisted. Boring, poorly writtten, an utter waste of anyone’s time. Now you know that a lot can be said both for and against Atlas Shrugged — sometimes…
I ran across this blog post the other day: “Kill your inner cynic.” It in turn was inspired by an article in Men’s Health. Both make the same point: that successful people are never cynics and if we want to succeed, we should find some way to stamp out our inner cynic and greet life filled with belief and hope. Now, that’s all nice and rosy. And I’ll admit that both authors have a point. To a point. But let me put in a good word for the cynics of the world. Mark Zimmerman, author of the Men’s Health piece,…
I should have included this with part II, but I didn’t quite have my head together this morning. This is for anybody struggling with boundary issues and not knowing the way out. You guys who already have it all figured out can ignore this. 🙂 Ten tips for defending boundaries 1. Know your boundaries. 2. Know your weak spots where it comes to defending boundaries (e.g. being “too nice,” saying yes when you want to say no, giving in to internal or external pressure, giving money to the wrong people). Watch for those weak moments and when you recognize one,…
Back in November, I wrote about defending personal boundaries. I typoed, then later corrected, the headline; but as several people pointed out, the typo made a certain kind of sense. So here it is again. In the original, I didn’t spend much time on why personal boundaries matter to freedom. MamaLiberty did that in the comments section: I think the boundaries, and setting them, are an integral part of self ownership. If we know for sure that we alone own our lives and are responsible for them … we are at least not as vulnerable. False guilt and ownership/responsibility issues…
Why you should always pay your website designer. George W. Bush cancels speaking engagement in Switzerland. If he’d gone he might have been arrested for war crimes. Speaking of which, I was poking around Wikipedia the other day and learned that the top U.S. representative at the Bretton Woods Conference (and with John Maynard Keynes one of the two most influential figures in the monetary agreement forged there) was a Soviet agent. Sheesh. I really do try not to fall into conspiracy theories. But that’s just strange. A lot of what this man did is just strange. Very smart, Mubarak.…
Charles Hugh Smith created this chart way back when to show the vast complex dedicated to preserving the status quo and offers this related comment now: There is a peculiar divide between the conventional and unconventional perception of the resilience/vulnerability of the Status Quo. The conventional view sees the Status Quo as stable and powerful enough to weather any threat or storm short of a full-scale thermonuclear war (i.e. an exchange of 1,000+ nuclear warheads) or climate catastrophe (meltdown of the Antarctic ice cap, etc.). The unconventional view is that the Status Quo is increasingly vulnerable to a “Black Swan”…
Or maybe I should ask — Do you see yourself as living in your “country of record,” wherever and whatever it may be? Of course, whether we’re anarchists, minarchists, unquestioning patriots, or brain-dead vegetables (but I repeat myself), we do reside within some country of record. Obviously a fact, even when we philosophically posture against bondage or allegiance to any governmental gang. But I’m asking about perceptions. The other day I read an article on LewRockwell.com about “Renewing the Patriot Act while America Sleeps.” I was struck by how little I cared, even though it was a fine, informative article.…
Few days ago, for reasons that escape me, I got curious about the fate of Laissez Faire City. If you’ve been around a while you might remember LFC as a hopeful and apparently well-funded effort to build a libertarian community in Costa Rica. That is, a hopeful, well-funded, and unfortunately badly “mis-mangled” project that died aborning. Wanting to see if there were any shreds of it remaining, I googled it startpaged it duckduckgoed it and found, sadly though not surprisingly, that it has disappeared without a ripple. The ‘Net that Never Forgets has forgotten it. Even its Wikipedia entry simply…