The website where all the details are to be found about the series was a new launch last week and so had some ‘tweak’s to be made. I am grateful to those of you who wrote to this e-address informing me that one of the contact boxes was blocked. My webmaster has now corrected this error and made a couple of other changes.
As this contact box was blocked I may therefore have missed some messages you may have sent through and therefore invite you now to resend them through the site.
Registration is still open to join a group. AND please note that if you have a limited financial budget, you are encouraged to write and ask me about a reduced fee for your group participation, although you will need to pay the full amount for your “Calendar of Archetypal Influences” $95 approximately for your initial copy for 12 months. Perhaps a payment plan may be available for this too.
Looking forward to hearing from you. With a smile for your day,
Zoë
How Muhammad treated his Jewish neighbor
Prophet Muhammad had a Jewish neighbour and this person used to every morning throw his garbage at the door step of the Prophet’s home. The Prophet would then pick it up and throw it in the disposal area along with his personal trash. One morning the Prophet didn’t see any garbage on his door step and he didn’t really care much about it. The next morning same thing and so on, until a week passed by without any garbage being put on the Prophet’s door step. So our Prophet went to that Jewish neighbor and paid him a visit to check on him. The Jewish neighbor was sick and he was in bed. Our Prophet then started taking care of his Jewish neighbor and the Jewish very soon embraced Islam because of our beloved Prophet’s high morals.
The point of the story is that Prophet Muhammad was very ordinary. He wasn’t rich nor was he treated with any special security by anyone. He spent his wealth on good Islamic causes and he was the best role model for everyone.
Allah Said Nor can Goodness and Evil be equal. Repel (Evil) with what is better: then will he between whom and thee was hatred become as it were thy friend and intimate) Fussilat, Verse 34.
(wireclub.com)
Wine Country Wildfire Destruction
More than 170,000 acres of burnt land in the iconic Northern California region have left an ashen landscape of commercial and residential structures. (Todd Johnson | San Francisco Business Times)
By Katie Burke – Food/Hospitality/Retail Reporter, San Francisco Business Times
October 11, 2017
The first thing you notice is the smell. Then it’s the silence.
With at least 17 fires burning more than 115,000 acres of Wine Country land, dozens of restaurants, wineries and businesses along with hundreds of homes have been destroyed and left to smolder in their wake. The fires have resulted in at least 15 deaths so far, a toll expected to rise further with more than 150 people still reported missing.
Cal Fire said in an update earlier today that more than 2,000 structures in Sonoma, Napa and Mendocino Counties have been destroyed. Also today, the White House approved an extensive disaster declaration for California. President Donald Trump approved Federal Emergency Management Agency funding for the fire-ravaged area this afternoon, and state and local governments can begin to apply for assistance starting immediately.
Driving through Santa Rosa, Yountville, Calistoga, Napa and circling back to Vallejo, the damage is both extensive and entirely random. Street upon street of shops, retail centers, malls and gas stations have been deserted, pockmarked by neighborhoods of burnt-out or damaged structures. Evacuation orders remain in place, leaving no cars in most driveways and empty recycling bins in the street.
A lengthening roster of wineries in the area have been damaged or destroyed by the fires: Stagg’s Leap, William Hill and White Rock Vineyards in Napa, Chateau St. Jean, Paradise Ridge, Mayo Family Wineries and Nicholson Ranch in Sonoma, and Oster Wine Cellars in Mendocino, have all been affected. Calls to the properties were not returned.
Vaugh Medeiros told us that he evacuated his Santa Rosa home across from Schaefer Elementary School in the early hours of Monday morning and came back today to survey what was left. His house survived.
The rest of the neighborhood was mostly flattened — a landscape of ash, doorsteps to nothing and smoldering piles of car parts, bicycles and lawn toys.
“There were always kids playing in the streets and making noise up and down the block, but now there’s just nothing,” Medeiros said. “By some stroke of chance, this house made it, and it’s probably because the neighbor was watering everything down once the fire got close.”
The Nectar Restaurant and Lounge at the Hilton Sonoma Wine Country hotel in Santa Rosa was destroyed when the Tubbs Fire ripped through the town.
Other areas weren’t as lucky. The Hilton Sonoma Wine Country hotel in Santa Rosa at 3555 Round Barn Blvd. has been completely destroyed, with roads at the bottom of the hill blocked off to anxious residents waiting to see the status of their apartment complexes nearby.
Traci, a Santa Rosa resident who declined to provide her last name after crossing a police barricade, said she evacuated right after midnight on Sunday. She left behind her cat, her medicine and all of her belongings in the chaotic rush to flee. Her apartment unit off Fountaingrove Parkway was stable, but everything immediately across from her has been destroyed.
As business owners and residents clamor to get more information, police officers, sheriffs, firefighters and volunteers on the outskirts of the heavily damaged area have been working with little to no new information.
“There is just nothing to say,” a police officer parked near the first of a string of barricades blocking the roads leading to the Silverado Resort, which was evacuated late Sunday evening. Guests visiting for last weekend’s PGA tour and staff were forced to flee, and condominiums, vineyards and other structures in the area have been flattened into the now-black hills.
A few of the Wine Country’s iconic landmarks are still standing, however, including Yountville’s French Laundry and Bouchon.
In an Instagram post, Chef Thomas Keller said the two restaurants were safe, but left with limited resources as the fires continue to create power outages and curtail cellular service.
“Our restaurants in Yountville have limited resources, yet are here to support and provide sustenance and comfort to those in the area whether visitors or locals,” he wrote of Bouchon Bistro opening later this morning. Ad Hoc and French Laundry are closed this evening, but will be open tomorrow.
Elton John – “Friends” (1971)
The title track from the 1971 soundtrack album of the film “Friends.” Elton John and Bernie Taupin were contracted to write songs for the Lewis Gilbert film in 1970, before their own albums were selling successfully. When the soundtrack album came out Elton John was now a successful name and the album sold well. This title track was also released as a single and made the top 40 in America. Elton and Taupin actually only wrote three songs for the film: this one, “Michelle’s Song” and “Seasons.” Other songs were designated as part of the film’s soundtrack, simply as background music, on the radio and such, and the rest of the film score (and album) was composed by Paul Buckmaster. Elton has only performed the song “Friends” live in concert in 1971, and then at a few dates in 1999 at the beginning of the Medusa solo tour.
Words & Music by Elton John & Bernie Taupin
©1970 Dick James Music Limited
(Submitted by Robert McEwen, HWM)
End of the World As We Know It: What’s the Draw of Dystopian Sci-Fi?
Credit: KhDuy Vo/Shutterstock
NEW YORK — Grim sci-fi and speculative fiction tales are often rooted in scenarios of oppression, moral disintegration or even total social collapse — from the perpetual surveillance and menace of “Big Brother” in George Orwell’s “1984,” to the deadly state-sanctioned battles fought by desperate children in Suzanne Collins’ “The Hunger Games” trilogy.
But as bleak as these stories are, they have captivated readers and writers alike for decades. What drives authors to imagine these broken futures, and what might explain their enduring popularity?
On Oct. 6, a panel of writers at New York Comic Con (NYCC) explored their own relationships with dystopian sci-fi, and what characters who navigate dire situations in futuristic but degraded environments under totalitarian control can tell us about our world today — and about ourselves. [Doom and Gloom: Top 10 Post-Apocalyptic Worlds]
Dystopian science fiction can also introduce weighty topics, such as climate change, in ways that are entertaining, and not “dry or preachy,” panelist Paolo Bacigalupi said.
When a reader meets a character who’s trying to survive on a coastline that’s been reshaped by rising sea levels, or who’s coping with a Category 6 hurricane, the story resonates because it reflects circumstances that are already in motion around us, Bacigalupi said. Recent destructive hurricanes like Harvey, Irma and Maria have already raised concerns about the possibility of stronger storms to come, fueled by a warming world, he told the audience.
“Fiction lets you talk about something that hasn’t happened yet, but we’re leaning toward it,” he said.
Visiting a pessimistic future can also be surprisingly cathartic, because the reader knows that, however frightening that world may be, they can instantly leave it behind with the turn of a page, according to panelist D. Nolan Clark. A reader can experience the gamut of anxiety and unease, but there’s also a sense of relief and safety when they step away from the book — which isn’t always possible in real life, Clark said.
Dystopian fiction also provides a space where readers can wrestle safely with disturbing situations in an uncertain or malevolent world, panelist Scott Reintgen explained. And seeing characters make tough decisions and bravely face gut-wrenching challenges provides a shred of hope that goodness can still prevail, even when the odds seem hopeless, Clark said.
“A lot of us feel like we don’t have any control over our lives these days. When you read about someone who stands up, you find in that character some kind of heroic model,” Clark told the audience.
“The act of standing up and talking back to power in the most sassy voice you can think of — that in itself is heroic,” he said.
Seeing that individual actions matter, and that even someone who seems powerless at the start of a story can be brave, and, in doing so, can dramatically change things for themselves and for others, is especially important for young readers, Oliver told the panel audience.
“Kids don’t have fairies under the bed — they have monsters,” she said. “You have to give them ways to imagine worlds in which they can be brave and make good choices. That’s good work for a book to do.”
Original article on Live Science.
“The Art of Thinking Well” by David Brooks
Richard Thaler has just won an extremely well deserved Nobel Prize in economics. Thaler took an obvious point, that people don’t always behave rationally, and showed the ways we are systematically irrational.
Thanks to his work and others’, we know a lot more about the biases and anomalies that distort our perception and thinking, like the endowment effect (once you own something you value it more than before you owned it), mental accounting (you think about a dollar in your pocket differently than you think about a dollar in the bank) and all the rest.
Before Thaler, economists figured it was good enough to proceed as if people are rational, utility-maximizing creatures. Now, thanks to the behavioral economics revolution he started, most understand that’s not good enough.
But Thaler et al. were only scratching the surface of our irrationality. Most behavioral economists study individual thinking. They do much of their research in labs where subjects don’t intimately know the people around them.
It’s when we get to the social world that things really get gnarly. A lot of our thinking is for bonding, not truth-seeking, so most of us are quite willing to think or say anything that will help us be liked by our group. We’re quite willing to disparage anyone when, as Marilynne Robinson once put it, “the reward is the pleasure of sharing an attitude one knows is socially approved.” And when we don’t really know a subject well enough, in T. S. Eliot’s words, “we tend always to substitute emotions for thoughts,” and go with whatever idea makes us feel popular.
This is where Alan Jacobs’s absolutely splendid forthcoming book “How to Think” comes in. If Thaler’s work is essential for understanding how the market can go astray, Jacobs’s emphasis on the relational nature of thinking is essential for understanding why there is so much bad thinking in political life right now.
Jacobs makes good use of C. S. Lewis’s concept of the Inner Ring. In every setting — a school, a company or a society — there is an official hierarchy. But there may also be a separate prestige hierarchy, where the cool kids are. They are the Inner Ring.
There are always going to be people who desperately want to get into the Inner Ring and will cut all sorts of intellectual corners to be accepted. As Lewis put it, “The passion for the Inner Ring is most skillful in making a man who is not yet a very bad man do very bad things.”
People will, for example, identify and attack what Jacobs calls the Repugnant Cultural Other — the group that is opposed to the Inner Ring, which must be assaulted to establish membership in it.
Other people will resent the Inner Ring, and they will cut all sorts of intellectual corners in order to show their resentment. These people are quick to use combat metaphors when they talk about thinking (he shot down my argument, your claims are indefensible). These people will adopt shared vague slurs like “cuckservative” or “whitesplaining” that signal to the others in the outsider groups that they are attacking the ring, even though these slurs are usually impediments to thought.
Jacobs notices that when somebody uses “in other words” to summarize another’s argument, what follows is almost invariably a ridiculous caricature of that argument, in order to win favor with the team. David Foster Wallace once called such people Snoots. Their motto is, “We Are the Few, the Proud, the More or Less Constantly Appalled at Everyone Else.”
Jacobs nicely shows how our thinking processes emerge from emotional life and moral character. If your heart and soul are twisted, your response to the world will be, too. He argues that by diagnosing our own ills, we can begin to combat them. And certainly I can think of individual beacons of intellectual honesty today: George Packer, Tyler Cowen, Scott Alexander and Caitlin Flanagan, among many.
But I’d say that if social life can get us into trouble, social life can get us out. After all, think of how you really persuade people. Do you do it by writing thoughtful essays that carefully marshal facts? That works some of the time. But the real way to persuade people is to create an attractive community that people want to join. If you do that, they’ll bend their opinions to yours. If you want people to be reasonable, create groups where it’s cool to be reasonable.
Jacobs mentions that at the Yale Political Union members are admired if they can point to a time when a debate totally changed their mind on something. That means they take evidence seriously; that means they can enter into another’s mind-set. It means they treat debate as a learning exercise and not just as a means to victory.
How many public institutions celebrate these virtues? The U.S. Senate? Most TV talk shows? Even the universities?
Back when they wrote the book of Proverbs it was said, “By long forbearing is a prince persuaded, and a soft tongue breaketh the bone.” These days, a soft tongue doesn’t get you very far, but someday it might again.
(Submitted by Bruce King)
One Racist at a Time: The Fly Efforts of Daryl Davis
A while back, Suzanne published a great post that touched on the necessity of talking to people, even those with whom we have huge differences. I posted a comment that in part addressed the difficulty of such an enterprise, however worthy I consider it to be.
Last week I stumbled upon this short interview with Daryl Davis by Fusion‘s Kim Brooks:
I’d heard something of Davis’s story, but only the vaguest of snippets. Now I think he may have discovered a way forward.
For more videos of Daryl Davis, click here…
Truth Will Operate
“What is important is not what hurts or what pleases, but to see what is true. And then that truth will operate, not you.” ~ Nobody knows
Monk Centennial
Today would have been the hundredth birthday of Thelonious Monk.
Back Sometime during the mid-sixties, while I was in high school, I discovered that one of my friends (nicknamed “Pod” for reasons it would be too long and complicated to get into here…) had a copy of Monk’s album Brilliant Corners. Now, I had heard tell of Monk, but had yet to actually hear any of his music, so one night I insisted that we listen to it. Here is what I heard, the album in its entirety (42:58 minutes):
Also present that night was Ken Wauchope, whom most of you probably remember, and who, after that, became as huge an admirer of Monk as I did.
Gnostics should note that Thelonious Monk’s motto was “Always Know” – “know” being “Monk” spelled backward with the “w” turned upside down…
The Dark Stuff
The approximate distribution of the Universe is 4% regular matter, 25% Dark Matter, and 71% Dark Energy.
Dark Matter and Dark Energy. Amazing that they now know they know very little about what the universe is actually made of.
And exciting too . . . . who knows what they’ll discover when they finally find out what those dark things actually are.
