Buch Day 151

today, I've run into this Chroma Key song, entitled "When You Drive"; the lyrics (and the voice reciting them) reminded me of what I will share with you now: that today the world should mourn the passage of 60 years since the assassination of Mahatma Gandhi...

here you have the lyrics:

When you drive, you practice mindfulness of driving. It is possible. When you stop at a red light, you look at the red light and smile. You look at the red light, you smile, and you breathe in and out, and sit back, relaxingly. Breathing in, I calm myself. Breathing out, I smile.
And the red light become a friend, become a bell of mindfulness. Something unpleasant become something pleasant. We have the habit energy of wanting to arrive. That is why we want to go as quickly as possible. But according to this practice, we arrive at every moment. Life can be found only in the present moment. Everything that we look for must be found in the present moment. Peace. Joy. Happiness. Buddha. The kingdom of God.
What is our final destination? If we abandon the present moment, our final destination may be our death. We don't want to arrive there, we want to go in the direction of life.
This concludes Tape 1, A Retreat on the Practice of Mindfulness. Our program continues with Tape 2.

Buch Day 149
[back @ work week 20]

location: here - there - here - there - everywhere :)
office mates' shirts colours: white and olive
air: still going...


working on:

• my continuous coordinating efforts towards the NUTS2 colleagues;
• the build up of solid arguments in relation to the MA;
• better templates for cover letters;
• Postcrossing updated lists;
• general GTD update.

APPs SQ: 39/50

17.01 to 19.01 - Cluj trip [with pit stops @ Enigma & Janis Pub]
22.o1 Corin's baasje
25.01 to 27.01 - Iasi trip [with talks, scans & a shot]

Quote of the Day: The intelligent man finds almost everything ridiculous, the sensible man hardly anything. - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
[image credits go here]

Political Ideals

Political Ideals was written during the upheaval of World War One. It is, in many ways, a statement, of Russell’s beliefs, a declaration of the ideas that influenced his thinking on the major events of the twentieth century. In this sense, it is essential reading for every student of this great philosopher. For it defines his principle that the only true aim of politics is to give free play to man’s natural creativity, and to deaden, whenever they manifest themselves, the forces of acquisition, power and convention that jeopardise individual responsibility and freedom.

[image and description taken from here]

... and to give you a flavour of the actual writing, here are a couple of nice quotes:

Political ideals must be based upon ideals for the individual life.The aim of politics should be to make the lives of individuals as good as possible. There is nothing for the politician to consider outside or above the various men, women, and children who compose the world. The problem of politics is to adjust the relations of human beings in such a way that each severally may have as much of good in his existence as possible. And this problem requires that we should first consider what it is that we think good in the individual life.

To begin with, we do not want all men to be alike. We do not want to lay down a pattern or type to which men of all sorts are to be made by some means or another to approximate. This is the ideal of the impatient administrator. A bad teacher will aim at imposing his opinion, and turning out a set of pupils all of whom will give the same definite answer on a doubtful point [...]
[above quotations taken from here]

Power

Even if it falls short of a general theory of human behaviour -- as nearly all books on similar themes do -- Power still makes fascinating reading. Readers of Hume or Gibbon will delight in a similar irony, which the author occasionally uses against himself. The very occasional digressions into political philosophy proper are always enlightening. For instance Russell believes that the doctrine of the Rights of Man is philosophically indefensible. But the doctrine was historically useful and helped to win many of our current freedoms. A utilitarian can restate it in the following terms: "The general happiness is increased if a certain sphere is defined in which each individual is free to act as he chooses without the interference of any external authority." This is not the last word, but at least it takes the discussion further.

An early 21st century reader has obviously to allow for the fact that Power was written in the late 1930s in the age of the great dictators, Hitler and Stalin, as well as smaller fry, such as Mussolini and Franco, and appeared a month after the now notorious 1938 Munich Agreement. Indeed part of the fascination for the modern reader is to assess for himself or herself how much the world has changed and how much it has essentially remained the same. [...]

Writing before the advent of political and religious correctness, Russell was able to say at the beginning of Chapter Ten that the classic example of power through fanaticism was the rise of Islam. When his followers were reluctant to march against the Byzantine empire, complaining among other things of the intolerable heat of the summer, Mohammed responded: "Hell is much hotter." Russell also manages a dig at German philosophical idealism. He states that Fichte was the first of the modern philosophers who veiled their own love of power beneath a garment of metaphysics. Fichte believed that the ego was the sole existing phenomenon in the world. But he also managed to argue that it was the duty of Germans to fight Napoleon. "Both the Germans and the French, of course, are only emanations of Fichte, but the Germans are a higher emanation, that is to say they are nearer to the one ultimate reality, which is Fichte's own." There is here a foretaste of the iconoclasm towards some revered thinkers which later so shocked the high minded in his History of Western Philosophy. [...]

A large part of this book is concerned with the classification of different sources of power:- such as priestly, kingly, revolutionary or economic power. Russell's aim is to investigate how we can enjoy the advantages of state power, to prevent the Hobbesian war of all against all, while taming its excesses. [outline credits go here, whereas the image was taken from here]

I personally found it so refreshing to read some common sense arguments, after a long time of gibberish speeches & prose being all that the world had to offer me; and, of course, I do enjoy Russell's writing style. It's a good reminder of the "debatablility" of all things political, economical, educational or propagandistic... which calls for all things surrounding us, for that matter. True, the argument might go that one needs not read Russell to be reminded of the above feature. Nonetheless, he manages to put it in a delighting historical perspective which many common viewpoints are missing out on currently; managing to get the strength to pause and ponder over what gets to be weighted against what is an attribute that many of us get to skip more and more often due to, mainly but not uniquely, time (or other type of resources) constraints. Put in this perspective, the history lessons that I've just been reminded of stand not only for a certain type of skepticism, but also for the discipline of reason.

Buch Day 138
[back @ work week 18]

Men walk past a mural on a wall of the former U.S. embassy in central Tehran, January 14, 2008

[source: reuters.com]

Why did I choose this topic today? well, because in the midst of a campaigning year, it appears to me that overseas US action remains fogged up in disarray... here's what Reuters had to say:

The economic impact of U.S. sanctions against Iran is unclear and Iran has signed about $20 billion in energy contracts with foreign firms since 2003, said a U.S. audit report.

"U.S. officials and experts report that U.S. sanctions have specific impacts on Iran; however, the extent of such impacts is difficult to determine," said the report by the nonpartisan Government Accountability Office, which was obtained by Reuters late on Tuesday.

"Other evidence raises questions about the extent of reported economic impacts," it added.

The report by the investigative arm of Congress comes as the Bush administration is pushing for a third round of U.N Security Council sanctions against Iran and planned talks with major powers in Berlin next week to iron out differences on those punitive measures. [...]

President George W. Bush has been pushing for tough measures against Iran during his trip to the Middle East over the past week, trying to shore up support to isolate Tehran and telling Arab allies that its nuclear program is a major threat to world peace.

[... and here's the missing part of the article, as well]

... now, may my skepticism be forgiven, but doesn't this type of external policy stubbornness kind of remind you of a series of particular events happening, roughly, about 5 years ago...?

as for my own spinning cycle, here's a little reminder - some wise planning spares you panic (:
air: feeling the deadlines' breath on my neck
mission: avoid getting sidetracked
today: possibly catching the night train to get my long-awaited BA diploma
this fortnight: the diploma, getting back to APPs, the plumber, the instructor, the book, the timetable... and avoiding getting hyper

on my ears: ADF's Collective Mode
Happy mid-Winter, everyone!

Buch Day 133
[still week 17 of back @ work]

dear C.C.,
my humble position in the greater mechanism that is my current job is due to the greater needs of systemic change in Romania's educational paradigm, which encompasses a large number of children (though not only) and a greater inclusion of women (by supporting the equality of opportunities). now, I'm not saying the world's perfect and that I alone will be the most relevant contributor to changing things for the better. Just saying that, for [a current] lack of a better option, this is what I can and am doing. Would you happen to have a better proposition?

.... then again, as my current tube companion - Mr. Bertrand Russell - wrote at a point in his life:

The increase of organization has brought into existence new positions of power. Every body has to have executive officials, in whom, at any moment, its power is concentrated. It is true that officials are usually subject to control, but the control may be slow and distant. From the young lady who sells stamps in a post office all the way up to the Prime Minister, every official is invested, for the time being, with some part of the power of the State. You can complain of the young lady if her manners are bad, and you can vote against the Prime Minister at the next election if you disapprove of his policy. But both the young lady and the Prime Minister can have a very considerable run for their money before (if ever) your discontent has any effect. This increase in the power of officials is a constant source of irritation to everybody else. [...] This tyranny of officials is one of the worst results of increasing organization, and one against which it is of the utmost importance to find safeguards if a scientific society is not to be intolerable to all but an insolent aristocracy of Jacks-in-office. [taken from here]

... and this is [part of] the downside of being a public servant...

Buch Day 131
[back @ work week 17]

air: 2008 came by the back door!... and I missed Vlad's birthday celebration yesterday evening
office mates' shirts colours: can't really remember now... they've all gone & I had too many people getting in & out of the office so as to bother remember such details

gps: twitter, again
working on: the labourious (assigned) work projects, involving cross-country cooperation

thinking of: how to better re-adjust to holidays being over & J. back to PT and how to get better time management, again
this week: compulsory full day @ work on Sat (12.01)
the week's discoveries: Patricia do Instituto Camoes & the fact that I'll meet again my driving instructor

last seen: Underclassman -- Futurama episodes -- My Super Ex-girlfriend --Thank You for Smoking -- 3:10 to Yuma -- Hot Fuzz (thanks to the Cinepinion blog) -- A Scanner Darkly -- Four Rooms -- Death Proof

p.s. will (hopefully) soon reply to the reader :) i just request a bit of your patiente