Comfusion
"When acting as a Basic Assumption group, the group acts as a closed system whereby external realities are ignored and collective dynamics rule."
- 48 laws of power
"An excellent book written by Robert Greene and designed by Joost Elffers on the nature of power and methods of getting power. I find it more entertaining and useful than Machiavelli. Each law is illustrated with examples from history and literature; even reversals of the law. The book is beautifully laid out in black and red, emphasizing the message of the text. I strongly recommend purchasing it -- it is an unsettling, and possibly very useful read. Practicing the laws involves being a right bastard."
- Approaches towards Understanding Islam
"The common blunder one commits is that he asks a philosophical question from a specialist in religious training or a person learned in applications. Similarly one may ask a practical problem from a scholar whose actual area of work is Islamic philosophy. An analogy here may help to elucidate the problem. The realm of business studies is a fast growing discipline these days. In this field of study, philosophy-based approach may take into account such subjects as the origins of business, business as a social activity, different schools of thought studying business, and the established principles to run a business organization. An application-based approach will give birth to many consultants who work with different business organizations on different functions, going into minor details on strategy and policy. A training-based approach quite differently will give birth to a breed of trainers who reach different employees in an organization and train them to solve the practical problems they confront in their day to day lives. One can easily understand the havoc one will play if he asks a trainer about the philosophy of business and then rejecting him on finding a not very convincing answer even if that person was a wonderful trainer of business executives. "
- Changing minds
"Welcome to ChangingMinds.org, the largest site in the world on all aspects of how we change what others think, believe, feel and do. There are already over 2200 pages here, with much more to come! "
- From the Druid Way: Rainbow
"The purpose of both dragons, inner and outer, is the same. They convey the creative fire, the fertilising breath that brings life and abundance - both to the individual and to the land. For all sorts of reasons beyond our understanding, these dragons have been allowed to sleep. But in the old days they were awake - and it was the old sage, the Druid or Druidess, who knew how to direct and utilise this inner and outer fire, to creative ends. The quest for personal fertility - of ideas, of children, of song and music - and of earthly fertility in abundant crops - were united in the ancients, and need to be united by us again as we try to extricate ourselves from the wasteland we have created within and around us. And it is in the two colours of white and red that we find the clue to this fertility we need to rediscover: for white and red symbolise male and female, sperm and blood, moon and sun. Still to this day in somewhere as far away as Bulgaria, an old territory of the Celts, everyone will be seen wearing small pom-poms of white and red in March, in conscious recognition of the coming Spring, and in unconscious recognition of the Spring Equinox on March 22nd and of the need to unite the two principles to create an abundant life."
- Gaia hypothesis
"In James Lovelock's latest book, "The Revenge of Gaia", he argues that the lack of respect humans have had for Gaia, through the damage done to rainforests and the reduction in planetary biodiversity, is testing Gaia's capacity to minimise the effects of the addition of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. This eliminates the planet's homeostatic negative feedback potential and increases the likelihood of positive feedbacks associated with runaway global warming. Similarly the warming of the oceans is extending the oceanic thermocline layer of tropical oceans into the Arctic and Antarctic waters, preventing the rise of oceanic nutrients into the surface waters and eliminating the algal blooms of phytoplankton on which oceanic foodchains depend. As phytoplankton and forests are the main ways in which Gaia draws down greenhouse gases, particularly carbon dioxide, taking it out of the atmosphere, the elimination of this environmental buffering will see, according to Lovelock, most of the earth becoming uninhabitable for humans and other life-forms by the middle of next century, with a massive extension of tropical deserts. Given these conditions, Lovelock expects civilization will be hard pressed to survive."
- The Open Mind
"I see classrooms in which everyone holds tight to their competency. The students want to appear knowledgeable to the teacher and to each other. The teacher wants to appear knowledgeable to the students. There is barely room in the cup for anything else. Can you show your students what an empty cup might look like? An open mind? One approach is to teach them to ask you hard questions so that you can answer that you do not know, thus demonstrating the empty cup as a positive. To do this you must feel comfortable voicing uncertainty in good spirit, and your students must be willing to find you without an answer. Can you teach this? It is easy to believe that you must be very good at this to teach it. Can you put aside this conclusion as well? This is advanced work, to create a moment into which your students can ask questions and you can answer without conclusion, using the inquiry itself and an open mind to pursue greater understanding."
- Wikipedia: Political aspects of Islam
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