David Roel › Comments

"Counterpunch articles are often from some other source, and that original source sometimes is dugg first, or most. I usually try to find the original, and submit or digg that. This one I didn't find the original, or maybe it is original to Counterpunch." - David Roel

"For this blog, I spoke with Columbia University, Professor Robert Thurman, the leading U.S. scholar of Buddhism with a background in Tibetan Medicine. Alison Rose Levy: Americans have poorer health outcomes than any other developed nation. That must be coming from how we approach health care. What are the blindspots that prevent us from recognizing and getting the health care we need? Robert Thurman: It's not a matter of fixing this or that institution or changing how we pay for health insurance. It requires a social movement. In Tibetan medicine and most other world medicines, when someone is unwell, they first look at lifestyle and diet because those two things are the major poisoning and major healing of people." - William Harryman from Bookmarklet

None of Thurman's comments had anything to do with religion. Thurman's comments are that lifestyle, diet and nutrition are important considerations, that current medicine practices do not sufficiently take these into account, and that corporate influence has a deleterious effect on medicine and public welfare. How are those perspectives off-topic and naive? - David Roel

"When done right, comics are a cognitive whetstone, providing two or three or more different but entangled streams of information in a single panel. Processing what you’re being shown, along with what’s being said, along with what you’re being told, in conjunction with the shifting multiple velocities of imaginary time, and the action of the space between panels that Scott McCloud defines as closure… Comics require a little more of your brain than other visual media." - David Roel from Bookmarklet

"Direct brain-computer interfacing (BCI) may sound fanciful, but it’s already a reality — and in coming decades it will almost surely advance dramatically. Neuroscientists are gradually understanding the electrochemical signals by which our brains encode thoughts and feelings; statistical and AI tools are getting better and better at interpreting complex data." - David Roel from Bookmarklet

In her remarkably incoherent speech announcing that she’s stepping down as governor of Alaska, Sarah Palin misattributed a quote to Douglas MacArthur. As the New York Times reports: But at another point she invoked a military quotation, misattributing it to Gen. Douglas MacArthur, in what seemed to be an effort to wave aside any suggestion that she was abandoning the fight. “He said, ‘We’re not retreating; we are advancing in another direction,’ ” she said. (The remark was actually said by Maj. Gen. Oliver Prince Smith.) Leaving aside the misattribution, it has to be said that the quote itself seems like a bit of overheated bravado to hide the fact that there actually was a retreat. As long ago as 1952, Harvey Kurtzman slyly called attention to the fake chest-thumping of the statement by showing a very bedraggled soldier retreating while claiming that the Marines “advanced in another direction.” - David Roel from Bookmarklet

Impressive cubing. - David Roel from Bookmarklet

"She keeps the souls of the drowned in lobster pots that she finds on the seabed. They sing, the captive souls, and they light her way home beneath the grey Atlantic. She had sisters once, but long ago they shed their tails and scales and stepped gingerly ashore to live with fishermen in their dry-land cottages. Now she’s lonely, and not even the souls of the dead are company. Walk the sea’s edge in winter and you may see her, too far away, waving to you. Wave back and she will take you down to her world, deep below the waves, and show you cold wonders, and teach you the songs of the merfolk, and the lonely ways beneath the sea." - David Roel from Bookmarklet

"To meditate is not to empty the mind and gape at things in a trancelike stupor. Nothing significant will ever be revealed by just staring blankly at an object long and hard enough. To meditate is to probe with intense sensitivity each glimmer of color, each cadence of sound, each touch of another’s hand, each fumbling word that tries to utter what cannot be said. –Stephen Batchelor, from Buddhism Without Beliefs" - William Harryman from Bookmarklet

exactly David - and thangka meditations can be very powerful as well - just not my thing - William Harryman

"We’ve already heard arguments to the effect that computer games could become the ‘new frontier’ for fiction writing and storytelling, but they’ve usually come from the games or fiction communities themselves. It seems the idea is starting to get some traction beyond the ghettos, though - here’s a reviewer at the Daily Telegraph responding to a new game based on Dante’s Inferno" - Grey Drane from Bookmarklet

If so, then I shall no longer be taking in fiction. - David Roel

"I really wish the title were more straightforward. :( Why should I be impressed that you have the sharp sarcastic wit of a grade schooler?" - David Roel

An online discussion group for all integral thinkers. Topics can be Ken Wilber, meditation, spirituality, metaphysics, personal growth, etc. - David Roel

Ken Wilber clips from Integral Naked. - David Roel

The best source for integral audio and video. - David Roel

The best teacher of esoterica I know of. - David Roel

Shinzen Young home meditation practice program - David Roel