Wednesday, December 19, 2007

Whatever...

So I'm home sick today, lying down is making me feel worse, so I'm sitting at the confuter reading the internets. The Unknown Candidate had a must-read link to an Online Journal piece, the excerpt of which simply didn't fit the Wall Street Journal's editorial stance in the slightest. (Turns out I had read Online Journal but thought online.wsj.com.)

I read the piece

Ah, I'm losing interest in this post. Long story short, there's this study done back in the 70's by Stanford Research Institute: Changing Images of Man. Someone put a 30 MB pdf of the book here. I didn't find anything about it on the SRI website.

Damned post wants to get long again. No!

The must-read piece, The planned collapse of America, by Peter Chamberlin, takes off from that study and paints a scary picture of the fairly near-term future. Being the pessimistic and ignorant nihilist that I am, OK, sounds plausible.

But I've grown tired of this kind of stuff. Nobody knows what will happen. It's very hard for me to imagine a good short- to medium-term future. It seems that all the trends, ALL the trends, point hopelessly in the wrong directions. Paying attention only darkens my outlook, so I seem to be paying less and less attention. Ekhart Tolle's living "in the now" seems to make more sense to me now than when I read his book (which kind of turned me off at the time).

Whatever... Nobody knows what will happen.

Merry Christmas! Steve

1 comment:

jj mollo said...

Well, I'm glad you avoided that tarbaby. SRI has supported, at least in the past, some very suspect research, including Harold Putoff's remote-viewing stuff. These works are apparently popular in the conspiracy cult, associated with fundamentalist religions and UFO nuts as well. Meanwhile, watch out for the Dimetapp. It can do funny things to your mind.