The God of Spinoza

Did you know that when Einstein gave lectures at the numerous US universities he was invited to, the recurring question that students asked him was:

Do you believe in God?
And he always answered:
I believe in the God of Spinoza.

The ones who hadn't read Spinoza didn't understand...

Baruch de Spinoza was a Dutch philosopher considered one of the three great rationalists of 17th-century philosophy, along with René Descartes in France, and Gottfried Leibniz in Germany.

Here's some of his wisdom:
God would have said:

Stop praying and punching yourself in the chest!

What I want you to do is go out into the world and enjoy your life. I want you to enjoy, sing, have fun and enjoy everything I've made for you.

Stop going to those dark, cold temples that you built yourself and say they are my house! My house is in the mountains, in the woods, rivers, lakes, beaches. That's where I live and there I express my love for you.

Stop blaming me for your miserable life; I never told you there was anything wrong with you or that you were a sinner, or that your sexuality was a bad thing!

Sex is a gift I have given you and with which you can express your love, your ecstasy, your joy. 

So don't blame me for everything they made you believe.

Stop reading alleged sacred scriptures that have nothing to do with me. If you can't read me in a sunrise, in a landscape, in the look of your friends, in your son's eyes... you will find me in no book! 

Trust me and stop asking me. 

Would you tell me how to do my job?

Stop being so scared of me. I do not judge you or criticize you, nor get angry, or seek to punish you. I am pure love.

Stop asking for forgiveness, there's nothing to forgive. 

If I made you... I filled you with passions, limitations, pleasures, feelings, needs, inconsistencies... free will. 

How can I blame you if you respond to something I put in you? 

How can I punish you for being the way you are, if I'm the one who made you? 

Do you think I could create a place to burn all my children who behave badly for the rest of eternity? 

What kind of God would do that?

Forget any kind of commandments, any kind of laws; those are wiles to manipulate you, to control you, that only create guilt in you.

Respect your peers and don't do what you don't want for yourself. All I ask is that you pay attention in your life, that your consciousness is your guide.

My beloved, this life is not a test, not a step, not a rehearsal, nor a prelude to paradise. This life is the only thing that exists here and now, and it is all you need.

I have set you absolutely free, no prizes or punishments, no sins or virtues... no one carries a marker, no one keeps a record.

You are absolutely free to create in your life heaven or hell.

I could tell you if there's anything after this life, but I won't... but I can give you a tip. Live as if there is nothing after... as if this is your only chance to enjoy, to love, to exist.

So, if there's nothing, then you will have enjoyed the opportunity I gave you. And if there is, rest assured that I won't ask if you behaved right or wrong, I'll ask. Did you like it? Did you have fun? What did you enjoy the most? What did you learn?...

Stop believing in me; believing is assuming, guessing, imagining. I don't want you to believe in me... 

I want you to feel me in you when you kiss your beloved, when you tuck in your little girl, when you caress your dog, when you bathe in the sea.

Stop praising me, what kind of egomaniac God do you think I am?

I'm bored being praised, I'm tired of being thanked. Feeling grateful? 

Prove it by taking care of yourself, your health, your relationships, the world. Express your joy!... that's the way to praise me.

Stop complicating things and repeating as a parakeet what you've been taught about me.

The only thing for sure is that you are here, that you are alive, and that this world is full of wonders.

What do you need more miracles for? Why so many explanations?

Look for me outside... you won't find me. Find me inside... there I am beating within you.

Spinoza.

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Protection

 

FOUCI Says...

 Fauci: US Likely Won’t Go Into Lockdown Over 

COVID-19 Delta Variant

The United States is unlikely to be sent back into lockdown despite a surge in COVID-19 cases stemming from the delta variant, top U.S. scientist Anthony Fauci said Sunday.

America is in for "some pain and suffering in the future," but enough people have now been vaccinated to prevent a repeat of last winter's deadly surge, the infectious disease expert who advises President Joe Biden told ABC's "This Week."

"I don't think we're going to see lockdowns," Fauci said after Biden's announcement this week that the United States was probably headed for new restrictions because of the delta variant surge.

Elsewhere in the world, countries including China and Australia have, in fact, put some of their people back under lockdown as the highly contagious variant spreads, not long after it seemed life was beginning to return to normal.

The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention changed course this week and said fully vaccinated people should mask up again indoors in higher-risk areas of the country.

The top U.S. health authority says the delta variant is as contagious as chickenpox and, critically, that breakthrough cases in vaccinated individuals, though still rare, may be as transmissible as unvaccinated cases.  READ MORE

College Campuses: Freedom of Speech

From the moment I stepped foot on campus at NYU three years ago, I’ve been taught that there is right-think and wrong-think. 

Everywhere I look, professors, administrators and peers all fervently parrot the same beliefs.

I have sat through orientation events that were highly politicized, assuming “community values” of radical progressivism — values I don’t share.

On the first day of the semester, a professor blatantly disparaged conservative politicians and their supporters as uneducated and ignorant. 

Even Mayor de Blasio intervened in October of 2018 to prevent right-wing provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos from speaking to a class of about 25 freshmen about political correctness after the campus erupted in outrage and Antifa threatened to shut down the event.

My experience is not unique. Across the nation, professors are espousing their own views at the lectern and thrusting politicized curricula upon students, teaching them what to think rather than how to think. 

Meanwhile, speech codes, safe spaces, trigger warnings and the conflation of speech with violence have all had a discernibly chilling effect on campus discourse. NYU identification cards even prominently display a bias report hotline to report any instances of offense. 

The resulting fear of saying the wrong thing or being behind on the latest political lingo is palpable.  READ MORE

Not Again...

 

A Cabin Outdoors

 

Motion

Surviving A Global Collapse of Society

New Zealand, Iceland, the UK, Tasmania and Ireland are the places best suited to survive a global collapse of society, according to a study.

The researchers said human civilisation was “in a perilous state” due to the highly interconnected and energy-intensive society that had developed and the environmental damage this had caused.

A collapse could arise from shocks, such as a severe financial crisis, the impacts of the climate crisis, destruction of nature, an even worse pandemic than Covid-19 or a combination of these, the scientists said.

To assess which nations would be most resilient to such a collapse, countries were ranked according to their ability to grow food for their population, protect their borders from unwanted mass migration, and maintain an electrical grid and some manufacturing ability. Islands in temperate regions and mostly with low population densities came out on top.

The researchers said their study highlighted the factors that nations must improve to increase resilience. They said that a globalised society that prized economic efficiency damaged resilience, and that spare capacity needed to exist in food and other vital sectors.

Billionaires have been reported to be buying land for bunkers in New Zealand in preparation for an apocalypse. “We weren’t surprised New Zealand was on our list,” said Prof Aled Jones, at the Global Sustainability Institute, at Anglia Ruskin University, in the UK.

Jones added: “We chose that you had to be able to protect borders and places had to be temperate. So with hindsight it’s quite obvious that large islands with complex societies on them already [make up the list].  READ MORE

Like Them Tats

 

Just 35 Light Years Away

Astronomers have discovered thousands of exoplanets — planets beyond our solar system — but few have been directly imaged, because they are extremely difficult to see with existing telescopes.

A University of Hawaiʻi Institute for Astronomy (IfA) graduate student has beaten the odds and discovered a directly imaged exoplanet, and it’s the closest one to Earth ever found, at a distance of only 35 light years

Using the COol Companions ON Ultrawide orbiTS (COCONUTS) survey, IfA graduate student Zhoujian Zhang and a team of astronomers, Michael Liu and Zach Claytor (IfA), William Best (University of Texas at Austin), Trent Dupuy (University of Edinburgh) and Robert Siverd (Gemini Observatory/National Optical-Infrared Astronomy Research Laboratory) identified a planet about six times the mass of Jupiter. 

The team’s research, published in The Astrophysical Journal Letters, led to the discovery of the low-temperature gas-giant planet orbiting a low-mass red dwarf star, about 6,000 times farther than the Earth orbits the Sun. They dubbed the new planetary system COCONUTS-2, and the new planet COCONUTS-2b.

“With a massive planet on a super-wide-separation orbit, and with a very cool central star, COCONUTS-2 represents a very different planetary system than our own solar system,” Zhang explained. The COCONUTS survey has been the focus of his recently-completed PhD thesis, aiming to find wide-separation companions around stars of all different types close to Earth.  READ MORE

Sea - Mirror - Sand

 

Time Crystal

Google’s quantum computer has been used to build a “time crystal” according to freshly-published research, a new phase of matter that upends the traditional laws of thermodynamics. 

Despite what the name might suggest, however, the new breakthrough won’t let Google build a time machine.

Time crystals were first proposed in 2012, as systems that continuously operate out of equilibrium. Unlike other phases of matter, which are in thermal equilibrium, time crystals are stable yet the atoms which make them up are constantly evolving.

At least, that’s been the theory: scientists have disagreed on whether such a thing was actually possible in reality. Different levels of time crystals that could or could not be generated have been argued, with demonstrations of some that partly – but not completely – meet all the relevant criteria. 

In a new research preprint by researchers at Google, along with physicists at Princeton, Stanford, and other universities, it’s claimed that Google’s quantum computer project has delivered what many believed impossible. 

Preprints are versions of academic papers that are published prior to going through peer-review and full publishing; as such, their findings can be challenged or even overturned completely during that review process. READ MORE

Raising Awareness

 

WOKE and the Military

Army Gen. Mark Milley is getting kudos from the media for telling Congress that the military hasn’t become “woke,” even as its leadership urges soldiers and sailors to absorb woke ideas. The brass is trying to have it both ways on this issue, and that may ultimately undermine its core mission.

The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs told the House Armed Services Committee Wednesday that he “personally” found it “offensive” that Republicans have accused general officers of being “woke.” A pair of Florida Congressmen had been criticizing Gen. Milley over seminars at West Point about “white rage.” 

The Chief of Naval Operations has recommended “How to Be an Antiracist,” a book that proposes “future discrimination,” ostensibly against white people, on his professional reading list for sailors.

Gen. Milley has to be sensitive to the political realities in the White House, but he was clearly exercised about the criticism, saying it’s “important actually for those of us in uniform to be open-minded and be widely read.” 

He later added: “I’ve read Mao Zedong. I’ve read Karl Marx. I’ve read Lenin. That doesn’t make me a communist.” So, he asked, “what is wrong” with “having some situational understanding about the country for which we are here to defend?”

Of course sailors and Marines should read widely. Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Michael Gilday said similarly last week that he was merely exposing sailors to new ideas. 

But one can still wonder why “How to Be an Antiracist,” a book promoting sectarian racism, is on the reading list as “foundational” material on par with Jim Hornfischer’s classic naval histories.   READ MORE

WOKE and SPORTS

“SPORTS HAS A PROBLEM…BEING WOKE AIN’T HELPING — PART II” 

By Phillip Stutts

(Part I in this series can be found here).

Also seen on Outkick.

If you listen carefully, you can feel the tremors collectively shaking around the sports world….

1. The University of Connecticut football team just opted out of their upcoming season (the first major university to do so).

2. A cascade of NFL players are now opting out of their upcoming season.

3. Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred threatened to cancel the season when players tested positive for Covid-19.

4. PAC 12 football players have revolted against their conference leaders demanding to be compensated or they plan to sit out their season.

5. Stanford University just eliminated 11 scholarship sports due to budget deficit concerns.

6. The NBA’s return was a rating’s bust.

7. ESPN has a subscriber decline of 6% in 2020 — the largest decline ever posted -and has seen a ratings collapse, ranking 19th amongst the top TV networks falling behind the the Hallmark Channel, Home and Garden Television, and a network called “Investigation Discovery.”

Most of these tremors were caused by the Coronavirus disruption when our leaders in medicine, government, media, and sports convinced us last spring that if we just flattened the pandemic curve, they could see sports settle back to normality soon enough.

But that isn’t going to happen now.

The disease has become a political football, wokeness has erupted everywhere, and major sports is teetering on the brink of collapse.

Five months since the lockdowns went into effect, the 21/90 rule has been adopted by many Americans and its impact on sports is a ticking timebomb.

What’s the 21/90 rule?

To quote: “It takes 21 days to build or break a habit and 90 days to create a lifestyle. If you want to make most things a cornerstone to your life, understand that it won’t feel like second nature to you until about the 90-day mark.”

140+ days into the Covid-19 nightmare and many (not all) fans have lost their passion for sports (as evidenced by the ratings). They’ve found other routines, different ways to find “escapism”, and this impact will have devastating effects on the economic future of sports.

And when you add to the mix how the Woke Cancel Culture has invaded corporate America, media, universities, and athletes, these tremors are quickly turning into a massive economic earthquake.

What does this all mean?  READ MORE

Bob Woodson and Critical Race Theory

 

Boxing

 

China Controlling Global Economy

China wants its currency, the yuan, to replace the U.S. dollar as the world's global currency. That would give it more control over its economy.

As China's economic might grows, it's taking steps to make that happen. A slim majority of institutional investors see it as inevitable, but don't say when.1 Could we see a switch from a greenback- to a redback-dominated world? If so, how and when would that happen? What would be the consequences?

Before the yuan can become a global currency, it must first be successful as a reserve currency. That would give China the following five benefits:

1. The yuan would be used to price more international contracts. China exports a lot of commodities that are traditionally priced in U.S. dollars. If they were priced in yuan, China would not have to worry so much about the dollar's value.
2. All central banks would have to hold yuan as part of their foreign exchange reserves. The yuan would be in higher demand. That would lower interest rates for bonds denominated in yuan.
3. Chinese exporters would have lower borrowing costs.
4. China would have more economic clout in relation to the United States.
5. It would support President Jinping's economic reforms.

READ MORE

A Different Perspective

 

Yesterday...  I went to my wife's hair stylist for my quarterly hair cut (cost:  $20) and it takes about 20 minutes not including the conversation that sometimes is involved...  My appointment was his first, and I had to wait in his chair for him to arrive as he was running late.

During the experience, he just "out of the blue," made the statement that the US was turning into a 3RD WORLD COUNTRY and that politicians on both sides have allowed this to happen over the last 50 years and did nothing about it...  I asked him why he felt that way...  his response was, "this kind of stuff does not happen over night..."

My wife's hair stylist is a high school dropout...

He also informed me that for the last year he has been asking high school girls who have made appointments with him what they have learned in school or what they might have learned today, and the overwhelming response by them was...  NOTHING...  I LEARNED NOTHING TODAY...

Now, this may not be indicative of the entire USA or even the entire State of Tennessee, but it is still scary...  What supports this for me is the fact that I have been teaching college students night courses in business since 2015 and have come into contact with the following:

• My college students read at a Junior High School level
• My college students write at a Junior High School level
• My college students present at a Junior High School level
• My college student don't do homework
• My college student don't prepare for class
• My college students want to be told exactly what to do
• My college students don't have critical thinking skills
• My college students don't have problem solving skills
• My college students don't work well together in teams
• My college students don't have self starting skills

East TN Living

Today, if you were to watch your local news or weather channel or check out the weather channel on cable or dish, you would discover that the temperatures are going to be in the HIGH 90's in the south from Texas curving around through Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, South Carolina, and North Carolina...   but because of the GREAT SMOKY MOUNTAINS the hot temperatures WILL NOT PENETRATE into the Voluteer State of Tennessee...  specifically east TN where I am living...

NOW...  that is not to say that we don't get hot temperatures in the 90's because we do...  and we had those temperatures here for the last two weeks, and the only good thing about those temps for me was the fact that I did not have to mow the lawn or weedeat and I could remain inside where it was cool cooking on my electric portable stovetop and watch programs on ROKU, HULU, and NETFLIX...

I am CABLE and DISH FREE...

I have a fiber optic WIFI connection to the internet and my telephone communications are done via cell phones not a landline any longer...  it is almost as satisfying as the day I became completely DEBT FREE...