An example of extreme multitasking: For 12 hours a day, a young intelligence officer monitors 10 overhead television screens, types computer responses to 30 different chats with commanders, troops, and headquarters, has a phone in one ear,
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“There is a particular kind of pain, elation, loneliness, and terror involved in this kind of madness. When you're high it's tremendous. The ideas and feelings are fast and frequent like shooting stars, and you follow them until you find better and brighter ones. Shyness goes, the right words and gestures are suddenly there, the power to captivate others a felt certainty. There are interests found in uninteresting people. Sensuality is pervasive and the desire to seduce and be seduced irresistible. Feelings of ease, intensity, power, well-being, financial omnipotence, and euphoria pervade one's marrow. But, somewhere, this changes. The fast ideas are far too fast, and there are far too many; overwhelming confusion replaces clarity. Memory goes. Humor and absorption on friends' faces are replaced by fear and concern. Everything previously moving with the grain is now against-- you are irritable, angry, frightened, uncontrollable, and enmeshed totally in the blackest caves of the mind. You never knew those caves were there. It will never end, for madness carves its own reality.”
― An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness
― An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness
“As the playwright George Bernard Shaw once put it: “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
― David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants
― David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants
“...legitimacy is based on three things. First of all, the people who are asked to obey authority have to feel like they have a voice--that if they speak up, they will be heard. Second, the law has to be predictable. There has to be a reasonable expectation that the rules tomorrow are going to be roughly the same as the rules today. And third, the authority has to be fair. It can't treat one group differently from another.”
― David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants
― David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants
“We don't need to shift our responsibilities onto the shoulders of some deified Spiritual Superman, or sit around and wait for Fate to come knocking at the door. We simply need to believe in the power that's within us, and use it. When we do that, and stop imitating others and competing against them, things begin to work for us.”
― The Tao of Pooh
― The Tao of Pooh
“We are usually told that democracy originated in ancient Athens—like science, or philosophy, it was a Greek invention. It’s never entirely clear what this is supposed to mean. Are we supposed to believe that before the Athenians, it never really occurred to anyone, anywhere, to gather all the members of their community in order to make joint decisions in a way that gave everyone equal say?”
― Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology
― Fragments of an Anarchist Anthropology
Pre-Columbian History
— 69 members
— last activity Jan 02, 2025 09:21PM
A group to discuss pre-Columbian history and books.
Gulo’s 2025 Year in Books
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