Re: OT: Inflammatory Post of the Week

On 23 Nov 2005 07:40:01 -0800, "Mike" <MJRainey@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:

>Still thinking of Taleb. Permit me to add this quote from an interview
>(Edge):
>
[snip]
>Instead, I'm afraid that my wife will someday discover a
>suspicious lump in her breast.

Not if you fondle them often enough to spot that tiny lump early ;-)

>I'm afraid that heart disease will kill
>me as it has most of the men in my family before the age of seventy.
>I'm afraid of suddenly finding dark blood in my stool.

Turns out that those two fears tend to be mutually exclusive. And an
aspirin a day is good for BOTH your heart AND your colon ;-)

>I'm afraid of
>slipping off a snowy road on my commute and wrapping my car around a
>tree.
>
[snip]
>
>Walking down an otherwise deserted backroads one morning, I came across
>a couple of schoolgirls waiting for their bus. I greeted them with a
>smile and a cheery "Good Morning." Instead of returning my greeting
>they reacted with visible fear. They shunk back and said nothing as I
>passed by. Having no other pressing matters to dwell on, I walked along
>wondering about what had just happened. I decided that it must have
>been their parents who instructed them to fear strangers - especially
>men. And this thought saddened me. If we teach our children to view
>shrink away from strangers; to automatically treat them as a threat and
>thereby not interact with them then we do our children a terrible
>disfavor. We instill in them an "us" and "them" view of the world which
>is a detriment to us all. By shrinking inward in search of safety we
>lose the sense of our universal brotherhood. Not one man in
>ten-thousand would think of harming a child, but if we teach our
>children to exclude the ten-thousand from their lives in order to
>protect themselves from the one, well...it is a cause for sadness. I
>could have told those girls the name of a songbirds just across the
>road. I could have remarked upon the beauty of the morning light coming
>through the trees and, perhaps, recited my favorite line from Tennyson:
>"Now lies the Earth all Danaë to the stars, And all thy heart lies
>open unto me." But they chose safety instead. Sterile safety.

That is indeed sad, but we've become so litigious that even _I_ make
sure that there are many witnesses around when I interview females for
admission to MIT :-(

>
>
[snip]
>
>It's us - it's we acquiescent sheeple, moreso than the wolves among us,
>that bear responsibilty for the worst attrocities in this world.
>
>Mike

Yep.

...Jim Thompson
--
| James E.Thompson, P.E. | mens |
| Analog Innovations, Inc. | et |
| Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus |
| Phoenix, Arizona Voice:(480)460-2350 | |
| E-mail Address at Website Fax:(480)460-2142 | Brass Rat |
| http://www.analog-innovations.com | 1962 |

I love to cook with wine. Sometimes I even put it in the food.
.