If you want to be happy, forget yourself. Forget all of it—how you look, how you feel, how your career is going. Just drop the whole subject of you. We all know this is true because we’ve all had the experience of doing some task—even cleaning the sock drawer or washing the dishes—and for a while, forgetting ourselves entirely. And when we blink our eyes and come back, we realize we've been happy.
So losing your self-preoccupation is important. How do you do that? Simple: focus on something else. People dedicated to something other than themselves—helping family and friends, or a political cause, or others less fortunate than they—are the happiest people in the world. We sometimes hear about how people "throw their lives away" or "live for others." But such people are often very happy.
Of course, if you care for others, if you devote yourself to some cause greater than you are, it doesn't mean your life will be free of troubles. No one's is. It doesn't mean you’ll enjoy every minute. No one does. But it does mean you'll have a happier time than somebody who's always looking out for number one, or who is hurrying to buy the latest trendy thing, or who is standing before the mirror, watching his or her life drain away—as it inevitably does.
So if you want to be happy, resolutely turn the spotlight off yourself. Forget your own self-importance, your aches and pains, your feelings and fears. Instead, get busy. The world is wide and fascinating, and it needs your participation. People out there need your help. And you need to get off it. A little more service to others, and a little fewer possessions to claim your attention.
Now: who knows all this? For one thing, terminally ill people do. When you learn you’re dying, you work out the priorities real quick. Nobody on their deathbed ever wishes they spent a few more days at the office, or bought that new car. What matters is friends and family, and human relationships: what you did for other people, what they did for you. How you helped and were helped. Where you cared and were cared for. That's the heart of happiness, and all the rest is commercial hustle. Don't buy it. Make the world a better place and you make your life worth while. Make your life worth while and you’ll be happy. You don't need to buy anything or ask anybody for advice. You can just go do it.
And you can start right now.
Michael Crighton
1942-2008.
What a stupid and dishonest claim. What a world we live in. Government funded propaganda pumps out of us from every corner. The right in this country was just as guilty of these crimes as the left, spending hundreds of millions of dollars on lying and dishonest advertisements. If something was an evident truth you would not need to advertise it; only to celebrate it. Where is there to go when both sides of politics have deserted you? The shameful failures of the Howard years are still being played out in people's lives today.
Fathers and their children are still paying the price for former prime minister John Howard's abject failure to reform family law and child support, while in a craven abuse of the citizenry who voted for him, he foisted ridiculous, vicious and nasty schemes like Work Choices on to the populace without even having mentioned the subject at the election. It was so dishonest. And he spend hundreds of millions of dollars on advertising campaigns and setting up various institutions in order to convince the working men and women of Australia they should give away their work conditions.
It was deeply foolish and deeply stupid, stale undies flapping in the wind, washing machines that don't work, street alcoholics waiting for their cheques. These abysmal government abuses continue to this day, through the change of government and the swing to the orthodox left that Kevin Rudd represents. The ABC pours our garbage on climate change as if it was a demonstrated fact when it's nothing of the kind. Rudd preens himself on jet planes, cutting through the air, spreading their greenhouse gases, destroying the ozone. While preparing to inflict an emissions trading scheme which will raise the price of everything on an unsuspecting populace.
Just when you think climate change hysterics are on the wane, they pop up again, wave after wave of them, outdoing each other in calling for emissions reductions to save the planet, making preposterous, utterly ridiculous claims about the death of the Barrier Reef and the loss of other assets. And the earth is not heating. Indeed there has been a slight cooling. But nobody, nobody in this frenzied debate, wants to look at the facts; they want to outdo each other in popping out technical babble it's doubtful even they understand.
"Professor" Garnaut, who clearly has a messiah complex, pontificates constantly about himself, his report, making the claim last night that his report was playing a part in the debate worldwide, as if anyone could really care what anyone did in Australia. But it goes on, the lunatics have taken over the asylum, offensive and dishonest garbage assaults us at every turn, nobody wants to be different, and the few clarion warriors who dare to speak up against this nonsense are dismissed as right wing lunatics, out of date curmudgeons, Neanderthal fools.
The problem is it takes so long for justice and truth to out. A disarmed population is defeated and defenceless, preyed on by parasites, politicians and parking cops. Nothing changes. They get you at every turn, the saying goes; and how true it is. Life in this city has become impossible. You cannot drive anywhere in this city without wracking up tolls. The utterly hapless state government is regarded as little better than a pack of criminals, yet people voted for them. They were fools and they bought the lies; and the other side was so bad nobody wanted to vote for them either.
We are defeated fools, preyed on, disarmed; and the parasites have won, preying on the physical flesh of the populace. We're all broken hearted. We're all defeated. And the summer days that come so slowly, the young flesh romping on yellow sand under blank blue skies, none of this is enough to erase the simple truth: this city, this country, has gone to the dogs.
THE BIGGER STORY:
http://www.michaelcrichton.net/
In Memoriam
Michael Crichton
1942 - 2008
Best-selling author Michael Crichton died unexpectedly in Los Angeles Tuesday, November 4, 2008 after a courageous and private battle against cancer.
While the world knew him as a great story teller that challenged our preconceived notions about the world around us -- and entertained us all while doing so -- his wife Sherri, daughter Taylor, family and friends knew Michael Crichton as a devoted husband, loving father and generous friend who inspired each of us to strive to see the wonders of our world through new eyes. He did this with a wry sense of humor that those who were privileged to know him personally will never forget.
Through his books, Michael Crichton served as an inspiration to students of all ages, challenged scientists in many fields, and illuminated the mysteries of the world in a way we could all understand.
He will be profoundly missed by those whose lives he touched, but he leaves behind the greatest gifts of a thirst for knowledge, the desire to understand, and the wisdom to use our minds to better our world.
Michael's family respectfully asks for privacy during this difficult time.
A private memorial service is expected, but no further details will be released to the public.
http://www.michaelcrichton.net/speech-ourenvironmentalfuture.html
To be in Washington tonight reminds me that the only person to ever offer me a job in Washington was Daniel Patrick Moynihan. That was thirty years ago, and he was working for Nixon at the time. Moynihan was a hero of mine, the exemplar of an intellectual engaged in public policy. What I admired was that he confronted every issue according to the data and not a belief system. Moynihan could work for both Democratic and Republican presidents. He took a lot of flack for his analyses but he was more often right than wrong.
Moynihan was a Democrat, and I’m a political agnostic. I was also raised in a scientific tradition that regarded politics as inferior: If you weren’t bright enough to do science, you could go into politics. I retain that prejudice today. I also come from an older and tougher tradition that regards science as the business of testing theories with measured data from the outside world. Untestable hypotheses are not science but rather something else.
We are going to talk about the environment, so I should tell you I am the child of a mother who 60 years ago insisted on organic food, recycling, and energy efficiency long before people had terms for those ideas. She drove refrigerator salesmen mad. And over the years, I have recycled my trash, installed solar panels and low flow appliances, driven diesel cars, and used cloth diapers on my child—all approved ideas at the time.
I still believe that environmental awareness is desperately important. The environment is our shared life support system, it is what we pass on to the next generation, and how we act today has consequences—potentially serious consequences—for future generations. But I have also come to believe that our conventional wisdom is wrongheaded, unscientific, badly out of date, and damaging to the environment. Yellowstone National Park has raw sewage seeping out of the ground. We must be doing something wrong.
In my view, our approach to global warming exemplifies everything that is wrong with our approach to the environment. We are basing our decisions on speculation, not evidence. Proponents are pressing their views with more PR than scientific data. Indeed, we have allowed the whole issue to be politicized—red vs blue, Republican vs Democrat. This is in my view absurd. Data aren’t political. Data are data. Politics leads you in the direction of a belief. Data, if you follow them, lead you to truth.
http://www.climatechangefraud.com/content/view/2705/223/
Just Another Day in Alarmist Land
Written by Chris Horner, Planet Gore
Wednesday, 12 November 2008
If ever there were two items fairly capturing much of the theme of Red Hot Lies — cruising up the charts nicely here in its first few days off the press, thanks to all — these are the two.
First, establishment scientists attack heretics, then refuse to release the data they claim supports their alleged debunking of what, in this case, increasingly appears to be a fatal flaw in the alarmist thesis: the alleged “fingerprint” of greenhouse warming continues to not exist.
As I detail in RHL, the global warming industry have a long and unhappy history of making claims they apparently cannot back up and, when challenged, clinging to their data like grim death, claiming it was lost, apparently fabricating data, having journals publish helpful conclusions without ever asking to see the numbers, and so on. When the data are released, things don’t end well for the alarmists — as the Hockey Team’s original and now latest flailing bears out.
Second, Australia’s ABC news nicely embodies the media’s now ritual double standard of selective curiosity and umbrage in their efforts to dismiss those who refuse to accept the faith, and elevate those who have found salvation. As Andrew Bolt writes, the ABC reporter “rings the leper’s bell” in introducing a mere professor for his sin of being a skeptic, while spinning alarmists into authorities to whom all must defer.
This shows once again what I explore with example after example in RHL: climate scientists know where the path of least resistance lies; and, conversely, they have seen the excommunication that awaits if they dare to follow the research rather than the research dollars. The same reality holds true for politicians. Should one choose to infer relative legitimacy of the various positions from those facts, so be it.
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