http://www.fiveminutejournal.com/

3 hour YouTube video of Marshall Rosenburg’s Nonviolent Communication Workshop. At least watch the first 5 or ten minutes.
http://youtu.be/XBGlF7-MPFI

Life and Death Planning:
Low effort, high reward.

http://getyourshittogether.org/

http://www.timferriss.com/  author of The 4-Hour Workweek, The 4-Hour Body

according to Boing Boing http://boingboing.net/2012/11/30/gweek-077-tim-ferriss-author.html

“Tim is a broad-spectrum enthusiast and his sense of curiosity drives him to learn about and participate in a dizzyingly large number of activities. He’s developed a system of sorts to quickly pick up enough skills and knowledge to understand, participate in, and appreciate crafts and practices such as learning languages, game hunting, martial arts, body building, tango dancing, and startup investment. His latest book, The 4-Hour Chef“

Stanley Kubrick in his 1968 interview with Playboy:

The most terrifying fact of the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent; but if we can come to terms with this indifference and accept the challenges of life within the boundaries of death — however mutable man may be able to make them — our existence as a species can have genuine meaning and fulfillment.
However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.

lifted from John Gruber’s Daring Fireball

from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dreyfus_model_of_skill_acquisition

Stages

In the novice stage, a person follows rules as given, without context, with no sense of responsibility beyond following the rules exactly. Competence develops when the individual develops organizing principles to quickly access the particular rules that are relevant to the specific task at hand; hence, competence is characterized by active decision making in choosing a course of action. Proficiency is shown by individuals who develop intuition to guide their decisions and devise their own rules to formulate plans. The progression is thus from rigid adherence to rules to an intuitive mode of reasoning based on tacit knowledge.

Michael Eraut summarized the five stages of increasing skill as follows:[2]

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One of my favorite videos, a must watch video.
http://www.ted.com/talks/robert_sapolsky_the_uniqueness_of_humans.html

2053 nuclear explosions. No mention of Israel and not the time frame for North Korea.

http://www.politicsdaily.com/2010/06/22/author-sydney-schanberg-on-the-language-of-war/

“This is probably a good moment to raise the question of whether the United States is more bestial in war than other nations. From my years of covering wars close-up, the answer is no. Ours is one of the world’s more disciplined military forces. It’s war that by definition is bestial and insane. That’s why presidents and politicians always say they consider war only as a last resort — even when there is no evidence that they had considered any other options first.”

I like the talk and draw format. sure beats powerpoint.

“Empires bought stability at the price of creating a parasitic court; monotheistic religions bought social cohesion at the expense of a parasitic priestly class; nationalism bought power at the expense of a parasitic military; socialism bought equality at the price of a parasitic bureaucracy; capitalism bought efficiency at the price of parasitic financiers.”

What made Homo sapiens so special? Dr. Ridley argues that it wasn’t our big brain, because Neanderthals had a big brain, too. Nor was it our willingness to help one another, because apes and other social animals also had an instinct for reciprocity.
“At some point,” Dr. Ridley writes, “after millions of years of indulging in reciprocal back-scratching of gradually increasing intensity, one species, and one alone, stumbled upon an entirely different trick. Adam gave Oz an object in exchange for a different object.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/18/science/18tier.html?ref=science

Anthropologist David Graeber recently sent in his essay on the 5000 year history of debt (orignally published in Mute and Eurozine). Aside from being an interesting read in general, this effort (which he is just now finishing as a book) is an interesting resource for the Eternal Coin and the Long Finance project.

Debt: The first five thousand years by David Graeber

Throughout its 5000 year history, debt has always involved institutions – whether Mesopotamian sacred kingship, Mosaic jubilees, Sharia or Canon Law – that place controls on debt’s potentially catastrophic social consequences. It is only in the current era, writes anthropologist David Graeber, that we have begun to see the creation of the first effective planetary administrative system largely in order to protect the interests of creditors.
http://blog.longnow.org/2010/04/22/debt-the-first-five-thousand-years/