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Anyone despairing of the future of the human race really should visit the Science Museum in London. You will surely walk away uplifted, as I was.There on display you will see thousands of examples of man's genius in fashioning the machines we so take for granted today. What is so astonishing is the progress that has been made in such a relatively short time. I have chosen images that illustrate this progress.

This is a replica of an Astrarium built in 1381. A description follows.

Astrararium

Astrarium 1

Then there is Stephenson's Rocket which was built in 1829.

Stephensons Rocket

Around 150 years later man had progressed to sending a man to the moon in this spacecraft.

Apollo 13

And here is a replica of the very first computer invented by Charles Babbage around 1849.

Babbage 3

 
On display is also the very first jet engine which I neglected to get a photo of, and many of the early machines created in man's attempts at flight. I marvelled at the courage and sheer persistence of these people in overcoming what must have seemed at times insurmountable problems. Yet they endured, and today we reap the rewards of their efforts. Surely there's a message there for all of us. 

Many people find it hard to say what they're good at. They prefer to be modest. Presenting your qualities in a confident way often is seen as being arrogant. Nevertheless it's important when you want to get things done, or when you want to create opportunities for yourself. When you have e.g. a job interview, it's important you know how to promote your qualities. Otherwise the job might very well go to someone else.

In your private life as well, it's important. When negotiating tasks, in the household, the volunteer board or anywhere else, it's important. If you're too modest, the most fun and challenging tasks will probably get assigned to someone else, and you might get stuck with the boring tasks. This is also annoying for others. It's highly likely your talents will also be appreciated by others. If the task assigned to you is too easy, you might get bored and unmotivated, and it's possible someone else gets assigned a task that's too difficult for them.

Arrogant or confident?

Confidence

We live in a negative culture. It's easy to tell others what they're doing wrong. And we treat ourselves pretty much the same way: we mostly pay attention to the things we're not good at, or the things that need improvement. Giving ourselves a compliment is not done, especially not out loud. We think this is arrogant. However, this isn't justified. There's a clear divide between being arrogant and being confident.

Arrogant people don't take criticism too well. They've got trouble accepting other viewpoints, and always think they are right, and their qualities are the best. On the other hand, if you're confident, you feel secure and at the same time you're open to other viewpoints. You don't feel threatened by criticism. You pay attention to it, and use it to your advantage.

Arrogance often serves to hide a lack of confidence. Bragging often is a way to hide a feeling of insecurity.

A fear of failure influences presenting strengths. Because if you say you're good at something, you might have to proof it. It's important not to overestimate yourself and it's also important not to promise too much, in order to avoid disappointment. It's important to have a realistic idea of your strengths and weaknesses. When you're really confident, you don't feel shame in admitting you're not up to something. People that try to hide their insecurities, often promise too much.

Use your Inner Coach

I've already mentioned our inner critic, that inner voice that just loves to tear you down, and make you feel miserable. Often you're not even aware of that inner critic. The voice has become all too obvious. It seems ingrained in your entire being. It undermines your confidence.

It seems your inner voice is a bad thing. That's not entirely true though. You are your inner voice. The challenge lies in using this inner voice to your advantage. You can change your inner critic into a coach, encouraging you and cheering you up.

3 against 1

Using your inner voice as a coach, doesn't mean you'll never have negative thoughts again. It's perfectly okay to have negative thoughts about yourself once in a while. Doing stupid things, messing things up, it's all part of life. It's important though not to let these negative thoughts put you down unnecessarily, and to have positive thoughts as well.

Research shows that if you want to feel good about yourself, and bring out the best in you, against every negative thought there have to be at least three positive thoughts. If you often think negatively about yourself, it's difficult to change this behaviour. Don't condemn yourself if you're having negative thoughts. Try to see these thoughts as clouds, just passing by.

20 000 moments

In the beginning thinking positively about yourself might seem artificial. If you do this on a regular basis though, it will become an automatism. You'll become your own coach. The advantages are enormous. According to Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman people experience 20 000 individual moments a day. These moments only last a few seconds. During such a moment you read something, look back on something, or say something to yourself. Imagine using just 1 % of these individual moments to say something nice about yourself, and you'll have 200 encouragements a day !

Exercise

Make a list of 5 qualities you'd like to use more in your professional or private life. Start each sentence with "I am good at ..." or "One of my qualities is ...".

Write down 3 encouraging sentences you can use if things don't go as planned. Examples are: "Everyone makes mistakes", "It's not a shame to fail" or "I'll do better next time".

Read these lists out loud at least twice a day.

Now think about how you can communicate the qualities you wrote down to others. Practise in front of a mirror. Watch your body language, and speak in a clear eloquent voice. You can use sentences like "I'm very good at ...", "One of my qualities is that ...", "The reason I should get this job / task is ...", "An important reason why I should get this task is ...", or variations on this theme.

An invitation to you, dear Voxers!  A while back, I started a Vox group called Healing Arts.  In typical Incommudicado Element fashion, I've neglected this little Internet cranny and have been a very absent host indeed.  As of late, I'm slowly getting back into the Vox loop,  visited the Healing Arts group, and came upon a recent posting in which Prana ponders walking the career change path to become a yoga instructor.

So, I invite you to inspire the masses with your story of change - that moment or set of moments that culminated in a meaningful detour.  Feel free to link your story in a comment.

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Tonight I'm thinking about family. This was prompted by my friend Cat's post today, about her concerns for her son's great adventure into this world of ours.This is, of course, perfectly natural for those of us who have brought kids into this world, cared for them, nurtured them, and then watched them flutter those wobbly wings out into this cold, hard, uncaring world, without us there to care for them.

They have a term for it now. It's called "empty nest syndrome". I don't know who dreamed up that name but it is so appropriate. Because so much of our lives is ordered for us. You go to school, you get an education, you work, you marry, you have a family, you educate them, and then, one by one, they're gone. They're off to live their lives without us, just as we did. Your nest is empty, as is your life. For we know that our family is our life.

But that nest is never really empty, for no matter where our kids may venture in this world, technology throws us grieving parents a lifeline. They are only really as far away as our mobile phone, or our webcam.

So, whoever said the good old days were better, then suck it up. Your nest may be empty. Ours isn't, and and a heartfelt thanks for that.

http://www.alternet.org/rights/90292/?page=entire

Warmongerer and neocon Christopher Hitchens just noticed that waterboarding is torture!

Stop the presses! Christopher Hitchens just noticed that waterboarding is torture!

Hitchens announced the news like he'd brought it down from Mount Sinai, in a Vanity Fair article. "Believe me," he told a waiting nation, "it's torture." Well, yeah. It usually is, when it happens to you. When it happens to somebody else, it's "extreme interrogation." I thought everybody over the age of 5 knew that, but as usual, I misoverestimated the media. Hitchens' tame little torture session is the biggest S&M video on the web since "9½ Weeks."

Hitchens' video is totally fake -- there's even soft-rock background music playing on the video, better music than you usually get at the dentist's office, and his "interrogators" treat him more like a client getting a mud pack at a spa than a real suspect in Iraq. That makes it even more disgusting that Hitch caved in after only 11 seconds of having water poured over a towel on his face. Eleven seconds! Think about the timeline here: For five long years he supported this stuff when it was happening to other people. Once it happened to him, he needed exactly 11 seconds to see the light.

Of course if Hitchens had been a real Iraqi suspect, they'd never have had to waterboard him at all. They do that to tough suspects, not wimps like him. In a real torture cell, everything would be a lot tougher from the start. For example, Chris wouldn't be in the nice dress shirt and slacks he's wearing on the video. He'd be naked -- a gross image, what a lifetime of booze and lying does to the body, but we have to be hard-nosed here -- because keeping the prisoner naked is basic interrogation strategy, especially with a culture as horrified of gettin' nekkid as Arabs are. You'll recall that in those Abu Ghraib pictures, the prisoners were naked.

So that's fake already, and the video gets faker as it goes. The guys "interrogating" him are fat, middle-aged, mild-mannered dudes. They don't even yell at him. A real suspect in Iraq would be snatched off the street, smacked around until he passes out, stripped and dumped into a cell with a hood over his head. He wouldn't be able to sleep off his misery, either, because sleep deprivation is one of the oldest, most effective tortures. The interrogators would maintain this schedule for hours, days, weeks, depending on how well and how soon the victim breaks down. When they think he's ready -- like, they notice with satisfaction that he screams like a steam whistle every time he hears footsteps in the corridor -- they drag him out of his cell and strap him onto that waterboarding table.

Well, Chris is a busy man and didn't have time for all that background research, so what you see in this video is a guy who hasn't been so much as slapped or yelled at. Who probably just finished a 10-martini lunch at some upscale restaurant. That's ridiculous enough, but the interrogators make it even more ridiculous with their little introduction to the torture session. One guy says, "All right, listen up, I'm going to give you some instructions ..." Then he tells the fat man on the table, "We're going to place metal objects in each of your hands," and if he feels "unbearable stress" at any time, all he has to do is drop the objects and they'll stop.

I've had dentists who did root canals on me without being that nice; they stuck to "this is going to hurt." More to the point here, putting the victim in "unbearable stress" is, uh, the whole point of torture, or "extreme interrogation," or whatever you want to call it. The last thing you'd ever do is give the victim a sense of power, like he can stop the process by dropping a "metal object" on the floor.

That kind of etiquette is what you get from those expensive dominatrixes English dudes like to get whipped by, or those nerf BDSM sites that talk about "consensual power exchanges." What reminded me most of those BDSM sites is the "code word" they tell Hitchens he can use to stop the waterboarding: "That word is red, R-E-D." They ask him if he understands and he says, "Yes, sir." That "sir" only added to the ridiculous porn feel here, like Hitchens was paying a hundred pounds an hour to have Baron Whipsong or Lady Cruella, whichever way he likes it, wear out their riding crop on his eager little bum.

The real thing isn't nearly so nice. After you've been beaten on bruises (which hurt more each time) for a few days, they slam the cell door open, screaming abuse at you, kick you to your feet and take you down the corridor, slamming your head into the walls as often as they feel like it, and strap you down. And all the time they're screaming: "OK, you worthless (Arabic obscenity here) -- We're through with you! We don't even want you any more! Ever drown before, (obscenity)? Ever go swimming head-first, (obscenity)?"

If you remember "The Big Lebowski," you can get a better idea of what waterboarding is like by remembering the scene where the Dude walks into his bungalow, where Jackie Treehorn's yuppie thugs are waiting for him. The blond one grabs the Dude's hair and runs him headfirst into the toilet, screaming, "Where's the money, Lebowski? Where's the money, shithead?" See, the point is to show overwhelming, terrifying power over the suspect, not give him little safety words.

But all that niceness doesn't matter once the torturer's helper takes a plastic milk container full of water and pours it, bit by bit, over a towel covering Hitch's face. The "metal object," whatever it is, drops after 11 seconds. And of course these fake interrogators are all over Hitch, making sure he's OK. That's also totally fake, but why bother listing any more fake features of this nonsense? The truth is that anybody who's been through as much dentistry as I have knows that nobody holds out under torture. It's not just the pain, it's the fear of the pain. I used to try to be a hero like the ones in my war books every time I went to have a root canal from the mean old Armenian who did our dental work. He scrimped on the Novocain, so I had plenty of scope to practice. And I learned the same thing any sane person knows by the time they grow up: Nobody can resist torture. Just like anybody knows what having water poured over a towel on your face is like: It's like drowning. Duh. Anybody who wanted to know that already knew it.

So why does Hitchens make such a big show of just realizing it now, after five years of supporting it? To me, the answer's easy: He's withdrawing from Iraq, making a big Jesus-on-the-cross demonstration, like a public punishment, for supporting the war all this time. By getting himself tortured in this half-assed way, he gives himself a reason to see the light, desert from the Neocon forces before it's too late. Karl Rove won't be happy, though, because the last thing the GOP wants is for people to start realizing what we're actually doing in Iraq. Reminds me of the debate about abolishing flogging with the cat-o'-nine-tails in the British Navy. The first time the bill was introduced, everybody laughed at how ridiculous a notion that was. Then somebody thought of having a real cat-o'-nine-tails introduced to the House of Commons, a bloody old Exhibit A. Nobody said a thing; they just voted unanimously to forbid it.

That's all it takes to change anybody's mind about torture, getting one little 11-second whiff of it, even if it's nowhere close to the real thing. The interesting thing is not that Hitchens changed his mind; it's the strategic thinking that made him decide to do it now. The timing of this little martyr is the key here, and what it tells you is that Hitchens is declaring martyrdom and getting out. He just unilaterally withdrew from Iraq, and in only 11 seconds.

Black tail deer fawn by fuzuoko on Flickr

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Sleepy Hollow, Northern California. “What a perfect place for a writer to live,” I thought, when I moved here almost five years ago. And I did get a lot of writing done, when I wasn’t in my garden, that is.

Our house is surrounded by woods and high hills, with a seasonal creek dancing along the right edge of our property, lined by a sentinel of three giant rocks. “We’re butt up against nature here,” is what my husband likes to say.

When I saw it, apart from thinking about the quaint name of the area and of its street names, like “Van Winkle Drive,” and “Ichabod Lane,” I also imagined that I could, at long last, have a garden.  Having lived all my life in small flats in a city or by the sea, I’d made do with potted flowers on my windowsills and balconies. Now I had almost a full acre of dirt to plant and I couldn’t wait to get started.

Testing the soil, mapping the sunny and shady areas of the ground, I bought containers and containers of colourful blooms and planted them with enthusiasm and care. I toiled in that garden daily, my nails turning jagged and brown as I dug in eggshells and coffee grinds to fertilize the earth, picked off caterpillars and crinkled dead stems from each plant, watered and weeded carefully and methodically. Week after week, month after month I worked, until my garden was rich and full and I could revel in the vibrancy of it. 

Then the deer came. Dozens of them, grown and small, with antlers and without; they came down from the rise of trees behind our house. To someone who’d never seen them up close before, they looked splendid, graceful and gentle. A gift from nature, a blessing, even.

Until I woke up one morning and wandered out into my garden to discover it no longer existed. I could see only the remnants of it left by a savage marauder who thought every blossom, every leaf I’d lovingly attended, was nothing more than dinner salad. The deer had eaten their way through bougainvillea, geraniums, lobelia, impatiens, petunias, pansies, azalea bushes, rose bushes, and when nothing else was left, even ivy vines. I stood in horrified dismay looking down at the concrete and the grass where scattered specks of green, blue, red, pink, purple, and yellow, which had once been my beloved, beautiful flowers, lay strewn and still, as though they’d tried to run and escape from a terrible siege, but had perished in their efforts, anyway.

The deer became my enemy then, and my war with them was on. Armed with powdered blood meal, deer netting, and a foul smelling spray made of garlic and eggs, I attacked. They retreated for a while. Then I woke up one morning again to discover that during the night, the hungry deer had somehow managed to nibbled under the netting. They’d also concluded that both powdered blood meal and rotten egg/garlic spray made delightful salad dressings. My flowers were murdered a second time. Not only did this make me cry, it made me furious.

My husband could not understand my perspective. Growing up on a farm and living in rural areas all his life, he’d shared space with various wild animals since he’d been born. To him, the presence of deer in our garden had the same feeling about it you get when you shrug on an old coat. It wasn’t necessarily attractive, but it felt familiar and comfortable. But in just the way I splashed delightedly into the sea in Greece while he stood there shivering and thinking of sharks; or slid easily between passengers on a New York City subway while he thought of pickpockets, the deer were as alien to me as those experiences were to him. Somehow, he'd missed that.
 
“Why not just plant things they won’t eat?” he asked pragmatically, not even trying to hide his impatience with me.

“What, you mean lavender?” I replied, sardonically, not even trying to hide my annoyance with him. 

To me, just having  purple buds in the garden looked dull. Judging by the preponderance of lavender and oleander in the area, everyone else had surrendered to the deer. But I wouldn’t. I didn’t even like oleander, although the fact that it was poisonous and that the deer just might get hungry enough to eat it, was an entertaining thought by that time.

My focus on the deer and their activities in our garden became a bone of contention between my husband and me. Now I’d graduated to running outdoors whenever I saw one, to clap my hands at it and “shoo” it away, spraying them with the hose when I was out watering in my garden, hovering by the windows whenever I heard any suspicious rustling outside, and even throwing small pebbles at their feet so they’d flee. But though they’d scramble away, they’d only come back again when they knew I wasn’t looking. Those devils.

And when I’d complain that they’d managed to foil me again, my husband would say, “It’s not personal, dammit. Stop planting deer food and they won’t come.”  

I despised the deer for not being discouraged by my efforts to thwart them, and I was hurt and irritated with my husband for not knowing what was at stake for me.

Then, two years ago, on Father’s Day, I was out in my garden and heard a strange bleating sound, just up the hill behind the house on the other side of the creek. As I began to walk across our lawn towards the creek to investigate, a doe stepped out from behind a tree on the hill where she’d been hiding, and looked down at me in a way I’d never seen a deer look. Her ears and head were actually bent foward in an aggressive position and she was staring directly at me. A head-on stare was an unusual pose for a deer, as they ordinarily looked out at me from the sides of their eyes. Not only that, but she was making a peculiar, snorting sound I’d never heard a deer make, either. It was as though she were growling a warning. I stopped still and looked up at her as the bleating continued, much closer this time. That’s when I realised:  She was guarding her fawn. The cry I was hearing was the sound of her newborn. I stepped back and nodded. A mother looking out for her baby. Fair enough. I wasn’t about to chase them, that was for sure.

But as I stepped back, the doe did an odd thing. She began to sway on her feet. Then, in the most ungraceful way I’d ever seen a deer move, she seemed to stagger across the hill, directly across from where I stood on the lawn, and away from her baby. She stumbled dizzily, and then ---God help me--- her knees gave way and she collapsed. I gasped in shock as she began sliding down the hill towards me, unable to stop her fall. I knew any moment she would come tumbling over the retaining wall and onto the lawn where I stood.

It was a pile of logs gathered at the base of the fence that prevented her complete tumble over the wall. Now, as I watched in horror, she was lying on her side, thrashing, her legs tangled up in logs, desperately trying, but unable to get her footing back on the hill. After a few moments, she sank down and gave up. Laying her head back on the dirt she twisted around,  and from her lying position, feebly but determinedly, she lifted her back head up and looked at me.

She wore that startled look one always sees on a deer. The look of prey that knows they are prey. You might think she was fearing for herself in her look, afraid of me, because she knew I’d always chased her kind away.

No. ... There was something else… I felt something else in that look. It was the look of one mother to another. It went straight through my heart as surely as if she’d spoken to me. And, as though I were reading that mother’s look from my spirit instead of my brain, I looked back at her, too, directly into her eyes, and said, “Don’t worry. I’ll find your baby. I promise. And I promise she won’t be harmed.”

She held my look as though she were listening and understanding my words, my English words, which I’d said out loud to an animal, a wild creature that couldn’t speak. Then with one weak nod, she lay her head back one final time, looked up at the sky and... I saw her die. Hoping I was wrong in everything I was witnessing, I stayed to see if she might move. But as I stayed and watched her, those brown doe eyes slowly filmed over white. For sure, she was gone.

I turned and ran into the house, calling for my husband. He was on the phone with Tim, one of our sons, who’d called to wish him a “Happy Father’s Day.”  He asked Tim to hold on a moment as he listened to my agitated words. Then he said into the phone, “Tim, I’ll have to let you go. We’ve got another deer emergency.”

And with that smart aleck remark, my husband followed me as I pointed out to where the doe lay, and then to where I knew I’d heard her fawn.

That remark to our son about ‘another’ deer emergency hadn’t done it, but what he said next did. “She’s not dead. She’s probably just resting. And I’m fairly certain there is no fawn.”

I turned on him. “I may not have been raised on a farm, but I’m not an idiot, “I snapped.  “That deer is as dead as you can get, and her fawn is over there, on the other side of our creek.”

He could tell I meant business then, so with sigh, he climbed up over the retaining wall and gingerly approached that poor doe. Peering at her, he confirmed what I knew. “Yeah. She’s gone, alright.” Then standing he turned to me and asked, “Where did you hear the fawn?” When I pointed in the direction again, he said, “We’ll have to approach very quietly, or we might scare it.”

I followed him across the creek. I couldn’t see anything, but a moment later, he lifted his arm and whispered, “there.”

Sure enough, sitting comfortably in a bed of leaves, her front legs crossed, looking directly at us, with curiosity and no fear whatsoever, was the tiniest fawn I’d ever seen.

My husband’s tone was very different now. “Listen, if that doe died after giving birth, she probably was too old or too sick to survive it. That might mean she wasn’t able to feed this little thing, either. And that’s not good. If Animal Services can’t get any milk into her, she won’t make it.”

I was beside myself at those words. I’d made a promise and I was already trying to figure out, if my husband’s verdict were true, how I, a woman who’d spent the last three years chasing deer from her garden, was going to save this one.

Animal Services estimation was not so bleak, however. It took two of their vans to our home --- one for the live animal and one for the dead --- but they determined that the fawn would survive. She’d been fed one last time by her mother, and in fact still had a belly full of milk.  She’d be cared for, then released when she was able to survive on her own. She’d probably live to eat my flowers another day.

As for her mother, I watched the man from Animal Services gently close her eyes. Then he and my husband wrapped her in a sheet and carried her down the hill into the back of the second waiting transport van. I watched as it drove away.

I am not a Hindu. But, the Anahata is the fourth primary chakra according to Hindi Yogic and Tantric traditions. It symbolises the consciousness of love, empathy, selflessness and devotion. On the psychic level, this centre of force inspires the human being to love, be compassionate, altruistic, devoted and to accept the things that happen in a divine way.

And wouldn’t you know it? The animal it is represented by is the deer.

I am not a Hindu, I'll say again. But I know what I felt and I know what I experienced. That mother doe and I communicated that day. And by our bond of motherhood, we became more than two different species on opposites sides of an issue. We became more than predator and prey. With her dying breath, she looked at me, her enemy, and saw something in me that was like her. She knew she could ask me for help with the one thing left for her here to take care of, her one last, most precious thing.

I didn’t let her down.

My garden is very different now. I keep one giant pot of red geraniums up high on a porch where no animals can reach, as a reminder that beauty can never excuse arrogance.  Now my yard is flooded with lavender.

And you know, it smells wonderful. What’s even more wonderful is seeing the deer there. We’re at peace with each other now.

I wish it were that easy to make peace within our species.

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banner of Three Goddesses by Thalia Took

The British built an underground complex at Fort Canning which is now known as "The Battle Box". Tours of the Battle Box are conducted regularly throughout the day. Below is a pic of the entrance, where memorabilia from the Japanese invasion is displayed, and a video shown at the commencement of the tour. The couple posing are my best friend and his wife. My best friend just happens to be the electrician I worked with on the Snowy Scheme, and whose sister is now my wife. It was their son whose marriage we would attend in Manchester.

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The Battle Box was the headquarters for General Percival of the British Army. Various rooms have been filled with lifelike robots to recreate the scenes as they would have appeared. Realistic conversations are played through audiophones given to the tour members. In the below scene, General Percival is asking for a report from one of his generals, and hoping that it is good news.

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In fact, the news was not good at all. General Percival was told that the only fuel left was in the tanks of the vehicles; there was little ammunition, or food; and the Japanese had bombed the water supply so that there was no water. As a result, General Percival called a meeting with his Commanding Officers to discuss the situation. This is re-enacted in the actual room shown below where the meeting was held, and the fateful decision taken to surrender. The robots are made to look as much as possible like the people involved, and even accents made to reflect the nationality of the characters. General Bennett's accent is very much Australian. He was one of the main advocates of surrender, according to the tour guide. He subsequently left his men to their fate, and escaped to Australia. He was later criticised for doing so. Was he right or wrong? I don't know. I would not presume to judge another in those circumstances.

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