Abilify Pharmacology, Aripiprazole Pharmacology - HealthyPlace.com: "Hyperglycemia, in some cases extreme and associated with ketoacidosis or hyperosmolar coma or death, has been reported in patients treated with atypical antipsychotics."
"I must study politics and war that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelain.
John Adams, 2nd U.S. President 1735-1826"
The dual life: spiritual and secular. Certainty and doubt. Mythos and logos.
Just because God can control everything doesn't mean he does (the Christian father/corporate balancing analogy: he delgates responsibilty for more minor stuff to humans).
"What, in ill thoughts again? Men must endure
Their going hence, even as their coming hither;
Ripeness is all" (edgar)
City Journal Spring 2004 | When Islam Breaks Down by Theodore Dalrymple: "their [Muslim] problem, and ours, is that they want the power that free inquiry confers, without either the free inquiry or the philosophy and institutions that guarantee that free inquiry."
How unique is this to Islam however? It seems to be a byproduct of all psyches.
City Journal Spring 2004 | When Islam Breaks Down by Theodore Dalrymple: "Unlike Christianity, which had to spend its first centuries developing institutions clandestinely and so from the outset clearly had to separate church from state, Islam was from its inception both church and state, one and indivisible, with no possible distinction between temporal and religious authority. Muhammad’s power was seamlessly spiritual and secular (although the latter grew ultimately out of the former), and he bequeathed this model to his followers. Since he was, by Islamic definition, the last prophet of God upon earth, his was a political model whose perfection could not be challenged or questioned without the total abandonment of the pretensions of the entire religion.
But his model left Islam with two intractable problems. One was political. Muhammad unfortunately bequeathed no institutional arrangements by which his successors in the role of omnicompetent ruler could be chosen (and, of course, a schism occurred immediately after the Prophet’s death, with some—today’s Sunnites—following his father-in-law, and some—today’s Shi’ites—his son-in-law). Compounding this difficulty, the legitimacy of temporal power could always be challenged by those who, citing Muhammad’s spiritual role, claimed greater religious purity or authority; the fanatic in Islam is always at a moral advantage vis-à-vis the moderate. Moreover, Islam—in which the mosque is a meetinghouse, not an institutional church—has no established, anointed ecclesiastical hierarchy to decide such claims authoritatively. With political power constantly liable to challenge from the pious, or the allegedly pious, tyranny becomes the only guarantor of stability, and assassination the only means of reform."
Foreign Affairs - The Global Baby Bust - Phillip Longman: "The clear tendency of economic development is toward a more knowledge-based, networked economy in which decision-making and responsibility are increasingly necessary at lower levels. In such economies, however, children often remain economically dependent on their parents well into their own childbearing years because it takes that long to acquire the panoply of technical skills, credentials, social understanding, and personal maturity that more and more jobs now require."
Foreign Affairs - The Global Baby Bust - Phillip Longman: "In 2000, 40-year-old women in the United States and in every European nation told surveys that they had produced fewer children than they intended. Indeed, if European women now in their 40s had been able to produce their ideal number of children, the continent would face no prospect of population loss."
Foreign Affairs - The Global Baby Bust - Phillip Longman: "An aging society may have an urgent need to gain more output from each remaining worker, but without growing markets, individual firms have little incentive to learn how to do more with less -- and with a dwindling supply of human capital, they have fewer ideas to draw on."
Foreign Affairs - The Global Baby Bust - Phillip Longman: "Theoretically, a highly efficient, global financial market could lend financial resources from rich, old countries that are short on labor to young, poor countries that are short on capital, and make the whole world better off. But for this to happen, old countries would have to contain their deficits and invest their savings in places that are themselves either on the threshold of hyper-aging (China, India, Mexico) or highly destabilized by religious fanaticism, disease, and war (most of the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa, Indonesia), or both."
Foreign Affairs - The Global Baby Bust - Phillip Longman: "Both common sense and a vast literature in finance and psychology support the claim that as one approaches retirement age, one usually becomes more reluctant to take career or financial risks. It is not surprising, therefore, that aging countries such as Italy, France, and Japan are marked by exceptionally low rates of job turnover and by exceptionally conservative use of capital."
Here's a topical poem (not only is today the longest day of the year, but it snowed here in Massachusetts yesterday)...
Stopping By Woods On A Snowy Evening
by Robert Frost
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village, though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
To ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark, and deep,
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
Let structure be the guide, the gauge;
Each line into a chapter stage;
A quatrain, thus, maps out a life -
Childhood, youth, parenting, old age.
Each hero flickers full of strife,
Consoles himself, lassoes a wife,
A new rime-child he lights - hurrah!
And dies well-fed like Mack the knife.
As you can see, a-a-b-a,
Will mold this family’s saga;
Four candles, sixteen iambi;
Each life, a semi-Chanukah.
Four lives; the last, do not deny,
Will catch up with the author’s I;
And where it goes, we can’t espy;
And where it goes, we can’t espy.
Prospect - article_details: ". The novel, in its fully realised state, exists to reflect on those links between us - on their making and breaking. How can it do that other than through stories? The writer's task, as Margaret Atwood has said, is to make those stories plausible. The only excuse for taking refuge in introspection and irony is meanness and the fear of involvement. Fiction, like life, is no idle stroll. As Flaubert continues in the letter quoted above, 'When I reflect that so much beauty has been entrusted to me - to me - I am so terrified that I am seized with cramps and long to rush off and hide.'"
Prospect - article_details: "Modernism as a movement may not be at fault. The problem is that its initial doctrine - the psychological and linguistic purity pursued by Woolf, Eliot, Pound, Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, Wallace Stevens - rapidly matured into a catastrophic literary self-consciousness. After the 1950s it was more creditable, as a writer of fiction, to be Beckett's or Borges's descendant than Orwell's or Waugh's. Possibly writers were tired of making the effort of linear narrative, possibly they simply wanted to be modern."
Prospect - article_details: "He could have gone further: such narrative patterns, experienced from childhood, have psychological priority over conscious thought, which is why they merge with dreams. Booker's explanation of how plots converge, under headings such as 'Overcoming the Monster' or 'Rags to Riches' or 'Voyage and Return,' is not new"
Except there are non-narratie patterns of thought. And why 'experienced from childhood'? Oftentimes the monsters and demons resided preconsciously.
Independent Enjoyment: "Booker has not contented himself with delineating the seven plots: a book on which, heaven knows, would have been vast and ambitious enough. He goes on to discuss the single underlying theme that unites those plots, and then to consider the whole of human history in its light. This theme is that story is the means by which the collective unconscious calls us sinners to order, to abandon the selfish pursuit of ego in the name of a greater self that accepts a place in the hierarchy of an organic society. In this sort of society, everyone has a place"
Prospect - article_details: "The histories of the novel and of storytelling ran together until the early 20th century; since the 1920s, that history has been one of formal drift, away from the novel as a social form that described how characters live in relation to others, a drift that gathered decisive momentum in the 1970s, as self-consciousness was joined to irony."
