Abhishek > Recent Status Updates

This is a slog, I can only proceed in small doses. G takes a long time to get to a point.

Freud juju. But unexpectedly profound.

“The fact that all people today share a common mitochondrial DNA ancestor about ten times more recently showed that humans today largely descend from a much later expansion from Africa.”
160k years ago, not 1.8m

Considering that I am a sucker for LA noir, and Brubaker is one of the best currently out there..

It proposed the creation of a new regulatory body, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), to be comprised of five commissioners appointed for five years. Business leaders reacted with outrage at the idea of putting a government “cop on their corner.” The New York Stock Exchange threatened to move to Montreal.

From start to finish, Roosevelt later wrote, the operators “did everything in their power to goad and irritate Mitchell, becoming fairly abusive in their language to him, and were insolent to me. I made no comment on what they said, for it seemed to me that it was very important that I should (keep my temper and be drawn into no squabble).”
USA, 1902

Rgd union leader John Mitchell: When news of President McKinley’s assassination first spread to the coal region, the workmen had gathered together, openly grieving. “Who shot our President?” they cried out. Upon learning that President McKinley, not President Mitchell, had been shot, they were greatly relieved.

When an unflattering letter Blair had written about Lincoln in the early days of the war unexpectedly surfaced in the press months later, the embarrassed Blair carried the letter to the White House and offered to resign. Lincoln told him he had no intention of reading it, nor any desire to exact retribution. “Forget it,” he said, “& never mention or think of it again.”

“From the moment his boss was stricken, Howe never lived with his family again, choosing instead to make the Roosevelt family his own, visiting his wife and children only on occasional weekends.”
FDR=religion

“... the term for suffering, duḥkha, seems to have been coined by analogy to its opposite, sukha, happiness. Kha refers to the axle of a wagon, and su- is a prefix denoting good (and duḥ-, bad). Thus in its old Indo-Aryan, Vedic usage, sukha denoted a wagon with good axles (that is, a comfortable ride).”

“For Cārvāka, an ancient materialist philosopher, all the pleasures of life have some inconveniences, and one must simply tolerate them. In one of his well-known quotes, the enjoyment of fish inevitably requires that one first remove the fish bones”

“Evidently not a vegetarian”

“Boss Platt’s scheme attracted the support of all the party bosses in the Republican Party save one—Mark Hanna, Republican Party chair. ‘Don’t you know that there’s only one life between that madman and the White House?’”

Burst out laughing here. Teddy on his way.

“This is a good example of how Vyāsa’s commentary has become almost as canonical as Patañjali’s original text: It is almost never questioned by all subsequent commentators, but reinforced.”
The task of the traditional exegete is not to probe if an authoritative text is true, but how it is true.

On similarity in meditation practices found in the yoga sutras:
“Once more, the common context of these practices is underscored—indeed, the Buddhist Saṁyutta Nikāya and the Saṁyukta Āgama texts contain explicit reference to the fact that these practices were also cultivated by those who did not follow the teachings of the Buddha.”
Bronkhorst says the same in BaB.

“Indeed, the two systems hold diametrically opposing understandings on certain basic premises pertaining to mind and consciousness”

“The very notion of concentration, from the perspective of the Yoga school, presupposes an enduring entity that can either concentrate or be distracted, not a flow of cognitive moments that exhaust themselves as soon as they arise as Buddhism holds.”

“Vyasa himself does not refer to Buddhism by name but uses one of several terms for Buddhist doctrine common in orthodox Hindu philosophical discourse: ksanikavada, the view that all reality is momentary.”