Bloggers From The United States

"Your attention will continue to be grabbed by anything until you give it the appropriate attention."

"Does something have your attention because you want it to, or because you're avoiding it?"

"Freedom to create a mess is proportional to your ability to know what "no mess" is and how to get there."

"What people call an "Interruption" is simply new input inappropriately managed."

"When you "have to get organized," you're probably not appropriately invested yet in what you need to get organized for."

"I suggest that you use your mind to think about things, rather than to think of them. You want to be adding value... not simply reminding yourself they exist."

"[A]nything that is held only in "psychic RAM" will take up either more or less attention than it actually deserves. The reason to collect everything is not that everything is equally important, it's that it's not. Incompletions, uncollected, take on a dull sameness in the sense of the pressure they create and the attention they tie up."

"Ask any psychologist how much of a sense of past and future that part of your psyche has, the part that was storing the list that you dumped: zero. It's all present tense in there. ...[A]s soon as you tell yourself that you should do something, if you file it... in your short-term memory... part of you... thinks that you should be doing it all the time. ...[Y]ou've created instant and automatic stress and failure ..."

"It's great to clear your psychic decks so you can go into the weekend ready for refreshment and recreation, with nothing on your mind."

"The organizing system merely provides placeholders for all your oprn loops and options so your mind can... make the necessary intuitive, moment-to-moment strategic decisions."

"In order to... have nothing on your mind, you've got to know where all your actionable items are located, what they are, and that they will wait. ...[I]n a few seconds, not days."

"How much of this planning model do you really need..? [A]s much as you need to get the project off your mind."

"[Y]ou must have a clear picture in your mind of what success would look, sound, and feel like."

"The goal is to get projects and situations off your mind, but not to lose any potentially useful ideas."

"[I]f it's just you, attempting to come up with a "good idea" before defining your purpose, creating a vision, and collecting lots of bad ideas is likely to give you a case of creative constipation."

"If you're waiting to have good ideas before you have any ideas, you won't have many ideas."

"The big problem is that your mind keeps reminding you of things when you can't do anything about them. It has no sense of past or future."

"The short-term-memory part of your mind—the part that tends to hold all of the incomplete, undecided, and unorganized “stuff”—functions much like RAM on a personal computer. Your conscious mind, like the computer screen, is a focusing tool, not a storage place. You can think about only two or three things at once. But the incomplete items are still being stored in the short-term-memory space. And as with RAM, there’s limited capacity; there’s only so much “stuff” you can store in there and still have that part of your brain function at a high level. Most people walk around with their RAM bursting at the seams. They’re constantly distracted, their focus disturbed by their own internal mental overload."

"Before you can achieve... you'll need to get in the habit of keeping nothing on your mind... not by managing time, managing information, or managing priorities. ...Instead, the key ...is managing your actions. ...[T]he real problem is a lack of clarity and definition about what a project really is, and what the associated next-action steps required are."

"Here's how I define "stuff": anything you have allowed into your psychological or physical world that doesn't belong where it is, but for which you haven't yet determined the desired outcome and the next action step."

"Most often, the reason something is "on your mind" is that you want it to be different than it currently is, and yet: • you haven't clarified exactly what the intended outcomes is; • you haven't decided what the very next physical action step is; • and/or you haven't put reminders of the outcome and the action required in a system you trust. That's why it's on your mind."

"First of all, if it's on your mind, your mind isn't clear. Anything you consider unfinished in any way must be captured in a trusted system outside your mind, or what I call a collection bucket, that you know you'll come back to regularly and sort through."

"I have lived half of my life in "Western society" and never encountered those principles [listed by the NYT as "Western" ]. What is wrong with me. … So Mr. Bush stands for "gender equality, religious freedom, scientific inquiry and the rule of law" and I have never noticed?"

"The Soviet occupation of Afghanistan gave us the Taliban. The American occupation of Saudi Arabia gave us bin Laden and Al Qaeda. The Israeli occupation of Lebanon gave us Hezbollah. Let us see what the American occupation of Iraq is going to give us."

"Paris Hilton gets more coverage than Congo, Darfur, Palestine, and Nahr Al-Barid combined."

"Paul Craig Roberts, a former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan Administration, has migrated from the Wall Street Journal editorial page to the world of 9/11 conspiracy theory and Putin worship."

"Paul Craig Roberts characterizes the resulting attitudes [of Western and U.S. intellectuals] as a "fusion of moral scepticism with the demand for moral perfection...""

"As strategic and Russian studies are largely funded by the military/security complex, the universities are also complicit in the march toward nuclear war. Republicans are as dependent as Democrats on funding from the military/security complex and the Israel Lobby."

"The Russians are aware that the accusations and demonization that they experience are fabrications. They no longer see the problem as one of misunderstandings that diplomacy can overcome. What they see now is the West preparing its populations for war. It is this perception for which the West is solely responsible that makes the situation today far more dangerous than it ever was during the long Cold War."

"All of this self-serving is driving America and its vassals to war with Russia, which might also mean with China. The war would be nuclear and be the end of the West, an act of self-genocide. The US national security establishment is so crazed that Trump’s efforts to get off the war track and onto a peace track are characterized as treason and a threat to US national security."

"The military/security complex has resurrected its Cold War enemy so necessary for its outsized budget and power and intends to keep Russia as The Enemy."

"When a country armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons and overwhelmed by its own exceptionalism and indispensability has political and media lunatics equating a bait-click commercial marketing scheme with Pearl Harbor, that country is a recipe for the end of the world."

"All of America’s wars except the first—the war for independence — were wars for Empire. Keep that fact in mind as you hear the Memorial Day bloviations about the brave men and women who served our country in its times of peril."

"The US is not a superpower. The US is a financially dependent country that foreign lenders can close down at will."

"If we add state capitalism to the [[George W. Bush|[George W.] Bush]] administration’s success in eroding both the US Constitution and the power of Congress, we may be witnessing the final death of accountable constitutional government."

"Noam Chomsky recently wrote that America thinks that it owns the world. That is definitely the view of the Bush administration. But the fact of the matter is that the US owes the world. The US “superpower” cannot even finance its own domestic operations, much less its gratuitous wars except via the kindness of foreigners to lend it money that cannot be repaid. I sometimes wonder if the bankrupt “superpower” will be able to scrape together the resources to bring home the troops stationed in its hundreds of bases overseas, or whether they will just be abandoned."

"Roberts' history of false-flag assertions is certainly well known... Roberts' piece will intrigue that narrow readership fond of fact-lite, rancidly-posited dot-connecting exercises, and repel just about everyone else."

"The logic of concentricism is so obvious that it’s almost never articulated anymore. If you look at people in Peru, Manchuria, or Chad, you’ll notice that they tend to feel the most duties and allegiances toward those whom they consider most like themselves, moderate amounts toward those moderately close to them, and so forth outward and onward. Instead, we now celebrate the anti-logic of leapfrogging loyalties. The Western liberal is noteworthy for feeling loyalty toward his inner circle, then leapfrogging over a whole bunch of folks who are kind of like him but whom he more or less despises, in order to embrace The Other."

"One lesson of Irish history might be that it’s better to tolerate your annoying neighbors rather than bring in people from beyond the seas to help you win your petty domestic disputes."

"Now, you might think that when the old majority becomes a minority, it would then get minority rights. But that’s not how it works. Whites can’t become a certified minority; they will always be the legacy majority. The closer we get to the future when whites are a minority, the more we hear about their ancestors’ sins, their ineradicable hereditary guilt, their corruption of blood."

"The governments of Europe are confronting an epochal choice in the Mediterranean. Do they allow Europe to remain on course toward inundation by the African population explosion, inevitably turning Florence into Ferguson and Barcelona into Baltimore?"

"To be preyed upon by those stronger than you is bad enough; but to allow your artists and children to be slaughtered and defiled by barely organized foreigners who could be kept out by simple acts of national self-respect is far more shameful."

"Privilege is basically a form of property, and as John Locke pointed out, property is what makes a civilization rather than a Libyan war zone of Hobbesian anarchy. The world is a better place when people can work constructively to earn privileges, individual and collective, and pass some of them on to their heirs."

"Political correctness is a war on noticing."

"If you analyze a host of real world outcomes using adoption studies, fraternal v. identical twin studies, twins-raised-apart studies, the history of early childhood intervention research, naturally-occurring experiments, differences between societies, changes over history, and so forth, you tend to come up with nature and nurture as being about equally important: maybe fifty-fifty. The glass is roughly half-full and half-empty."

"If somebody invented a magic bullet tomorrow that would somehow eliminate racial IQ disparities among all babies born from now on, measurable (though diminishing) gaps in the total population would still exist until everybody alive today is dead in the 22nd century."

"In the West, we have easier ways now to make a killing than killing. If Sir Francis Drake, the great admiral-pirate of Elizabethan England, were a young man today, would he emigrate to Somalia to get a start in the piracy industry? Of course not. He’d apply for a job at Goldman Sachs."

"As the empirical case for mass immigration has become less plausible, its advocates have increasingly switched to emphasizing their moral superiority: they don't look out for the general welfare of their fellow citizens, so that makes them better than their fellow citizens."

"Besides the multiculturalist and the assimilationist, there's a third position that isn't often invited to the immigration debate: the skeptical realist. On the rare occasions when they are mentioned in polite society, immigration skeptics are dismissed as "extremists"."

"It becoming ever more clear that the combination of racial gaps in IQ and the IQ taboo acts as a black hole that sucks all the intelligence out of an institution. Racial gaps in achievement are the overwhelmingly dominant fact driving school performance, for instance, but nobody is allowed to mention the IQ gap among the races, so misbegotten nonsense rushes in."