That Got Me Thinking

When discussing global warming and climate change arguing and trying to convince people of our position rarely if ever works. Our positions often get tangled up with our personal identities. Shared interests and informed decisions go out the window when discourse gets heated. Philip Kitcher attempts to bring constructive conversation back.

Global democracy. Hope. Conversation. In this groundbreaking new work, Philip Kitcher and Evelyn Fox Keller transform the debate surrounding climate change and global warming, clarifying some of the most complex issues facing humanity today. Through understandable, constructive conversation they present the realities of climate change and global warming, giving us pause for thought, action and hope in their book, “The Seasons Alter: How to Save Our Planet in Six Acts.”

Kitcher tells us, “If we’re to have a global alliance. If it’s going to be strong enough to win the war against atmospheric carbon… we need to understand how…despite all kinds of differences… many of us share hopes for the human future.” We share this planet; we need to work out an ethical life together. So, let’s get to work.

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If you could travel anywhere in time, would you? Should you? How conditioned are we by the science and words around us? And where does our future lie; in front, behind or all around us? Does free will exist, or are our futures pre-determined? Are we moving toward order or disorder? Is eternity an open or closed system? Is the Universe one big mathematical formula that’s waiting to be figured out? Mr. James Gleick has some answers.

Bestselling author, journalist, and science historian James Gleick, has been called one of the great science writers of all time. His most recent book is Time Travel: A History.  And it takes us on a wild ride on the Wayback machine through the history of time travel – a dimension hopping anthology of sorts.

Gleick tells us, “Time travel is a fantasy of the modern era…No one bothered with the future in 1516. It was indistinguishable from the present.” In the twenties the future seemed to be arriving daily. Time travel took shape in the pages of the Pulps. But James Joyce, Virginia wolf and Marcel Proust – were all time traveler writers – thinking about time travel in exciting fluid ways. Fiction writer HG Wells along with world renowned scientists were focused on the fourth dimension. It was born in fantasy and validated by Albert Einstein.

The meaning of time was altered and it conceptually became like a fourth dimension of space – the whole world was learning new things about time because of new technologies – railroads and telegraphs to synchronize clocks across hundreds of miles, geologists looking at billions of years of history and biologists comparing ancient fossils and specie development, literal perspectives were being altered.

So if a hole opens up in the air, would you walk through it, and which way would you turn the dial, forward or back? Meeting yourself as a time traveler could get tricky, and what happens next? It could get messy, problems with free will, continuity of the self and destiny. As Gleick well reminds us, “ A lot of paradoxes in the time travel business…” Ready to go?

https://around.com/

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Novelist, Diane B. Saxton was a journalist with Vanity Fair, Holiday Magazine, Huffington Post and Greenwich Review, and covered everything from torture victims to psychics, animal rights activists, exotic travel and Hollywood royalty.

Through Crashing waves, strong winds, Shakespeare and the stormy complications of intimate family relationships, she deftly weaves a tale of mystery, love and loyalty. “She interweaves the lives of three generations of women, one valuable painting, the artist who created it, and those who would do anything to possess it – even kill…During the course of the inquiry and as the summer progresses, the family discovers new facts about their past. They also learn that people are not always who they appear to be – themselves included.”

Saxton explains, “While the tale of PEREGRINE ISLAND is driven by a mystery, the reader finds that his or her satisfaction at the end has been earned, not necessarily by the mystery, but by the novel’s ever-present sense of spiritualism … accentuated by the symbolism of the Sound, the soul of relationships—judge a tree from its fruit, not from the leaves, said Euripedes—plus the message of hope embodied in the wisdom of the very young and the very old.”

http://www.dianebsaxton.com/

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2017 is the 50 year anniversary of the Summer of Love; or is it? There are a number of misconceptions shrouding the history of the Summer of Love and the Hippie Idea. And acclaimed author Danny Goldberg has set the record straight in his most recent book, In Search of the Lost Chord: 1967 and the Hippie Idea. Goldberg tells us, “There was a time when the word, “hippie” wasn’t a joke, but it didn’t last long.” The word “hippie” may actually have expressed its truest meaning, resonating with what is now the lost chord, in the summer of 1966 – The real Summer of Love

Goldberg takes us along on a historical journey to the places he wasn’t old enough, or cool enough, to be a part of. If he could time travel he’d like to be a lot of places: When Muhammad Ali refused the draft, Dr. King’s stand against the war, the anti-war protest when protesters pretended to elevate the pentagon, when the Beatles made Sargeant Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band…But there is no place he’d rather have been than the Be In. He talks about what was so threatening to the established order by the counter culture movement. And he conveys what it was that so many “hippies” experienced that has stayed with them their entire lives.

The true Summer of Love existed before there was the barrage of suffocating publicity; it was an innocent time. It is a misconception of the hippie hey day that it was a time of dropping out… The multitude of counter cultures were actually leaning in very deeply.

Peter Coyote famously said,” Acid showed you what was there but didn’t deliver it.. like a helicopter taking you to the top of a mountain and then back without providing a guide to get you back there.” And just maybe that’s what the hippie movement did. Goldberg confirms, “You’ve got to do the spiritual work of a lifetime… A group of us got a glimpse of the way the world can be and something to aspire to, but there’s not that kind of a short cut to utopia.”

By 19967 The coming apart had begun. As soon as Height Ashbury got famous, it was doomed. The media creation of the summer of 1967, brought the summer of dissolution – predators arrived, heroin dealers and the dissemination of the true movement, as the ramifications of over 100,000 people descending upon this small neighborhood set in after the Be In.

By 1968 the balance of forces had grown significantly darker. People today complain about our government and the FBI, but today’s obstruction is nothing like that experienced with J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI. The killings of the two greatest leaders who could have bridged the gap between the the functioning society and the ideals of the protest movement, were a tragic end. In October, 1967 a significant ritual was staged.. the Death of Hippie, a coffin was marched through the streets – the external symbols had lost meaning, but the inner values stayed with people and do to this day.

With head, heart and soul, Goldberg leads us through this fantastic journey, shining amidst the peak of hippie idealism and its coming apart to rediscover the incredible lost chord of humanity.

www.amazon.In Search of the Lost Chord

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Pablo Picasso said, “I am always doing that which I cannot do in order that I may learn how to do it.” And bestselling, author Bernadette Murphy took those words to heart. She learned to give herself the permission to fail, so she could have the courage to start.

Discovering, after 48 years of life, that she loved riding a motorcycle – finding both solitude and a sense of belonging she’d never experienced caused her to question what else didn’t she know about herself. What else might there be out there that could bring such joy? So she began a deep exploration on how risk taking and going out of her comfort zone allowed her to more fully inhabit her authentic self and transform all aspects of life. Success or failure wasn’t the point.

She was literally building skills one freeway exit at a time. Murphy tells us, “We can’t think ourselves into right action, we can only act ourselves into right thinking.” By learning to approach the things that scared her most, she found out it isn’t as bad as she feared and was emboldened. By taking physical risks one learns how to physiologically handle fear in all realms, including psychological and relational. It’s empowering to test ourselves and find out what we are truly capable of and stop selling ourselves short.

On the bike 8 or 9 hours a day with a laser focus, just being present. She felt graceful and powerful at the same time as she rode with others- part of a flock of birds moving in unison. There was something freeing, not trying to prove herself as a badass or sex pot; she was just trying to be another human on the road. And she succeeded!

She learned, “To survive, we have to take the counterintuitive approach. Lean into what scares you with all your might. Throw your body into that turn even when it feels like it will kill you.” The bike took on such huge proportion in her life, she pondered what life would be without it, “Without the bike, I sometimes fear I might cease to exist.”

She tells of the fallacy we’ve all grown up with that the goal is getting the markers of adulthood in place. That once in place, they are supposed to stay there and not be disrupted. That undisturbed, destiny is trapped, as in amber, and now we are supposed to just skate through the rest of life. Yet, reality awakens us. Murphy’s path enlightens ours and she confirms, “All human life has to grow and change or it dies, so we need to learn to challenge ourselves in healthy ways… Is a midlife crisis really a crisis, or is it an awakening? Life is asking us: “Are you ready to shut down and get smaller, or do you still want to grow”

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Are we more connected than we think? Do science and spirituality have more in common than we believe? Can we be happier and more fulfilled by connecting with our life purpose and our soul? Yes, yes and yes!

Dr. Anna Yusim, Albert Einstein, and Carl Jung are all in agreement. There is much more going on than meets the eye, and we are literally all in this together.

Dr. Yusim was an extremely successful perfectionist. She’d graduated from Stanford and Yale Universities. She had a thriving psychiatric practice on the Upper East Side of New York, and great friends and family; but something was amiss. She had hit a bump in the road, or what she would later describe as her, “Dark Night of the Soul.” Her life looked perfect from the outside, but inside she felt disconnected and alone. She was having trouble academically for the first time in her life, and the soulmate she’d been searching for hadn’t materialized. So she went looking for answers. She began exploring other cultural traditions of healing. She spent time with shamans in South America, practiced Buddhist meditation in Thailand, and lived in ashrams in India.

She needed to discover the nature of consciousness – how it works, and where it resides. And through her exploration, Dr. Yusim has come to believe that the world works from a very different stand point than she knew. Upon becoming interconnected and aligned with her soul, and understanding the relationship between quantum physics and consciousness, she was able to find herself and fulfillment.

And in her new book, Fulfilled, Dr. Yusim will teach you to conquer that deep inner fatigue from living a life that isn’t authentically your own, and allow you to figure out who you are deep inside, beneath all of the labels and expectations that have been imposed upon yourself. She will open your eyes and open your hearts.

https://www.annayusim.com/

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Probably the most important thing to understand about Russia is its end game. Historian and bestselling author, Dr. Simon Sebag Montefiore tells us that Russia’s primary objective is power – with limited focus on ideology, power is the ultimate goal. But with an economy the size of Spain’s, Russia doesn’t have the engine to carry the load of a real super power, so they need to be pragmatic and creative to achieve their lofty aspiration. A top priority is to weaken the West whenever possible and undermine the legitimacy of democracies everywhere. Expansionism may be outdated, but it’s a card Russia can play and no one is more experienced at manipulating the press – theirs and everyone else’s.

Dr. Monetfiore is a descendent of a Jewish titan and magnate who was a well respected friend of Queen Victoria. Early in his career, he was a war correspondence spending time with war lords, and also tried his hand as a banker. He was thrilled and terrified by his adventures in the empire, which included being shot at. He came back to write books on power and how it works. Making history utterly accessible to everyone.

In his most recent, historically accurate, saga filled with murder, debauchery, ambition, empire and sex to rival any episode of The Game of Thrones, he tells us what we need to know about the power structure of Russia. The Romanovs, his full narrative history covering the entire Romanov family dynasty is essential for understanding the current state of international affairs. So timely and relevant today, Montefiore blends the personal and the political into a single narrative, From the excesses and cruelty of Peter the Great to the assassinations of Nicholas and Alexandra.

We discover there is an eery similarity with the way the Russian court worked then and works today. The Economist review says, it is astonishing reading The Romanovs because the inner circle of these tsars was identical and worked identically to “the court” of Vladimir Putin. President Putin admires strength and although he may be improvising, Russia’s influence over the other major powers is at a height greater than even Stalin ever achieved.

And while we are on the topic of Russia, tsars and tsarinas, we may want to mull over President Trump’s fascination with Russia and Putin. The plentitude and the pomp of of this power is alluring. The swaggering gangster like power of the Russian rulers who can act on their own has appeal. Will Trump strive to become the tsar of America, ruling without checks and balances? It’s a risky proposition because history shows us supreme power works both ways. Putin and Trump may suffer the same fate as Emperor Paul in 1801, ultimately being brought down by their own courtiers. Only time will tell and Dr. Montefiore may have another saga to publish.

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Thomas Jefferson writes in the Declaration of Independence, “We let facts speak to a candid world.” But what happens when the world is no longer candid? Is there a contingency plan?

Today, there is an unprecedented assault on the truth coming from all directions. We have lost the ability to reason together. Reason and constructive discourse have been replaced with hyperbole, hypocrisy and dehumanization. Paranoia and conspiracy mongering have taken center stage in the news and throughout the political arena. Tolerance of every kind is at an all time low. The night before Greg Gianforte won a seat in the House of Representatives, he body slammed a reporter, merely for asking a question, and then justified it by falsely asserting that it was called for because the reporter was a liberal, and a whiny millennial to boot.

In The Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton queried whether people are capable of writing a constitution in which they can live justly and fairly reason, or whether we all are fated inevitably to be ruled by force and accident? Peter Wehner believes it’s possible, but we may have momentarily lost our way. Wehner is a Senior Fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center. He served three GOP administrations and writes and speaks about the moral fracturing and confusion within our current society and politics. He believes our political culture is sick and the assault on truth has reached unprecedented and dangerous proportions. Here he discusses what led to our current state and how we can rise together out of it and find our way back to constructive discourse and a healthy respect for the opposition.

Wehner tells us,“Politics has always been a contentious business and if you look back through American history there have been some deeply divided times.” But it is alarmingly different today. We are creating our own narratives and just deny the facts we don’t like. We’ve always looked for data to support preexisting views, but advances in technology and social media progress enforce these previous tendencies and raise them to an alarming degree.

“The Country itself in is a kind of distemper, in a bad mood, a foul mood and that’s manifested itself in politics.” Both parties have become more ideological with less common ground – so the other team must be defeated at all costs. The Country is out of sorts, economically vulnerable, so ugly populism rises up; we begin to look within and look for enemies to blame and classify as others.

The American ideal and credo, E pluribus unum (Out of many One) is suffering, there is a coming apart and the path to piece it together again requires a shift back to integrity, both moral and intellectual.

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Let’s start with the landscape…

50% of Americans are taking some kind of medication. Hundreds of thousands of deaths each year occur from adverse drug reactions. Close to $300 billion is spent a year on prescriptive drugs –in 2009 almost $11 billion was spent on antibiotic therapy alone. And resistant infections now account for $20 billion in annual health care costs. Livestock consume 32 million pounds of antibiotics in 2012. 26% of adults in the United States are now taking a statin – costing the healthcare system $20 billion annually. 40 million Americans have a chronic sleep disorder and 62% of adults experience a sleep problem a few nights per week. Adverse reactions to drugs are the fourth leading cause of death in the United States and in 2010 antidepressants were the second most commonly prescribed medication. We’ve got our background.

Now let’s focus in on our subjects…Antibiotics, Statins for high cholesterol, GERD, Antihistamines, Medications for the common cold and flu, Sleep Aids, Steroids, NSAIDs, Psychiatric Medications for adults, children, and adolescents, ADHD medications, Opioids for chronic pain, Antihypertensive drugs, Diabetes, Osteopenia and other preconditions. It’s a crowded landscape!

And now for the master critique. We are over medicated and under informed. Dr. Andrew Weil tells us, “We have a problem. More people are taking more medications than ever before, and that is cause for concern…No responsible physician today would reject medications as a method of treating disease and maintaining health. But it is one method only.”

His new book, Mind Over Meds: Know When Drugs are Necessary, When Alternatives Are Better – and When to Let Your Body Heal on Its Own, is said to be the go to resource for anyone who is sick and tired of being sick and tired. (And as our landscape demonstrates that is a much bigger audience than we’d like.)  Weil’s solution is simple, educate. “My reason for writing this book is simple. I believe that few people on popular medications understand how they work, whether they work well enough to justify the risks of using them, and what other effective methods of treatment are available to use along with them or in place of them.”

https://www.drweil.com/

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The one question typically on entrepreneur Ari’s Meisel’s mind is: How to be more efficient and effective? He is constantly looking at how he is doing what he’s doing and then figuring out how he can do it better. It is this conscious and inquisitive mindset that served him so well as he beat Crohn’s disease – an “incurable” disease -and when he gut renovated a 2000 foot, New York loft in 21 days, just prior to his wedding. It is this same mindset of awareness and optimization that led to imagining and establishing Leverage.

Leverage, where no task is too big or too small (as long as it’s legal) for this boutique of virtual assistants. Leverage is powering the future of work, allowing people to work when they want, where they want and, most importantly, on what they want. Allowing people to work on what they are best at, Leverage frees up your valuable time so it can be used in the most productive manner possible.

Number four on the Forbes 10 Best Books for Entrepreneurs in 2017 list, comfortably nestled  between Tim Ferriss and Tony Robbins, Ari’s most recent book, Idea to Execution: How to Optimize, Automate, and Outsource Everything in Your Business, written with business partner, Nick Sonnenberg  documents their own experience creating a successful company from an impromptu, dinner conversation idea to a successful startup in a few short months.  They developed and executed their superior approach to Optimization, Automation, and Outsourcing to create a profitable Virtual Assistant company – Leverage

Ari’s number one tip for personal and professional success? Place artificial constraints on your time, money and space to force your brain to ideate and become more innovative, then use an external brain to capture your genius.

Ari believes everybody has some sort of genius in them, and most of the time it’s being obfuscated by something in their lives that’s preventing them from realizing it. He tells us, “Just giving yourself the space to use it the way that you want, great things will happen for you, your life, your family and the entire world.” Ari doesn’t believe in a work life balance, he believes in a work life integration. He wants to improve in every way, every day, whether as a father, friend, husband or business person. And he wants you to join him – with Leverage he’s providing you the platform to do so.

“We want people doing as much as they are humanly cable of, enjoying it, loving it and doing their best and highest work.” His mission is to empower the future of work because there is nothing more important, no greater success, than people feeling they are having an impact and doing something meaningful.

https://getleverage.com/

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