A Cure for Anxiety - Part 4

In Stanley Kubrick's Cold War black comedy Dr. Stangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb, a character named General Jack D. Ripper goes crazy and launches a B-52 loaded with nukes in the direction of the USSR.

In one classic scene (located at 7:10 on this video clip from YouTube) Ripper explains to a British officer (played by Peter Sellers) the role that fluoridation of drinking water plays in the commie plot to take over the world.

Watch the video and . . .

Karma Happens to Everyone

A version of this article was published by Technorati on 28 February 2010.

At the risk of branding myself a contrarian, I feel compelled to render a reality check on Charles Robinson's Yahoo! Sports blog, Team Canada Ruins McKeever's Dream.

For every egoic force, there is a counter-force. This is called karma. This is what the Canadian cross-country skier Brian McKeever is going through right now. McKeever, who is legally blind, was bumped from today's 50 kilometer marathon, in favor of faster skiers.

This may sound like an odd situation, but here's how it went down. Canada is not normally strong in cross-country skiing. So they fielded a team giving the widest number of skiers the chance to participate. So their best skiers are not necessarily scheduled to ski in every race.

But hold on, over the course of the Vancouver games, Team Canada has posted now six top-ten finishes in cross-country events. New coach Inge Braten made the uncontroversial decision to change the line-up for today's marathon, fielding those he considers his best four skiers (the maximum allotment), thinking, Hey! We could medal here!

This bumped McKeever from the race.

"Magical Thinking" a Slur Against Enlightenment

Whenever you hear someone use the term "magical thinking," beware! You're dealing with an intolerant Aristotelian, a person who cannot conceive or concede that there may be a philosophical conception of the world (e.g. Platonism or even pre-Socratic philosophy, see The Philosophy of Success, elsewhere on this blog) other than his or her own (i.e. Aristotelianism).

This intolerance stems from their blind adherence to the law of causation, which makes it doubly important for the person of faith to develop an understanding of occasionalism (see The Law of Cause and Effect a Tenet of Faith elsewhere on this blog).

More commonly, people profess Aristotelianism but practice Platonism. For example, you never hear rich, famous, powerful people declaiming against visualization, which is a Platonic principle (see the Visualization of Success, elsewhere on this blog). This is because they couldn't have reached their lofty position without it--it cannot be otherwise.