Marcus Aurelius From The Virtual University (MICHAEL SUGRUE)

This is a lecture, the first of a series about Marcus Aurelius. I’ve read the Meditations a couple of times and I’ve read Epictetus as well. However, a good teacher can put all this in context and that is what is happening here. Unlike many You-Tube teaching videos, the sound is good and the teacher is easy to give your undivided attention to. I enjoyed the lecture. I believe there are three more. Once you are watching this one, the follow ups will be listed on the right hand side of the screen.

I personally find this philosophy compelling but I’m older and more skeptical. So, let’s see where this material takes us.

James Pilant

Mark Steel Explains Descartes!!

Today, I am rushing ahead on my philosophical journey to Descartes. This is actually more for your benefit, Steel doesn’t do any philosophers between Descartes and Aristotle and I’m afraid if I go in order I’ll forget to put this up.

Having a standup comic do a lecture on a philosopher is a wonderful experience. Education is fun as well as important. If you have any interest in philosophy, you will enjoy. If you have no interest in philosophy, it’s still pretty good.

James Pilant

James Pilant

Music Helps Patients To Breathe!

A World of Music!

From BBC news -

Playing music to hospital patients on ventilators helps them to breathe more easily, findings show.

Experts at the Cochrane Library say music could be better than drugs to calm patients during forced ventilation.

In studies involving more than 200 intensive care patients, listening to music reduced anxiety and helped slow patients’ breathing rates.

More work is planned to determine if the type of music played is important.

One day, I asked my class how many of them would give up listening to music for their entire lives for a million dollars. I had no takers. Now, you might get a different result from a different classroom. Certainly that was unscientific.

However, I believe that music lengthens our lives, gives intensity to our emotions and enriches our thought. How to measure that drives me crazy. I ask music teachers why music is important. The principle result of this exercise is that music teachers avoid me.

I am biased. My utterly huge You-Tube collection of music is testament to my focus and my willingness to spend hours looking for a song a solid indicator of the importance of music in my life. (Hunting down Wadsworth Mansion’s song Sweet Mary was that last one I’ve worked on.)

A lot of the music I listen to is bad music. It’s garage band stuff from the mid sixties and early seventies. But it helps me remember when I was young and everything was possible.

Currently I listen to Aqua and BWO (Bodies Without Organs) as well as my old stuff. I told my class I didn’t want the my musical taste to end with The Loving Spoonful’s “Do you Believe in Magic.”

Maybe you’ve seen a study I haven’t. Don’t send the one where babies in the womb benefit from classical music. I tried to explain this to an overseas reader with little success, and now that I think about it, it’s just not that convincing.

But if you know something about the benefits of music I don’t, charge in here. Write huge comments. I’ll publish them. Let me know what this stuff is all about.

Why is it important to me that I listen to two or three songs in the morning before I go to work? Why do I feel like I did so long ago when a once familiar song is played? Why does any of this work, drums, guitar, etc. Why do they affect people?

If you can, tell me.

James Pilant

Unemployment And Suicide

What some think of the Unemployed.

When my son comes home from school, he tells me how his friends explain unemployment as a matter of laziness and sponging off the government. My son to his credit does not let this go unchallenged. I talk at home about the people who have lost their manufacturing jobs that they have been at for 15 – 20 years trying to find a new career where I teach. They don’t look lazy to me.

I have been unemployed fortunately not recently. It was a terrible experience.

And it seems like it’s a terrible experience for others as well. Read the following -

I was informed about this report by Homophilosophicus.

A report published earlier this year by the National Suicide Research Foundation; ”Suicide and Employment Status during Ireland’s Celtic Tiger Economy,” published in the European Journal of Public Heath, showed overwhelming statistical evidence supporting a direct link between unemployment and suicide. Ella Arensman Ph.D., the foundation’s research director, commented to the Irish Times (June 7th, 2010) that this analysis showed that while unemployed men were at risk of suicide, unemployed women were at significantly greater risk. One explanation for this, heretofore anomalous ratio, is the fact that since the early 1990s women have been increasing represented in the Irish workforce. This study concluded that unemployment was related to a threefold suicide risk increase in men, and double this in women. In 1987 there were 245 registered suicides in the Irish Republic (not including undetermined deaths), a figure which rose to 478 by 1998; representing an one hundred and ten percent increase in the Irish suicide rate in little over a decade. Professor Kevin Malone from University College Dublin’s school of medicine and medical science at Saint Vincent’s University Hospital commented that the 527 recorded deaths by suicide in Ireland in 2009 probably did not reflect the real numbers. In March of this year Jane Walshe, in an article for Irish Central, stated that “Ireland’s property collapse has led to 29 definite suicides.” All of the scientific research is pointing to a firm relationship between Economics and concrete examples of human suffering.

The Irish example is relevant here because similar studies in the United States demonstrate similar numbers and I wanted to talk about the pain of unemployment on a broader scale than the United States.

We often think of ourselves as a special case different in every way from the rest of the world. Certainly there are areas where that’s true. But it’s not always true. We don’t have to be myopic in our view of the world. Their examples especially the Greek and Irish austerity programs may become reality here soon.

I think that the laziness explanation of unemployment is a psychological defense. It implies moral virtue on the part of those still working and an “it can’t happen to me” comfort on the other.

I worked in a homeless shelter for a while. I’ve seen a well dressed middle class family come in and get processed. They didn’t look too confident. But I’ll bet you that in six months when he got employed again, he and his family went right back to the ranks of the righteous. It was just an accident. It won’t happen again. I am hard worker and I’m safe.

There is no safety and the pain of unemployment is real.

As a nation, it might well be more important to get people employed than to make sure the banks are profitable.

James Pilant

Another Business Ethics Blog!! Evaluation of Ethics (via Something About Business)

Something About Business is subtitled, The Pursuit of Ethically Successful Business. The blog has been up since September. Below is a representative selection. There are a good number of postings there now. September is fairly new, at least, to me. So, let us all welcome Wes Connolly by visiting it and reading some of his stuff! May he post a thousand times and make the business world a better place! Good luck, Mr. Connolly.

James Pilant

We have to learn from the mistakes of our past. In looking back in history, we are witnesses to the destructive effects of unethical leadership from companies like Enron, Tyco, WorldCom and various banks. These companies not only brought a mess to their own businesses but to our whole country as well. So how did this happen? And what can we do? Well what we have to do is be more ethical. This basically means just doing the right thing. In a busin … Read More

via Something About Business

An Irish Show of Irish Strength (via homophilosophicus)

Our buddy in Ireland has survived the demonstration to bring us an account of it. It was not very successful and there was no violence. (I like the no violence part.) He gives an account of the events of that day in usual modest way. It was a good read for me.

James Pilant

There once was a time, before the introduction of the blasphemy law (January 1st 2010), when one could find a comic picture postcard in the tourist trap shops of Dublin citing all the reasons why Jesus was Irish. It ran something like this: "Jesus was Irish because he never got married, he was always telling stories, he lived at home until he was thirty three, he was convinced his mother was a virgin, and she was sure he was God." At the best of … Read More

via homophilosophicus