“You are beautiful. You are sunlight, breathing.” Quiet Lotus

“You are beautiful. You are sunlight, breathing.” Quiet Lotus

You are what you do

“You are what you do, not what you say you’ll do.” Carl Jung

You’re not obligated to win

You’re not obligated to win. You’re obligated to keep trying. To the best you can do everyday. 

Fasting detaches

“Fasting detaches you from this world, prayer reattaches you to the next world.” Fulton Sheen

Fast latin

Novus: New

Civitas: State

Intellegere: To understand

Brevis: Short

Remedium: Cure, remedy

             

Good words to have

Pasha (PA-shuh, PASH-uh, puh-SHAH) : A person of high rank or importance. From Turkish pasa, from Persian padshah, from pati (master) + shah (king). Pasha was used as a title of high-ranking officials in the Ottoman Empire.

Loquacious  (Loh-KWAY-shus)  full of excessive talk : wordy,       given to fluent or excessive talk: garrulous. Loquacious made its first appearance in English in the 17th century and, with poetic license, stretched its meaning to include such things as the chattering of birds and the babbling of brooks. In less poetic uses, loquacious usually means "excessively talkative." The ultimate source of all this chattiness is loqui, a Latin verb meaning "to speak." Other words descended from loqui include colloquial, eloquent, soliloquy, and ventriloquism.

Ayatollah (ah-yuh-TO-luh)  1. A high-ranking religious leader of the Shiite Muslims. 2. A person having authority and influence, especially one who’s dogmatic. From Persian ayatollah (literally, sign of god), from Arabic ayatullah, from aya (sign) + allah (god).

Moue:  (MOO) a little grimace: pout. Moue is one of two similar words in English that refer to a pout or grimace; the other is mow, which is pronounced to rhyme either with no or now. Mow and moue share the same origin—the Anglo-French mouwe—and have a distant relationship to a Middle Dutch word for a protruding lip. (They do not, however, share a relationship to the word mouth, which derives from Old English mūth.) While current evidence of moue in use in  English traces back only a little more than 150 years, mow dates all the way back to the 14th century. Moue has also seen occasional use as a verb, as when Nicholson Baker, in a 1988 issue of The New Yorker, described how a woman applying lip gloss would "slide the lip from side to side under it and press her mouth together and then moue it outward…."

Baksheesh (BAK-sheesh)  A payment, such as a tip or bribe. From Persian bakhshish, from bakhshidan, from baksh (to give). Ultimately from the Indo-European root bhag- (to share) that is also the source of nebbish, Sanskrit bhagya (good fortune), and words related to -phagy (eating), such as onychophagia (the biting of one’s nails) and xerophagy (the eating of dry food).

Engender (in-JEN-der) 1:   beget, procreate 2:   to cause to exist or to develop : produce 3: to assume form : originate. When engender was first used in the 14th century, it meant "propagate" or "procreate," but extended meanings soon developed. Engender comes from the Latin verb generare, which means "to generate" or "to beget." Generate, regenerate, degenerate, and generation are of course related to the Latin verb as well. As you might suspect, the list of engender relatives does not end there. Generare comes from the Latin noun genus, meaning "birth," "race," or "kind." From this source we have our own word genus, plus gender, general, and generic, among other words.

Dervish (DUHR-vish) 1. A Muslim monk of various ascetic orders, some of whom take part in ecstatic rituals such as whirling dances or chants. 2. Someone who exhibits frenzied movements. From Turkish, from Persian darvish (poor, beggar). 

Squinny (SKWIN-ee) To look or peer with eyes partly closed: squint.

“I remember thine eyes well enough. Dost thou squiny at me?" So asks Shakespeare's mad King Lear of blind Gloucester, marking the first known use of the verb squinny. It is likely that Shakespeare formed the word from an earlier English word squin, meaning "with the eye directed to one side." Shakespeare also uses the more familiar squint in King Lear: "This is the foul fiend Flibbertigibbet.… He gives the web and the pin, / squints the eye … mildews the white wheat, / and hurts the poor creature of earth." Although this is not the first known use of the verb squint, it is the first known use of the verb's transitive sense.

Prodnose (PROD-nohz)  verb intr.: To pry. noun: A prying person. After Prodnose, a pedantic and nosy character, who appeared in the columns of J B Morton in the Daily Express. Earliest documented use: 1954.

Penchant (PEN-chunt) A strong and continued inclination; broadly: liking.

Like its synonyms leaning, propensity, and proclivity, penchant implies a strong instinct or liking for something. Penchant, a descendant of Latin pendere (meaning "to weigh"), typically implies a strongly marked taste in the person ("a penchant for jazz music") or an irresistible attraction in the object ("a penchant for taking risks").

Ascetic (uh-SET-ik)  1: practicing strict self-denial as a measure of personal and especially spiritual discipline 2: austere in appearance, manner, or attitude. Ascetic comes from askētikos, a Greek adjective meaning "laborious." Ultimately, it comes from the Greek verb askein, which means "to exercise" or "to work." There aren't many other English words from askein, but there's no dearth of synonyms for ascetic. Severe and austere, for example, are two words that share with ascetic the basic meaning "given to or marked by strict discipline and firm restraint." Ascetic implies abstention from pleasure, comfort, and self-indulgence as spiritual discipline, whereas severe implies standards enforced without indulgence or laxity and may suggest harshness (as in "severe military discipline"). Austere stresses absence of warmth, color, or feeling and may apply to rigorous restraint, simplicity, or self-denial (as in "living an austere life in the country").

Calaboose (KAL-uh-booss) jail; especially: a local jail. Calaboose is Spanish in origin; it's from the Spanish word calabozo, meaning "dungeon."

Suppose the strong had become master in everything

“Suppose the strong had become master in everything, even in moral valuations. Self-contempt on the part of the weak would be the result, and they would try to disappear and extinguish themselves. Would we really want a world in which the influence of the weak with their subtlety, consideration, spirituality, and pliancy was lacking?”—F. Nietzsche, The Will to Power

To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children;

“To laugh often and much; to win the respect of intelligent people and the affection of children; to earn the appreciation of honest critics and to endure the betrayal of false friends. To appreciate beauty; to find the best in others; to leave the world a bit better whether by a healthy child, a garden patch, or a redeemed social condition; to know that even one life has breathed easier because you have lived. This is to have succeeded.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Robert F. Kennedy, Address, Berkeley Campus, University of California, October 22, 1966.

“…It is not enough to allow dissent. We must demand it. For there is much to dissent from. We dissent from the fact that millions are trapped in poverty while the nation grows rich. We dissent from the conditions and hatred which deny a full life to our fellow citizens because of the color of their skin. We dissent from the monstrous absurdity of a world where nations stand poised to destroy one another, and men must kill their fellow men. We dissent from the sight of most of mankind living in poverty, stricken by disease, threatened by hunger and doomed to an early death after a life of unremitting labor. We dissent from cities which blunt our senses and turn the ordinary acts of daily life into a painful struggle. We dissent from the willful, heedless destruction of natural pleasure and beauty. We dissent from all those structures-of technology and of society itself-which strip from the individual the dignity and warmth of sharing in the common tasks of his community and his country.”

The best advice I've heard in a decade: This is well worth a read

Wharton’s No. 1 professor: 'Never give up is bad advice. Sometimes quitting is a virtue.'

Catherine Clifford

When it comes to success, unwavering determination is often revered as the secret to achieving your dreams. If you have grit and just never give up, then you will, eventually, win.

Not so, says Adam Grant, the No. 1 professor at top-tier business school Wharton, best-selling author and management consultant to the likes of Facebook, Google, Goldman Sachs and the NBA. Grant says there's a time when grit will get you nowhere but stuck further in a hole.

"Never give up is bad advice. Sometimes quitting is a virtue," says Grant in a speech he delivered to Utah State University graduates.

Grant researched graduation speeches before giving his and learned that most extol the importance of living with generosity, authenticity and grit. And while he doesn't argue that these are values worth respecting, he also offers a warning.

"If you're too obsessed with any of these virtues, you might undermine your own resilience," he says. "Virtues can be a little bit like vitamins. Vitamins are essential for health. But what if you get more than your body needs? If you take too much Vitamin C, it won't hurt you. If you overdose on Vitamin D, though, it can do serious harm: you could wind up with kidney problems."

Grant does not dispute that great success often requires determination in the face of rejection.

"Persistence is one of the most important forces in success and happiness," says Grant. "There's the author whose novel was rejected half a dozen times. The artist whose cartoons were turned down over and over. And the musicians who were told 'guitar groups are on the way out' and they'd never make it in show business. If they had quit, Harry Potter, Disney and the Beatles wouldn't exist.

"But that's only half the story," he says. "For every J.K. Rowling and Walt Disney and Lennon and McCartney, there are thousands of writers and entrepreneurs and musicians who fail not for lack of grit, but because of how narrowly they apply it.

"Sometimes resilience comes from gritting your teeth and packing your bags," says Grant.

For example, when Grant was young, he wanted to be a basketball player. He dreamed of being in the NBA, he says. And yet, despite his gallant efforts practicing as a kid, Grant didn't make the seventh grade team or the eighth grade team. And when he got to high school, he still wasn't even five feet tall.

He dropped his basketball dreams. Instead, he picked up diving.

And while he wasn't an instant champion — "My coach told me I walked like Frankenstein and his grandmother jumped higher than me" — he did excel with time and hard work. Grant qualified for the junior Olympic nationals twice and competed at the NCAA level in diving.

"Grit doesn't mean keep doing the thing that's failing. It means define your dreams broadly enough that you can find new ways to pursue them when your first and second plans fail. I needed to give up on my dream of making the NBA, but I didn't need to give up on my dream of becoming a halfway decent athlete."

He also didn't have give up being an author just because his publisher didn't want the first book he wrote. Grant scrapped the original rejected draft — all 102,000 words — and started over nearly from scratch. His new draft became "Give and Take," which went on to be a New York Times bestseller translated into 30 languages.

"Don't give up on your values, but be willing to give up on your plans," he says.

And today's weasel in the world is: NORWAY!

Norway wants China to forget about the human rights thing and eat salmon instead

Echo Huang & Isabella Steger

June 14, 2017

Norway is the world’s biggest producer of salmon. But hardly any of it goes to China, the biggest consumer of seafood.

Since the Nobel Prize was awarded to human rights activist Liu Xiaobo in 2010—at a ceremony in Oslo where the award was famously placed on an empty chair as Liu was in prison in China—Norway, and its fish, have been given the cold shoulder in China. In 2010, the country almost accounted for all of China’s salmon exports, according to data from the Norwegian government and DNB Markets, a Norwegian bank. Since then, its salmon exports to the mainland have plummeted, and by 2015 even the Faroe Islands, Norway’s tiny Nordic neighbor, was exporting more salmon to China.

So strained were relations that Norway’s ambassador to China, Svein O. Sæther, remained five years longer than the usual four-year tenure in his post for fear that a new ambassador may not be confirmed by Beijing, according to Norwegian newspaper Aftenposten (link in Norwegian).

In December, the two countries made a breakthrough when they normalized relations (paywall) after Norway’s foreign minister visited Beijing. China said that Norway had “deeply reflected upon the reasons bilateral mutual trust was harmed.” Norway’s foreign ministry didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment for this story.

Last month, Norway’s seafood industry appeared to get the firmest sign yet that the Chinese market would be fully opened back to them when a delegation visited China and signed a seafood trade agreement, with the aim of exporting $1.45 billion worth of salmon to China by 2025. The agreement came after Norwegian prime minister Erna Solberg’s visit to e-commerce giant Alibaba in April. Taobao and Juhuasuan, two Alibaba-affiliated shopping sites, hosted promotional events for Norwegian salmon in May.

A Chinese state-owned company will also deliver intelligent offshorefish farms—installations equipped with advanced technologies—estimated to be worth around $300 million, to Norwegian fish-farming giant SalMar, China Daily reported on June 5.

Ivar Kolstad, an economist, calculated in a paper for Norwegian think-tank CMI that the freeze in Norway-China relations cost Norway $780 million to $1.3 billion in exports and said that China had become “too big to fault,” according to the Financial Times (paywall). Norway’s annual global exports totaled $104 billion in 2015.

Norwegian fisheries minister Per Sandberg, head of the delegation, said that Norway “speaks up about human rights in many other circumstances,” and added “This time it is fish that matters!” according to Aftenposten (link in Norwegian) and a statement from the Norwegian Ministry of Trade, Industry and Fisheries.

A spokesman for the ministry told Quartz that as part of prime minister’s Solberg’s April visit, Norway and China agreed to regularly discuss matters including human rights.

A spokesman for the Norwegian foreign ministry told Quartz that “the normalization of relations” would “create major business opportunities for both countries,” with discussions on a free trade agreement to resume. “Norway and China has agreed to establish a consultation mechanism at political level between our foreign ministries, where we can discuss all matters of common interest, both bilateral and multilateral, including issues relating to the UN, human rights, and trade policy,” the spokesman added.

In a counter view, more Norwegian salmon may have been reaching Chinese consumers than the official numbers suggest. In a paper (pdf, paywall) published last year, researchers at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences, said Norwegian salmon likely made its way around rules aimed at the product, possibly by entering the mainland via Vietnam, which appeared to see a sudden surge in salmon imports from Norway around 2011. The researchers based their conclusions on export figures in the region and interviews with stakeholders.

In general, the overall impact of the Chinese salmon freeze on Norway’s economy has been “negligible,” according to an independent researcher on China and the Arctic who writes under a pseudonym, adding that overall trade between Norway and China continued have grown since the Nobel incident. Still, blocking salmon was an important way for China to express its “Nobel revenge” in a visible way, he said.

It seems to have had results—in 2015, no Norwegian government members would meet with Tibetan spiritual leader the Dalai Lama, who is labeled as a separatist by Beijing, when he visited the country.

“The Norwegian administration took some domestic criticism for submitting to Chinese pressure in recent years,” said the researcher, and if a salmon deal hadn’t been achieved “all that China-friendliness can be perceived as delivering no results.”

Visen Liu contributed reporting

I think my dog missed me while I was away in Connecticut

The mighty serious business of face painting

What made me smile about this was how very serious the children in line were about the situation. There were several grave discussions on the pros and cons of a devil face drawing and the many drawbacks of a rainbow face.

The little girl in the last few photos was VERY upset because her sister, if I understood things correctly, was getting the face painting design that she intended to get but now she couldn't get it because her sister got it first.