SAR_sarsential™_toolbox_9/14
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Above: PGIA SAR 30K BLMTT. Sarsential 9: "Don't mention the war." [ adapt, improvise and improve efficiency ] (click on image for excellent clip on BBCWorldwide's Youtube-channel; with John Cleese, talking about 'Fawlty Towers' episode with the Germans and the hotel on fire).
"I dislike humour I can't believe in. No matter how daft something becomes, it's got to be credible at the level it's offered and real to the characters involved in it." John Cleese on Fawlty Towers in a Radio Times interview, quoted in 'Fawlty Towers, fully booked', first published in 2001 by BBC Worldwide Ltd., London.
And now for something completely different:
"An optimist might counter that nuclear weapons will never be used, even in a crisis situation, because states have such a strong incentive, namely national survival, to ensure that nuclear weapons are not used. But, this objection ignores the fact that leaders operate under competing pressures. Leaders in nuclear-armed states also have very strong incentives to convince their adversaries that nuclear weapons could very well be used. Historically, we have seen that leaders take actions in crises, such as placing nuclear weapons on high alert and delegating nuclear launch authority to low level commanders, to increase purposely the risk of accidental nuclear war in an attempt to force less resolved opponents to back down."
Matthew Kroenig in 'MOVING BEYOND PRETENSE: NUCLEAR POWER AND NONPROLIFERATION', CHAPTER 3 'THE HISTORY OF PROLIFERATION OPTIMISM: DOES IT HAVE A FUTURE?', first published June 2014 by Strategic Studies Institute and U.S. Army War College Press
"[ ... ] Modern man ascended from the apes when the brain suddenly sprouted a neocortex and frontal lobe, commonly called the forebrain. This relatively recent addition to the brain system of humans caused a dramatic shift in our development over other mammals. In essence it allowed for us to take control of time and to develop intricate, clever ways to plan and organize. We were soon formulating elaborate plans for the future allowing us to dominate other beings – including humans – and to manipulate nature. We also developed an obsession for dwelling on the past, which helped us learn from mistakes. These handy skills were absent in our mammalian-brained ancestors. [...] It appears to me that our infatuation with the frontal lobe caused us to throw the baby out with the bathwater by denying the power and value of the midbrain. Research has shown that that forebrain utilizes words and symbols to process and communicate information. However the language of the midbrain (or mammalian brain) is imagery and sensations. Thus modern humans have over-developed the verbal language based forebrain and allowed the midbrain to languish. To be fair, the imagery and sensations are still there, but they are largely drowned out by the noise of the frontal lobe, and [i]gnored. What we get is fantasy and uncontrolled emotions. The result is that we have ignored and denied our visual acuity and sensory awareness – and the complimentary skills of remote viewing, healing, manifestation, pre-cognition and intuition – relegating them to the category of “special” and to the fringes of weird science. [...] Personally I doubt that we humans were gifted the powerful frontal lobe so that we could ignore or ditch that pesky, emotional and visual mammalian brain. We were meant to operate as whole, complete beings, using each aspect of our brain-mind system to it’s fullest."
Mark Divine in 'Sealfit Blog: Let's Get Visual', published August 2nd, 2014: http://sealfit.com/sealfit-blog/sealfit-blog-lets-get-visual/?utm_source=SEALFIT&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=blog
SAR_sarsential™_19_walk
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Sarsential 19: walk [ exit trough the giftshop ]
"The cliche about sculpture, that the sculptor finds the statue which is waiting in the stone, applies equally to [film-] editing; the editor finds the film which is waiting hidden in the material."
British film editor Tom Priestly quoted by Ralph Rosenblum and Robert Karen in 'When The Shooting Stops... The Cutting Begins', page 273, first published in USA by Da Capo Press, New York, 1979
"When we align with our purpose, passion long lost is once again ignited."
Mark Divine in his recently pubished blog, accompanying his excellent keynote lecture at Colgate University on September 18th: http://sealfit.com/sealfit-blog/part-3-uncover-your-purpose-ignite-your-passion/
"[The] opening adage of Romance of the Three Kingdoms, China's classic novel of war and strategy, best captures the essential dynamism of Chinese geopolitics ["Here begins our tale: The empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide. Thus it has ever been"]. At its heart is the millennia-long struggle by China's would-be rulers to unite and govern the all-but-ungovernable geographic mass of China. It is a story of centrifugal forces and of insurmountable divisions rooted in geography and history -- but also, and perhaps more fundamentally, of centripetal forces toward eventual unity. [T]he Dalai Lama, Tibet's spiritual leader, may be nearing a deal that would enable him to return to his Tibetan homeland. If it happens, it would end the Dalai Lama's exile in Dharamsala, India -- an exile that began after the Tibetan uprising in 1959, nine years after the People's Republic of China annexed Tibet. More important, a settlement between Beijing and the Dalai Lama could be a major step in lessening the physical and psychological estrangement between the Chinese heartland and the Tibetan Plateau.[…] The very existence of the Tibetan issue bespeaks several overlapping themes of Chinese geopolitics. […] The Tibetan Plateau and its environs constitute roughly one-quarter of the Chinese landmass and are a major source of freshwater for China, the Indian subcontinent and mainland Southeast Asia. The high mountains of the Himalayas make a natural buffer for the Chinese heartland and shape the complex geopolitical relationship between China and India. […] The Dalai Lama has concentrated the Tibetan cause into himself and his image. It is the Dalai Lama who represents the Tibetan identity in foreign capitals and holds a fractious Tibetan movement together, holding sway over both indigenous Tibetans in the homeland and the old and new generations of Tibetan exiles. [T]he Dalai Lama's international prestige exposed the central power in Beijing to numerous international critics. […] The peaceful path promoted by the Dalai Lama is respected, but not guaranteed forever, by the younger and more radical elements of the Tibetan movement, which have only temporarily renounced the use of violence to achieve their political goals. […] Over the years, the Dalai Lama repeatedly has expressed a strong desire to return to the Tibetan homeland, seeing it as an end goal in his longstanding efforts to gain Tibetan autonomy. […] The report of the Dalai Lama's possible return to Tibet comes as Beijing has resumed talks with representatives of the spiritual leader. This round of negotiations comes after nine rounds of failed talks over the past decade and four years after the last attempt. Nonetheless, the mood appears at least somewhat optimistic on both sides. In recent weeks, the Dalai Lama has offered conciliatory comments about Xi and intimated that he could be open to returning to Tibet, a longstanding desire of the 79-year-old spiritual leader. For its part, Beijing has released some Tibetan political prisoners and reportedly allowed the Dalai Lama's image and words to be used in certain Tibetan regions after years of prohibition. […] This dynamism is not limited to China. The Scottish referendum and waves of secession movements -- from Spain's Catalonia to Turkey and Iraq's ethnic Kurds -- are working in different directions. More than half a century after World War II triggered a wave of post-colonial nationalism that changed the map of the world, buried nationalism and ethnic identity movements of various forms are challenging the modern idea of the inviolable unity of the nation-state."
Zhixing Zhang in 'Centripetal and Centrifugal Forces at Work in the Nation-State' on the Stratfor website, published yesterday: http://www.stratfor.com/weekly/centripetal-and-centrifugal-forces-work-nation-state#axzz3EA2yWnta
SAR_4
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Above: Footprint after today's completion of 32K-lunch-time-SAR 4. Todays weather was the experience of the Creation of the Heavens and the Earth within roughly 2 hours30. Start under fully-clouded-sky with rain. First step on the beach at sun-break: clear blue sky, fresh wind from South/West, deep-tide. Next: partly cloudy with silver sun reflections, then sky opened again to end the training and the day in Friday sunshine.
There is an excellent study to be found on the SSI Website (Strategic Studies Institute). From the booklet 'Forging an American Grand Strategy: Securing a Path Through a Complex Future Selected Presentations From a Symposium at the National Defense University' (pag.80): "... Our greatest problems are not political; they are biological. Specifically [...] that science and anthropology converge to prove that the human brain has not evolved to keep up with human progress. Complexity has outpaced the brain’s ability to process it. This causes it to hit [...] a cognitive threshold, defined as the difference between the slow speed at which the human brain can evolve and the rapid rate at which complexity grows".
There is more interesting stuff to be found in the book; such as the case around a questionnaire that asked people in many different disciplines across the sciences, engineering, arts, futurists and other fields too numerous to mention about their projections of the future. From page 103: "...the possibility of a technological singularity by 2060 is noted, when robots will be smarter than human beings..."
Read te paper here: http://www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pubs/display.cfm?pubID=1177
SAR_act_3.2
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Above: FP 30K SAR BLT. SAR training: confidence [ready to lead, ready to follow].
"Herrschen darf man nur wenn man dienen kann." - Rainer Werner Fassbinder
"When you let someone else handle a mission critical task, then you had better understand the ramifications of what happens if they mess up. It is certainly important to delegate and trust, but you must also have the wisdom to verify that the task they performed will lead to mission success. The only way that you can verify at that level is if you know how to do it perfectly yourself." - Mark Divine
Read more: http://sealfit.com/sealfit-blog/sealfit-blog-divines-10-ways-to-be-a-kokoro-leader-part-2/
"The human spirit craves freedom to express itself and when that freedom is cut off externally, the spirit turns within to find it. But not many have learned how to turn within. [ Victor Frankl ] made a choice to not let his mind be captured by [...] dire circumstances and [...] brutal people [...]. This choice to turn for freedom within led to great liberation, and he felt free in spite of his physical incarceration. He then chose to deepen his spiritual strength by serving his fellow prisoners by teaching them to be truly free. Those who learn freedom at this level will never experience, nor tolerate, tyranny or loss of mental freedom again."
Mark Divine about Victor Frankl in his last 'Seal Fit Blog: Freedom': http://sealfit.com/sealfit-blog/sealfit-blog-musing-on-freedom/
SAR_8_along_the_way
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Above: FPS Sunday 9K SAR with Jesse today (2002). "Most [people], when experiencing fear or anxiety, tend to magnify the unknown. Training, including knowledge and experience gained in simulated situations, has the power to reduce the unknown and contribute to the control of fear." From: The Air Force Survival Training Manual.
"I expected it to be heavy."
Jesse van Broekhoven, member AV Haarlem
"Our practice cannot be perfect, but without being discouraged by this, we should continue it. This is the secret of practice."
Shunryu Suzuki in 'Zen Mind, Beginner's Mind' (page 73)
"Many of us have come to consider comfort as our greatest need. Comfort is not essential, and we often value it much too highly when the alternative is survival. You must value your life more than your comfort and be willing to tolerate heat, hunger, dirt, itching, pain and almost any discomfort. If you expose yourself to capture because you have a blister and think you can't walk another mile, you have not thought the situation trough. Reason is the key to this change of attitude; reason which identifies discomfort as a temporary problem in comparison with the much more serous problems you will be faced with if you are captured." '
From:'Survival Training Edition' , first published in 1962 by Air Training Command/Department of the air Force, reprinted in 1978 (chapter 1, page 8: 'The Will and Ability to Survive')
"The Tibetan tradition maintains that contemplation on suffering is much more effective when it is done on the basis of one's own personal experience, and when it is focussed on oneself, because, generally, we tend to be better able to relate to our own suffering than to that of others. This is why two of the principal elements of the Buddhist path, compassion and renunciation, are seen as two sides of the same coin. True renunciation arises when one has a genuine insight into the nature of suffering, focused upon oneself, and true compassion aries when that focus shifts to others; so the difference lies simply in the object of focus."
The Dalai Lama: 'The Dalai Lama's book of Transformation', first published in India in 2003, page 89-90.
"It is not the strongest of the species that survive, nor the most intelligent, but the one most responsive to change."
Charles Darwin as quoted by Don Mann in the introduction to 'The US Navy Seal Survival Handbook' (2012)
