Kokyou AWARD08

During my stay in Tokyo. i got the fortunate chance of visiting the Imperial residence know as Kokyo. here I'm sharing some of it's beauty

OsakaJO

I've had the pleasure of going to Japan on a program supported by the JAPAN FOUNDATION. The name of the program is Japanese Language Program for Overseas students, it's a 2 week program where participants get to experience culturally significant aspects of japan, Advanced Research centers, as well as learn some of the accents used in various regions in japan.



One of the most beautiful places we visited was OsakaJO-Osaka Castle-. This castle is nearly 5 centuries old, it lies in Kansai region, Osaka. The area covered by OsakaJO is About 60,000 square meters.

let me show you the path a walked through to reach OsakaJO



The weather was sunny, a fine day, just seeing all that green i felt great. I showed the pictures i took to my Japanese teacher and he said your pictures are different no Japanese person would have taken pictures of trees like i did:P

Here we see friendly Japanese school children-wave back to them-.

Here the dried up moat that used to surrounded OsakaJO. it's so green, i could hardly believe my eyes.

And ladies and gentlemen introducing OsakaJO-he's 500 years old cut him some slack-.


Of course he's been bombed and rebuilt several times.




The view on the last floor is very beautiful, the wind is so strong their-you'll notice warning singes-


these are very big gold statues-taller than me- inside OsakaJO-

Hope you enjoined OsakaJO, I'm a bit lazy to write more, I'll try to post more often tho :D. till we meet again, matte ne:D

Corporations feeding of us

*I’m not going to state the name of the company I’m referring to I’ll name it DRestaurant *

Now day’s corporatocracy has greatly affected our way of life-Bahrain as a case study-I believe that instead of it serving us, we are serving it. It has molded our life to produce for it; it is consuming us and feeding of us. Let me give you an example, it’s just something that hit me all of a sudden, once in a Japanese class my teacher said in Japan, people who work at DRestaurant’s are all Japanese so we don’t get a chance to practice English like in Bahrain. Let us think in Bahrain DRestaurant came as foreign company and got foreign labor-cheap labor-and is making prophet from Bahrain’s economy, has DRestaurant been beneficial to Bahrain as it has to Japan? I think not! in Japan it provided decent jobs for the people of Japan ,here in Bahrain they bring people from the far east and pay them very low wages, all that adds up to people who own the company getting richer and our people’s life degraded, this is a corporation that is actively consuming of our generation, we are consumers only. We don’t share DRestaurant’s fate, when the state of Bahrain degrades, DRestaurant will leave Bahrain. I met a lady who works their, she was from Philippines, I asked about how her job was, she said she didn’t like it and wanted to leave as soon as her contract finishes, I said you should try studying and getting a degree so that you could get a better job-ya3ni- she replied saying that she had a degree in Computer Science, I was like何!!!!!!!-WHAT-. This is the world we live in now day

Economic Hit Man

I'm going to talk about a book I'm reading.
the books name is Confessions of an economic hit man by john Perkins.
the author of the books claims the following; he says that he used work as an economic hit man. and told of his stories. he hopes for redemption for all the suffering that he brought to other people
he explained a mechanism that the united states government uses to control natural resources of a country.
the first mechanism is economic control, this is where our friend John Perkins comes in, he was an economic hit man"EHM"; an EHM basically tries to go to a country and tries giving it as big a loan from the American controlled world bank as possible to be used for building projects to aid in the countries development for example, electric power plants and oil refineries. The catch is that the companies that build these projects have to be American and the nations that take those loans can't pay them back. the author gives Ecuador as an example, for every 100$ of oil profits that come from Ecuador's natural reserves 75$ go in to the American company that manges it the rest goes to the Ecuadorian government, most of which is spent by the military

the second mechanism is initiated when EHMs fail, the second mechanism is called jackles, jackles are people that are native to the country to which the American government is interested in controlling. These jackles are trained bye the American government to rebel on their government and over through it-very clean-. The Author claims that Saddam Hussain was a jackle he referred to him as our boy. The guy who Saddam help overthrow was a patriot that had a rule saying Iraq's oil is for Iraqis. Another scenario is whit iran's shah -the king of kings- .
their was a time before the shah was in power, the man that shah replaced was Mohammad Mossadegh,

in 1951, when Iran rebelled against a British oil company that was exploiting Iranian natural resources and its people . In response, the highly popular, democratically elected Iranian prime minister (and TIME magazine's Man of the Year in 1951), Mohammad Mossadegh, nationalized all Iranian petroleum assets. An outraged England sought the United States . However, both countries feared that military retaliation would provoke the Soviet Union into taking action on behalf of Iran .
Instead of sending in the Marines, therefore, Washington dispatched CIA agent Kermit Roosevelt (Theodore's grandson) . He performed brilliantly, winning people over through payoffs and threats .
He then enlisted them to organize a series of street riots and violent demonstrations, which created the impression that Mossadegh was both unpopular and inept. In the end, Mossadegh went down, and he spent the rest of his life under house arrest . The pro-American
Mohammad Reza Shah became the unchallenged dictator.


The last and simplest of these mechanisms is war :), isn't their an easier answer

The Power to Choose(continued)

Welcome everyone-めなさんこんにちわー

Let’s continue what we started before. Let me make clear what I’m writing about here, I’m going to introduce Dr.Stephen covey’s habit 1-and i may introduce habit number 2-.this habit defines a framework to work with in life. The stuff I’m going to write here is so natural, that anyone who reads will be very comfortable with it. Shall we start?

“I know of no more encouraging a fact than the unquestionable ability of man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor”

Henry David Thoreau

Self-awareness

One of the most precious of human’s abilities. What does it mean to be self aware?

Let us explore self awareness.

Can you think about your self? Can you forma picture of your self, look at your self as thou you were a different person?

Moreover you can think about your mental state. Can you think about your mood? What are you feeling? You can describe yourself.

You can remember any scenario that happened to you and think about every aspect, how you felt, how your mood changed, and how it affected you.

Self awareness is the ability of thinking about every thought that goes in your head. It’s unique to humans. It’s the reason that humans advance by time and how civilization increases, it’s why humans improve in any skill they spend time in.

We aren’t just feelings or mood, there is more than that. A feeling is a separate process that runs inside of us-we’ve just thought about our mood-, the way we think isn’t us, we’ve just thought about all that, these are all separate things.

With self awareness, we have overview and vision on how we think, we can look on every process that runs in our heads, this is a great paradigm. You can view yourself and view each way you think about anything. You can see that if you’re a function of moods or feelings of others, or what you seek-be that money, fame, position, ethics or principles-.

The experiences that affect us

It’s widely accepted that there are three major categories that model us:

Family; the way you were raised, you are the way you are because that’s the way your parents raised you to be. When you were small and highly dependent on your parents, the experiences at that age changed you and made you the way you are

DNA; you are the way you are because your grandparents were like that, you inherited it. It’s your genes. You’re of a particular group. It’s our way. we have the following character

Environment; you lived in your environment that made you the way you are. Your school colleagues, the state of your country, the people at work, or your sons, or your spouse, something in the environment you work in

Each of these relays on idea conditioning; your conditioned in some way to respond to a particular stimulus in a particular way.

NOW. Let us think are these ideas right?

Let me quote the good Dr’s words

Challenging these ideas

In answer to those questions, let me share with you the catalytic story of Viktor Frankl.

Frankl was a determinist raised in the tradition of Freudian psychology, which postulates that whatever happens to you as a child shapes your character and personality and basically governs your

whole life. The limits and parameters of your life are set, and, basically, you can't do much about it.

Frankl was also a psychiatrist and a Jew. He was imprisoned in the death camps of Nazi Germany,

where he experienced things that were so repugnant to our sense of decency that we shudder to even

repeat them.

His parents, his brother, and his wife died in the camps or were sent to the gas ovens. Except for

his sister, his entire family perished. Frankl himself suffered torture and innumerable indignities,

never knowing from one moment to the next if his path would lead to the ovens or if he would be

among the "saved" who would remove the bodies or shovel out the ashes of those so fated.

One day, naked and alone in a small room, he began to become aware of what he later called "the

last of the human freedoms" -- the freedom his Nazi captors could not take away. They could control

his entire environment, they could do what they wanted to his body, but Viktor Frankl himself was a

self-aware being who could look as an observer at his very involvement. His basic identity was intact.

He could decide within himself how all of this was going to affect him. Between what happened to

him, or the stimulus, and his response to it, was his freedom or power to choose that response.

In the midst of his experiences, Frankl would project himself into different circumstances, such as

lecturing to his students after his release from the death camps. He would describe himself in the

classroom, in his mind's eye, and give his students the lessons he was learning during his very torture.

Through a series of such disciplines -- mental, emotional, and moral, principally using memory and

imagination -- he exercised his small, embryonic freedom until it grew larger and larger, until he had

more freedom than his Nazi captors. They had more liberty, more options to choose from in their

environment; but he had more freedom, more internal power to exercise his options. He became an

inspiration to those around him, even to some of the guards. He helped others find meaning in their

suffering and dignity in their prison existence.

In the midst of the most degrading circumstances imaginable, Frankl used the human endowment of

self-awareness to discover a fundamental principle about the nature of man: Between stimulus and

response, man has the freedom to choose.

Within the freedom to choose are those endowments that make us uniquely human. In addition to

self-awareness, we have imagination -- the ability to create in our minds beyond our present reality.

We have conscience -- a deep inner awareness of right and wrong, of the principles that govern our

behavior, and a sense of the degree to which our thoughts and actions are in harmony with them. And

we have independent will -- the ability to act based on our self-awareness, free of all other influences.

Even the most intelligent animals have none of these endowments. To use a computer metaphor,

they are programmed by instinct and/or training. They can be trained to be responsible, but they can't

take responsibility for that training; in other words, they can't direct it. They can't change the

programming. They're not even aware of it.

But because of our unique human endowments, we can write new programs for ourselves totally

apart from our instincts and training. This is why an animal's capacity is relatively limited and man's

is unlimited. But if we live like animals, out of our own instincts and conditioning and conditions, out

of our collective memory, we too will be limited.

The deterministic paradigm comes primarily from the study of animals -- rats, monkeys, pigeons,

dogs -- and neurotic and psychotic people. While this may meet certain criteria of some researchers

because it seems measurable and predictable, the history of mankind and our own self-awareness tell us

that this map doesn't describe the territory at all!

Our unique human endowments lift us above the animal world. The extent to which we exercise

and develop these endowments empowers us to fulfill our uniquely human potential. Between

stimulus and response is our greatest power -- the freedom to choose.”

Wish you all the best:D

The power to choose

What makes us what we are today? What contributed to us and made us like we are?

My old view:

I had an idea that humans are a summation of experiences. Past experiences all affect us in a matter. I had the idea that differences that occur in people are caused from a different experience set.

It would be common for some group of people that have the same background and environment to have identical –to some degree- character/behavior.

Let’s say if character is a result from the experiences the individual has undertaken. Does the individual have control over his character? Why do people that have the same experiences have different behavior?

Dr.Stephen Covey’s model:

His model is written in a chapter titled “be proactive”.

To be continued ......

Happy Birthday to me:D

Dear Neglected blog

I’m writing here to congratulate my self for my own birthday :P . I doubt anyone would notice this post.. but am I complaining :D naaaaaaaah:P .

Anyways happy birthday to me!