Erich Vieth Photography Website Upgrade

I'm about to hear a ratchet click of yet another year of age. Time is truly flying by! One way I try to keep track of things is by taking photos. It started as a hobby, then grew into a business about eight years ago. And it is also therapy. Photography helps me to stay in the moment. Photography is also exciting, and post-production is as exciting as capturing images.

I have accumulated an unwieldy number of photos over the past eight years. Given that I'm about to be a year older, I decided to steer away from any existential funk by going through my favorite images from home and abroad. It then occurred to me that I really ought to share these by making them accessible in a website. Over the past two days I have designed my official photography website. I invite you to take a look at some (or many) of the hundreds of images you can find in the seven Galleries.

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Quotes for gearing up for the next adventure

I offer these nine short quotes so sum up my emotions this morning. I've recently concluded a rather intense and unsuccessful foray into public interest law. Down but not out. It's time to turn my energies to a new project, not to cloister myself: Our lives begin to end the day we become silent about things that matter. Martin Luther King, Jr. “Do the next right thing.” Dale Irwin (A Kansas City consumer attorney, a friend of mine, who I hold in the highest esteem) “If everything seems under control, you're not going fast enough.” ― Mario Andretti There is no such thing as a disembodied mind. The mind is implanted in the brain, and the brain is implanted in the body. Antonio Damasio (Neuroscientist) “I will keep constant watch over myself and – most usefully – will put each day up for review… Let us balance life’s books each day…” – Seneca Many People Die at 25 and aren’t buried until they are 75. Benjamin Franklin “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.” Voltaire. “To understand everything is to forgive everything.” ― Buddha “You may choose to look the other way but you can never say again that you did not know.” ― William Wilberforce

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Getting upset about the right things.

Here's a post by Darrell Lackey, a pastor challenging Christians to get save their energy and frustration for the right kinds of things. He begins the post with this statement that Tony Campolo has been known to use when addressing Christian audiences:

I have three things I’d like to say today. First, while you were sleeping last night, 30,000 kids died of starvation or diseases related to malnutrition. Second, most of you don’t give a shit. What’s worse is that you’re more upset with the fact I just said “shit” than you are that 30,000 kids died last night.
There is some good food for thought for all of us in this post, whether or not we are religious (I am not).  For example, many of us often get much more upset about the minor irritations of our own local lives than the enormous suffering and stark injustices over the next hill or the next continent. For instance, our own country has been bombing many countries in the Middle East for many years.  We've been bombing Afghanistan since 2001, and according to reliable sources, we have been killing many innocent civilians in a "war" regarding which we are utterly unable to articulate any meaningful objective or metric of success. Therefore, that "war" goes on, largely unchallenged and unnoticed, our news media almost never mentioning that we are even at war.  Out of sight, out of mind for most of us. If we want to be morally cohesive, we need to use unceasing effort to make certain we are focused on the things that matter.  That is often not easy to do.  Trying to stay focused on important things in a sustained way wears us down.  It's not easy to be moral.  It's much easier to complain about that the microwave burned the popcorn. To live moral lives, we need to stay focused on important things, and focus is another word for attention, a psychological resource that humans have in short supply.  Attention is like a spotlight.  When we look at a thing, we often exclude attending to most other things.  that's how we are wired; we are almost the opposite of omniscient, even though we want to believe that we are generally aware of most things that are important. Because attention is so limited, our attentional decisions and habits (maybe we should call this our "attentional hygiene") gives us great power to define our "world."  Whether it's conscious or unconscious, we are capable of manipulating what we pay attention to, and whatever we choose to ignore simply doesn't exist for us; if we are not paying  attention to something, it holds no moral sway over us because our attentional choices turn it into nothing at all. Most of us aren't at all bothered by world starvation most of the time because  we are not thinking about that horrific problem.  Further, human animals are capable of not paying attention to things that are right in front of us.  This is especially true when we are emotionally motivated to not see.   See no evil and hear no evil functionally means that there is no evil. I have long been fascinated by this confluence of attention and morality and, in fact wrote a detailed paper on it, drawing from many domains of cognitive science:  "Decision Making, the Failure of Principles, and the Seduction of Attention."  Feel free to take a look, if you find this general topic compelling.

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Delving further into the Moral Landscape

After Sam Harris wrote The Moral Landscape, he encountered both accolades and criticisms. In response to the criticisms, he held a contest, offering $2,000 to the best short essay to challenge his own work. He published both the winning essay and his own response to it. I find it to be a good read that cross-cuts some traditional concepts of moral philosophy (e.g., that there is no intersection between descriptive versus prescriptive statements) and points the idea that we can dispense with (or at least translate into factual observations) the notions of "good" and "bad." Here is an excerpt from Harris' essay commenting on the winning essay:

Part of the resistance I’ve encountered to the views presented in The Moral Landscape comes from readers who appear to want an ethical standard that gives clear guidance in every situation and doesn’t require too much of them. People want it to be easy to be good—and they don’t want to think that they are not living as good a life as they could be. This is especially true when balancing one’s personal well-being vs. the well-being of society. Most of us are profoundly selfish, and we don’t want to be told that being selfish is wrong. As I tried to make clear in the book, I don’t think it is wrong, up to a point. I suspect that an exclusive focus on the welfare of the group is not the best way to build a civilization that could secure it. Some form of enlightened selfishness seems the most reasonable approach—in which we are more concerned about ourselves and our children than about other people and their children, but not callously so. However, the well-being of the whole group is the only global standard by which we can judge specific outcomes to be good.

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