my journal 3

[Yamato]

OK, one last analysis of this song, with colors separating the parts where she sings from where she talks. It's funny because I was wondering: what is really the difference between talking and singing? There is really a fine line, because we have musical notes while we talk as well. Furthermore, she talks in a way that the difference is almost imperceptible and she switches very often. It's tricky, but I'll take the challenge.

I will mark in red the parts where she talks.

One more remark.

She doesn't sing "süßen Träumereien" but instead "süße Träumerei". Yet I will still write the plural version of it, for I am convinced it's her mistake, for the following reasons:

1) "Bei" takes the dative case, "Träumerei" is a feminine noun. So, we would need to decline the adjective in the strong declension (there is no article) dative feminine, and that is "süßer", yet she doesn't sing it. Cf. duden.de:
http://www.duden.de/rechtschreibung/suesz
"süßer"
She sings "süße Träumerei".

2) all rhymes make us opt for "süßen Träumereien", because that is the ending of 3 other lines in the same 6-lines verse (or whatever the technical terms are).

3) last but not least: all other singers sing "süßen Träumereien"

Ok, here goes my analysis:

Wenn mir dein Mund nun tausend Schwüre aufschwört
wenn Du auch klagst und weinst.
Was heute geschah, hat unsere Liebe zerstört,
nie wird es mehr wie einst.

So wird es nie wieder sein.
Bei Kerzenlicht und Wein,
bei süßen Träumereien.
Beim wandern durch die Felder,
irgendwo im Sonnenschein.
Wie herrlich das war.

So wird es nie wieder sein.
Bei zarten Melodien,
beim Feuer am Kamin.
Wir fühlten unsere Herzen
wie im heißen Fieber glühen.
Wie herrlich das war.

Nur keine tragischen Szenen,
und nur keine Klagen und Tränen.
Wenn wir uns auch quälen und sehnen,
denn so ein Glück kommt nie zurück.

Ach, so wird es nie wieder sein.
Wie einst beim ersten du,
beim ersten Rendezvous,
dem Buch der großen Liebe schlug
der Wind die Seiten zu.
Siehst du wie ich lache, nimm auch
du es nicht so schwer!
Ich dank dir so sehr!

(whistling)

Siehst du wie ich lache, nimm auch
du es nicht so schwer!
Ich dank dir so sehr!

Gee, I can't remember another song where someone switched between talking and singing as many as 8 times! This is being an excellent exercise for my German, for my singing, and for my focusing on listening.

Hey, look, she does it a lot, this alternating between singing and talking:

It's crazy, trying to keep up with her. She sings fast and changes all the time. Much easier to follow when she sings than when she talks.

Another interesting related clip: she was an early TV star, in the early 1940s:

This was one fascinating clip, on the early years of German television.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ilse_Werner

Ilse Werner (née Ilse Charlotte Still, 11 July 1921 – 8 August 2005) was a Dutch-German actress and singer.

She was born in Batavia (present-day Jakarta) to a Dutch father, merchant and plantation owner, and a German mother. Werner was a Dutch citizen by birth; although she had her greatest successes in Germany, mainly during the time of the Third Reich, she did not assume German citizenship until 1955.

Wow... speaking of Dutch singers during the 1940s. I just came across an engrossing movie (although not a masterpiece) by the famous action movie Dutch director Paul Verhoeven about a Dutch jewish female singer during world war 2. I can't stop watching it, by how captivating it is (not a masterpiece but action-packed):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Book_(film)

You can watch it streaming here:
http://vidspot.net/p7hu96v3t4ln#
http://vodlocker.com/gfmrdrj3y6xc

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Book_(film)

Black Book (Dutch: Zwartboek) is a 2006 Dutch World War II thriller film co-written and directed by Paul Verhoeven and starring Carice van Houten, Sebastian Koch, Thom Hoffman, and Halina Reijn. The film, credited as based on several true events and characters, is about a young Jewish woman in the Netherlands who becomes a spy for the resistance during World War II after tragedy befalls her in an encounter with the Nazis. The film had its world premiere on 1 September 2006 at the Venice Film Festival and its public release on 14 September 2006 in the Netherlands. It is Verhoeven's first film made in the Netherlands since The Fourth Man, made in 1983 before moving to the United States.

Country
Netherlands
Germany
UK
Belgium

Language
Dutch
German
English
Hebrew

Budget $21 million
Box office $26,768,563

Yo, this movie is so packed with action that when I stopped to write this post, I felt that it was almost finished by how much action I had already seen, and instead I now just found out that I am less than half way through it. This movie is good for learning foreign languages. It's got 4 languages in it, constantly subtitled in English.

Not a masterpiece but so action-packed and interesting that it will keep you glued to your seat. However it is not an historically accurate and not a movie for history's sake, but rather an action movie set in world war 2. At the beginning they say it is based on true events, but they probably put together 10 different true events, mix them up, so they could come up with an entertaining, but totally unrealistic plot. This is science fiction that pretends to be history. Engrossing but historically meaningless. From an historical point of view, this movie was entertaining garbage. I would not recommend it. There are much better movies, although I admit that it was entertaining.

...

Holy cow! At minute 85 of the movie, they play Ilse Werner's 1941 song, "Ja, das ist meine Melodie" (authored by Bochmann/Balz), the one I posted in the very post I am quoting (before knowing it):

 

[Yamato]

This instead is historically accurate and realistic, but it's less entertaining, almost to the point of being boring:

https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Die_bleierne_Zeit

Die bleierne Zeit ist ein Spielfilm der deutschen Regisseurin Margarethe von Trotta aus dem Jahr 1981. Das Drama lehnt sich an die Biografien der beiden Schwestern Christiane und Gudrun Ensslin an. Christiane Ensslin war eine politisch aktive Journalistin und streitbare Frauenrechtlerin, ihre Schwester wählte den Weg des bewaffneten Kampfes und schloss sich der Rote Armee Fraktion an.

 

[Yamato]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannah_Arendt

Arendt was born into a secular family of German Jews in Linden (present-day Hanover), the daughter of Martha (née Cohn) and Paul Arendt.[6] She grew up in Königsberg (renamed Kaliningrad and annexed to the Soviet Union in 1946) and Berlin. At the University of Marburg, she studied philosophy with Martin Heidegger.

According to Hans Jonas, her only German-Jewish classmate, Arendt embarked on a long and stormy romantic relationship with Heidegger, for which she later was criticized because of Heidegger's support for the Nazi Party when he was rector at the University of Freiburg.

In the wake of one of their breakups, Arendt moved to Heidelberg, where she wrote her dissertation under the existentialist philosopher-psychologist Karl Jaspers on the concept of love in the thought of Saint Augustine. In 1929, in Berlin, she married Günther Stern, later known as Günther Anders. (They divorced in 1937.) The dissertation was published in 1929. Arendt was prevented from "habilitating"—a prerequisite for teaching in German universities—because she was Jewish. She researched anti-Semitism for some time before being arrested and briefly imprisoned by the Gestapo in 1933.[7]

Paris[edit]
In 1933, Arendt fled Germany for Paris...

movie on her life by Margarethe von Trotta:
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosa_Luxemburg_(Film)

streaming here:
http://vodlocker.com/dzc3prb5vzsq

Lecture on the movie, by Richard J. Bernstein:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_J._Bernstein

This talk is even more interesting than the movie.

 

[Yamato]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hannah_Arendt#Eichmann_in_Jerusalem:_A_Report_on_the_Banality_of_Evil

In her reporting of the 1961 Adolf Eichmann trial for The New Yorker, which evolved into Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (1963), she coined the phrase "the banality of evil" to describe the phenomenon of Eichmann. She raised the question of whether evil is radical or simply a function of thoughtlessness, a tendency of ordinary people to obey orders and conform to mass opinion without a critical evaluation of the consequences of their actions and inaction.

Eichmann is the best answer to Holocaust deniers, because he boasted about his killing of jews in his interviews with Willem Sassen:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willem_Sassen#The_Eichmann_interviews

In 1960, Sassen interviewed Adolf Eichmann about his involvement in the Nazis Final Solution. Parts of the interviews were published in two articles in Life magazine. It is assumed that the transcripts of the interviews are much more realistic and personal than the autobiography Eichmann wrote while in prison in Israel, possibly attempting to place himself in a better light and alter the outcome of the trial. In 1980 the Sassen documents or Sassen tapes, consisting of approximately 600 pages of material from the interviews, were given to Eichmann's widow, Veronika.

Full trial videos here (dozens of hours worth of videos):
http://www.youtube.com/user/EichmannTrialEN/videos

This below is the first video:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Servatius

Robert Servatius (31 October 1894 – 7 August 1983) was a German lawyer, prominent in his profession in Cologne, and especially known for his defense of Nazi criminals, including Adolf Eichmann.

Life[edit]
Servatius was born in Cologne on 31 October 1894. In the First World War he served as an artillery officer, and during the Second World War returned to military service, rising to the rank of Major. He was never a member of the Nazi Party, and was never connected with any of its crimes. At the Nuremberg Trials he served as a criminal defense lawyer.[1]

Notable cases he argued included the defense of Fritz Sauckel, Karl Brandt and Paul Pleiger at Nuremberg, and of Adolf Eichmann in Jerusalem.[2][3]

A number of lawyers had offered to appear for his defense, and Eichmann chose Servatius. As a result, the Israeli law had to be changed to enable this, as until that time foreign lawyers had no right of audience in the Israeli courts. The change made enabled only those facing a capital charge to be represented by a non-Israeli lawyer.[4] Before he was appointed to defend Eichmann, Mossad investigated the history of Servatius, but they found nothing which greatly troubled them.[1] Although hired by Eichmann, Servatius was paid by the Israeli government, following a precedent set at Nuremberg.[5]

 

[Yamato]

Shortcut for relaxation techniques: deep breathing

Shortcut for relaxation techniques: deep breathing

Remember how I told you that our emotions upset our decision-making and how they evolve through an ESESA sequence?

1) Event causes...
2) Sensory annoyance, which causes...
3) Emotional frustration (other directly or by mental association of event with unpleasant sensory perception), which causes...
4) Symptoms of frustration, which are the first phase or the phase that precedes...
5) Action based on altered/impaired decision-making

These steps lead to such decisions as doubling up on losing trades, not closing them, reacting in the wrong way to someone's offense, and many of the problems we cause to ourselves.

To avoid an impaired decision-making and for optimal decision-making, we must stay emotionally balanced, or rather: we pretty much need a lack of emotions.

We can act on the ESESA scale at every step of it, from trying to avoid the event that will upset us, to stopping all actions once we realize that we are emotionally affected by something.

Well, today's news is that, after practicing with relaxation techniques for weeks, mainly at the 4th step of ESESA, which is the "S", when I start seeing the symptoms, for example by wrinkling my forehead when I hear the neighbor slamming her door or a dog barking.

After weeks of this awareness and practice, I realized that we don't need to overcome these emotions of frustrations (anger, and similar emotions) through time-consuming Progressive Muscle Relaxation or autogenic training (as mentioned in earlier posts), but through what both methods use as a premise: deep breathing.

If we follow the deep breathing methodology described here:
http://www.guidetopsychology.com/autogen.htm#1

The Breathing Warm-up

Use this Warm-up before every autogenics practice session, even after you have become proficient at the more advanced exercises.

Begin a process of deep breathing, exhaling to a mental count that is twice as long as you inhale. With each breath cycle, increase the duration. For instance, inhale counting, “One,” exhale counting, “One, Two.” Inhale counting, “One, Two;” exhale counting, “One, Two, Three, Four.” Go up the scale to six counts in, twelve counts out. Then reverse: six counts in, twelve counts out; five counts in, ten counts out; and so on, down to one count in, two counts out.

If we follow this method or even take just a couple of those deep breaths, this will be enough to identify the cause of stress and neutralize its effects very quickly.

All you have to do is realize you're stressed, identify the source (sensory annoyance or emotional annoyance, produced by an event which is ultimately associated, sometimes unconsciously, to a sensory annoyance, such as if you saw a gun pointed at you), and eliminate the stress from it through a few deep breaths.

While you do this, you also have to realize that:
1) there is no reason to not accept things not going your way, or to expect them to always go your way. That is, you have to understand reality.
2) there is no reason to add emotional damage to the damage already done by the event: you fight the event by not allowing emotions to add damage to damage.

If event can't be removed (optimal choice), then deep breathing will take care of it. A couple of deep breaths allow me to forget about dogs barking and neighbors slamming doors. A stupid comment by a colleague, such as being called by a stupid nickname needs this for example:
1) that I stay calm, through relaxation techniques (if you're already calm, it's harder for frustrating events to destabilize you)
2) that I tell my stupid colleague to call me by my name (to avoid any future misunderstandings, as is the case when you're around people who joke too much).

Obviously another option is that you're at such an advanced level of emotional control and acceptance of reality that you don't even feel any symptoms of frustration when a dog barks, and similar, or when you incur a loss in trading. But this is not my case yet.

So, recap:

1) control as much as you can (without becoming a "control freak" in your nature)
2) mentally accept what you cannot control nor escape from
3) physically counter, via deep breathing, the tendency to get frustrated (emotionally and physically) when upsetting events happen

So my whole point of this post is that, once you have acquired the right mindset and attitude, you can neutralize harmful emotions with a few deep breaths after recognizing the event, the emotions, and the symptoms.

But the key to doing this, is that you have to recognize causes of frustrations, and symptoms, at their onset, and not allow emotions to build up, or it will cause you to make bad choices and produce even more frustration, at which point your emotions will have been set in motion, bouncing off each other, like balls on a pool table, along with the events you're producing, and it will be much harder to stop this whole process.

In other words, my point is getting closer and closer to the suggestion that we have to become like computers. Right, because don't forget the other side of this issue: even positive emotions cause euphoria and recklessness which in life may not do much damage, but in trading are lethal.

 

[Yamato]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosa_Luxemburg

Rosa Luxemburg (also Rozalia Luxenburg; Polish: Róża Luksemburg; 5 March 1871[1] – 15 January 1919) was a Marxist theorist, philosopher, economist and revolutionary socialist of Polish-Jewish descent who became a naturalized German citizen. She was successively a member of the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania (SDKPiL), the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), the Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD), and the Communist Party of Germany (KPD).

In 1915, after the SPD supported German involvement in World War I, she and Karl Liebknecht co-founded the anti-war Spartakusbund ("Spartacus League") which eventually became the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). During the German Revolution she co-founded the newspaper Die Rote Fahne ("The Red Flag"), the central organ of the Spartacist movement.

She considered the Spartacist uprising of January 1919 a blunder,[2] but supported it as events unfolded. With the crushing of the revolt by Friedrich Ebert's social democratic government and by the Freikorps (World War I veterans who banded together into right-wing paramilitary groups), Freikorps troops captured Luxemburg, Liebknecht and some of their supporters. Luxemburg was shot and her body thrown in the Landwehr Canal in Berlin.

What do all these women have in common:
Rosa Luxemburg
Hannah Arendt
Gudrun Ensslin

German women, involved in politics, who were imprisoned at least once in their life (2 of them murdered while in custody, 2 of them Jews) and who were protagonists of films directed by Margarethe von Trotta, and interpreted by Barbara Sukowa:
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barbara_Sukowa

I think she's the Robert De Niro of German actresses. I can't recognize her from one movie to another. She changes appearance, completely.

Another intersting thing is the coincidence of the lives of these three women as played in these movies by Sukowa. Rosa Luxemburg dies, and she plays Hanna Arendt. After she dies, too, it's Gudrun Ensslin's turn. She spans across 100 years of German history, from 1871 to 1977. In fact, all movies by von Trotta are movies on history. And yes, they're not as entertaining as movies by Verhoeven, who changes history to accomodate the need for action. Like he did in that crap I saw yesterday... The Black Book.

 

[Yamato]

facial reaction to unpleasant physical sensations

These are our five typical facial reactions to the five unpleasant physical sensations

Unpleasant light:


Unpleasant noise:


Unpleasant smell:


Unpleasant taste:


Unpleasant touch:


Notice anything in common? Similar expressions: the symptoms of stress, but also symptoms of an emotional reaction to the sensory annoyance. An emotional reaction which is not instrumental in removing the annoyance.

For example, once you have decided, or are forced, to receive an injection, what is the point of that expression on your face? It doesn't remove any pain, nor reduce any of the effects. It is merely the symptom of an emotional reaction. Your face is showing how you are feeling about the injection.

Part of all the expressions shown in the pictures is due to an emotional reaction to the sensory stress, while another part is due to an effort to avoid the sensory annoyance, such as the guy trying to avoid the sun in his eyes. The "unpleasant taste" expression is entirely emotional, though, because she is not avoiding the taste by showing that expression. Also the "unpleasant smell" expression is not doing any good. What you should do is stop breathing. Any other changes in your face do not spare you the smell. The unpleasant noise expression shows that she's avoiding the noise, but, again, the facial expression is emotional, because it doesn't decrease the noise.

This is the root of my problems in trading. Even if trading doesn't cause direct sensory annoyances, but only annoyances that are indirectly associated to sensory stress (we know that if we lose money, we might feel hungry and/or cold one day because of it), it triggers emotions in us, and emotions impair your decision-making.

On top of linking losses with future unpleasant physical sensations (lack of food and shelter), I link it with the denial of pleasant physical sensations (prostitutes I can pay for), and I link it with the fear and shame of losing, inculcated in me as a child by my father, who yelled at me, threatened me, despised me, whenever I lost, in a very traumatizing way (like in the army boot camps basically).

When you're trading and feeling this huge burden on you, linked to the event of losses, you can imagine how your urge to prevent them will cause disasters, such as not wanting to close a losing trade and similar. My upbringing has made me a "control freak", which means a "maladaptive perfectionist" (as opposed to an "adaptive perfectionist", who doesn't obsess with what cannot be changed, and what is not important), and although in life it might bring some benefits, along with a lot of frustration, in trading (where I expected to control the outcome of all my trades) it makes you blow out your account.

This is the lesson I have learned from trading, that also applies to daily life. You have to learn to deal with reality for how it is, not how it should be according to your wishes or expectations.

It doesn't make sense to expect the orangutan (my colleague) to behave like a polite person and get angry when he doesn't, just as it doesn't make sense to expect the BUND to go up and down exactly as I'd need it to do in order to make money. Getting angry doesn't make sense, based on its premise, and based on the consequence it has on my subsequent actions (wasting hours complaining about the orangutan and blowing out my account, because I am in denial about how my trade is going).

You are not going to change reality by being in denial about it, and you're not going to change it by being angry about it, nor by complaining about it. In fact, you'll be subtracting energies and time from the action you need to undertake in order to change reality.

So, the lesson I have been learning is this:
1) accept reality for how it is
2) optimally deal with reality for how it is
3) try to not waste time with emotions, to the point of not even wrinkling your forehead, like that girl does when she feels an unpleasant taste

 

[Yamato]

The Maze Runner, streaming (in German, with Spanish subtitles):
http://kinoger.com/main/1193-maze-runner-die-auserwhlten-im-labyrinth-2014.html

At first, it seems the usual action movie crap, but then pretty quickly, after a few minutes of watching it, you realize that it's a metaphor, probably for life on earth. It's a philosophical movie, so far. I hope it doesn't later turn into crap, because it might, as with most hollywood movies.

...

Yep, it quickly turned into crap, as often happens with these movies. At minute 25, unnecessary cruel sadistic violence, for the sake of entertaining the sick audience. This is crap. I can watch the rest of it, or even stop it, if I find something better. Usual worthless American crap. They just added a little bit of philosophy in it, as an ingredient, as the American movies do. Not because it's the main theme, but because the more ingredients you put in the movie the more people you can attract to watch it. So they often mix comedy, tragedy, horror, action, philosophy. Obviously by now I know how they make their movies, so I never pay to watch them.

I first noticed this when I was watching Titanic, and how this idiot director injected a little bit of comedy into a tragic moment, like this:

That's when I realized how pathetic these movie-makers are. "Titanic - Saving Jack", sequence... full of "funny" sequences... how appropriate for a movie where Jack a few minutes later dies. This tells you that all this dick (director Cameron) had in mind was not making a good movie, a realistic movie, a credible movie, but one that would entertain audiences and make money. Audience sucks, right? So of course, if we want to make as much money as possible let's make a movie that sucks, little does it matter if the intelligent people will waste their money on it. The objective is to get money, and entertain the stupid masses.

---

Wow, I just finished watching that movie, for whatever reason, and I confirm that it is absolute and complete garbage from minute 25 till the end.

It was like watching someone play a video game, and a stupid one, for 2 hours. So entertaining that I actually skipped the last 10 minutes: too lame.

Actually the reason I watched it is that in the meanwhile I was looking for better movies.

 

[Yamato]

This was good, Westen (2013 German movie):
http://kinoger.com/main/1204-westen-2013.html

Very realistic, although depressing.

 

[Yamato]

Still reading page 3, Hitler's speech to the Reichstag on 19390901:
http://anno.onb.ac.at/cgi-content/anno?aid=dkb&datum=19390902&seite=3&zoom=33

Very important part here:

Was will man von uns mehr? Ich habe es feierlich versichert, und ich wiederhole es, dass wir von diesen Weststaaten nichts fordern und nie etwas fordern werden. Ich habe es versichert, dass die Grenze zwischen Frankreich und Deutschland eine endgültige ist. Ich habe England immer wieder angeboten eine Freundschaft und, wenn notwendig, das engste Zusammengehen. Aber Liebe kann nicht nur von einer Seite geboten werden. Sie muss von der anderen ihre Erwiderung finden.
Deutschland hat keine Interessen im Westen. Unser Westwall ist zugleich für alle Zeiten die Grenze des Reiches nach dem Westen. Wir haben auch keine Ziele, für die Zukunft. Diese Einstellung des Reiches wird sich nicht mehr ändern.
Die anderen europäischen Staaten, sie begreifen zum Teil unsere Haltung. Ich möchte hier vor allem danken Italien, das uns diese ganze Zeit unterstützt hat.

What more do they want from us? I have solemnly assured, and repeat it, that we do not demand anything from the Western States (England and France, Transl.Note) and never will ask anything. I have assured that the Franco-German border is a final one. I have offered to England repeatedly a friendship, and, if necessary, the closest alliance. But love cannot come just from one side. It has to be returned.
Germany has no interests in the West...

Ah, ah, damn moron. I just found the translation. What a fool I've been:
http://avalon.law.yale.edu/wwii/gp2.asp

What more is wanted? I have solemnly assured them, and I repeat it, that we ask nothing of those Western States and never will ask anything. I have declared that the frontier between France and Germany is a final one. I have repeatedly offered friendship and, if necessary, the closest co-operation to Britain, but this cannot be offered from one side only. It must find response on the other side.
Germany has no interests in the West, and our western wall is for all time the frontier of the Reich on the west. Moreover, we have no aims of any kind there for the future...

Here they make a mess, and mix lines, so I had to pick it up from above in their translation:

..This attitude on the part of the Reich will not change.

The other European States understand in part our attitude. I should like here above all to thank Italy, which throughout has supported us.

The audio is here:
https://archive.org/details/AdolfHitlerReichstagsredeMitKriegserklrungAnPolenVom01.09.1939

Oh, and "This attitude on the part of the Reich will not change" is most likely the wrong translation. He said: "this setting of the Empire will not change". I think he meant to say that the borders are final. In other words, he meant: let me conquer Poland, and I will be satisfied with the borders, which are basically the borders before world war I (minute 1:20):

Like Lord Haw Haw (William Joyce) says in his final broadcast (listen to the first three minutes), Hitler basically wanted to get Germany back to the way it was before WW I and then he might have been satisfied. But they wouldn't let him, and... you know, maybe they should have continued appeasement a little bit longer. Today almost everyone, like Churchill, say they went on for too long, or rather that it should not have even started, but I say that, since they started it, maybe they didn't keep doing it long enough. Of course, the winners are always right (i.e. Churchill), so today the common superficial truth is just one, that appeasement was foolish. But what if letting Hitler have Poland would have spared the world 50 million deaths? On the other hand, there are also battles for principles, and since he was already killing the handicapped and the Jews, then even triggering a war that caused over 50 million deaths might have made sense, for the sake of saving those persecuted minorities.

At any rate, the masses don't understand nuances, and reasoning, they just want one single truth, and want those against that truth to be killed, so Lord Haw Haw was sentenced to death, merely for broadcasting pro-Nazi radio broadcasts from Germany. Winners are right, by definition (because they make the laws and control the mass media), and losers are wrong, and they must die to please the masses and to avoid threats to power. In the same way behaved the Nazis, who, when victorious, killed all the losers. So what is the difference between the Nazis and the democracies? That they had different leaders. But the masses always suck. There is this garbage, represented by 95% of the population, and they get swayed one way or the other according to superficial factors. You can't rely on their judgment and critical thinking. The same person will be a nazi and then, within his lifetime, a democrat, and then a nazi again, depending on the situation. Especially depending on what the majority around him will do.

 

[Yamato]

Today when I get home, I need to do this: write down a series of parameters to measure my emotional control improvements.

I can't drag this ESESA analysis/methodology forever. I need to step it up, complete the "computerization" of my mind. So that soon, I may resume trading. Which is the reason I embarked on all this.

Some parameters that I will write are these. How many times per day...:

1) ...are you crossing your legs (earliest symptom of emotional stress)
2) ...do you join your hands
3) ...do you wrinkle your forehead
4) ...do you slouch
5) ...do you get mad because someone contradicted you
6) ...do you get mad because the boss treated you like an idiot

I need to write down everything on an excel sheet, and measure it on a daily basis, with charts.

...

Back at home. More things to place on the list:

How many times per day...:
1) ...do you complain about anything/anyone
2) ...do you scratch anywhere in your body (even if it's due to itching) - scratching is a useless activity, in all cases caused by our inability to handle emotions (even when it's due to itching)

 

[Yamato]

Relationship between physical sensations and emotions

Some sensory stress doesn't produce emotional stress: sonic boom. You hear it, find it totally normal, and move on, forgetting about it.

Some emotional stress is caused by sensory stress: 20 sonic booms per minute for several days in a row, will certainly produce sensory stress and emotional stress. Hear the stories of those living near airports.

Some emotional stress is caused by sensory input, but not necessarily by sensory stress. If you hear the orangutan colleague yawning out loud and you get angry because of his rudeness, you're showing an emotional reaction which may not be connected to the actual sensory stress, as his yawning is extremely rude but not as powerful as a sonic boom.

With the orangutan there may still be some sensory stress, but there is some emotional stress certainly not produced by sensory stress: for example, seeing a gun pointed at you stresses you out emotionally without an immediate sensory stress (but the emotional stress is connected to an anticipation of potential sensory stress).

Some sensory stress is not produced by any (immediate) sensory input: for example, you get depressed about a sudden thought, which does not originate from any event happening in the last 24 hours.

As a summary, not all sensory stress produces emotional stress and not all emotional stress is produced by sensory stress (nor sensory inputs).

I am now going to try to draw one of those Venn diagrams:



Our objective should be to avoid as much sensory stress as possible, and to not allow any emotional stress to be triggered by sensory stress, the wider range of sensory inputs, or even by thinking itself. This will keep our decision-making healthy and efficient.

In particular, a trading loss impairs our decision-making, because, via a sensory input, it triggers emotional stress (since we subconsciously connect losing with many negative emotions: the fear/shame of failure, the fear of starvation and the fear of lack of shelter).

 

[Yamato]

This is obviously good, but I've already seen it decades ago:
http://kinoger.com/main/1182-es-war-einmal-in-amerika-1984.html

Now I am watching it in German (it has extra scenes which weren't in the original release, scenes I had never seen). Once Upon a Time in America. One of my top ten favorite movies. Over 4 hours long.

 

[Yamato]

how the office is preparing me for trading

Pretty good test at work, such a good test, that it knocked me out for 24 hours. Indeed I couldn't sleep and took a day off.

Yesterday, 30 minutes before leaving, the boss, as she does once every 3 months, called me because the time was right (she felt in her sick mind) to overload me with work, until breaking my back.

This is the deal, all the time: those who work get overloaded with work, and those who don't work are left alone.

Of course, because why would she go and ask the lazy ones to do something heavy and complex, when she already knows that they'll cop out of it or even answer rudely?

So, each and every time there is something heavy to do, she asks me. The result is that she wears me out. Then, when I am worn out, she treats me like an idiot.

So I definitely need to organize myself to avoid this totally unfair situation. On top of it, I never got promoted or anything. So this is just pure exploitation.

However, I do have a sense of duty, so I will still work the entire six hours I am there. Well, since I sometimes take a break to write a thing or two on the journal, I will work those 5 and a half hours.

I will still do my duty like no one else does, despite the fact that I am not getting rewarded (besides the salary, of course, which cannot be forgotten).

But such defending myself will still take place, and, since I still have to work out of my sense of duty, it will take the form of slowing down to the point that I am relaxed. In other words, I am not going to be in a rush the whole day because she is assigning to me 5 times as much work as she expects from the others.

Furthermore, relaxation itself and avoiding emotions is precisely part of my ESESA training (to benefit my trading). Initially, I had planned (tonight, while i wasn't sleeping) some sort of showdown where I'd tell her "listen, I have had enough... Yesterday you just doubled my work, when I already had my day entirely filled up with work...".

But as i said all these months I need to learn to control my emotions and a showdown would only be the consequence of anger.

I must be able to take "injustice" even, without showing and without feeling emotions. This is a great opportunity. The boss burning me out, treating me like an idiot, and, again, overloading me with work, to burn me out some more.

Great opportunity to test my capability of controlling emotions, and understanding reality. I must at once understand reality and not get mad about it. Instead of, like I did before, not understanding reality and getting mad because, somehow, things didn't go my way.

Excellent opportunity and test that my bank offer me for free, to benefit my trading. Thanks, bank. Thanks for providing this free "mental gym" to train my personality, to be ready for trading.

Now I must not fail. The plan is clear. Not getting mad. Not standing up for myself. Just assessing the situation, calmly. No hot-headed action.

The plan is clear, but it's going to be hard. This is the type of situation (a clear injustice), where I'd usually start yelling at the boss. I did it often in the past, each time I perceived such extreme injustices.

Typical situation: everyone is joking around and having coffee breaks and singing and whistling, and in the meanwhile the boss asks me to double, triple my workload. And I can't even focus enough to do all that work, because in the meanwhile the slackers (paid four times as much as I am) are having a good time.

But hey, this is part of the way I want to go about it. It's my choice to have a clean conscience: no one is forcing me to do anything. I could have been like everyone else: dishonest, lazy and butt-kisser. And, for the future, I can do anything, even shoot the whole office, but I must not do it out of anger. And, since I am feeling anger, I choose to stop all action... until I will no longer feel anger.

That is the 5th step of my ESESA methodology.

Event (boss overloading me while others slacking off)
Sensation (skipped in this case)
Emotion (anger, rage)
Symptoms (inability to sleep)
Action (yelling at people, and lots of other counter-productive things)

This is the phase, the last phase, ESESA phase 5, when I decide, just like it should be done in trading, that all action must be stopped if I haven't managed to halt this "emotional degeneration" in earlier phases (first of all by avoiding the event, then by avoiding the emotions, then by stopping the symptoms by relaxation techniques). If all fails and emotions get through, I must stop all action, even if this means not reacting to injustices.

This is good, too, training yourself to not act when you perceive injustices, because all damage done to my accounts (blowing them out dozens of times), has been triggered by a sensation of the markets behaving unjustly towards me, by not giving me the profit I was so certain about.

So ultimately my boss is testing me to see if I am ready to trade again. And, since I didn't sleep all night, I clearly am not ready yet to trade.

And the more I will make progress at work, and outside of trading, and the more this will prepare me for trading. I need a radical and complete and final change. Because I must be sure that I will be under stress, in one sense or another, my trading choices will neither be impaired by anger nor by the euphoria caused by winning.

 

[Yamato]

not letting my boss's anxiety infect me

Ok, nothing much to say today.

I will just report my conversation with my boss (female boss).

After not sleeping yesterday, I took a day off, and, despite being angry, I decided that i must learn to control (eliminate if possible) my emotions, in order to be able to trade and live better.

So today I went there, back to the office, and she told me to go near her to ask me / show me how to do something. So I did.

Then, while I was there, no longer being angry (I can do anything, even kill her, provided that it's not an emotional decision), I told her: "You know, by the way, I think you're giving me too many things for me to be able to do them in six hours. My six hours were already full, before you assigned me all that work on Monday. Now I will either have to leave something undone, or I will have to decrease the quality, which I would prefer to avoid".

She replied that yesterday (during my day off) she received this x amount of work/emails for me, implying that my day is not that busy after all, and implying that all I do is that x thing she mentioned, while ignoring to mention y and z, which are the other 66% of what I do.

So, once again, I didn't react in an emotional way, because I could have gotten quite offended for her belittling my work, and implying that my work only amounts to x, which is a lie.

But I did say: "Oh, but I do other things. Maybe you are unable to see the things I do...".

Indeed, I didn't say it in an argumentative critical way, but I do think that she a retarded bitch, who doesn't realize how much I am doing. And how much she's overloading me.

She replied "No, I know...".

Then if you know, why did you imply that all I do is x, and why are you overloading me?

But I didn't say it. Because I never say anything rude to anyone, unless I lose control. All the more now that I am fighting my emotions.

I went back to my place and I came up with an effective way to show her I am not pleased but without arguing and without doing anything emotional.

Here's what I did.

She's overloading me? She's stressing me out? My work is allegedly not that much?

So I guess it's OK if I relax and take another day off, since my absence should not be a problem, right?

So I wrote her an email just saying "May I take a day off tomorrow?". She said OK, and so I am taking a day off.

Hopefully tomorrow they will have a lot of problems related to the fact that I am not there, but even if it doesn't happen, I am sure she got my point.

You burn me out? You wear me out? You overload me? You disregard and belittle my work? And I take it easy and relax instead. I will not let you burn out my brain again.

I will not let you infect me with your anxiety. In other words, I will not let you pass on to me your unhealthy emotions.

I am referring to the events described here, whereby I lost some mental sharpness in May-June 2014, partly due to smoking pot (or maybe not) and partly due to trading losses (or maybe not) and partly due to her stressing me out with impossible requests (definitely the case, maybe in conjunction with other factors):
http://www.trade2win.com/boards/trading-journals/140032-my-journal-3-post2404334.html

And most of all, I am not going to burn my brain out for a bitch who treats me like an idiot, when she sees that I am not too quick in understanding what the **** she's talking about among the 200 different things she has given me to do (given the huge amount of work I am doing every day for her).

 

[Yamato]

These Hitler parodies (from Der Untergang) are usually disrespectful but sometimes give you precious historical information like this one:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rochus_Misch

Rochus Misch (29 July 1917 – 5 September 2013) was a German Oberscharführer (sergeant) in the 1st SS Panzer Division Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler (LSSAH) during World War II. He served as a courier, bodyguard and telephone operator for German leader Adolf Hitler from 1940 to 1945. He was the last surviving occupant of the Führerbunker when he died in 2013.

Here's the original clip:

These parodies helped make this movie famous, so we forgive them for being so disrespectful to history.

 

[Yamato]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kessler_Twins

 

[Yamato]

good movies

http://www.movie2k.tl/Can-A-Song-Save-Your-Lifess-562232-online-film.html
(8 on a scale from 1 to 10)

http://www.movie2k.tl/Die-Große-Versuchung-565438-online-film.html
(7.1 a scale from 1 to 10)

http://kinoger.com/main/783-otis-2008.html
(6.5 on a scale from 1 to 10)

 

[Yamato]

Wow, that was tough. I finished Hitler's speech. This was the last page (5th page of pages 2 through 5):
http://anno.onb.ac.at/cgi-content/anno?aid=dkb&datum=19390902&seite=5&zoom=33



Audio here:
https://archive.org/details/AdolfHitlerReichstagsredeMitKriegserklrungAnPolenVom01.09.1939

Here's the last page of the same speech from the parliamentary transcripts:
http://www.reichstagsprotokolle.de/Blatt2_n4_bsb00000613_00049.html

Hitler ends his speech with this quote from a previous speech of his:

Wenn unser Wille so stark ist, dass keine Not ihn mehr zu zwingen vermag, dann wird unser Wille und unser deutscher Stahl auch die Not meistern!

My translation:
When our will will be so strong that no difficulty will be able to dominate it, then our will and our German steel (TN, see chart below) will also overcome the difficulties!

Needless to say the concept of "German steel", which I was unable to translate properly, was at its peak popularity precisely in those years:
https://books.google.com/ngrams/gra...,s0;;deutscher Stahl;,c0;;Deutscher Stahl;,c0



It was obviously a concept that Hitler and the other nazis liked to repeat.

So, I finished hitler's speech. 28 minutes of speech. Now I've translated it all, and heard it all. That was a tough one. Now I can proceed with the rest of the newspaper. As for the rest of the last few weeks, I've been studying just one day of Austrian newspapers: September 2nd, 1939, which means the newspaper issues reporting on the first day of the Polish campaign, which is not exactly the first day of the war, in the sense that the UK and France declared war on September 3rd. It is the first day of the war, considering what we know today, but then it was just the first day of the Polish campaign.

Quite interesting is the tile of the section that describes what happened after his speech (same article, a few lines lower): "Der Reichstag gelobt dem Führer Treue bis zum letzten". That means "the Reichstag vows to the Fuhrer loyalty till the end".

I did a search on "zum letzten", because I was curious about the term, and it doesn't seem to be much used today, as it usually requires another word after "letzten". Indeed, "bis zum letzten" sounds like "until the last...".

Sure enough, on Google Ngram, the situation is the same as for "German steel":
https://books.google.com/ngrams/gra...g=3&share=&direct_url=t1;,bis zum letzten;,c0

 

[Yamato]

Remember how I was saying that my boss gave me a nervous breakdown and how I took yesterday off to avoid letting myself be contaminated by her anxiety?

Well, today I am back at work and as I was getting dressed, I was thinking that even my nervous breakdown had an emotional cause that should be analyzed or at least mentioned.

She wore me out not only because she was asking a lot of me, namely to put together two different databases with different columns and different dates (very complex impractical useless task), but because all the while I was doing it, I was continuously thinking that we were going about it the wrong way, that it was useless, that it was a terrible idea. So the breakdown didn't just come from the stupid task, but also from my control freak nature of not accepting a task that wasn't in line with my optimization of the world. Half of the stress causing the mental breakdown was from the continuous anger I was feeling while doing that stupid task. Instead, had I taken it as a neutral task, without adding any of my judgments and ensuing emotions, it would have been a lighter task. (Of course an office run like this, by idiot bosses like the ones I have often had, has all the usual limits typical of bureaucracy).

So, once I will remove this emotional ingredient, I should also be able to stave off nervous breakdowns more effectively. I'm starting to understand that my job here is not to do things well, but to do things the way my boss wants them done. This, too, is an assessment that I owe to a rationality devoid of emotions, because in order to accept this concept I need to be free from emotions (e.g.: I am no longer feeling the anger that used to arise in me when things were not done properly).

The orangutan just got here. I have to stop writing, because he's distracting me.