Books about Futility from Amazon.com

The Greek mythic figure of Sisyphus was condemned by the gods to a life of pushing a rock up a mountain, only to have it fall back down to the bottom, there to begin his labors again. His life of futility mirrors our life in the body and the hopelessness inherent in pursuing any meaning in the world. The first part of the book addresses this view as presented in A Course in Miracles, summarized in the idea that we can never be truly happy in the world because it is not our home. The second part discusses the transition from futility to happiness in the context of the Course s offering of another way of looking at our seeming fate, reflecting Camus important essay on Sisyphus, which he ended by stating, We must imagine Sisyphus happy. Through a change of mind brought about by changing our inner teacher from the ego to Jesus, our lives of futility are transformed into opportunities for unlearning the ego s thought system. A purposeless life of inherent meaninglessness thus metamorphoses into a meaningful classroom that leads us to the Heaven we never truly left. As with the other books in this series, The Practice of A Course in Miracles, From Futility to Happiness is presented as an aid in applying the Course s principles of forgiveness more meaningfully to our everyday lives, that they may become increasingly happy and less futile in our experience..
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With engaging wit and subtle irony, Albert Hirschman maps the diffuse and treacherous world of reactionary rhetoric in which conservative public figures, thinkers, and polemicists have been arguing against progressive agendas and reforms for the past two hundred years.

Hirschman draws his examples from three successive waves of reactive thought that arose in response to the liberal ideas of the French Revolution and the Declaration of the Rights of Man, to democratization and the drive toward universal suffrage in the nineteenth century, and to the welfare state in our own century. In each case he identifies three principal arguments invariably used: (1) the perversity thesis, whereby any action to improve some feature of the political, social, or economic order is alleged to result in the exact opposite of what was intended; (2) the futility thesis, which predicts that attempts at social transformation will produce no effects whatever--will simply be incapable of making a dent in the status quo; (3) the jeopardy thesis, holding that the cost of the proposed reform is unacceptable because it will endanger previous hard-won accomplishments. He illustrates these propositions by citing writers across the centuries from Alexis de Tocqueville to George Stigler, Herbert Spencer to Jay Forrester, Edmund Burke to Charles Murray. Finally, in a lightning turnabout, he shows that progressives are frequently apt to employ closely related rhetorical postures, which are as biased as their reactionary counterparts. For those who aspire to the genuine dialogue that characterizes a truly democratic society, Hirschman points out that both types of rhetoric function, in effect, as contraptions designed to make debate impossible. In the process, his book makes an original contribution to democratic thought. The Rhetoric of Reaction is a delightful handbook for all discussions of public affairs, the welfare state, and the history of social, economic, and political thought, whether conducted by ordinary citizens or academics..
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Futility, or the Wreck of the Titan is a novel which was originally writtena nd published in 1898 by Morgan Robertson This novel is the story of an ocean liner, called the Titan, which sinks in the North Atlantic ocean after hitting an iceberg There are many similarities between this novel and the facts in the sinking of the Titanic fourteen years later. Morgan Robertson revisited his work in 1912 after the sinking of the Titanic and made the ship larger as well as changing the ending of the story..
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Question: What is the only team dating back to the 1970 AFL-NFL merger that has yet to win a division title?

Question: What is the only team in the four major pro sports that has existed since the early 1960s and never had a coach leave with a winning career record for the team?

Question: What is the only team in sports that plays its home games in a stadium named for another team?

If you bleed green and white, you know the answer to these questions as well as you know the color of Joe Willie Namath's shoes. The New York Jets have a record for futility and self-sabotage that is unmatched in the history of professional sports. And nonetheless, they have been rewarded with a loyal following that has made Jets tickets as hard to come by as Jets winning seasons.

For Jets fans, the bright beacon of promise has always turned into an onrushing train. They reveled in the joy of the Jets' epic victory in Super Bowl III, when their team beat the 18 1/2-point odds to defeat the Baltimore Colts, just as their cocky young quarterback had guaranteed; they then watched as contract squabbles broke up the core of the team, which would reach just one playoff game in the next twelve years. They cheered as their sleek, explosive team roared into the AFC Championship Game in January 1983; the team was held scoreless after overnight rains pelted the uncovered Orange Bowl field, turning the gridiron into a quagmire that favored the defense-oriented Dolphins. They dared to hope when the Jets went on an unprecedented spending spree in 1996, signing a Super Bowl quarterback and adding a host of fleet receivers and experienced linemen; they saw that team go 1-15, as Rich Kotite's Jets career coaching record sank to a jaw-dropping 4-28.

In Gang Green, New York Times sportswriter Gerald Eskenazi details the bizarre history of this remarkable team. From the poor decisions (drafting Ken O'Brien instead of Dan Marino) and bad luck (Joe Namath's knees, Dennis Byrd's near-tragic neck injury) to the horrendous leadership (see Kotite, above) and outright strangeness (team practices held in an open area alongside the Belt Parkway, leRoy Neiman's presence as team artist-in-residence, the Richard Todd/Matt Robinson quarterback duel that wasn't) that have typified the Jets' mystifying approach to football, Gang Green captures the history of this most unusual franchise in a funny, rollicking, nostalgic tale. If you can name the Jet who is the only man in NFL history to run more than 90 yards on a play from scrimmage without scoring; if you remember the glory days of the New York Sack Exchange, when practice was often disrupted by the distracting presence of Mark Gastineau's inamorata, Brigitte Nielsen; if you can still hum the fight song coach Lou Holtz made the team sing after victories -- not that there were enough for them to memorize the lyrics; or if you know which Jets coach told which Jets punter that his flatulence traveled farther than the punter's kicks -- then Gang Green is the book for you..
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This is the Humean self": It is a reality known to us only by virtue of resemblance amongst our perceptions and impressions; a unity and a permanent existence which we cannot refrain from conceiving because of the causal relations through the life of mind. The implications are such that we can only ever know Hume's "self" as an historical entity and at best our knowledge can only ever be approximate. Our judgements must therefore refer to varying instantiations of "self" rather than an enduring self. Assuming the authenticity and adequacy of judgements only hold so long as the judgement actually refers to the nature of the judged judgement must prove superfluous and obsolete the moment one's "identity" changes.Hardly free of criticism Hume's theory has met with some longstanding and intuitively-appealing objections. I take the most persuasively argued to be those put forth by Terence Penelhum Barry Stroud and Jane L. McIntyre. Not surprisingly then this dissertation is largely preoccupied with examining the subtleties of these arguments why they are intuitively appealing and well-received and why they should not be. ".
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