The meter is running.....................

....................Jeff is on a road trip.   Looking forward to his return.

Quirkily........................

 “Leonardo Da Vinci was a very human genius. He was not the recipient of supernatural intellect in the manner of, for example, Newton or Einstein, whose minds had such unfathomable processing power that we can merely marvel at them. His genius came from being wildly imaginative, quirkily curious and willfully observant.”

-Walter Isaacson

This Isaacson quote came from this essay, as did several other quotes posted this morning.  Found the essay via.

But really, what day isn't................

the curious, tinkering boy......

 What eventually set him apart was his mindset and drive. He never stopped being the curious, tinkering boy looking for new challenges.

-Carol Dweck, on Thomas Edison

Ask yourself.....................

The ability to destroy your ideas rapidly instead of slowly when the occasion is right is one of the most valuable things. You have to work hard on it. Ask yourself what are the arguments on the other side. It’s bad to have an opinion you’re proud of if you can’t state the arguments for the other side better than your opponents. This is a great mental discipline.

-Charlie Munger, as culled from here

Life can be difficult............

-from the comment section of this Scott Adams post

I'm hoping someday my kids will explain all this to me.

Good news.............................

The World's Poorest People Are Getting Richer Faster than Anyone Else. In 1820, 94% of the world’s population lived in extreme poverty. In 1990, 34.8%, and in 2015, just 9.6%.

-as posted here by the News Junkie

I've often wondered if the extreme decline in absolute poverty around the globe was a result of the container revolution and the off-shoring of American industry that followed.  Did we essentially export our middle class?  Just wondering.

The Mandela Effect.....................

.....................................................An interesting post about remembering things that never happened.

Fifty years ago.............................

Beach Boys...............................Heroes and Villains

 

Uh-oh................................

.............................................The balance of power has shifted.

Some people........................

Those were the days my friend.......

I grew up in America in the 1960s when, sure, we had our own nonsense. But back then, defending the First Amendment was a left-wing cause, and we mutinous youth exercised our freedom of speech like a motherfucker. We marched against the war, dared to use profanity in the days it still sounded dirty, burned the flag, refused to get married just to have sex, and lobbied against prudish censorship laws. We danced naked on stage and sneaked into Deep Throat under-age. We wanted to do and say whatever we bloody well wanted. For the young, struggling from cultural straitjackets seems normal to me. Struggling into one doesn’t.

Classical liberals like me are forever pontificating that freedom of speech is precarious, and all too easy to lose. Yeah, yeah. But contemporary western young people appear to value this right so little that the prospect of losing it isn’t faintly troubling.

...the young casually assume not only that they’re the cutting-edge, trend-setting arbiters of the acceptable now, but that they always will be. The students running campuses like re-education camps aren’t afraid of being muzzled, because they imagine they will always be the ones doing the muzzling — the ones dictating what words we can use (cis, not heterosexual), what books we can read (Tom Sawyer is out), what practices we can embrace (white people may not wear dreadlocks). These millennials don’t fear censorship because they plan on doing all the censoring.

-Lionel Shriver, as culled from here

The world has always been an interesting place.  Twenty years from now will be no different.

Fifty years ago...........................

American Breed............................................Bend Me, Shape Me

 

Bobbing.....................

On symbols and knowing............

     Symbols are only the vehicle of communication;  they must not be mistaken for the final term, the tenor, of their reference.  No matter how attractive or impressive they may seem, they remain but convenient means, accommodated to the understanding.  Hence the personality or personalities of God - whether represented in trinitarian, dualistic, or unitarian terms, in polytheistic, monotheistic, or henotheistic terms, pictorially or verbally, as documented fact or apocalyptic vision - no one should attempt to read or interpret as the final thing.  The problem of the theologian is to keep his symbol translucent, so that it may not block out the very light it is supposed to convey.  "For then alone do we know God truly," writes Saint Thomas Aquinas, "when we believe that His is far above all that man can possibly think of God."  And in the Kena Upanisad, in the same spirit:  "To know is not to know; not to know is to know."  Mistaking a vehicle for its tenor may lead to the spilling not only of valueless ink, but of valuable blood.

-Joseph Campbell, as excerpted from The Hero With A Thousand Faces

Don't know about you, but I had to look up henotheistic.  Short cut here.

Not sure intellect is the correct path.....

For creation is not a change, but that dependence of the created existence on the principle from which it is instituted, and thus is of the genus of relation; whence nothing prohibits it being in the created as in the subject. Creation is thus said to be a kind of change, according to the way of understanding, insofar as our intellect accepts one and the same thing as not existing before and afterwards existing.

-Thomas Aquinas

larger photo and description here

Show up.....................

“Every election is determined by the people who show up.” 


-Larry J. Sabato

Voted early again this year.   A skimpy ballot to be sure, but I wanted to vote for the County's Children's Services levy.  The need is dire.  I hope you will vote for it.

Morning......................

Why do we bother with the rest of the day,

the swale of the afternoon,

the sudden dip into evening,

then night with his notorious perfumes,

his many-pointed stars?

This is the best -

throwing off the light covers,

feet on the cold floor,

and buzzing around the house on espresso -

maybe a splash of water on the face,

a palmful of vitamins -

but mostly buzzing around the house on espresso,

dictionary and atlas open on the rug,

the typewriter waiting for the key of the head,

a cello on the radio,

and, if necessary, the windows -

trees fifty, a hundred years old

out there,

heavy clouds on the way

and the lawn steaming like a horse

in the early morning.

-Billy Collins

Fictive kinship...................

     One of the main reasons humans have been so successful, as Israeli researcher Yuval Noah Harari points out, is due to what is called "fictive kinship."  Most species hang out only with family.  Everybody else is a potential enemy.  Good ol' Homo sapiens have been so successful because we've extended the definition of family by using mutually agreed upon stories.  Families are not merely blood relatives.  We're in many families:  We're Americans.  We're IBM employees.  We're on the same softball team.  Most simply, we're friends.  Friends are just the family we choose.  This allows us to collaborate on a scale that's impossible for other animals.  This is the secret to our success as a species.  It's also the secret to your success as an individual:  friendship.

-Eric Barker,  Barking Up The Wrong Tree:  The Surprising Science Behind Why Everything You Know About Success Is (Mostly) Wrong

This wee corner of the blogosphere is filled with "fictive kinship."  It is why I'm still here.

Certain............................

“It is the essence of certainty to be established only with reservations.” 
-Maurice Merleau-Ponty

cartoon via

Here's an idea................

Fifty years ago.....................

Franki Valli & the Four Seasons................Tell It To The Rain

 

All the wisdom................

..................you'll ever need, right at your fingertips, via the Sovereign Professional's Echoes through time series.  Take a look see.  You will thank me.

This actually makes a lot of sense.....

The two biggest barriers to good decision making are your ego and your blind spots. ...

     Once you understand how your a) logical/conscious you and b) emotional/subconscious you fight with each other, you can imagine what it's like when your two yous deal with other people and their own two "thems."  It's a mess.  Those lower level selves are like attack dogs - they want to fight even when their higher level selves want to figure things out.  This is very confusing because you and the people you are dealing with typically don't even know that these lower-level beasts exist, never mind that they're trying to hijack everyone's behavior.

-Ray Dalio, as excerpted from Principles

The information tsunami..........

"Information, it turned out, has authority in proportion to its scarcity – the more there is, the less people believe."

-Martin Gurri, from this post that ends this way:

"But if you’re me, tracking the trajectory of this structural conflict between political elites who are bleeding authority and a public that is stuck in negation – if you’re me, you worry that in a few years we might look back on these dark times and think of Trump as the good old days…"

Needs..............................

"To be effective you must not let your need to be right be more important than your need to find out what's true."

-Ray Dalio,  Principles

Been true for a long time...................

via

If I am doing my sums correctly....................

..........................one would have to read (and process and understand) a page a minute over eight hours.   Every day?  Really?   Color me doubtful (but then, I'm not Warren Buffet).


"Read 500 pages (of books, magazines, reports, etc.) every day. That's how knowledge works. It builds up, like compound interest. All of you can do it, but I guarantee not many of you will do it."


 -Warren Buffett


extracted from here

Three things.......................................

It's a good question.......................

Leaving aside the possibility of a war that we blunder into (look at history), what if the inability of Washington DC to do anything is a plus?  Government on autopilot for four years, maybe eight if we decide we are better of without change — is that a plus or minus?


-David Merkel, as culled from here

Gone, but not forgotten............................

Fats Domino..............................................Ain't That A Shame

A quick reminder about "tax reform".........

thanks Kurt