If...............................

     We'll start our analysis with a truism, stark, self-evident and understated:  Sometimes things do not go well.  That seems to have much to do with the terrible nature of the world, with its plagues and famines and tyrannies and betrayals.  But here's the rub:  sometimes, when things are not going well, it's not the world that's the cause.  The cause is instead that which is currently most valued, subjectively and personally.  Why?  Because the world is revealed, to an indeterminate degree, through the template of your values (much more on this in Rule 10).  If the world you are seeing is not the world you want, therefore, it's time to examine your values.  It's time to rid yourself of your current presuppositions.  It's time to let go.  It might even be time to sacrifice what you love best, so that you can become who you might become, instead of staying who you are.

-Jordan B. Peterson,  12 Rules For Life:  An Antidote To Chaos

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

At the movies...........................Faye Dunaway and Steve McQueen
                                                       star in The Thomas Crown Affair

 

Happy Anniversary, Sweetie..............

Wonderful Tonight..............................................................

 

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

Solzhenitsyn's Cancer Ward translated into English...

     The door was usually shut tight, but at the moment it was slightly ajar.  It was dark inside.  In the darkness he could hear a heavy gasping noise.  There was no nurse in sight.  Either they were with other patients or they were asleep.
     Oleg opened the door a bit more and edged his way in.
     Dyomka was asleep.  Shulubin was the one gasping and groaning.
     Oleg went right into the room.  Now the door was open there was a little light coming in from the corridor.  "Aleksi Filippovich ..." he said.
     The gasping stopped.
     "Aleksei Filippovich ... Do you feel bad?"
     "What?"  The word came out in another gasp.
     "Do you feel bad?  Do you want your medicine?  Shall I turn a light on?"
     "Who is it?"  Terrified, the man breathed out and coughed.  Then the groaning began again because the coughing was too painful.
     "It's Kostoglotov.  Oleg."  He was now right by the bed, bending over it.  He was beginning to distinguish Shulubin's great head lying on the pillow.  "What can I get you?  Shall I call a nurse?"
     "No-thing."  Shulubin breathed the word out.
     He didn't cough or groan again.  Oleg could distinguish more and more detail.  He could even make out the little curls of hair on the pillow.
     "Not all of me shall die,"  Shulubin whispered.  "Not all of me shall die."
     He must be delirious.
     Kostoglotov groped for the man's hot hand lying on the blanket.  He pressed it lightly.  "Aleksei Filippovich," he said, "you're going to live!  Hang on, Aleksei Filippovich!"
     "There's a fragment, isn't there? ... Just a tiny fragment,"  he kept whispering.
     It was then it struck Oleg that Shulubin was not delirious, that he'd recognized him and was reminding him of their last conversation before the operation.  He had said, "Sometimes I feel quite distinctly that what is inside me is not all of me.  There's something else, sublime, quite indestructible, some tiny fragment of the universal spirit.  Don't you feel that?"

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

Hugh Masekela................................................Grazing in the Grass

I'm not a finance guy..............

...............................but I would venture a guess that "human nature" is the unidentified culprit:

There’s rarely a good reason for a stock market downturn. I’ve been studying many of the historical bear markets and corrections that don’t get as much publicity as the usual suspects (looking beyond the Great Depression, 1973-74, Black Monday crash, the dot-com bust, Great Financial Crisis, etc.). The theme I’ve found in many of the other instances where markets fell is that very few have a catalyst for the downfall, even after the fact.

-Ben Carlson, as culled from here

This might be funny...................

..................................................................if it wasn't so sad.

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

On the TV..................................................................Hawaii Five-O

 

Since lists of rules..............

....................are in vogue these days, you might check out these 25 Principles for Adult Behavior from John Perry Barlow.  The first ten are here:

1. Be patient. No matter what.
2. Don’t badmouth: Assign responsibility, not blame. Say nothing of another you wouldn’t say to him.
3. Never assume the motives of others are, to them, less noble than yours are to you.
4. Expand your sense of the possible.
5. Don’t trouble yourself with matters you truly cannot change.
6. Expect no more of anyone than you can deliver yourself.
7. Tolerate ambiguity.
8. Laugh at yourself frequently.
9. Concern yourself with what is right rather than who is right.
10. Never forget that, no matter how certain, you might be wrong.

On optimism.........................

“One may as well be optimistic. The road to catastrophe will be rougher if it's paved with dread.” 

-John Perry Barlow

Rugged individualism................

......................................................................on display.

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

........................................The final curtain call for Marty Allen

   

Toward universal human flourishing......

...................................Steven Pinker offers his thoughts on why we are living in a golden age, despite what you might heard on the news.  An excerpt:

Thanks to these gifts, people in a majority of countries have become happier. Even Americans, who take their good fortune for granted and have stagnated in happiness, call themselves “pretty happy” or happier. And despite the panic about “kids today” (heard in every era), younger generations are less unhappy, lonely, drug-addicted and suicidal than their Boomer parents.

via my favorite optimist

Norms..............................

“The only normal people are the ones you don't know very well.” 

-Alfred Adler, about whom more can be found here

Ed. Note:  The Adler quote brings to mind another favorite:  "normalcy is merely the psychosis of the majority"

Likely true...........................

"Restraining orders work best, however, with the sort of person who would never require a restraining order."

-Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules For Life:  An Antidote To Chaos

cartoon via

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

Smokey Robinson & The Miracles............................Special Occasion

 

Happy Valentine's Day...........

Delay...............................

People watched the successful succeed and the unsuccessful fail for thousands and thousands of years.  We thought it over, and drew a conclusion:  The successful among us delay gratification.  The successful among us bargain with the future.  A great idea begins to emerge, taking ever-more-clearly-articulated form, in ever more-clearly-articulated stories:  What's the difference between the successful and the unsuccessful?  The successful sacrifice.

-Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules For Life:  An Antidote To Chaos

Privilege the future..................

This is to say nothing other than that the future can be mad better if the proper sacrifices take place in the present.  No other animal has ever figured this out, and it took us untold hundreds of thousands of years to do it.  It took further eons of observation and hero-worship, and then millennia of study, to distill that idea into a story.  It then took additional vast stretches of time to assess that story, to incorporated it, so that we now can simply say, "If you are disciplined and privilege the future over the present you can change the structure of reality in your favour."

-Jordan B. Peterson, 12 Rules For Life:  An Antidote To Chaos

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

Glen Campbell...............................................Wichita Lineman

 

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

At the 1968 Winter Olympics.............Jean-Claude Killy strikes gold

 

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

At the 1968 Winter Olympics........Peggy Fleming skates for the gold