While flying into Heathrow.....................

A few years back I was attending the World Humanities Conference, which had Members of Parliament, and Ruth Carter Stapleton, and all kinds of impressive people.  I was on the program, and I was to be met by dignitaries.

Except that I didn't get through customs.

I wasn't carrying anything, but I was on a list that said that I was "not conducive to the well-being of the United Kingdom," mainly because of my affiliation with Timothy Leary.  So I was detained, and then I was thrown out of the country.

Now, I had planned to arrive and be welcomed and be taken to a hotel, and instead I found myself sitting in this green room with guys guarding the doors.  I was sitting there with Pakistanis, and South Africans, and all these people who were also not conducive to the well-being of the United Kingdom.  We were a great group and we had a wonderful day.  It took me a few minutes to go from "What?" to "Wow! This is a much more interesting day than I expected to spend."

It's always a question of how long it takes you to let go.

-Ram Dass, Changing Lenses:  Essential Teaching Stories from Ram Dass

Checking in with..............................

............................................................................Ram Dass:

“The most exquisite paradox… as soon as you give it all up, you can have it all. As long as you want power, you can't have it. The minute you don't want power, you'll have more than you ever dreamed possible.” 

“The spiritual journey is individual, highly personal. It can't be organized or regulated. It isn't true that everyone should follow one path. Listen to your own truth.”

“It's only when caterpillarness is done that one becomes a butterfly. That again is part of this paradox. You cannot rip away caterpillarness. The whole trip occurs in an unfolding process of which we have no control.” 

“Information is just bits of data. Knowledge is putting them together. Wisdom is transcending them.”

“Cosmic humor, especially about your own predicament, is an important part of your journey.” 

“The human mind is like that monkey, incessantly active by its own nature, then it becomes drunk with the wine of desire, thus increasing its turbulence. After desire takes possession comes the sting of the scorpion of jealousy at the success of others, and last of all the demon of pride enters the mind, making it think itself of all importance.” 

“I think the message is that you don’t need to go to anywhere else to find what you are seeking.”

It's really not all that...........................

...........................................................................complicated.

Yesterday.........................

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

Bobby Sherman......................................................Little Woman

Oh happy day...........................

Son Connor graduated today from The Ohio University with a Doctorate in Physical Therapy.  This is known as a good thing.

Recommended.....................

thanks Kurt

The censorial power.........................

     His other monument, coequal if not greater, is American politics, the behavior that makes constitutionalism work:  the ways and means of acquiring, conferring, and rebuking power, the party organizations and partisan media that are the vehicles of interest, ambition, and thought.  He was at the birth of the American political system, and he understood it better than almost all his great peers.  Like the Constitution, politics has changed since he died, but not in ways that would make it unrecognizable to him, or that make him foreign to us.  It is all around us, in election years, and every day between elections as well.
      Politics can be low, sometimes sordid.  Much of that has to be endured, because that is the way men are.  "If men were angels," as Madison wrote, "no government would be necessary."  But some of the shortcomings of politics may be capable of improvement.  So say why and do better.  As Madison also wrote, "The censorial power is in the people over the government, and not in the government over the people."  

-Richard Brookhiser,  James Madison

Constitutionalism.....................

     Madison took care of his reputation in other ways (think of his convention notes), but his real monument is not them, or any other item or thing—not even originals of the Constitution or Bill of Rights, or first editions of The Federalist.  The English architect Sir Christopher Wren was buried in one of his creations, St Paul's Cathedral, where he has a famous epitaph:  if you seek his monument, look about you.  Madison's circumambient  monument is American constitutionalism—the laws of doing and not doing, and all the debate and revisions they have generated (debating and revising are among the laws;  some of the most important ongoing debates—over the power of the federal government, and of the courts; over free speech and freedom of religion—go back to Madison's lifetime).  Many other people helped build constitutionalism, including enemies of his, and he would be the last person to deny his collaborators.  But he played a major role.

-Richard Brookhiser,  James Madison

if you seek his monument, look about you......

................................................................Sir Christopher Wren:

St Paul's Cathedral during the Blitz

St Paul's Cathedral, the aftermath of the Blitz

St Paul's Cathedral, London

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

R. B. Greaves...............................................Take A Letter Maria

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

Stevie Wonder.................................................My Cherie Amour

On the importance of change......

"'Forever' may turn out to be much shorter than you think."


-Tony Isola, as lifted from this blog post

Happiest of anniversary wishes..................

…………………….to the Mighty E.  Long may you blog!

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

At the newsstand.................Life Magazine features Judy Collins

Judy Collins......................................................Someday Soon

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

Judy Collins...........................................................Someday Soon

On politicians and responsibility...............

These cults of personality are dangerous and they elevate politicians to an undeserved status. The more we place politicians on pedestals and believe that they can personally make our lives better, the more we relinquish our own sense of personal responsibility. And to be perfectly clear, that is the only way we can hope to better our own lives, or anyone else’s for that matter.

-as culled from this Intellectual TakeOut blog post

via

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

Classics IV.......................................................................Traces
(music starts about the 1 minute mark)

Is this a great country..........................

..............................................................................or what?

On capitalism.......................

"capitalist engine is first and last an engine of mass production which unavoidably also means production for the masses … It is the cheap cloth, the cheap cotton and rayon fabric, boots, motorcars and so on that are the typical achievements of capitalist production, and not as a rule improvements that would mean much to the rich man. Queen Elizabeth owned silk stockings. The capitalist achievement does not typically consist in providing more silk stockings for queens but in bringing them within reach of factory girls."

-Joseph Schumpeter, as quoted in 1919, and as cut-and-pasted from this blog post on how much cheaper (in the relative terms of how much labor do you perform in exchange for what you want) a basket of food is today as compared with 1919.

via Newmark's Door

On mentoring............................

Go lead, teach, coach, and model the behaviors and actions that your customers, clients, and community desire. Make this week about working hard to become better than you were last week.

-Sean Carpenter, from here

It is all a matter of ........................

....................................................................perspective.

If only this were true...................

". . . the first rule is simple: it should be as simple to fix an error as it is to make one."

-Seth Godin, from here

Never forget Part B......................

Part B is the so-often-neglected bit: ideas into action.

-Nicholas Bate

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

Creedence Clearwater Revival........................Bad Moon Rising

Beauty...............................

Standing the test of time..................

"Governmental prohibitions do always more mischief than had been calculated and it is not without much hesitation that a statesman should try to regulate the concerns of individuals, as if he could do it better than themselves."

-Albert Gallatin, as quoted by Richard Brookhiser in James Madison

When the "public good was paramount"....

     Hamilton and Burr had been rivals in New York politics since the early 1790s.  During the endgame of the presidential election of 1800, when Federalists hoped to use the tie vote in the Electoral College to make Burr president, Hamilton had urged them to accept Jefferson.  "Of there be a man in the world I ought to hate," he wrote Gouverneur Morris, "it would be Jefferson.  With Burr I have always been personally well.  But the public good must be paramount."  Why was Hamilton so hostile toward Burr?  For a reason that might have interested Madison, if he had known of it.  Jefferson had bad principles, from Hamilton's point of view, but Burr had none.  "Is it a recommendation to have no theory?" Hamilton asked another Federalist.  Without theory, Burr, he believed, must be ruled entirely by ambition.

-Richard Brookhiser,  James Madison

The world...............................

"The world is not a debating society;  it was not wise to be provocative without a plan."

-Richard Brookhiser

Thinking this quote has stood the test of time....

"In all very numerous assemblies, of whatever character composed, passion never fails to wrest the scepter from reason.  Had every Athenian citizen been a Socrates, every Athenian assembly would still have been a mob."

-James Madison

Diplomats...........................

Though Jay was now serving as the chief justice of the Supreme Court, most of his career had been spent in diplomacy.  He was polite and patient, willing to take half a loaf if that was all he could get and to eat toads along the way.  Madison, whose notions of diplomacy ran to stating unanswerable propositions, disliked him and expected little from his mission.

-Richard Brookhiser,  James Madison

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

The Zombies...................................................Time of the Season