bonkers......................

 

being obliged...........................

 

I confess that there are several parts of this Constitution which I do not at present approve, but I am not sure I shall never approve them. For having lived long, I have experienced many instances of being obliged by better information, or fuller consideration, to change opinions even on important subjects, which I once thought right, but found to be otherwise.

-Ben Franklin, speaking at the Constitutional Convention, September 1787

on binary debates.................

 

     Where I get frustrated, though, is the binary debate I see in business, boardrooms, and books declaring that the ruthless efficiency of Amazon or Shopify has finally won out over the romance of life and that retail is dead.  Retail is not dead, but utilitarian retail is dead because there's now a much faster, cheaper, and more convenient way to acquire cheap commodities online if that's all you're looking to purchase.  Human beings, however, want more than commodities and have desires greater than their possessions.

     The debates between function versus emotion, literal versus imagination, and rock-bottom prices versus high-fidelity curation have been going on for generations in retail and will continue long into the future.  Fortunately, there's enough room in the market for many players and positions to win.

-Kevin Ervin Kelley, Irreplaceable: How to Create Extraordinary Places That Bring People Together

rating this mostly true............

 

And plumbers and electricians were usually more skilled in their trades than most journalist graduates were in their reporting.

-as culled from this VDH post

a process of elimination..........

 

Brooks asks Hughes what he most would like to have more of than an average person: power, money, pleasure, or honor. They go through a process of elimination. What does Hughes care least about having in excess of the average person? Power. Then what? money. Then what? pleasure. So Hughes cares most about honor. He wants to be respected by people who are important to him. I also would have eliminated power first and ended up caring most about honor, but I care more about money than pleasure. Money to me represents security for my wife and family.

-Arnold Kling, from here

Ours is a country.................

 

Ours is a country where you can hear 800 languages spoken in New York City, drive two hours, and end up among the Amish in Pennsylvania. We are 342 million people, from California to New York Island, gathered together as one.

Each of those 342 million will tell you that ours is not a perfect country. But we suspect most of them would agree that their lives would not be possible without it.

-from this episode of The Free Press

The wisdom of Calvin..............

 

via

Essence..................

The essence of Franklin is that he was a civic-minded man.  He cared more about public behavior than inner piety, and he was more interested in building the City of Man than the City of God.  The maxim her proclaimed on his first trip back from London—"Man is a sociable being"—was reflected not only in his personal collegiality, but also in his belief that benevolence was the binding virtue of society.  As Poor Richard put it, "He that drinks his cider alone, let his catch his horse alone."

-Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

character..................

 

     Tocqueville came to the conclusion that there was an inherent struggle in America between two opposing impulses: the spirit of rugged individualism versus the conflicting spirit of community and association building.  Franklin would have disagreed.  A fundamental aspect of Franklin's life, and of the American society he helped to create, was that individualism and communitarianism, so seemingly contradictory, were interwoven.  The frontier attracted barn-raising pioneers who were ruggedly individualistic as well as fiercely supportive of their community.  Franklin was the epitome of this admixture of self-reliance and civic involvement, and what he exemplified became part of the American character.

-Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

mobility........................

 

Social mobility was not very common in the eighteenth century.  But Franklin proudly made it his mission—indeed, helped it become part of America's mission—that a tradesman could rise in the world and stand before kings.

-Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

pressing advantages.............

What Alice Longworth said of her father, Theodore Roosevelt, is true of Mr. Trump, at least as far as his approach to international and domestic politics. He wants to be the corpse at every funeral, the bride at every wedding, and the baby at every christening. . . .

The 47th president loathes crusades for democracy, despises multinational institutions, and treats international courts with the contempt he believes they deserve. While he genuinely hates war, Mr. Trump believes in pressing America’s economic, technological and military advantages as far as he can in pursuit of an expansive vision of the national interest.

-Walter Russell Mead, from here

hardwired................

 

Our elders tell us, "Don't judge a book by its cover."  Though well-intentioned advice, it doesn't entirely reflect the primitive parts of our brains that have had to make snap judgments for thousands of years to survive and thrive in our habitats.  We're hardwired to judge things by their covers because, in previous eras of lions, wolves, and marauding tribes, that's how our ancestors stayed alive.

     As evolved as we might seem today, this split-second context scanning and decision-making process never left us.  It's still a core part of our environmental awareness and innate survival system.  While we're not conscious of it, we prefer the world around us to be stable and predictable because it gives us a sense of control over our environment.  But deep down, we know stability isn't always possible.  So no matter where we are, we're constantly on the lookout for contextual clues and the slightest changes in our environment.

-Kevin Ervin Kelly, Irreplaceable:  How to Create Extraordinary Places That Bring People Together

aspects................................

 

Humans, like all other animals, are selective creatures; that is, our survival and flourishing depend on our ongoing, mostly unconscious, selection of aspects of our environment for attention, interaction, and transformation.  So, objects are events with meanings that 'stand out' within the context of a situation.

-Mark Johnson, The Aesthetics of Meaning and Thought

no idea.....................

 

. . . What am I to make of this?  Where did it come from to the weary human who'd rather parse the mysteries of oatmeal topped with strawberries, but then any kid knows that during the long night the imagination thumbs its nose at civilization as the lid of a jar screwed on too tight that has no idea what its true contents are.

-Jim Harrison, Old Times

Sadly..................

 

...........................reading cursive is now a superpower.  My kids can't read my parents' letters—and they were really good letter writers.

The failure to teach cursive in many of our schools may eventually be more harmful than we realize.

-Michael Wade

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

The Manhattan Transfer.........The Manhattan Transfer

 

old fashioned.............

 

You don’t need to be the smartest person in the room. You need to be the one who shows up. Who is true to their word. Who can figure it out. Who does the boring things well. Who takes pride in their work. Who is reliable. Old fashioned things never go out of style.

-Sahil Bloom

Adulting...........................

 

All of this has left them with an excessive need for control, which makes them unable to deal with scenarios where being out of control is the whole point.

-Suzy Weiss, as culled from here

Ok, as long as I don't have to watch the kids....

 

Jonathan Haidt gave a platform to Emily Brownlee, M.Ed to deliver a rant against technology in schools. Contrarian that I am, my reaction to her screed was to think the solution is not to ban tech, but to ban schools.

-Arnold Kling, from this episode

A worthy goal...........................

......................to live life in radical amazement.

On summaries.......................

 

Everyone wants the summary. But the summary is what's left after someone else decided what matters. Their priorities aren't yours. Their filters aren't yours. When you operate on summaries, you're thinking with someone else's brain.

-Farnum Street