Saturday, August 9, 2025
aversions...................
He didn't have all that much information on the Great Leader but he still refused to ask the FBI for help. They were both nosy and condescending and as the disaster of 9/11 indicated they didn't like to share information they themselves ignored. Roxie had done the best she could in helping him build a file but in four days he would no longer be able to use her services. Despite his apparent intelligence he had never learned the computer mostly because of a lifelong aversion to electricity. When he was seven a cousin had been electrocuted having climbed the fence of the power station behind the pulp mill,
-Jim Harrison, The Great Leader
heard..........................
I heard an Angel singing
When the day was springing
Mercy Pity Peace
Is the worlds release
side-effect.....................
By declaring that man is responsible and must actualize the potential meaning of his life, I wish to stress that the true meaning of life is to be discovered in the world rather than within man or his own psyche, as though it was a closed system. I have termed this constitutive characteristic "the self-transcendence of human existence." It denotes the fact that being human always points, and is directed, to something, or someone, other that oneself—be it a meaning to fulfill or another human being to encounter. The more one forgets himself—by giving himself to a cause to serve or another person to love—the more human he is and the more he actualizes himself. What is called self-actualization is not an attainable aim at all, for the simple reason that the more one would strive for it, the more he would miss it. In other words, self-actualization is possible only as a side-effect of self-transcendence.
-Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning
crucial..................
One more time, because this point is crucial: a lie believed as truth will affect your life as if it were true.
-Craig Groeschel, Winning the War In Your Mind
That vision thing........................
Physics opens windows through which we see far into the distance. What we see does not cease to astonish us. We realize that we are full of prejudices and that our intuitive image of the world is partial, parochial, inadequate. Earth is not flat; it is not stationary. The world continues to change before our eyes as we gradually see more extensively and more clearly.
-Carlo Rovelli, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics
Checking in...................................
............................with Ray Dalio:
No system of government, no economic system, no currency, and no empire lasts forever, yet almost everyone is surprised and ruined when they fail.
To see the big picture, you can't focus on the details.
What I don't know is much greater than what I know.
I have been wrong more times than I can remember, which is why I value diversification of my bets above all else,
. . . throughout time and in all countries, the people who have the wealth are the people who own the means of wealth production. In order to maintain or increase their wealth, they work with the people who have the political power, who are in a symbiotic relationship with them, to set and enforce rules.
-All quotes culled from the early-going of his book, Principles for Dealing with The Changing World Order
Wednesday, August 6, 2025
AI versus EI........................
Innovate. Break the rules, or at least use them to the human advantage. Be unpredictable in the best possible ways. Look up from that screen. Be a human.
-Kurt Harden, as he ponders Michael Wade's latest substack
A worthy experiment................?
Grocery aisles are today what sewers were in the early twentieth century: a major component of daily life run in an unfathomably dysfunctional manner. And just as the project of expanding and improving public sewers was derided until they became indispensable, municipal groceries will seem obvious once they are built and the difference they make can be felt.
Municipal grocery stores, "paying fair wages and reinvesting profits locally": what could possibly go wrong? One of the beautiful things about how our government is divided up is that it allows for experimentation. Let's encourage New York City to try opening - and operating - municipally-owned grocery stores and see how it works. The author points to two small Kansas communities where this sort of venture may, or may not, have worked. Good luck with that in the big city. The author may have missed a major point when he says "that the cost to launch a city-owned grocery store is comparable to the subsidies the city already hands out to private retailers — subsidies that do little to nothing to prevent closures." It's not the cost of launching that causes the problems, it is the cost of operation. The reinvestment of profits seems like wishful thinking. Massive tax-payer subsidies seem more likely.
efforts............................
Conversations are efforts toward good relations. They are an elementary form of reciprocity. They are the exercise of our love for each other. They are the enemies of our loneliness, our doubt, our anxiety, our tendencies to abdicate. To continue to be in good conversation over our enormous and terrifying problems is to be calling out to each other in the night. If we attend with imagination and devotion to our conversations, we will find what we need; and someone among us will act—it does not matter whom—and we will survive.
your innate humanness...................
There's a common illusion that spiritually evolved, loving people never have any negativity, as though they are already angelic. They get annoyed that they still have negative feelings, and then it's compounded by their guilt and self-frustration. They have to realize that feelings are transitory, whereas their intention to evolve remains constant. Let go of feeling guilty that you are still just an ordinary human despite your angelic ambitions! Having compassion towards your innate humanness, its nervous system, and the brain function that goes with it allows for greater equanimity. Heavenly ambitions do not necessarily make us angels!
-David R. Hawkins, Letting Go: The Pathway of Surrender
Monday, August 4, 2025
equal.........................
THE YEAR WAS 2081, and everybody was finally equal. They weren't only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way. Nobody was smarter than anybody else. Nobody was better looking than anybody else. Nobody was stronger or quicker than anybody else. All this equality was due to the 211th, 212th, and 213th Amendments to the Constitution, and to the unceasing vigilance of agents of the United States Handicapper General.
-so begins Kurt Vonnegut's classic short story Harrison Bergeron
Uncertain..........................
The night before the D-Day Invasion, Franklin Roosevelt asked his wife Eleanor how she felt about not knowing what would happen next.
“To be nearly sixty years old and still rebel at uncertainty is ridiculous isn’t it?” she said.
-Morgan Housel, from here
Not universally true....................
The more the Internet exposes people to new points of view, the angrier people get that different views exist.
Sunday, August 3, 2025
soul..........................
It's the great self-persuasion paradox: To believe in yourself, you first have to get yourself to believe in yourself.
Aristotle, the most rational of all rational beings, understood that logic rarely persuades on its own.
Choices complicate things.
Bad news, good news. Stuff happens. Your response determines what kind of soul you have, and how much you live up to that soul.
Opportunity requires a decision.
Chaotic moments—a sudden promotion or a piece of bad news—don't determine your future. Your choices do.
-all excerpts from the latest from Jay Heinrichs, Aristotle's Guide to Self-Persuasion
learned a new word today..................
10. Watch sunsets
Best show in town. Life is better as an opacarophile.
making do.................
We want things to go perfectly, so we tell ourselves that we'll get started once the conditions are right, or once we have our bearings. When, really, it'd be better to focus on making do with how things actually are.
To the very last...................
When Einstein died, his greatest rival, Bohr, found for him words of moving admiration.* When a few years later Bohr in turn died, someone took a photograph of his blackboard in his study. There's a drawing on it. A drawing of the "light-filled box" in Einstein's thought experiment. To the very last, the desire to challenge one-self and understand more. And to the very last: doubt.
-Carlo Rovelli, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics
*"With the death of Albert Einstein, a life in the service of science and humanity which was as rich and fruitful as any in the whole history of our culture has come to an end. Mankind will always be indebted to Einstein for the removal of the obstacles to our outlook which were involved in the primitive notions of absolute space and time." -Niels Bohr
the tree of life...............
13. How blessed is the man who finds wisdom,
and the man who gains understanding.
and the man who gains understanding.
14. For its profit is better than the profit of silver,
and its gain finer than fine gold.
15. She is more precious than jewels:
And nothing you desire compares with her.
16. Long life is in her right hand;
In her left hand are riches and honor.
17. Her ways are pleasant ways,
And all her paths are peace.
18. She is the tree of life to those who take hold of her,
And happy are all who hold her fast.
-Proverbs 3:13-18, The Holy Bible, The Open Bible Version
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