Verse..........................

 God be merciful unto us, and bless us; and cause his face to shine upon us; 

2 That thy way may be known upon earth, thy saving health among all nations.

3 Let the people praise thee, O God; let all the people praise thee.

4 O let the nations be glad and sing for joy: for thou shalt judge the people righteously, and govern the nations upon earth. 

5 Let the people praise thee, O God; let all the people praise thee.

6 Then shall the earth yield her increase; and God, even our own God, shall bless us.

7 God shall bless us; and all the ends of the earth shall fear him.

-Psalm 67, The Holy Bible, King James Version

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

Grand Funk Railroad.....from Closer To Home:  I'm Your Captain

Embrace life's challenges.......

4.  You may think that taking a detour in life is a waste of time and energy, but you can also see the detour as a means of learning more about who you are and where you are headed.  Being off the beaten path may be disorienting and confusing at times, yet it challenges your creative spirit to discover new ways to build a stronger you.

-Marc & Angel Chernoff,  1000+ Little Things Happy Successful People Do Differently, from the Chapter:  10 Actions That Always Bring Happiness

Quotable..........................

"Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire."

-attributed to William Butler Yeats, but I found the quote, unattributed, here

Stand for something............

Add up the sum of our days and that’s who we are. We get what we repeat.

-Seth Godin, from here

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

The Moody Blues...from A Question of Balance:  Melancholy Man

I'm a melancholy man, that's what I am,
All the world surrounds me, and my feet are on the ground.
I'm a very lonely man, doing what I can,
All the world astounds me and I think I understand
That we're going to keep growing, wait and see.

When all the stars are falling down
Into the sea and on the ground,
And angry voices carry on the wind,
A beam of light will fill your head
And you'll remember what's been said
By all the good men this world's ever known.
Another man is what you'll see,
Who looks like you and looks like me,
And yet somehow he will not feel the same,
His life caught up in misery, he doesn't think like you and me,
'Cause he can't see what you and I can see.

Whimsy in the age of Covid.........

more fun here

The great sin.....................?

In my research, I have found the so-called Millennial generation to be every bit as shallow, irresponsible, stupid, and smart-assed as my own, and what is worse, younger.

-David Warren, from this post

On the wisdom..................................

.................................................of one war at a time.

On the contagiousness...............

..................................................................of behavior.

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

The Allman Brothers.....from the amazing Idlewild South:  Revival

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

Spirit.......from the Twelve Dreams of Dr. Sardonicus:  Nature's Way

Be very careful what you wish for......

     Lest there be any misunderstanding:  It is capitalism that opened the gates to the Land of Plenty, but capitalism alone cannot sustain it.  Progress has become synonymous with economic prosperity, but the twenty-first century will challenge us to find other ways of boosting out quality of life.

. . .  conflicting utopias are the lifeblood of democracy, after all.

     True progress begins with something no knowledge economy can produce:  wisdom about what it means to live well.

If anything, kids today are struggling under the burden of too much pampering.

-Rutger Bregman, being a few excerpts from his Utopia For Realists:  How We Can Build The Ideal World

a torment without end.................

Of all tyrannies, a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It would be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies.

-C. S. Lewis, read the balance of the passage here

He's pretty good..................

...........................at searching for the silver lining.

Speaking of silver linings....................

1. Necessity is the mother of invention, so our willingness to solve problems is about to surge.

2. Worry will exceed actual harm, which is both tragic and in a way comforting.

-as cut and pasted from Two Things We Know With High Confidence

Maintaining a sense of humor...........

more fun here

Grateful..........................

"When we're grateful, our problems don't disappear, they simply occupy less space in our hearts, minds, and lives."

-from here

Decisions, decisions, decisions......

Uncertainty shrinks your field of vision at the worst time. When the world changes in a 24-hour period it becomes hard to think more than 24 hours ahead. The year ahead is impossible to envision when assumptions you had at breakfastime were destroyed by dinnertime. The irony is that long-term thinking is most powerful when everything is falling apart. The majority of long-term results are determined by decisions made during a minority of times, and right now is one of those times. It’s a tragic moment to become short-sighted.

-Morgan Housel, from this post

Wisdom..........................

 “I’m certain that the answer is totally uncertain.”

-as clipped from here

More wisdom....................

When the old glasses don't work, it helps to get a new pair.

-From this post from our man in Phoenix

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

In short, when it comes to detecting emotion in other people, the face and body do not speak for themselves. Instead, variation is the norm. Your brain may automatically make sense of someone’s movements in context, allowing you to guess what a person is feeling, but you are always guessing, never detecting. 

-from this Nautilus post, Emotional Intelligence Needs a Rewrite:  Think you can read people’s emotions? Think again.

via

Healthy thinking..................

No one wants to hear this right now because we’re living in scary times but things will get better eventually. They’re likely to get worse before they get better, potentially much worse, but I have faith in our human spirit to continue moving forward.

-Ben Carlson, as culled from here

Happy Birthday, Al....................

 "Yeah Einstein was pretty smart in high school but you should have seen this other guy!"

-as cut-and-pasted from here

Works for me............................

via

A daunting task indeed.....

................creating the essential mix of Bill Evans:



Prolific hardly describes the man.

My favorite optimist..................

…........................…….takes a turn toward pessimism:

It is very easy, in other words, to bet on the tendency of journalists and their readers to engage in a competitive auction of unjustified alarm. “The whole aim of practical politics,” said H.L. Mencken, “is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.” And no, the fact that the millennium bug was a damp squib was not because we were well prepared; some countries and industries did nothing and were still fine.

So why don’t I think this hobgoblin is imaginary? First, because lethal plagues have a long track record. From the plague of Justinian to the Black Death to the Spanish flu of 1918 to the HIV epidemic, new diseases have proved they can burn through the human population with frightening efficiency. It’s true we have got better at eradicating infectious diseases through vaccinations, pills and public health, but most viruses are still very hard to cure and some are very easy to catch.

Dreamin............................

What a day for a daydream
Custom made for a daydreamin' boy
And now I'm lost in a daydream
Dreamin 'bout my bundle of joy

-John Sebastian

Stringing words together in a fun way.....

It is a vapor of anxiety and resentment, a shorthand for the incomprehensible complexity of modern business life that has its uses in the imbecilic politics of our time and in the vast apparatus of self-moronization that enables that politics.

-Kevin Williamson

Two........................................

“Sometimes I am two people. Johnny is the nice one. Cash causes all the trouble. They fight.”

–Johnny Cash

please..............................

Help me if you can, I'm feeling down
And I do appreciate you being 'round
Help me get my feet back on the ground
Won't you please, please help me

-Lennon/McCartney

Opening paragraphs...................

The world was going mad in the spring of 1939, or that's how it seemed to Joan Bright.  A jaunty twenty-nine-year-old with swept up hair and a button-down dress, she had travelled to London in search of secretarial work, having just turned down a job in Germany as governess to the children of Rudolf Hess, the Deputy Fuhrer of the Third Reich.

-Giles Milton:  Churchill's Ministry Of Ungentlemanly Warfare:  The Mavericks Who Plotted Hitler's Defeat

Forward.......................

There were all these pieces split and broker on the floor, and she spent days on end trying to put the pieces back together again.  But if she only realized that life is meant not to restore what was but rather to create something new and move forward.

-Courtney Peppernell, from Pillow Thoughts III: Mending the Mind

Get together.....................

Come on people now
Smile on your brother
Everybody get together
Try to love one another
Right now

-Chet Powers, aka Dino Valente

Get the chance........................

Someday I hope you get the chance
To live like you were dying
Like tomorrow was a gift
And you've got eternity
To think about
What you'd do with it
What could you do with it
What did I do with it?
What would I do with it?

-Tim McGraw

On wants and needs.................

You can't always get what you want
But if you try sometimes you just might find
You get what you need

-Jagger/Richards

Believe.........................

This world's gone crazy
It's hard to believe
That tomorrow will be better than today
Believe it anyway

-Martina McBride

Now...................

It's my life
It's now or never
I ain't gonna live forever
I just want to live while I'm alive

- Bon Jovi

Arise.......................

Take these broken wings and learn to fly
All your life
You were only waiting for this moment to arise

-The Beatles

Self...........................

Emancipate yourself from mental slavery
None but our self can free our minds

-Bob Marley

Can I get an Amen.............................?

I love the ability to think rationally and form my own opinions too much to expose myself to the drivel that comes from most of the main stream media these days. I swear listening to it too long or too hard can cause you to lose IQ points, especially when they start taking politics.

-as culled from here

When the answer is in the question......

What if happiness was the secret ingredient that makes being successful easier?

-Matthew Ferrara, from this post

             via

The wisest........................

.................................................................of the wise (pay special attention to the concluding sentence).

Would that I could..................

      Your soul is oftentimes a battlefield, upon which your reason and your judgment wage war against your passion and your appetite.
     Would that I could be the peacemaker in your soul, that I might turn the discord and the rivalry of your elements into oneness and melody,
     But how shall I, unless you yourselves be also the peacemakers, nay, the lovers of all your elements?

-Kahlil Gibran, from his passage on Reason and Passion in The Prophet

The shift.............................

If you want to summarize the changes in family structure over the past century, the truest thing to say is this:  We've made life freer for individuals and more unstable for families.  We've made life better for adults but worse for children.  We've moved from big, interconnected, and extended families, which helped protect the most vulnerable people in society from the shocks of life, to smaller, detached nuclear families (a married couple with their children), which give the most privileged people in society room to maximize their talents and expand their options.  The shift from bigger and interconnected extended families to smaller and detached nuclear families ultimately led to a familial system that liberates the rich and ravages the working-class and poor.

-David Brooks, from his recent essay, The Nuclear Family Was a Mistake

wrong and yet confident.................

     Being wrong and yet confident is a good description of the human condition.  And it isn't hard to understand why we are this way.  Our consistent wrongness has a lot to do with the fact that the world is a complicated place and it is hard to predict what will happen next.  Yet we are continually forced to predict the future in both big and small ways because otherwise we wouldn't know what we should be doing at any given moment.  We get the easy stuff right, such as knowing we'll want a beverage if we eat pretzels.  But when it comes to big, complicated, long-term predictions, we're not equipped with the psychic powers required to know how the future turns out.  We also can't stop ourselves from imagining we do know how things will work out.  I'm not the exception.  Neither are you.
     
-Scott Adams, Loserthink:  How Untrained Brains Are Ruining America

Idle day dreams........................

But my real preference is for absolutely boring government, run by men and women of integrity, expertise, and competence.

-from this Althouse post

an uncovenanted surplus...............

56.  Take it that you have died today, and your life's story is ended; and henceforward regard what further time may be given you as an uncovenanted surplus, and live it out in harmony with nature.

-Marcus Aurelius,  Meditations, Book Seven

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

Johnny Rivers.........................................................Muddy River

Not sure this argument holds up.............

Whatever the technological advances of modern society—and they're nearly miraculous—the individualized lifestyles that those technologies spawn seem to be deeply brutalizing to the human spirit.
     "You'll have to be prepared to say that we are not a good society—that we are an antihuman society," anthropologist Sharon Abramowitz warned when I tried this idea out on her.  Abramowitz was in Ivory Coast as a Peace Corps volunteer during the start of the civil war in 2002 and experienced firsthand the close bonds created by hardship and danger.  "We are not good to each other.  Our tribalism is to an extremely narrow group of people:  our children, our spouse, maybe our parents.  Our society is alienating, technical, cold, and mystifying.  Our fundamental desire, as human beings, is to be close to others, and our society does not allow for that."

-Sebastian Junger, Tribe:  On Homecoming and Belonging

Darwin's message..................

..................wasn't survival of the fittest, it was the survival of the most adaptable.  For a long while now, us pesky humans have had the ability to adapt to most everything.  Not sure why that won't continue.

     The human brain evolved in an environment that was local and linear.  Local, meaning most everything that we interacted with was less than a day's walk away.  Linear, meaning the rate of change was exceptionally slow.  Your great-great-great-grandfather's life was roughly the same as his great-great-grandson's life.  But now we live in a world that is global and exponential.  Global, meaning if it happens on the other side of the planet, we hear about it seconds later (and our computers hear about it only milliseconds later).  Exponential, meanwhile, refers to today's blitzkrieg speed of development.  Forget about the difference between generations, currently mere months can bring a revolution.  Yet our brain—which hasn't really had a hardware update in two hundred thousand years—wasn't designed for this scale or speed.

-Peter H. Diamadis and Steven Kotler,  The Future Is Faster Than You Think:  How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives

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

Elton John.......................................Ballad Of A Well-Known Gun

On emotion-based click-bait versions of reality....

     In such a world, where truth routinely loses to emotion-based click-bait versions of reality, how can you know what is true and what is not?   And more importantly, how can you act for the greater good—or even your own good—when you can't reliably sort the truth from the lies?
     If you buy into the full-scary narratives promoted by either the political left or the political right, you're probably experiencing loserthink.  A more useful way to think of the political news is that nearly every major story is exaggerated to the point of falsehood, with the intention of scaring the public.  If you think the frightened feeling you are getting from the news is legitimate and appropriate, you probably don't understand how the business model of news has changed

-Scott Adams, Loserthink, How Untrained Brains Are Ruining America

Investing (or living) in 2020................

It’s in our DNA to feel fear when threatened—but, we have to first recognize it, then control it before it controls us. Once we lose control, it’s game over.

-from this blog post reminding us it is never time to panic

The coherence of Eurasia..............

...............an interesting essay from Robert D. Kaplan about trade, the Silk Road, the Indian Ocean and the durability of imperialism.  His happy conclusion:

Moreover, Al-Duqm was built in the expectation that the U.S. 5th Fleet soon will want a more secure harbor than those available inside the Gulf. Al-Duqm, which shrinks the Eurasian trading system down to one port complex, is a monument to pessimism: It assumes future conflict and the instability that comes with connectivity.

A vision................................

........................................of heaven on earth.  Let us give thanks!

He couldn't have waited..............

............................................................until next Wednesday?

dead media walking................

     The technological change that broke the news business was our ability to measure audience reaction to every headline and every variation of every story.  Once you can reliably measure the income potential of different approaches to the news, people who manage the news have to do what works best for profitability or else they are abandoning their responsibilities to shareholders.  On top of that, executive compensation is determined by profit performance.  From the moment technology allowed us to know which kinds of content influenced viewership the most, the old business model of the news industry was dead media walking.  From that point through today, the business model of the press changed from presenting information to manipulating brains.

-Scott Adams, Loserthink:  How Untrained Brains Are Ruining America

In the background.....................

Fourplay.....................................................................yes, please!

On the undisciplined pursuit of more....

     Curiously, and overstating the point in order to make it, the pursuit of success can be a catalyst for failure.  Put another way, success can distract us from focusing on the essential things that produce success in the first place.
     We can see this everywhere around us.  In his book How The Mighty Fall, Jim Collins explores what went wrong in companies that were once darlings of Wall Street but later collapsed.  He finds that for many, falling into the "undisciplined pursuit of more" was a key reason for failure.

-Greg McKeown, essentialism:  The Disciplined Pursuit of Less

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

The James Gang.............................................................Funk #49

From a defense of incidental plagiarism....

     We, as human beings, are landed with memories which have fallibilities, frailties, and imperfections—but also great flexibility and creativity.  Confusion over sources or indifference to them can be a paradoxical strength:  if we could tag the sources of all our knowledge, we would be overwhelmed with often irrelevant information.  Indifference to source allows us to assimilate what we read, what we are told, what others say and thing and write and paint, as intensely and richly as if they were primary experiences.  It allows us to see and hear with other eyes and ears, to enter into other minds, to assimilate the art and science and religion of the whole culture, to enter into and contribute to the common mind.  Memory arises not only from experience but from the intercourse of many minds.

-Oliver Sacks,  The River Of Consciousness, from the chapter The Fallibility of Memory

Verse....................

Almighty God, to you all hearts are open, all desires known, and from you no secrets are hid: Cleanse the thoughts of our hearts by the inspiration of your Holy Spirit, that we may perfectly love you, and worthily magnify your holy Name; through Christ our Lord. Amen.

-From the Episcopal Book of Common Prayer (as read aloud here by Presiding Bishop Michael Curry)

On the elusive elixir of truth..............

     Huis clos made Sartre famous, and it is another instance of the unrivaled power of the theatre to project ideas.  But, oddly enough, it was through the old-fashioned forum of the public lecture that Sartre became world-famous, indeed notorious, a monstre sacré.  Within a year of the play's opening France was at peace.  Everyone, especially youth, was catching up greedily on the lost cultural years and searching for the post-war elixir of truth.  The Communists and the new-born Catholic Social Democrats (MRP) were fighting a fierce battle for paramountcy on the campus.  Sartre used his new philosophy to offer an alternative:  not a church or a party but a challenging doctrine of individualism in which each human being is seen as the absolute master of his soul if he chooses to follow the path of action and courage.  It was a message of liberty after the totalitarian nightmare. . . .
     Nothing is so powerful, Victor Hugo had laid down, as an idea whose time has come.  Sartre's time had come in two distinct ways.  He was preaching freedom to people who were hungry and waiting for it.  But it was not an easy freedom.  "Existentialism," says Sartre, "defines man by his actions . . . It tells him that hope lies only in action, and that the only thing that allows man to live is action."  So, "Man commits himself to his life, and thereby draws his image, beyond which there is nothing."  The new European of 1945, Sartre said, was the new existentialist individual—"alone, without excuses.  This is what I mean when I say we are condemned to be free."  So Sartre's new existential freedom was immensely attractive to a disillusioned generation:  lonely, austere, noble, slightly aggressive, not to say violent, and anti-elitist, popular—no one was excluded.  Anyone, but especially the young, could be an existentialist.

-Paul Johnson,  Intellectuals:  From Marx And Tolstoy To Sartre And Chomsky

Wait...................What?............

     The world was entering a period of environmental change.  In Europe, this was evidenced by rising sea levels and the emergence of malaria in the North Sea region.  While in Asia from the start of the fourth century sharply reduced salinity in the Aral Sea, markedly different vegetation on the steppes (evident from high-resolution pollen analyses) and new patterns of glacier advances in Tian Shan range all show fundamental shifts in global climatic change.

-Peter Frankopa,  The Silk Roads:  A New History Of The World

APOD.....................

........................................if you don't visit periodically, well, do.

enlargeable photo and description here

Off...........................

..........................................................the new killer app.

It's called Off. You've probably heard of it. It's been around for a while. Remarkably, it's already built into everything.  Off has been included, free of charge, on most of the devices vying for your mind-time. You don't need to watch a video tutorial to take advantage of Off. But you do need to practice.

In the background..................

Dan Fogelberg...........................................................Nether Lands

Where is Thomas H. Huxley when we need him?

The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For him, scepticism is the highest of duties; blind faith the one unpardonable sin. And it cannot be otherwise, for every great advance in natural knowledge has involved the absolute rejection of authority, the cherishing of the keenest scepticism, the annihilation of the spirit of blind faith; and the most ardent votary of science holds his firmest convictions, not because the men he most venerates hold them; not because their verity is testified by portents and wonders; but because his experience teaches him that whenever he chooses to bring these convictions into contact with their primary source, Nature — whenever he thinks fit to test them by appealing to experiment and to observation — Nature will confirm them. The man of science has learned to believe in justification, not by faith, but by verification.

Science has taught... me to be careful how I adopt a view which jumps with my preconceptions, and to require stronger evidence for such belief than for one to which I was previously hostile. My business is to teach my aspirations to conform themselves to fact, not to try and make facts harmonise with my aspirations.

Science seems to me to teach in the highest and strongest manner the great truth which is embodied in the Christian conception of entire surrender to the will of God. Sit down before fact as a little child, be prepared to give up every preconceived notion, follow humbly wherever and to whatever abysses nature leads, or you shall learn nothing. I have only begun to learn content and peace of mind since I have resolved at all risks to do this.

The great tragedy of Science — the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact.

The only medicine for suffering, crime, and all the other woes of mankind, is wisdom.

-These quotes, and more, from Thomas Henry Huxley are available to all here

An argument for gratitude...................

     Simply put, cultures that do not cherish their best selves die by their own hand.  We protect what we are grateful for.  That which we resent, we leave out for the trash man or let rot and decay in the elements, as the termites of human nature gnaw away at it.  Ingratitude is the spirit that inebriates us with despair and, in our dark moments, makes suicide seem heroic.
     "From whence shall we expect the approach of danger?" asked Abraham Lincoln.  "Shall some trans-Atlantic military giant step the earth and crush us at a blow?  Never.  All the armies of Europe and Asia . . . could not by force take a drink from the Ohio River or make a track in the Blue Ridge in the trial of a thousand years.  No, if destruction be our lot we must ourselves be its author and finisher.  As a nation of free men we will live forever or die by suicide."

-Jonah Goldberg,  Suicide Of The West:  How The Rebirth Of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, And Identity Politics Is Destroying American Democracy

News...............................

     Professor C. John Sommerville, author of How the News Makes Us Dumb:  The Death of Wisdom in an Information Society, saw this coming two decades ago, in 1999, when "tweeting" was still something only birds did:  "If news were just one of many things we read each day, it wouldn't have the same impact.  If we would read science, the classics, history, theology or political theory at any length, we would make much better sense of today's events."

-Ben Sasse, Them:  Why We Hate Each Other—And How To Heal

Ed. Note:  A short cut to all that reading would be to just check in regularly with these nice folks

Apparently many.............................

Cicero says that to philosophize is nothing else but to prepare for death.  This is because study and
contemplation draw our soul out of us to some extent and keep it busy outside the body, which is a sort of apprenticeship and semblance of death.  Or else because all the wisdom and reasoning in the world boils down finally to this point: to teach us not to be afraid to die. In truth, either reason  is a mockery, or it must aim solely at our contentment, and the sum of its labors must tend to make us live well and at our ease, as the Holy Scripture says. All the opinions in the world agree on this—that pleasure is our goal—though they choose different means to it.  Otherwise they would be thrown out right away; for who would listen to a man who would set up our pain and discomfort as his goal?

-Michel De Montaigne,  The Complete Works, Book 1, Chapter 20

Vex not................................

38.  Vex not thy spirit at the course of things;
       They heed not thy vexation.

-Marcus Aurelius,  Meditations, Book 7

Pope Francis..............

...................has a suggestion for this Lenten season:

via

Fear and Influenza............

................The 1918 pandemic revisited.  Worth a quick look see.

Parenting....................

     Our upbringing was also filled with the hazards of an unconventional life.  Our parents never set out to put us in danger, of course; they would have defended us from anything, died before they let us be harmed.  But they would not shelter us.  To shelter us where we grew up would have been to fail to prepare us.  They walked that line as best they could, and all too often they got it wrong.  But in the end we survived all we ever faced, and we came out strong and largely unafraid of life, with the full knowledge of its dangers.

-Boyd Varty, Cathedral of the Wild

This is brilliant....................

Making a point while having some fun with stereotypes.

Found this interesting..............

You’re Likely to Get the Coronavirus

Most cases are not life-threatening, which is also what makes the virus a historic challenge to contain.

-The headline to this James Hamblin, MD article in The Atlantic

Checking in with Martin Gurri.........

When I think the politics of nominating a president in the United States are crazy, I mean institutionally crazy. This is not “revolt of the public” crazy. It’s institutionally crazy. It’s kind of hard to get a sense of what the hell actually is happening there. But if I were to make a guess, that’s exactly right. I think many layers of the public want a disruptor; they don’t like the elite class to feel comfortable and smug. So they elect people like Trump, who that seems to be his job in life, or they settle on somebody like Bernie, who’s a real disruptor. I mean, God help us. He’s what he is and has always been so. Warren is much more of a . . . Well, I think for this election, this is who I’m going to be. And the public can sniff that out in a minute, I think, in this environment.

-As culled from this conversation with Arnold Kling

Opening paragraphs............

The Skirball Cultural Center sits just off the 405 Freeway, on the northern edge of Los Angeles.  Built atop the thin spin of the Santa Monica Mountains, the Center offers spectacular views in nearly every direction, except for the freeway below—which is bumper-to-bumper for miles on end.
     Of course it is.
     In 2018, for the sixth straight year, Los Angeles earned the dubious honor of being the most gridlocked metropolis in the world, where the average driver spends two-and-a-half working weeks a year trapped in traffic.  Yet help may be on its way.  In May 2018, the Skirball Center was ground zero for Uber Elevate, the ridesharing company's radical plan for solving this traffic:  their second annual flying car conference.

-Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler,  The Future Is Faster Than You Think:  How Converging Technologies Are Transforming Business, Industries, and Our Lives

Ed. Note:  For what it's worth, a traffic jam in our fair city is when the traffic signal cycles twice before you get through it.  It is likely that we all define the "quality of life" differently.

In the background...................

Grover Washington, Jr........................................Inner City Blues

perceptions......................

Keep constant guard over your perceptions, for it is no small thing you are protecting, but your respect, trustworthiness and steadiness, peace of mind, freedom from pain and fear, in a word your freedom.  For what would you sell these things?

-Epictetus, Discourses, 4.3

unknown..........................

He is as quiet and unassuming as ever, a true still life, yet he reminds me that most true acts of heroism—reflections of one's deepest nature—remain unknown to the hero.

Boyd Varty, Cathedral of the Wild:  An African Journey Home

Percentages..................

     Every great, successful person I know shares the capacity to remain centered, clear and powerful in the midst of emotional "storms."  How do they accomplish this?  Most of them have a fundamental rule:  In life, never spend more than 10 percent of your time on the problem, and spend at least 90 percent of your time on the solution. 

-Anthony Robbins,  Awaken The Giant Within

Forty years ago......................

At the Lake Placid Olympics.................USA/USSR ice hockey

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

Black Sabbath.................................................................Iron Man

almost easy...........................

The Winner's Game in investing—open to all investors, so every investor can be a real winner—is almost easy.  Almost.  The first secret for success is that each investor has to ignore the "beat the market" hype that pervades the advertising that floods out of stockbrokers, "performance" mutual funds, and the investment letters from stock market gurus—all working with Mr. Market.
     The second secret for success is that each investor must decide for himself or herself what investment policy will, over the long term, have the best chance of producing the particular results he or she most wants to achieve.  These winning investors are not in competition with each other; they are in competition only with themselves.  Can they stay "on mission"—even when Mr. Market goes into his gyrations?

-Charles D. Ellis,  Winning The Loser's Game:  Timeless Strategies for Successful Investing

A MEGATHREAD...........

40 tweets on 40 concepts.  Worth a wee bit of your time.  A sample:

Thanks Chris

Feynman on politicians and the populace....

Suppose two politicians are running for president, and one goes through the farm section and is asked, "What are you going to do about the farm question?"  And he knows right away—bang, bang, bang.  Now he goes to the next campaigner who comes through.  "What are you going to do about the farm problem?"  "Well, I don't know.  I used to be a general, and I don't know anything about farming.  But it seems to me it must be a very difficult problem, because for twelve, fifteen, twenty years people have been struggling with it, and people say that they know how to solve the farm problem.  And it must be a hard problem.  So the way that I intend to solve the farm problem is to gather around me a lot of people who know something about it, to look at all the experience that we have had with this problem before, to take a certain amount of time at it, and then come to some conclusion in a reasonable way about it. Now, I can't tell you ahead of time what conclusion, but I can give you some of the principles I'll try to use—not to make things difficult for individual farmers, if there are any special problems we will have some way to take care of them," etc., etc., etc.
      Now such a man would never get anywhere in this country, I think.  It's never been tried, anyway.  This is in the attitude of mind of the populace, that they have to have an answer and that a man who gives an answer is better than a man who gives no answer, when the real fact of the matter is, in most cases, it is the other way around.  And the result of this of course is that the politician must give an answer.  And the result of this is that political promises can never be kept.  It is a mechanical fact;  it is impossible.  And the result of that is that nobody believes campaign promises.  And a result of that is a general disparaging of politics, a kind of lack of respect for the people who are trying to solve problems, and so forth.

-Richard Feynman, from his lecture This Unscientific Age contained in The Meaning Of It All:  Thoughts of a Citizen-Scientist