Glasses..................

    The year 1900 ushered in a new century as well as an entirely new life for Bucky.  Late in 1899, his nearsightedness was diagnosed, and eyeglasses were prescribed.  Following that momentous transformation, the five-year-old was able to view a new world beyond his wildest dreams.  Prior to receiving glasses, Bucky had believed everyone was confined to the same blurred environment he experience.  So when his sister Leslie described the world as she saw it, he thought he was listening to the output of a fanciful imagination.  With his newly discovered, normal vision Bucky embarked on a journey of outward exploration, questioning, and experimental learning which would continue throughout his life. . . .
     In typical Fuller fashion, he turned his apparent visual problem into a benefit over the years.  Rather than regarding his myopia as a handicap, Bucky considered himself fortunate to be able to remove his glasses at times and consciously shift his attention inward, using his imagination and intuition, rather than his sight for guidance.  At those times, he could effortlessly recall the inner, imaginative environment he had lived within and explored prior to receiving glasses, and that "in-sight" provided him with many of his extraordinary ideas.

-Lloyd Steven Sieden, Buckminster Fuller's Universe:  His Life And Work

Some harsh truths........................

.................................that make us stronger:

2.  You will fail sometimes.
The faster you accept this, the faster you can get on with moving forward.  So don't let failure get to your heart (or success to your head).  Do your best and let your consistent daily actions speak for themselves over the long term.

5.  There's a lot you can't control.
You don't have to control everything to find peace and happiness.  It lives with you always, deep within.  See what happens when you loosen your grip, throw your hands into the air, and allow life to just happen and flow.

7.  You can't be successful without providing value.
Don't waste your time trying to be successful.  Spend your time adding value to the world around you.

13.  In life, you get what you put in.
If you want love, give love.  If you want friends, be one.  If you want money, provide value.

-Marc & Angel Chernoff, from their list of 16 "harsh truths" in 1000+ Little Things Happy Successful People Do Differently

in no way "natural".................

For over a thousand years, Western man's approach to understanding the natural world could be summed up by two words:  Don't try.  This faulty, self-contained, self-satisfied system brooked no serious dissent, as Bruno and Galileo discovered.  The Aristotelian cosmos certainly did not stimulate inquiry.  Nor did it allow creative thought or real advance in our knowledge of the world, nor, ultimately, real improvement in the lot of the average human being.  The great medieval historian Johan Huizinga wrote, "The idea of a purposed and continual reform and improvement of society did not exist.  Institutions in general are considered as good or as bad as they can be; having been ordained by God, they are intrinsically good, only the sins of men pervert them. . . ."
     It did not much bother the average sixteenth-century European that no real social, intellectual, or scientific advance had occurred for a thousand years;  the human condition was universally assumed to be static.  Bacon's staggering genius lay in realizing three thing:  1) that there actually was a problem, that the state of medieval man was in no way "natural";  2) that the deductive system was at fault; and 3) that knowledge of the natural world could be continuously improved, and with it the welfare of mankind.  Improving the lot of mankind could necessitate replacing the old Aristotelian framework with an "inductive" system in which facts would first be gathered without preconception, then analyzed.

-William J. Bernstein,  The Birth of Plenty:  How The Prosperity Of The Modern World Was Created

The prelude....................

In the Spring of 1918 death was no stranger to the world.  Indeed, by then the bodies of more than five million soldiers had already been fed into what was called "the sausage factory" by generals whose stupidity was matched only by their brutality.
     German generals, for example, had decided to bleed France into submission by matching it death for death at Verdun, believing that Germany's greater population would leave it victorious.  The French later replied with their own massive offensive, believing that their elan vital would triumph.
     Only slaughter triumphed.  Finally one French regiment refused orders to make a suicidal charge.  The mutiny spread to fifty-four divisions, stopped only by mass arrests, the conviction of twenty-three thousand men for mutiny, with four hundred sentenced to death and fifty-four actually executed.
      Yet nothing expressed the brutality of this war as did a sanitation report on the planned eradication of rats in the trenches to prevent the spread of disease.  A major noted, "Certain unexpected problems are involved in the rat problem. . . . The rat serves on useful function—he consumes the corpses on No Man's Land, a job which the rat alone is willing to undertake.  For this reason it has been found desirable to control rather than eliminate the rat population."

-John M. Barry, The Great Influenza:  The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History

a restless animal..........................

     The ideal of static perfection, which Plato derived from Parmenides and embodied in his theory of ideas, is one which is now generally recognised as inapplicable to human affairs.  Man is a restless animal, not content, like the boa constrictor, to have a good meal once a month and sleep the rest of the time.  Man needs, for his happiness, not only the enjoyment of this or that, but hope and enterprise and change.

-Bertrand Russell,  Philosophy And Politics

a daunting task............................

The value of natural project planning is that it provides an integrated, flexible, aligned way to think through any situation.  Whereas, the basic five-step process of capturing, clarifying, organizing, reflecting, and engaging is a coherent way to achieve stability across the whole spectrum of your life, natural planning produces relaxed, focused control in more specific areas.
     Challenging the purpose of anything you may be doing is healthy and mature.  Being comfortable making up visions of success, before the methods are clear,  is a phenomenal trait to strengthen.  Being willing to have ideas, good or bad, and to express and capture all of them without judgment is critical for fully accessing creative intelligence.  Honing multiple ideas and types of information into components, sequences, and priorities aimed toward a specific outcome is a necessary mental discipline.  And deciding on and taking real next actions—actually moving one something in the physical world—is the essence of productivity.
     Being able to bring all these ingredients together, with appropriate timing and balance, is perhaps the major component of competence for this new millennium.  But it's not yet the norm of much professional and personal behavior; far from it,  It's still a daunting task to apply this awareness to all the aspects of one's life.  The natural planning model is natural, but in many cases it is not automatic.

-David Allen, Getting Things Done:  the art of stress-free productivity

Habits..............................

"It's not what you know, it's what you do consistently."

-Tim Ferriss

Life its ownself.........................

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

Pat Metheny..........................................................Secret Story

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

Hal Parker was resolutely closing in on his prey, and he felt his blood pressure amp up with every firm step he placed into the dirt.  He could tell he was nearing his target by the frequency and volume of blood that had fallen onto the darkened ground, like dulled rubies scattered in the rich soil.  He had obviously wounded rather than killed his quarry.

-David Baldacci,  Walk The Wire

The long run...........................

"My goal is not to fail fast.  My goal is to succeed over the long run.  They are not the same thing."

-Marc Andreessen

Peace...............................

"The very word 'success' has become contaminated by our ideas of someone extraordinary, very rich, etc., and that's really unhelpful. . . . Ultimately, to be properly successful is to be at peace as well."

-Alain de Botton, as quoted here

Sometimes............................

2.  If you have the power to make someone happier today, do it.  The world needs more of that.

5.  Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, and honest compliment, or the smallest act of love—all of which have the potential to turn a life around.

13.  The single greatest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place.  Too often we don't listen to understand, we listen to reply.  Bring awareness to this.  And listen for what's truly behind the words.

15.  Sometimes it is better to be kind than to be right.

-Marc & Angel Chernoff, from their chapter 20 Morning Mantras to Start the Day Loving People (instead of Judging or Ignoring Them) in 1000+ Little Things Happy Successful People Do Differently

Eurocentric..................................

     Although I try to maintain a global perspective throughout this book, many readers will find its focus overly Eurocentric.  Were not the Chinese—the inventors of paper, the printing press, and gunpowder—the great innovative engineers of the premodern world?  Were not the early Arab empires oases of learning and culture during a time when Europe was mired in the Dark Ages?  did not mathematicians in India devise a numerical system, incorporating the concept of zero, far more advanced that the Greco-Roman letter based system?  To all these questions, the answer is a resounding yes.  Yet not one of these societies was able to turn the modern Western trick of continuously and permanently raising its citizens' standard of living.  Furthermore, the four factors responsible for modern wealth—property rights, borne on the common law, scientific rationalism, advanced capital markets, and the great advances in transportation and communication—were largely European in origin.  Although prosperity has become a global phenomenon, there is no escaping the fact that its nursery lay in the area between Glasgow and Genoa.

-William J. Bernstein, The Birth Of Plenty:  How The Prosperity Of The Modern World Was Created

Curious................................

Later in life, remembrances of his restrictive educational experience continually reminded Bucky of just how debilitating our educational system can be for curious young minds.
     He felt that, like almost all human organizations, including government, industries, and religions, the primary function of the educational system is self-perpetuation and acquisition of fame, fortune, and power for the people who control it.  Rather than contributing to the wisdom and well-being of everyone, he believed organizations attempt to indoctrinate individuals into accepting traditional dogma, restrict the perspective of members, and influence individuals to believe rather than think for themselves.

-Lloyd Steven Sieden, Buckminster Fuller's Universe:  His Life And Work

irreducibly wild...........................

. . . Job wants justice;  God offers only awe.
     But as we read in the Book of Proverbs, the beginning of wisdom is awe.  God is going to bring Job wisdom, and to do so God has to strip Job of his anthropocentric view of reality.  God cannot be reduced to human ideas of right and wrong, just and unjust.  Creation does not run in harmony with human notions of law and order.  Creation is irreducibly wild . . . chaotic and unformed.  There is no conquering the chaos of life.  There is no avoiding the terror of merely being alive.  There is only learning how to make meaning in the madness. . . .

-Rabbi Rami Shapiro, from this essay included in Roger Walsh's The World's Greatest Wisdom:  Timeless Teachings from Religions and Philosophies

enlargeable photo and description here

I haven't been blogging....................

........................much here of late, mostly because I've stayed away from the computer.  It seems like a logical conclusion that paying to much attention to what passes for news these days does not enhance one's mental well-being.   However, it is a given that checking in regularly with these fine people does enhance one's mental well-being.   Stuff like this for instance:

 I'm a glutton for punishment but I would love to watch a Jeopardy! showdown between CNN's Jim Acosta and Wolf Blitzer. I'd put the combined over/under for correct answers for the entire show at 5. I'd also bet that neither would qualify for Final Jeopardy because they would both be well into negative numbers...

Like Danny used to say, "he cracks my head up."

a great and strange reputation...............

     So science has, it seems, been so successful that it has inevitably earned a great and strange reputation.  If it has never yet been defeated, presumably it is all-powerful.  And since science is, after all, the work of scientists—for one seldom encounters disembodied science—then presumable these scientists are both so clever and so wise that they can do anything.  Perhaps we should turn the world over to this superbreed.  Perhaps they could, if properly supported, really liberated, and put in charge—perhaps they could solve all problems of human relations, of economic stability, of international peace, and of the good life.  Perhaps they should design not only the churches, but the creeds also.  Perhaps the best music and the loveliest poetry will, in a short time, come out of a machine.
     The sad fact is that some scientists themselves appear to believe precisely this.  And this arrogant attitude quite naturally irritates, or even angers, the social scientists, the humanists, the moralists, and the creative artists.  The classic protest is surely that of Keats:

               Do not all charms fly
               At the mere touch of cold philosophy?  
               There was an awful rainbow once in Heaven:
               We know her woof, her textures; she is given
               In the dull catalogue of common things.
               Philosophy will clip and Angel's wings.

-Warren Weaver, Science and Imagination, 1967

Asking history to repeat itself............

Initial responses are inevitably confused. But trial-and-error learning happens and we do get better. The U.S. was horribly unprepared going into WWI and WWII but, once on track, American productivity stunned enemies as well as friends.

-Peter Gordon, from this list of ten things we are re-learning

As long as Scott................

................................keeps introducing (some of) us to new music, the future will be normal enough for me.  Stay healthy my friend.

Freed.............................

"Refusal to forgive leads to a self-imposed imprisonment.  It's time we freed ourselves by letting old pain dissipate into the darkness, so that new opportunities can take us to greater heights of joy."

-Marc & Angel Chernoff,  1000+ Little Things Happy Successful People Do Differently

Worth their salt......................

     Today, thousands of years of coveting, fighting over, hoarding, taxing, and searching for salt appear picturesque and slightly foolish.  The seventeenth-century British leaders who spoke with urgency about the dangerous national dependence on French sea salt seem somehow more comic than contemporary leaders concerned with a dependence of foreign oil.  In every age, people are certain that only the things they have deemed valuable have true value.
     The search for love and the search for wealth are always the two best stories.  But while a love story is timeless, the story of a quest for wealth, given enough time, will always seem like the vain pursuit of a mirage.

-Mark Kurlansky,  Salt:  A World History

On education...........................

I wrote two books on education and spent a lot of time thinking about it but, as anyone might have expected, I was better at talking about it than at doing.  I am not a believer in complete freedom during childhood.  I think children need a fixed routine, though there should be days when it is not carried out.  I think also that, if a person when adult is to be able to fit into a society, he must learn while still young that he is not the center of the universe and that his wishes are often not the most important factor in a situation.

-Bertrand Russell, Portraits From Memory and Other Essays

On cares..............................

There are many things you should care about

Like sick animals, dying trees, and saving the bees.

What other people think of you

is not one of these things.

-Courtney Peppernell, Pillow Thoughts III:  Mending the Mind

An interesting book.................

As we all know, predictions are difficult, especially about the future.  Our fearless authors are undaunted by the task.  Essentially, they explore the intersection of the exponential growth of a wide swath of technologies and the convergence of those various technologies in unpredictable ways.   The future they envision sounds amazing—and cheap, as technological advances solve one problem after another.   The one thing they seemed to ignore is human nature and our love of mischief (and control).   Well, they did devote three whole paragraphs to the subject before dismissing it.  The authors note:

. . . we're going to experience a hundred years of technological progress over the next ten years.  In fact, many of the most powerful technologies we'll have at our disposal—artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, biotechnology—are only starting to come online.  So yes, the threats we seem to face might seem dire, but the solutions we already possess will only continue to increase in power.

We will see.

Fun with math.........................

more fun here

Steven Pressfield.................

..............takes a stab an defining an all important ethic:

It’s the ability to keep on working with undiminished focus and effort even when we believe (or at least strongly suspect) that there will be no external reward or recognition at the finish.

            In other words, the act of performing a function for its own sake entirely.

thanks Chris

Horrorscope........................?

Can't even pretend that this is a bad sign.........................

via

The times, well they have changed..........

"The Congress is ordinarily courteous and patient about listening to testimony, but gives not evidence of being willing to delegate any of its authority."

-Warren Weaver, Science and Imagination:  Selected Papers, circa 1959

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

"We've upped our standards.  Up yours."

 "To get to the meat of the matter, I will come right to the point, and take note of the fact that the heart of the issue in the final analysis escapes me."

-One of Pat Paulsen's campaign slogans, followed by one on his stock answers to most questions.

the good life.............................?

     True leisure, however, is neither a luxury nor a vice.  It is as vital to our brains as Vitamin C is to our bodies.   There's not a person on earth who on their deathbed thinks, "Had I only put a few more hours at the office or sat in front of the tube some more."  Sure, swimming in a sea of spare time will not be easy.  A twenty-first century education should prepare people not only for joining the workforce, but also (and more importantly) for life.  "Since men will not be tired in their spare time," the philosopher Bertrand Russell wrote in 1932, "they will not demand only such amusements as are passive and vapid."
      We can handle the good life, if only we take the time.

-Rutger Bregman, Utopia For Realists:  How We Can Build the Ideal World

Rooting for clarity.................

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

Neil Young......from After The Gold Rush......... I Believe In You

On praise and blame.................

     My soul preached to me and said, "Do not be delighted because of praise, and do not be distressed because of blame."
     Ere my soul counselled me, I doubted the worth of my work.
     Now I realize the trees blossom in Spring and bear fruit in Summer without asking praise; and they drop their leaves in Autumn and become naked in Winter without fearing blame.

-Kahlil Gibran,  Thoughts And Meditations

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

There are some things only intellectuals are crazy enough to believe.

One is almost driven to the cynical conclusion that men are only decent when they are powerless.

Perhaps a man really dies when his brain stops, when he loses the power to take in a new idea.

The thing that strikes me more and more—and it strikes a lot of other people, too—is the extraordinary viciousness and dishonesty of political controversy in our time.  I don't mean merely that controversies are acrimonious.  They ought to be that when they are on serious subjects.  I mean that almost nobody seems to feel that an opponent deserves a fair hearing or that the objective truth matters as long as you can score a neat debating point.  (December, 1944)

The choice before human beings, is not, as a rule, between good and evil but between two evils.

Each generation imagines itself to be more intelligent than the one that went before it, and wiser than the one that comes after it. This is an illusion, and one should recognise it as such,. . .

Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage — torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians — which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by ‘our’ side.

The real division is not between conservatives and revolutionaries but between authoritarians and libertarians.

The point is that we are all capable of believing things which we know to be untrue, and then, when we are finally proved wrong, impudently twisting the facts so as to show that we were right. Intellectually, it is possible to carry on this process for an indefinite time: . . .

Fate seemed to be playing a series of extraordinarily unamusing jokes.

It is almost impossible to think without talking. ... Take away freedom of speech, and the creative faculties dry up.

-attributed to George Orwell, much more fun here

the elegant patterning................

The universe is a form of divine law,
your reasonable father.

When you feel ungrateful to him,
the shapes of the world seem mean and ugly.

Make peace with that father, the elegant patterning,
and every experience will fill with immediacy.

Because I love this, I am never bored.
Beauty constantly wells up, a noise of springwater
in my ear and in my inner being.

-Rumi

enlargeable photo and description here

Science...............................

Science tries to answer the question: ‘How?’ How do cells act in the body? How do you design an airplane that will fly faster than sound? How is a molecule of insulin constructed? Religion, by contrast, tries to answer the question: ‘Why?’ Why was man created? Why ought I to tell the truth? Why must there be sorrow or pain or death? Science attempts to analyze how things and people and animals behave; it has no concern whether this behavior is good or bad, is purposeful or not. But religion is precisely the quest for such answers: whether an act is right or wrong, good or bad, and why.

"We keep, in science, getting a more and more sophisticated view of our essential ignorance."

-Warren Weaver

Warren Weaver...........................

     Warren Weaver is not a household name, but he may be the most influential scientist you've never heard of, actively shaping three of the most important scientific revolutions of the past century—life sciences, information technology, and agriculture.  In 1932 Weaver joined the Rockefeller Foundation to lead the division charged with supporting scientific research.   Funding was scarce during the Great Depression, and the Rockefeller Foundation, with an endowment nearly twice the size of Harvard's at the time, was one of the most important patrons of scientific research in the world.  Over his three decades at the Rockefeller Foundation, Weaver acted as a banker, talent scout, and kingmaker to support the nascent field of molecular biology, a term he himself coined.  Weaver had an uncanny knack for picking future all-stars.  Eighteen scientists won Nobel Prizes for research related to molecular biology in the middle of the century, and Weaver had funded all but three of them.

-Donald Sull and Kathleen M. Eisenhardt, Simple Rules:  How To Thrive In A Complex World

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

23    And be renewed in the spirit of your mind;

24   And that ye put on the new man, which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness.

25   Wherefore putting away lying, speak every man truth with his neighbour: for we are members one of another.

26   Be ye angry, and sin not: let not the sun go down upon your wrath:

27   Neither give place to the devil.

28   Let him that stole steal no more: but rather let him labour, working with his hands the thing which is good, that he may have to give to him that needeth.

29   Let no corrupt communication proceed out of your mouth, but that which is good to the use of edifying, that it may minister grace unto the hearers.

30   And grieve not the holy Spirit of God, whereby ye are sealed unto the day of redemption.

31   Let all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, and clamour, and evil speaking, be put away from you, with all malice:

32   And be ye kind one to another, tenderhearted, forgiving one another, even as God for Christ's sake hath forgiven you.

-The Holy Bible, Ephesians 4:23-32, King James Version

injustice collecting.....................

     We need to be aware that we have unwittingly become "injustice collectors."  The media reports are full of this form of chronic resentment.  We see "injustice collecting" in international relations where making the other nation "wrong" is actually a primary objective.  We are unconsciously programmed to believe that  "injustice collecting" is "normal."  In contrast to this habitual pattern, which is destructive and weakening, the letting go technique frees us from keeping close account of the "wrongs" made against us.  Our time and attention are freed up to see the beauty and opportunity around us.
     Anger is binding, not freeing.  It connects us to another person and holds them in our life pattern.  We are stuck in the negative pattern until we let go of the energy of anger and its little payoffs of righteous indignation, feeling wronged, and the desire for revenge.  It may not be exactly the same person who constantly recurs in our life.  If not that person, then others will appear who have the same quality that triggers our anger and resentment.  This will keep recurring until we finally handle our inner angriness.   Then, suddenly, people with that quality disappear from our life.  Therefore, anger may force someone to be physically distant from us, but psychically it binds them to us more closely, until we fully relinquish the anger and resentment.
     Relinquishing anger brings us many benefits.  We are free to experience emotional comfort and ease, gratitude for the daily opportunities to grow and heal, mutual caring with another without subtle "strings attached," improvement in health, and more life energy.  These breakthroughs allow us to move up to a more effective and effortless state of inner freedom.

-David R. Hawkins,  Letting Go:  The Pathway Of Surrender

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

Santana.................from the Abraxas album...............Samba Pa Ti

this triple trend...........................

The first digital camera, built in 1976 by Kodak engineer Steven Sasson, was the size of a toaster oven, took twelve black-and-white images, and cost over $10,000.  Today, the average camera that comes with the average smartphone shows a thousand-fold improvement in weight, cost, and resolution over Sasson's model.  And these cameras are everywhere.  In cars, drones, phones, satellites, and such, and with an image resolution that's downright spooky.  Satellites photograph the Earth down to the half-meter range.  Drones shrink that to a centimeter.  But the LIDAR sensors atom autonomous cars capture just about everything—gathering 1.3 million data points per second.
     We see this triple trend of decreasing size and cost, and increasing performance everywhere.  The first commercial GPS hit shelves in 1981, weighing fifty-three points and costing $119,900.  By 2010, it had shrunk to a $5 chip small enough to sit on your finger.  The "inertial measurement unit" that guided our early rockets is another example.  In the mid-sixties, this was a fifty-pound $20 million device.  Today, the accelerometer and gyroscope in your cell phone do the same job for about $4 and weigh less than a grain of rice.

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

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

James Taylor............................................................Country Road

Random images found on my computer....

On the vision thing........................

Intellectuals are often shortsighted, failing to see what is before their very nose. Their object is to obscure the obvious and to make complex the simple, so that they are then needed to lead humanity away from its ignorance and stupidity. With the inexorable rise of tertiary education, we have more intellectuals than ever before, and yet final enlightenment seems as elusive as ever. Man remains a problem-creating animal.

-Theodore Dalrymple, as he begins this post

via

Opportunities arising................

     Every time a technology goes exponential, we find an internet-sized opportunity tucked inside.  Think about the internet itself.  While it seemingly decimated industries—music, media, retail, travel, and taxis—a study by McKinsey Global Research found that the net created 2.6 new jobs for each one it extinguished.
     Over the next decade, we'll see these kinds of opportunities arise in dozens of industries.  As a result, if the internet is our benchmark, more wealth could be created over the next ten years than was over the previous century.

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

Fun with the language...............

 Having beers with Shakespeare would be extraordinary.

• Sir Nathaniel. I praise God for you, sir: your reasons 
• at dinner have been sharp and sententious; 
• pleasant without scurrility, witty without affection, 
• audacious without impudency, learned without opinion, 
• and strange without heresy. I did converse this quondam 
• day with a companion of the king's, who is intituled, nomi-
• nated, or called, Don Adriano de Armado.
• 
  

• Holofernes. Novi hominem tanquam te: his humour 
• is lofty, his discourse peremptory, his tongue filed, 
• his eye ambitious, his gait majestical, and his general
• behavior vain, ridiculous, and thrasonical. He is
• too picked, too spruce, too affected, too odd, as it
• were, too peregrinate, as I may call it.

• Sir Nathaniel. A most singular and choice epithet.

       -William Shakespeare,  Love's Labour's Lost:  Act Five, Scene 1

      thrasonical is a new one for me.  According to our friends at Dictionary.com it means boastful; vainglorious.

frictionless................................

     Instead of starting big and then flaring out with nothing to show for it other than time and energy wasted, to really get essential things done we need to start small and build momentum.  Then we can use that momentum to work toward the next win, and the next one an so on until we have a significant breakthrough—and when we do, our progress will have become so frictionless and effortless that the breakthrough will seem like an overnight success.  As former Stanford professor and educator Henry B. Eyring has written, "My experience has taught me this about how people and organizations improve:  the best place to look is for small changes we could make in the things we do often.  There is power in steadiness and repetition."

-`Greg McKeown,  essentialism:  The Disciplined Pursuit of Less

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

Lee Ritenour...........................................the This Is Love album

On angriness.....................

     We typically feel so much guilt about anger that we find it necessary to make the object of our anger "wrong" so that we can say our anger is "justified."  Few are the persons who can take responsibility for their own anger and just say, "I am angry because I am full of angriness."

-David R. Hawkins, from Letting Go:  The Pathway Of Surrender

It's likely fallen off the cliff here of late, but......

The Gross Domestic Product.  So, what is it really?  Well, that's easy you say:  the GDP is the sum of all goods and services that a country produces, corrected for seasonal fluctuations, inflation, and perhaps purchasing power.
     To which Bastiat would respond:  You've overlooked a huge part of the picture.  Community service, clean air, free refills on the house — not of these things make the GDP an iota bigger.  If a businesswoman marries her cleaner, the GDP dips when her hubby trades his job for unpaid housework.  Or take Wikipedia.  Supported by investments of time rather than money, it has left the old Encyclopedia Britannica in the dust — and taken the GDP down a few notches in the process.

-Rutger Bregman,  Utopia For Realists:  How We Can Build The Idea World

The type of person...............

.......................................it would be fun to have beers with:

Clarke had an expanding brain that functioned like an accordion.  He sucked in ideas, mixed them together and then expelled them as something altogether more melodious.  Where most people saw problems, he saw only solutions.

-Giles Milton describing Cecil "Nobby" Clarke in Churchill's Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare

The most important step.......

….......….in becoming a successful real estate investor is surviving the ownership of the first investment property.    As we tell all of our prospective new investors, life its ownself can be messy at times, and that goes double (or triple) when dealing with property and tenants.  Acceptance of that reality is an important step in clearing the way to success.

     Apparently (ten years of a bull market notwithstanding) the same thing is true for investing in the stock market:

Risk and reward are attached at the hip. You can’t expect to earn higher returns if you aren’t willing to accept occasional losses and volatility.

Some fights are worth having...............

Check out the 2:30 mark.   Comic genius.

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Learning new tricks..............

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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