"So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do."
-Benjamin Franklin, as culled from his Autobiography
Sunday, February 21, 2021
for ourselves.............................
What the patterns of an artist's progress show is the human capacity to find meaning and to make lasting work not by planning it but by remaining open to the possibilities they see inside and around themselves. This argues against forcing predetermined expectations and goals onto our experience of life and for an alert way of being, open to noticing and responding to the future as it emerges. We think ourselves efficient when we squeeze our lives into schedules, itineraries, and plans, asking of apps that they tell us what to do, where to go next. But what we lose is the freedom to notice for ourselves, to filter and reflect for ourselves, to craft our unique sense of who we are and what we wish to make of our lives.
-Margaret Heffernan, Uncharted: How To Navigate The Future
Checking in..............................
.....................................with Will Rogers (1879-1935):
"It's pitiful when you think how ignorant the founders of our Constitution must have been. Just think what a Country we would have if men in those days had the Brains and forethought of our men today!"
"We shouldn't elect a President; we should elect a magician."
"Washington, D.C. Papers say, 'Congress is deadlocked and can't act.' I think that is the greatest blessing that could befall this Country."
"If all politicians fished instead of spoke publicly, we would be at peace with the world."
"Lord, the money we do spend of Government and it's not one bit better than the government we got for one third the money twenty years ago."
"Things in our country run in spite of government. Not by aid of it."
"You know, Congressmen are the nicest fellows in the world to meet. I sometimes really wonder if they realize the harm they do."
"Elect 'em for a six-year term; not allow 'em to succeed themselves. that would keep their mind off politics."
Saturday, February 20, 2021
Four hours and forty-four minutes..........
.....................................of musical blissfulness. Thank you!
Effort................................
“no matter what your ability is, effort is what ignites that ability and turns it into accomplishment.”
Mindset: The New Psychology Of SuccessThe ultimate..................................
...........................................................choice.
Fifty years ago.............................
Gordon Lightfoot........................If You Could Read My Mind
As Louis L' Amour said......................
..........................there is always a faster gun:
12. Don’t worry about what everyone else is doing. There will always be someone getting richer than you in life and the markets. And with the advent of social media, that means people throwing this fact in your face constantly.
This one is not easy but defining what a rich life means to you can help avoid unnecessary envy and regret.
-Ben Carlson, from this list at this post
Phase of the Mood..............................
.............................waiting patiently for this essential mix.
Friday, February 19, 2021
Herds.................................
“Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, one by one.”
"ethnomathematics"..........................?
Warren Meyer opines on the latest unusual idea to come out of what passes for the educational industry these days - here. A wee excerpt here:
Steve Martin used to have a comedy routine where he would say something like, "wouldn't it be funny to teach your kids how to talk wrong. On their first day in Kindergarten class they would walk up to the teacher and exclaim, "Mumbo dogface in the banana patch!" That had a certain dark humor to it but teaching kids to do math wrong in real life is simply insane.
An explanation of "cargo cult thinking" is here
Always be learning...................................
..................................................................The 5-Hour Rule.
A few more books...................
..................................................I haven't read.
Tuesday, February 16, 2021
On the toxicity of brands..............
The future isn't something to be nailed down, defined, and programmed. The only way to influence it is to keep noticing. While an efficient mind-set prizes predictability and continuity, an artist's passion for exploration develops the capacity for change. For years now, we've been encouraged to develop "the brand you," to adopt, as businesses or individuals, an unwavering, fixed positioning that everyone can recognize and rely on. But for artists, brands are toxic, suppressing the lively evolution that keeps them growing. . . .
Artists often change before they have to. Fans and followers frequently deplore these moments of evolution, when musicians adopt or abjure new technology, when painters change media, when writers shift style or genre. Ibsen was forever frustrating his champions by his furious refusal to be tied down by their definition of him. Picasso's shifts in style baffled critics. Fans of Schoenberg's gorgeous classicism were dismayed and disgusted by his adoption of the twelve-tone scale. Even James Joyce's staunchest supporters balked before diving into Finnegans Wake. Many Miles Davis fans never forgave his electric years. It took decades before Bob Dylan's fans got used to the idea that change was the point, that developing self was Dylan's subject.
-Margaret Heffernan, Uncharted: How To Navigate The Future
Perspectives...........................
Psychologists have a name for our tendency to confuse our own perspective with something more universal: it's called 'naive realism', the sense that we are seeing reality as it truly is, without filters or errors. Naive realism can lead us badly astray when we confuse our personal perspective on the world with some universal truth. We are surprised when an election goes against us: everyone in our social circle agreed with us, so why did the nation vote otherwise? Opinion polls don't always get it right, but I can assure you they have a better track record of predicting elections than simply talking to your friends.
-Tim Harford, How to Make the World Add Up: Ten Rules for Thinking Differently About Numbers
Craving, not having..............................
One of the rules that emerges from a consideration of the factors that promote self-sacrifice is that we are less ready to die for what we have or are than for what we wish to have and to be. It is a perplexing and unpleasant truth that when men already have "something worth fighting for," they do not feel like fighting. People who live full, worthwhile lives are not usually ready to die for their own interests nor for their country nor for a holy cause. Craving, not having, is the mother of a reckless giving of oneself.
-Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts On The Nature Of Mass Movements
An imaginary museum...................
Like many people with an interest in art, I carry an imaginary museum around in my head. I change exhibitions frequently, not in any orderly way, adding new pieces and putting old ones in storage. I throw away very little, so that the place, if it can be called that, is cluttered. One of the pleasant attributes of an imaginary gallery is that it can be any size, and there is no maintenance or upkeep and no worry about conservation. Nothing costs anything. If the pictures I put in it sometimes gain in value and sometimes decline, it is a matter of taste (call it whim, if your please)—my taste—and any arguments about it are between my taste today and my taste of yesterday.
It is almost impossible not to put what is in my museum in categories—landscapes, genre, nudes, portraits or nonrepresentational, religious, mythical, still life, and decorative paintings. Though I have some sculpture and some objets de vertu and a great many drawings, that is about it, except for a very few photographs and prints. My museum doesn't tend towards "mulitples" of any sort. It is a matter of playing favorites; I am under no pressure to put something in my museum because some critic, or generations of connoisseurs and dilettantes, have declared it to be a masterpiece. One generation's masterpiece can obviously be the next generation's colossal bore, which does not change the nature of the object in the least.
-Russell Lyne, Life In The Slow Lane: Observations On Art, Architecture, Manners, And Other Such Spectator Sports
Here are a few things hanging in my imaginary gallery:
Parenting.............................
One of the incidents in Ike's youth that he later said had a lasting impact on him revolved around Halloween. When he was in elementary school, hit two older brothers were given permission to go out and trick-or-treat. Ike wanted desperately to go, but was denied permission by his parents. In a spectacular display of what we would today call a "meltdown," Ike went into a rage—and essentially blacked out as he bloodied his fists by repeatedly hitting them against a tree. His parents, rightly concerned, took measures. His father probably gave Ike's backside a few strokes of a hickory stick, and he was sent to his room—the one he shared with the two brothers who were out on the town.
As Ike lay in bed sobbing pitifully, his mother came upstairs and sat quietly for a few minutes, waiting for him to settle down. When his tears had turned to occasional whimpers, Ida talked to him in a gentle but firm way. Did he know that his behavior had hurt only himself?
After a few quiet words she ended with a paraphrase from the Bible: "He who conquereth his soul is greater than he who taketh a city."
As his mother bandaged his hands, she continued to talk to her son, again calmly urging him to understand that in his anger he had hurt only himself; that the object of his anger (in this case his brothers) probably didn't even know of his resentment.
Eisenhower later wrote that the conversation was "one of the most valuable moments of my life."
-Susan Eisenhower, How Ike Led: The Principles Behind Eisenhower's Biggest Decisions
Happy Anniversary Sweetie.................
The Beatles...........................................................Michelle
Monday, February 15, 2021
an inner sense of captaincy..................
Developing an inner sense of captaincy is not about compensating for an incompetent leader—nor does it mean thinking we always know best. The better someone is at leading people, the more they create the conditions for their team to take initiative and be proactive about preventing problems. They show by example that they inhabit a state rather than a particular role. A stronger leader can mean a more independent team.
-from this Farnam Street post
The world...........................
.........................is just a better place when The Sovereign Professional is posting regularly. Do check in.
On being careful what you wish for................
It doesn’t matter how well-intentioned the program is. It doesn’t matter what a regulation was meant to do — it matters what it does. . . .
“Markets work!” is cartoon libertarianism, but you know what? Markets work. And if you don’t let them work, you end up with artificial scarcity, high prices, and rationing.
-Kevin D. Williamson, as culled from this post
Opening paragraphs...................
John Maynard Keynes was not an athletic man. Though a spirited debater, he had always suffered from fragile health. Overworked by choice and underexercised out of habit, he had acclimated himself to living in the constant shadow of head colds and influenza attacks. He was thirty-one years old on the first Sunday of August 1914 and had lived nearly all those years at Cambridge, where, like his father before him, he held a minor academic post. His friend and mentor Bertrand Russell was accustomed to seeing the younger man reviewing figures or buried in papers on weekend afternoons. A King's College man, Keynes might, in moments of extreme restlessness, calm himself with a walk through the Great Court of Russell's Trinity College, taking in the turrreted medieval towers of King's Gate, the soaring gothic windows of the chapel built during the reign of Queen Elizabeth, and the steady waters of the fountain designed when William Shakespeare had composed Hamlet. Keynes was a man who savored tradition and contemplation. He was perfectly suited for a life at the timeworn university.
-Zachary D. Carter, The Price Of Peace: Money, Democracy, And The Life Of John Maynard Keynes
Saturday, February 13, 2021
Join...................
Join with all those who experiment, take risks, fall, get hurt, and then take more risks. Stay away from those who affirm truths, who criticize those who do not think like them, people who have never once taken a step unless they were sure they would be respected for doing so, and those who prefer certainties to doubts.
Join with those who are open and not afraid to be vulnerable: they understand that people can improve only once they start looking at what their fellows are doing, not in order to judge them, but to admire them for their dedication and courage
-Paul Coelho, The Archer
Election fraud......................
I am certain that voting shenanigans went on in the most recent election. Did it determine the outcome? Maybe, maybe not. Regardless, students of America will know that what occurred in 2020 was child's play in the context of our history. To wit:
Already, some two generations out of slavery, when statistically they had been three-fifths of a person, "Negroes" conducted an unrequited love affair with the republic that had, reluctantly at best, freed them in 1863. They fought in U.S. wars and paid taxes. They rendered cheap labor on railroads and docks, in factories, private kitchens, and cotton fields. Although fulfilling the obligations of citizenship, Negroes were systematically denied the benefits. White supremacy was certified and enforced as national policy by the full force of the Supreme Court, Congress, and the executive branch of the federal government, although in wholly different ways. The Court's 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson "separate but equal" ruling was a sham decision that froze in place an impregnable caste structure under legalized segregation. Negroes were repressed as a permanent underclass and were flagrantly denied equal access to housing, jobs, education, public accommodations, due process in the courts, and despite, the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment, the guaranteed right to vote. Even when American women were granted the vote in 1920, Negroes across gender lines were largely denied the franchise, especially in the South, where some 80 percent of them lived.
-Les Payne, The Dead Are Arising: The Life of Malcolm X
Friday, February 12, 2021
Just in case you forgot...........................
.....................................................the best story wins.
Wednesday, February 10, 2021
Now that you mention it.....................................
.................................. a glass of wine would be nice.
It's a possibility......................
A curious paradox characteristic of every kind of courage here confronts us. It is the seeming contradiction that we must be fully committed, but we must also be aware at the same time that we might possibly be wrong. This dialectic relationship between conviction and doubt is characteristic of the highest types of courage . . .
People who claim to be absolutely convinced that their stand is the only right one are dangerous. Such conviction is the essence not only of dogmatism, but of its more destructive cousin, fanaticism. It blocks off the user from learning new truth, and it is a dead giveaway of unconscious doubt. The person then has to double his or her protests to quiet not only the opposition but his or her own unconscious doubts as well. . . .
. . . The relationship between commitment and doubt is by no means an antagonistic one. Commitment is healthiest when it is not without doubt, but in spite of doubt. To believe fully and and the same time to have doubts is not at all a contradiction: it presupposes a greater respect for truth, an awareness that truth always goes beyond anything that can be said or done at any given moment. To every thesis there is an antithesis, and to this there is a synthesis. Truth is thus a never-dying process. We then know the meaning of the statement attributed to Leibnitz: "I would walk twenty miles to listen to my worst enemy if I could learn something."
-Rollo May, The Courage To Create
Why enabling How...............................
I remember two cases of would-be suicide, which bore a striking similarity to each other. Both men had talked of their intention to commit suicide. Both used the typical argument—they had nothing more to expect from life. In both cases, it was a question of getting them to realize that life was still expecting something from them; something in the future was expected of them. We found, in fact, that for the one it was his child whom he adored and who was waiting for him in a foreign country. For the other it was a thing, not a person. This man was a scientist and had written a series of books which still needed to be finished. His work could not be done by anyone else, anymore that another person could ever take the place of the father in the child's affections.
This uniqueness and singleness which distinguishes each individual and gives a meaning to his existence has a bearing on creative work as much as it does on human love. When the impossibility of replacing a person is realized, it allows the responsibility which a man has for his existence and its continuance to appear in all its magnitude. A man who becomes conscious of the responsibility he bears toward a human being who affectionately waits for him, or to an unfinished work, will never be able to throw away his life, He knows the "why" for his existence, and will be able to bear almost any "how."
-Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Search For Meaning
thanks Michael
Focusing on the chronic...........................
. . . as we strap into a rollercoaster of external change, we forget to work on the problems we have the opportunity to improve.
-Seth Godin, from this post
Tuesday, February 9, 2021
The Art of Accepting..................
The art of acceptance is the art of making someone who has done you a small favor wish that he might have done a greater one.
Never accept flattery as though it were a compliment, and never accept a compliment as though it were a flattery.
The only graceful way to accept an insult is to ignore it; if you can't ignore it, top it, laugh at it; if you can't laugh at it, it's probably deserved.
Always accept defeat as though it were defeat and success as though it were success, but never take either for granted; neither is permanent.
But if the art of accepting is, as I have suggested, the art of gratifying those who would be generous to you, "Thank you" has no peer.
-Russell Lynes, a few snippets culled from this essay contained in this book
Start...........................
Artists begin without being asked. That is the acid test of agency: not just having ideas, but acting on them. Where experimenters may carefully calculate need, passion, and resources, artists supply all three themselves. The need and passion are internally generated. The resources are ideas and time, but time is not infinite. So choosing one subject means abandoning the rest, with no guarantee that the choice is right. The only way to find out is to start. Almost every artist describes their way of working as a curious combination of invention, which is conscious, and discovery, which is not.
-Margaret Heffernan, Uncharted: How To Navigate The Future
On questions and answers...............
Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart
and to try to love the questions themselves
like locked rooms and like books that are written
in a very foreign tongue.
Do not now seek the answers,
which cannot be given you
because you would not be able to live them.
And the point is, to live everything.
Live the questions now.
Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it,
live along some distant day
into the answer.
Alone..................................
Unlike today, when people tailor even their most intimate moments for consumption on social media, Eisenhower believed that the task of overcoming any challenge must be a personal matter—a burden to be borne alone.
-Susan Eisenhower, How Ike Led: The Principles Behind Eisenhower's Biggest Decisions
Fifty years ago...............................
Nitty Gritty Dirt Band.....................................Mr. Bojangles
Monday, February 8, 2021
Here's one risk I am willing to run.........
..................................................."longevity risk."
But till that morning..............................
Janis Joplin........................................................Summertime
Responsibilities..............................
It is certain, I think, that the best government is the one that governs the least. But there is a much-neglected corollary: the best citizen is the one who least needs governing. The answer to big government is not private freedom, but private responsibility.
Undaunted........................
If artists have the capacity to make work that defies time, it is because instead of trying to force-fit a predetermined idea of the future, they have learned to live productively with ambiguity, to see it as a rich source of discovery and exploration. Instead of trying to reduce complexity, they mine it, undaunted by contradictions and paradoxes. . . . In this, artists have much to teach us about how we ourselves could address the future with imagination and independence. In addition to thinking about what to do, the artist's method suggest that we should think about how to be.
-Margaret Heffernan, Uncharted: How To Navigate The Future
Yep.............................
..............................................................a lot of people are.
Just a head's up......................................
If you’re not paying, you’re the product, not the customer. And sometimes, even if you are paying, the long-term impact of your quest for convenience might not be what you were hoping for.
-Seth Godin, from here
VDH revisits..............................................
..........................................Animal Farm:
Beware, he warns, of the powerful who claim to help the helpless.
One impossible.................................
........................................................................question.
Sunday, February 7, 2021
Lead me.........................
Lead me from dreaming to waking.
Lead me from opacity to clarity.
Lead me from the complicated to the simple.
Lead me from the obscure to the obvious.
Lead me from intention to attention.
Lead me from what I'm told I am to what I see I am.
Lead me from confrontation to wide openness.
Lead me to the place I never left,
Where there is peace, and peace
On lurching..........................
In Gettysburg I still feel close to my grandparents, and I still go to these rolling hills for reflection. Yet so much has changed since that time—not just the disappearance of the Stuckey's souvenir shops or the Rexall drugstore on Gettysburg's main square—the fabric of our society today has a different texture than it did in the 1950s: some of it stronger but much of it badly frayed.
Engaging one's deepest self was easier in those days—with long waits between letters and long-distance phone calls deferred until Sunday when the rates were cheaper. Today, tethered to smartphones and transfixed by Twitter and Instagram, we lurch from one demand to another with scarcely a moment to think. Our impulses are reactive, not considered. They are short-term rather than strategic. We have lost our capacity to act in the present while thinking into the future. We are struggling.
-Susan Eisenhower, from her Introduction to How Ike Led: The Principles Behind Eisenhower's Biggest Decisions
Conversation starters (or maybe stoppers)..............
.............100 more questions that don't get asked.
Important questions............................
........................nobody is asking:
Why aren't there any left-handed catchers in the Major Leagues?
Generosity of spirit...............
The most important thing is love of others. Not necessarily a sugary, let's-all sing-'We-Are-The-World' kind of love, but a stable, meaningful generosity of spirit that enables us to do things for others—those we know and those we don't—because at base level we choose to give of ourselves. . . . So here's my working definition of generosity of spirit: It is the commitment to treat a person with dignity and kindness regardless of how you feel about him or her.
-Mark Sanborn, The Fred Factor
Look.............................
Look beneath the surface: never let a thing's intrinsic quality or worth escape you.
-Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 6:3
this huge and unparalleled modern wrong........
My forthcoming work in five volumes, `The Neglect of Cheese in European Literature,' is a work of such unprecedented and laborious detail that it is doubtful whether I shall live to finish it.
-Gilbert Keith Chesterton, as he begins this short essay
Bezos..........................
The initial start-up capital for Amazon.com came primarily from my parents, who invested a large fraction of their life savings in something they didn't understand. They weren't making a bet on Amazon or the concept of a bookstore on the internet. They were making a bet on their son. I told them I thought there was a 70 percent chance they would lose their investment, and they did it anyway. It took more than fifty meetings for me to raise $1 million from investors, and over the course of all those meetings, the most common question was, "What's the internet?"
Unlike many other countries around the world, this great nation we live in supports and does not stigmatize entrepreneurial risk-taking. I walked away from a steady job into a Seattle garage to found my startup, fully understanding it might not work. It feels like just yesterday I was driving the packages to the post office myself, dreaming that one day we might be able to afford a forklift.
Amazon's success was anything but preordained. Investing in Amazon early on was a very risky proposition. From our founding through the end of 2001, our business had accumulated losses of nearly $3 billion, and we did not have a profitable quarter until the fourth quarter of that year. Smart analysts predicted Barnes & Noble would steamroll us, and branded us "Amazon.toast." In 1999, after we'd been in business for nearly five years, Barron's headlined a story about our impending demise "Amazon.bomb." My annual shareholder letter for 2000 started with a one-word sentence" "Ouch."
-Jeff Bezos, Invent & Wander: The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos
Saturday, February 6, 2021
Thursday, February 4, 2021
More than you want to know...................
...............................about hedge fund managers.
My point here is more about politics than finance. Our class enemy are not evil geniuses practising some arcane magic; investing successfully requires little intellect. Instead, they are beneficiaries of emergent processes such as principal-agent failures and deference towards the rich and of the cronyism that gives them special treatment from the state. There are no wizards, just common little humbugs.
Only one question..................................
..................................is this a surprise to you?
On parasites and charity..................
Up here in the High Doganate, we are reactionaries, not squishy “conservatives.” True, there is only one of us up here, but I speak for the majority. The number of politicians we trust is even smaller. We don’t think there is a political solution, to anything.
-David Warren, from this blog post
Charlie Munger teaches............
..........................the importance of learning to make fewer stupid decisions. Morgan Housel concurs:
Most of this industry is devoted to finding greatness, which is inevitable because it’s what captures attention. But an occasional great decision can quickly become irrelevant unless you consistently avoid the blunders that move the needle even more. It’s not exciting, but we should spend more effort on ensuring we’re capable of doing the average thing all the time before we spend a moment trying to do a great thing some of the time.
Only one question................................
........................................is this a surprise to you?
Resolved...........................
“Let scholastic sophisters entangle themselves in their own cobwebs; I am resolved to take my own existence, and the existence of other things, upon trust; and to believe that snow is cold, and honey sweet, whatever they may say to the contrary. He must either be a fool, or want to make a fool of me, that would reason me out of my reason and senses.”
Experimenting...................
"So the conclusion is not, 'Do nothing and a great idea will come to you.' The conclusion is, 'Do everything because you never know where the great idea will come from.'" . . . "Remember: It's easy to experiment, but hard to change. None of these people started with a grand vision and then worked toward it. These people were not goal setters or planners; they were adventurers." . . . "Each quandary is a call for experimentation. Each experiment a question put to the world. Each answer is a journey. Let life plan the itinerary. Your job is to pack light and bring a camera."
Dale Dauten, The Max Strategy: How A Businessman Got Stuck At An Airport And Learned To Make His Career Take Off
Wednesday, February 3, 2021
Tuesday, February 2, 2021
But not just any old idea.............................
What is strange about the modern world, in other words, is its utter economic unpredictability. As Nassim Nicholas Taleb puts it, the Great Enrichment was a "black swan" event, deeply unpredictable, not to be reduced to a probability distribution with finite variance. The premodern world, by contrast, was highly predictable in economic shape. Dukes would go on collecting rents, merchants would go on making modest fortunes from trade, peasants would expect to earn what their fathers and grandfathers and great-grandfathers had earned—unless they could pull ahead by tricking neighbor Nat, the fool, into selling the Nether field for less than it was worth.
-Deidre Nansen McCloskey, Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital Or Institutions Enriched The World
On Time...................................
Think of your many years of procrastination; how the gods have repeatedly granted you further periods of grace, of which you have taken no advantage. It is time now to realize the nature of the universe to which you belong, and of what controlling power whose offspring you are; and to understand that your time has a limit set to it. Use it, then, to advance your enlightenment; or it will be gone, and never in your power again.
-Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 2:4
Fifty years ago..................................
The Doors...................................................Riders On The Storm
One should not forget...................
.....................that normalcy is just the psychosis of the majority.
Monday, February 1, 2021
On perspective..................................
If we don't understand the statistics, we're likely to be badly mistaken about the way the world is. It is all too easy to convince ourselves that whatever we've seen with our own eyes is the whole truth; it isn't. . . .
And yet, if we understand only the statistics, we understand little. We need to be curious about the world we see, hear, touch, and smell as well as the world we can examine through a spreadsheet.
My second piece of advice, then, its to try to take both perspectives—the worm's eye view as well as the bird's eye view. They will usually show you something different, and they will sometimes pose a puzzle: how could both views be true? That should be the beginning of an investigation.
-Tim Harford, How To Make The World Add Up: Ten Rules For Thinking Differently About Numbers
If you ask the right person some really good questions............................
..............you are likely to get some really good answers.
Fifty years ago.......................................
The Rolling Stones..........................................Brown Sugar
Chatting with Saul Alinsky......................
Life is an adventure of passion, risk, danger, laughter, beauty, love; a burning curiosity to go with the action to see what it is all about, to go search for a pattern of meaning, to burn one's bridges because you're never going to go back anyway, and to live to the end.
The greatest enemy of individual freedom is the individual himself.
Conflict is the essential core of a free and open society. If one were to project the democratic way of life in the form of a musical score, its major theme would be the harmony of dissonance.
Political realists see the world as it is: an arena of power politics moved primarily by perceived immediate self-interests, where morality is rhetorical rationale for expedient action and self-interest.
Humor is essential to a successful tactician, for the most potent weapons known to mankind are satire and ridicule. A sense of humor enables him to maintain his perspective and see himself for what he really is: a bit of dust that burns for a fleeting second. A sense of humor is incompatible with the complete acceptance of any dogma, any religious, political, or economic prescription for salvation. It synthesizes with curiosity, irreverence, and imagination.
Curiosity, irreverence, imagination, sense of humor, a free and open mind, an acceptance of the relativity of values and of the uncertainty of life, all inevitably fuse into the kind of person whose greatest joy is creation.
In this world laws are written for the lofty aim of “the common good” and then acted out in life on the basis of the common greed.
The human spirit glows from that small inner light of doubt whether we are right, while those who believe with complete certainty that they possess the right are dark inside and darken the world outside with cruelty, pain, and injustice.
There can be no darker or more devastating tragedy than the death of man’s faith in himself and in his power to direct his future.
Sunday, January 31, 2021
the sacredness of simple things.................
For at present we all tend to one mistake; we tend to make politics too important. We tend to forget how huge a part of a man's life is the same under a Sultan and a Senate, under Nero or St Louis. Daybreak is a never-ending glory, getting out of bed is a never-ending nuisance; food and friends will be welcomed; work and strangers must be accepted and endured; birds will go bedwards and children won't, to the end of the last evening. And the worst peril is that in our just modern revolt against intolerable accidents we may have unsettled those things that alone make daily life tolerable. It will be an ironic tragedy if, when we have toiled to find rest, we find we are incurably restless. It will be sad if, when we have worked for our holiday, we find we have unlearnt everything but work. The typical modern man is the insane millionaire who has drudged to get money, and then finds he cannot enjoy even money. There is danger that the social reformer may silently and occultly develop some of the madness of the millionaire whom he denounces. He may find that he has learnt how to build playgrounds but forgotten how to play. He may agitate for peace and quiet, but only propagate his own mental agitation. In his long fight to get a slave a half-holiday he may angrily deny those ancient and natural things, the zest of being, the divinity of man, the sacredness of simple things, the health and humour of the earth, which alone make a half-holiday even half a holiday or a slave even half a man.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton, from his essay, What Is Right With The World
Good advice......................
Today's persuaders don't want you to stop and think. They want you to hurry up and feel.
Don't be rushed.
-Tim Harford, How To Make The World Add Up: Ten Rules for Thinking Differently About Numbers
Maybe not the worst...............
The worst intellectuals to put in charge of things are the ones who think that they should be in charge of things.
The interesting thing..........................
.........................................about feed-back loops:
Find a feedback loop and you will find people who underestimate how crazy prices can get, how famous a person can become, how hard it can be to change people’s minds, how irreparable a reputation can be, and how tiny events can compound into something huge.
Forecasting is difficult *........................................
Nor does talent exist in a vacuum. Outstanding performers in part of a company may, when transferred, suddenly fail. . . . Hypotheses abounded but what everyone learned is that ability and environment are inextricably linked. As anyone who's suffered a terrible boss will recognize: given the right circumstances, everybody can be made to fail. Because achievement derives in part from context, forecasting individual talent omits half the picture.
-Margaret Heffernan, Uncharted: How To Navigate The Future
* although the weather people seem to have gotten the latest snow forecast right
Some of us history majors like this essay...
I am approaching the subject of this lecture with considerable trepidation. I know that among my hearers there are professional historians whom I greatly respect, and I should not at all wish to seem desirous of instructing them as to how their work should be done. I shall write as a consumer, not a producer. In shops they have a maxim: "The customer is always right." But academic persons (among whom I should wish to include myself) are more lordly than shopkeepers: if the consumer does not like what he is offered, that is because he is a Philistine and because he does not know what is good for him. Up to a point I sympathize with this attitude. It would never do for a mathematician to try to please the general reader. . . . But history seems to me to be in a different category. The multiplication table, though useful, can hardly be called beautiful. It is seldom that essential wisdom in regard to human destiny is to be found by remembering even its more difficult items. History, on the other hand, is so I shall contend a desirable part of everybody's mental furniture in the same kind of way as is generally recognized in the case of poetry. If history is to fulfill this function, it can only do so by appealing to those who are not professional historians.
-Bertrand Russell, as excerpted from his 1954 essay, History As An Art
Observing that this is true..........................
One generation's masterpiece can obviously be then next generation's colossal bore, which does not change the nature of the object in the least.
The Rat Pack.............................
Just add this story to the stack of "stuff I never knew," especially the part about Joe Kennedy. Our history is a tangled mess.
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