People don't talk this way...............

 

...............(or think this way) anymore:

Among the vicissitudes incident to life no event could have filled me with greater anxieties than that of which the notification was transmitted by your order, and received on the 14th day of the present month. On the one hand, I was summoned by my Country, whose voice I can never hear but with veneration and love, from a retreat which I had chosen with the fondest predilection, and, in my flattering hopes, with an immutable decision, as the asylum of my declining years--a retreat which was rendered every day more necessary as well as more dear to me by the addition of habit to inclination, and of frequent interruptions in my health to the gradual waste committed on it by time. On the other hand, the magnitude and difficulty of the trust to which the voice of my country called me, being sufficient to awaken in the wisest and most experienced of her citizens a distrustful scrutiny into his qualifications, could not but overwhelm with despondence one who (inheriting inferior endowments from nature and unpracticed in the duties of civil administration) ought to be peculiarly conscious of his own deficiencies. In this conflict of emotions all I dare aver is that it has been my faithful study to collect my duty from a just appreciation of every circumstance by which it might be affected. All I dare hope is that if, in executing this task, I have been too much swayed by a grateful remembrance of former instances, or by an affectionate sensibility to this transcendent proof of the confidence of my fellow-citizens, and have thence too little consulted my incapacity as well as disinclination for the weighty and untried cares before me, my error will be palliated by the motives which mislead me, and its consequences be judged by my country with some share of the partiality in which they originated.

-George Washington, from his first inaugural speech

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

 

The Rolling Stones.....the Black and Blue album

now and then...................

 

A little nonsense now and then, is cherished by the wisest men.

-attributed to Roald Dahl

essential...................

 

     Play, which I would define as anything we do simply for the joy of doing rather than as a means to an end—whether it's flying a kite or listening to music or throwing a baseball—might seem like a nonessential activity.  Often it is treated that way.  But in fact play is essential in many ways.  Stuart Brown, the founder of the National Institute for Play, has studied what are called the play histories of some six thousand individuals and has concluded that play has the power to significantly improve everything from personal health to relationships to education to organizations' ability to innovate.  "Play," he says, "leads to brain plasticity, adaptability, and creativity."  As he succinctly puts it, "Nothing fires up the brain like play."

-Greg McKeown, essentialism: The Disciplined Pursuit of Less

pick a story..................

 

     According to Illich, society fosters a consumerist mindset and diminishes the self in the process. The beauty of individualism is lost, like a field of spring flowers wilted to a dull grey.  It becomes harder to find satisfaction and happiness in life,

     That's why we should read books that preserve our sense of self.  Not just buy books, but to read them and understand the world.  Instead of blindly following what the media tells us, we should find our own happiness.  When we're feeling lonely, we shouldn't head to a shop but visit a friend.  When we crave stability, instead of dreaming of a perfect home, we should find perfection in a simple life within our means.

     Be aware of our own anxieties, know how to prioritize ourselves, understand and manage our inner desires, and books will help us find our way forward,

     The media is full of sensationalized stories and temptations.  To fight against its influence, we need to build a 'story vending machine' for ourselves. Each time we need something to lift our spirits, we can pick a story and let it play in our hearts.

-Hwang Bo-Reum,  Every Day I Read: 53 Ways to Get Closer to Books

Sixty years ago......................

The Rolling Stones..........the Aftermath album

the soulful gamble known as trust......

 

     Raising our children under the telescope of our permanent gaze is costly.  If you are trusting, you win some encounters and lose others, but in the long-term, you gain much more than you would from distrusting, which results in lost opportunities, says Hardin.  A panoptic culture teaches our children that we cannot take a chance on others.  Unintentionally, such a culture also teaches children that they are to be distrusted, and that we cannot take a chance on them.  Cameras, breathalyzers, software monitoring, GPS tracking, and other far-reaching paraphernalia of the eye take away our children's brief chance in life to gradually, with inevitable stumbling, to learn to take responsibility for their actions.  Surveillance erodes their freedom to fall.  "What I always say to parents is if you are giving your kids appropriate freedom, it will feel like neglect in our culture," says psychologist Wendy Mogel, author of The Blessings of a Skinned Knee.  We're setting up safe zones that are cages.  And we're substituting instamatic fragments for the homegrown mutual knowledge that slowly builds into the soulful gamble known as trust.  We've mistaken the monologue of surveillance for the dialogue that is care.

-Maggie Jackson, Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age

flourishing.........

 

We have sold ourselves into a fast-food model of education, and it's impoverishing our spirit and our energies as much as fast food is depleting our physical bodies. . . . human talent is tremendously diverse.  People have very different aptitudes. . . . Human flourishing is not a mechanical process.  It's an organic process. . . . You cannot predict the outcome of human development.  All you can do is create the conditions under which they will begin to flourish,

-Sir Ken Robinson, the link goes to a 2010 TED talk that is well worth watching.

Sixty years ago..................................

 

The Dave Brubeck Quartet.................Jackpot

To pay attention

 
How necessary it is to have opinions! I think the spotted 
trout lilies are satisfied, standing a few inches above the 
earth. I think serenity is not something you just find in 
the world, like a plum tree, holding up its white petals.

The violets, along the river, are opening their blue faces, 
like small dark lanterns.

The green mosses, being so many, are as good as brawny.

How important it is to walk along, not in haste but 
slowly, looking at everything and calling out

Yes! No! The

swan, for all his pomp, his robes of grass and petals, 
wants only to be allowed to live on the nameless pond. 
The catbrier is without fault. The water thrushes, down 
among the sloppy rocks, are going crazy with 

happiness.  Imagination is better than a sharp 

instrument. To pay attention, this is our endless and 

proper work.

-Mary Oliver, Yes! No!

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

 

Dave Brubeck.............All The Things We Are

Treasures................

 

. . . it is impossible to get high-quality products from low-quality processes. 

-Rob Firchau

Sounds about right......................

 

     In those two days, I pushed out more than ten boxes of books, but within a few months, my shelves are packed again.  Even though I resolved to buy only books I need, the problem is that when I'm shopping online, every book looks like something I need.

-Hwang Bo-Reum,  Every Day I Read: 53 Ways to Get Closer to Books

The fundamental question..............

 National security, which this conference is largely about, is not merely series of technical questions – how much we spend on defense or where, how we deploy it, these are important questions.  They are.  But they are not the fundamental one.  The fundamental question we must answer at the outset is what exactly are we defending, because armies do not fight for abstractions.  Armies fight for a people; armies fight for a nation.  Armies fight for a way of life.  And that is what we are defending: a great civilization that has every reason to be proud of its history, confident of its future, and aims to always be the master of its own economic and political destiny.

-Marco Rubio, from this speech

thanks Kurt

the presence of the unforethinkable.....

 

Contingency, or the "presence of the unforethinkable," is at the heart of earthly reality, according to philosopher Albert Borgman.  Contingency doesn't make life random or meaningless, he says, adding that in ancient times contingency meant something like consummation.  Rather, it attests to the "unsurpassable eloquence" of a reality that often asks us to confront what we cannot control or even understand.  A face-to-face meeting, which demands a mutual reading of body language, emotion, and soul, is harder to fathom, and less predictable than a virtual encounter.  But by losing the will to face one another, we are turning away from the messy, unpredictable, and real in life.

-Maggie Jackson, Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age

illusions...............

 

The greatest menace to progress is not ignorance, but the illusion of knowledge.

-Daniel Boorstin, Cleopatra's Nose

Let it go...............

 

The art of being wise is the art of knowing what to overlook.

-William James, The Principles of Psychology

Snippets ....................

 

....................from Maggie Jackson's Distracted: The Erosion of Attention and the Coming Dark Age:

Cyberspace, in science fiction writer William Gibson's words, is a "consensual hallucination."

The fear was that the Internet would turn us all into hermits, and maladjusted hermits at that.

"I don't think people know how to socialize anymore, to sit down and come together, because there are so many alternatives.  They like to be entertained, not socialize."

We become attentional wanderers, sated by the mirage.

As economist Jeremy Rifkin reminds us, "the great turning points in human history are often triggered by changing conception of space and time."

A culture of divided attention fuels more than perpetual searching for lost threads and loose ends.  It stokes a culture of forgetting, the marker of a dark age.

Without safety nets of trust or secure traditions, he says, relations crumble into obsession and compulsion.  Or revenge.

Can we Google our way to wisdom?

But what constitutes a distraction? Are we paying attention to the screen or are we distracted by it?  The answer is slippery, tantalizing, daunting, for distraction is in the eye of the beholder.

We can create a culture of attention, recover the ability to pause, focus, connect, judge, and enter deeply into a relationship or an idea, or we can slip into numb days of easy diffusion and detachment. . . . The choice is ours.

pondering the future.......

 

Albert Robida         The Release of the Opera in the Year 2000       c. 1882, lithograph

Their every day will be caught in the wheels of mechanized society, to the point where I wonder how they will find the time to enjoy the most simple pleasures we had at our disposal: silence, calm, solitude.  Having never known them, they shall not be able to miss them.  As for me, I do—and I pity them.

-Albert Robida, from his short story "1965," written in 1920

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

 

The Alan Parson Project. . .Tales of Mystery etc . . .

finding....................

 

Spirituality is not just about finding quiet in a noisy world. It is about finding the sacred in the mundane.

-Tara Mohr

via

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

 

I am not at all persuaded by skepticism.

-Arnold Kling, from this substack edition

Happy Valentine's..............

 

more here

To distracted to answer the question.......

 

Civil War historian Shelby Foote, when asked to cite anything about the American Civil War he did not understand, often replied, “I still don’t know how they did it… How does a starving man march 20 miles, then go into a 3-hour battle?”

That’s a great question. Each generation, in raising the next, has to wonder how much toughness to pass along and whether the deprivation of hardship is doing harm.

-Michael Wade, from this substack

Fun with memes............

 

more fun here

in the game.................

 

Success is endurance in disguise. It belongs to the person who can absorb the losses without absorbing the identity of "loser." It's the courage to start — and to stick with it — that is the real separator. Results tend to find the person who stays in the game.

-James Clear, from this edition

nibbles....................

 

     Robert Pirsig honors the aggravation.  "Motorcycle maintenance gets frustrating," he writes. "Angering. Infuriating. That's what makes it interesting."  His approach is to inspect the aggravation itself.  He proposes that when you're baffled, it means your current theories about how to proceed aren't working.  You have to empty your mind of them, Zen-style, which takes time.  He advises:

     Just stare at the machine. . .Watch it the way you watch a line when fishing and before long. . .you'll get a nibble, a little fact asking in a timid, humble way if you're interested in it... 

     After a while you may find that the nibbles you get are more interesting than your original purpose of fixing the machine. . .Then you're no longer strictly a motorcycle mechanic, you're also a motorcycle scientist, and you've completely conquered the gumption trap of value rigidity.

     Three terms for his last sentence bear examining.  Pirsig's technique for becoming a "motorcycle scientist" is through studying how he arrives at solutions.  By "value rigidity" Pirsig means "an inability to revalue what one sees because of commitment to previous values."

-Stewart Brand, Maintenance: Of Everything

Internally stable...............

 

Although he paid attention to the effectiveness of the Roman military system, Polybius believed that Rome's success rested far more on its political system.  For him the Republic's constitution, which was carefully balanced to prevent any one individual or section of society from gaining overwhelming control, granted Rome freedom from the frequent revolution and civil strife that had plagued the Greek city-states.  Internally stable, the Roman Republic was able to devote itself to waging war on a scale and with a relentlessness unmatched by any rival.  It is doubtful that any other contemporary state could have survived the catastrophic losses and devastation inflicted by Hannibal, and still gone on to win the war.

-Adrian Goldsworthy, Caesar: Life of a Colossus

Down is up........................

 

     Creation is composed of the descending movement of gravity, the ascending movement of grace, and the descending movement of the second degree of grace.

     Grace is the law of the descending movement.

     To lower oneself is to rise in the domain of moral gravity.  Moral gravity makes us fall toward the heights.

-Simone Weil, Gravity & Grace

Ah, science...........

 

Apparently everywhere in the "developed world" human communities and their natural and cultural supports are being destroyed, not by natural calamities or "acts of God" or invasion by foreign enemies, but by a sort of legalized vandalism known as "the economy."  The economy now famously depends upon the authority and the applicable knowledge of science.  It would therefore be useful to say what is the character of this science that has benefited us in so many ways, and yet has cost us so dearly and exacted from us such deference and such questionable permissions.

-Wendell Berry, Life Is A Mircle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition

True even for non-low stakes.............

 

When stakes are low, possibility is our playground. Curiosity is our guide. Mistakes are data. And the real reward is in watching yourself evolve.

-Tanmay Vora, from here

Sixty years ago......................

 

.........Any Major Dude With Half A Heart takes a quick musical dip into the year 1966.

Interesting...................

 

via

Knocking on your door..........

The experience that tech workers have had over the past year, of watching AI go from "helpful tool" to "does my job better than I do", is the experience everyone else is about to have. Law, finance, medicine, accounting, consulting, writing, design, analysis, customer service. Not in ten years. The people building these systems say one to five years. Some say less. And given what I've seen in just the last couple of months, I think "less" is more likely.

"But I tried AI and it wasn't that good"

I hear this constantly. I understand it, because it used to be true.

If you tried ChatGPT in 2023 or early 2024 and thought "this makes stuff up" or "this isn't that impressive", you were right. Those early versions were genuinely limited. They hallucinated. They confidently said things that were nonsense.

That was two years ago. In AI time, that is ancient history.

-Matt Shumer, from this post

Show up......................

 

anti-fragileness as a goal.............

 

The goal for both your body and finances is to make them anti-fragile systems. Growing stronger through controlled stress to avoid collapse under reckless intensity is the North Star for amplifying wealth and optimal health.

-Tony Isola, from here

Clarity.................

 

In the movies, there’s plenty of stirring music when the hero has to make their choice. But in our lives, there isn’t a single moment. Instead, there are a million of them.

The way we show up will rarely be perfect. But perfect isn’t the point. Countless tiny decisions add up to a whole. It helps to be clear about the purpose of the work we’re here to do.

-Seth Godin, from here

The gentle morph into a surveillance state......

 

During the Superbowl there was an amazing Rorschach test masquerading as a feel-good Ring doorbell commercial.  For those who missed it, find it here.  Essentially it touts a new service where neighborhood networks of Ring doorbell cameras can combine with Amazon AI to find a lost dog based on an uploaded photo.  Half the population reacted, "isn't that wonderful" and the other half of viewers, of whom I am one, reacted "that's freaking scary."

-Warren Meyer, from this Coyote Blog post