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

 

Boney James.......................Body Language

unlived lives................

 

The world is full of people suffering from the effects of their own unlived life. They become bitter, critical, or rigid, not because the world is cruel to them, but because they have betrayed their own inner possibilities. The artist who never makes art becomes cynical about those who do.

-Carl Jung, as quoted here

Hot streak..............................

 

.........................................declared.

On opinions...............

 

     Holmes and Hand were indeed very far apart, a gap in values all the more remarkable because Hand and Holmes shared a common philosophical outlook in most respects.  Neither believed in absolutes or eternal truths; both were skeptic; and both doubted the effectiveness and even the legitimacy of judicial restraints on legislative enactments.  Yet from these premises Hand was able to derive arguments for the judicial protection of minority views, more than a year before Holmes finally arrived at a similar (albeit weaker) conclusion.

     The dispute was remarkable at a more personal level as well.  That Hand would disagree with Holmes on anything, and would do so strongly and persistently, was extraordinary. . . .

"Opinions are at best provisional hypotheses, incompletely tested," Hand argued, so "we must be tolerant of opposite opinions or varying opinions by the very fact of our incredulity or our own."  Deference to majoritarianism was ordinarily central to Hand's beliefs, but here he could not follow Holmes's guide.  Yes, he agreed, silencing "the other fellow when he disagrees" was indeed "a natural right," but not one that a democratic society and its law could afford to endorse.

-Gerald Gunther, Learned Hand: The Man and the Judge

Freedom to speak.............

 

I view the guaranties of the First Amendment as the foundation upon which our governmental scheme rests and without which it could not continue to endure as conceived and planned.  Freedom to speak and write about public questions is as important to the life of our government as is the heart to the human body.  In fact, this privilege is the heart of our government.  If that heart be weakened, the result is debilitation; if it be stilled, the result is death.

-Justice Hugo Black, as quoted in Roger K. Newman's Hugo Black: A Biography

Gurri...........................

 

Super-credentialed administrators, caught in fraud and falsehood, can no longer adjudicate reality. The Counter-Reformation of the elites, for all its abandonment of liberal ideals, will never close the breach in the public’s trust. A great culling of institutions is at hand, propelled by a Darwinian need for structural adaptation. Strange new voices come and go, some of them brilliant and useful, while others resemble the rantings of mad prophets, would-be messiahs, and pirate kings.

The diffusion of AI will compound the turmoil. In most of its possible iterations, AI will be the opposite of a truth machine. To the extent that the platforms acquire a subjective will of their own, they will simply join the melee and seek to impose their preferred frames on their creators. Superior intelligence may exalt them to a status equal to that of the oracles of the Olympian gods—attended, it may be, by a priestly caste of technologists. But to the extent that AI is a mere tool, it will place the totality of human knowledge in the hands of the least educated persons and so hasten the demise of the expert class.

-Martin Gurri, from this essay.   It's Gurri.  Go read the whole thing.  Here is another wee sample:

Here I finally reveal myself in my true colors. I’m an analyst. My task is to describe reality, and that’s what this essay is about. But I also lead an active life inside the world that I’m describing—and I have preferences. I see equality as a factor of opportunity, law, and human dignity, not of perfect outcomes. I think truth emerges from examining a subject from a large number of perspectives, even those that may seem disturbing or false. I hope that my story—as a person, a father, a grandfather—connects to other stories in the past and will connect to more in the future, in a pattern that is not entirely devoid of meaning. And I believe fervently in liberal democracy, because—born in Cuba—I have tasted the alternative.

In praise of.........................

 

.............tradition, culture, and the common good:

Runaway individualism, he argues, has fostered isolation and identity-based tensions, dissolving the social contract and replacing it with a clash of impulses and competing subjectivities. As heirs to this culture of deconstruction—and deprived of stable cultural and moral anchors—Generation Z is living through the full consequences of this illusory freedom, a pseudo-liberation that leads not to fulfillment but to alienation.

-Matthew B. Crawford, from this substack

Trying to be less stupid............

 

No one ever said it was an easy path but it’s one you need to follow - though each in their own way.

 

Max Frost et. al. ........Shape of Things To Come

There's a new sun
Risin' up angry in the sky
And there's a new voice
Cryin' we're not afraid to die
Let the old world make believe
It's blind and deaf and dumb
But nothing can change the shape of things to come
There are changes
Lyin' ahead in every road
And there are new thoughts
Ready and waiting to explode
When tomorrow is today
The bells may toll for some
But nothing can change the shape of things to come
The future's comin' in, now
Sweet and strong
Ain't no-one gonna hold it back for long
There are new dreams
Crowdin' out old realities
There's revolution
Sweepin' in like a fresh new breeze
Let the old world make believe
It's blind and deaf and dumb
(But) nothing can change the shape of things
Nothing can change the shape of things
Nothing can change the shape of things
Nothing can change the shape of things
To come

unmired..................

 

     Specifically, NASA was unable to predict solar particle storms, radioactive material spewed by the sun that can gravely damage astronauts and the equipment they depend on.  Solar physicists were understandably skeptical that outsiders could help, but after three decades of being stuck, there was nothing to lose; NASA posted through InnoCentive in 2009.  Within six months, Bruce Cragin, an engineer retired from Sprint Nextel and living in rural New Hampshire, solved the challenge using radio waves picked up by telescopes.  Pre-retirement, Cragin had collaborated with scientists, and found that those specialist teams often got mired in working out small details at the expense of practical solutions.  "I think it helped me being out of that," he said, "having moved on."  A NASA official noted, diplomatically, that "there was some resistance" to Cragin's solution at first, "because it was using a different methodology."

-David Epstein, Range:  Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World

A republic, if we can keep it...........

 

     Our constitutional system has endured for more than two centuries, but its preservation is not guaranteed.  Today, as at other critical times in our nation's history, it is an open question whether a constitutional system and culture that are "so ordered" can continue to flourish.

-Samuel A. Alito Jr., from the introduction to So Ordered: An Originalist's View of The Constitution, The Court, and Our Country

a balancing act..............

 

      A point Holmes recurred to was that many of the new rules that had evolved reflected efforts by courts to work out a balance between competing interests in society and establish standards of conduct so as to avoid conflict.  That meant the law was as much about setting policy as doing justice in individual cases: "In substance the growth of the law is legislative," he insisted.  To American legal theorists, that was an especially heretical idea.  They had been adamant that judges were not "legislators": that was a power reserved to the democratic will of the people, expressed through their elected representatives.

-Stephen Budiansky, Oliver Wendell Holmes: A Life in War, Law, and Ideas

strange times.............

 

A new generational war could prove devastating. Societies, noted Aristotle, are like ships: though the crew members have different roles, they all must work together on a common journey. Seniors and young people need each other, but the movement to confiscate the wealth of “the greedy geezer” can only fundamentally weaken society by turning parents against children and vice versa.

-Joel Kotkin, from this essay

A tune from 1962.....................

 

Booker T. & the M.G.s..........Green Onions

choices.......................

 

Interesting for certain...................

 

stingy....................

 

People are frugal in guarding their personal property; but a soon as it comes to squandering time they are most wasteful of the one thing in which it is right to be stingy.

-Seneca

yearning...................

 

Our consciousness yearns for transcendence, to feel we are a part of something greater than our individual selves.

-Robert Greene, The Law of The Sublime

coherent and livable..................

Holmes said he thought railing against the universe was like damning the weather or firing a gun at the sky; the only change it produced on the relation between man and the cosmos was the kick of the gun on the man who fired it.  "It seems to me that the only promising activity is make my universe coherent and livable, not to babble about the universe," he wrote (William) James in 1907.

-Stephen Budiansky, Oliver Wendell Holmes: A Life in War, Law, and Ideas

Wait . . . . . .what?..............