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

Joe Walsh.....The Smoker You Drink, The Player You Get

 

Highly recommended....................

 

     Billions of data points are available at any given moment and we collect only a small number.  With this glimpse through a keyhole, we assemble an interpretation and add another story to our collection.

     With each story we tell ourselves, we negate possibility.  Reality is diminished.  Rooms of the self are walled off.  Truth collapses to fit a fictional organizing principle we've adopted.

     As artists, we're called to let go of these stories, again and again, and blindly put our faith in the curious energy drawing us down the path.

     The artwork is the point where all the elements come together—the universe, the prism of self, the magic and discipline of transmuting idea to flesh.  And if these lead you into contradiction—into territories that seem unbridgeable or unknowable—that doesn't mean they aren't harmonious.

     Even in perceived chaos, there is order and pattern.  A cosmic undercurrent running through all things, which no story is immense enough to contain.

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

 The corruption inherent in absolute power derives from the fact that such power is never free from the tendency to turn man into a thing, and press him back into the matrix of nature from which he has risen. For the impulse of power is to turn every variable into a constant, and give to commands the inexorableness and relentlessness of laws of nature. Hence absolute power corrupts even when exercised for humane purposes. The benevolent despot who sees himself as a shepherd of the people still demands from others the submissiveness of sheep. The taint inherent in absolute power is not its inhumanity but its anti-humanity.

-Rob Firchau channeling Eric Hoffer

the end of the "in the background" posts?.....

      In middle age, the prefrontal cortex degrades in effectiveness, and this has several implications.  The first is that rapid analysis and creative innovation will suffer—just what we would expect when looking at the evidence on decline.  The second is that some specific, once-easy skills become devilishly hard, like multi-tasking.  Older people are much more easily distracted than younger people.  If you have—or had—teenage kids, you might have found yourself telling them they can't study effectively while listening to music and texting their friends.  Actually, it is you who can't do that.  If fact, older adults can enhance their cognitive effectiveness precisely by taking their own advice: turn off the phone and music and go someplace completely quiet to think and work.

-Arthur C. Brooks, From Strength to Strength

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

The Grass Roots.....................................Greatest Hits

 

On privilege........................

 Moreover, in politics as well as in philosophy and in religion the intellect of democratic nations is particularly open to simple and general notions.  Complicated systems are repugnant to it, and its favorite conception is that of a great nation composed of citizens all formed upon one pattern and all governed by a single power.

     The very next notion to that of a single and central power which presents itself to the minds of men in the ages of equality is the notion of uniformity of legislation.  As every man sees that he differs but little from those around him, he cannot understand why a rule that is applicable to one man should not be equally applicable to all others.  Hence the slightest privileges are repugnant to his reason; the faintest dissimilarities in the political institutions of the same people offend him, and uniformity of legislation appears to him to be the first condition of good government.

     I find, on the contrary, that this notion of a uniform rule equally binding on all members of the community was almost unknown to the human mind in aristocratic ages; either it was never broached, or it was rejected.

-Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Volume II,  Fourth Book, Chapter II

   

It's a pretty short list....................

 .............................................rules for life:

Mission creep..............................

 

more fun here

useful, provided you did not notice them....

The concept of the intellectual (though not the word) is new to the English language.  In the past we were in the habit of distinguishing the educated from the uneducated person.  And during the nineteenth century there were many educated people among our leaders—for example Disraeli and Gladstone, who between them did much to create the new style of politics, in which parties bargain for votes by promising goods that do not belong to them.  But the concept of the intellectual—as a creature whose social role is shaped by his critical posture outside society—was foreign to English life.  Coleridge had marked out an important role for the 'clerisy'; but he saw this class as a conservative force, maintained by church, university, and the professions.  The Romantic poet, the 'man of feeling', and the hermit had all be extolled and ridiculed, with Jane Austen and Thomas Love Peacock effectively putting a lid on their pretensions.  Thereafter, thinking and feeling re-assumed their old functions in social life: they were useful, provided you did not notice them.  The very idea that someone should draw attention to his intellect and emotions, and regard them as a qualification for overthrowing the established civil order, was anathema to the ordinary English person.

-Roger Scruton, An Intelligent Person's Guide to Modern Culture

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

 .................................Jim Brown:

a rule..................................

 Your Ma did the cooking and I hustled for things to cook, though I would take a shy at it myself once in a while and get up my muscle tossing flapjacks.  It was pretty rough sailing, you bet, but one way and another we managed to get a good deal of satisfaction out of it, because we had made up our minds to take our fun as we went along.  With most people happiness is something that is always just a day off.  But I have made it a rule never to put off being happy till tomorrow.  Don't accept notes for happiness, because you'll find that when they're due they're never paid, but just renewed for another thirty days.

-George H. Lorimer, Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son

rites of passage.................

      The youth culture prides itself on its inclusiveness.  That is to say, it removes all barriers to membership—all obstacles in the form of learning, expertise, allusion, doctrine, or moral discipline. For these would be rites of passage, constituting a tacit admission that to be young is not enough, that the world expects something, and that there is a higher stage of existence to which we all must eventually proceed.  This very inclusiveness, however, deprives the youth culture of human purpose.  It remains locked in the present tense, looking for good causes, spiritual icons, ways of representing itself as legitimate, but without crossing the fatal barrier into responsible adulthood.

-Roger Scruton, An Intelligent Person's Guide to Modern Culture (1998)

This chart measures.................

 .........the growth of interest payments on the U. S. debt.  Hang on.  It will be an interesting ride.

Turn off and tune out.................

 Our brains haven’t evolved to handle the deluge of bad news we now receive on a regular basis. Before 24/7 news, social media and alerts on our smartphones, most people simply weren’t aware of all the bad stuff occurring in the world.

-Ben Carlson

On "relative wealth"...............

 If our system is so unfair and “exploitative,” then why are tens of thousands of people every year willing to risk their health, even their lives, to try to get here? It’s because even poor people are rich, by comparative standards. The US is a marvel, but our friends on the left have to deny that, because admitting it would mean that their imaginary utopias are not actually better than the system we already have.

-Michael Munger, from this post

via

lists.......................

What gets you up in the morning?  What keeps you up at night?  If you're not working on these two lists, you're wasting your precious time.

-Alan M. Webber 

a picture...................

 A man who does not have a picture of the whole in his head cannot possibly arrange the pieces.

-Michel de Montaigne

worth....................

 Even when I was young, I just decided I was worth a lot more than the market thought I was worth, and I started treating myself that way.

-Naval Ravikant

vibration........................

     This is the essence of great art.  We make it for no other purpose than creating our version of the beautiful, bringing all of ourself to every project, whatever its parameters and constraints.  Consider it an offering, a devotional act.  We do best, as we see the best—with our own taste.  No one else's. . . .

      With the objective of simply doing great work, a ripple effect occurs.  A bar is set for everything you do, which may not only life your work to new heights, but raise the vibration of your entire life.  It may even inspire others to do their best work.  Greatness begets greatness. It's infectious. 

-Rick Rubin, The Creative Act: A Way of Being

Lightly........................

 Touch everything lightly, enjoy it while it is within your reach, and no not regret it when it is gone, since that is the nature of things.

-Massimo Pigliucci

A little bit of wisdom............

 What you do on your bad days matters more than what you do on your good days.

-Kevin Kelly

judged.........................

 Although I am always minded to say good of what is good, and inclined to interpret favorably anything that can be so interpreted, still it is true that the strangeness of our condition makes it happen that we are often driven to good by vice itself—were it not that doing good is judged by intention alone.

-Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Works, Book 2, Chapter 1

complexity.....................

 True wisdom requires discarding the intention heuristic. It requires accepting that the world is complex and that each individual is complex.

-Arnold S. Kling, from here

the line separating..................

 It was granted me to carry away from my prison years on my bent back, which nearly broke beneath its load, this essential experience: how a human being becomes evil and how good. In the intoxication of youthful successes I had felt myself to be infallible, and I was therefore cruel. In the surfeit of power I was a murderer, and an oppressor. In my most evil moments I was convinced that I was doing good, and I was well supplied with systematic arguments. And it was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains … an unuprooted small corner of evil.

-Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Gulag Archipelago.

sale pending.......................

 The commercialisation of modern life has been the subject of lamentation ever since it was first remarked upon, and ambitious theories—commodity fetishism, conspicuous consumption, the affluent society, and countless lesser attempts—have arisen from the natural revulsion that intellectuals feel towards the "getting and spending" of others.  But something new seems to be at work in the contemporary world—a process that is eating away the very heart of social life, not merely by putting salesmanship in place of moral virtue, but by putting everything—virtue included—on sale.  The cynic, said Oscar Wilde, is the one who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.  And in a letter to Lord Alfred Douglas he described sentimentality as "the bank holiday of cynicism". Wilde's quips tend to be more exciting that truthful.  These, however, are exact.  Cynicism and sentimentality are two ways in which things of value are demoted to things with a price.

-Roger Scruton, An Intelligent Person's Guide to Modern Culture