As the Soviets proved, lies don’t have staying power, but even passed hand to hand, truth and good art do.
-Matt Taibbi, from here
Saturday, March 9, 2024
a point of view............
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| Edward Hopper Cape Cod Morning Oil on Canvas 1950 |
It is a woman looking out to see if the weather is good enough to hang out her wash.
-Josephine Hopper remarking on her husband's painting, Cape Cod Morning.
Did I say that? You're making it Norman Rockwell. From my point of view she's just looking out the window, just looking out the window.
-Edward Hopper's reply
The very definition.........................
............................................of public service.
Who is not in favor....................
..........................of Type 2 growth?
In English there is a curious and unhelpful conflation of the two meanings of the word “growth.” The most immediate meaning is to increase in size, or increase in girth, to gain in weight, to add numbers, to get bigger. In short, growth means “more.” More dollars, more people, more land, more stuff. More is fundamentally what biological, economic, and technological systems want to do: dandelions and parking lots tend to fill all available empty places. If that is all they did, we’d be well to worry. But there is another equally valid and common use of the word “growth” to mean develop, as in to mature, to ripen, to evolve. We talk about growing up, or our own personal growth. This kind of growth is not about added pounds, but about betterment. It is what we might call evolutionary or developmental, or type 2 growth. It’s about using the same ingredients in better ways. Over time evolution arranges the same number of atoms in more complex patterns to yield more complex organisms, for instance producing an agile lemur the same size and weight as a jelly fish. We seek the same shift in the technium. Standard economic growth aims to get consumers to drink more wine. Type 2 growth aims to get them to not drink more wine, but better wine.
-Kevin Kelly
Friday, March 8, 2024
Thursday, March 7, 2024
On nectar and honey..............
There are two paths to magic: Imagination and paying attention. Imagination is the fiction we love, the truths built of falsehoods, glowing dust on the water's surface. Pay attention is about intentional noticing, participating in making meaning to lend new weight to our world. An acorn. The geometry of a beehive. The complexity of whale song. The perfect slowness of a heron.
Real magic requires your intention, your choice to harmonize. Of course it does. The heron cannot cast starlight onto the dark shadows to entrance the bluegills. Not unless you do your part. You must choose to meet her halfway. And when you do, you may find that magic isn't a dismissal of what's real. It's a synthesis of it, the nectar of fact becoming the honey of meaning.
the absurd beauty of it all.......
There are wonders here.
Things worth experiencing, worth knowing.
Magic hidden in plain sight.
Bats can hear shapes. Plants can eat light. Bees can dance maps. We can hold all these ideas at once and feel both heavy and weightless with the absurd beauty of it all. These are some facts that are easy to overlook.
These are facts that saved my life.
Some thoughts about AI.......
As soon as economists started doing experiments on generative AI, they found an incredibly consistent pattern: AI narrowed the productivity gap between high-skilled and low-skilled workers.
-Noah Smith, from here
Appreciation.......................
Instead of feeling guilty when someone helps you, your only obligation is to be grateful. Expressing appreciation doesn't just make givers feel good, it also motivates them to keep doing good. It allows them to feel values and shows them their time was well spent.
Generosity is not a loan to repay or a debt to settle. It's a gift to appreciate. Yes, you can reciprocate a favor by paying it back. But the best way to honor an act of kindness is by paying it forward.
-Adam Grant, from this substack
Wednesday, March 6, 2024
hijacks...............................
Our brains are special, fascinating miracles of the natural world, but they are also organs of the body. They are flesh and water and electricity, and the fact that they are the seat of our thoughts does not negate their physicality or susceptibility to sickness. Depression is, without any doubt, an illness and should be thought of as such.
If a virus hijacks the machinery of your cells to manufacture more of itself, you wouldn't talk ownership of the decision to produce viruses, would you? If you have a reaction to poison ivy, you wouldn't measure your self-worth by the itching of your skin, would you? Can you imagine considering chickenpox to be an indictment of your life or evidence that you are lesser than other people?
No.
So how is it that our self-worth and the value of our personhood becomes tied to the painful negative thoughts that depression sufferers neither willfully create nor invite into our lives? Depression is not a mirror held up to our identities, nor a yardstick with which to evaluate the quality of our essential selves.
It's the flu. It's a rash.
It's the emotional equivalent of a persistent headache.
faith..........................
I have known people who lost their faith in God during the Holocaust, and others who kept it. But that anyone can have faith in humanity after Auschwitz to me defies belief.
-Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning
Tuesday, March 5, 2024
Checking in................................
.............................with Jasper Johns:
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| Three Flags 1958 |
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| Target 1961 |
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| Between the clock and the bed 1989 |
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| Scent 1975-76 |
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| False Start 1959 |
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| Bread 1969 |
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| Dancers on a Plane 1981 |
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| 0 through 9 1961 |
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| Map 1961 |
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| Flag above white 1955 |
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| Target 1955 |
I make what it pleases me to make.. ..I have no ideas about what the paintings imply about the world. I don't think that's a painter's business. He just paints paintings without a conscious reason. I intuitively paint flags.
I made the flags and targets to open men's eyes.. ..[they] were both things - which are seen and not looked at - examined.
Sometimes I see it and then paint it. Other times I paint it and then see it. Both are impure situations, and I prefer neither. At every point in nature there is something to see. My work contains similar possibilities for the changing focus of the eye.
I assumed that everything would lead to complete failure, but I decided that didn't matter – that would be my life.
As one gets older one sees many more paths that could be taken. Artists sense within their own work that kind of swelling of possibilities, which may seem a confusion, or a freedom.
To be an artist you have to give up everything, including the desire to be a good artist.
Taking some of the fun..........
............................out of doing our taxes:
SOME 90% OF TAXPAYERS claim the standard deduction on their tax return. Thanks to 2017’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, today’s standard deduction is larger than the itemized deductions of most taxpayers, including those who previously itemized.
The wonder of accounting..............
Washington DC continues to spend much more than it gets in revenue. In the Calendar Year of 2023, the federal government spent $6.3 trillion, but only collected $4.5 trillion in taxes. This $1.8 trillion gap drove the national debt to $34 trillion in December 2023. And it is only going higher.
One problem with these budget numbers is that government accountants, rightly or wrongly, lowered spending in 2023 by about $300 billion after the Supreme Court struck down a large part of President Biden’s proposal to forgive student loans. That legal decision didn’t change the government’s cash flow last year in any significant way, but it did let the Department of Education “write up” the value of its loan portfolio by about $300 billion. This, they counted as “negative spending,” which then reduced the official budget deficit. So, while the reported deficit in 2023 was $1.8 trillion, the Treasury needed to borrow more than $2 trillion to make ends meet.
The high levels of borrowing are causing some investors to fear some sort of imminent and unprecedented snowballing of federal debt. Continual borrowing will lead to skyrocketing interest rates (and higher interest payments), which will lead to severe problems in the financial system.
Monday, March 4, 2024
refuse.......................
In particular, the Stoics don't think it is helpful for people to consider themselves victims of society—or victims of anything else, for that matter. If you consider yourself a victim, you are not going to have a good life; if, however, you refuse to think of yourself as a victim—if you refuse to let your inner self by conquered by your external circumstances—you are likely to have a good life, no matter what turn your external circumstances take.
-William B. Irvine, A Guide to the Good Life (the ancient art of stoic joy)
missing the point................
This old story is a myth, but it is not hard to imagine why such a story gets passed on. It tells a figurative truth within a literal falsehood, a pathway to a kind of knowledge.
Yes, technically speaking, it's a lie.
Technically speaking, you can look at any human life as the sum of a complex collection of chemical reactions, in much the same way as you can look at any beautiful painted as a simple collection of pigments, which is to say, you can miss the point of anything.
the common denominator.................
Mark Rothko Number 10 1950 Oil on canvas
It is really one of the most serious faults which can be found with the whole conception of democracy, that its cultural function must move on the basis of the common denominator. Such a point of view indeed would make a mess of all of the values which we have developed for examining works of art. It would address one end of education in that it would consider that culture which was available to everyone, but in that achievement it would eliminate culture itself.
This is surely the death of all thought.The trouble with really smart people......
Comedian Robin Williams was a terrible student. During a macroeconomic class at College of Marin, Williams’ final paper contained a single sentence to his professor: “I really don’t know, sir.”
He failed the test, but it’s the right answer to most economic problems.
-Morgan Housel, from here
Recommended....................
As the war drew to a close and Washington stepped down from command, he turned the army over to Knox, who was given the assignment of reducing it to 700 men. He demonstrated a prophetic vision as a statesman. While serving as secretary at war under the confederation government, Knox realized that he needed to redefine perceptions about the army to suit the needs of a democratic republic. Many prominent American leaders wanted to disband the army completely and viewed any force as antithetical to representative government. Knox created a vision of a new kind of army in which solders were instilled with the nation's most cherished values. He believed that soldiers could be trained to fight to preserve political ideals rather than geographic boundary lines, to love liberty more than personal ambition, and to value honor above greed and the spoils of war.
Entropy...........................
Entropy applies to every part of our lives. It is inescapable, and even if we try to ignore it, the result is a collapse of some sort. Understanding entropy leads to a radical change in the way we see the world. Ignorance of it is responsible for many of our biggest mistakes and failures. We cannot expect anything to stay the way we leave it. To maintain our health, relationships, careers, skills, knowledge, societies, and possessions requires never-ending effort and vigilance. Disorder is not a mistake; it is our default. Order is always artificial and temporary.
-Farnam Street, from here
Sunday, March 3, 2024
Life skills..................
it is an astonishment to be alive, and it behoves you to be astonished.
-attributed to John Donne
It's a process........................
Human intelligence is collective. Pretty much everything I know I learned from other people, either directly or indirectly.
-Arnold S. Kling, from here
Expectations..........................
Jack Levine The Feast of Pure Reason Oil 1937
The satirical direction I have chosen is an indication of my disappointment in man, which is the opposite way of saying that I have high expectations for the human race.
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