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

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

 

Righteous Brothers............Soul and Inspiration

understanding......................

 

They had cliche answers but only to their self-created straw-men. To exaggerate only slightly, they had never talked to anyone who really believed, and had thought deeply about, views drastically different from their own. As a result, when they heard real arguments instead of caricatures, they had no answers, only amazement that such views could be expressed by someone who had the external characteristics of being a member of the intellectual community, and that such views could be defended with apparent cogency. Never have I been more impressed with the advice I once received: "You cannot be sure that you are right unless you understand the arguments against your views better than your opponents do."

-Milton Friedman, as cut-and-pasted from here

Avoidance...................

 

There is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the real labor of thinking.

-Robert B. Cialdini

In praise of crooked trees..........

 

We have convinced ourselves that being “smart” is the same thing as being useful. It's not.

Language is a tool used to shape reality. When we continue to culturally degrade language that once pointed toward something difficult and valuable, we devalue the very thing it pointed toward. We no longer have a reliable way to name genuine excellence because we have spent the word on light bulbs, algorithmic patterns, and passive-aggressive comebacks.

It is time to retire “smart” from this type of casual drivel.

Let it rest until we're able use it to describe a mind that sees the wonder others dismiss, holds conclusions lightly but courageously, changes its mind when the evidence demands it, and remains humble in the face of what it does not yet understand.

-Rob Firchau, from this post

While hunting and gathering.............

 

 . . . shaped my future productivity strategies: focus on what matters most, since you rarely have time for everything. In the end, prioritising what truly matters is the key to meaningful achievement.

-Nicholas Bate

choosing..........

 

Focus means choosing what doesn’t matter.  What you refuse to do determines what you can do.

-Shane Parrish, from this edition

On mastery.....................

 

Mastering others is strength; mastering yourself is true power.

-attributed to Lao-Tzu

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

 

The Beatles................................Michelle

Odds and ends...............

 

sovereignty.................

 

     The vanity of the ego is endless and vainglorious in its grandiose delusion that it can disprove the existence of God. . . .

     Why does the mind even struggle so valiantly to try to supplant Divinity?  The answer is that it really refutes and secretly hates any sovereignty other than its own.  That is the self-perpetuating core of narcissism.

-David R. Hawkins, Reality, Spirituality, and Modern Man

In support of publick virtue.............

 

A general Dissolution of Principles & Manners will more surely overthrow the Liberties of America than the Whole Force of the Common Enemy.  While the People are virtuous they cannot be subdued; but when once they lose their Virtue they will be ready to surrender their Liberties to the first external or internal Invader.  How necessary then is it for those who are determind to transmit the Blessings of Liberty as a fair Inheritance to Posterity, to associate on publick Principles in Support of publick virtue.

-Samuel Adams, from this 2/12/1779 letter

wrestling with catastrophe.............

 

And so we’re in a very dim and grim time, but we have to have a blues sensibility. And the blues is about wrestling with catastrophe, but never allowing catastrophe to have the last word, because we have a love and a courage and a joy inside of us that can never be taken away.

-Cornell West, as lifted from here

Opening paragraphs................

 

     The first time I set eyes on Vincent I was standing in the snow next to my father, trembling under the authority of a loaded shotgun.  I remember that it had been a perfect night for poaching.  January cold and windless.  A full moon had whitewashed the thin layer of fog that lingered above the feeder creeks.  Above the sky was clear; below, the ground hard.  Deer had moved down from the forest to glean the wheat fields on Count Robert de Costebelle's estate.   Buyers in Paris waited in the wings, ready to pay cash for a carcass in good condition.

     I recall my father cursing and I remember wanting to hit him for being old and hardheaded and most of all for getting us caught.  A small gnarly terrier scurried between my feet, uprooting pockets of snow in a fit of agitation.  Vincent stood next to his uncle, Serge Lebuison, gamekeeper of Merlecourt.  The year was 1958.  I was eighteen years old.

-Guy De La Valdène, Red Stag

thanks Rob

Society.....................

 

Society is concerted action, cooperation.

     Society is the outcome of conscious and purposeful behavior.  This does not mean that individuals have concluded contracts by virtue of which they have founded human society.  The actions which have brought about social cooperation and daily bring it about anew do not aim at anything else than cooperation and coadjuvancy with others for the attainment of definite singular ends.  The total complex of the mutual relations created by such concerted actions is called society.  It substitutes collaboration for the—at least conceivable—isolated life of individuals.  Society is division of labor and combination of labor.  In his capacity as an acting animal man becomes a social animal. 

     . . . The individual lives and acts within society.  But society is nothing but the combination of individuals for cooperative effort.  It exists nowhere else than in the actions of individual men.  It is a delusion to search for it outside the actions of individuals.  To speak of a society's autonomous and independent existence, of its life, its soul, and its actions is a metaphor which can easily lead to crass errors.

-Ludwig Von Mises, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics

Hallelujah........................

 

This world is full of conflicts and full of things that cannot be reconciled. But there are moments when we can … reconcile and embrace the whole mess, and that’s what I mean by ‘Hallelujah.'

-Leonard Cohen, as channeled by Tim Ferriss

A question answered......................

 

........The why behind Mitigating Chaos.  Keep it going.

In the background (as it so often is)......

 

The Allman Brothers Band..............Eat A Peach

Well worth the trip...............

 

more fun here

straying....................

 

The two ideas of human freedom and economic freedom working together came to their greatest fruition in the United States.  Those ideas are still very much with us.  We are all of  us imbued with them.  They are part of the very fabric of our being.  But we have been straying from them.  We have been forgetting the basic truth that the greatest threat to human freedom is the concentration of power, whether in the hands of government or anyone else.  We have persuaded ourselves that it is safe to grant power, provided it is for good purposes.

     Fortunately, we are waking up.  We are again recognizing the dangers of an overgoverned society, coming to understand that good objectives can be perverted by bad means, that reliance on the freedom of people to control their own lives in accordance with their own values is the surest way to achieve the full potential of a great society.

-Milton & Rose Friedman, as they conclude their 1979 book, Free to Choose: A Personal Statement

Insuperable limits.............

 

If man is not to do more harm than good in his efforts to improve the social order, he will have to learn that in this, as in all other fields where essential complexity of an organized kind prevails, he cannot acquire the full knowledge which would make mastery of the events possible. He will therefore have to use what knowledge he can achieve, not to shape the results as the craftsman shapes his handiwork, but rather to cultivate a growth by providing the appropriate environment, in the manner in which the gardener does this for his plants. There is danger in the exuberant feeling of ever growing power which the advance of the physical sciences has engendered and which tempts man to try, “dizzy with success”, to use a characteristic phrase of early communism, to subject not only our natural but also our human environment to the control of a human will. The recognition of the insuperable limits to his knowledge ought indeed to teach the student of society a lesson of humility which should guard him against becoming an accomplice in men’s fatal striving to control society – a striving which makes him not only a tyrant over his fellows, but which may well make him the destroyer of a civilization which no brain has designed but which has grown from the free efforts of millions of individuals.

-Friedrich August von Hayek, from his 1974 Nobel Prize lecture

Basic concepts.................

 

more fun here

Supernova Remnant Cassiopeia A............

 

Enlargeable photo and description may be found here.  I love the confidence they project in describing what we are looking at.

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

 

Bob Marley & the Wailers....Rastaman Vibration

Color me skeptical too...............

 

The hot new theory online is that reading is kaput, and therefore civilization is too. The rise of hyper-addictive digital technologies has shattered our attention spans and extinguished our taste for text. Books are disappearing from our culture, and so are our capacities for complex and rational thought. We are careening toward a post-literate society, where myth, intuition, and emotion replace logic, evidence, and science. Nobody needs to bomb us back to the Stone Age; we have decided to walk there ourselves.

I am skeptical of this thesis.

-more on the subject from Adam Mastroianni here

A playful mind is inquisitive..........

 

Selling out is usually more a matter of buying in.  Sell out, and you're really buying into someone else's system of values, rules, and rewards.

-Bill Watterson, from his 1990 Commencement address at his alma mater, Kenyon College

A few more snippets:

A playful mind is inquisitive, and learning is fun. If you indulge your natural curiosity and retain a sense of fun in new experience, I think you’ll find it functions as a sort of shock absorber for the bumpy road ahead. . . .

We’re not really taught how to recreate constructively. We need to do more than find diversions; we need to restore and expand ourselves. Our idea of relaxing is all too often to plop down in front of the television set and let its pandering idiocy liquefy our brains. Shutting off the thought process is not rejuvenating; the mind is like a car battery — it recharges by running.

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

 

There is too much tendency to look inward at one's own moods, and to try to evaluate them.  To stand on the outside and try to look inside is futile; whatever was there will go away.  This also applies to a nebulous thing described as "Happiness."  To try to identify it is like turning on a light to look at the darkness.  Analyze it, and it is gone.

-Striking Thoughts: Bruce Lee's Wisdom for Daily Living

Scaling.......................

 

     Kroc sees the genius behind the Speedee Service System.  The genius isn't only in its ability do deliver a perfect burger within seconds.  The true genius is that it can be replicated nearly anywhere on planet Earth.  And that, as we know, is exactly what Ray Kroc did.  He took the Speedee Service System and went big time, bugger than even the brothers had anticipated.  He applied their methodology to thousands of McDonald's restaurants across the globe.  The brothers started with one store in 1937.  By 2020, there were almost forty thousand across the globe. . . .

Unlimited predictability is more valuable than intermittent quality.

-Dan Martell, Buy Back Your Time: Get Unstuck, Reclaim Your Freedom, and Build Your Empire

I don't know...........................

 

Whatever success I've had has been more due to my knowing how to deal with what I don't know than anything I know.  Betting on the future is betting on probabilities and nothing is certain, not even the probabilities.  That's just the way it is.  While what I've given you up until this point is what I believe I know about the future based on my reasoning about the past, what I want to pass along that is probably more important is how I make decisions in life and in the markets based on what I don't know.  In a nutshell, here's what I try to do:

 *  Know all the possibilities, think about the worst-case scenarios and then find ways to eliminate the intolerable ones.

  * Diversify.

  * Put deferred gratification ahead of immediate gratification so you will be better off in the future.

  * Triangulate among the smartest people possible.

Ray Dalio, Principles for Dealing with The Changing World Order:  Why Nations Succeed and Fail

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

 Joan Armatrading....the Joan Armatrading album