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

Jefferson Airplane..........Surrealistic Pillow album

 

play your own game...............

Personally, I cringe when I hear that individual investors are “disadvantaged” because they don’t have access to things like private equity and that the only answer is to provide them with access through the “democratization of finance.”

Why?

Because the answer to a lack of resources is not to follow others. Rather, the answer is to be different. To be creative. To think outside the box. . . . a lack of resources means you have something they don’t — a license to be creative. It means you have the chance to play your own game, do things differently, and adhere to a game plan unique to you.

-Ted Lamade, from this episode

Today, I will be following this advice....

 

as cut-and-pasted from here

A Wall Street guy...........

 

.................................................who gets it.

Got me.................

 

more fun here

activate our presence..................

 

Does it need to be said? We are not machines. Our lives are not data problems that can be quantitatively optimized. And the actual human ability to attend is something much more expansive and much more beautiful than a tool for filtering information or extending our time on task. True attention lies at the heart of personhood: reason, judgment, memory, curiosity, responsibility, the feeling of a summer day, the burying of our dead. All of these require and activate our presence. As for mental functions that can be measured and indexed — and ultimately bought and sold — they are precisely the kind of attention we need to escape.

-from the essay, “The Multi-Trillion-Dollar Battle for Your Attention Is Built on a Lie”

thanks Rob

the full attention..............

The authentic and pure values — truth, beauty and goodness — in the activity of a human being are the result of one and the same act, a certain application of the full attention to the object.

-Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace

Mixed blessings....................?

 

     The legendary Morgan was seventy years old in the fall of 1907, nearing the end of his epic reign.  Founded in 1871, J. P. Morgan & Co. was regarded as the "greatest international banking firm in the world" and "what the business world considered the headquarters of financial power."  No single person in the history of Wall Street had ever wielded more power and influence than J. Pierpont Morgan.  Under his rule, the House of Morgan had helped modernize the American economy, transforming the sprawling hinterland of relatively small companies that characterized nineteenth-century capitalism into the mighty corporate structures that dominated the twentieth century.

-Andrew Ross Sorkin, 1929: Inside The Greatest Crash In Wall Street History And How It Shattered A Nation

Reading with a dictionary at hand.............

 

     Bear in mind that equivocity is true to being only as one way of attending to and speaking of being.  It is true to being as relative to being and as relative to the other senses of being.  Against ironic postmodern truth-refusal and metamodern oscillations between sincerity and indifference at the expense of truth, Chesterton guides his readers to notice how preconceptions can warp attention and prevent clear perception.  This is perhaps nowhere more evident than in his detective fiction, which draws attention to puzzlement and indefiniteness, as well as the unexplained intractabilities of reality.  Fitting the metaxological mode of attention at the heart of Chesterton's journalistic metaphysics, his interest is in restoring the adventurous side of life where the comfort of the overly familiar has caused us to lose our primal astonishment and foundational perplexity.  How can we feel at home if we have lost a sense of wonder?  That would not be home but a prison for the soul.  And how can we truly wonder if we have no place of refuge?  Without a safe haven, wonder turns into terror.

      Chesteronian defamiliarization may be misunderstood as an attempt to restore passivity to the perceiver, given that univocity tends to put people in an active relationship with reality, albeit still unconscious and devoid of reflective reasoning.  This is only part of the truth.  As suggested, Chesterton wants to resist the "worship of law," especially the worship of arbitrary human laws, by restoring difference.  But the deeper aim of this strategy is to restore the possibility of genuine consciousness and real choice; that means recovering participation in reality.

-Duncan Reyburn, The Roots of the World: The Remarkable Prescience of G. K. Chesterton

Beer...is there nothing it can't do?.........

 

     Tempting though it is to attribute the adoption of agriculture entirely to beer, it seems most likely that beer drinking was just one of many factors that helped to tip the balance away from hunting and gathering and toward farming and a sedentary lifestyle based on small settlements.  Once this transition had begun, a ratchet effect took hold: The more farming was relied on as a means of food production by a particular community, and the more its population grew, the harder it was to go back to the old nomadic lifestyle based on hunting and gathering.

     Beer drinking would also have assisted the transition to farming in a more subtle way.  Because long-term storage of beer was difficult, and complete fermentation takes up to a week, most beer would have been drunk much sooner, while still fermenting.  Such a beer would have a relatively low alcohol content by modern standards but would have been rich in suspended yeast, which dramatically improved its protein and vitamin content.  The high level of vitamin B, in particular, would have compensated for the decline in the consumption of meat, the usual source of that vitamin, as hunting gave way to farming.

-Tom Standage, A History of the World in 6 Glasses

refilling...........................

 

The safety instructions the flight attendant delivers before takeoff are clear: "Put your own oxygen mask on first before assisting others."  But when you're in the hospitality industry, that instruction can feel counterintuitive.  Aren't we supposed to put others first and attend to them before we attend to ourselves?

     The answer is no.  If you aren't tending to your own needs, you can't help those around you.  Pride and ambition motivated us to push—to tweak, to optimize, to work harder, demanding more of ourselves and those around us every day.  But you can't pour endlessly from your own pitcher without ever stopping to refill it.

-Will Guidara, Unreasonable Hospitality: The Remarkable Power of Giving People More Than They Expect

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

Jeff Fetterman................Bottle Full of Blues

  

accepts......................

 

      Humility  is, above all, honesty.  True humility neither exaggerates nor minimizes, but accepts.

-Kurtz and Ketcham, The Spirituality of Imperfection: Storytelling and the Search for Meaning

breezing...................

 

     I've always found it hard to conform to the so-called standards.  Each time a teacher or an adult told me I shouldn't do this or that, I'd nod but let their words breeze past me.  I refused to believe there was only one path in life.

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

Consequences..............

 

     Over time, first the Spanish, then the French, then the British stepped into the African marketplace that the Portuguese had created.  Although the word "capitalism" had not yet entered the lexicon, The Atlantic Slave Trade flourished for one elemental reason: it was the most lucrative investment available for Europe's merchants, bankers, and landed aristocracy.  And until late in the game—the middle years of the eighteenth century—one would be hard pressed to hear any criticism of such a flourishing enterprise.  Moral blindness made eminent economic sense.

-Joseph J. Ellis, The Great Contradiction: The Tragic Side of the American Founding

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

Barry McGuire.............................Eve of Destruction

 

national amnesia............

 

It’s difficult to think of a more divisive way of addressing sensitive personnel issues, but many power bases in America had been infected with the idea that discrimination on behalf of some racial and ethnic groups was not only permissible, but commendable. A common message on campuses was that discrimination against whites, and particularly white males, was necessary to eliminate imbalances.

These beliefs, which would never have been accepted by the nation which embraced the “no one should be subjected to racial discrimination” message of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, amazingly caught hold. It was as if there was national amnesia. They were soon joined by programs that were less focused on behavior – a clear and measurable standard – than on the far more intangible and elusive issue of feelings.

-Michael Wade, from here

secure.....................

Humility is just as much the opposite of self-abasement as it is of self-exultation.  To be humble is not to make comparisons.  Secure in its reality, the self is neither better nor worse, bigger nor smaller, than anything else in the universe.  It is—is nothing, yet at the same time one with everything.

-Dag Hammarskjold, Markings

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

John Haydock..........Going Slow in the Outside Lane

 

curiously........................

 

The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.

-Carl Rogers, as quoted here

navigating the social world..........

 

My hypothesis is that psychology usually operates close to the boundary between science and baloney sandwich. The reason is that all of us believe in some sort of folk psychology. In order to navigate the social world, we have to try to predict how other people will behave. We necessarily formulate psychological theories. We end up judging an academic’s psychological theory by how well it aligns with our personal folk psychology. This creates a playing field on which it is hard to tell by the uniform who is on the scientific team and who isn’t. It is likely that none of us are fully on the scientific team.

-Arnold Kling, from here

the best test of truth............

Persecution for the expression of opinions seems to me perfectly logical. If you have no doubt of your premises or your power, and want a certain result with all your heart, you naturally express your wishes in law, and sweep away all opposition. To allow opposition by speech seems to indicate that you think the speech impotent, as when a man says that he has squared the circle, or that you do not care wholeheartedly for the result, or that you doubt either your power or your premises. When men have realized that time has upset many fighting faiths, they may come to believe even more than they believe the very foundations of their own conduct that the ultimate good desired is better reached by free trade in ideas—that the best test of truth is the power of the thought to get itself accepted in the competition of the market, and that truth is the only ground upon which their wishes safely can be carried out. That, at any rate, is the theory of our Constitution. It is an experiment, as all life is an experiment

-Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, from this dissent

A conversation between...................

 

............John Mayard Keynes and Swiss banker Felix Somary (according to Somary) in April of 1928:

Keynes asked me what I was advising clients.  'To insulate themselves as much as possible from the coming crisis, and to avoid the markets,' I replied.

Keynes took the opposite view.  'We will not have any more crashes in our time', he insisted, and asked me in detail for my opinions about individual companies.

'I think the market is very appealing and prices are low,' said Keynes.  'And where is the crash coming from in any case?'

'The crash will come from the gap between appearances and reality.  I have never seen such stormy weather gathering,' I said.

-Edward Chancellor, The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest