On intentional scheduling...............

 

Here’s the standard interpretation of this result: Social media is distracting, and if you’re distracted, it becomes harder to maintain control over your schedule. So, the more you use social media, the worse you become at time management.

But I’ve become interested in the reverse form of this argument: the better your planning system, the less time you’ll spend on engagement-based applications like social media.

-Cal Newport, as posted here

WTF...............................

 The truth does not reveal itself to idle spectators.

Stepping outside the intellectually serious circle of my teachers at Chicago into broader academic world, it struck me as an industry hostile to thinking.

Process becomes more important than product.

What the hell is going on?  Is this our society as a whole, buying more education only to scale new heights of stupidity?

Tocqueville foresaw a "soft despotism" in which Americans would increasingly seek their security in, and become dependent upon, the state.  His analysis must be extended to our time: the softly despotic tendencies of a nanny state are found in the large commercial enterprise as well, and indeed a case could be made that it is now outsized corporations, more than government, that exercise this particularly enervating form of authority in our lives, through work.

-some thoughts culled from Matthew Crawford's Shop Class as Soulcraft

Wave of the future..............?

 more fun here

Community.................

 Communities depend upon the force which Burke called prejudice; they are essentially local, bound to a place, a history, a language and a common culture.  The Enlightened individualist, by forgoing such things, lives increasingly as a stranger among strangers, consumed by a helpless longing for an attachment which his own cold thinking has destroyed.

     These conflicts within Enlightenment culture are part of its legacy to us.  We too are individualists, believers in the sovereign right of human freedom, living as strangers in a society of strangers.  And we too are beset by those ancient and ineradicable yearnings for something else—for a homecoming to our true community.

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

The time they are a changin'—Part 2

Come gather 'round, people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You'll be drenched to the bone
If your time to you is worth savin'
And you better start swimmin'
Or you'll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin'

Come writers and critics
Who prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide
The chance won't come again
And don't speak too soon
For the wheel's still in spin
And there's no tellin' who
That it's namin'
For the loser now
Will be later to win
For the times they are a-changin'

Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don't stand in the doorway
Don't block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
The battle outside ragin'
Will soon shake your windows
And rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin'

Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don't criticize
What you can't understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is rapidly agin'
Please get out of the new one
If you can't lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin'

The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
The slow one now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
The order is rapidly fadin'
And the first one now
Will later be last
For the times they are a-changin'

-Bob Dylan, circa 1963

On acid and Prozac.....................

via

Decisions......................

“I wish it need not have happened in my time,"  said Frodo.
"So do I,"  said Gandalf,  "and so do all who live to see such times.  But that is not for them to decide.  All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.” 

― J.R.R. Tolkien, The Fellowship of the Ring

Hoping to miss out on Step 4..................

      via

Chronicles of Defunction............

Alas, they had the Big Idea. Too, they were exemplars of temperance — workaholic instead, and probably incorruptible, in that sterile, short-sleeve, Puritan way. This is of the essence of liberalism and progress. It is a matter of stolid conviction, in opposition to all human experience. Everything is done consciously, nothing by instinct. Statistics are gratuitously gathered, and constantly reviewed. Everything must be managed, to the end of eliminating anything that smacks of a living tradition, spontaneity, or morale.

The (ancient) Greeks, who knew a thing or two about tyranny, felt that no decision should be made until it had become unavoidable, by when it would have been discussed, in a leisurely and therefore thorough way, sometimes drunk and sometimes sober. If the same conclusion is reached by both methods — by the coffee method and by the whisky method, as it were — then, and only then, should we dare proceed.

- David Warren, as culled from this post

Seeking............................

............................................................................immortality.

This is one bandwagon........................

.........................I won't be getting on.  Talk about slippery slopes...

There is no shame......................

....................................in losing a bet with Warren Buffett.

"Studies of human behavior repeatedly point to the inability of investors to stay the course through tough times."

-as quoted from this Ted Seides post

via

Creeping and crawling...........................

While the trend line looks okay, the recovery of the single-family residential construction business has been painfully slow.    Isn't it about time you built a new home for yourself, people?    Please.

Have I told you lately that we have some fabulous, reasonably priced, wooded home sites available?

enlargeable image here

There is no accounting for people.............

 "It was nevertheless shocking to learn this weekend that Trump ordered a $54 dry-aged strip steak well done, with ketchup. At every step, this is tragic."

-as culled from here

via

There is an ancient......................

..............Chinese curse that goes something like:  "May you live in interesting times."  I'm thinking we should update it to:  "May you live when Scott Adams is the smartest guy in the room."

An unexpected conclusion.................

.......................................to a post titled, It was the best of times, it was the second best of times:

"Still, I see Trump as a pretty small cloud attached to an awfully big silver lining."

Witches..................................

     Hobbes was sceptical of tales about ghosts and witches, and this scepticism was itself regarded in some quarters as evidence of irreligion, or at least insufficient respect for spiritual matter.  Denying that there was such a thing as a witch was almost as bad as being one.  There were other enlightened thinkers who shared Hobbes's disdain for stories of supernatural creatures stalking the villages of England;  but the belief in witches was a powerful force in his day, perhaps because these were unsettled times.  A third or more of all the people executed for witchcraft in England between the fifteenth and eighteenth centuries were dispatched in the mid-1640s by Matthew Hopkins, the self-described "Witch-finder General," and his associates, just when Hobbes was working out the consequences of his materialist philosophy.

-Anthony Gottlieb,  The Dream Of Enlightenment:  The Rise Of Modern Philosophy

If you want to read something scary, read this.

It has been one of those......................

via

A suggestion that we get a grip...........

"We are in the midst of our tenth consecutive 'most important election in our lifetime!'  This nonsense is really starting to get old."

-As excerpted from this brief primer on the history of American electoral politics (and he left out the, arguably, most important election of all - 1800's Adams v Jefferson).

Might have something to do................

...................with a gratitude shortage.  That would be my best guess.

"I think we need to find out why the citizens of the world's wealthiest, most envied, most powerful country are so cynical, so distressed, so angry, so ticked of about so many things."

-William J. Bennett