Friday, March 11, 2016
Life its ownself...................
"What does it all mean?" many wonder while chasing purposes they're told are worthwhile, but which feel empty. "What is the purpose of this life?" humans have wondered for millennia, contemplating how insignificant we are in the great cosmic symphony.
Well, as the preeminent mythologist Joseph Campbell said, deep down inside, we don't seek the meaning of life, but the experience of being alive. And that's what the nature of genius is ultimately about.
It's about how we can empower ourselves to bring true meaning to our lives and the lives of others in ways most people would consider impossible. It's about rising above a life of, as Thoreau said, "quiet desperation" that ends with our songs still in our hearts, and experience the rapture of true living. It's about saying yes to our adventures.
We rely on geniuses to entertain us, educate us, lead us, and show us all what our species is capable of. We rely on geniuses to give us smart phones, electric cars, cures for diseases, social networking sites, sublime art, world-class food, and, indeed, the very fabric of our culture.
If you've ever dreamed of playing a hand in the development of mankind, or if you just have a burning desire to improve one small aspect of it, then you have an adventure waiting.
Will you take it?
-Sean Patrick, Nikola Tesla: Imagination And The Man That Invented The 20th Century
This is true.....................
...................regardless of what country you live in:
The drive for change comes from two sources, one foolish, the other discreditable. The foolish idea is that you should aim to create the appearance of progressivity, not just in the tax system as a whole, but in every part of it — an idea which has added much avoidable complexity to the tax system in the past two decades. And the discreditable idea is that if you fiddle with the rules to raise more revenue now, the consequences will be a matter not for you but for your successors.
-John Kay, as excerpted from here
Thursday, March 10, 2016
We were all a lot younger then.........
The Rolling Stones................................................. The Last Time
Do you think these are true......?
A few sayings attributed to the very quotable John Dewey:
“We only think when confronted with a problem.”
“Art is the most effective mode of communications that exists.”
“The only way to abolish war is to make peace seem heroic.”
Consider.............................
Often, it is not enough to embrace limitations. Instead, consider creating limitations.
Why? Because it forces one to consider cost. Not just monetary, but also spatial, cognitive, and practical as well. It forces one to ask tough questions about real need versus desire.
-Patrick Rhone, Enough
Somehow............................
Fifty years ago..........................
The Rolling Stones.........................19th Nervous Breakdown
Metering.............................
Last-minute design changes were required, however, necessitating more money. Tesla had already obtained a second loan from Morgan, and when those funds ran out, he again approached the financier for additional capital. In an attempt to convince the powerful Morgan to invest another large sum, Tesla explained that the tower could be used for more than transmitting radio signals - it could be used to saturate the entire globe with electricity harmless to living things so that everyone could obtain usable power by simply sticking wires in the soil.
Morgan considered Tesla's words carefully and coldly replied, "If anyone can draw on the power, where do we put the meter?" He refused Tesla's pleadings for more money...
-Sean Patrick, Nikola Tesla: Imagination and the Man That Invented the 20th Century
the rain is made for singing in.............
Life happens. We can't possibly be prepared for it all. Decide to be adequately prepared for the things that matter to you, balanced with practicality and the realization that sometimes you are going to get a little wet no matter how many umbrellas you own.
Who knows? You might even have a little fun. Especially if instead of getting angry, you sing.
-Patrick Rhone, Enough
Wednesday, March 9, 2016
Magic............................
Pat Metheny Group............................................San Lorenzo
the stage properties...................
The world of medieval thought was deeply centered upon itself and the traditional myths of Christianity. In spite of sectarian clashes, Christians of the prescientific era saw the earth essentially as the platform of a divine, but short-lived drama - a drama so brief that there was little reason to study the stage properties. The full interest centered upon man - his supernatural origins, the drama of his Fall from the deathless Garden, the coming of his Redeemer, and the day of his Judgment.
Outside space was the Empyrean realm beyond time and blemish. Inside were corruption and a falling away from grace which were the consequence of man's sin. The atmosphere was not one to encourage scientific exploration. Men were busied about their souls, not about far voyages either in space or in time. They were contented with the European scene; they were devout and centered inward. It was indeed a centripetally directed society on an earth which itself lay at the center of the universe. Sinful though man had proved to be, he was of enormous importance to himself. The eye of God was constantly and undividedly upon him. The Devil, passing to and from upon Earth, contended for his soul. If man was not in all ways comfortable, he was at least valuable to divinities, and good and evil strove for the possession of his immortal being.
Then someone found a shell embedded in rock on a mountaintop; someone saw the birth of a new star in the inviolable Empyrean heavens, someone watched a little patch of soil carried by a stream into the valley. Another saw a forest buried under ancient clays and wondered. Some heretical idler observed a fish in stone. All these things had doubtless been seen many times before, but human interests were changing. The great voyages that were to open up the physical world had begun. The first telescope had been trained upon a star. The first crude microscope was turned upon a drop of ditch water. Because of these small buried events, a world would eventually die, only to be replaced by another - the world in which we now exist.
-Loren Eiseley, as extracted from The Firmament Of Time
As a rule...........................
"When great changes occur in history, when great principles are involved, as a rule the majority are wrong."
-attributed to Eugene V. Debs
Fifty years ago..................
The Capitols..........................................................Cool Jerk
How easy to forget..................
She (Jane Addams) found that the people she was trying to help had better ideas about how their lives might be improved than she and her colleagues did. She came to believe that any method of philanthropy or reform premised on top-down assumptions - the assumption, for instance, that the reformer's tastes or values are superior to the reformee's, or more simply, that philanthropy is a unilateral act of giving by the person who has to the person who has not - is ineffectual and inherently false.
-Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America
Tuesday, March 8, 2016
Essential................
....................Kurt started this, so blame him. Anyway, this is an ESSENTIAL album. Perfect for the long haul. Here is a taste:
Pat Metheny Group..............................................Lone Jack
The sun shines every day............
Stevie Ray Vaughan............................................Texas Flood
Real knowledge............................
"Confucius said that real knowledge is knowing the extent of one’s ignorance. Aristotle and Socrates said the same thing."
"Knowing what you don’t know is more useful than being brilliant."
-Charlie Munger, as culled from this interview
One reason why......................
...................................I majored in History. The professors never scheduled a class before 10:30. Times were simpler back then.
so restless.............................
...so restless is man's intellect that were he to penetrate the secret of the universe tomorrow, the likelihood is that he would grow bored on the day after.
-Loren Eiseley
Testing, 1 - 2 - 3.................
"This intelligence-testing business reminds me of the way they used to weigh hogs in Texas. They would get a long plank, put it over a cross-bar, and somehow tie the hog on one end of the plank. They'd search all around till they found a stone that would balance the weight of the hog and they'd put that on the other end of the plank. Then they'd guess the weight of the stone."
-attributed to John Dewey
The magic of............................
..............................................................Mr. Market.
y
“The economics of the cannabis industry show us that with
healthy competition in the market, prices drop, quality rises,
violence diminishes, and peaceful transactions increase.
Maybe we should just surrender in the "War on Drugs" and
declare victory. Back story here.
Fifty years ago........................
The Supremes.................................You Keep Me Hangin' On
I don't always enjoy.......................
....................Maureen Dowd's columns, but sometimes I do. A wee excerpt from her March 5th piece in the NYT:
"It’s delightful to see the encrusted political king-making class utter a primal scream as Trump smashes their golden apple cart. He’s a real threat to the cozy, greedy, oleaginous cartel, their own Creature from the Black Lagoon."
Monday, March 7, 2016
Till you came into my life.......
Al Wilson...........................................................Show and Tell
Good luck with that.......................
Peirce called himself an idealist, by which he meant that he believed that the universe is knowable because our minds are designed to know it. "In every form of material manifestation," he explained, "there is a corresponding form of human thought, so that the human mind is as wide in its range of thought as the physical universe which it thinks. The two are wonderfully matched." Thought and matter obey the same laws because both have common origin in the mind of a Creator. This is why the truths of mathematical reasoning (as Peirce often reminded his students) are God's truths. "The universe is a book written for man's reading," he said, echoing a metaphor of Galileo's. "The universal plan is apparent to every mind which yields itself to logical induction."
-Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America
Trying, unsuccessfully to date, to yield my mind to logical induction. Reading is one thing, understanding is another.
photo (enlargeable with description) here
A curve of possibilities................
If scientific laws are not absolutely precise, then scientific terminology has to be understood in a new way. Words like "cause" and "effect," "certainty" and "chance," even "hard" and soft" cannot be understood as naming fixed and discrete entities or properties; they have to be understood as naming points on a curve of possibilities, as guesses or predictions rather than conclusions. Otherwise, scientists are in danger of reifying their concepts - of imputing an unvarying essence to phenomena that are in a continual state of flux. Peirce was the first scientist to perceive all the implications of this problem...
Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America
On the up and square..........
Chorus: [singing] He's Popeye the Sailor Man. He's Popeye the Sailor Man. He's strong to the finich cause he eats his spinach, he's Popeye the sailor man.
Popeye: [singing] I'm one tough gazookas that hates all palookas that ain't on the up and square. I biffs 'em and buffs 'em and always out-roughs 'em and none of 'em gets nowhere.
Chorus: [singing] If anyone dashes to risks his fists, it's buff, and it's wham, understand?
Popeye: [singing] So keep good behavior, it's your one lifesaver, with Popeye the Sailor Man.
Fifty years ago..........................
Jimmy Ruffin..........................What Become of the Brokenhearted
Uncertainty...................................
Wright thought that metaphysical speculation - ideas about the origin, end, and meaning of life - came naturally to human beings. He didn't condemn such ideas out of hand, he just thought the should never be confused with science. For what science teaches is the the phenomenal world -the world we cans see and touch - is characterized, through and through, by change, and that our knowledge of it is characterized, through and through, by uncertainty.
His favorite illustration was the weather. Everyone believes that the weather is purely a product of physical cause and effect, but no one can predict it with certainty. "Unlike planetary perturbations, the weather makes the most reckless excursions from its averages, and obscures them by a most inconsequent and incalculable fickleness," he maintained in one of the first articles he ever published, "The Winds and the Weather," in 1858. We accept this state of affairs about the weather - that it is a perfectly lawful, rather mundane phenomenon whose complexity nevertheless vastly exceeds our ability to understand it - and yet we freely pontificate about the causes of human unhappiness and the future progress of society, things determined by factors presumably many times more complex than the weather...
It is not, Wright believed, that every event is not completely determined by physical causes. It is just that precise knowledge of those causes and how they operate is inaccessible to science in its present state - and considering the multitude of factors, each with its own probability of occurrence, involved in producing the outcome of even the simplest events, such as flipping a coin, that knowledge will probably remain inaccessible.
-Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America
Somedays...........................
...............................................he just takes my breath away.
Mirrored................................
"Man finds himself everywhere mirrored in nature. Wayward, inconstant, always seeking rest, always impelled by new evils, the greatest of which he himself creates, – protecting and cherishing or blighting and destroying the fragmentary life of a fallen nature, incapable himself of creating new capacities, but nourishing in prosperity and quickening in adversity those that are left, – he sees the workings of his own life in the strife of the elements. His powers and activities are related to his spiritual capacities, as inorganic movements are related to an organizing life. The resurrection of his higher nature is like a new creation, secret, sudden, inconsequent. 'The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, and whither it goeth; so is every one that is born of the Spirit.' "
-Chauncey Wright, the concluding paragraph to his 1858 essay, The Winds and the Weather
Sunday, March 6, 2016
Learning to live together..............
Tedeschi, Trucks, et. al............................................Space Captain
Young Van..............................
Them....................................................Baby Please Don't Go
Fifty years ago....................
Lovin' Spoonful.......................................................Daydream
Rigged..............................?
"For the past six months my Republican friends and I have watched Donald Trump’s ascendancy and asked ourselves whether the voters had gone crazy. The voters aren’t crazy. We in the Republican elite were crazy: we thought we could allow the American economy to remain a rigged game indefinitely. The voters think otherwise. That’s why Trump is winning. That’s also why Bernie Sanders, the least likely presidential candidate in living memory, gave Hillary Clinton a run for her money. If you don’t give people capitalism, the late Jude Wanniski used to say, they’ll take socialism."
-Spengler opines here on the staying power of Trump
It has been noted...................
..............that the pollsters have had a tough time predicting the future lately. Maybe it is because they are not asking the right questions. Sometimes nine-year-olds know best:
Can you imagine.......................
................................................a world without "experts"?
more fun charts here. via
Saturday, March 5, 2016
Kicking off a Saturday night.............
Cab Calloway/Nicholas Brothers et al.............Jumping Jive
More fun with charts..................
You may have seen this chart used as in indictment on our current economic situation, and maybe it is. But before going overboard, consider this:
"Incomes have not improved for the bottom 80% of Americans
over the last decade. Before I go on, recognize that the income
distribution is not static. The same people are not in each
decile today, as were in 2006."
The chart comes from this David Merkel post, wherein he lists a host of causes for mobility between the "deciles." Read it yourself, but my take-away is that technology driven change has driven a significant amount of our "income inequality." Here is another wee excerpt:
"...many feel that the comfortable life that was theirs has been
denied to them by forces beyond their control. They think that
shadowy elites want to turn previously well-off people into
modern serfs. It’s a tempting thought, because most of us
don’t like to blame ourselves."
growing the pie....................
"... the US has done well because we have not wrangled as much as the rest of the world over distribution issues, and have left a lot of room for people to gain a lot from their own productivity. That has led to a lot of wealth, and in general, a growing pie for everyone to benefit from.
Productivity goes in waves, and labor plays catchup with capital after technological progress. We have seen people redeployed from agriculture and servanthood/slavery in the past 150 years. We will see them redeployed from manufacturing in the next 100 years. They will provide services to their fellow men, should there continue to be peace and tranquility, allowing labor income to catch up with that of capital."
-David Merkel, as extracted from here
Continuing.........................
..........our conversation with David Merkel:
"Debt, debt, debt… debt is kind of like a snowflakes. A single snowflake is a pretty star, but one quintillion of them is a horrendous mess."
His take on our current debt situation is here.
Fifty years ago...........................
Bobby Hebb...............................................................Sunny
It was a long time ago.................
..............................but I don't remember junior high school as being anything like a "cozy emotional embryo."
"Are today’s students, then, brave reformers or fragile hothouse campus plants? Do they want to wade into freewheeling debate and battle all ideological comers, or do they insist on being protected by surrogate faculty parents, who must provide them the same cozy emotional embryos that they enjoyed in junior high school?"
A quote from Victor Davis Hanson does some research on a new breed: the cry-bully. Read about it here.
This strange juxtaposition...........
There are two ways to tell the story of the twentieth century. You can describe a series of wars, revolutions, crises, epidemics, financial calamities. Or you can point to the gentle but inexorable rise in the quality of life of almost everybody on the planet: the swelling of income, the conquest of disease, the disappearance of parasites, the retreat of want, the increasing persistence of peace, the lengthening of life, the advances in technology. I wrote a book about the latter story, and wondered why it seemed original and surprising to do so. It was surely gloriously obvious that the world was a much, much better place than it had ever been. Yet read the newspapers and you would think we had lurched from disaster to disaster, and faced a future of inevitable further disaster. Glance at school history curriculums and you find them utterly dominated by the disasters of the past - and the crises of the future. I could not quite reconcile in my mind this strange juxtaposition of optimism and pessimism. In a world that delivers an endless supply of bad news, people's lives get better and better.
-Matt Ridley, The Evolution of Everything: How New Ideas Emerge
Friday, March 4, 2016
Silky.................................
Dave Brubeck/Paul Desmond..................................Take Five
Just between us....................
George Strait..................................Love Without End, Amen
When a recommendation.............
...............comes from both Kurt Harden and Nicholas Bate, then action usually follows. In this case, the downloading of Patrick Rhone's Enough. May I suggest you do the same? From James Shelly's Forward:
Patrick Rhone is one of the new voices prompting us to rethink this old juxtaposition of attitudes. He stakes out a place between the absolutisms of unbridled consumption on one side and monastic luddism on the other. In this new sacred middle ground he asks us to reconsider everything in light of one simple value: enough.
I've always been a fan of the sacred middle. Looking forward to finishing the book. More later, I'm sure.
More or less...............
Less is never Enough.
Less is not more any more that more is less, more or less. It is only when we reduce more or increase less so as to satisfy our needs and desires the Enough can be found.
Enough is a very personal metric. Like our center of gravity, each of us must find what is enough by swaying from less to more until a comfortable medium is found.
-Patrick Rhone, as extracted from his Introduction to Enough
Fifty years ago.......................
The Cyrkle....................................................Turn Down Day
Dancing to a different tune.............
Don't confuse creativity and imagination with "thinking" either. Ray Bradbury said that thinking is the enemy of creativity because it is self-conscious. When you think you sit calmly and try to reason through something in a structured, logical way. Creativity dances to a different tune. Once you flip that switch, things get a bit chaotic. Ideas start buzzing. Images start popping into your head. Fragments of all kinds of data find their way into orbit. We're pulled in one direction, then suddenly our instincts send us flying in another. Material collides and fuses, disappears and reappears. This chaos is essential to the creative process. A breakthrough comes when pieces happen to come together in unique and harmonic ways.
-Sean Patrick, Nikola Tesla: Imagination and the Man That Invented the 20th Century
Hanging out..........................
....................................with heroes. John's got a pretty good list. Who would you hang with? My list would likely start with Ben Franklin, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, Chuck Yeager, and Winston Churchill.
Ungraspable.......................
The tiny particles which form the vast
universe are not tiny at all.
Neither is the vast universe vast.
These are notions of the mind,
which is like a knife, always
chipping away at the Tao, trying
to render it graspable
and manageable.
But that which is beyond form is
ungraspable, and that which is
beyond knowing is unmanageable.
There is, however, this consolation:
She who lets go of the knife will find
the Tao at her fingertips.
-Hua Hu Ching: The Unknown Teachings of Lao Tzu
Brian Browne Walker
image via
Thursday, March 3, 2016
Gonna work this out..............
George Strait.............................................I Hate Everything
Extremes.............................
"The most important fact about extreme weather is that the number of deaths caused by floods, droughts and storms has dropped by 93 per cent since the 1920s, despite a trebling of the world population; not because the weather has grown less wild, but because the world has grown rich enough to enable us to protect ourselves better."
-Matt Ridley, The Evolution of Everything
Nature.............................
“There is nothing very 'normal' about nature.”
-Loren Eiseley, The Immense Journey: An Imaginative Naturalist Explores the Mysteries of Man and Nature
photo via
Not sure how I missed it..................
..............but yesterday was Theodor Seuss Geisel's 112th birthday.
“I like nonsense, it wakes up the brain cells. Fantasy is a necessary ingredient in living, It's a way of looking at life through the wrong end of a telescope. Which is what I do, And that enables you to laugh at life's realities.”
-Dr. Seuss
Fifty years ago.....................
The Cyrkle...................................................Red Rubber Ball
The more things change.........................
A great nation is not saved by wars, James said; it is saved "by acts without external picturesqueness; by speaking, writing, voting reasonably; by smiting corruption swiftly; by good temper between parties; by the people knowing true men when they see them, and preferring them as leaders to rabid partisans or empty quacks." This is the behavior monuments should honor.
-Louis Menand, as excerpted from The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America
(the above quote was spoken by William James in an 1897 oration at the unveiling of the monument in Boston Commons erected in the honor of Civil War hero Robert Gould Shaw).
Just wondering if....................................
.....................................the newest migration patterns will lead to the re-naming of some cities?
Below is a map showing the European places with the word "Saint" in them. Think it might be different fifty years from now?
via
Wednesday, March 2, 2016
They say........................
Santana......................................................The Facts of Love
Be....................................
"Waste no more time arguing about what a good person should be. Be one."
-Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book Ten: 16
tenuous thread......................
“Since the first human eye saw a leaf in Devonian sandstone and a puzzled finger reached to touch it, sadness has lain over the heart of man. By this tenuous thread of living protoplasm, stretching backward into time, we are linked forever to lost beaches whose sands have long since hardened into stone. The stars that caught our blind amphibian stare have shifted far or vanished in their courses, but still that naked, glistening thread winds onward. No one knows the secret of its beginning or its end. Its forms are phantoms. The thread alone is real; the thread is life.”
-Loren Eiseley, The Firmament of Time
thanks john
Fifty years ago........................
Neil Diamond............................................Cherry, Cherry
Wonder how that's working..............?
"Asian observers try to understand American politics in rational terms."
-David P. Goldman
The quote comes from this post, wherein Spengler takes the gloves off.
(In related news: try this one out as a campaign slogan.)
Opening paragraphs.....................
The sun had just crested on the horizon like a misplaced planet, swollen and molten and red, lighting a landscape that seemed sculpted out of clay and soft stone and marked by the fossilized tracks of animals with no names, when a tall barefoot man wearing little more than rags dropped his horse's reins and eased himself off the horse's back and worked his way down an embankment into a riverbed chained with pools of water that glimmered as brightly as blood in the sunrise. The sand was the color of cinnamon and spiked with green grass and felt cool on his feet, even though they were bruised and threaded with lesions that were probably infected. He got to his knees and wiped the bugs off the water and cupped it to his mouth with both hands, then washed his face in it and pushed his long hair out of his eyes. His skin was striped with dirt, his trousers streaked with salt from the dried sweat of the horse. For an instant he thought he saw his reflection in the surface of the pond. No, that was not he, he told himself. The narrow face and the shoulder-length hair and the eyes that were like cups of darkness belonged on a tray or perhaps to a crusader knight left to the mercy of the Saracens.
"Venga!" he said to the horse. "You have to be instructed to drink? It is no compliment to me that the only horse I could steal is probably the dumbest in Pancho Villa'a army, a horse that didn't have the courtesy to wear a saddle."
-James Lee Burke, House Of The Rising Sun
Jetboy............................
...............................................is playing dedications. Sweet.
Tuesday, March 1, 2016
While I was away......................
I was going to host................
................an introvert party, but Scott beat me to it. Called down to the bullpen and they sent this one up:
Life would be a lot less interesting without Doug Savage.
a long-standing human tradition.............
"...there is a long-standing human tradition to become so enthusiastic about a favoured scientific, religious or superstitious explanation for the world as to close your mind and come to hate those who disagree. We have seen it far too often to ignore it, and scientists have shown themselves no better than the rest of us at resisting the urge."
-Matt Ridley
Fifty years ago........................
Cher (written by Sonny).........................................Bang Bang
Reading with a dictionary................
So, I started reading Louis Menand's The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America. It didn't take me long to figure out that his vocabulary makes mine look a bit inchoate.
Here is a start to my list of words that needed to be looked up:
afflatus
belletrist
aperçus
peripeteia
meretricious
frisson
Have you used any of these words lately? Just wondering.
Certainty............................
In the midst of this mutilation and mayhem, Holmes (Oliver Wendell Jr.) did an extraordinary thing: he road tested his beliefs. Lying in a hospital on Harrison's Island, watching his comrades dying around him and listening to rumors that the building was about to be shelled, he interrogated his philosophical convictions in order to discover whether there were any he now might want to revise. He was undergoing an experience of terror that nothing in his life had prepared him for, and he decided to solicit his own reactions to it...He found he did not require a religious faith. Uncertainty - "I am to take a leap in the dark" - turned out to be all the certainty he needed. The assurance that he had done his duty was a wholly adequate consolation.
-Louis Menand, The Metaphysical Club: A Story of Ideas in America
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