Inquiring minds would like to know......

A prayer......................................

 Can we please lay down our swords of vitriol and venom? Might we pray for peace and it begin with me, each of us? We pray for a peace that surpasses party, personal preferences, and tightly held prejudices.

-as culled from this post

ideal......................................

 . . . "my ideal of a scientific man, accepting nothing upon authority, but putting every scientific theory to the severest test. . . . I hope I have learned from Professor Ludwig's precept and practice that the most important lesson for every man of science, not to be satisfied with loose thinking and half-proofs, not to speculate and theorize but to observe closely and carefully."

-William Henry Welch, as quoted in John Barry's The Great Influenza:  The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History

The more things change.........................

 Machiavelli had the good fortune always to be disappointed by the statesmen he met.  None, it turned out, measured up to the situation; none was ready to act with the sharpness, decisiveness, and speed that the quality of the times demanded.  It was good fortune, in a way, when you consider the moral and literary depths to which intellectuals can descend when they become entranced with a powerful figure.  If that figure captures their admiration, their intelligence soon capitulates.

     Machiavelli tried to find princes to admire, but when he found none he was forced to invent a Prince on paper.

-Patrick Boucheron, Machiavelli:  The Art of Teaching People What To Fear

On Quarterbacks............................

 ......in the most loving and kind way, a harsh assessment.

"regret minimization framework".....................

      To make the decision, Bezos used a mental exercise that would become a famous part of his risk-calculation process.  He called it a "regret minimization framework."  He would imagine what he would feel when he turned eighty and thought back to the decision.  "I want to have minimized the number of regrets I have," he explains.  "I knew that when I was eighty, I was not going to regret having tried this.  I was not going to regret trying to participate in this thing called the internet that I thought was going to be a really big deal.  I knew that if I failed, I wouldn't regret that, but I knew the one thing I might regret is not ever having tried.  I knew that that would haunt me every day.

-Walter Isaacson, from the Introduction to Invent & Wander:  The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos

Regrets, I've had a few, but then again............

Frank Sinatra.................................................................My Way

 

Unmoved....................................

      It is said of Cato that even from his infancy, in his speech, his countenance, and all his childish pastimes, he discovered an inflexible temper, unmoved by any passion, and firm in everything.  He was resolute in his purposes, much beyond the strength of his age, to go through with whatever he undertook.  He was rough and ungentle toward those that flattered him, and still more unyielding to those who threatened him.  It was difficult to excite him to laughter, his countenance seldom relaxed even into a smile; he was not quickly or easily provoked to anger, but if once incensed, he was no less difficult to pacify.

     When he began to learn, he proved dull, and slow to apprehend, but of what he once received, his memory was remarkably tenacious.  And such in fact, we find generally to be the course of nature; men of fine genius are readily reminded of things, but those who receive with most pains and difficulty, remember best; every new thing they learn, being, as it were burnt and branded in on their minds.  Cato's natural stubbornness and slowness to be persuaded may also have made it more difficult for him to be taught.  For to learn is to submit to have something done to one; and persuasion comes soonest to those who have least strength to resist it.

-Plutarch's Lives, Translated by John Dryden, from the chapter, Cato The Younger

Invisible friends......................................

      Machiavelli is a hunter, always on the lookout for the mechanism that moves human passions and acts on the lives of others.  Where is politics to grasped if not among ordinary people, when differences of opinion arise?  At the tavern are "a butcher, a miller, and two kiln tenders. With these men I dawdle all day playing cards and backgammon, which results in a thousand quarrels with streams of spiteful and wounding words."

     At nightfall, finally, it is time for Machiavelli to pay a visit to his invisible friends who live in ancient books.  They died a long time ago, but they sustain us.  They, too, can be asked for news.  But for that, you need to go to a little trouble, make yourself presentable, to join solemnly in conversation with the men of antiquity:

     When the evening comes, I return home and go into my study.  At the door I take off my everyday clothes, covered with mud and dirt, and don garments of court and palace.  Now garbed fittingly I step into the ancient courts of men of antiquity, where, received kindly, I partake of food that is for me alone and for which I was born, where I am not ashamed to converse with them and ask them the reasons for their actions.  And they in their full humanity answer me.  For four hours I feel no tedium and forget every anguish, not afraid of poverty, nor terrified of death.

-Patrick Boucheron, Machiavelli:  The Art Of Teaching People What To Fear

In praise of doubt..............................

      In Faust, Goethe wrote,

            'Tis writ, "In the beginning was the Word."/  I Pause, to wonder what is here inferred./The Word I cannot set supremely high:/A new translation I will try./I read, if by the spirit, I am taught,/This sense, "In the beginning was the Thought. . . ."

     Upon "the Word" rested authority, stability, and law;  "the Thought" roiled and ripped apart and created—without knowledge or concern of what it would create. . . .

      If a society does set Goethe's "Word . . . supremely high," if it believes it knows the truth and that it need not question its beliefs, then that society is more likely to enforce rigid decrees, and less likely to change.  If it leaves room for doubt about the truth, it is more likely to be free and open.

-John Berry,  The Great Influenza:  The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History

The cancel culture has been with us for a very long while..........

      So, in denouncing totalitarianism, and in advocating a multicultural Algeria where both communities would enjoy the same rights, Camus antagonized both the right and the left.  At the time of his death [1960] he was very much isolated and subject to attacks from all sides designed to destroy the man and the artist so that his ideas would have no impact.

-Albert Camus, The First Man, as culled from the Editor's Note

Makes me think he's not a history major...........

 Regardless of how things play out from here, yesterday was one of the most embarrassing days in our country’s history.

-Ben Carlson, from this read-worthy post 

Not everyone will admire this skill set..............

      All the talking, all the horse-trading came down to sniffing out what the many players needed to come to terms, a process that was Baker at his strongest.  He was at heart a canny pol who knew Congress well, knew who could deliver, knew how to play them off each other just enough to get them to give a little, knew he needed to give enough himself so that everyone could come out of the negotiation feeling they had won.  Baker had a talent for connection.  He could be whatever he needed to be at the moment it was necessary.  The young man who slid back and forth from Texas to Princeton, from the Ivy Club in the spring to the wildcatter's rig in the summer, now applied the same skills on Capitol Hill.

-Peter Baker and Susan Glasser,  The Man Who Ran Washington:  The Life and Times of James A. Baker III

Three good questions.......................

 Where does commitment end and obstinance begin?  Doesn't government—and life—require compromise?  Aren't there times when we have to pick the lesser of two evils?

-Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman, The Lives Of The Stoics:  The Art of Living from Zeno to Marcus Aurelius, from the chapter on Cato

in collaboration and tension................

 Pushing beyond Chrysippus's "no shoving" rule, he believed every human being was quite literally on the same team.  We are all tied together in cosmic sympathy, Posidonius believed, and none of us are entirely self-sufficient or autonomous.  Each of us has been given a role to play in this large body—one of us is a finger, another a skin cell, another a liver—and we exist in collaboration and tension with each other.  It was God, he thought, that ran through this organism as pneuma—a kind of soul of the universe.

-Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman,  Lives Of The Stoics:  The Art of Living from Zeno to Marcus Aurelius

You can google pneuma here

Today's (recent) American history lesson.....

      With Simpson ruled out, the finalists included both Bob and Elizabeth Dole; Jack Kemp; Senator Pete Domenici of New Mexico; and a little-known junior senator from Indiana named Dan Quayle, talked up by conservatives as a fresh face at age forty-one.  Quayle would be a reassuringly hard-line presence on a ticket with Bush, who had never really overcome their doubts despite eight years as Reagan's loyal sidekick.  (Donald Trump, the media-hungry developer who had groused about Baker's economic policies sent word through Lee Atwater that he would be willing to serve as vice-president, an offer that Bush dismissed as "strange and unbelievable.")

-Peter Baker and Susan Glasser, The Man Who Ran Washington:  The Life and Times of James A. Baker III

And yet.........................................

 We do not perceive the present as it is and in its totality, nor do we infer the future from the present with any high degree of dependability, nor yet do we accurately know the consequences of our own actions.

-Frank H. Knight, from his 1921 classic, Risk, Uncertainty And Profit

What if.......................................?

 

Power..........................

      [10]  Well, what does Zeus say?  'Epictetus, if it were possible I would have made your little body and possessions both free and unrestricted.  [11]  As it is, though, make no mistake; this body does not belong to you, it is only cunningly constructed clay.  [12]  And since I could not make the body yours, I have given you a portion of myself instead, the power of positive and negative impulse, of desire and aversion - the power, in other words, of making good use of impressions.  If you take care of it and identify with it, you will never be blocked or frustrated; you won't have to complain, and never will need to blame or flatter anyone. [13]  Is that enough to satisfy you?'

     'It's more than enough.  Thank you.'

-Epictetus, Discourses, from Book 1, Chapter 1.

This book has been on the shelf....................

 ............for probably ten years.  This weekend seemed like a good time to dust it off and begin reading it:

Lewis was correct.  In 1918 an influenza virus emerged—probably in the United States—that would spread around the world, and one of its earliest appearances in lethal form came in Philadelphia.  Before that world-wide pandemic faded away in 1920, it would kill more people that any other outbreak of disease in human history.  Plague in the 1300s killed a far larger percentage of the population—more than one-quarter of Europe—but in raw numbers influenza killed more than plague then, more than AIDS today.

      The lowest estimate of the pandemic's worldwide death toll is twenty-one million, in a world with a population less than one-third today's.  That estimate comes from a contemporary study of the disease and newspapers have often cited it since, but it is almost certainly wrong.  Epidemiologists today estimate that influenza likely caused at least fifty million deaths world-wide, and possibly as many as one hundred million.

-John M. Barry, The Great Influenza:  The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History

Today's American history lesson...............

      For the nation was then [1876], as it so often has been, at war with itself; in fact it was engaged in different wars simultaneously, each being waged on several fronts, wars that ran along the fault lines of modern America. . . .

     In the South, a far more important but equally savage war was being waged as white Democrats sought "redemption" from Reconstruction in anticipation of the presidential election.  Throughout the South "rifle clubs," "saber clubs," and "rifle teams" of former Confederates were being organized into infantry and cavalry units.  Already accounts of intimidation, beatings, whippings, and murder directed against Republicans and blacks had surfaced.  After the murder of three hundred black men in a single Mississippi county, one man, convinced that the words from the Democrat's own mouths would convince the world of their design, pleaded with the New York Times, "for God's sake publish the testimony of the Democrats before the Grand Jury."

      Voting returns had already begun to come in—there was no single national election day—and two months later Democrat Samuel Tilden would win the popular vote by a comfortable margin.  But he would never take office as president.  Instead the Republican secretary of war would threaten to "force a reversal" of the vote, federal troops with fixed bayonets would patrol Washington, and southerners would talk of reigniting the Civil War.  That crisis would ultimately be resolved through an extra-constitutional special committee and a political understanding:  Republicans would discard the voting returns of three states—Louisiana, Florida, South Carolina—and seize a single disputed electoral vote in Oregon to keep the presidency in the person of Rutherford B. Hayes.  But they also would withdraw all federal troops from the South and cease intervening in southern affairs, leaving the Negroes there to fend for themselves.

-John M. Barry, The Great Influenza

One great reason to become a history major........

 Man is a rational animal—so at least I have been told.  Throughout a long life, I have looked diligently for evidence in favor of this statement, but so far I have not had the good fortune to come across it, though I have searched in many countries spread over three continents.  On the contrary, I have seen the world plunging continually further into madness.  I have seen great nations, formally leaders of civilization, led astray by preachers of bombastic nonsense.  I have seen cruelty, persecution, and superstition increasing by leaps and bounds, until we have almost reached the point where praise of rationality is held to mark a a man as an old fogy regrettably surviving from a bygone age.  All this is depressing, but gloom is a useless emotion.  In order to escape from it, I have been driven to study the past with more attention that I had formerly given to it, and have found, as Erasmus found, that folly is perennial and yet the human race has survived.  The follies of our own time are easier to bear when they are seen against the background of past follies.  

-Bertrand Russell, from his 1943 essay, An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish

I'll believe it when I see it.................

 

                         more here

Happy New Year..........................

 

    via

Aspirational....................

 

                   via

Here's a notion............................

"Reward thoughtfulness and consistency and responsibility."

-Seth Godin, from here

Dancing with wisdom...........................

      In his studies with living teachers like Crates, and his conversations with the dead—that chance encounter with Socrates's teachings that the oracle had predicted—Zeno danced with wisdom.  He explored it in the agora with his students, he had thought deeply about it on long walks and tested it in debates.  His own journey toward wisdom was a long one, some fifty years from that shipwreck until his death.  It was defined not by some single epiphany or discovery but instead by hard work.  He inched his way there, though years of study and training, as we all must.  "Well-being is realized by small steps," he would say, looking back, "but is truly not small thing."

-Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman,  Lives Of The Stoics:  The Art of Living from Zeno to Marcus Aurelius

Win-win.............................

      A mind that is concentrated on a positive thought has the power to increase the likelihood that the positive thought will materialize in the world of events.  The most successful people in the world are those who hold in mind the highest good of all concerned, including themselves.  They know that there is a win-win solution to every problem.  They are at peace with themselves, which allows them to be supportive of the potential and success of others.  They do work which they love, and so feel continually inspired and creative.  They do not seek happiness; they have discovered that happiness is a by-product of doing what they love.  A feeling of personal fulfillment comes naturally from their positive contribution to the lives of others, including family, friends, groups, and the world at large.

-David Hawkins, Letting Go:  The Pathway of Surrender

Recommended.......................

 

I wanted to tell Uncle Will I had noticed, not just his actions today but his actions through all these years, to let him know I loved him, and that I so appreciated the burden he recognized and shouldered.  That's a complicated thing to talk about.  I worried I didn't have the words.  Thankfully I wouldn't need words.

     I reached into the bag and gripped the neck of the bottle and walked out to the waiting room.  He saw me and leapt up and we embraced.  Then I handed him the bottle.  Tears filled his eyes and there wasn't a word that needed to be said.  He took that bottle home and shares it with special people and on special occasions.  I'm not sure what it means, but the last two gifts I've given Uncle Will were that bottle and a Thomas Merton book, because I like to talk about my evolving faith with him.  There's a synchronicity at work all around us.  A few weeks later, a package arrived at my house from the Old Rip Van Winkle Distillery.  I tore open the box and gasped.  Julian had sent a hand-labeled bottle of whiskey to Wallace, bearing her name and date of birth, safe in a plush red bag.  It sits in my liquor cabinet, hopefully making the trip, waiting on a time when its presence is required to properly convey what a moment means, or what the people we are sharing that moment with mean, so we can revel in the great communal joy of being alive.

-Wright Thompson,  Pappyland:  A Story of Family, Fine Bourbon, and the Things that Last

Life its ownself....................................

 "To influence people, appeal to their dreams and aspirations, not just their needs."

-Walter Wright Thompson, as culled from this amazing essay on fatherhood and life its ownself.

Boundless.........................

      What made Reagan special was his boundless sense of optimism at a time when America desperately needed it.  Despite the economic hardship he inherited and the "crisis of confidence" that his predecessor had identified, Reagan managed through sheer force of personality to infuse the nation with his belief in a better tomorrow.  

-Peter Baker and Susan Glasser,  The Man Who Ran Washington:  The Life and Times of James A. Baker III

Reagan......................................

 After years of unrest through Vietnam, Watergate, recession, and the Iran hostage crisis, Reagan reversed a sense of national decline and replaced it with a renewed confidence.  He was devoted to the new conservative catechism of lower taxes, a strong military, and anti-communism, but not so wedded to the details that it stopped him from reaching across the aisle to achieve many of his priorities with bipartisan support.  To Reagan, compromise was acceptable and course corrections necessary at times.  He did not practice the politics of personal destruction; he fought hard but treated his opponents with dignity and respect.

-Peter Baker and Susan Glasser,  The Man Who Ran Washington:  The Life and Times of James A. Baker III

Pragmatism..............

      Baker also recognized that while Reagan talked in black and white, he governed in gray.  For all of the conservatives chanting about "let Reagan be Reagan," Baker saw time and again a president who was more pragmatic that some of his supporters assumed.  "I'd rather get 80 percent of what I want that go over the cliff with my flag flying," Reagan told Baker repeatedly.  Holding out for some pure version of policy or principle was not Reagan's way.  He was willing to take what he could get, then come back and get more the next time.  Sometimes he even took a few steps backward in interest of moving ahead another day.  "That was Ronald Reagan," said Jim Cicconi, a White House aide to Baker.  "He was the labor negotiator and he was a very principled conservative  but he believed in getting things done and he recognized that in a democracy you can't have your way 100 percent of the time."

-Peter Baker and Susan Glasser, The Man Who Ran Washington:  The Life and Times of James A. Baker III

This might take a while....................

 

Looking forward to it, actually..........................

 

     more fun here

There was a time in my life (1975-6)..............

 ...............when I thought I wanted to be a journalist.  Once given the opportunity, however, I found I didn't want it as much as I thought.  Anyway, this chart may be of interest:

         more fun here

A mentor.........................................

 ............................offering mentorship.

Success by any measurement....................

 ..............may be had by following this simple list.   A sample:

21.  I know that of all the super-powers, courtesy consistently surprises and cannot be beaten.

'Tis the season........................................

Kelly/Trisha/Reba....................................................Silent Night

 

Today's history lesson............................Part 1

      For farmers, whiskey was the only way to get full value from their crops.  Not everyone had access to markets and distribution methods, so to feed their family and keep their land, a man sought to do something with the surplus of a harvested crop.  The dominate crop at the time was rye.  They were spending time and money carefully planting and growing rye, and saw no point in watching that money rot before their eyes.

     So they turned rye into whiskey.

     What happened next would send ripples into the American future that we're still dealing with today:  it began with a man who'd become the subject of a huge Broadway musical and ended with Jefferson's Republican Party replacing Washington's Federalist Party.  The American Revolution earned the country its freedom but cost incredible amounts of money, most of it paid for by state-financed debt.  Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton wanted the federal government to assume that debt and impose a sizable whiskey tax to help pay for it.  He saw it as a sin tax, ignoring the economic realities of rural life that led to whiskey's distillation in the first place.  It wasn't the first time a city dweller didn't understand life in a world different from his or her own.

-Wright Thompson, Pappyland:  A Story Of Family, Fine Bourbon and the Things That Last

Today's history lesson.........................Part 2

      George Washington, who made whiskey at Mount Vernon knew different.

      He opposed the tax at first, but a listening tour through Virginia and Pennsylvania in 1791 persuaded him.  Congress passed the bill.  And then, to use academic historian language, the farmers and distillers in Western Pennsylvania, the frontier at the time, went batshit crazy.  This was the first bubbling of the Tea Party Movement, the anti-government strain that continues to exert great control over American politics.  The new sin-tax punished farmers who needed to make whiskey to maintain value, which meant that the farther away from the seats of power a man lived, the more likely he was to get hit by this tax.  And the large distillers used their influence to keep the bill from crushing their businesses;  they paid six cents per gallon and accrued substantial tax breaks.  Small distillers paid nine cents per gallon

     The revolt that simmered and ultimately forced Washington to send in troops is now known as the Whiskey Rebellion.  Until it was quelled, real fear existed that it could turn into a second revolution.  Washington himself rode at the front of his army. . . .

     President Washington won the rebellion and strengthened the power of the federal government, but in the process the major debate in American public life was cemented, baked in, really.  Nearly every political and cultural flashpoint we've experienced since is descended from this divide.  Hamilton favored concrete and tall buildings and Wall Street, where he's buried, while Jefferson favored Main Street and the dirt of rural America in which he's buried.  Violence and discord over Hamilton versus Jefferson remain the greatest threats to the health of our experiment in democracy.

Wright Thompson, Pappyland:  A Story Of Family, Fine Bourbon, and the Things That Last

The more things change........................

 We in this country have been going through a long, dark night of self-criticism.  We have been telling ourselves that America has tried to run the world, that it is corrupt, that many of our institutions have failed us and need to be "dismantled" under the guise of "reform."  Confession may be good for the soul, but there comes a time when too much confession makes us weaker rather than stronger.

     Sure we made mistakes, but who in this world doesn't?

-James A. Baker III, as quoted from a 1976 commencement address in the book The Man Who Ran Washington:  The Life and Times of James A. Baker III by Peter Baker and Susan Glasser

Epictetus.....................................

      By contrast, Epictetus, in typical Stoic fashion, continually warned his students not to confuse academic learning with wisdom and to avoid petty arguments, hairsplitting, or wasting time on abstract, academic topics.  He emphasized the fundamental difference between a Sophist and a Stoic:  the former speaks to win praise from his audience, the latter to improve them by helping them to achieve wisdom and virtue.

-Donald Robertson, How To Think Like A Roman Emperor:  The Stoic Philosophy of Marcus Aurelius

About shortcuts................................

 More and more today, we don't want to do the work or take the chances required for greatness, and we try to fix all those shortcuts on the back end with marketing and branding—modern, fancy words that mean lie.

-Wright Thompson, Pappyland:  A Story Of Family, Fine Bourbon, and the Things That Last

Focus....................

 Some things are entirely up to you, while other things are not entirely up to you.  It's surprising to realize what falls into each category.  Entirely up to you are your considered judgments, your opinions, your goals, your adopted values, and your decisions to act or not to act—in essence, what you decide upon after reflection and deliberation.  Not entirely up to you is pretty much everything else . . .

Remember, then, that the only thing truly yours are those that are entirely up to you.  Everything else is on loan from the universe, and the universe may recall such loans at a moment's notice, in any number of ways.  It follows that if you put a lot of stake into things that are not ultimately up to you, you are bound to suffer, to envy, to be disappointed, and in general to depend on the vagaries of Fortune.  Yet, if you focus your efforts on what is up to you, you will go through life with serenity, approaching all that comes with equanimity, never envying anyone, and never being disappointed by the turning of the cosmos.

-Massimo Pigliucci,  A Field Guide To A Happy Life:  53 Brief Lessons For Living

When he is right...........................

 ................................................................he's right:

. . . the best Christmas Song and video of the century thus far.

Words matter.................................

      Joe had always considered individual words as finite units of currency, and he believed in savings.  He never wanted to waste of unnecessarily expend words.  To Joe, words meant things.  They should be spent wisely.  Joe sometimes paused for a long time until he could come up with the right words to express exactly what he wanted to say.  Sometimes it confused people (Marybeth fretted that perhaps people thought Joe was slow) but Joe could live with that.  That's why Joe despised meetings were he felt the participants acted as if they were paid by the number of words spoken and, as a result, the words began to cheapen by the minute until they meant nothing at all.  In Joe's experience, the person who talked the most very often had the least to say.  He sometimes wished that every human was allotted a certain number of words to use for their lifetime.  When the allotment ran out, that person would be forced into silence.  If this were the case, Joe would still have more than enough in his account while people like Les Etbauer would be very quiet.  Joe had attended meetings where little got accomplished except what he considered the random drive-by spewing of words, like unaimed machine-gun bullets.  What a waste of words, he often thought.  What a waste of currency.  What a waste of bullets.

-C. J. Box, Open Season:  A Joe Pickett Novel  (first in the series)

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

Mannheim Steamroller...........................Christmas Celebration

 

Kurt: got you a Christmas present...........

 ..............as soon as I finish reading it, I'll bring it over.

An antidote...................................

      Julian almost never complains—few people know, for instance that he's just on the other side of cancer treatment that could have ended very differently.  Normally a private person, he allowed his closest friends to see the fear in his eyes; to share in his vulnerability.  His illness made him newly reflective, which would have a cascade of repercussions in his life.  He'd reached the point when he had to take dying seriously.  Everyone passes through that valley and everyone emerges changed.  His bourbon is passing through a valley, too.  In the coming months, he will taste the new liquor that will fill his bottles.  The whiskey that built his success had run out, and the "new whiskey," distilled and laid up many years ago, is now ready to be tasted and, with luck, bottled.  I would come to appreciate the challenge of dealing with market trends when you product gets made as many as twenty-five years in the past.  When I met Julian, this is what loomed largest;  soon it would be time for him to test the first ever Pappy Van Winkle's Family Reserve made from whiskey distilled by his partner Buffalo Trace.  Whiskey is marketed as an antidote to change, so the magic is especially vulnerable during times of transition.  That tension ran through my mind during this otherwise carefree day at the nation's most famous racetrack.  Julian was looking far into the future, to see how this brand and whiskey would be passed from one generation to the next.  The Van Winkles have done most things very well, except for that:  the last time the baton pass got seriously fucked up.

The race ended, and Julian pulled a Cohiba out of his pocket and lit it.  "My victory cigar.' he said.  A grin flashed across his face.  "I didn't bet on the race," he said.  "So I won."

-Wright Thompson, two excerpts from Pappyland:  A Story of Family, Fine Bourbon and the Things That Last

One role for the government.....................

      These massive and predictable sources of demand from the government caused the price of each microchip to fall rapidly.  The first prototype chip for the Apollo Guidance Computer cost $1,000.  By the time they were being put into regular production, each cost $20.  The average price for each microchip in the Minuteman missile was $50 in 1962; by 1968 it was $2.  Thus was launched the market for putting microchips in devices for ordinary consumers.

-Walter Isaacson, The Innovators:  How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created The Digital Revolution

All good questions.......................

      Are leaders born or made?  Where does ambition come from?  How does adversity affect the growth of leadership?  Do the times make the leader or does the leader shape the times?  How can a leader infuse a sense of purpose and meaning into people's lives?  What is the difference between power, title, and leadership?  Is leadership possible without a purpose larger than personal ambition?

-Doris Kearns Goodwin, from the Forward to her book, Leadership In Turbulent Times

Made me laugh..............................

 

           much more fun here

On the value of uncertainty................

 The price of certainty is high:  surrendering to a limited experience of life, designed by individuals and corporations who do not know us, whose interests are not ours.  In this condition, convenience is passivity and choice obedience. . . . Every generation of human being has lived with uncertainty and unpredictability:  that's how we developed our staggering human capacity for invention, discovery, improvisation, and creativity.  Our ability to invent came from necessity, not comfort.

-Margaret Heffernan, Uncharted:  How To Navigate The Future

'Tis the season.....................................

The Moody Blues...............In the Quiet Of Christmas Morning

 

Life its ownself..........................

 We pass our existence within this warm wobble of flesh and yet take it almost entirely for granted.  how many among us know even roughly where the spleen is or what it does?  Of the difference between tendons and ligaments? Or what our lymph nodes are up to?  How may times a day do you suppose you blink?  Five hundred?  A thousand?  You've no idea, of course.  Well, you blink fourteen thousand times a day—so much that your eyes are shut for twenty-three minutes of every waking day.  Yet you never have to think about it, because every second of every day your body undertakes a literally unquantifiable number of tasks—a quadrillion, a nonillion, a quindecillion, a vigiantillion (these are actual measures), at all events some number vastly beyond imagining—without requiring an instant of your attention.

-Bill Bryson, The Body:  A Guide For Occupants

Ed Note:  To save you the trouble, a vigintillion is, in US measurements, a number equal to 1 followed by 63 zeros: 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.

You can look up the spleen yourself.

On the magic of compounding.............

 It’s not until you consider the time factor of compounding that you realize maximizing annual returns in a given year and maximizing long-term wealth are two different things.

Carl Richards once made the point that a house might be the best investment most people ever make. It’s not that housing provides great returns – it does not. It’s not even the leverage. It’s that people are more likely to buy a house and sit on it without interruption for years or decades than any other asset. It’s the one asset people give compounding a fighting chance to work.

-Morgan Housel, from this post

"It's in our nature"........................................

Read the paragraph below and you likely say:  "Yep, that's true."  Except, it hasn't happened in other parts of the world.  What's up?   Culture matters.  Interesting take here.

One of the simplest explanations offered for the continued strength of the U.S. stock market in recent years is generationally low interest rates. If there are no safe yield alternatives, investors are forced to go out further on the risk curve.

Guessing this is true.................

 Government rulebooks may not be the place to look for the authoritative word on state-of-the-art technology, whether in communications or in sustainability.  Regulatory usurpation of decision-making by individuals voluntarily engaging with one another to fund and build transformative technologies will be harmful to liberty and to our shared goals for a greener, safer, healthier, and more prosperous world.

-Hester Peirce, as culled from here

Traditions............................

..........................................The Courthouse lighting:  this is how we know Christmas is coming to Licking County

Winter wonderland.............................

 

'Tis the season............................

Pentatonix......................................Mary, Did You Know?

 

Recommended..........................................

 

Good strategy grows out of an independent and careful assessment of the situation, harnessing individual insight to carefully crafted purpose.  Bad strategy follows the crowd, substituting popular slogans for insights.

     Being independent without being eccentric and doubting without being a curmudgeon are some of the most difficult things a person can do. . . .

An important virtue of a good leader is putting the situation in perspective and having cool-minded judgment.  Both virtues help mitigate the bias inherent in social herding and the inside view.  The inside view describes the fact that people tend to see themselves, their group, their project, their company, or their nation as special and different.

-Richard P. Rumelt

a more fundamental challenge................

      Today, we are offered a bewildering variety of tools and concepts to aid in analysis and the construction of strategies.  Each of these tools envisions the challenge slightly differently.  For some it is identifying important trends; for others it is erecting barriers to imitation.  Yet, there is a more fundamental challenge common to all contexts.  That is the challenge of working around one's own cognitive limitations and biases—one's own myopia.  Our own myopia is the obstacle common to all strategic situations.

      Being strategic is being less myopic—less shortsighted—than others.

-Richard P. Rumelt, Good Strategy Bad Strategy:  The Difference and Why It Matters

Recommended..............................

     One interpretation of trends today is that the Rise of the Rest challenges the free values of the West.  Focusing on the last few decades, the high growth in autocratic China seems like a particular assault on the Western model.  But this book has offered another interpretation from a longer-run perspective:  free values are gradually spreading from the West to the Rest, including to China, and the Rise of the Rest reflects precisely that spread of free values.  The idea that individual rights are "Western values" may be an anachronism that is becoming clearer.

     The global double standard of rights for the rich and not for the poor is very much alive in the technocratic world view of development.  But this, too, could be a casualty of the Rise of the Rest and the spread of freedom.  The disrespect for poor people shown by agencies such as the World Bank and the Gates Foundation, with their stereotypes of wise technocrats from the West and helpless victims from the Rest, may become increasingly untenable.  Development may have to give up its authoritarian mind-set to survive.

-William Easterly

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

        On the third day of their honeymoon, infamous environmental activist Stewie Woods and his new bride, Annabel Belloti, were spiking trees in the forest when a cow exploded and blew them up.  Until then, their marriage had been happy.

-C. J. Box, Savage Run

Be careful what you wish for....................

      As the Italian economist and culture researcher Guido Tabellini puts it:  "Lack of trust and lack of respect for others are typical of hierarchical societies, where the individual is regarded as responding to instinct rather than reason, and where instinct often leads to a myopic or harmful course of action.  In such societies, individualism is mistrusted and to be suppressed, since nothing good comes out of it: good behavior is deemed to result from coercion.  Hence, the role of the state is to force citizens to behave well."

-William Easterly, The Tyranny of Experts:  Economists, Dictators, and The Forgotten Rights of the Poor

Bad trades..........................

 Remembering that technology outsources human activity to a machine should be enough to steer us clear of apps whose ambitious developers hope will produce better humans than humans.  Treating each other first as objects and then as groups, mediated by technological interfaces, just makes it cheaper, faster, easier to isolate and demonize one another.  Relying on such systems means that we trade judgment for efficiency, reflection for obedience, inquiry for conformity, and independence for constraint.  Only organizations or individuals that are implicitly authoritarian would arrogate to themselves the right to tell people who they are and what they might become.

-Margaret Heffernan, Uncharted:  How To Navigate The Future

On gratitude...........................

 

“When it comes to life the critical thing is whether you take things for granted or take them with gratitude.”

-Gilbert Keith Chesterton

One constitutional amendment coming right up...

   I'd like to live in a country where the official motto was, "You never know." It would help me relax.

-George Carlin

'Tis the season..........................

August Burns Red.............................Carol Of The Bells

 

Damn..............................

 By definition, winging it is not a strategy.

-Richard P. Rumelt, Good Strategy Bad Strategy:  The Difference and Why It Matters

Advance...............................

 4.  Think of your many years of procrastination; how the gods have repeatedly granted you further periods of grace, of which you have taken no advantage.  It is time now to realize the nature of the universe to which you belong, and of that controlling Power whose offspring you are;  and to understand that your time has a limit set on it.  Use it, then, to advance your enlightenment;  or it will be gone, and never to your power again.

-Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book Two

cartoon via

Testing this, as we speak................................

 

'Tis the season...................................

Jennifer Nettles...............................O Holy Night/Hallelujah

 

I always thought..............................

 ............that Dasher, Donner, Blitzen, et. al. had character issues, but was always willing to give Santa a free pass:

Parenting............................

 ...................................It is more of an art than science.

Verse.................................

3.  When I was a son to my father,
Tender and the only son in the sight of my mother,
4 

4.  He taught me and said to me,
“Let your heart take hold of my words;
Keep my commandments and live;
5 

5.  Acquire wisdom! Acquire understanding!
Do not forget nor turn away from the words of my mouth.
6 

6.  Do not abandon her, and she will guard you;
Love her, and she will watch over you.
7 

7.  The [c]beginning of wisdom is: Acquire wisdom;
And with all your possessions, acquire understanding.
8 

8.  Prize her, and she will exalt you;
She will honor you if you embrace her.
9 

9.  She will place on your head a garland of grace;
She will present you with a crown of beauty.”

-The Holy Bible, Proverbs 3:3-9

NASB version

Listen up..............................

 Go out of your way to be good to an older person.  You'll discover that you can make somebody's entire day with a smile, a phone call, some fresh-picked daisies, or whatever it is you've got.

Our elders have so much to give to those who listen, but that are the ones who deserve to receive.  Don't pass up the chance to brighten their lives.  An old adage reminds us that they need only a little, but they need that little—a lot.

-Douglas Pagels

Public service........................................

 ...................................................This is what it looks like.

The library is a dangerous place.................

 Long-time readers will remember that my library card is one of my most valued possessions.  Still, it important to know that said library is filled with traps, snares, sink-holes, and very long cul-de-sacs.  I fell into one of those places around Thanksgiving.   It was my intention, as the days got darker, to read some of the very important books that The-Wonder-That-Is-Amazon recently delivered to our home.  Instead, I picked up a C. J. Box book at the library.  Eight books later, I am not quite halfway through his Joe Pickett series.  Sometimes the mind just wants to spend time in very long cul-de-sacs.  The very important books will just have to wait.   I highly recommend him to you.

Truth..............................

more fun here

Getting there............................

 

I don't see any way...........................

 ...........................................he can stop with 100.

Recommended............................

 

Could we start with maybe twenty minutes.........?

 Most professions would benefit from at least one a day month where you did nothing but think. No meetings, no calls, no deliverables. Just a seat on the couch thinking about what’s working, what’s not, and what to do about it. One day a week is necessary for some fields. But it’s rare, because sitting on the couch doesn’t look like work, so managers raise an eyebrow – even if it’s obvious that if your job involves thinking you should be given time to think.

-Morgan Housel, from this post

Seems to me.....................................

 ..........................Step #1 is the hard part.

Step 9.   You need to set the right expectations. . . .Whatever your reasoning, just go into it with low expectations. If you surpass them, that’s icing on the cake.

Interplay.............................

      Mentally, we are all time travelers  We might exhort one another to live in the moment, but the truth is that we can't, we don't—and wouldn't want to.  What give life meaning is the rich and constant interplay between past, present, and future.

-Margaret Heffernan,  Uncharted:  How To Navigate The Future

Purge away........................................

 

47.  Survey the circling stars, as though yourself were in mid-course with them.  Often picture the changing and re-changing dance of the elements.   Visions of this kind purge away the dross of our earth-bound life.

-Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book Seven

image via

Entropy..............................

 Despite all the high-level concepts consultants advertise, the bread and butter of every consultant's business is undoing entropy—cleaning up the debris and weeds that grow in every organizational garden.

-------------------------------------------

One of the clearest examples of entropy in business was the gradual decay of the order imposed on the early General Motors by Alfred Sloan.  In this decay, one can see the value of competent management by its absence.  Indeed, you cannot fully understand the value of the daily work of managers unless one accepts the general tendency of unmanaged human structures to become less ordered, less focused, and more blurred around the edges.

-Richard P. Rumelt, Good Strategy Bad Strategy:  The Difference and Why It Matters

Alfred P. Sloan..........................

 It is astonishing what you can do when you have a lot of energy, ambition and plenty of ignorance.

The greatest real thrill that life offers is to create, to construct, to develop something useful. Too often we fail to recognize and pay tribute to the creative spirit. It is that spirit that creates our jobs. There has to be this pioneer, the individual who has the courage, the ambition to overcome the obstacles that always develop when one tries to do something worthwhile, especially when it is new and different.

Growth and progress are related, for there is no resting place for an enterprise in a competitive economy.

We must move toward a soundly based and widely distributed economic well-being. This is the 'theory of plenty' as distinguished from the 'theory of scarcity' which has dominated our recent economic thinking and politics.

Bedside manners are no substitute for the right diagnosis.

I never give orders. I sell my ideas to my associates if I can. I accept their judgment if they convince me, as they frequently do, that I am wrong. I prefer to appeal to the intelligence of a man rather than attempt to exercise authority over him.

Get the facts. Recognize the equities of all concerned. Realize the necessity of doing a better job every day. Keep an open mind and work hard. The last is most important at all. There is no short cut.

If we are all in agreement on the decision - then I propose we postpone further discussion of this matter until our next meeting to give ourselves time to develop disagreement and perhaps gain some understanding of what the decision is all about.

Wikipedia's entry on Sloan may be found here