“Let scholastic sophisters entangle themselves in their own cobwebs; I am resolved to take my own existence, and the existence of other things, upon trust; and to believe that snow is cold, and honey sweet, whatever they may say to the contrary. He must either be a fool, or want to make a fool of me, that would reason me out of my reason and senses.”
Thursday, February 4, 2021
Experimenting...................
"So the conclusion is not, 'Do nothing and a great idea will come to you.' The conclusion is, 'Do everything because you never know where the great idea will come from.'" . . . "Remember: It's easy to experiment, but hard to change. None of these people started with a grand vision and then worked toward it. These people were not goal setters or planners; they were adventurers." . . . "Each quandary is a call for experimentation. Each experiment a question put to the world. Each answer is a journey. Let life plan the itinerary. Your job is to pack light and bring a camera."
Dale Dauten, The Max Strategy: How A Businessman Got Stuck At An Airport And Learned To Make His Career Take Off
Wednesday, February 3, 2021
Tuesday, February 2, 2021
But not just any old idea.............................
What is strange about the modern world, in other words, is its utter economic unpredictability. As Nassim Nicholas Taleb puts it, the Great Enrichment was a "black swan" event, deeply unpredictable, not to be reduced to a probability distribution with finite variance. The premodern world, by contrast, was highly predictable in economic shape. Dukes would go on collecting rents, merchants would go on making modest fortunes from trade, peasants would expect to earn what their fathers and grandfathers and great-grandfathers had earned—unless they could pull ahead by tricking neighbor Nat, the fool, into selling the Nether field for less than it was worth.
-Deidre Nansen McCloskey, Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital Or Institutions Enriched The World
On Time...................................
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 what controlling power whose offspring you are; and to understand that your time has a limit set to it. Use it, then, to advance your enlightenment; or it will be gone, and never in your power again.
-Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 2:4
Fifty years ago..................................
The Doors...................................................Riders On The Storm
One should not forget...................
.....................that normalcy is just the psychosis of the majority.
Monday, February 1, 2021
On perspective..................................
If we don't understand the statistics, we're likely to be badly mistaken about the way the world is. It is all too easy to convince ourselves that whatever we've seen with our own eyes is the whole truth; it isn't. . . .
And yet, if we understand only the statistics, we understand little. We need to be curious about the world we see, hear, touch, and smell as well as the world we can examine through a spreadsheet.
My second piece of advice, then, its to try to take both perspectives—the worm's eye view as well as the bird's eye view. They will usually show you something different, and they will sometimes pose a puzzle: how could both views be true? That should be the beginning of an investigation.
-Tim Harford, How To Make The World Add Up: Ten Rules For Thinking Differently About Numbers
If you ask the right person some really good questions............................
..............you are likely to get some really good answers.
Fifty years ago.......................................
The Rolling Stones..........................................Brown Sugar
Chatting with Saul Alinsky......................
Life is an adventure of passion, risk, danger, laughter, beauty, love; a burning curiosity to go with the action to see what it is all about, to go search for a pattern of meaning, to burn one's bridges because you're never going to go back anyway, and to live to the end.
The greatest enemy of individual freedom is the individual himself.
Conflict is the essential core of a free and open society. If one were to project the democratic way of life in the form of a musical score, its major theme would be the harmony of dissonance.
Political realists see the world as it is: an arena of power politics moved primarily by perceived immediate self-interests, where morality is rhetorical rationale for expedient action and self-interest.
Humor is essential to a successful tactician, for the most potent weapons known to mankind are satire and ridicule. A sense of humor enables him to maintain his perspective and see himself for what he really is: a bit of dust that burns for a fleeting second. A sense of humor is incompatible with the complete acceptance of any dogma, any religious, political, or economic prescription for salvation. It synthesizes with curiosity, irreverence, and imagination.
Curiosity, irreverence, imagination, sense of humor, a free and open mind, an acceptance of the relativity of values and of the uncertainty of life, all inevitably fuse into the kind of person whose greatest joy is creation.
In this world laws are written for the lofty aim of “the common good” and then acted out in life on the basis of the common greed.
The human spirit glows from that small inner light of doubt whether we are right, while those who believe with complete certainty that they possess the right are dark inside and darken the world outside with cruelty, pain, and injustice.
There can be no darker or more devastating tragedy than the death of man’s faith in himself and in his power to direct his future.
Sunday, January 31, 2021
the sacredness of simple things.................
For at present we all tend to one mistake; we tend to make politics too important. We tend to forget how huge a part of a man's life is the same under a Sultan and a Senate, under Nero or St Louis. Daybreak is a never-ending glory, getting out of bed is a never-ending nuisance; food and friends will be welcomed; work and strangers must be accepted and endured; birds will go bedwards and children won't, to the end of the last evening. And the worst peril is that in our just modern revolt against intolerable accidents we may have unsettled those things that alone make daily life tolerable. It will be an ironic tragedy if, when we have toiled to find rest, we find we are incurably restless. It will be sad if, when we have worked for our holiday, we find we have unlearnt everything but work. The typical modern man is the insane millionaire who has drudged to get money, and then finds he cannot enjoy even money. There is danger that the social reformer may silently and occultly develop some of the madness of the millionaire whom he denounces. He may find that he has learnt how to build playgrounds but forgotten how to play. He may agitate for peace and quiet, but only propagate his own mental agitation. In his long fight to get a slave a half-holiday he may angrily deny those ancient and natural things, the zest of being, the divinity of man, the sacredness of simple things, the health and humour of the earth, which alone make a half-holiday even half a holiday or a slave even half a man.
Gilbert Keith Chesterton, from his essay, What Is Right With The World
Good advice......................
Today's persuaders don't want you to stop and think. They want you to hurry up and feel.
Don't be rushed.
-Tim Harford, How To Make The World Add Up: Ten Rules for Thinking Differently About Numbers
Maybe not the worst...............
The worst intellectuals to put in charge of things are the ones who think that they should be in charge of things.
The interesting thing..........................
.........................................about feed-back loops:
Find a feedback loop and you will find people who underestimate how crazy prices can get, how famous a person can become, how hard it can be to change people’s minds, how irreparable a reputation can be, and how tiny events can compound into something huge.
Forecasting is difficult *........................................
Nor does talent exist in a vacuum. Outstanding performers in part of a company may, when transferred, suddenly fail. . . . Hypotheses abounded but what everyone learned is that ability and environment are inextricably linked. As anyone who's suffered a terrible boss will recognize: given the right circumstances, everybody can be made to fail. Because achievement derives in part from context, forecasting individual talent omits half the picture.
-Margaret Heffernan, Uncharted: How To Navigate The Future
* although the weather people seem to have gotten the latest snow forecast right
Some of us history majors like this essay...
I am approaching the subject of this lecture with considerable trepidation. I know that among my hearers there are professional historians whom I greatly respect, and I should not at all wish to seem desirous of instructing them as to how their work should be done. I shall write as a consumer, not a producer. In shops they have a maxim: "The customer is always right." But academic persons (among whom I should wish to include myself) are more lordly than shopkeepers: if the consumer does not like what he is offered, that is because he is a Philistine and because he does not know what is good for him. Up to a point I sympathize with this attitude. It would never do for a mathematician to try to please the general reader. . . . But history seems to me to be in a different category. The multiplication table, though useful, can hardly be called beautiful. It is seldom that essential wisdom in regard to human destiny is to be found by remembering even its more difficult items. History, on the other hand, is so I shall contend a desirable part of everybody's mental furniture in the same kind of way as is generally recognized in the case of poetry. If history is to fulfill this function, it can only do so by appealing to those who are not professional historians.
-Bertrand Russell, as excerpted from his 1954 essay, History As An Art
Observing that this is true..........................
One generation's masterpiece can obviously be then next generation's colossal bore, which does not change the nature of the object in the least.
The Rat Pack.............................
Just add this story to the stack of "stuff I never knew," especially the part about Joe Kennedy. Our history is a tangled mess.
Saturday, January 30, 2021
Friday, January 29, 2021
The Wonder that is the Intertunnel...........
There is this guy I don't know, but whose style I admire. He advises, via this medium, a friend I do know, and whose style I also admire, to read a certain book. Sounded good to me, so I ordered it (not from Amazon - I am done with them for a while, but that is another story). In no time the book arrives and, unsurprisingly, jumped to the top of the stack. It is a collection of essays from Russell Lynes. Here is the opening paragraph to the opening essay:
Some years ago a magazine no longer published but then widely read and respected asked me to write a piece about the "rat race." I did and was paid for it, but it languished in the editor's "hold" file for a long time and then disappeared without a trace. My thesis, evidently not agreeable to the editor, was that each of us makes his own rat race, that it is not an inevitability imposed by the nature of society, and that those who are caught in it are there essentially because they choose to be.
I'm going to enjoy this book. Expect to see more.
The artistry..............................
..............................................of a blogger.
Remember..........................
To seek "causes" of poverty in this way is to enter an intellectual dead end because poverty has no causes. Only prosperity has causes.
We would do well to remember that, from a historical perspective, abundance has not been the norm for us humans.
Careful.............................
Interpreting behavior is rife with value judgments that are invisible to those making them.
-Margaret Heffernan, from Uncharted: How To Navigate the Future
Happy Birthday Sweetie................................
Sir Paul delivering the Beatles "Birthday" Song
Thursday, January 28, 2021
Homing impulse......................
“Our passionate preoccupation with the sun, the stars and a God somewhere in outer space is a homing impulse. We are drawn back to where we came from. ”
Wednesday, January 27, 2021
Chatting with Eric Hoffer..........................
A man is likely to mind his own business when it is worth minding. When it is not, he takes his mind off his own meaningless affairs by minding other people's business.
The greatest weariness comes from work not done.In a world of change, the learners shall inherit the earth, while the learned shall find themselves perfectly suited for a world that no longer exists.
When people are free to do as they please, they usually imitate each other.
The hardest arithmetic to master is that which enables us to count our blessings.
The individual's most vital need is to prove his worth, and this usually means an insatiable hunger for action. For it is only the few who can acquire a sense of worth by developing and employing their capacities and talents. The majority prove their worth by keeping busy.
Scratch an intellectual, and you find a would-be aristocrat who loathes the sight, the sound and the smell of common folk.
The search for happiness is one of the chief sources of unhappiness.
Kindness can become its own motive. We are made kind by being kind.
Opening paragraphs.........................
When ranch owner Opal Scarlett vanished, no one mourned except her three grown sons. Arlen, Hank, and Wyatt, who expressed their loss by getting into a fight with shovels.
-C. J. Box, In Plain Sight: A Joe Pickett Novel
Gamestop..........................
..............I'm not even going to pretend I have a clue about what's been going on with their finances or their stock. Chris Lynch has part of the story here. David Merkel has - what seems to me anyway - a pretty good explanation here. Stories like this make me glad I'm an investor in real estate. Much simpler (at least the way we do it).
Tuesday, January 26, 2021
A dog named................................
.......................................................................Beau.
Goal setting......................
Extend to each person, no matter how trivial the contact, all the care and kindness and understanding and love that you can muster, and do it with no thought of any reward. Your life will never be the same again.
A really good question.....................
The Bible actually has a very clear statement that spells out what it means to love God first and foremost, and our neighbors second. That statement, of course, is the 10 Commandments, albeit in the McClendon version: “Have no other gods but Me; Don’t make or bow down to idols; Don’t use my name in a way to make it mean something it doesn’t; Keep at least one day holy so you can have time to remember Who I am; Respect your parents and those who take care of you; Don’t murder and that includes way more than you think; Sex is sacred, so don’t fool around in your head, bed or on your TV, computer, or phone; Never steal in any way, shape, or form; Don’t lie or spread anything that isn’t 100% accurate; Be content, and don’t be envious or want what you don’t have.”
These commandments are pretty evenly split between love of God and neighbor. They beg the question: What would happen if we took them to heart, and put them into practice?
-Tim McClendon, as culled from here
Grace..........................
Listen to your life. See it for the fathomless mystery it is. In the boredom and pain of it, no less than in the excitement and gladness: touch, taste, smell your way to the holy and hidden heart of it, because in the last analysis all moments are key moments, and life itself is grace.
Monday, January 25, 2021
Differences........................
"There is very little difference between one man and another; but what little there is, is very important."
Sunday, January 24, 2021
Bernie and his mittens......................
..........................the non-meme:
..........................a new favorite:
............................some old favorites:
Fifty years ago..............................
Credence Clearwater Revival.............Have You Ever Seen The Rain
Released in December 1970, received major airplay in 1971
On the importance of self-knowledge............
Extreme adherence to an investment strategy is dangerous in a world that changes all the time, so an important question to ask when things aren’t working whether you’re being patient or stubborn.
Embrace and accept your flaws and build a financial plan around them, rather than assuming you can alter your susceptibility to dopamine and cortisol by reading a blog post.
There are few universally right answers. Just lots of shades of gray that work for people’s unique personalities and situations. A lot of finance arguments happen when people get upset after realizing that not everyone has, or wants, the same life as you.
-Morgan Housel, three excerpts from this read-worthy post
Friday, January 22, 2021
The difficult part is finding the "good"...........
Of course, we shouldn't be credulous, but the antidote to credulity isn't to believe nothing, but to have the confidence to assess information with curiosity and a healthy scepticism.
Good statistics are not a trick, although they are a kind of magic. Good statistics are not smoke and mirrors; in fact, they help us see more clearly. Good statistics are like a telescope for an astronomer, a microscope for a bacteriologist, or an X-ray for a radiologist. If we are willing to let them, good statistics help us see things about the world around us and about ourselves — both large and small — that we would not be able to see in any other way.
-Tim Harford, How to Make the World Add Up: Ten Rules for Thinking Differently About Numbers
Reminiscent...............................
If Mr. Trump was less than honorable in refusing to acknowledge defeat, his opponents are less than satisfied with mere electoral victory. The current impeachment is reminiscent of the beheading of Oliver Cromwell, which took place two years after his death.
-Arnold Kling, from this read-worthy post
A few simple rules...........................
To avoid the various foolish opinions to which mankind are prone, no super human genius is required. A few simple rules will keep you, not from all error, but from silly error.
If the matter is one that can be settled by observation, make the observation yourself. . . .
If an opinion contrary to your own makes you angry, that is a sign that you are subconsciously aware of having no good reason for thinking as you do. . . .
A good way of ridding yourself of certain kinds of dogmatism is to become aware of opinions held in social circles different from your own. . . .
Be wary of opinions that flatter your self esteem. . . .
-Bertrand Russell, from his 1943 essay An Outline Of Intellectual Rubbish, which is reprinted here
On freedom........................................
What is freedom? It is, first, the capacity to deliberate or weigh alternatives. "Shall I be a teacher or a lawyer?" "Shall I vote for this candidate or the other candidate?" "Shall I be a Democrat, Republican, or Socialist?" Second, freedom expresses itself in decision. The word decision like the word incision involves the image of cutting. Incision means to cut in, decision means to cut off. When I make a decision I cut off alternatives and make a choice. The existentialists say that we must choose, that we are choosing animals; and if we do not choose we sink into thinghood and the mass mind. A third expression of freedom is responsibility. This is the obligation of the person to respond if he is questioned about his decision. No one else can respond for him. He alone must respond, for his acts are determined by the centered totality of his being.
From this analysis we can clearly see the evilness of segregation. It cuts off one's capacity to deliberate, decide, and respond.
The absence of freedom is the imposition of restraint on my deliberation as to what I shall do, where I shall live, how much I shall earn, the kind of tasks I shall pursue. I am robbed of the basic quality of man-ness.
-Martin Luther King, Jr., as excerpted from a December 1962 speech, as reprinted in A Testament of Hope
Thursday, January 21, 2021
Fifty years ago.....................................
The Rolling Stones...............................................Wild Horses
Wednesday, January 20, 2021
Different..........................
As Arius would write, like Panaetius before him, we each have our own implanted gifts (aphormai), resources that can lead us to virtue. Our personalities suit us differently to different paths of ethical development. We all have different launching points, but these inborn tools together with hard effort will get us to where we want to go.
We must focus on the task at hand, and waste not a moment on the tasks that are not ours. We must have courage. We must be fair. We must check our emotions. We must, above all, be wise.
-Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman, Lives Of The Stoics: The Art of Living from Zeno to Marcus Aurelius
Opening paragraphs..................
On the phone, Tomlinson said to Ford, "When the deputy's wife and kids disappeared, moonshiners might've dumped their bodies in the lake—it was during Prohibition. It wouldn't be the first time karma has waited decades to boot justice in the ass."
-Randy Wayne White, Mangrove Lightning
On unjust laws......................................
Playboy: Perhaps. But the kind of extremism for which you've been criticized has to do not with love, but with your advocacy of willful disobedience of what you consider to be "unjust laws." Do you feel you have the right to pass judgment on and defy the law — nonviolently or otherwise?
King: Yes—morally, if not legally. For there are two kinds of laws: man's and God's. A man-made code that squares with the moral law, or the law of God, is a just law. But a man-made code that is inharmonious with the moral law is an unjust law. And an unjust law, as St. Augustine said, is no law at all. Thus a law that is unjust is morally null and void, and must be defied until it is legally null and void as well. Let us not forget, in the memories of six million who died, that everything that Adolph Hitler did in Germany was "legal." and that everything the Freedom Fighters in Hungary did was "illegal."
-as excerpted from the January 1965 Playboy interview with Martin Luther King, Jr., as reprinted in A Testament of Hope
Editor's Note: What gives power to King's willful disobedience, as with Gandhi before him, was the willingness to nonviolently accept the consequences of disobedience, ultimately bringing shame, and then change, to the oppressor.
Traveling..........................
"The only true voyage would be, not to visit strange lands, but to possess other eyes."
-Proust, The Captive. An epigraph used by Margaret Heffernan in the chapter Think Like An Artist from her book, Uncharted: How To Navigate The Future
Gifts..................................
"You get different gifts in life, and one of my greatest gifts is my mom and dad."
-Jeff Bezos, as culled from Invent & Wander
I have a difficult time accepting the notion that I am privileged by my skin color. I have absolutely no doubt that I have been highly privileged by growing up in the stable, safe, supportive, positive home of my parents. The foundation they provided me has been priceless.
The genius of knowing what to ignore...............
Einstein reportedly once said that his own major scientific talent was his ability to look at an enormous number of experiments and journal articles, select the very few that were both right and important, ignore the rest, and build a theory on the right ones. In that assessment of his own abilities, Einstein was very likely overly modest. But part of his genius was an instinct for what mattered and the ability to pursue it vertically and connect it horizontally.
-John M. Barry, The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History
Fifty years ago................................
Led Zeppelin.........................................Stairway To Heaven
Tuesday, January 19, 2021
The need to be "maladjusted".....................
Modern psychology has a word that is probably used more than any other word. It is the word "maladjusted." Now we all should seek to live a well adjusted life in order to avoid neurotic and schizophrenic personalities. But there are some things within our social order to which I am proud to be maladjusted and to which I call you to be maladjusted. I never intend to adjust myself to segregation and discrimination. I never intend to adjust myself to mob rule. I never intend to adjust myself to the tragic effects of the methods of physical violence and to tragic militarism. I call upon you to be maladjusted to such things. I call upon you to be as maladjusted as Amos who in the midst of the injustices of his day cried out in words that echo across the generation, "Let judgment run down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream." As maladjusted as Abraham Lincoln who had the vision to see that this nation could not exist half slave and half free. As maladjusted as Jefferson, who in the midst of an age amazingly adjusted to slavery could cry out, "All men are created equal and are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights and among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." As maladjusted as Jesus of Nazareth who dreamed a dream of the fatherhood of God and the brotherhood of man. God grant that we will be so maladjusted that we will be able to go out and change our world and our civilization. And then we will be able to move from the bleak and desolate midnight of man's inhumanity to man to the bright and glittering daybreak of freedom and justice.
-Martin Luther King, Jr., as he concluded a June 7, 1957 speech. From A Testament Of Hope
Shadows................................
The quality of the outcome casts a shadow over our ability to see the quality of the decision.
We want outcome quality to align with decision quality. We want the world to make sense in this way, to be less random than it is. In trying to get this alignment, we lose sight of the fact that for most decisions, there are lots of ways things could turn out.
Experience is supposed to by our best teacher, but sometimes we draw a connection between outcome quality and decision quality that is too tight. Doing so distorts our ability to use those experiences to figure out which decisions were good and which were bad.
Annie Duke, How To Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices
The power elite?.....................................
The understanding of America as an empire is as foreign to most Americans as is the idea that the specific country that they live in is run by a class of people who may number themselves among the elect but weren’t in fact elected by anyone.
-David Samuels, as extracted from this read-worthy essay
In praise of chaos......................
..............four suggestions for investors. Here's #2:
2. Don’t base investment decisions on your gut feel for which way markets are headed. Instead, adopt practices that have worked through many different market cycles. Like a good poker player, don’t sweat the losses if you have a process in place that puts the probabilities in your favor. Focus on tax efficiency, holding down investment costs, diversifying broadly and investing in line with your risk tolerance.
If music is one of your things................................
......check in periodically with Any Major Dude With Half A Heart.
Decide......................................
“‘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)A different perspective...............................
..........................................................In praise of "bubbles."
Can I get an..................................
.........................................................................Amen.
Monday, January 18, 2021
Fifty years ago.............................................
The Allman Brothers Band.............................Statesboro Blues
Recommended............................
Raymond Aron said it in 1945: "The quarrel of Machiavellianism is rekindled every time a Caesar subjects Europe anew to servitude and war." Have we reached that point? Perhaps not, or at least not yet. If history is rife with Machiavellian moments, some are pronounced and some are less so—more discreet, insidious, stubborn. The less pronounced moments are not always the least perilous, particularly when accompanied by a general lethargy. Machiavelli is an awakener, because he is a writer. He writes to scratch his pen in the open wound. He writes not to revive the splendor of words but to say the truth about things.
-Patrick Boucheron, Machiavelli: The Art Of Teaching People What To Fear
A few snippets..............................
"A platoon commander who joins at the age of twenty-four is commanding a battalion fifteen years later. But we don't know what they will be asked to do in fifteen years so we have to train now for a deeply adaptive mind set."
But however big the Planning Machine was, it focused almost exclusively on financial information. Pierre Wack, and idiosyncratic French oil executive, regarded the forecasts that emerged from these systems as wholly inadequate, a dangerous substitute for real thinking because it was too easy to mistake financial models for reality.
Scenarios should focus less on predicting outcomes and more on illuminating the forces at work across the organization and the environments in which it operates. They must be relevant and challenging, pragmatic not ideological. And that means that they won't be tidy: like life, they are bound to be messy, patchy, full of paradox and contradictions.
Pierre Wack regarded computer modeling as the enemy of thought. Once quantified, he believed, models become too rigid, their makers so wedded to them as to become blind to disconfirming data.
Sterility and paralysis might be blamed on corporate cultures but I've encountered it when running scenario exercises for individuals who find it cognitively or emotionally impossible to leave their past behind. They can't imagine changing industries or jobs, learning a new skill, or enjoying more freedom. They don't love where they are, but fear of change and addiction to certainty traps them, making present misery more comfortable than future hope.
Scenario planning always surfaces conflict and there is always a moment when everything seems to fall apart. But getting the conflict out in the open, constructively, is critical; it's how and when people start to acknowledge and consider alternative perspectives.
"They looked in the mirror and said: 'We don't want to be that!'"
Kahane recalls a popular joke at the time that defined two options: the practical option, in which everyone went down on their knees and prayed for angelic intervention, and the miraculous option, in which people learned to walk and work together.
If you build a model of the world that excludes people, ideas, and forces you don't like or understand, of course your vision appears perfect to you. But nobody else inhabits that world or recognizes it as true.
"Making something binary seems simple but it is a way not to have a conversation . . . it's a form of bullying."
"nobody is an expert on what hasn't happened yet."
"The future is built from today. . . . There is no law of history that condemns us to be better or worse in 2030."
. . . much in the world is too complex to be predictable and that the future is too malleable to be revealed by hard data alone. Absolutely accurate forecasting is feasible, but only where everything is known and predetermined—and nowhere is that true.
-all passages culled from the chapter Go Fast, Go Far in Margaret Heffernan's Uncharted: How To Navigate The Future
for the cause of Peace and Brotherhood....
You may well ask, "Why direct action, why sit-ins, marches, and so forth? Isn't negotiation a better path?" You are exactly right in your call for negotiation. Indeed, this is the purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and establish such creative tension that a community that has consistently refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. I just referred to the creation of tension as a part of the work of the nonviolent resister. This may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word "tension." I have earnestly worked and preached against violent tension, but there is a type of constructive nonviolent tension that is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half-truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, we must see the need of having nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men to rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood. So, the purpose of direct action is to create a situation so crisis-packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation. We therefore concur with you in your call for negotiation. Too long has our beloved Southland been bogged down in the tragic attempt to live in monologue rather than dialogue.
-Martin Luther King, Jr., as excerpted from one of the most amazing letters ever written
Sunday, January 17, 2021
Fifty years ago....................................
The Beach Boys.........................................Disney Girls (1957)
Next book up...................
Why is it so important to have a high-quality decision process?
Because there are only two things that determine how your life turns out: luck and the quality of your decisions. You have control over only one of these two things.
Luck, by definition, is out of your control. Where and when you were born, whether your boss comes into work in a bad mood, which admissions officer happens to see your college application—these are all things that are out of your hands.
What you do have some control over, what you can improve, is the quality of your decisions. And when you make better-quality decisions, you increase the chances that good things will happen to you.
-Annie Duke, from the Introduction to How to Decide: Simple Tools for Making Better Choices
Recommended.........................
He was no visionary, no innovator. He articulated no grand plan for the country or the world. He did not start Reagan's revolution, nor the one that later swept Eastern Europe. Yet he figured out how to channel these forces, to harness them and focus them on constructive outcomes while averting potential disasters. He could bring together people who were more comfortable apart and find pragmatic ways to paper over any rifts. There was little idealism involved and a fair degree of opportunism. He was not above political hardball to advance his team's chances at the ballot box. He never lost sight of what was good for Jim Baker and he survived the ruthless arena of Washington. Asked in later years his biggest accomplishment, he regularly joked, "leaving Washington unindicted," a line he lifted from a Doonesbury cartoon. But somehow in the main, it worked. Things got done.
-Peter Baker and Susan Glasser. The Man Who Ran Washington: The Life and Times of James A. Baker III
One might question.......................
................................the entire notion of "control":
Every day, facts on the grounds were outpacing political leaders struggling to adjust to a reality that seemed increasingly beyond their control.
-Peter Baker and Susan Glasser, The Man Who Ran Washington: The Life and Times of James A. Baker III. The "facts on the grounds" were occurring in the fall of 1989 — the coming re-unification of East and West Germany, an event which no smart people predicted, or even anticipated.
On ends and means..............................
All the same, this doesn't mean that the end justifies the means. Machiavelli never wrote those words, nor would he have been capable of it. His philosophy of necessity rests on the principle of the changeableness of the times and the unpredictability of political action. It would be impossible for the means to justify the end, since, at the moment one is acting, the end is still unknown. The end will always occur too late to justify the means of an action. To govern is to act blindly within the indeterminacy of the times.
-Patrick Boucheron, Machiavelli: The Art Of Teaching People What To Fear
Saturday, January 16, 2021
my old time that used to be................................
Duane Allman and Boz Scaggs.................Loan Me A Dime
Wednesday, January 13, 2021
Monday, January 11, 2021
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.
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.
Sunday, January 10, 2021
"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
Thursday, January 7, 2021
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
Monday, January 4, 2021
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
Sunday, January 3, 2021
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
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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
Posts
