.......................................Claude Monet:
Tuesday, March 9, 2021
Every once in a while.....................
Abbott & Costello.................................................Who's On First
A weapon....................................
In psychology there are at least two biases that drive this pattern. One is confirmation bias: seeing what we expect to see. The other is desirability bias: seeing what we want to see. These biases don't just prevent us from applying our intelligence. They can actually contort our intelligence into a weapon against the truth. We find reasons to preach our faith more deeply, prosecute our case more passionately, and ride the tidal wave of our political party. The tragedy is that we're usually unaware of the resulting flaws in our thinking.
My favorite bias is the "I'm not biased" bias, in which people believer they're more objective that others. It turns out that smart people are more likely to fall into this trap. The brighter you are, the harder it can be to see your own limitations. Being good at thinking can make you worse at rethinking.
-Adam Grant, Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know
If only you could avoid the human element....
I don't want to be a great problem solver. I want to avoid problems—prevent them from happening and doing it right from the beginning.
Reconsider.............................
But the twentieth-century experiments of nationalism and socialism, of syndicalism in factories and central planning for investment, of proliferating regulation for imagined but not factually documented imperfections in the market, did not work. And most of the pessimisms about how we live now have proven to be mistaken. It is a puzzle. Perhaps you yourself still believe in nationalism or socialism or proliferating regulation. And perhaps you are in the grip of pessimism about growth or consumerism or the environment or inequality. Please, for the good of the wretched of the earth, reconsider.”
Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital or Institutions, Enriched the WorldMonday, March 8, 2021
On patience and restraint.......................
For a younger generation and those to come, the presidency would fuse with television, and politics with storytelling and drama. Eisenhower knew that leadership has many outward signs, but getting constant attention is not one of them. For Eisenhower patience and restraint were also critical attributes of sound leadership. He was confident enough to know that action—any action at all—may be satisfying in the short term but, if not justifiable, could bring with it untold consequences over the longer haul. This could be seen in his refusal to intervene in Vietnam, for example.
-Susan Eisenhower: How Ike Led: The Principles Behind Eisenhower's Biggest Decisions
Fifty years ago.........................................
Santana.........................................................Toussaint L'Overture
Strive.............................
Col. William Draper, President Eisenhower's Air Force One pilot, told former president Eisenhower that after many years of service he was being forced into retirement because of a heart problem, which would necessitate a new career as an airline executive. He confided that he was worried about whether he would be able to succeed in the corporate world. On listening to Draper, Ike said to his longtime pilot, "Go ahead, be scared, and do it anyway."
Whether Eisenhower was frightened or scared we will never know. But he once articulated his simple formula in a letter to Mamie that contained the critical word. He wrote that it was imperative on him to "struggle is to do one's best; to keep the brain and the conscience clear; never be swayed by unworthy motives of inconsequential reasons, but to strive to unearth the basic factors involved and then do one's duty."
-Susan Eisenhower, How Ike Led: The Principles Behind Eisenhower's Biggest Decisions
Fun with statistics.................
That vertical line at the end of the chart represents the money supply - a 450% increase. Scary? Inflationary? Maybe, but not so fast. Morgan Housel weighs in with some context:
Money supply has increased from $4 trillion a year ago to $18 trillion today.
A 450% increase!
That’s something you might see in a third-world country with hyperinflation.
But before you dump life savings into gold and build a bunker, here’s the punchline: The huge majority of the increase you’re seeing in this chart is not money printing or new money creation.
It’s an accounting rule change. . . .
Of the $14 trillion increase in M1, $11.2 trillion (80%) came from an accounting rule change that shifted money from savings accounts to checking accounts.
A fundamental error...........................
David Brooks thinks it is your day job that can make you rich. He suggests avoiding coding = as of 2015 there were nearly eight times as many software developers in this country as there were dentists, but nearly as many dentists in the top one percent as there were software developers. He recommends becoming a surgeon, a lawyer, or a hedge-fund manager.
For what it is worth, an easier path to a brighter future is likely to be found in the trades. Plumbers and electricians can write their own ticket today. Lest you forget, a good sales person is worth their weight in gold.
Brooks's error? It is not what you earn that makes you wealthy, it is what you do with what you earn.
On favoritism...........................
Eisenhower believed that nothing destroyed the morale of a fighting man more than seeing favoritism in the ranks. In thinking about his experience, he once observed: "Morale is at one and the same time the strongest and most delicate of growths. It withstands shocks—even disasters of the battlefield, but can be destroyed utterly by favoritism, neglect, or injustice." He asserted that the same was true in civilian life.
-Susan Eisenhower, How Ike Led: The Principles Behind Eisenhower's Biggest Deicisons
Sunday, March 7, 2021
Temper.............................
In times of stress, perhaps the greatest struggle Ike had to contend with was the desire—the imperative—to control his temper: "Anger cannot win," he wrote in his diary in 1942. "It cannot even think clearly . . . for many years I've made it a religion never to indulge myself, but yesterday I failed."
-Susan Eisenhower, How Ike Led: The Principles Behind Eisenhower's Biggest Decisions
Be careful out there......................
Ben’s rule number one of the unfortunate realities of the investment business is a talented sales staff will trump a talented investment staff when attracting capital from investors.
-Ben Carlson, from his Investments as a Status Symbol post
The more things change.............................
Eisenhower's professional responsibilities were, as he described them, "maintaining the peace we had just won." And Ike was concerned by what he saw around him. "Washington," he observed, "seemed little bothered about the long-term future." In his words, the city was more consumed in rewriting the past by looking, for instance, for "a scapegoat for Pearl Harbor . . . But of the future, piled high with threats to our victory and to our continuing security, there seemed to be little thought."
-Susan Eisenhower, How Ike Led: The Principles Behind Eisenhower's Biggest Decisions
Fifty years ago......................................
Van Morrison...................................................Tupelo Honey
Well, tell us how you really feel..................
I really want to send our public health officials walking across a live minefield wearing blindfolds, so that they can get a sense of how they are providing us with information that would be helpful.
-Arnold Kling, from this post
Continuing education.........................
Spend the day profitably? Spend it pondering these quotes.
First.............................
I've learned that nothing is worth doing if it cannot be done from a place of deep peace. If we want to restore the planet, we must first restore ourselves. I believe that you find your way to your right life, your mission, the same way you find an animal. First quiet your heart and be still. Then find the fresh track and be willing to follow it. You don't need to see the whole picture; you only need to see where to take the next step. Life isn't about staying on track; it's about constantly rediscovering the track.
-Boyd Varty, Cathedral of the Wild: An African Journey Home
If.......................
. . . if we take responsibility for being the author of our world, we can come close to its source where we can correct it. By being loving towards others, we discover that we are surrounded by love and lovingness. When we unreservedly support life without expecting gain, life supports us in return. When we abandon gain as a motive, life responds with unexpected generosity.
-David R. Hawkins, I: Reality And Subjectivity
Saturday, March 6, 2021
Power vs Authority.........................
Authority is not mere power, and it is extremely unhelpful, even dangerous, to confuse the two. When people exert power over others, they compel them, forcefully. They apply the threat of privation or punishment so their subordinates have little choice but to act in a manner contrary to their personal needs, desires, and values. When people wield authority, by contrast, they do so because of their competence—a competence that is spontaneously recognized and appreciated by others, and generally followed willingly, with a certain relief, and with the sense that justice is being served.
-Jordan Peterson, Beyond Order: 12 More Rules For Life
Fun with the language....................
Anyone totally committed to a single pursuit almost inevitably becomes the propagandist of his own effort. As a nation of specialists, we have become a nation obsessed with self-justification. When we don't have it, we make it. And we are now familiar enough with the make-work of manufacturers who need products, scholars who need projects, politicians who need issues, generals who need armies. We speak the language of a people bent on justifying everything we do or want to do, whether it is justifiable or not.
This preoccupation, with its consequent language of self-praise, is epidemic. It is chronic at the highest levels of the government. Much of the blame for the erosion of our idealism must be laid to the government, because the language of ideals has been so grossly misused by the propagandists. The liars of policy and public relations are addicted to a rhetoric of high principle. Our political ideals fill their mouths as unctuously, and with as little involvement of conscience or intelligence, as so many pieces of fat meat.
-Wendell Berry, The Long-Legged House
On curiosity....................................
Awaken our sense of wonder, I say to my fellow nerd-communicators. Ignite the spark of curiosity and give it some fuel, using the time-honoured methods of storytelling, character, suspense and humour. But let's not rely on the journalists and the scientists and the other communicators of complex ideas. We have to be responsible for our own sense of curiosity. As the saying goes, 'only boring people get bored'. The world is so much more interesting if we take an active interest in it.
'The cure for boredom is curiosity,' goes the old saying. 'There is no cure for curiosity.' Just so: once we start to peer beneath the surface of things, become aware of the gaps in our knowledge, and treat each question as the path to a better question, we find that curiosity is habit-forming.
-Tim Harford, How to Make the World Add Up: Ten Rules for Thinking Differently About Numbers
Your share......................
To maintain good relationships with your colleagues means, among other things, to give credit where credit is due; to take your share of the jobs no one wants but still must be done; to deliver on time and in a high-quality manner when teamed with other people; to show up when expected; and, in general, to be trusted to do somewhat more than your job formally requires.
-Jordan Peterson, Beyond Order: 12 More Rules For Life
a cathedral project...........................
True cathedral projects can sustain such ambition because they are so broad: in their base of support, in the number and diversity of people and ideas that they bring together, in the number of experiments they contain. In doing that, they create and sustain the legitimacy that allows them to endure. Lose that and they're finished: anachronisms or pariahs that will dwindle and die. They remain public goods only as long as the public says so. In this, they are profoundly democratic.
Does that imply that democracy, too, is a cathedral project, one in which all of us are involved? Constructed over centuries, radical in conception, daring in ambition, sustained only by those who continue to believe in it. What we know of such projects is that, to endure, they require enormous openness to new ideas, a broad base of support, the ability to adapt and to change, a willingness to experiment, and to be febrile in their responsiveness to the unforeseen and unpredictable. Without that, they have no future. But with it, they may last for millennia.
-Margaret Heffernan, Uncharted: How To Navigate The Future
Gone, but not forgotten..................................
Michael Stanley Band..........Let's Get The Show On The Road
Friday, March 5, 2021
Checking in with.................................
............................................Jordan Peterson:
. . . people depend on constant communication with others to keep their minds organized. We all need to think to keep things straight, but we mostly think by talking.
Freud and Jung, with their intense focus on the autonomous individual psyche, placed too little focus on the role of the community in the maintenance of personal mental health.
We compete for attention, personally, socially, and economically. No currency has a value that exceeds it. Children, adults, and societies wither on the vine in its absence.
We cannot live without food, water, clean air, and shelter. Less self-evidently, we require companionship, play, touch, and intimacy.
It is much better to make friends with what you do not know than with what you do know, as there is an infinite supply of the former but a finite stock of the latter.
No one unwilling to be a foolish beginner can learn.
-all quotes excerpted from Rule One, the first chapter, in Beyond Order: 12 More Rules For Life
Sunday, February 28, 2021
Fifty years ago............................
Badfinger....................................................Day After Day
Saturday, February 27, 2021
Fifty years ago......................................
Richie Havens..........................................Here Comes The Sun
Toughen up................................
Humans are not built for a life of ease. This is a forgotten wisdom, one revered by the ancient Stoics and once fundamental to philosophical thought. Within the writings of Seneca and Epictetus lies the maxim that it is not our hardship that harms us, but how we relate to it. In choosing to learn and grow from affliction, we fortify our mind. As Seneca wrote, “Difficulties strengthen the mind, as labor does the body.” . . .
“Humans don’t mind hardship,” Junger remarks, “in fact they thrive on it. What they mind is not feeling necessary. Modern society has perfected the art of making people not feel necessary.”
-Freya India, from this post on Generation Z and suffering
practice is necessary.........................
The archer allows many arrows to go far beyond the target, because he knows that he will learn the importance of bow, posture, string, and target only by repeating his gestures thousands of times and by not being afraid of making mistakes.
And his true allies will never criticize him, because they know that practice is necessary, that it is the only way in which he can perfect his instinct, his hammer blow.
And then comes the moment when he no longer has to think about what he is doing. From then on, the archer becomes his bow, his arrow, and his target.
-Paulo Coehlo, The Archer
What leadership is not....................
Today's American culture tells us that those most likely to rise to the most important positions of responsibility are the ones who graduate at the top in their classes and have long lists of extracurricular activities. Such countless engagements on a CV are somehow equated with leadership—though they may actually have as much to do with a fear of commitment, a preoccupation with image, or the inescapable desire to assure others that one can master everything at once.
It is ironic, perhaps, that many great, victorious military commanders in our history—Civil War general Ulysses S. Grant; Gen. John Pershing, World War I commander of U. S. forces; and Dwight Eisenhower, World War II supreme Allied commander in Europe—graduated from West Point well below the top of their classes.
-Susan Eisenhower, How Ike Led: The Principles Behind Eisenhower's Biggest Decisions
On the importance of Feynman..........
One of the most important things Feynman ever taught me was that some of the most exciting scientific surprises can be discovered in everyday phenomena. All you need do is take the time to observe things carefully and ask yourself good questions. He also influenced my belief that there is no reason to succumb to external pressures that try to force you to specialize in a single area of science, as many scientists do. Feynman showed me by example that it is acceptable to explore a diversity of fields if that is where your curiosity leads.
-Paul Steinhardt, as culled from here
Toward better..........................
One challenge is embracing the effective and generative approach of possibility when we’re sure that we’re entitled to grievance.
-Seth Godin, from his post Grievance and possibility
Thursday, February 25, 2021
Fifty years ago.......................................
John Denver..........................Take Me Home, Country Roads
One by one..............................
"As they say 'to be in the world, but not of the world.' You can go to the Himalayas and miss it completely, and you can be stuck in the middle of New York and be very spiritual. I mean, I noticed in certain places, like New York, it brings out a certain thing in myself. If I go to some place like Switzerland, I find a lot of uptight people because they're living amongst so much beauty there's no urgency in trying to find the beauty within themselves. If you're stuck in New York you have to somehow look within yourself - otherwise you'd go crackers. So, in a way, it's good to be able to go in and out of both situations. Most people think when the world gets itself together we'll all be okay. I don't see that situation arriving. I think one by one, we all free ourselves from the chains we have chained ourselves to. But I don't think that suddenly some magic happens and the whole lot of us will all be liberated in one throw."
-George Harrison
Ah, human nature...................
“To suppose that the value of a stock is determined purely by a corporation’s earnings discounted by the relevant interest rates and adjusted for the marginal tax rate is to forget that people have burned witches, gone to war on a whim, risen to the defense of Joseph Stalin and believed Orson Welles when he told them over the radio that the Martians had landed.”
-Jim Grant, as quoted in this brief essay
You don't come across writing like this every day
I have a friend blessed with an intellect as keen as a drill, who, though he takes an interest in aesthetics, has never during a life of almost forty years been guilty of an aesthetic emotion. So, having no faculty for distinguishing a work of art from a handsaw, he is apt to rear up a pyramid of irrefragable argument on the hypothesis that a handsaw is a work of art. This defect robs his perspicuous and subtle reasoning of much of its value; for it has ever been a maxim that faultless logic can win but little credit for conclusions that are based on premises notoriously false. Every cloud, however, has its silver lining, and this insensibility, though unlucky in that it makes my friend incapable of choosing a sound basis for his argument, mercifully blinds him to the absurdity of his conclusions while leaving him in full enjoyment of his masterly dialectic.
-Clive Bell, from his little book, Art, found here
Wealthy 101...........................
74. soft wealth: health, relationships, creativity, art, books, deserts, perfect pizzas.
75. hard wealth: cash, enough to live on, finances managed.
And then there is real wealth..................
Wednesday, February 24, 2021
Uh-oh..........................
Walter Russell Mead eyes the politics of a coming "Green" wave. Careful what you wish for - it gets complicated. A wee excerpt:
Those who dismiss ideas like the “green new deal” as mere left-wing fantasies miss the enormous appeal of these programs for corporations looking for new business opportunities. It isn’t only renewable energy companies looking for government mandates and funding. It’s major auto manufacturers dreaming of replacing every gasoline-powered car and truck on the planet with an electric vehicle—and reaping the public-relations reward of looking virtuous. It’s construction companies looking to replace the existing energy infrastructure.
Judgment.......................
"Whatever strengthens your ego weakens your judgement, and ultimately, your success."
Tuesday, February 23, 2021
On manners.............................
Technology, it might be said, by providing machines to do what used to be done by hand . . . has complicated our lives in as many ways as it has simplified and enriched them . . . but in committing ourselves to machine control we have sacrificed many of the pleasures of self-control—of manners, if you wish. . . .
Now and then someone I have just met, avoiding false coziness, calls me "Mr. Lynes." I am as astonished as I am pleased, but it's my age and white hair that evokes it. I think of a story told by Dame May Witty, the distinguished actress, who was in a London shop and was being waited on by an uppity salesgirl (there are two words that have vanished) who was offhand and rude. Dame May, piqued, said, "I suppose you know who I am," and the clerk replied, "Certainly." To which the actress said, "I suppose you think you're as good as I am," and the girl said, "Of course." "Then why," Dame May said, " can't you be civil to your equals?"
Civility is, of course, the root and branch of manners . . .
-Russell Lynes, from his 1986 essay, On Good Behavior, found here
Just think................................
Most of us take pride in our knowledge and expertise, and in staying true to our beliefs and opinions. That makes great sense in a stable world, where we get rewarded for having the conviction of our ideas. The problem is that we live in a rapidly changing world, where we need to spend as much time rethinking as we do thinking.
Rethinking is a skill set, but it's also a mindset. We already have many of the mental tools we need. We just have to remember to get them out of the shed and remove the rust.
-Adam Grant: Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don't Know
Investing with your heart.............
Money — the making of it — is never part of that purpose. It’s a byproduct of one or more of these other more lofty goals. The only purpose the money really serves for us is to allow us to do it all over again.
-Patrick Rhone, full story here
Sunday, February 21, 2021
Help From History..................
Please help me know it happened, that life I thought we had—
Our friends holding out their hands to us—
Our enemies mistaken, infected by unaccountable
prejudice—
Our country benevolent, a model for all governments,
good-willed—
Those mad rulers at times elsewhere, inhuman, and yet
mob-
worshipped,
leaders of monstrous doctrine, unspeakable
beyond belief,
yet strangely attractive to the uninstructed.
And please let me believe these incredible legends that
have
dignified our
lives—
The wife or husband helplessly loving us, the children
full of
awe and
affection, the dog insanely faithful—
Our growing up hard—hard times,
being industrious and
reliable—
The places we lived arched full of serene golden light—
Now, menaced by judgments, overheard revisions, let me
retain what ignorance it
takes to preserve what we need—
a past that redeems any
future.
That sound you hear..............................
........................is minds being blown all over the country.
On unconscious biases.....................
My left-leaning, environmentally conscious friends are justifiably critical of ad hominem attacks on climate scientists. You know the kind of thing: claims that scientists are inventing data because of their political biases or because they're scrambling for funding from big government. In short, smearing the person rather than engaging with the evidence. Yet the same friends are happy to embrace and amplify the same kind of tactics when they're used to attack my fellow economists: that we're inventing data because of our political biases, or scrambling for funding from big business. I tried to point out the parallel to one thoughtful person, and got nowhere. She was completely unable to comprehend what I was talking about. I'd call this a 'double standard', but that would be unfair—it would suggest it was deliberate. It's not. It's an unconscious bias that's easy to see in others and very hard to see in ourselves.
-Tim Harford: How to Make the World Add Up: Ten Rules for Thinking Differently About Numbers
Reasonable...............................
"So convenient a thing it is to be a reasonable creature, since it enables one to find or make a reason for everything one has a mind to do."
-Benjamin Franklin, as culled from his Autobiography
for ourselves.............................
What the patterns of an artist's progress show is the human capacity to find meaning and to make lasting work not by planning it but by remaining open to the possibilities they see inside and around themselves. This argues against forcing predetermined expectations and goals onto our experience of life and for an alert way of being, open to noticing and responding to the future as it emerges. We think ourselves efficient when we squeeze our lives into schedules, itineraries, and plans, asking of apps that they tell us what to do, where to go next. But what we lose is the freedom to notice for ourselves, to filter and reflect for ourselves, to craft our unique sense of who we are and what we wish to make of our lives.
-Margaret Heffernan, Uncharted: How To Navigate The Future
Checking in..............................
.....................................with Will Rogers (1879-1935):
"It's pitiful when you think how ignorant the founders of our Constitution must have been. Just think what a Country we would have if men in those days had the Brains and forethought of our men today!"
"We shouldn't elect a President; we should elect a magician."
"Washington, D.C. Papers say, 'Congress is deadlocked and can't act.' I think that is the greatest blessing that could befall this Country."
"If all politicians fished instead of spoke publicly, we would be at peace with the world."
"Lord, the money we do spend of Government and it's not one bit better than the government we got for one third the money twenty years ago."
"Things in our country run in spite of government. Not by aid of it."
"You know, Congressmen are the nicest fellows in the world to meet. I sometimes really wonder if they realize the harm they do."
"Elect 'em for a six-year term; not allow 'em to succeed themselves. that would keep their mind off politics."
Saturday, February 20, 2021
Four hours and forty-four minutes..........
.....................................of musical blissfulness. Thank you!
Effort................................
“no matter what your ability is, effort is what ignites that ability and turns it into accomplishment.”
Mindset: The New Psychology Of SuccessThe ultimate..................................
...........................................................choice.
Fifty years ago.............................
Gordon Lightfoot........................If You Could Read My Mind
As Louis L' Amour said......................
..........................there is always a faster gun:
12. Don’t worry about what everyone else is doing. There will always be someone getting richer than you in life and the markets. And with the advent of social media, that means people throwing this fact in your face constantly.
This one is not easy but defining what a rich life means to you can help avoid unnecessary envy and regret.
-Ben Carlson, from this list at this post
Phase of the Mood..............................
.............................waiting patiently for this essential mix.
Friday, February 19, 2021
Herds.................................
“Men, it has been well said, think in herds; it will be seen that they go mad in herds, while they only recover their senses slowly, one by one.”
"ethnomathematics"..........................?
Warren Meyer opines on the latest unusual idea to come out of what passes for the educational industry these days - here. A wee excerpt here:
Steve Martin used to have a comedy routine where he would say something like, "wouldn't it be funny to teach your kids how to talk wrong. On their first day in Kindergarten class they would walk up to the teacher and exclaim, "Mumbo dogface in the banana patch!" That had a certain dark humor to it but teaching kids to do math wrong in real life is simply insane.
An explanation of "cargo cult thinking" is here
Always be learning...................................
..................................................................The 5-Hour Rule.
A few more books...................
..................................................I haven't read.
Tuesday, February 16, 2021
On the toxicity of brands..............
The future isn't something to be nailed down, defined, and programmed. The only way to influence it is to keep noticing. While an efficient mind-set prizes predictability and continuity, an artist's passion for exploration develops the capacity for change. For years now, we've been encouraged to develop "the brand you," to adopt, as businesses or individuals, an unwavering, fixed positioning that everyone can recognize and rely on. But for artists, brands are toxic, suppressing the lively evolution that keeps them growing. . . .
Artists often change before they have to. Fans and followers frequently deplore these moments of evolution, when musicians adopt or abjure new technology, when painters change media, when writers shift style or genre. Ibsen was forever frustrating his champions by his furious refusal to be tied down by their definition of him. Picasso's shifts in style baffled critics. Fans of Schoenberg's gorgeous classicism were dismayed and disgusted by his adoption of the twelve-tone scale. Even James Joyce's staunchest supporters balked before diving into Finnegans Wake. Many Miles Davis fans never forgave his electric years. It took decades before Bob Dylan's fans got used to the idea that change was the point, that developing self was Dylan's subject.
-Margaret Heffernan, Uncharted: How To Navigate The Future
Perspectives...........................
Psychologists have a name for our tendency to confuse our own perspective with something more universal: it's called 'naive realism', the sense that we are seeing reality as it truly is, without filters or errors. Naive realism can lead us badly astray when we confuse our personal perspective on the world with some universal truth. We are surprised when an election goes against us: everyone in our social circle agreed with us, so why did the nation vote otherwise? Opinion polls don't always get it right, but I can assure you they have a better track record of predicting elections than simply talking to your friends.
-Tim Harford, How to Make the World Add Up: Ten Rules for Thinking Differently About Numbers
Craving, not having..............................
One of the rules that emerges from a consideration of the factors that promote self-sacrifice is that we are less ready to die for what we have or are than for what we wish to have and to be. It is a perplexing and unpleasant truth that when men already have "something worth fighting for," they do not feel like fighting. People who live full, worthwhile lives are not usually ready to die for their own interests nor for their country nor for a holy cause. Craving, not having, is the mother of a reckless giving of oneself.
-Eric Hoffer, The True Believer: Thoughts On The Nature Of Mass Movements
An imaginary museum...................
Like many people with an interest in art, I carry an imaginary museum around in my head. I change exhibitions frequently, not in any orderly way, adding new pieces and putting old ones in storage. I throw away very little, so that the place, if it can be called that, is cluttered. One of the pleasant attributes of an imaginary gallery is that it can be any size, and there is no maintenance or upkeep and no worry about conservation. Nothing costs anything. If the pictures I put in it sometimes gain in value and sometimes decline, it is a matter of taste (call it whim, if your please)—my taste—and any arguments about it are between my taste today and my taste of yesterday.
It is almost impossible not to put what is in my museum in categories—landscapes, genre, nudes, portraits or nonrepresentational, religious, mythical, still life, and decorative paintings. Though I have some sculpture and some objets de vertu and a great many drawings, that is about it, except for a very few photographs and prints. My museum doesn't tend towards "mulitples" of any sort. It is a matter of playing favorites; I am under no pressure to put something in my museum because some critic, or generations of connoisseurs and dilettantes, have declared it to be a masterpiece. One generation's masterpiece can obviously be the next generation's colossal bore, which does not change the nature of the object in the least.
-Russell Lyne, Life In The Slow Lane: Observations On Art, Architecture, Manners, And Other Such Spectator Sports
Here are a few things hanging in my imaginary gallery:
Parenting.............................
One of the incidents in Ike's youth that he later said had a lasting impact on him revolved around Halloween. When he was in elementary school, hit two older brothers were given permission to go out and trick-or-treat. Ike wanted desperately to go, but was denied permission by his parents. In a spectacular display of what we would today call a "meltdown," Ike went into a rage—and essentially blacked out as he bloodied his fists by repeatedly hitting them against a tree. His parents, rightly concerned, took measures. His father probably gave Ike's backside a few strokes of a hickory stick, and he was sent to his room—the one he shared with the two brothers who were out on the town.
As Ike lay in bed sobbing pitifully, his mother came upstairs and sat quietly for a few minutes, waiting for him to settle down. When his tears had turned to occasional whimpers, Ida talked to him in a gentle but firm way. Did he know that his behavior had hurt only himself?
After a few quiet words she ended with a paraphrase from the Bible: "He who conquereth his soul is greater than he who taketh a city."
As his mother bandaged his hands, she continued to talk to her son, again calmly urging him to understand that in his anger he had hurt only himself; that the object of his anger (in this case his brothers) probably didn't even know of his resentment.
Eisenhower later wrote that the conversation was "one of the most valuable moments of my life."
-Susan Eisenhower, How Ike Led: The Principles Behind Eisenhower's Biggest Decisions
Happy Anniversary Sweetie.................
The Beatles...........................................................Michelle
Monday, February 15, 2021
an inner sense of captaincy..................
Developing an inner sense of captaincy is not about compensating for an incompetent leader—nor does it mean thinking we always know best. The better someone is at leading people, the more they create the conditions for their team to take initiative and be proactive about preventing problems. They show by example that they inhabit a state rather than a particular role. A stronger leader can mean a more independent team.
-from this Farnam Street post
The world...........................
.........................is just a better place when The Sovereign Professional is posting regularly. Do check in.
On being careful what you wish for................
It doesn’t matter how well-intentioned the program is. It doesn’t matter what a regulation was meant to do — it matters what it does. . . .
“Markets work!” is cartoon libertarianism, but you know what? Markets work. And if you don’t let them work, you end up with artificial scarcity, high prices, and rationing.
-Kevin D. Williamson, as culled from this post
Opening paragraphs...................
John Maynard Keynes was not an athletic man. Though a spirited debater, he had always suffered from fragile health. Overworked by choice and underexercised out of habit, he had acclimated himself to living in the constant shadow of head colds and influenza attacks. He was thirty-one years old on the first Sunday of August 1914 and had lived nearly all those years at Cambridge, where, like his father before him, he held a minor academic post. His friend and mentor Bertrand Russell was accustomed to seeing the younger man reviewing figures or buried in papers on weekend afternoons. A King's College man, Keynes might, in moments of extreme restlessness, calm himself with a walk through the Great Court of Russell's Trinity College, taking in the turrreted medieval towers of King's Gate, the soaring gothic windows of the chapel built during the reign of Queen Elizabeth, and the steady waters of the fountain designed when William Shakespeare had composed Hamlet. Keynes was a man who savored tradition and contemplation. He was perfectly suited for a life at the timeworn university.
-Zachary D. Carter, The Price Of Peace: Money, Democracy, And The Life Of John Maynard Keynes
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