A rugged individual.....................

      "Remember when you got thrown out of the sailing club for leaving the race and sailing all the way across the bay?"  I only had to think a moment about that major event in my mis-spent youth.  It had been the same kind of a day as today.

     "You bet I do," I said with a laugh.

     "I never told you, but that was about as proud as I ever was of you.  I mean, being the first Buffett to get a college degree was good, don't get me wrong, but that time you just decided to light out on your own, that was the moment."

-Jimmy Buffett, A Pirate Looks at Fifty

A pretty fair prophesy.................

     Mead was prophesying a revolution with profound social and political consequences.  Influence in this new world would accrue to people who could produce computing power and manipulate it with software.  The semiconductor engineers of Silicon Valley had the specialized knowledge, networks, and stock options that let them write the rules of the future—rules that everyone else would have to follow.  Industrial society was giving way to a digital world, with 1s and 0s stored and processed on many millions of slabs of silicon spread throughout society.  The era of the tech tycoons was dawning. "Society's fate will hang in the balance," Carver Mead declared. "The catalyst is the microelectronics technology and its ability to put more and more components into less and less space." Industry outsiders only dimly perceived how the world was changing, but Intel's leaders knew that if they succeeded in dramatically expanding the availability of computing power, radical changes would follow.  "We are really the revolutionaries in the world today," Gordon Moore declared in 1973, "not the kids with the long hair and beards who were wreaking the schools a few years ago."

-Chris Miller, Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology

Choose wisely..........................

Comparison makes you unhappy, and there's no end to comparison in the world, if that's the path you choose.

-Dan Sullivan/Benjamin Hardy, The Gap and the Gain 

As mottos go........................

The family adopted a motto: "Live dangerously—carefully."

-Walter Isaacson, Elon Musk

On beauty..........................

      I had thought that going into space would be the ultimate catharsis of that connection I had been looking for between all living things—that being up there would be the next beautiful step to understanding the harmony of the universe.  In the film Contact, when Jodie Foster's character goes to space and looks out into the heavens, she lets out an astonished whisper, "They should've sent a poet."  I had a different experience, because I discovered that the beauty isn't out there, it's down here, with all of us.

-William Shatner, Boldly Go: Reflections of a Life of Awe and Wonder

wringing...................

 They live laboriously, in order that they may live better; they fit themselves out for life at the expense of life itself, and cast their thoughts a long way forwards: yet postponement is the greatest waste of life: it wrings day after day from us, and takes away the present by promising something hereafter: there is not such obstacle to true living as waiting, which loses to-day while it depends on the morrow.

-Lucius Annaeus Seneca, On the Shortness of Life

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

Bruce Hornsby............................the Hot House album

 

harboring...........................

 Despite the fact that it had been around for most of my adult life, I harbored a deep distrust for social media of any kind.  The idea of voluntarily revealing all that personal info to strangers had always struck me as dumber than dumb—and I'd seen far too many cases of Internet stalking, fraud, catfishing, and worse to change my mind about it.  Ever since my early twenties, when I'd shut down my meager Facebook account after some jerk tried to blackmail me for nudes via private message, I've used the Internet only for work and for the purchasing of shoes—an approach I believe could lead to world peace if more people shared it.

-Alison Gaylin, Robert B. Parker's Bad Influence: A Sunny Randall Novel

fierce determination............................

       One day when he was five, one of his cousins was having a birthday party, but Elon was punished for getting into a fight and told to stay home.  He was a very determined kid, and he decided to walk on his own to his cousin's house.  The problem was that it was on the other side of Pretoria, a walk of almost two hours.  Plus, he was too young to read the road signs. "I kind of knew what the route looking like because I had seen it from the car, and I was determined to get there, so I just started walking," he says.  He managed to arrive just as the party was ending.  When his mother saw him coming down the road, she freaked out.  Fearing he would be punished again, he climbed a maple tree and refused to come down.  Kimbal remembers standing beneath the tree and staring at his older brother in awe. "He has this fierce determination that blows your mind and was sometimes frightening, and still is."

-Walter Isaacson, Elon Musk

that vision thing.................

 Lucky people are more relaxed and open, and therefore see what is there rather than just what they are looking for.

-Richard Wiseman

toward.................................

 The key to productivity is doing more of what matters and less of what doesn't. When you concentrate your mental and physical energy in one direction, you have the most impact. . . .

Being busy and being productive are not the same thing. Running around in circles is busy. Going toward your destination is productive. It's easy to be busy. It's hard to be productive.

-from our friends at Farnum Street

Louis XVI..................................?

 In some industries – admittedly not all – the executive to employee pay imbalance is in Louis XIV territory, and the peasants are actively rattling the cage doors for their slice of cake.

For instance, while the UAW demands seem insane, greedy, and self-defeating on their face, when you look at them in relation to what they’re paying, say, the insipid head of GM (Her 2022 compensation comes in at a paltry $28,979,570 which, if you can believe it, meant she made a little less than in 2021.)? You have a sense of where the anger may be coming from.

-as culled from here

Fifty years ago............................

The Oscar Peterson Trio..................The Good Life

 

Because nobody wants to get rich slow......

 ..................................twenty-four beliefs.

wild-cattish................................

       It seems to me that the newspaper reporters of today know very little of the high adventure that bathed the reporters of my time, now nearly thirty years ago.  The journalism of that era was still somewhat wild-cattish: all sorts of mushroom papers sprang up; any man with a second-hand press and a few thousand dollars could start one.  Thus there was a steady shifting of men from paper to paper, and even the most sober journals got infected with the general antinomianism of the craft.  Salaries were low, but nobody seemed to care.  A reporter who showed any sign of opulence was a sort of marvel, and got under suspicion.  The theory was that journalism was an art, and that to artists money was somehow offensive.

      Now all that is past.  A good reporter used to make as much as a bartender or a police sergeant; he now makes as much as the average doctor or lawyer, and probably a great deal more.  His view of the world he lives in has thus changed.  He is no longer a free-lance in human society, thumbing his nose at its dignitaries; he has got a secure lodgment in a definite stratum, and his wife, if he has one, maybe has social ambitions.  The highest sordid aspiration that any reporter had, in my time, was to own two complete suits of clothes.  Today they have dinner-coats and some of them even own plug hats.

-H. L. Mencken, from a 1/10/1027 Baltimore Evening Sun article

What happens when information................

 .........................is widely available:

More information led to a more functional market for both suppliers and consumers. Profits increased and consumers experienced far less volatility in the price of the fish they were eating. Plus there were fewer fish going to waste.

affected..............................

 If you have never been punched in the nose, you have no idea how it affects you the rest of your life.

-Elon Musk

expanded horizons.......................

      I started out wanting to be a Serious Southern Writer.  My mother had made me a reader and stressed the legacy of my family's Mississippi roots.  William Faulkner, Walker Percy, Eudora Welty, and Flannery O'Connor were household names—Mississippians who had made people take notice. . . .

Well, I knew I wasn't one of those people.  I was too warped by the court-jester-like behavior that's essential to being a good stage performer.  I knew that whatever I wrote, it would have a heavy layer of humor.  By the time I expanded my horizons from three verses and a couple of choruses to short stories, and then prose, my sense of humor naturally came along for the ride.

     Besides, I don't have the talent to compete with the Great Serious Writers.  Anyway, writing is not a competition to me.  Writing is fun, and I am simply a storyteller.  I also really enjoy the self-discipline writing requires.

-Jimmy Buffett, A Pirate Looks at Fifty

a culture of responsibility....................

      The alternative is to create a culture around taking responsibility instead.  Most organizations are happy to offer responsibility to anyone willing to take it, but we all need to learn to do a better job of encouraging leadership and positive action, regardless of title or org chart tier.

      And the companion to taking responsibility is relentlessly giving away credit.  When we offer others a chance to shine, they're more likely to connect, to enroll in the journey, and to join the next chance they have to do so.

-Seth Godin, The Song of Significance

idle and unprofitable.....................

 If history is deprived of the Truth, we are left with nothing but an idle, unprofitable tale.

-Polybius

Polybius............................

 In London, meanwhile, John Adams composed his best-known work, A Defense of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America, the sole piece of writing he finished that is longer than an essay. . . .

     In this rambling constitutional study, Adams surveyed all sorts of governments in the ancient and modern worlds, and concluded, as others did, that the most effective and sustainable form is one that is "a mixture of monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy, extolled by Polybius."  That ancient Greek historian had tired in his work to explain the rapid rise of the Roman Republic.  Polybius wrote that he intended to analyze how "it came about that nearly the whole world fell under the power of Rome in somewhat less than fifty-three years."

-Thomas E. Ricks, First Principles: What America's Founders Learned from the Greeks and Romans and How That Shaped Our Country

Quotes..........................

 There are so goddamn many ways to be a fool a man can’t expect to avoid them all.
-Ivan Doig, Dancing at the Rascal Fair

Indecision with the passing of time becomes decision.

-Bill W.

I cannot remember the books I've read any more than the meals I have eaten; even so, they have made me.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

Is there anything in life so disenchanting as attainment?
-Robert Louis Stevenson

It was easier to know it than to explain why I know it. If you were asked to prove that two and two made four, you might find some difficulty, and yet you are quite sure of the fact.
-Arthur Conan Doyle

The first principle is that you must not fool yourself — and you are the easiest person to fool.
-Richard Feynman

oscillates.......................

       God offers to every mind its choice between truth and repose.  Take which you please,—you can never have both.  Between these, as a pendulum, man oscillates.  He in whom the love of repose predominates will accept the first creed, the first philosophy, the first political party he meets,—most likely his father's.  He gets rest, commodity, and reputation but he shuts the door of truth.  He in whom the love of truth predominates will keep himself aloof from all moorings, and afloat.  He will abstain from dogmatism, and recognize all the opposite negations, between which, as walls, his being is swung.  He submits to the inconvenience of suspense, and imperfect opinion, but he is a candidate for truth, as the other is not, and respects the highest law of his being.

-Ralph Waldo Emerson, from his essay Intellect

a cockpit.......................

 We live in a time of ideological exhaustion. . . . Identity is the ruling orthodoxy of the day. Wesley Yang calls it the “successor ideology”, but it is less an ideology than a cockpit of grinding, wounding grievances contradicting one another: a perpetual conflict machine.

-Martin Gurri, from here

thanks Michael

a taste..................................

      The men who live in the democratic ages upon which we are entering have naturally a taste for independence; they are naturally impatient of regulation, and they are wearied by the permanence even of the condition they themselves prefer.  They are fond of power, but they are prone to despise and hate those who wield it, and they easily elude its grasp by their own mobility and insignificance.

-Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Volume 2, Chapter VII (1840)

The fate of nations...............................

      We rarely think about chips, yet they've created the modern world.  The fate of nations has turned on their ability to harness computing power. Globalization as we know it wouldn't exist without the trade in semiconductors and the electronic products they make possible.  America's military primacy stems largely from its ability to apply chips to military uses.  Asia's tremendous rise over the past half century has been built on a foundation of silicon as its growing economies have come to specialize in fabricating chips and assembling the computers and smartphones that these integrated circuits make possible.

-Chris Miller, Chip War: The Fight for the World's Most Critical Technology

Question answered....................

 Parents, teachers, coaches, and guidance counselors bombarded me with the same question: "What are you going to do with your life?"  I didn't even want to think about that when I was fourteen.  My teachers called me a daydreamer.  They would write comments on my report card like, "He seems to live in a fantasy world and prefers that to paying serious attention to serious subject matters that will prepare him for life."

     The life they were so hell-bent on preparing me for bored the living shit out of me.  It seemed way too serious.  I saw more meaning in the mysteries of the ocean and the planets than in theology or religion.  I was too busy figuring out ways to skip school, go diving, and get laid.  My heroes were not presidents, they were pirates.  Emerging from adolescence with a healthy "lack of respect for the proper authorities," and a head full of romanticism and hero worship, I was able to come up with an answer.

    Q. What are you going to do with your life?

    A. Live a pretty interesting one.

-Jimmy Buffett, A Pirate Looks at Fifty

     

One of the all-time...........................

 ........................................great quotes.

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

  If this bus isn't going where you want to go, today is a great time to get off.

-Seth Godin

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

      Watching all this, Orwell arrived at some conclusions that clashed with leftist conventions of the era.  At a time when leftist solidarity was considered mandatory, the right thing to do, Orwell began to harbor suspicions.  Observing the fighting in Barcelona between different antifascist factions, he noted, "You had all the while a hateful feeling that someone hitherto your friend might be denouncing you to the secret police."

      In effect, the events in Barcelona forced him to examine the left as he once earlier had scrutinized imperialism and capitalism.  He concluded, "The Communist Party, with Soviet Russia, had thrown its weight against the revolution."  It was determined to systematically wipe out the anticommunist parts of the left—first POUM, then the anarchists, and then socialists.

     But to say this in public was a form of modern heresy.  Orwell realized, with shock, that the left-wing newspapers did not report the situation accurately, and did not want to.  Rather, they willingly accepted lies.  "One of the dreariest effects of this war has been to teach me that the Left-wing press is every bit as spurious and dishonest as that of the Right," he wrote.  This set him on his life's work, to push continually to establish the facts, no matter how difficult or unpopular that might be.

-Thomas E. Ricks, Churchill & Orwell: The Fight for Freedom

Fifty years ago.....................................

Dobie Gray..........................................Drift Away

 

Privilege................................

 .....................I grew up in a home like this.

Apparently people are starting to notice that it makes a difference.  For instance, this book review, or this column review.   For a different take, check this blog post. All I know is I do feel privileged.

follow through.........................

 

   via

wise contrivance............................

      As the historian Daniel Howe puts it, the founding generation was "fed up with the Articles of Confederation and their reliance on uncoerced public virtue."  The moment had come, he continues, to consider whether "the vices could, through wise contrivance, be made to do the work of virtues."  Thinking through this apparent paradox would become the specialty of James Madison. . . .

       Not only was the structure of the United States flawed, but so was the classical conception behind it, he argued.  The time had come to accept that "all civilized societies are divided into different interests and factions, as they happen to be creditors or debtors—Rich or poor—husbandmen, merchants or manufacturers—members of different religious sects—followers of different political leaders—inhabitants of different districts—owners of different kinds of property etc etc"  But if "different interests and factions" were inevitable, then faction would have to be accepted and interest would have to be seen not as sinful but as natural.  What would a government designed to accommodate them look like?

-Thomas E. Ricks, First Principles: What America's Founders Learned from the Greeks and Romans and How That Shaped Our Country

What.................................?

 Every enquiry into first principles, original causes, and fundamental laws, will at some state come up against an unanswerable question: what makes those first principles true or those fundamental laws valid?  What explains those original causes or initial conditions?  And the answer is that there is no answer—or no answer that can be expressed in terms of the science for which those laws, principles and causes are bedrock.

-Roger Scruton, Confessions of a Heretic

life its ownself..................

 My trade and my art is living.

-Michel de Montaigne, Complete Works, Book 2, Essay 6

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

Santana.......................Beyond Appearances album

 

Rooted.......................................

 

Let it be...........................

 If it is someone else's problem, you probably don't have the solution.

-Anne Lamott, Almost Everything: Notes on Hope

Remember..........................

     Wanting and fearing are natural energies, part of evolution's design to protect us and help us thrive.  But when they become the core of our identity, we lose sight of the fullness of our being.  We become identified with, at best, only a sliver of our natural being—a sliver that perceives itself as incomplete, at risk and separate from the rest of the world.  If our sense of who we are is defined by feelings of neediness and insecurity, we forget that we are also curious, humorous, and caring.  We forget about the breath that is nourishing us, the love that unites us, the enormous beauty and fragility that is our shared experience in being alive.  Most basically, we forget the pure awareness, the radiant wakefulness that is our Buddha nature.

-Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life with the Heart of a Buddha

Fifty years ago...........................

Charlie Daniels...................................Uneasy Rider

 

An interesting conversation.............

 I'm so pleased that Yeats

never got off his stilts

though I have only one.

Midday silence is different

from nighttime silence.

I can't tell you how.

-Ted Kooser and Jim Harrison, Braided Creek: A Conversation in Poetry

Can I get a few Amens...........................?

.......................... Amen #1

.......................... Amen #2

.......................... Amen #3

On trying.................

 The odds increase, the more you try.

-James Clear

pearl..............................

 With students, perhaps even Rumi, taking notes, he explained, "You are your own pearl . . . If you don't know anything else, but know yourself, then you are a scholar and a mystic.  If you don't know yourself, then all the science and knowledge that you possess is useless."

-Brad Gooch, as excerpted from Rumi's Secret: The Life of the Sufi Poet of Love

relentlessly binary......................

 We live in culture-war hell.  The internet ensures that many of us spend all day, every day surrounded by the opinions of people we can't stand.  In the scrum of the day-to-day turf war for the American soul, even minor skirmishes can seem to take on world-historical purpose.  And in a relentlessly binary political culture, people frequently feel that to give any ground to "the other side" at all is to admit defeat.  Which means that progressive culture warriors will often go to the wall for positions they see as broadly on their side, even if they're so extreme as to be ridiculous.  They'll throw their full weight behind ideas and statements and arguments that they secretly feel to be stupid, so as not to tacitly lend support to the right.

     I promise: you don't have to do that.

Fredrik DeBoer, How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement

unfortunate conflations.................

      For example, there are people who earnestly believe that the phrase "I see what you mean" is ableist—that is, disrespectful and oppressive toward people with disabilities—because some people can't see.  This is—and I choose the word carefully—nuts.  It's nuts in several different dimensions all at once.  Setting aside the unfortunate conflations inherent in the concept of ableism, which aggregates together conditions that have no business being aggregated together, this prohibition insults blind people, pretends to misunderstand the way language works, and is fundamentally unserious.  It insults blind people and those with reduced vision because it assumes that they are incredibly sensitive and fragile, that if they come into contact with a perfectly common turn of phrase they've encountered their whole lives, they will be broken by it.  As is true of so many contemporary progressive norms, this prohibition belittles and condescends to the very people it ostensibly honors.  I have a disability myself, a mental illness.  I am not hurt of offended by people using the word "crazy," because I am not so fragile as that and because I know how language works.

-Fredrik DeBoer, How the Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement

10-4...........................

 

summon up..............................

 The only persons who are really at leisure are those who devoted themselves to philosophy: and they alone really live: for they do not merely enjoy their own lifetime, but they annex every century to their own: all the years which have passed before them belong to them.  Unless we are the most ungrateful creatures in the world, we shall regard these noblest of men, the founders of divine schools of thought, as having been born for us, and having prepared life for us: we are led by the labour of others to behold most beautiful things which have been brought out of darkness into light; we are not shut out from any period, we can make our way into every subject, and, if only we can summon up sufficient strength of mind to overstep the narrow limit of human weakness, we have a vast extent of time wherein to disport ourselves:  we may argue with Socrates, doubt with Carneades, repose with Epicurus, overcome human nature with the Stoics, out-herod it with the Cynics.  Since Nature allows us to commune with every age, why do we not abstract ourselves from our own petty fleeting span of time, and give ourselves up with our whole mind ot what is vast, what is eternal, what we share with better men than ourselves?

-Lucius Annaeus Seneca, On The Shortness Of Life

curious creatures............................

       We're curious creatures, aren't we?  We are very good at bucking each other up.  Your friend falls down; you give them a hand up, tell them it's going to be okay.  How many of us do that for ourselves?

-William Shatner, Boldly Go: Reflections On A Life Of Awe And Wonder

Asking......................

 I asked God if it was okay to be melodramatic

and she said yes

I asked her if it was okay to be short

and she said it sure is

I asked her if I could wear nail polish

or not wear nail polish

and she said honey

she calls me that sometimes

she said you can do just exactly

what you want to

Thanks God I said

And is it even ok if I don't paragraph my letters

Sweetcakes God said

who knows where she picked that up

what I'm telling you is 

Yes Yes Yes

-Kaylin Haught, God Says Yes To Me

Fifty years ago............................

Stories............................................Brother Louie

On being totally hosed..............

. . . learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.

-from this Farnum Street post

Reality Check.......................

 

if you are not visiting this blog, well do...........

He'd love it today.......................

     Edison had come to despise government bureaucrats, seeing them as a blight on democracy.  In his disgust he had turned down a medal for his defense work, arguing that he deserved it no more than any other member of the Naval Consulting Board.  He said he had lost interest in weapons of war—not to mention respect for the patent and copyright clause of the U. S. Constitution, "and the other 27,946 books filled with laws."

-Edmund Morris, Edison 

at times.......................

 Secrets are at times a necessary tool for peace.

-Ann Patchett, Tom Lake

thanks David

Self care.............................

 Go to bed on time. Eat healthy food. Meditate.

Skewer your guilt on a red-hot poker and burn it to ash.

Drink more water. Take a walk. Look at trees. Listen to water.

-Annie Mueller, from this longer list

thanks Patrick

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

Pat Metheny Group album..(Lyle Mays, Mark Egan, Dan Gottlieb)

 

The Return on Hassle....................

 The way I think of Return on Hassle is with a simple life value that drives countless decisions for our family.

We value simplicity over complexity… even if it means leaving money on the table.

-back story here

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

      At seventy-three, with his wartime career as president of the Naval Consulting Board behind him, Edison tried to make sense of a new intellectual order that challenged everything he had learned of Newtonian theory.  Abstract thought did not come easily to him.  "My line of sorrows," he wrote, "lies in the realm of technical science."  He needed to feel things come together under his hands, see the filament glow, smell the carbolic acid, and—as far as possible for a near-deaf man—hear the "molecular concussions" of music.

-Edmund Morris, Edison

On the importance of ..........................

 ..........................honoring the truth.

Interestingness...........................

 So I’m not going to spend what’s left of my life hanging round waiting for it. I’m going to settle for small, random stabs of extreme interestingness – moments of intense awareness of the things I’m about to lose, and of gladness that they exist. Things that remind me of other things. Tiny scenes. Words that people choose, their accidentally biblical turns of phrase. Hand-lettered signs, quotes from books, offhand remarks that make me think of dead people, or of living ones I can no longer stand the sight of. I plan to keep writing them down, praising them, arranging them like stepping stones into the dark. Maybe they’ll lead me somewhere good before I shrivel up and blow away.

-Helen Garner, from here

On skipping............................

 ............................the word salad.

debating one's self..........................

 A few years ago, I decided I would try to change my mind about something at least once a month – and that turned out to be way too easy.

I started with politics – we are a polarized nation and I’ve got plenty of opinions about why the other side’s policies are so awful. But if the US is split close to 50/50 on most of these issues, I can’t possibly believe that 160 million people are dead wrong. Or stupid. Or misguided.

I needed to approach my beliefs the way I did when I was debating in high school. I had to prepare myself to be able to articulate and defend a certain side of an argument, but I had to do so without knowing until right before the debate which side I would need to argue for.

The more I did this, the more I realized how shallow so many of my opinions were . . .

-Marc Randolph, from here

You can never go wrong...................

 .................by reading Morgan Housel:

The proper financial mindset is to be scared enough to save for the short run and brave enough to invest for the long run.

Image, if you will.....................

 .....................the voice of God.

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

Bruce Springsteen...................The Rising Album

  

reaching..................

 Success means doing the best we can with what we have. Success is the doing, not the getting — in the trying, not the triumph. Success is a personal standard — reaching for the highest that is in us — becoming all that we can be. If we do our best, we are a success. Success is the maximum utilization of the ability that you have.

-attributed to Zig Ziglar, from here

patiently and persistently...............

 For the wise have always known that no one can make much of his life until self-searching has become a regular habit, until he is able to admit and accept what he finds, and until he patiently and persistently tries to correct what is wrong.

-Bill W.

guardianship...................

. . . we are not poor in days, but wasteful of them.  When great and kinglike riches fall into the hands of a bad master, they are dispersed straightway, but even a moderate fortune, when bestowed upon a wise guardian, increases by use: and in like manner our life has great opportunities for one who knows how to dispose of it to the best advantage. 

-Lucius Annaeus Seneca, On The Shortness of Life

pursuit.....................

. . . by embracing the pursuit of happiness, we rob ourselves of happiness in the here and now.  We fail to appreciate who we are and what we've done to this point.

-Dan Sullivan/Benjamin Hardy, The Gap and The Gain 

single-player..................

 Training yourself to be happy is completely internal.  There is no external progress, no external validation.  You are competing against yourself—it is a single-player game.

-Naval Ravikant

Beating up on Malthus.....................

     Malthus had quite accurately foretold the one phenomenon [population explosion], but had missed the other altogether [productivity increases].  Why? Because of the systematic pessimistic bias to which prophecy is prone. . . . They all thought they were making sober predictions based on the best knowledge that was available to them.  In reality they were all allowing themselves to be misled by the ineluctable fact of the human condition that we do not yet know what we have not yet discovered.

-David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity

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

 

A one-day workweek...................

 Busyness is not the engine of production. It can, in many cases, instead be the obstacle to accomplishing your best work.

-Cal Newport, from here

allow..........................

      If you allow yourself to be awed by life, to keep drinking in its limitless knowledge, to keep striving for answers, to enjoy the beauty around us at every moment, to never stagnate . . . well, then you might find yourself living for a very long time, and ideally, prospering.  Or, in the absence of the longevity and self-defined prosperity you seek, you might well find meaning, or even better, happiness.

-William Shatner, as lifted from Boldly Go: Reflections On a Life of Awe and Wonder

A reminder............................

 

Stressing the importance....................

 ..........................of these three things.

sitting in a cafe................

Paul Cezanne   Oil on Canvas  1894-95  The Card Players

 I’m glad Cezanne was not here in Key West

to set up an easel, and paint
the card game I was in last night,
unless he was really good at depicting despondency.

Cezanne once said that a single carrot,
if painted in a completely fresh way,
would be enough to set off a revolution.
I’ll bet he was sitting in a café that day

where such observations are usually made,
but if I had been sitting in that café
across from Cezanne, I would have quipped
“Maybe if Bugs Bunny were in charge of things,”

and I would have described in a fresh way
how the famous rabbit might be portrayed
using a carrot to point the mob to the Bastille.

Beer and chips and more beer and chips
were served at the poker table,
but no carrot soup, a staple on every menu
in the bunny rabbit stories of Beatrix Potter

and a dish that would have warmed me
inside and out the way a good soup does
and made me feel much better
about losing all my money and then some.

But at least now I have found the answer
to the old question of who would you invite
to your ideal dinner party:
Paul Cezanne, Bugs Bunny, Beatrix Potter,
and okay, maybe at the last minute, Gore Vidal.

Billy Collins, The Card Players

within the sweep of history..................

 One basic rule I try to follow when I write about current affairs is to remember that I do not live in extraordinary times.  We live within the sweep of history, not outside it, and it's our nature as conscious beings to assume that our times must be special because we live in them.  But better to remember that today's crises will be little remembered.

-Fredrick deBoer, How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement

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

 Spend enough time in activist spaces and you start to see the patterns unfold before you, like a skipping record.  I am now some twenty-five years into a career as a part-time organizer.  Some years I've organized more, some I've organized less, and I took a break during grad school, but I've tried to get involved one way or another since I first became politically conscious as a teenager.  Over that time, I have watched the same dynamics play out again and again, dedicated organizers falling into the same sad patterns that obstruct progress.  The victories have been real, but the failures have been more frequent and bitter, sometimes resulting in the fracturing of groups and friendships.  There are many stories I could tell, and in this book I will tell some of them.

-Fredrik deBoer, from his Introduction to How Elites Ate the Social Justice Movement

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

Joe Nichols.................................The Impossible album

 

thumbing..........................

First, I would have her be beautiful,
and walking carefully up on my poetry
at the loneliest moment of an afternoon,
her hair still damp at the neck
from washing it.  She should be wearing
a raincoat, an old one, dirty 
from not having money enough for the cleaners.
She will take out her glasses, and there
in the bookstore, she will thumb
over my poems, then put the book back
up on its shelf.  She will say to herself,
"For that kind of money, I can get
my raincoat cleaned."  And she will.

-Ted Kooser, Selecting A Reader

words.........................

 

Sometimes you just have to stay silent because no words can explain what’s going on in your heart and mind.

-attributed to Maanayata Dutt

via

secrets........................

 

via

A father writes to a son.................

 You might think you want an expensive car, a fancy watch, and a huge house. But I’m telling you, you don’t. What you want is respect and admiration from other people, and you think having expensive stuff will bring it. It almost never does – especially from the people you want to respect and admire you.

-Morgan Housel

Can I get an Amen............................

 If a book sucks, stop reading it. The best readers actually quit a lot of books. Life is too short to read books you don’t enjoy reading.

-Ryan Holiday

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

      That Veronica and I were given keys and told to come early on a frozen Saturday in April to open the school for the Our Town auditions was proof of our dull reliability.  The play's director, Mr. Martin, was my grandmother's friend and State Farm agent.  That's how I was wrangled in, through my grandmother, and Veronica was wrangled because we did pretty much everything together.  Citizens of New Hampshire could not get enough of Our Town.  We felt about the play the way other Americans felt about the Constitution or the "Star-Spangled Banner."  It spoke to us, made us feel special and seen.  Mr. Martin predicted a large turnout for the auditions, which explained why he need use of the school gym for the day.  The community theatre production had nothing to do with our high school, but seeing as how Mr. Martin was also the principal's insurance agent and very likely his friend, the request was granted.  Ours was that kind of town.

-Ann Patchett, Tom Lake

thanks David

eternal........................

 We all know that something is eternal. And it ain’t houses and it ain’t names, and it ain’t earth, and it ain’t even the stars . . . everybody knows in their bones that something is eternal, and that something has to do with human beings. All the greatest people ever lived have been telling us that for five thousand years and yet you’d be surprised how people are always losing hold of it. There’s something way down deep that’s eternal about every human being.

-The Stage Manager, channeling Thornton Wilder in Our Town

Henri Matisse....................

 Today all it takes to buy a Matisse is a lot of money.  Sixty-odd years ago it was not wealth that was needed so much as courage, faith in the new, and a bit of artistic clairvoyance.  In the early 1900s, such qualities were almost nonexistent among French collectors and gallery owners, who considered Matisse a misguided radical, hardly a good investment.  At his few exhibitions his paintings were jeered at for their implausible colors, two-dimensional quality and primitive design: practically none were bought.

-The World of Matisse 1869-1954, published by Time-Life Books in 1969

Henri Matisse   The Open Window   Oil on canvass  1905

Self Portrait    1906

Joy of Life       1905

Dance     1910

On the importance of problems..................

 And most people are not satisfied merely to be confident in the survival of the species: they want to survive personally.  Also, like our early ancestors, they want to be free from physical danger and suffering.  In the future, as various causes of suffering and death such as disease and aging are successively addressed and eliminated, and human life spans increase, people will care about ever longer-term risks.

     In fact people will always want still more than that: they will want to make progress.  For, in addition to threats, there will always be problems in the benign sense of the word: errors, gaps, inconsistencies and inadequacies in our knowledge that we wish to solve—including, not least, moral knowledge: knowledge about what to want, what to strive for.  The human mind seeks explanations; and know that we know how to find them, we are not going to stop voluntarily.  Here is another misconception in the Garden of Eden myth: that the supposed unproblematic state would be a good state to be in.  Some theologians have denied this, and I agree with them: an unproblematic state is a state without creative thought.  Its other name is death.

-David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform the World

attitudes......................

      What actually separates thriving organizations from struggling ones are the difficult-to-measure attitudes, processes, and perceptions of the people who do the work.

     Culture defeats strategy every time.  Measurable skills without productive attitudes aren't worth much.

-Seth Godin, The Song of Significance

accidentally...............................

     As we develop love, appreciation, and forgiveness for others over time, we may accidentally develop those things towards ourselves, too.  While you might think it's a trick, having affection for one's goofy, crabby, annoying, lovely self is home.  This has been my meager salvation.

     That we are designed for joy is exhilarating, within reach, now or perhaps later today, after a nap, as long as we do not mistake excitement for joy.  Joy is good cheer.  My partner says joy and curiosity are the same thing.  Joy is always a surprise, and often a decision.

-Anne Lamott, Almost Everything: Notes on Hope

create.......................

 At the birth of societies, the leaders of republics create the institutions; thereafter, it is the institutions that form the leaders of republics.

-Montesquieu

as revolutions go........................

      As a permanent structure, the Articles of Confederation did not work.  But as a means of transition, a bridge into the future, it served a purpose, and, arguably, succeeded brilliantly.  Edmund Morgan, another giant of the field, writes: "If the American Revolution was in any sense a civil war"—which in part it was—"the Confederation did a much faster and better job of reconstruction than the United States did after Appomattox."  That is, the American Revolution did not turn on itself, with the victors shattering into warring factions and a government that maintains power only by the exercise of violence against citizens, as has happened so often with other successful rebellions, as in France in the eighteenth century and Russia in the twentieth.

     A peaceful outcome was not a given.  The Revolutionary generation would have had in mind Montesquieu's warning that the great first hurdle of nationhood was surviving the shift from war to peace.

Thomas E. Ricks, First Principles

one of the most difficult questions.........

 The nature of appeasement—what it was, how to implement it, when to stop it—became the key issue of British politics for most of the 1930s.

     It is important to remember that a narrow but strong strain of sympathy for fascism, and even for Hitler, ran through part of the English aristocracy.  Most prominent of those seen friendly to Germany was Lord Londonberry, a relative of Churchill's who served in the Cabinet in the early 1930s and then briefly was leader of the House of Lords.  Orwell once commented that "whether the British ruling class are wicked or merely stupid is one of the most difficult questions of our time, and at certain moments a very important question."  It is possible that he had Lord Londonberry in mind when he wrote this.

-Thomas E. Ricks:  Churchill & Orwell: The Fight For Freedom

I miss these guys.....................

Clark and Dawes with a timeless piece explaining how our financial system "works".