Checking in................................

 .............................with Jasper Johns:

Three Flags            1958

Target      1961

Between the clock and the bed            1989

Scent              1975-76

False Start    1959

Bread     1969

Dancers on a Plane     1981

0 through 9    1961

Map              1961

Flag above white     1955

Target           1955

I make what it pleases me to make.. ..I have no ideas about what the paintings imply about the world. I don't think that's a painter's business. He just paints paintings without a conscious reason. I intuitively paint flags.

I made the flags and targets to open men's eyes.. ..[they] were both things - which are seen and not looked at - examined.

Sometimes I see it and then paint it. Other times I paint it and then see it. Both are impure situations, and I prefer neither. At every point in nature there is something to see. My work contains similar possibilities for the changing focus of the eye.

I assumed that everything would lead to complete failure, but I decided that didn't matter – that would be my life. 

As one gets older one sees many more paths that could be taken. Artists sense within their own work that kind of swelling of possibilities, which may seem a confusion, or a freedom.

To be an artist you have to give up everything, including the desire to be a good artist.

Taking some of the fun..........

............................out of doing our taxes:

 SOME 90% OF TAXPAYERS claim the standard deduction on their tax return. Thanks to 2017’s Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, today’s standard deduction is larger than the itemized deductions of most taxpayers, including those who previously itemized.

The wonder of accounting..............

 Washington DC continues to spend much more than it gets in revenue.  In the Calendar Year of 2023, the federal government spent $6.3 trillion, but only collected $4.5 trillion in taxes.  This $1.8 trillion gap drove the national debt to $34 trillion in December 2023.  And it is only going higher.

One problem with these budget numbers is that government accountants, rightly or wrongly, lowered spending in 2023 by about $300 billion after the Supreme Court struck down a large part of President Biden’s proposal to forgive student loans.  That legal decision didn’t change the government’s cash flow last year in any significant way, but it did let the Department of Education “write up” the value of its loan portfolio by about $300 billion.  This, they counted as “negative spending,” which then reduced the official budget deficit.  So, while the reported deficit in 2023 was $1.8 trillion, the Treasury needed to borrow more than $2 trillion to make ends meet.

The high levels of borrowing are causing some investors to fear some sort of imminent and unprecedented snowballing of federal debt.  Continual borrowing will lead to skyrocketing interest rates (and higher interest payments), which will lead to severe problems in the financial system.

-as extracted from here

refuse.......................

 In particular, the Stoics don't think it is helpful for people to consider themselves victims of society—or victims of anything else, for that matter.  If you consider yourself a victim, you are not going to have a good life; if, however, you refuse to think of yourself as a victim—if you refuse to let your inner self by conquered by your external circumstances—you are likely to have a good life, no matter what turn your external circumstances take.

-William B. Irvine, A Guide to the Good Life (the ancient art of stoic joy)

missing the point................

      This old story is a myth, but it is not hard to imagine why such a story gets passed on.  It tells a figurative truth within a literal falsehood, a pathway to a kind of knowledge.

     Yes, technically speaking, it's a lie.

     Technically speaking, you can look at any human life as the sum of a complex collection of chemical reactions, in much the same way as you can look at any beautiful painted as a simple collection of pigments, which is to say, you can miss the point of anything.

-Jarod K. Anderson

the common denominator.................

 

Mark Rothko   Number 10     1950   Oil on canvas

It is really one of the most serious faults which can be found with the whole conception of democracy, that its cultural function must move on the basis of the common denominator. Such a point of view indeed would make a mess of all of the values which we have developed for examining works of art. It would address one end of education in that it would consider that culture which was available to everyone, but in that achievement it would eliminate culture itself.

This is surely the death of all thought.

-Mark Rothko

The trouble with really smart people......

 Comedian Robin Williams was a terrible student. During a macroeconomic class at College of Marin, Williams’ final paper contained a single sentence to his professor: “I really don’t know, sir.”

He failed the test, but it’s the right answer to most economic problems.

-Morgan Housel, from here

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

      As the war drew to a close and Washington stepped down from command, he turned the army over to Knox, who was given the assignment of reducing it to 700 men.  He demonstrated a prophetic vision as a statesman.  While serving as secretary at war under the confederation government, Knox realized that he needed to redefine perceptions about the army to suit the needs of a democratic republic.  Many prominent American leaders wanted to disband the army completely and viewed any force as antithetical to representative government.  Knox created a vision of a new kind of army in which solders were instilled with the nation's most cherished values.  He believed that soldiers could be trained to fight to preserve political ideals rather than geographic boundary lines, to love liberty more than personal ambition, and to value honor above greed and the spoils of war.

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

 Entropy applies to every part of our lives. It is inescapable, and even if we try to ignore it, the result is a collapse of some sort. Understanding entropy leads to a radical change in the way we see the world. Ignorance of it is responsible for many of our biggest mistakes and failures. We cannot expect anything to stay the way we leave it. To maintain our health, relationships, careers, skills, knowledge, societies, and possessions requires never-ending effort and vigilance. Disorder is not a mistake; it is our default. Order is always artificial and temporary.

-Farnam Street, from here

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

Linda Ronstadt...........Heart Like A Wheel (the album)

 

Life skills..................

 it is an astonishment to be alive, and it behoves you to be astonished.

-attributed to John Donne

It's a process........................

 Human intelligence is collective. Pretty much everything I know I learned from other people, either directly or indirectly.

-Arnold S. Kling, from here

Aging like a fine wine..............

 

more aging fun here

Expectations..........................

Jack Levine   The Feast of Pure Reason   Oil     1937

 

The satirical direction I have chosen is an indication of my disappointment in man, which is the opposite way of saying that I have high expectations for the human race.

-Jack Levine

On spinning.......................

 .................................................your wheels:

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

Gene Clark............................No Other (the album)

 

The dopamine...................

.............................................................culture:

    via

A useful channel.....................

 ..................................for questions and answers.

The weaponization..............

 ........................................of "scientific consensus."

via

19 paths..........................

 .....................................................to sureness. 

Eighty percent.......................

 ...........................................of human wisdom!

The trouble with facts................

 There is a tendency to mistake data for wisdom, just as there has always been a tendency to confuse logic with values, intelligence with insight. Unobstructed access to facts can produce unlimited good only if it is matched by the desire and ability to find out what they mean and where they lead. Facts are terrible things if left sprawling and unattended. They are too easily regarded as evaluated certainties rather than as the rawest of raw materials crying to be processed into the texture of logic. It requires a very unusual mind, Whitehead said, to undertake the analysis of a fact. The computer can provide a correct number, but it may be an irrelevant number until judgment is pronounced.

-Norman Cousins

thanks Michael

36 more.......................................

 9.   When you’re lacking motivation, remind yourself: discipline now, freedom later. The labor will pass, and the rewards will last.

-Ryan Holiday, from here

AI has been in the news lately..................

  .............................there will be implications.

source

Uh-oh.....................

 “The empires of the future are the empires of the mind,” said Winston Churchill. And judging by the state of education in America, it seems both of those empires could soon crumble. The dysfunction is evident from top to bottom: from Ivy League outposts down to the secondary schools. Both are producing a generation that is ill-informed, illiterate and innumerate. In other words, a generation increasingly ill-suited to function as productive citizens in a democracy.

-Joel Kotkin

A different definition of discipline......

 In the spiritual life, the word 'discipline' means 'the effort to create some space in which God can act'. Discipline means to prevent everything in your life from being filled up. Discipline means that somewhere you're not occupied, and certainly not preoccupied … to create that space in which something can happen that you hadn't planned or counted on.

-attributed to Henri Nouwen

The key to power...............

 Gratitude is the most potent force in the universe.

-Tony Isola

savor.......................

 We are obsessed with optimization. Professionally, most of us are under considerable pressure to produce. Do more, better. Faster. Regardless of your line of work, you likely have a to-do list. And, if you’re anything like me, it is never-ending. There is always unfinished business. Another opportunity. Something important needing my attention. But our lives should be more than a list of tasks that we just trying to power through. Instead, we need to treat our days for what they are: fleeting gifts to savor.

-Joy Lere, from here

    via

powerless......................

 Older age gives us the knowledge of how powerless we are — not helpless so much but with little control over life’s results. I don’t love this.

-Anne Lamott, from here

please...........................

 

the leap of faith.................

 

-Tanmay Vora, Three Buckets of Courage

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

.

Edwin Starr.....................Hell Up in Harlem album

 

haunted by riddles...........

 Contemporary humanity is a child lost in the woods, haunted by riddles at every turn. How did we get here? Where are we headed? Amid the affluence and luxury, given global communication and cheap travel to iconic places, what is the right path as individuals and as a people—and why?

-Martin Gurri, from here

Moon Woman Cuts the Circle    Jackson Pollock     1942ish

 

a desire for a desire..................

      One thing that distinguishes human beings from other animals is that we are evaluative creatures.  We can take a critical stance toward our own activities, and aspire to direct ourselves toward objects and projects that we judge to be more worthy than others that may be more immediately gratifying.  Animals are guided by appetites that are fixed, and so are we, but we can also form a second-order desire, "a desire for a desire," when we entertain some picture of the sort of person we would like to be—a person who is better not because she has more self-control, but because she is moved by worthier desires.

-Matthew B. Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction

fun with languages..................

 We have here, in other words, a unique phenomenon in the history of religion: a religion whose sacred texts are written in what to its founder would have been a foreign and largely unintelligible language.

     Had the languages in question been closely related, part of the same linguistic family, this might have been of little consequence.  But first-century Greek and Hebrew were not just different languages. They represented antithetical civilisations, unlike in their most basic understanding of reality.  In terms of the last chapter, Greek philosophy and science—the Greece of Thales and Democritus, Plato and Aristotle—was a predominantly left-brain culture, the Israel of the prophets a right-brain one.

-Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning

Lincoln......................

 Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained.  Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with, or even before, the conflict itself should cease.  Each looked for an easier triumph, and a result less fundamental and astounding.  Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes his aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God's assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men's faces; but let us judge not, that we be not judged.  The prayers of both could not be answered--that of neither has been answered fully.

The Almighty has his own purposes.  "Woe unto the world because of offenses! for it must needs be that offenses come; but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh."  If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which, in the providence of God, must needs come, but which, having continued through his appointed time, he now wills to remove, and that he gives to both North and South this terrible war, as the woe due to those by whom the offense came, shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to him?  Fondly do we hope--fervently do we pray--that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman's two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk, and until every drop of blood drawn by the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said three thousand years ago, so still it must be said, "The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether."

-Abraham Lincoln, from his second Inaugural Address 1865

thanks Michael

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

Gordon Lightfoot.....................Sundown (the album)

 

luxury beliefs..................

 White privilege is the luxury belief that took me the longest to understand, because I grew up around a lot of poor white people. Affluent white college graduates seem to be the most enthusiastic about the idea of white privilege, yet they are the least likely to incur any costs for promoting that belief. Rather, they raise their social standing by talking about their privilege. When policies are implemented to combat white privilege, it won’t be Yale graduates who are harmed. Poor white people will bear the brunt.

-Rob Henderson, from here

in relationship................................

       That means that the original basis of Abrahamic monotheism remains, whatever the state of science.  For religious knowledge as understood by the Hebrew Bible is not to be construed on the model of philosophy and science, both left-brain activities.  God is to be found in relationship, and in the meanings we construct when, out of our experience of the presence of God in our lives, we create bonds of loyalty and mutual responsibility known as covenants.  People have sought in the religious life the kind of certainty that belongs to philosophy and science.  But it is not to be found.  Between God and man there is moral loyalty, not scientific certainty.

-Rabbi Jonathan Sacks,  The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning

A mind is a terrible thing to waste...........

      In Finnish schools, a popular mantra is "We can't afford to waste a brain."  This ethos makes their educational culture distinct.  They know that the key to nurturing hidden potential is not to invest in students who show early signs of high ability.  It's to invest in every student regardless of apparent ability.

-Adam Grant, Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things

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

      Because of the high wartime inflation—the cost of imports was six times higher than usual—Henry found it difficult to fill the civilian jobs at the arsenals despite offering exorbitant wages of $30 a month along with a suit of clothes and another suit every year along with the normal army rations.  He wrote Washington that he would add an allotment of half a pint of rum per day to sweeten the deal.  

-Mark Puls,  Henry Knox: Visionary General of the American Revolution

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

 

George Bellows      Cliff Dwellers     1913      Oil on canvas

I am always very amused with people who talk about lack of subjects for painting.  The great difficulty is that you cannot stop to sort them out enough.  Wherever you go, they are waiting for you.  The men of the docks, the children at the river edge, polo crowds, prize fights, summer evenings and romance, village folk, young people, old people, the beautiful, the ugly.

-George Bellows

Witness.................

 

 The universe is an event, not a place.
 Don't seek to own.
 Witness.

-Jarod K. Anderson

image via

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

Joe Walsh..........................So What - the album

 

If only...............................

 We are crossing a perilous landscape. The surface seems frozen solid, but tremendous energies churn below. An angry public’s distrust of, and discontent toward, our system of government feels like a movement seeking a label. Unforeseen events can trigger a shift from repudiation to positive action. Americans, historically sensible, may recover from their temporary derangement and demand an accounting of the politicians and bureaucratic despots who have violated their ancestral rights. The will to freedom, I believe, can overcome the will to power.

-Martin Gurri, from this essay

Compare this...................

In its early Buffett years, Berkshire had a big task ahead: turning a tiny stash into a large and useful company. And it solved that problem by avoiding bureaucracy and relying much on one thoughtful leader for a long, long time as he kept improving and brought in more people like himself. 

Compare this to a typical big-corporation system with much bureaucracy at headquarters and a long succession of CEOs who come in at about age 59, pause little thereafter for quiet thought, and are soon forced out by a fixed retirement age.

-Charlie Munger, as culled from here

Might be why he lives in Omaha..........

 Wall Street’s love affair with this hocus-pocus intensified as the 1960s rolled by. The Street’s denizens are always ready to suspend disbelief when dubious maneuvers are used to manufacture rising per-share earnings, particularly if these acrobatics produce mergers that generate huge fees for investment bankers. Auditors willingly sprinkled their holy water on the conglomerates’ accounting and sometimes even made suggestions as to how to further juice the numbers. For many, gushers of easy money washed away ethical sensitivities.

-Warren Buffett, from this recent letter

Some new quotes.......................

 ...................................from Warren Buffett:

. . . it is madness to risk losing what you need in pursuing what you simply desire.

Cash, though, is to a business as oxygen is to an individual: never thought about when it is present, the only thing in mind when it is absent.

Periodically, financial markets will become divorced from reality – you can count on that.

Our suggestion: Whatever their line, never forget that 2+2 will always equal 4. And when someone tells you how old-fashioned that math is --- zip up your wallet, take a vacation and come back in a few years to buy stocks at cheap prices.

My successor will need one other particular strength: the ability to fight off the ABCs of business decay, which are arrogance, bureaucracy and complacency. When these corporate cancers metastasize, even the strongest of companies can falter.

Where does he find this stuff...................?

 ...................take a scroll through Rob Firchau's blog to find more wondrous music you have never heard before than you ever thought possible.

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

Willie Nelson..........................Phases and Stages

 

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

 

ties that bind....................

A civilization can survive only if its members, especially those with the greatest influence, believe in its basic values.  Today our key institutions—the academy, the media, the corporate hierarchy, and even some churches—reject many of the fundamental ideals that have long defined Western culture.  Activists on both left and right, instead of emphasizing what binds a democratic society together, have focused on narrow identity politics that cannot sustain a pluralistic society. 

-Joel Kotkin, The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class

power.........................

     What is needed today is a new kind of politics that focuses primarily on fulfilling the aspirations of the Third Estate—on expanding opportunities for the middle and working classes.  The current emphasis on social justice through redistribution and subsidies does not increase opportunities for upward mobility, but instead fosters dependency while consolidating power in a few hands. 

-Joel Kotkin, The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class

those pesky "other people"............

      As Irving Kristol wrote almost two decades ago, the fundamental problem is that technological and scientific elites "have the inclination to think that the world is full of 'problems' to which they should seek 'solutions.' But the world isn't full of problems; the world is full of other people."  Of course, he adds, "there is no 'solution' to the existence of other people.  All you can do is figure out a civilized accommodation with them."

-Joel Kotkin, The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class

heads up...........................

 The new urban paradigm elevated efficiency and central control above privacy, local autonomy, class diversity, and broad-based property ownership.  The same oligarchs who dominate our commercial culture, seek to profit from manipulating our moods, and influence the behavior of our children want to structure our living environment as well.

-Joel Kotkin, The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class

Beware the planners................

 In most high-income countries—including Canada, Australia, and the United States—suburban living still predominates.  Among Americans under 35 who buy homes, four-fifths choose single-family detached housing. . . . Since 2010, a net 1.8 million people have moved away from the urban core counties of major metropolitan area, mainly to lower-density counties where single family houses are the norm.

     Despite the continuing appeal of suburbia, planners, academics, and pundits sneer at this lifestyle.  "The suburbs are about boredom, and obviously some people like being bored and plain and unpredictable," said Elizabeth Farrelly, an Australian urbanist and architectural critic.  She continued: "I'm happy for them . . . even if their suburbs are destroying the world."

-Joel Kotkin, The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class

the missing ladder......................

      Unlike earlier newcomers, today's immigrants find it difficult, in rapidly deindustrializing economies with slow growth, to secure the kind of work that might provide a ladder to the middle class.  Mass migration has not created the vibrant multicultural future expected by some, but instead has created much of the poverty and social disorder that characterized large European cities in the nineteenth century. 

-Joel Kotkin, The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class

the "great question"................

 But the issue boils down to whether people—not just those with elite credentials and skills—actually matter in a technological age.  Wendell Berry, the Kentucky-based poet and novelist, observed that the "great question" hovering over society is "what are people for?"  By putting an "absolute premium on labor-saving devices," we may be creating more dependence on the state while undermining the dignity of those who want to do useful work.  

-Joel Kotkin, The Coming of Neo-Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class

Words fail........................

 

Edward Hopper    Soir Bleu      1914     oil on canvas

If you could say it in words, there would be no reason to paint.

-Edward Hopper

Mistakes were made................

 

• Assuming that rules are rules.

-A more complete error list can be found here

Ouch...........................

 

more fun here

Risk and reward.....................

 The big stuff in life boils down to trade-offs and risk management.

-from this post

On getting............................

 ...............................an "A" in life:

Realizing that education begins after graduation is a vital first step.

expanded minds...........................

       Lucy was especially homesick for her family and the gaiety of her life of just a few years earlier.  She felt out of place in Connecticut, where the people, she thought, lacked gentility and displayed coarse manners and unrefined behavior.  Henry advised her: "Take care, my love of permitting your disgust to the Connecticut people to escape your lips.  Indiscreet expressions are handed from town to town and a long while remembered by people not blessed with expanded minds.  The want of that refinement which you seem to speak of is, or will be, the salvation of America; for refinement of manners introduces corruption and venality. . . . There is a kind of simplicity in young states as in young children which is quite pleasing to an attentive observer."

-Mark Puls, Henry Knox: Visionary General of the American Revolution

Them................................

 It was so much easier to blame it on Them. It was bleakly depressing to think that They were Us. If it was Them, then nothing was anyone’s fault. If it was us, what did that make Me? After all, I’m one of Us. I must be. I’ve certainly never thought of myself as one of Them. No one ever thinks of themselves as one of Them. We’re always one of Us. It’s Them that do the bad things.

-Terry Pratchett, Jingo

via

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

Bob James.....................................One (album)

 

a mad intoxication..................

  

The Cathedral      Rodin     1908     Stone original/Bronze casting

For him life is an endless joy, a perpetual delight, a mad intoxication. Not all seems good to him, for suffering, which must often come to those he loves and to himself, cruelly contradicts his optimism. But all is beautiful to him because he walks forever in the light of spiritual truth.

-Auguste Rodin

Fantasy..........................

Fantasy is an exercise bicycle for the mind. It might not take you anywhere, but it tones up the muscles that can. Of course, I could be wrong.

-Terry Pratchett

image via

Our only hope...............?

 Real stupidity beats artificial intelligence every time.

-Terry Pratchett

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

     My mother says I reopened Uncle Jake's private investigation agency because I'm always losing men, so it's natural for me to search for things that are missing.  This would offend some women my age, but she had a stroke two years back and now her damaged brain relies on honesty instead of good manners, so I've got no choice but to take it in stride.  One thing I've learned is, don't argue with the truth on those scarce occasions when you're lucky enough to know what the truth is.

-Randy Wayne White, Gone

Meaning...........................

 People who are confident in their beliefs feel no need to pillory or caricature their opponents.

Curiosity leads to science, but it also leads to questions unanswerable by science.

A mood is not a truth; a feeling is not a fact.

Meaning is a phenomenon not of nature but of culture.

Nature is sublimely indifferent to who we are and what we deserve.

Science deals in explanation.  Meaning is always a matter of interpretation.

Homo sapiens is the meaning-seeking animal.

-all quotes taken from The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks

Delacroix................................

Eugene Delacroix   La Liberté guidant le peuple   1830   Oil

 

They say that each generation inherits from those that have gone before; if this were so there would be no limit to man's improvements or to his power of reaching perfection. But he is very far from receiving intact that storehouse of knowledge which the centuries have piled up before him; he may perfect some inventions, but in others, he lags behind the originators, and a great many inventions have been lost entirely. What he gains on the one hand, he loses on the other.

-Eugène Delacroix 

surpassingly.........................

 Today you did things that humans 50 years ago wouldn't believe and 200 years ago would struggle to imagine.

You know the names of planets
and the shapes of the bones inside you.

You comprehend death and make art.
You are a surpassingly strange animal, worthy of study.

I love you.

Jarod K. Anderson, Crush from Field Guide to the Haunted Forest

a natural upshot.....................

     What sort of ecology can preserve a robust intellectual biodiversity?  We often assume that diversity is a natural upshot of free choice.  Yet the market ideal of choice and attendant preoccupation with freedom tends toward a monoculture of human types: the late modern consumer self.  At least the market seems to have this effect when we are constantly being addressed with hyperpalatable stimuli.  What sort of outlier would you have to be, what sort of freak of self-control, to resist those well-engineered cultural marshmallows? 

-Matthew B. Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction

Sounds like a plan...........................

 via

Meetings..........................

 

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

Gram Parsons..........................Grievous Angel album

 

Checking in with.............................

 

.........................Masters of Time and Space.

responsibilities...................

      It's more important to be good ancestors than dutiful descendants.  Too many people spend their lives being custodians of the past instead of stewards of the future.  We worry about making our parents proud when we should be focused on making our children proud.  The responsibility of each generation is not to please our predecessors—it's to improve conditions for our successors.

-Adam Grant,  Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things

Homer...........................

 

Sunset Fires    Winslow Homer     1880      Watercolor

The life that I have chosen gives me my full hours of enjoyment for the balance of my life. The sun will not rise, or set, without my notice, and thanks.

-Winslow Homer

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

King Crimson..............................Red album

 

an uncompromising man..............

 What made him truly original was that he presented himself as the embodiment of the two central figures of African-American folk culture, simultaneously the hustler/trickster and the preacher/minister.  Janus-faced, the trickster is unpredictable, capable of outrageous transgressions; the minister saves souls, redeems shattered lives, and promises a new world.  Malcolm was a committed student of black folk culture, and to make a political point he would constantly mix animal stories, rural metaphors, and trickster tales—for example, refashioning the fox vs. the wolf as Johnson vs. Goldwater.  His speeches mesmerized audiences because he could orchestrate his themes into a narrative that promised ultimate salvation.  He presented himself as an uncompromising man wholly dedicated to the empowerment of black people, without regard to his own personal safety.  Even those who rejected his politics recognized his sincerity.

-Manning Marable,  Malcolm X: A Life of Reinvention

native freedom...............

   [24]   Consider how we apply the idea of freedom to animals. [25] There are tame lions that people cage, raise, feed and take with them wherever they go.  Yet who will call such a lion free?  The easier its life, the more slavish it is.  No lion endowed with reason and discretion would choose to be one of these pet specimens.

   [26]  The birds above us, when they are caught and raised in a cage, will try anything for the sake of escape.  Some starve to death rather than endure their condition. [27] Those that survive - barely, grudgingly, wasting away - fly off in an instant when they find the least little opening to squeeze through, so great is their need for their native freedom, so strong the desire to be independent and unconfined. [28] 'Well, what's wrong with you here in your cage?' 'You can ask? I was born to fly wherever I like, to live in the open air, to sing whenever I want.  You take all this away from me and then say, "What's wrong with you?"

-Epictetus, The Discourses, Book IV

Partners............................

 . . . religion and science are to human life what the right and left hemispheres are to the brain.  They perform different functions and if one is damaged, or if the connections between them are broken, the result is dysfunction. . . .

     Science is about explanation.  Religion is about meaning.  Science analyses, religion integrates.  Science breaks things down to their component parts.  Religion binds people together in relationships of trust. Science tells us what is.  Religion tells us what ought to be. Science describes.  Religion beckons, summons, calls.  Science sees objects.  Religion speaks to us as subjects.  Science practices detachment.  Religion is the art of attachment, self to self, soul to soul.  Science sees the underlying order of the physical world.  Religion hears the music beneath the noise.  Science is the conquest of ignorance.  Religion is the redemption of solitude.

-Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, The Great Partnership:  Science, Religion and the Search for Meaning

honest amusement..........................

     I should certainly like to have a more perfect knowledge of things, but I do not want to buy it as dear as it costs.  My intention is to pass pleasantly, and not laboriously, what life I have left.  There is nothing for which I want to rack my brain, not even knowledge, however great its value.

     I seek in books only to give myself pleasure by honest amusement; or if I study, I seek only the learning that treats of the knowledge of myself and instructs me in how to die well and live well.

-Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Works, Book Two, Chapter 10

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

Mason Proffit.............Come & Gone album