A civil religion.................

But Williamson has more in common with President Trump than she — and indeed many voters — might admit, and it’s not just that both have used personal celebrity as a springboard into politics. At their core, both are also prime representatives of one of the most important and formative spiritual trends in American life: the notion that we can transform our material circumstances through faith in our personal willpower. Trump’s authoritarian cult of personality and Williamson’s woo-inflected belief in the power of “self-actualization” both come from the quintessentially American conviction that the quickest and surest route to Ultimate Reality can be found within ourselves. . . . 

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

On the surface, Americans are more religiously divided than ever. White evangelicals overwhelmingly support Trump; meanwhile, the ranks of the religiously unaffiliated, who tend to lean left, continue to grow. But many Americans of almost every political and spiritual affiliation share the inheritance of New Thought ideology: a distrust of institutions and experts, a reliance on personal intuition and feeling, and a conviction that “self-actualization” will lead inexorably to a bigger house, a better job, a banging body.

While it’s highly unlikely that Williamson will win the Democratic presidential nomination, her presence on the campaign trail, and Trump’s presence in the White House, serve as reminders that the ethos of Quimby and Peale thrives on both sides of the political aisle.

It may not be the “oneness” Williamson has in mind. But it’s the closest thing we have to a civil religion.

-Tara Isabella Burton, as cut and pasted from here.   Read the whole thing.

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I suspend judgment........................

      Like the others, Skepticism amounted to a form of therapy.  This, at least, was true of Pyrrhonian Skepticism, the type originated by the Greek philosopher Pyrrho, who died about 275 BC, and later developed more rigorously by Sextus Empiricus in the second century AD. ("Dogmatic" or "Academic" Skepticism, the other kind, was less far-reaching.)   Some idea of the bizarre effect Pyrrhonism had on people is apparent from the story of how Henri Estienne, Montaigne's near-contemporary and first French translator of Sextus Empiricus, reacted to his encounter with  Sextus's Hypotyposes.  Working in his library one day, but feeling too ill and tired to do his usual work, he found a copy while browsing through an old box of manuscripts.  As soon as he started reading, he found himself laughing so heartily that his weariness left him and his intellectual energy returned.  Another scholar of the period, Gentian Hervet, had a similar experience.  He too came across Sextus by chance in his employer's library, and felt that a world of lightness and pleasure had opened up before him.  The work did not so much instruct or convince its readers as give them the giggles.
     A modern reader perusing the Hypotyposes might wonder what was so funny.  It does contain some sprightly examples, as philosophy books often do, but it does not seem wildly comic.  It is not obvious why it cured both Estienne and Hervet of their ennui—or why it had such an impact on Montaigne, who would find it the perfect antidote to Raymond Sebond and his solemn, inflated ideas of human importance.
     The key to the trick is the revelation that nothing in life need be taken seriously.  Pyrrhonism does not even take itself seriously.  Ordinary dogmatic Skepticism asserts the impossibility of knowledge;  it is summed up in Socrates's remark:  "All I know is that I know nothing."  Pyrrhonian Skepticism starts from this point, but then adds, in effect, "and I'm not even sure about that."  Having stated its one philosophical principle, it turns in a circle and gobbles itself up, leaving only a puff of absurdity.
      Pyrrhonians accordingly deal with all the problems life can throw at them by means of a single word which acts as a shorthand for this maneuver:  in Greek, epekho.  It means "I suspend judgment."  Or, in a different rendition given in French by Montaigne himself, je souliens:  "I hold back."  This phrase conquers all enemies;  it undoes them, so that they disintegrate into atoms before your eyes.

-Sarah Bakewell,  How To Live - 0r - A Life of Montaigne:  In One Questions And Twenty Attempts At An Answer

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

We all make mistakes, but starting the Third World War would have been a rather large one.  To this day, I still maintain it was not entirely my fault.  But I'm getting ahead of myself.

-Frederick Forsyth,  The Outsider:  My Life in Intrigue

Fifty years ago..................at Woodstock

Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young..............................Wooden Ships

Meddling...............................

     President Kennedy, during his first months in office, spent long hours on the exotic disturbances in Laos—primarily because just before his inauguration, Eisenhower had told him that Laos was the key to all Southeast Asia.  Once they had taken Laos, the Communists, he said, could bring "unbelievable pressure" on Thailand, Cambodia, and South Vietnam.  If the situation reached the point where other countries could not be persuaded to act with us, we should be willing "as a last desperate hope, to intervene unilaterally."  Kennedy's interest in Laos was no doubt further stimulated by the natural desire of all new Presidents to show their skill at statecraft.  Laos was at the time the only game in town—the only genuine shooting war, even though little actual shooting was ever heard.
      To me, Laos and Vietnam were all part of the Southeast Asia drama that had begun long before.  Refusing to sign the 1954 settlements that made possible the French withdrawal, Secretary John Foster Dulles had the preempted the French role.  With his addiction for formalistic paper solutions, he had devised the South East Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO)—a so-called mutual security arrangement the included the United States, Great Britain, France, Australia, and New Zealand as well as three Asian states:  Thailand, Pakistan, and the Philippines.  By a supplementary protocol, the signatory states of SEATO pledged themselves to protect three nonsignatory nations:  South Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos.   Through Dulles's astigmatic vision, Laos loomed large as a "bulwark against Communism" and a "bastion of freedom," and by the end of 1960, we had provided the Laotian government with nearly $300 million, of which 85% was to help build an army.
     Not much of an army was ever built, however, for the Laotian generals and civilian bureaucrats concentrated on stealing the new wealth.  That left a Viet Minh-directed group, the Pathet Lao, to establish a firm hold on the villages and countryside.  Old friendships and family played a role;  the leader of the Pathet Lao, Prince Souphanouvong, was closely tied to Ho Chi Ming, while the regular government of Laos in Vientiane was headed by his half-brother Souvanna Phouma.  In October 1957, the two half-brothers negotiated the so-called Vientiane Agreements, which provided a neutralized Laos under a coalition government—with the Pathet Lao represented in both the army and cabinet.
      That infuriated Dulles, who thought coalitions with Communists a halfway house to perdition, so he made use of his own family ties by persuading his brother, CIA Chief, Allen W. Dulles, to force out Prince Souphanouvong and replace him with a politician bearing the even more unlikely name of Phoui Sananikone.  Then the CIA conjured up from France a Laotian military officer named General Phoumi Nosavan; sixteen months later, Phoumi overthrew Phoui (which could have been either a significant event or a typographical error).  Five months after that, Souphanouvong escaped from jail to the North, and the Pathet Lao resumed the civil war.
     Phoumi in turn was displaced by a young paratroop captain, Kong Le, who seized power and asked Prince Souvanna to form a new government that, as before, would be neutralist.  Meanwhile, the Defense Department continued to whoop it up for Phoumi, who, with American encouragement, took the Royal Laotian Army to Savannakhet in September 1960, where he proclaimed a new government and denounced Souvanna.  Washington promptly responded by sending him American military aid, though continuing to give economic assistance to the Souvanna government in Vientiane.   Then, in December, shortly after the American elections, Phoumi marched on Vientaine.  Souvanna fled to Cambodia, where he made a deal with Souphanouvong.  Kong Le, prudently taking along a huge store of American supplies, joined the Pathet Lao.  That ended the first act of a preposterous long-running serial that, more than anything else, resembled a Kung Fu movie.

-George W. Ball,  The Past Has Another Pattern:  Memoirs

We should know our history.................

     Ten years after the United States had withdrawn its last man, ignominiously, from Saigon, the journalist Joseph Lelyveld observed acutely, "When we talk about Vietnam, we are seldom talking bout the country of that name or the situation of the people who live there.  Usually we are talking about ourselves.  Probably we always were, which is one conspicuous reason our leaders found it so hard to shape a strategy that fit us and our chosen terrain."  There are many ways of explaining why the United States came to grief so spectacularly in Vietnam.  But the plain fact of it will always be astounding.   The United States was not only five times more populous than Vietnam, its economy was seventy-six times larger.  In 1964 there were only around ten countries in the world, aside from sub-Saharan Africa, that were poorer than Vietnam in terms of per capita gross domestic product, at a time when the United States cam in second only to Switzerland.  Technologically the gap between the two countries—not least in the realm of armaments—was so large as to be nigh immeasurable.  Yet America lost.  Small wonder the Vietnam War became a trauma not just for those men who served in it but for all Americans of that generation.
     Robert McNamara, who was secretary of defense throughout the period of military escalation, looked back in shame on at least six different failures for which he took at least some measure of responsibility.  There was the failure to consult allies, despite the existence of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) since 1954;  the failure to appreciate how a people in arms could withstand and overcome the most sophisticated weaponry;  the failure to see the limits of economic and military aid in the process of state building;  the failure to uphold democratic principles in the governance of South Vietnam;  the failure to understand the complex relationship between the application of military force and the achievement of political objectives;  and above all, the failure of the American decision-making process itself.  To explain this, McNamara blamed lack of time, lack of institutional memory within the government, and "the incremental nature of decision making about intervention in Vietnam [which] never allowed policy makers an opportunity to step back."
      Another member of the flagellant order of the former Kennedy-Johnson officials was McGeorge Bundy.  In a memorandum written as late as May 1967—a year after he had left the administration to run the Ford Foundation—Bundy could still assure the president, "The fact that South Vietnam has not been lost and is not going to be lost is a fact of truly massive importance in the history of Asia, the Pacific and the U. S."  Nearly thirty years later Bundy added a simple marginal note; "McGB all wrong."  His explanation for the American failure was a basic underestimation of  "the endurance of the enemy."

-Niall Ferguson,  Kissinger:  1923-1968:  The Idealist

View from my desk..............

Fifty years ago................at Woodstock

Crosby, Stills & Nash....................................Suite: Judy Blue Eyes

Fifty years ago......................at Woodstock

Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young.......................Long Time Gone



It's been a long time comin'
It's goin' to be a long time gone

And it appears to be a long
Appears to be a long
Appears to be a long time
Yes, a long, long, long, long time before the dawn

Turn, turn any corner
Hear, you must hear what the people say
You know there's something that's goin' on around here
That surely, surely, surely won't stand the light of day, no

And it appears to be a long (yes it does)
Appears to be a long (mm)
Appears to be a long time
Such a long, long time before the dawn

Speak out, you got to speak out against the madness
You got to speak your mind, if you dare
But don't—no, don't no—try to get yourself elected
If you do you had better cut your hair, mm

And it appears to be a long (yes it does)
Appears to be a long (mm)
Appears to be a long time
Such a long, long, long, long time before the dawn

Secret...................................

"The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources."

-attributed to Albert Einstein

Building blocks..........................

     It's a thrilling story of invention:  the young wizard of Menlo Park has a flash of inspiration, and within a few years his idea is lighting up the world.  The problem with this story is that people had been inventing incandescent light for eighty years before Edison turned his mind to it.  The lightbulb involves three fundamental elements:  some kind of filament hat glows when an electrical current runs through it, some mechanism to keep the filament from burning out to quickly, and a means of supplying electric power to start the reaction in the first place.  In 1802, the British chemist Humphry Davy had attached a platinum filament to an early electric battery, causing it to burn brightly for a few minutes.  By the 1840's dozens of separate inventors were working on variations of the lightbulb.  The first patent was issued in 1841 to an Englishman named Frederick de Moleyns.  The historian Arthur A. Bright compiled a list of lightbulb's partial inventors, leading up to Edison's ultimate triumph in the late 1870s. [one version of that list may be found on page 38 of this pdf.]

-Steven Johnson, How We Got to Now:  Six Innovations That Made the Modern World

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Historically misunderstood..............

     By any measure, Edison was a true genius, a towering figure in nineteenth-century innovation.  But as the story of the lightbulb makes clear, we have historically misunderstood that genius.  His greatest achievement may have been the way he figured out how to make teams creative:  assembling diverse skills in a work environment that valued experimentation and accepted failure, incentivizing the group with financial rewards that were aligned with the overall success of the organization, and building on ideas that originated elsewhere.  "I am not overly impressed by the great names and reputations of those who might be trying to beat me to an invention. . . . It's their 'ideas' that appeal to me,"  Edison famously said.  "I am quite correctly described as "more of a sponge than an inventor."

-Steven Johnson,  How We Got to Now:  Six Innovations That Made the Modern World

Fifty years ago.....................at Woodstock

Blood, Sweat & Tears.....................................their 22 minute set

Guilty, Your Honor.................................

         via

The glory of repetition.................................

I was once asked, at a journalism conference, how I defined my job. I said: My job is to write the exact same thing between 50 and 100 times a year in such a way that neither my editors nor my readers will ever think I am repeating myself.

That’s because good advice rarely changes, while markets change constantly. The temptation to pander is almost irresistible. And while people need good advice, what they want is advice that sounds good.

-Jason Zweig, as cut-and-pasted from here

Fifty years ago.................At Woodstock

Richie Havens...........................................................Freedom

Soul force.............................

We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force.

-Martin Luther King, Jr., as excerpted from here

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

.................................................................Jessica Hagy:

This is likely not a compliment.......

"His upper lip is Nixonizing."

-as extracted from the end of the fifth paragraph of this post

Stand thou forth.........................

I am not a day of season,
For thou mayst see a sunshine and a hail
In me at once.  But to the brightest beams
Distracted clouds give way, so stand thou forth,
The time is fair again.

-The King, as channeled by Wm. Shakespeare in Act Five Scene Three of All's Well That Ends Well