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

The Beach Boys.........................................Disney Girls (1957)

 

Next book up...................

      Why is it so important to have a high-quality decision process?

      Because there are only two things that determine how your life turns out:  luck and the quality of your decisions.  You have control over only one of these two things.

      Luck, by definition, is out of your control.  Where and when you were born, whether your boss comes into work in a bad mood, which admissions officer happens to see your college application—these are all things that are out of your hands.

      What you do have some control over, what you can improve, is the quality of your decisions.  And when you make better-quality decisions, you increase the chances that good things will happen to you.

-Annie Duke, from the Introduction to How to Decide:  Simple Tools for Making Better Choices

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

      He was no visionary, no innovator.  He articulated no grand plan for the country or the world.  He did not start Reagan's revolution, nor the one that later swept Eastern Europe.  Yet he figured out how to channel these forces, to harness them and focus them on constructive outcomes while averting potential disasters.  He could bring together people who were more comfortable apart and find pragmatic ways to paper over any rifts.  There was little idealism involved and a fair degree of opportunism.  He was not above political hardball to advance his team's chances at the ballot box.  He never lost sight of what was good for Jim Baker and he survived the ruthless arena of Washington.  Asked in later years his biggest accomplishment, he regularly joked, "leaving Washington unindicted," a line he lifted from a Doonesbury cartoon.  But somehow in the main, it worked.  Things got done.  

-Peter Baker and Susan Glasser.  The Man Who Ran Washington:  The Life and Times of James A. Baker III

One might question.......................

................................the entire notion of "control":

 Every day, facts on the grounds were outpacing political leaders struggling to adjust to a reality that seemed increasingly beyond their control.

-Peter Baker and Susan Glasser,  The Man Who Ran Washington:  The Life and Times of James A. Baker III.   The "facts on the grounds" were occurring in the fall of 1989 — the coming re-unification of East and West Germany, an event which no smart people predicted, or even anticipated.

On ends and means..............................

      All the same, this doesn't mean that the end justifies the means.  Machiavelli never wrote those words, nor would he have been capable of it.  His philosophy of necessity rests on the principle of the changeableness of the times and the unpredictability of political action.  It would be impossible for the means to justify the end, since, at the moment one is acting, the end is still unknown.  The end will always occur too late to justify the means of an action.  To govern is to act blindly within the indeterminacy of the times.

-Patrick Boucheron,  Machiavelli:  The Art Of Teaching People What To Fear

my old time that used to be................................

Duane Allman and Boz Scaggs.................Loan Me A Dime

 

Inquiring minds would like to know......

A prayer......................................

 Can we please lay down our swords of vitriol and venom? Might we pray for peace and it begin with me, each of us? We pray for a peace that surpasses party, personal preferences, and tightly held prejudices.

-as culled from this post

ideal......................................

 . . . "my ideal of a scientific man, accepting nothing upon authority, but putting every scientific theory to the severest test. . . . I hope I have learned from Professor Ludwig's precept and practice that the most important lesson for every man of science, not to be satisfied with loose thinking and half-proofs, not to speculate and theorize but to observe closely and carefully."

-William Henry Welch, as quoted in John Barry's The Great Influenza:  The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History

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

 Machiavelli had the good fortune always to be disappointed by the statesmen he met.  None, it turned out, measured up to the situation; none was ready to act with the sharpness, decisiveness, and speed that the quality of the times demanded.  It was good fortune, in a way, when you consider the moral and literary depths to which intellectuals can descend when they become entranced with a powerful figure.  If that figure captures their admiration, their intelligence soon capitulates.

     Machiavelli tried to find princes to admire, but when he found none he was forced to invent a Prince on paper.

-Patrick Boucheron, Machiavelli:  The Art of Teaching People What To Fear

On Quarterbacks............................

 ......in the most loving and kind way, a harsh assessment.

"regret minimization framework".....................

      To make the decision, Bezos used a mental exercise that would become a famous part of his risk-calculation process.  He called it a "regret minimization framework."  He would imagine what he would feel when he turned eighty and thought back to the decision.  "I want to have minimized the number of regrets I have," he explains.  "I knew that when I was eighty, I was not going to regret having tried this.  I was not going to regret trying to participate in this thing called the internet that I thought was going to be a really big deal.  I knew that if I failed, I wouldn't regret that, but I knew the one thing I might regret is not ever having tried.  I knew that that would haunt me every day.

-Walter Isaacson, from the Introduction to Invent & Wander:  The Collected Writings of Jeff Bezos

Regrets, I've had a few, but then again............

Frank Sinatra.................................................................My Way

 

Unmoved....................................

      It is said of Cato that even from his infancy, in his speech, his countenance, and all his childish pastimes, he discovered an inflexible temper, unmoved by any passion, and firm in everything.  He was resolute in his purposes, much beyond the strength of his age, to go through with whatever he undertook.  He was rough and ungentle toward those that flattered him, and still more unyielding to those who threatened him.  It was difficult to excite him to laughter, his countenance seldom relaxed even into a smile; he was not quickly or easily provoked to anger, but if once incensed, he was no less difficult to pacify.

     When he began to learn, he proved dull, and slow to apprehend, but of what he once received, his memory was remarkably tenacious.  And such in fact, we find generally to be the course of nature; men of fine genius are readily reminded of things, but those who receive with most pains and difficulty, remember best; every new thing they learn, being, as it were burnt and branded in on their minds.  Cato's natural stubbornness and slowness to be persuaded may also have made it more difficult for him to be taught.  For to learn is to submit to have something done to one; and persuasion comes soonest to those who have least strength to resist it.

-Plutarch's Lives, Translated by John Dryden, from the chapter, Cato The Younger

Invisible friends......................................

      Machiavelli is a hunter, always on the lookout for the mechanism that moves human passions and acts on the lives of others.  Where is politics to grasped if not among ordinary people, when differences of opinion arise?  At the tavern are "a butcher, a miller, and two kiln tenders. With these men I dawdle all day playing cards and backgammon, which results in a thousand quarrels with streams of spiteful and wounding words."

     At nightfall, finally, it is time for Machiavelli to pay a visit to his invisible friends who live in ancient books.  They died a long time ago, but they sustain us.  They, too, can be asked for news.  But for that, you need to go to a little trouble, make yourself presentable, to join solemnly in conversation with the men of antiquity:

     When the evening comes, I return home and go into my study.  At the door I take off my everyday clothes, covered with mud and dirt, and don garments of court and palace.  Now garbed fittingly I step into the ancient courts of men of antiquity, where, received kindly, I partake of food that is for me alone and for which I was born, where I am not ashamed to converse with them and ask them the reasons for their actions.  And they in their full humanity answer me.  For four hours I feel no tedium and forget every anguish, not afraid of poverty, nor terrified of death.

-Patrick Boucheron, Machiavelli:  The Art Of Teaching People What To Fear

In praise of doubt..............................

      In Faust, Goethe wrote,

            'Tis writ, "In the beginning was the Word."/  I Pause, to wonder what is here inferred./The Word I cannot set supremely high:/A new translation I will try./I read, if by the spirit, I am taught,/This sense, "In the beginning was the Thought. . . ."

     Upon "the Word" rested authority, stability, and law;  "the Thought" roiled and ripped apart and created—without knowledge or concern of what it would create. . . .

      If a society does set Goethe's "Word . . . supremely high," if it believes it knows the truth and that it need not question its beliefs, then that society is more likely to enforce rigid decrees, and less likely to change.  If it leaves room for doubt about the truth, it is more likely to be free and open.

-John Berry,  The Great Influenza:  The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History

The cancel culture has been with us for a very long while..........

      So, in denouncing totalitarianism, and in advocating a multicultural Algeria where both communities would enjoy the same rights, Camus antagonized both the right and the left.  At the time of his death [1960] he was very much isolated and subject to attacks from all sides designed to destroy the man and the artist so that his ideas would have no impact.

-Albert Camus, The First Man, as culled from the Editor's Note

Makes me think he's not a history major...........

 Regardless of how things play out from here, yesterday was one of the most embarrassing days in our country’s history.

-Ben Carlson, from this read-worthy post 

Not everyone will admire this skill set..............

      All the talking, all the horse-trading came down to sniffing out what the many players needed to come to terms, a process that was Baker at his strongest.  He was at heart a canny pol who knew Congress well, knew who could deliver, knew how to play them off each other just enough to get them to give a little, knew he needed to give enough himself so that everyone could come out of the negotiation feeling they had won.  Baker had a talent for connection.  He could be whatever he needed to be at the moment it was necessary.  The young man who slid back and forth from Texas to Princeton, from the Ivy Club in the spring to the wildcatter's rig in the summer, now applied the same skills on Capitol Hill.

-Peter Baker and Susan Glasser,  The Man Who Ran Washington:  The Life and Times of James A. Baker III

Three good questions.......................

 Where does commitment end and obstinance begin?  Doesn't government—and life—require compromise?  Aren't there times when we have to pick the lesser of two evils?

-Ryan Holiday and Stephen Hanselman, The Lives Of The Stoics:  The Art of Living from Zeno to Marcus Aurelius, from the chapter on Cato