A declarative force........

 

She was not beautiful according to the standards of the magazines and moving pictures of the time, and she knew it.  But by any standard she was a desirable woman, and she also knew that.  She knew it from what she had seen in the eyes of certain men, to which from time to time she had felt something like an echo in herself.

     That she was desirable was acceptable to her as a part of the liveliness and also the goodness of the world.  It was a gift.  But that she was desirable and knew it and accepted it unfitted her somewhat for her role as a minister's wife.  It was not expected.  She had not expected it herself until her own wits told her it was so.  Part of her desirability was her look of knowing more that she was saying, and being amused by the difference.  That, and the utter frankness of her presence.  There was in her, even in old age, a declarative force of being that was unhesitating and without disguise.

-Wendell Berry, from his story, A Desirable Woman (1938-1941)

when investing....................

 

. . . lean more heavily on emotional intelligence rather than IQ.   Temperament is more important than brainpower in the markets.

-Ben Carlson

Although, understanding the past would be a good place to start.......................

 

     It is no longer sufficient for Johnny to understand the past.  It is not even enough for him to understand the present, for the here-and-now environment will soon vanish.  Johnny must learn to anticipate the directions and rate of change.  He must, to put it technically, learn to make repeated, probabilistic, increasing long-range assumptions about the future.  And so must Johnny's teachers.

-Alvin Toffler, Future Shock (1976)

cherry picking......................

 

When any statistic can be recruited to support your preferred theory, you are suffering from confirmation bias. Scientists like to boast that they strive to prove themselves wrong, that following the philosopher Karl Popper they know falsification is the essence of science. Nonsense. Like prosecutors determined to find a suspect guilty, they usually seek out evidence that bolsters, rather than challenges, their pet ideas. In this they are only human.

As the philosopher Francis Bacon noted in 1620: “And such is the way of all superstition, whether in astrology, dreams, omens, divine judgments, or the like; wherein men, having a delight in such vanities, mark the events where they are fulfilled, but where they fail, though this happen much oftener, neglect and pass them by."

-Matt Ridley, from this substack

thanks chris

unfortunately...................

 

Delaying a conversation doesn't make it easier.

-James Clear

A dream.................

 

     I think Christianity has often forgotten that it is a dream, to its own peril.  When threaded to political power it often engenders the will rather than the wonder, the law almost entirely over the spirit.  Christianity is a dream in which the very best of us is encouraged to emerge.  A dream that challenges and inspires us.  A dream in which God speaks directly to us.

-Martin Shaw,  Liturgies of the Wild

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

 

Skye and Henry stood on a corner of Union Square on a fading San Francisco afternoon in early June, the occasional odor of popcorn swirling through, trying to busk up a few dollars.  Skye saw the devil go by in his black '85 T-top, crooked smile, ponytail, twisty little braids in his beard.  His skinny blond girlfriend sat beside him, tats running across her bare shoulders like grapevines, front teeth filed to tiny sharp points.  Skye turned away, a chill running down her back.

-John Sanford, Gathering Prey

Wait, what.............................?

 

No item sold on Amazon has the ability to perform a life transplant.

-Eric Barker, from this episode, delving into wantingness and lifeitsownself.

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

 

Any Major Dude With Half a Heart offers his 20 major albums from 1976.

It would overstate things to say that 1976 was a great year for music, the release of a few absolute classics notwithstanding, but it was a satisfying year. 

working with..................

 

The basic ground of compassionate action is the importance of working with rather than struggling against, and what I mean by that is working with your own unwanted, unacceptable stuff, so that when the unacceptable and unwanted appears out there, you relate to it based on having working with loving-kindness on yourself.  

-Pema Chodron

have the genius..............

 

     We should all engage in capitalism in this country.  In the United States, we believe capital belongs in the hands of the people.  Communism teaches that capital belongs in the hands of the state.  This is a great difference in ideology.  Communism seems to be based on the idea that humans are too stupid to know what to do with capital, so it should all be given to the state to manage.

    In our country, we believe the knowledge of what to do with capital resides in the populace.  The people have the genius to come up with ideas for goods and services for the marketplace.  This philosophy has built a dynamic enterprise known as capitalism and has created an abundance of opportunities.

-Jim Rohn, Leading an Inspired Life

access......................

 

What you need is access to the ways in which people explain themselves to themselves.

-via this Thrive post

differences......................

 

     more memes here

All outcomes.....................

 

But just know that economic outcomes do not play out in a vacuum. There are trade-offs to consider.

-Ben Carlson, from here

most profound mysteries...........

 

     But for all the impressive scholarship that has been marshaled in an effort to determine the Sistine Ceiling's elusive meanings and to unmask its secret author, the evidence strongly suggests that Michelangelo himself was almost entirely responsible for what we see, and that he developed the elaborate program organically in response to the demands—technical, conceptual, and esthetic—that confronted him when he discarded the pope's simplistic plan and opted for a more elaborate scheme.  What we see is the product of Michelangelo's genius, not merely the skills of a consummate craftsman illustrating a theological text, but a passionate, unconventional vision of an artist who thought deeply about the miracle of Creation and developed his own unique language to confront life's most profound mysteries.

-Miles J. Unger, Michelangelo: A Life in Six Masterpieces

expertism..................

 

The problem with experts, put succinctly, is that experts are humans who are susceptible to all the human foibles. That ranges from being clueless about their own deficiencies to being downright evil.

Assuming anything benevolent about them, simply because they’re experts, is the surest way to make everything worse.

Should we listen to them? To a point. We need to consider what they have to say, but we also need to hear what the other experts have to say. We need to learn as much as we can before we do anything simply because an expert said it was a good thing.

-Tom Knighton, from this substack

clarity....................

 

Clarity isn't about knowing what you want to do with your life, it's about knowing what you want to do this week. You don't need to have it all figured out. You just need to know your next step.

-James Clear, from this edition

prepare for the unpredictable.................

One can only prepare for the unpredictable by trying to keep an open and unprejudiced mind — a feat which is extremely difficult to achieve, even with the best will in the world. Indeed, a completely open mind would be an empty one, and freedom from all prejudices and preconceptions is an unattainable ideal. Yet there is one form of mental exercise that can provide good basic training for would-be prophets: Anyone who wishes to cope with the future should travel back in imagination a single life-time — say to 1900 — and ask himself just how much of today’s technology would be, not merely incredible, but incomprehensible to the keenest scientific brains of that time.

1900 is a good round date to choose because it was just about then that all hell started to break loose in science.

-Arthur C. Clarke, from his 1962 essay, Hazards of Prophecy: The Failure of Imagination

If I could remember who set me off on the chase to find this essay, I would thank them

all kinds of scuffs................

 

     The God I follow has things to say about envy, and self-serving motivations.  He offers a road that doesn't indulge peering at our neighbours' fields and fuming with our supposed lack.  For you and I trying to get home, to become real human beings, to gather our thrown-away stories, this is a radical step in the right direction.  You can be a pious monk in fifth-century Egypt or a burlesque dancer in modern New York, but we all turn green sometimes.  Someone is our Akanida, someone evokes our smaller nature.  There be monsters.  Pat the gargoyle on the shoulder and tell it a story, I promise it will help.  There are all sorts of accumulated hurt in us, all kinds of scuffs.  A story helps settle the interior-den and brings these turbulent and evasive forces to the table.  In my decades as a story-teller I have become much more honest.  Stories are the most delightful vehicles for the brightening of consciousness.  True, archaic technology.

-Martin Shaw, Liturgies of the Wild

listen.......................

 

It is better for the intellectual not to talk all the time.  To begin with, it would exhaust him, and, above all, it would keep him from thinking.

-Albert Camus