Gone, but not forgotten.......................

Sam Cooke..........................................A Change Is Gonna Come

Radical meritocracy...........................................or, Ray Dalio for president........................

"I think the greatest tragedy of mankind is that people have ideas and opinions in their heads but don't have a process for properly examining these ideas to find out what's true. That creates a world of distortions."

-As extracted from this conversation between Ray Dalio and Henry Blodget

Happy 13th............................

.......................................................to the amazing Althouse!

We're about to get our low-attention-span President, and I will indulge my low-attention-span reading propensities. We will see what happens. So far what has happened, doing only what I love here, is 13 years of 10-post-a-day blogging without a single day's break. It's not as though I'm doggedly plugging away here trying to keep a record going. It's only blogging if it runs on intrinsic reward.

Sensing this is true....................

"Someone who has spent his life as a heterosexual white male will never be able to understand how an incorrectly-made sandwich could trigger a trauma."

-Philipp Oehmke. as extracted from his essay Has Political Correctness Gone off the Rails in America?

Tension...............................

You may well ask: "Why direct action? Why sit ins, marches and so forth? Isn't negotiation a better path?" You are quite right in calling for negotiation. Indeed, this is the very purpose of direct action. Nonviolent direct action seeks to create such a crisis and foster such a tension that a community which has constantly refused to negotiate is forced to confront the issue. It seeks so to dramatize the issue that it can no longer be ignored. My citing the creation of tension as part of the work of the nonviolent resister may sound rather shocking. But I must confess that I am not afraid of the word "tension." I have earnestly opposed violent tension, but there is a type of constructive, nonviolent tension which is necessary for growth. Just as Socrates felt that it was necessary to create a tension in the mind so that individuals could rise from the bondage of myths and half truths to the unfettered realm of creative analysis and objective appraisal, so must we see the need for nonviolent gadflies to create the kind of tension in society that will help men rise from the dark depths of prejudice and racism to the majestic heights of understanding and brotherhood. The purpose of our direct action program is to create a situation so crisis packed that it will inevitably open the door to negotiation. I therefore concur with you in your call for negotiation. Too long has our beloved Southland been bogged down in a tragic effort to live in monologue rather than dialogue.

-Martin Luther King, Jr., as excerpted from his Letter from Birmingham Jail

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

The Association................................................................Windy

On quieting the ego.................

Failure and rejection can be a miserable place. How do you carry on? How do you take pride in yourself and your work?

The famous coach John Wooden’s advice to his players gives the answer: Change the definition of success. “Success is peace of mind, which is a direct result of self-­satisfaction in knowing you made the effort to do your best to become the best that you are capable of becoming.”

That’s it. Your effort, doing the best, is what you can control. This is what you need to focus on.

Do your work. Do it well. Then “let go and let God.“ That’s all there needs to be. Recognition and rewards — ­those are just extra. Rejection, that’s on them, not on us.

In other words, the less attached we are to outcomes the better. 

-Ryan Holiday, as culled from this post

It is never too late....................

.........................for ten life lessons that take a long time to learn.

thanks

Kurt..........................

.................you really should check this out (if you haven't already).

#18 from this wondrous list

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

"The danger of civilization, of course, is that you will piss away your life on nonsense."

-attributed to Jim Harrison

Gone, but not forgotten...................

Bob Marley......................................................Redemption Song

Steps..............................

In any nonviolent campaign there are four basic steps: collection of the facts to determine whether injustices exist; negotiation; self purification; and direct action. We have gone through all these steps in Birmingham. There can be no gainsaying the fact that racial injustice engulfs this community. Birmingham is probably the most thoroughly segregated city in the United States. Its ugly record of brutality is widely known. Negroes have experienced grossly unjust treatment in the courts. There have been more unsolved bombings of Negro homes and churches in Birmingham than in any other city in the nation. These are the hard, brutal facts of the case. On the basis of these conditions, Negro leaders sought to negotiate with the city fathers. But the latter consistently refused to engage in good faith negotiation.

Then, last September, came the opportunity to talk with leaders of Birmingham's economic community. In the course of the negotiations, certain promises were made by the merchants--for example, to remove the stores' humiliating racial signs. On the basis of these promises, the Reverend Fred Shuttlesworth and the leaders of the Alabama Christian Movement for Human Rights agreed to a moratorium on all demonstrations. As the weeks and months went by, we realized that we were the victims of a broken promise. A few signs, briefly removed, returned; the others remained. As in so many past experiences, our hopes had been blasted, and the shadow of deep disappointment settled upon us. We had no alternative except to prepare for direct action, whereby we would present our very bodies as a means of laying our case before the conscience of the local and the national community. Mindful of the difficulties involved, we decided to undertake a process of self purification. We began a series of workshops on nonviolence, and we repeatedly asked ourselves: "Are you able to accept blows without retaliating?" "Are you able to endure the ordeal of jail?" We decided to schedule our direct action program for the Easter season, realizing that except for Christmas, this is the main shopping period of the year. Knowing that a strong economic-withdrawal program would be the by product of direct action, we felt that this would be the best time to bring pressure to bear on the merchants for the needed change.

-Martin Luther King, Jr., as excerpted from his Letter from Birmingham Jail

Parenting 101:

......................I'll have to ask my kids how well we did:

I don't believe in playing down to children, either in life or in motion pictures. I didn't treat my own youngsters like fragile flowers, and I think no parent should.  Children are people, and they should have to reach to learn about things, to understand things, just as adults have to reach if they want to grow in mental stature. Life is composed of lights and shadows, and we would be untruthful, insincere, and saccharine if we tried to pretend there were no shadows. Most things are good, and they are the strongest things; but there are evil things too, and you are not doing a child a favor by trying to shield him from reality. The important thing is to teach a child that good can always triumph over evil, and that is what our pictures attempt to do.

-Walt Disney, as excerpted from here

True.......................................?

"Since Plato, Western thought and the theory of knowledge have focused on the notions of True-False;  as commendable as it was, it is high time to shift the concern to Robust-Fragile, and social epistemology to the more serious problem of Sucker-Nonsucker."

-Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Knowing the wondrousness of the Intertunnel, this was inevitable:

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

     You never knew what a kid in the interview room might say to jolt you out of your slumber and back to your senses and force you to pay attention.  And once you were paying attention, you naturally placed far greater weight on whatever he had just said than you probably should:  The most memorable moments in job interviews for the National Basketball Association were hard to consign to some appropriately sized compartment of the brain.  In certain cases it was as if the players were trying to screw up your ability to judge them.  For instance, when the Houston Rockets interviewer asked one player if he could pass a drug test, the guy had gone wide-eyed and grabbed the table and said, "You mean today!!!???"  There was one college player who'd been arrested on charges (subsequently dropped) of domestic violence, and whose agent had claimed it had been a simple misunderstanding.  When they'd asked the player about it he'd explained, chillingly, that he'd grown weary of his girlfriend's "bitching, so I just put my hands around her neck and I squeezed.  'Cause I needed her to shut up."  There was Kenneth Faried, a power forward out of Morehead State.  When he showed up for his interview they'd asked him, "Do you prefer Kenneth of Kenny?"  "Manimal," Faried said.  He wanted to be called Manimal.  What do you do with that?  Roughly three out of every four of the black American players who came for NBA interviews - or at least came for interviews with the NBA's Houston Rockets - had never really known their father.  "It's not uncommon, when you ask these guys who their biggest male influence was, for them to say, 'My Mom,'" said the Rockets' director of player personnel, Jimmy Paulis.  "One said, 'Obama.'"

-Michael Lewis,  The Undoing Project:  A Friendship That Changed Our Minds

Trouble shots.........................

         Because Pap didn't allow the members to practice chipping and putting on the greens, he certainly wasn't going to let me do it, which is one reason why my short game was rather weak in my early amateur days.  On the other hand, I tended to be perfectly comfortable hitting shots from places where no other golfer ever wanted to be.  It turned out to be an important lesson about the game:  you've got to learn to live with trouble, and you've got to learn how to get out of it.  In golf, as in life, you get some good breaks and some bad breaks, but if you're going to depend on the breaks always going your way, you're in for a surprise.

-Arnold Palmer, A Life Well Played:  My Stories

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

The Happenings........................................................I Got Rhythm

But luckier than most......................

Gone, but not forgotten..............

Minnie Riperton.........................................................Loving You

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

Ornament Of The World referenced Moses de Leon, a Jewish mystic writing in Al-Andalus in the late 13th century.   Interest piqued about Moses, the Colossus Amazon was consulted.  Three Mystics Walk Into A Tavern:  A Once and Future Meeting of Rumi, Meister Eckhart, and Moses de Leon in Medieval Venice popped up first.  Fairly certain that the three never actually met, it seemed like a good book to own, and a good place to find out more about Moses de Leon.  If the faithful reader is  interested in mysticism, as applied via the three Abrahamic religions, this easy-to-read book is recommended.