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

David Sanborn........................................Pearls

As Commencement Addresses go..................

 

..................this is a pretty good one:

Whenever I speak with my students—I teach at the University of Virginia—they seem deeply pessimistic about the state of the world. We all know the reasons. Climate change is going to kill us all; late-stage capitalism is running amok; inequality is at an all-time high; racism and bigotry are rampant; gender-nonconforming and queer people are under unprecedented attack; economic anxiety has never been worse; AI is coming for our jobs; and on and on and on.

I then pose a simple thought experiment to them: If you were given a time machine that could take you back to any period in the last 12,000 years—since the dawn of civilization—when would you rather live?

You see, I believe we currently live in the golden age of humanity. Things have never been better for human beings. Yet it seems we have never felt worse about our prospects.

The secret sauce..............

 

When people start, they want to know the secret sauce.

     After Katie Ledecky won four gold medals at the Rio Summer Olympics, that's what she was asked.

    And she said, "The secret is there is no secret."

    Work hard.

    Take care of your body - nutrition, sleep, training, recovery, and so forth.

    Pay attention to the details - the little things that will add up to make a big difference.

    Show up every day - whether it's a Sunday game day, a Wednesday practice day, or a Tuesday in the off season.    

    Fall in love with what you do.  The simplicity of it.  The beauty of it. The day-to-dayness of it.

    You do all of this, and on a long enough timeline, you'll get where you want to be,

-Paul Rabil,  The Way of the Champion: Pain, Persistence and the Path Forward

Ah, culture........................

 

And all the time—such is the tragicomedy of our situation—we continue to clamor for those very qualities we are rendering impossible.  You can hardly open a periodical without coming across the statement that what our civilization needs is more 'drive', or dynamism, or self-sacrifice, or 'creativity.'   In a ghastly simplicity we remove the organ and demand the function.  We make men without chests and expect of them virtue and enterprise.  We laugh at honor and are shocked to find traitors in our midst.  We castrate and bid the geldings be fruitful.

-C. S. Lewis, The Abolition of Man (1943)

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

 In the three short decades between now and the twenty-first century, millions of ordinary, psychologically sound people will face an abrupt collision with the future.  Citizen of the world's richest and most technologically advanced nations, many of them will find it increasingly painful to keep up with the incessant demand for change that characterizes our time.  For them, the future will have arrived too soon.

-Alvin Toffler,  Future Shock (1970)

Ed. note:  first read this book about fifty years ago.  Young Brandon handed me a new copy of it today, thinking I might find value in it.  Early returns say he was correct.

Chasing............................

 

           from the wide, wide world of xkcd.

Life is full of tradeoffs:..............

 

 .............if we want more "big data" and artificial intelligence then we might have less green energy.

Data centers consume massive amounts of electricity.  They are sprouting up all over Central Ohio.  If the push for all electric vehicles doesn't fade, there is little chance the electric grid will be able to keep up.  Sooner or later, we need to reconsider building new nuclear power plants.

If you believe the system....................

 

...............has your best interest at heart, you might consider reading this post from our friend at Sippican Cottage.

Evolution.............................

 

..............................can be messy and painful:

The world rewards those who can best adapt to change. Legacy companies struggle to adapt because their businesses are organized to dominate a market that no longer exists. The game has changed, but media is far from dead.

morning musings...........................

 

.....What would an elder do at a time like this?

Less would be good.......................

 What the nation will most need from the presidency in 2025 is less of it. But both the incumbent and his predecessor intend to intensify the anti-constitutional executive aggrandizement that has become a bipartisan tradition.

It preceded Donald Trump, whose presidential lawlessness was, like him, haphazard and opportunistic. Joe Biden’s presidency-without-limits has been ideological and perversely principled. Progressives, such as he has become late in life, are impatient with institutional impediments (Congress and courts) to progress, meaning their policy preferences achieved by unfettered presidential actions.

-George Will, as clipped from here

And the game goes on..............

 

more fun here

Interesting sky tonight.................

 

..........the Northern Lights visit Ohio.

In the background...........................

Classic Sinatra......His Great Performances 1953-1960

 

An act of..............................

 

.............................................generosity.

Some..........................

 

................................pretty good quotes.

Unfortunately..............................

 

..........his understanding appears correct.

dogmatically.....................

 

History and the study of cultures do not teach or prove that values or cultures are relative.  All to the contrary, that is a philosophical premise that we now bring to our study of them.  This premise is unproven and dogmatically asserted for what are largely political reasons.

-Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind

full...............................

 

Although the world is very full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it.

-attributed to Helen Keller

your thing..........................

Making art is not selfish; it's for the rest of us.  If you don't do your thing, you are cheating us.

-Kevin Kelly 

chosen consciously...............?

 

. . . the essential point of freedom is whether we have chosen consciously to fulfill a certain want, or whether we are just being blindly run by unconscious programs and belief systems.

-David R. Hawkins, Letting Go: The Pathway of Surrender

Limits....................

 

You won't see most of this planet.

Under each rock.

Beneath the water.

Secrets of air and soil

Can you feel the joy behind this limitation?

That there is always a new thing to discover,

a new way to grow, 

is one of the sweetest parts of living,

and it's free and inexhaustible.

-Jarod K. Anderson, Field Guide to the Haunted Forest

impact........................

 

Habits are the compound interest of self-improvement.  The same way money multiplies through compound interest, the effects of your habits multiply as you repeat them.  They seem to make little difference on any given day and yet the impact they deliver over the months and years can be enormous.  It is only when looking back two, five, or perhaps ten years later that the value of good habits and the cost of bad ones becomes strikingly apparent.

-James Clear, Atomic Habits: Tiny Changes, Remarkable Results

one day at a time................

 

Only you can create the life you want for yourself—no one is going to do it for you.  If you don't know what that life looks like yet, for whatever reason, that's fine.  We're here now.  The choices you make from here on out are what matters. . . . Focus on making improvements and banking achievements one day at a time.

-Arnold Schwarzenegger,  Be Useful:  Seven Tools for Life

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

 

What made Melvin, the youngest of the Kaminsky kids, so darn funny?  Later people said—he himself said—it was Brooklyn, the Depression, being Jewish and growing up in the shadow of Hitler.  But there was also something about birth order and the family genes that contributed to "the strange amalgam, the marvelous pastiche that is me."

-Patrick McGilligan, Funny Man: Mel Brooks

Mel Brooks explaining much................

 

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

 

.........................................Mel Brooks:

Comedy is a very powerful component of life. It has the most to say about the human condition because if you laugh you can get by. You can struggle when things are bad if you have a sense of humor. Laughter is a protest scream against death, against the long goodbye. It’s a defense against unhappiness and depression.

Failure is vital. It is an incredibly important quotient in the equation of a career. After you wipe away your tears, it’s not a bad experience and under the right circumstances it will make you better, both as a person and as an artist. I think it’s important to fail, especially between the ages of twenty and thirty. Success is like sugar. It’s too good. It’s too sweet. It’s too wonderful and it burns up very quickly. Failure is like corned beef hash. It takes a while to eat. It takes a while to digest. But it stays with you.

Feeling different, feeling alienated, feeling persecuted, feeling that the only way to deal with the world is to laugh - because if you don't laugh you're going to cry and never stop crying - that's probably what's responsible for the Jews having developed such a great sense of humor. The people who had the greatest reason to weep, learned more than anyone else how to laugh.

Look at Jewish history. Unrelieved lamenting would be intolerable. So for every ten Jews beating their breasts, God designated one to be crazy and amuse the breast-beaters. By the time I was five I knew I was that one.

Look, I really don't want to wax philosophic, but I will say that if you're alive, you've got to flap your arms and legs, you got to jump around a lot, you got to make a lot of noise, because life is the very opposite of death. And therefore, as I see it, if you're quiet, you're not living. You've got to be noisy, or at least your thoughts should be noisy, colorful and lively.

As long as the world is turning and spinning, we're gonna be dizzy and we're gonna make mistakes.

I've been accused of vulgarity. I say that's bullshit.

Hope for the Best. Expect the worst. Life is a play. We're unrehearsed.

decipher......................

We always have a choice.  What we don't always have, unless we create it, is something to measure our choices against.

     That is what a clear vision gives you: a way to decipher whether a decision is good or bad for you, based on whether it gets you closer or further away from where you want your life to go. 

-Arnold Schwarzenegger, Be Useful: Seven Tools for Life

Although, more sleep would be pretty good.......

 No, we don’t need more sleep. It’s our souls that are tired, not our bodies. We need nature. We need magic. We need adventure. We need freedom. We need truth. We need stillness. We don’t need more sleep, we need to wake up and live.

-Brooke Hampton

Reaching......................

 

    

via

Instant...................................

 

............................................karma.

You gotta love..............................

 

.......................................Martin Gurri:

This being an age of social justice, I want to recognize the achievements of today’s most ruthlessly marginalized and stereotyped ethnicity: the Anglo-Saxons.

Adding by.............................

 

......................................subtracting.

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

 

It’s the unbidden realization that you are deeply into the second half of your life . . .

-as culled from here

Can't wait to find out.................

 

   more fun here

Dots...........................

 

You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

-Steve Jobs, as quoted here

This should make some interesting reading...

 

King-Slutzky, whose thesis is on “theories of the imagination and poetry as interpreted through a Marxian lens” and the “fantasies of limitless energy in the transatlantic Romantic imagination from 1760–1860,” and whose fantasies are indeed limitless, goes on . . .

-as cut-and-pasted from here

On volatility, debt, and endurance..................

 I think this is the most practical way to think about debt: As debt increases, you narrow the range of outcomes you can endure in life.

-Morgan Housel