Every first draft is perfect, because all a first draft has to do is exist.
~ Jane Smiley
Published in 1997...
The dumbing down of America is most evident in the slow decay of substantive content in the enormously influential media, the 30 second sound bites (now down to 10 seconds or less), lowest common denominator programming, credulous presentations on pseudoscience and superstition, but especially a kind of celebration of ignorance.
~ Carl Sagan, The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark
I, too, feel old...
The father: "Really, can't you see that we are in a loveless marriage?"
Logan: "Everyone can see that you're in a loveless marriage! But you are OLD - that is just marriage at this point!"
~ Our Little Secret (a Hallmark Christmas-type show on Netflix)
Generally a one-way trip
Best Russian aphorism to sum up the challenge that regional and global powers now face in fixing Syria:
“It is easier to turn an aquarium into fish soup, than to turn fish soup into an aquarium.”
~ Thomas L. Friedman, New York Times Opinion Columnist
Dec 2024
Ugh! I need to remind myself this every day
Don't ever say that you don't have time to train. I’d rather you just tell me that you don't want to train, that you don't care about getting stronger, that you are satisfied at being inadequate as a human.
If you say that to me, what can I say? It’s so much easier that way: just say it and I will respect you more than saying that you don’t have time to train.
~ Jim Steele, from the Starting Strength website
Back when leaders were leaders
I don't want any messages saying 'I'm holding my position.' We're not holding a goddamned thing.We're advancing constantly and we're not interested in holding anything except the enemy's balls.
~ George S Patton, June 1944
Advice when given two bad choices...
If we must have an enemy at the head of the government, let it be one whom we can oppose and for whom we are not responsible, who will not involve our party in the disgrace of his foolish and bad measures.
~ Alexander Hamilton, to fellow Federalist the House speaker Theodore Sedgwick
Decent advice
You shouldn’t worry about criticism from somebody that you wouldn’t ask for advice.
~ Aaron Rodger
Hitched
When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the Universe.
~ John Muir
Well...
A friend of mine told me to shoot first and ask questions later.
I was going to ask him why, but I had to shoot him.
~ John Wayne
Back when men were men
George Washington McLintock: [the two argue heatedly over whom their daughter will stay with] No go, Kate.
Katherine McClintock: I hate you. Oh, how I hate you.
George Washington McLintock: Half the people in the world are women. Why does it have to be YOU that stirs me?
[passionately kisses Katherine]
Katherine McClintock: You animal!
~ John Wayne and Maureen OHara, in McLintock
Inspired indeed
Make friends with people who want the best for you
Your friendships aren't just social circles.
They're projections of your future self.
After hanging out, do you feel inspired or drained?
The answer will reveal your relationship's quality.
~ Jordan Peterson
Start with your habits
Set your house in perfect order before you criticize the world
Some people complain about everything but can't manage their own life.
Look at yourself first. This makes you confident to face bigger issues later.
Changing the world is hard, so start with your habits.
~ Jordan Peterson
Read online in a retirement blog
The Lone Wolf:
Radical independence is the other end of codependence.
It’s a different way to medicate your pain of not connecting and a lack of trust.
Seems to make sense
Three rules to remember:
1) When you give a government a power, it will never voluntarily relinquish it2) If you give a government a power, it will ultimately abuse that power to the maximum extent possible3) Nobody ever complied their way out of totalitarianism
~ Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.
Deep heart, yes...
Pain and suffering are always inevitable for a large intelligence and a deep heart
~ Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Yep
If you’re bored, go on a walk.
If you’re anxious, go on a walk.
If you lack ideas, go on a walk.
If you need space, go on a walk
If you need exercise, go on a walk
If you need sunlight, go on a walk.
Walking is a medicine
Now you tell me...
Don’t chase, don’t beg, don’t stress, don’t be desperate.
When you relax, it will come to you.
~ Stoic Wisdon
Word...
Reputation is what men and women think of us; character is what God and angels know of us.
~ Thomas Paine
A child’s poem
They try to tell us stories of hatred,
but I know a better one:
Once, I dreamed I carried love & temperance
alone through the sand toward your direction.
But I never made it, did I?
Long, but worth it and enlightening
Excellent speech by Dr. Marty Makary:
I'm trained in gastrointestinal surgery. My group at Johns Hopkins does more pancreatic cancer surgery than any hospital in the United States. But at no point in the last 20 years has anyone stopped to ask, why has pancreatic cancer doubled over those 20 years? Who's working on that? Who's looking into it?
We are so busy in our health care system billing and coding and paying each other and every stakeholder has their gigantic lobby in Washington D.C. and everybody's making a lot of money except for one stakeholder, the American citizen. They are financing this giant expense of health care system through their paycheck deduction for health insurance and the Medicare exercise tax as we go down this path of billing and coding and medicating.
And can we be real for a second? We have poisoned our food supply, engineered highly addictive chemicals that we put into our food. We spray it with pesticides that kill pests. What do you think they do to our gut lining and our microbiome? And then they come in sick. The GI tract is reacting. It's not an acute inflammatory storm. It's a low grade chronic inflammation. And it makes people feel sick and that inflammation permeates and drives so many of our chronic diseases that we didn't see half a century ago.
Who's working on it? Who's looking into this? Who's talking about it? Our health care system is playing whack-a-mole on the back end and we are not talking about the root causes of our chronic disease epidemic. We can't see the forest from the trees sometimes. We're so busy in these short visits, billing and coding. We've done a terrible thing to doctors. We've told them put your head down, focus on billing and coding. We're gonna measure you by your throughput. And good job, you did a nice job. We have all these numbers to show for it.
Well, the country is getting sicker. We cannot keep going down this path. We have the most over-medicated, sickest population in the world. And no one is talking about the root causes. The Pima Indians are the perfect example. Here is a group where the obesity diabetes rate was less than 1%. The land in New Mexico and Arizona had its rivers supplied, diverted by ranchers and settlers, and the land and the soil was destroyed. The government, recognizing this tremendous injustice, started to send free government food, but it wasn't organic kale and fruit and vegetables, it was processed and junk food. Instantly, the Pima Indians developed an obesity, diabetes rate of 90 percent. And what did the United States government do? What did our health care system do? The NIH dispatches its researchers to draw the blood of the Pima Indians to look for a gene that predisposes them to obesity and diabetes. What are our leaders doing?
The H in NIH is supposed to stand for health. Where are they spending their money on food as medicine and looking at the estrogen binding properties of pesticides that are driving our fertility rates down? They're funding research in Wuhan, China, and they're funding research on a new food compass to replace the misinformation they put out with the food pyramid, telling us lucky charms is healthier than steak. Somebody has got to speak up.
Maybe we need to talk about school lunch programs not just putting every kid on obesity drugs like Ozempic.
Maybe we need to talk about treating diabetes with cooking classes, not just throwing insulin at everybody. Maybe we need to talk about environmental exposures that cause cancer, not just the chemo to treat it. We've gotta talk about food as medicine and research these areas. 20% of our nation's kids are on medication. And as you heard, half are obese or overweight. Are they more disobedient than children in Japan or have we poisoned the food supply? Is this a chronic disease epidemic that has been a direct result of what adults have done to children?
We like to blame people for their diseases, but maybe we need to look inward. We see all these shiny objects thrown at us. Politicians talk about, oh, we've got a new healthcare proposal. Medicare can now negotiate the prices of ten generic drugs. Don't be fooled. These are things in the periphery. It's not to say they don't have merits, but the proposed program savings in year one by their own description is six billion dollars. In a four point five trillion dollar economy that's expanding at eight percent per year in the commercial sector, that's a two hundred billion dollar expansion, we save six billion dollars.
The best way to lower drug costs in the United States are to stop taking drugs we don't need."
Think first of your parents
Your life is a precious gift from your parents.
Think about them and the rest of your family. You don't have to suffer alone.
~ sign at the entrance of Japan's 'suicide forest', Aokigahara forest, located at the foot of Mount Fuji
Follow the money
The more that is spent, the worse it gets, because the money doesn’t go to the homeless, it goes to the hundreds of “charities” that then treat the homeless as sources of revenue.
The more homeless there are, the more money these organizations get, so their incentive is to increase, not decrease, homelessness!
Whatever you incentivize will happen.
~ Elon Musk
It's called the Cobra Effect.
In colonial India, under British rule, the city of Delhi had a problem with cobras. To control the cobra population, the government offered a bounty for every dead cobra.
Huge numbers of dead cobra were handed in but the cobra problem got worse, not better. Why? Because people realized they could profit from this bounty by breeding cobras, not to kill them in the wild, but to kill them for the bounty. This turned into a small-scale cobra farming operation.
When the government became aware of this practice, they discontinued the bounty program. Without the incentive, the cobra breeders released their now-worthless snakes into the wild. As a result, the cobra population in Delhi ended up increasing rather than decreasing, exacerbated by the government's own policy.
I can relate
I Get Along Without You Very Well
I get along without you very well,
Of course I do,
Except when soft rains fall
And drip from leaves,
then I recall
The thrill of being sheltered in your arms.
Of course, I do,
But I get along without you very well.
I've forgotten you just like I should,
Of course I have,
Except to hear your name,
Or someone's laugh that is the same,
But I've forgotten you just like I should.
What a guy, what a fool am I,
To think my breaking heart could kid the moon.
What's in store? Should I phone once more?
No, it's best that I stick to my tune.
I get along without you very well,
Of course I do,
Except perhaps in Spring,
But I should never think of Spring,
For that would surely break my heart in two.
Attitude
Anybody can play.
The note is only 20 percent.
The attitude of the motherfucker who plays it is 80 percent.
~ Miles Davis
Meditate on this
An athlete won’t judge you
for working out.
A millionaire won’t judge you
for starting a business.
A musician won’t judge you
for trying to sing a song.
It’s alway people going nowhere
who have something to say.
~ Unknown
Yes
One day, in retrospect
the years of struggle will
strike you as the most beautiful.
~ Albert Camus
For so many years...
For so many years, I thought you felt nothing.
I’ll take your anger over indifference any day.
~ Rebecca’s mom, to Rebecca, on Ted Lasso
One way or the other
Aut viam inveniam aut faciam
~ Latin proverb, most commonly attributed to Hannibal in response to his generals who had declared it impossible to cross the Alps with elephants.
You mean there’s hope?
Regrets are a waste of time.
Regrets cause depression.
They're a big waste of time.
- You didn't invest early?
- You didn't treat that person right?
- You let her get away?
- You didn't practice the right habits?
It's okay as long as you take positive action today, there's hope.
~ interwebs wisdom
Vision for the future
Gene Rodenberry’s (the creator of Star Trek) vision of the 24th century:
- there will be no sexism
- there will be no racism
- there will be no hunger
- there will be no greed
- and all the children will know how to read
Lovely, indeed
You’re a good cook, Maggie.You look lovely in the candlelight.
~ Rock Torrey (John Wayne) in In Harm’s Way
Indeed…I will meditate on this for a while
Some people find fault like there is a reward for it.
~ Zig Zigler
"Eat at a local restaurant tonight. Get the cream sauce. Have a cold pint at 4 o'clock in a mostly empty bar. Go somewhere you've never been.
Listen to someone you think may have nothing in common with you. Order the steak rare. Eat an oyster. Have a negroni. Have two. Be open to a world where you may not understand or agree with the person next to you, but have a drink with them anyways. Eat slowly. Tip your server. Check in on your friends. Check in on yourself. Enjoy the ride."
- Anthony Bourdain
Ooooooo, spicy!
The problem with society today is that no one drinks from the skulls of their enemies anymore.
~ read on the internet
I concur
If there is something I could do or something I could say that would make you be happy just being with me, I'd do it.
I'd do it in a nanosecond, but I ain't got no control over any of that.
~ Ted Lasso, in Ted Lasso
A Man’s Poem
When I was young, I thought I’d live forever.
When I was young, I thought fun was the thing.
When I was young, I cared little for what others thought.
When I was young, I knew not what regret felt like.
When I became a dad, I thought I might not live long enough.
When I became a dad, I thought fun was for the kids.
When I became a dad, I cared deeply what the kids thought.
When I became a dad, I understood what regret was.
When I was old, I realized I’d not live long enough.
When I was old, I thought fun was the thing, again.
When I was old, I cared little for what others thought, again.
When I was old, I deeply understood what regret felt like.
Now that I’m old, I yearn to be young again!
~ Dan Mills
Applies to personal goals AND with relationships...
If you really wanted it, you would make time for it.
~ Bret O.
One of the saddest things…
‘I have led a toothless life’, he thought.
‘A toothless life.
I have never bitten into anything.
I was waiting.
I was reserving myself for later on - and I have just noticed that my teeth have gone.’
~ Jean-Paul Sartre
Gossip and the Three Sieves - Socrates
In Ancient Greece, Socrates had a great reputation for wisdom.
One day, someone came to find the great philosopher and said to him:
"Do you know what I just heard about your friend?”
"A moment," replied Socrates. "Before you tell me, I would like to test it with the three sieves.”
"The three sieves?”
"Yes," continued Socrates. "Before you speak about others, it's important to take the time to filter what you mean. I call it the test of the three sieves.
The first sieve is TRUTH. Have you checked if what you're going to tell me is true?”
"No, I just heard it.”
"Very well! So, you don't know if it's true. Let's move on to the second sieve, that of KINDNESS. Is what you want to tell me about my friend something good?”
"Oh, no! On the contrary.”
"So," questioned Socrates, "you want to tell me something negative about him, and you're not even sure it's true? Perhaps you can still pass the test of the third sieve, that of UTILITY. Is it useful for me to know what you're going to tell me about this friend?”
"No, not really.”
"Therefore," concluded Socrates, "what you were going to tell me is neither true, nor good, nor useful. Why, then, did you want to tell me this?"
"Gossip is a bad thing. Initially, it may seem enjoyable and fun, but ultimately, it fills our hearts with bitterness and poisons us."
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