Many paths up the mountain...

The best thing I've read all week!

The best way to spot an idiot - look for the person who is cruel.
Let me explain:
When we see someone who doesn't look like us, or sound like us, or act like us, or love like us, or live like us, the first thought that crosses almost everyone's brain is either rooted in fear or judgement, or both.
That's evolution. We survived as a species by being suspicious of things we aren't familiar with. In order to be kind, we have to shut down that animal instinct and force our brains to travel a different pathway.
Empathy and compassion are evolved states of being. They require the mental capacity to step past our most primal urges. This may be a surprising assessment because somewhere along the way in the last few years, our society has come to believe that weaponized cruelty is part of some well thought-out master plan.
Cruelty is seen by some as an adroit cudgel to gain power. Empathy and kindness are considered weak. Many important people look at the vularable only as rungs on a ladder to the top.
I'm here to tell you that when someone's path through this world is marked with acts of cruelty, they have failed the first test of an advanced society. They never forced their animal brain to evolve past its first instinct; they never forged new mental pathways to overcome their own instinctual fears. And so, their thinking and problem solving will lack the imagination and creativity that the kindest people have in spades.
Over my many years in politics and business, I have found one thing to be universally true: The kindest person in the room is often the smartest.

~ Illinois Governor J.B. Pritzker, 2023 Northwestern University commencement speech

Almost always!

PowerPoint's are the peacocks of the business world -
All show, no meat.

~ Dwight Shute, in The Office

The man has thought it through!

Ted Bundy (shoe salesman) to arrogant lady:

So you think I'm a loser?
Just because I have a stinking job that I hate, a family that doesn't respect me, and a whole city that curses the day I was born?
Well, that may mean loser to you, but let me tell you something:

Every morning when I wake up, I know that it's not going to get any better until I go back to sleep again.
But I get up, have my watered-down Tang and still-frozen Pop Tart. Get in my car with no upholstery, no gas, and six more payments, to fight traffic just for the privilege of putting cheap shoes on the cloven hooves of people like you.
I'll never play football like I thought I would. I'll never know the touch of a beautiful woman.
And I'll never again know the joy of driving without a bag on my head.
But I'm not a loser.
Because despite it all, me and every other guy who will never be what he wanted to be are still out there being what we don't want to be, 40 hours a week for life.
And the fact that I haven't put a gun to my head makes me a winner!

~ from Married with Children

Surely we deserve and can do better...

"Among us friends, let's be honest," John Kelly said. "About a third of the things the President wants us to do are flat-out stupid. Another third would be impossible to implement and wouldn't even solve the problem. And a third would be flat-out illegal."

~ John Kelly, retired U.S. Marine Corp General and Trump's former Chief of Staff

I concur...

The worse a country is, the more secrets it has.

~ Matt Taibbi

Now you tell me!

Unrealistic expectations result in unmet expectations.

In one of the most notable moments in sports history, Kenyan runner Abel Mutai was just a few feet from the finish line, but became confused with the signage and stopped thinking he had completed the race.

A Spanish athlete, Ivan Fernandez, was right behind him, and after realizing what was happening, he started shouting at the Kenyan for him to continue running; but Mutai didn't understand his Spanish.

Fernandez eventually caught up to him and instead of passing him, he pushed him to victory.

A journalist asked Ivan, "Why did you do that?"

Ivan replied, “My dream is that someday we can have a kind of community life where we push and help each other to win.”

The journalist insisted “But why did you let the Kenyan win?"

Ivan replied, "I didn't let him win, he was going to win.”

The journalist insisted again, “But you could have won!”

Ivan looked at him & replied, “But what would be the merit of my victory? What would be the honor of that medal? What would my Mom think of that?”

Values are transmitted from generation to generation. What values are we teaching our children? Let us not teach our kids the wrong ways to WIN.”

Indeed...

I want to die peacefully in my sleep, like my grandfather...

...not screaming in terror like his passengers.

~ Jack Handy

More VP word salad...[smh]*

But let's always take a moment to also see what we have achieved thus far, while we clearly see the moment that we are presently in.

So we have achieved a lot.

~ Vice President Kamala Harris

* shaking my head

Applies to many adults, too

Tips for dealing with teenagers:

Don't try to win arguments with teenagers using logic, evidence, or persuasion.

Even if they see your point, it's not worth the loss of power, so they must resist.

~ From Voice Lessons

Sigh...

We have now sunk to a depth at which restatement of the obvious is the first duty of intelligent men.

~ George Orwell

So I've heard

Happiness is positive cash flow.

~ Fred Adler, author

That's depressing...

Call no man happy until he is dead.

~ adage known in ancient Athens

Price's Law

The square root of the number of people in a group do 50 percent of the work.

I'm so out of luck...

If you judge the success of your marriage on your happiness, what do you have when it's nothing but suffering?
What you want to have in your marriage, first and foremost, is a scrupulous honesty. And I don't mean you tell each other other the truth, because you can be brutal with the truth.
I mean the kind of honesty that's devoted towards thriving in love.
You want someone in a relationship that you can spar with - and it's partly because you have hard problems to solve. And if the person that you're with isn't willing to put forward their opinion, then you only have half the cognitive power that you would otherwise have.
Hopefully, you find someone who is interestingly different from you, but not so different that you can't communicate.

~ Jordan Peterson

Cognitive bias

The human mind is not wired for probabilty.
What's wrong with feeling special?
I guess in principle, nothing. But it's not an accurate understanding of the world.
That is your choice. Do you want to live in a delusion of what you think is true?
Or do you want to live in a reality of what IS true?

~ Neil deGrasse Tyson, on Master Class

And the difference is…?

Sally: You lied to me…

Barry: I didn’t lie to you…

Sally: You did. You did!

Barry: I didn’t lie to you - I didn’t tell you the part I didn’t want to be true.

~ Barry (on HBO)

The Pale Blue Dot

Pale Blue Dot is a photo of Earth that was taken by the Voyager 1 space probe in 1990 from a distance of about 6 billion kilometers (3.7 billion miles) as it was leaving our solar system.

This is what Carl Sagan said about the photo:

Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it, everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor, and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every 'superstar,' every 'supreme leader,' every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there — on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand. It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience.

There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.

Doing nothing is better than being busy doing nothing.

~ Lao Tzu

A fit body, a calm mind, a house full of love.

These things cannot be bought – they must be earned.

~ Naval Ravikant

To do something is better than to not do something.

~ John Lennon

Old skool truth

Who controls the past controls the future: who controls the present controls the past

~ George Orwell, in 1984

Oh, Bobby, Bobby...

Come you masters of war.
You that build all the guns.
You that build the death planes.
You that build the big bombs.
You that hide behind walls.
You that hide behind desks.

I just want you to know I can see through your masks...

Let me ask you one question. Is your money that good? Will it buy you forgiveness, do you think that it could?

I think you will find, when your death takes its toll, all the money you made will never buy back your soul.

~ Bob Dylan

Yep

The more you know, the more you realize how much you don’t know. The less you know, the more you think you know everything. Knowledge is humbling. Ignorance is arrogant.

~ Richard Feynman

Powerful

We who lived in concentration camps can remember the men who walked through the huts comforting others, giving away their last piece of bread.

They may have been few in number, but they offer sufficient proof that everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms -- to choose one's attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one's own way.

~ Viktor E. Frankl

Life in 2023…

We live in a society where the algorithms reward craziness.

~ Scott Galloway

The man knew...

No great mind has ever existed without a touch of madness.

~ Aristotle

[spit take!]

This is America - we all can have different beliefs.
Some of us choose to believe in REALITY...

~ Comedienne Chrissie Mayr

Even back then, too???

A fool contributes nothing worth hearing and takes offense at everything.

~ Aristotle

Truth

Follow the Money

~ Rush Limbaugh

What a novel idea!

We are not afraid to trust the American people with unpleasant facts, foreign ideas, alien philosophies, and competitive values.

For a nation that is afraid to let its people judge the truth and falsehood in an open market is a nation that is afraid of its people.

~ President John F. Kennedy

True then, true now...

The opinion of ten thousand men is of no value if none of them knows anything about the subject.

~ Marcus Aurelius

Simple, but profound advice

The better the quality of your practice, the greater the return on your investment of time and energy.

~ Benjamin Pang Jeng Lo, on practicing Tai Chi

There's still time!

It's never too late to be the person you know you could have become.

~ Dan Miller, author and coach

Playing small, indeed...

There is no passion to be found playing small - in settling for a life that is less than the one you capable of living.

~ Nelson Mandela

Eternal truths

Be a free thinker and don't accept everything you hear as truth. Be critical and evaluate what your believe in.

~ Aristotle

Good parental advice

Teach children how to think, not what to think

~ Richard Feynman

Yikes! Sad, but true...

It was very good of God to let Carlyle and Mrs. Carlyle marry one another, and so make only two people miserable and not four.

~ novelist and lifelong bachelor Samuel Butler wrote to his friend Eliza Savage, in 1884.

True then. True now.

We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies. Though passion may have strained, it must not break our bonds of affection.

The mystic chords of memory will swell when again touched, as surely they will be, by the better angels of our nature.

~ Abraham Lincoln

More word salad...

I think it's very important...for us at every moment in time, and certainly this one, to see the moment in time in which we exist in our present. And to be able to contextualize it. To understand where we exist in the history and in the moment as it relates not only to the past but the future.

~ Vice President Kamala Harris

Words to live by...

Hope is not a strategy

~ Alex Lindsey

Indeed...

You must read to your children and you must hug your children and you must love your children.

Your success as a family, and our success a society, depends not on what happens in the White House, but on what happens inside your house.

~ Barbara Bush

Me, too!

I'd rather have questions that can't be answered than answers that can't be questioned.

~ Richard Feynman

The secret is acknowledging the charlatan

One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle.

We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken.

Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.

~ Carl Sagan, in The Demon-Haunted World

Deep...don't waste your life

Listen well             everyone
Great is the problem of life and death
No forever              gone gone
Awake awake          each one
Don't waste your life

~ old Buddhist poem (sent to a friend by teen-aged Steve Jobs)

Grim determination, indeed...

The Finnish way of life is summed up in “sisu,” a trait said to be part of the national character. The word roughly translates to “grim determination in the face of hardships", such as the country’s long winters.

Even in adversity, a Finn is expected to persevere, without complaining.

Back in the day when it wasn’t that easy to survive the winter, people had to struggle, and then it’s kind of been passed along the generations,”

Our parents were this way. Our grandparents were this way. Tough and not worrying about everything. Just living life.”

~ Matias From, age 18, finnish citizen, in a NYT article on Finnish happiness

'Gratitude' is my mantra for this week

Being sad or being not content with our life would be seen as ungrateful.

~ Clara Paasimaki, in a New York Times article on happiness

Wait. What?

There isn’t just one model of enduring happy marriage. But the usual contemporary ideal begins with sexual attraction and passionate romantic feelings and turns into a long-term mutual engagement, with physical intimacy as a big part of it.

~ The Ethicist, New York Times Magazine

He’s not wrong…

Only women, children, and dogs are loved unconditionally.

A man is only loved under the condition that he provides something.

~ Chris Rock

Odd connection

Oscar gets caught cheating with Angela's husband.

Angela: YOU WERE SUPPOSED TO BE MY FRIEND!

(later)

Angela: I feel so stupid. I sit next to him every day.

Dwight: You're not stupid. Jazz is stupid.

Angela (crying): Jazz IS stupid! I mean, just play the right notes!

~ in The Office

Tree trivia

Nathan: Do you guys ever want to be in charge? Be the boss? Get all the credit?

Coach Beard: You know, we used to believe that trees competed with each other for light. Suzanne Simard's field work challenged that perception, and now we now realize that the forest is a socialist community. Trees work in harmony to share the sunlight.

Nathan: Can't you just give me a straight answer? For once?

Roy Kent: I think he just did.

A good life, indeed...

(Diane, leaving to pursue a writing career)

Sam (to Diane): Hey. Have a good life.

Diane: Have a good life? That's something you say when something's over.

I'll see you in six month's, ok?

Sam: ...ok.

(Diane turns and leaves the bar)

Sam (watching the door close): Have a good life.

~ from Cheers

It's been a while

Pam, when was the last time you lived so intensely that your brain literally couldn't hold the memories in?

~ Robert California, in The Office

Flawlessly logical...

SPOCK: T'Pring. Explain.

T'PRING: Specify.

SPOCK: Why the challenge, and why you chose my captain as your champion.

T'PRING: Stonn wanted me, I wanted him.

SPOCK: I see no logic in preferring Stonn over me.

T'PRING: You have become much known among our people, Spock. Almost a legend. And as the years went by, I came to know that I did not want to be the consort of a legend. But by the laws of our people, I could only divorce you by the kal-if-fee. There was also Stonn, who wanted very much to be my consort, and I wanted him.

If your Captain were victor, he would not want me, and so I would have Stonn. If you were victor you would free me because I had dared to challenge, and again I would have Stonn.

But if you did not free me, it would be the same. For you would be gone, and I would have your name and your property, and Stonn would still be there.

SPOCK: Logical. Flawlessly logical.

T'PRING: I am honoured.

~ From Star Trek

Makes sense to me...

There are two rules in life:
1) Never give out all the information

~ Richard Feynman

Anthony had it right

Anthony Bourdain said: "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.