First Blog

  Read too much, and you become dependent and lazy in your thinking. Read too little, and you become vulnerable to specious ideas. -------------------- Unresolved what are: too much? too little?  Beware of questions easy to ask and impossible to answer. 

Did you ever consider the complexity or development of your mind correlates and corresponds with your dreams? The caveman who hunts by day and eats at the campfire has dreams little more than this and the world of his senses. The engineer, with immense training, living in a complex world, performing complex tasks by day, necessarily has more complex dreams intertwined with everyday events of friends and family.   While this seems natural and simple, a step more complex is involved. All those complex dreams of the engineer use the advanced workings and training of the mind and memory, testing, working, and variating those same mental features used by day.   In fact, during the dreams, the mind gets a “nighttime workout.” The result is a more pliable and active mind for the next day.   Although most of us enter adulthood with a mind mostly trained, we can simulate or actuate higher-order mental features by giving the conscious mind a boost before dreaming.   One way is reading befo

You want to learn?  You want to achieve?  You want to know?  Go to school, say the educators. Sometimes schools feed information and learning; sometimes schools teach how to learn. The how is what you need, and these are most important ways to learn.         First, we learn from reading books or being taught in the classroom. We learn by solving given problems. Practice and repetition, this is the role and scope of all school teaching. Occasionally, inspiration occurs.           Second we learn from examples and experience. Seeing many examples, some working and some not, and knowing why helps. These build our knowledge and intuition of reality.  Knowledge is a pathway to solving problems, while intuition provides a pathway to innovation.  More simply, we learn by doing.  Attending the school of hard knocks is an expression of this.         Third, we learn from mistakes*.  Make no mistake about it; this is a key way we learn.  How many times have you and I learned this or that of

What’s good about the world?   We’re not looking for miracles or final results. We are looking for improvement.   Let’s not look at the world we don’t have now, but look more at the far and recent past where almost nothing was possible, available, accessible, and the like.  Our list does not include everyone everywhere.   Progress is not constant nor uniform.   In some places forward steps come in leaps while in others backward steps seem the rule.   With all we hear daily of riots here, wars there, violence in the streets, intrigue in the palace, assassinations,   subversions, perversions, and all others, we take a pause and consider what we have is far, far beyond the situations of almost all only a century or two ago.       We now live in a world where most people --- Have some civil rights. Have basic schooling. Have machines to make life easier. Have food produced by an agricultural bounty. Have some rights to practice a religion of choice. Are neither s

On the Presidency. With few exceptions, all are humbled, yet intoxicated by the office. Donald.   Never thought I think it, but his countless unforced errors leads me to think he may fear being President. He fears getting it, understanding that having it is a monumental job. Hillary. Her unbridled ambition overrides every other consideration. She primarily wants to get it, and then to worry about having it. Remember the two goals: to get and to have.  They are different.  ------------ Many important leaders have a handler or two.   Almost all lessor leaders, past and present, have handlers. These persons, living in the shadows, suggest   what to do heavy situations, point toward the greater vision,   guide them to say nothing when nothing should be said, and importantly reinforce how great they are in their quest toward the glory to come.   Some have or had no handlers preferring to follow their own vision, perhaps such Eisenhower, T. Roosevelt, Lincoln, and several