Month: September 2020

Doing a 1% solution is better than not doing a 100% solution.

I cannot grow garlic to save my life.

A few things reminded me of something I’ve been turning over in my head for a long time.

If you ever feel powerless, remember you have immense power over other people. A kind word or a nasty one can make or break someone’s day. Anxiety, depression, and a host of mental problems have been strongly correlated with feelings of powerlessness. A good way to fight them is make a point of complimenting someone else because it really gives you a feeling of empowerment to make a stranger smile. There’s nothing wrong in making yourself feel better by helping someone else out, and if you need a short boost just to get through a tough time, throwing out a little kindness works for you too.

I believe we’re programmed to operate that way. It’s better for humanity, it’s better for other people, and it’s better for you. So don’t replace your medical care with kindness, but by all means set yourself up for success. Tilt the odds in your favor. Things will tilt them against you. There are reasonable limits, of course, but if you start looking for ways to make someone else’s life a bit easier, you will realize just how incredibly, effortlessly powerful you are.

A lot of life is making cost/benefit analysis, and a thumbs up costs nothing. Take the easy wins. Know that you made someone else smile. It helps you too.

I don’t think trying to make yourself happier makes you happy. I do think making other people happier does.

Four big foreign policy events happened recently.

1) Serbia and Kosovo signed an economic normalization agreement.

2) The Taliban and Afghan governments started peace talks.

3) Israel and the UAE normalized ties.

4) Bahrain and Israel normalized ties.

There was definitely some White House electioneering going on, but this is politics. To think there isn’t, or to discard meaningful accomplishments because of electioneering, is naive.

In all of these actions, the participants will drive meaning or its absence. Details, treaty obligations, and suchlike can be changed and implemented or not at the discretion of those participants. Even if a paper says ‘A will do this’ there’s not much obligation for A to do this. People can try to write more things on the paper to make it certain, but it’s still just a paper.

On the other hand, this is the human race. Take the wins you can get. If you want people to stop smoking and you get ten people to sign pieces of paper that say they’re going to stop smoking, you take the one or two or might stick through it. At the very least, most of the other eight or nine might stop for a while, and that’s a short win too.

Either Trump or Biden administrations, as well as following administrations, will have to push things, keep up pressure, and yet not overdo the pressure so participants don’t defy the treaties and agreements to thumb their noses at the US.

Where I’m going is, these are accomplishments, but they just open the door to more work. We need to set our expectations to one or two becoming meaningful after a lot of work and a long time. But if one or two turn into something meaningful, that’s more than zero. Consider it cautious, low expectation optimism.

Classes start up on Monday. I’ve got two in-person classes, and that’s going to be a little interesting, all things considered.

Hopefully proofreading corrections for Mara will be done by then. That would be a big one. Then it’s back to layout experts, and Mara will be republished hopefully soon.

It’s WSJ opinion page, so serious grain of salt, but this is a fairly comprehensive examination of the mentalities behind the most recent Brexit phenomena. More than anything, this is a simple putting into words of how WSJ believes the major personalities think about the deal, the conflict, and their parts in it.

If I died tonight, the only thing I’d regret was not spending enough time using chainsaws.

Snow, baby, snow. I love this weather.

GR really needs more than one negative ranking. There’s a difference between ‘this steaming pile of crap made me regret reading it, and I want the time back’ and ‘the scene changes and blocking were confusing, so I couldn’t get engaged by the action.’ Both of them rank as 1 star.

It’s a bit optimistic to call the study of Bronze Age Greece ‘ancient history.’ It’s closer to archeology.

There is some myth, but can the Illiad be considered historical record? Even though the Trojan war probably did happen in some fashion, does Homeric myth count as record?

If not, how do we know things? Digs. Submerged records. Artifacts in tombs or shipwrecks. All of which are more archeology than history.

It’s in the shadow area when we really make changes to what we know. Outside history, we know the mechanisms of how people lived. We know their weapons, their diets, and their extent. We know nothing of their doings, their politics, or their cultures. We don’t know what songs proto-man sang even if we know the tonal range by bone analysis. We don’t know when they feasted or for what even though we know what they ate.

And on the other side of the shadow are is true history. We know the actions of Roman people. We’ve read their campaign posters, seen their party pictures, followed their wars, foreign policies, and domestic politics via personal accounts, correspondence, and histories told by others long after. We have the billing statements for the legion budget. We know their jokes, their songs, and their artistic movements. We know so incredibly much more than what we know archeologically.

And the Illiad dwells in the shadow area. So does 800-ish to 1200-ish Scandinavian history and myth. We think a Trojan War probably happened 1187BC-ish. We think a Fimbulwinter probably occurred in 987-ish AD. Two thousand years difference, and yet both in the shadow area of myth. The Three Kingdoms period of China is born in here but escapes by its end. We know almost nothing of the Apache, the Navajo, and so many other tribes from before Europeans arrived. There is almost no shadow, merely a sudden darkness as one goes back from winner written rules to nothing left.