Reviews

 

Foreword:

The Human Race is not one with a finish line where we ultimately claim victory, but a relay where we hand off our position of knowledge, wisdom and experience to the next eligible runner.

Chapter One:

The wonderful dexterity, knowledge of the notes and the execution of difficult passages did not constitute in the critic’s eyes an accurate presentation of the composers intention; which was not to baffle the less than sophisticates in the orchestra seats with technical wizardry, but to move the spirit of those few souls in the audience who are in touch with that in nature and the human existence which although is omnipresent, has yet to be defined.

Chapter Three:

Another priceless lesson about not letting what you love become the source of your sustenance, because eventually you will have to compromise one or the other. Once will give you short term regret and the other, long term.

Chapter Five:

Happiness in life is defined relative to the amount of suffering you are exposed to. When you are forced to live without the most basic necessities, you learn to find solitude in just having those in your life.

Chapter Six:

We gauge our self-worth on the value of what we are capable and willing to give against the value of that which others are willing to trade in return.

There is no greater virtue than remaining the central source of wisdom for one’s family at the time of your death.

Chapter Eight:

The problem with maturity is that having a relationship worth investing in becomes more difficult as you get older and more discerning of whom you spend your time with.

Creating an expectation based on assumptions with no merit is the catalyst for traumatic disappointment.

Too often we believe what we want to believe and block out all information that would challenge any one of our assumptions, and the fact that these assumptions are so intrinsically tied to one another, a successful challenge of one can topple the entire expectation.

Our redemption will not come from our perpetrators any more than their punishment will come from us.

Chapter Nine:

I know that when you feel you are abandoned by the persons you love and need most, it often renders you incapable of recognizing them as the ultimate source of that pain. Instead, you look inward and learn to discredit who you are as a person.

Being disorganized is something that is definable and quantifiable. Abandonment creates the ultimate state of disorganization as everything around you feels out of place. Creating a highly structured and organized environment becomes necessary for survival and as soon as something finds itself out of place, there is no limit to the amount of energy an abandoned person will invest to correct it.

Chapter Ten:

Drama cannot survive in the presence of pragmatic reality, but it is certainly and often used to fill the void.

Chapter Eleven:

I have a rule in my life that one should never, under any circumstances, make humor over that which is chromosomal. The ultimate degradation of a soul is to exacerbate the presence of a flaw or deformity that exists by no fault of the person who possesses it. It is the deepest form of emotional cruelty humans can impart on one another; and its impact should be one of the primary lessons taught to a child by their parents.

When the tide turns you sometimes have to go with it to find its path and sometimes against it to build the strength to stay clear of the rocks.

What should have been a simple realization and life adjustment turned into a dark abyss of denial. And that denial required literally destroying that which brings you news you are unwilling to accept.

Chapter Thirteen:

They got the answer they wanted from their original marketing efforts and stopped asking questions; a guarantee of catastrophic failure for any and all scientific and business decision makers.

Now with the help of a new wave of data analysts along with their marketing and hype master counterparts, we were about to witness the virtual elimination of anything and everything that could not be assigned a number.

Chapter Fourteen:

I respect the business model, but not when it limits the end users ability to access what the artist intended, any more than replacing healthy food items with less nutritious ingredients in order to cut costs. No one benefits long term from this model.

You don’t pivot from these times; as the weight of the pivot will drive you into the payment like a screw into a piece of soft wood. You either stand your ground or run like hell.

So even if the fix would work, the legal standard is that you don’t have to fix something that can hurt you if that fix is more costly than the original item. As sick and irrational as this may sound, in the right context I am in full agreement.

You cannot form an opinion and then attempt to enforce that opinion with just the facts that you choose to present.

I do however blame our ostrich culture; which has empowered anyone with the ability to intimidate or make us fearful, control our lives and put at risk the development of future generations. No, it doesn’t take a village…just two brave parents.

Chapter Fifteen:

Every small business has extreme and unpredictable ups and downs. I’ve yet to meet a single truly successful small business owner-operator with a consistent score over 650.

When the 2006 Subprime crash hit, home buyers almost instantly vanished; as new banking regulations made it now impossible to obtain mortgages…sort of like putting up a speed limit sign after they zip up your body bag on the side of the same road.

When I speak of things I regret, it is usually that I allow primitive intellectual instincts to take over without considering the consequences. I am far too slight of stature to be physically intimidating and even if I was, other than fighting over the last piece of fruit in the jungle, there is nothing to be gained by that in a civilized society. What I did have at that time was a deep understanding of how many people and institutions were full of shit and their representatives, in an attempt to intimidate the weaker persons in our society, would hide behind some culturally acceptable façade to push the weak among us into submission. This was not going to happen on this day.

The data was there. The presentation was there. The science was there. And none of it could overcome the emotions of the jurists. Not even in black and white. They believed in whatever they were conditioned to believe based on their own personal prejudices.

Chapter Sixteen:

Having the atmosphere of nature, the serenity and vastness of space around you can make a person unaware of their gifts at best and at worst take on a self-righteous confidence in their particular place in the world; that power and will to make decisions for those whom they feel are either less fortunate, or less worthy…or both.

Evolution gave us the being known as man, who wandered the earth along with the many other creatures of nature. At one point in time that creature was chosen to receive a soul. A soul is the power to accept and acknowledge that there are unexplainable forces greater than ourselves and that if we allowed, would guide our lives. Some people call that God, some simply refer to it as a higher power. Still others deny its existence while continually trying to define in scientific or mathematical terms exactly what it is. You can call it whatever you like. But when you choose to believe in the existence of something greater than yourself, only then will you become a creation; because to be a creation, one would need to acknowledge the existence of a creator.

So from my perspective and as I said in the opening of this book, in the proper context all data is false…to somebody, and only a probability to the rest of us.

Data is a historical recounting of events and makes no claim to every possible scenario or contingency. It is simply a collection of educated guesses based on the information available at the time. The damage data does is when we have a populace that is insecure and uninformed or ambivalent; insecure in their ability to understand complexities and therefore succumb to overlooking and/or ignoring their own instincts, uninformed on the credentials of the person or institution that is projecting those complexities, or ambivalent for many reasons; one obvious being the desire to take the shortest path to satisfy primal needs.

In fact one could successfully argue that using the same source material, the actual sound information that cavemen #1 sent to caveman #2 was sonically more accurate than what would be received through modern day computers.

At no time are statistics exact. In the truest sense they are defined simply as probabilities and nothing more. Even with the extreme algorithms they create, no statistician worth their salt would claim their findings to be absolute. Are you comfortable with your communication being a probability? Would you engage in a contract that says “We probably agree”? Would you buy a gallon of milk that says “Probably a gallon”? How about “I probably love you”? Try that out on your next relationship.

Chapter Eighteen:

A dozen Michael Jordans do not equate to a winning team and a single musician with a keyboard, no matter how talented, cannot create and perform a film score comparable to that of even a half dozen or more professional musicians with individual personalities, passions and souls.

We have gone from artist Tracy Chapman singing “Fast Car” to an emotionally scarred pre-teen performing a “twerking” move and receiving more value points, especially if the company paying for your views is selling bootie pants.

You can only hold onto that which you are willing to fight for.

And the investors made fortunes. Rightfully so I might ad for as much as I believe what they have done has made a deep negative impact on our society as a whole, their job title has never included the word humanitarian. They are in the business of making money, and for that they should be applauded. Just be careful who sees you.

Our current generation of consumers owns relatively nothing. They lease their cars, phones, and every other item of necessity including their living spaces and in some cases the ability to purchase food, travel or receive health care. When they are not beholden to the government, they are beholden to the companies they sign up with to provide their basic needs; assuming of course they continue to pay their required monthly subscription fees with money they make from working; which when broken down means they are slaves.

Are you aware that our bi-partisan elected representatives have allowed credit card companies to have no cap on the amount of interest they can charge on a credit card? Who voted for these people?…we did.

Remember this: One “billionaire” eliminates 1,000 “millionaires”. Multiply that by the amount of their billions.

Everyone with a soul has a strand of brilliance. Whether it be the neurosurgeon at Yale Medical Center, or the mechanic down the road working on his new luxury sedan, or the broken-English speaking woman working at the IKEA cafeteria who feeds hundreds of people a day and then travels home on a public bus to feed her own family, or the regular white male who picks up your trash or fixes your roads and then takes his children to the amusement park for their birthdays on the weekend, or the now single middle-aged woman discarded by her hedonistic husband; alcohol addicted and forced to work at a retail store changing room so she can survive. Despite the titans of dollars pushing them aside to feed off of their scraps, all of them do something better than most people. Some recognize it and many don’t. But that doesn’t make that strand any less valuable in the proper context.

The hypocrisy of persons making tribal claims of racism and sexism and all of the other isms, while simultaneously they categorize persons as relevant or irrelevant based on THEIR criteria (which just so happens to put them in the “safe” categories) is the real problem. And it should be noted that desire for someone to wish harm and even death to a person whom they have neither met nor spoken to, strictly on the basis of information received from a third party source, should be identified for its commonality with the purveyors of the worst atrocities against our fellow beings in human history.

If we base all of our truths on “data” that we quantify with only our own perspectives and assumptions, then what happens if the data is later proven to be incorrect? We simply wake up and find our life was a living lie, if we wake up at all. For the presence of a single link of truth along the chain of later to be proven false assumptions will sever the chain at that very point. Allowing one’s perceptions and truths to be altered or modified will support the development of an intellectual web as opposed to a cumulative chain. A web can be severed in any one, two or more places and still remain both effective and strong, but a chain with a link removed becomes a fraction of itself; as one side falls to the ground, no longer functional or valued.

The primary difference I find between my life and theirs is that generally speaking, academia overlooks the obvious while those less formally educated focus on the obvious. For the academic whose life revolves around their formal education status, finding a solution to be within the obvious potentially undermines the value of that coveted status and therefore must not be considered.

I personally would never purchase a pharmaceutical from a drug store owner who was also a respected horn player in a jazz band. The notion that those two portions of the brain could work at a high level from both sides just doesn’t seem possible, and in fact it often is not.

History is a wonderful thing because no matter how hard you try, no matter the extent of your cognitive dissonance and no matter how much you believe that “It’s not who you are, it’s what people perceive you to be”…you can never change the reality of your life after the fact.

So the modern creative participants of the music industry became just one more sector that is willing to accept emotional gratification for payment. And with the exception of those less-than-creative individuals among us, who desperately strive for notoriety through soulless anthems to a carnal existence; composing “songs”, and shooting “videos” where they demean their own being in order to meet data metrics designed by a global corporation to gain access to markets they need product penetration into, everything else is pure deception…and everyone who is anyone knows it.

Chapter Nineteen:

I see no shortage of static data and zero sum projections designed to put us all into panic with no benefit other than to elevate the messenger to some prophetic stature. I have always believed that even when yelling “fire”, there should also be shared, at the very least, some idea of how to put it out.

The challenge in writing about subjects that overlap from the studies of science to the world of nature is the fundamental foundation of their thinking. Generally each side has its own language, terms and core belief structure; much like in some ways a rigid ideology that is so embedded into the valuation parameters of the individuals, it disallows the consideration of alternative perspectives. I find without exception that at this time in history, the science and academic community is so invested in credentials founded in the notion that everything in “nature” is quantifiable and can therefore be defined in those terms either now or in the near future, along with the premise that anything less than a scientific and/or mathematical approach to an issue in humanity should be dismissed as a religion of sort, not only disallows their consideration, but more often than not broods contempt for any resistance.

Knowing one’s strengths and weaknesses is far more valuable to a child’s development than filling their heads with ridiculous notions of success in fields that are miles beyond their DNA. The exceptions you are thinking of are as a result of another super abundance in their personality which granted, may not be apparent when they are young, but will ultimately come out as they age regardless of what you tell them they can or cannot do. But for the risk adverse out there, having a child change course for the better as they age is a hell of a lot more palatable than their feeling a terrible sense of failure and self-doubt when they realize their dreams were unobtainable.

If you’re not willing to teach and guide your child, and in doing so take the risk of that child hating you for a period in their life, than maybe you should reconsider whether you want to be a parent.

At the hands of academia, our children set out to be princes and princesses, but now are merely peasants….unless of course you believe strictly in binary resolution. In that case nothing matters but the numbers and the data. If your life is not what you thought it would be, then you should have conformed to the median. It was your choice; now take what we give you and get off of the playground.

Chapter 20:

What drives a true entrepreneur is the glory of doing something as a single person that improves the quality of life for others and in the process for us.

The fearful among us are held back by their self-imposed limitations; self-imposed because those limitations are viewed as a weakness instead of indicators to find a better way to do things.

Data is the perfect fix for a fearful risk-adverse person with low esteem. With “data” you can do whatever you like with the false sense of comforting knowledge that persons much smarter than you have already asked all of the right questions. With “data” you can boast to all around you why your decisions and opinions are the right ones and theirs are wrong. And above all, with “data”, you can never make a mistake, an error or be held accountable, because when called out you can always blame the “data”.

Data is the invisible friend you created as a child to avoid accountability.

Data defines you. So who do you become when the data is wrong? What if you someday find that all of the opinions, the “research”, the general consensus and conventional wisdom somehow are different than reality? What then does that leave you with? More importantly, what then are you defined as?

Is data of any value? Absolutely when dealing with definable things, but even then there is a very good chance that it can be as much of a distraction as it is an indicator. Data does not reduce risk in an infinite resolution environment and once again, just like the neuroscience of emergence, be it with the human brain or the human soul, you cannot predict from an analysis of the components, that which emerges from the system.

Chapter Twenty-One:

I’m OK, but I feel like I’m escaping a burning building with all of my old friends inside.

Where did this “talented and gifted” branding evolve from? It came from our obsession with elevating ourselves above other persons. And why would we need to do that? Possibly because we have no soul in the true sense; no acknowledgement of or desire to confront the possibility there is anything out there that we don’t know, anything we can’t define the origin of, anything that we cannot control.

So the only bumper sticker you need on your car is one that reads: “Proud Parent of a Happy, Well Adjusted Nobody”

Sooner or later we all will be outside of the mean and it is doubtful at best that anyone in the science, popular culture or data world will acknowledge our contributions of the past or ideas in the now; and at that juncture, long before our physical lives are completed, we will truly become irrelevant.

All you will then have to hold onto will be those things which are not tangible, not quantifiable but infinite; and hopefully at that time, ever present in your life. The sooner we consider and ultimately surrender to that alternative, the more freedom, peace and joy in our lives we can look forward to.