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I’ve been thinking a lot about the idea of currency in the exchange of values. If we think in strict economic terms, all we see is money and goods. But if you broaden the idea of value-pursuit to all human values, we can think of a currency as being something I have that I can use to get something I want.

Consider: Marriages fail because he is trading the promise of love and devotion (one currency) in pursuit of lots of really hot sex (another currency). In her turn, she promises hot sex in trade for lots of love and devotion. Both parties almost immediately start issuing scrip — counterfeit currency — all the while bitching about the bogus bills they’re getting in exchange.

The turmoil grows from there, but those are the root resentments from which the rest of the gnarled tree grows. They both feel cheated — and they’re both right. They’re also both counterfeiters — which neither will admit. Instead, each partner will disavow any responsibility for the steady destruction of what started as a grand passion for each of them.

Here’s some really good news: As soon as each one of them acknowledges and accepts the other partner’s values, they (more…)

This is a snarky take from Dvice, but it’s wonderfully good news if you like being alive:

It’s like something out of science fiction or a horror movie or both: in order to facilitate transplants, we can now keep human hearts alive and beating and toasty warm inside a special electromechanical box full of fresh blood.

Up until this point, live organs have been transported from donors to patients in coolers, buried in ice to keep them “fresh.” This only works for about six hours, which is why private jets, helicopters, and ambulances are used to speed these irreplaceable and lifesaving items around the country as quickly as possible.

Now, if I where a disembodied heart, I’d find an icy cooler a distinctly uncomfortable way to travel. A company called TransMedics agrees, which is why it’s constructed this self-contained Organ Care System, or OCS. You can stick a heart into this fancy device, hook it up to a supply of donated blood, and start it beating again, and it’ll happily sit there, warm and toasty and productive and supplied with all the oxygen and nutrients it could want.

From Pajamas Media:

All of the analogous 26 alarms analyzed by Green and Armstrong turned out to be false, either completely or to such an extent that actions intended to be remedial caused greater harm than the supposed problem. See www.PublicPolicyForecasting.com for descriptions of some of the other 26 analogies: because media report alarms enthusiastically but not their demise, many readers will be surprised to find that alarms they still believe to be true have now been debunked.

When alarming forecasts are presented in the form of vivid scenarios, many people ignore the low likelihood that they will come about: they want action. This is especially so if they think the cost of action will be low (to themselves), and they can blame others.

Policy responses to environmental alarms are often promoted in terms of “caring for the planet” or “caring for our children.” This has the intended effect of deflecting questions about the substance of alarming claims, and of demonizing those who ask them.

In modern times, when we are safer than we have ever been, some activists have become rich and famous by exploiting our ready acceptance of alarming scenarios: “So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and (more…)

The author of this piece, from The Wall Street Journal, can’t see the silver lining for the clouds, but all this seems to me to be a cause to celebrate: We are no longer hostages to the tendentious “professionals” of the news business:

On Sept. 11, 2001, there was no such thing as a YouTube video. Or a Facebook page. Or a Twitter feed. Cellphone cameras did not exist. Yet legions of people rushed to the site of the twin towers to document the attack and its aftermath. Their images, as much as those from stationary TV cameras or professional photographers, became our window onto the calamity. Meanwhile, countless others used their pagers, phones and PCs to enter firsthand reports of what things were like in Lower Manhattan. Thousands more, forwarding those accounts around the world, helped produce a people’s chronicle of 9/11 that corresponds with—rivals, really—the record seen on television and in print.

What was extraordinary that day has become thoroughly familiar. In 2011, when history happens, it is more often than not a nonjournalist with a pocket camera, a blog or a Twitter account who files the initial dispatch. It was a tourist with a camcorder who captured the first devastating (more…)

From City Journal:

Despite several brushes with mortality in its start-up years, after a decade, the firm was earning $20 million in sales, reported Forbes this January. From the start, some customers developed an intensely personal relationship with the product, accusing Rollins of failing if he wasn’t constantly putting out new material. “They’d call me to say, ‘C’mon, Tom, I’m done with your latest; when’s the next one out?’ It was like intellectual crack.” The audience—mostly older professionals with successful careers—sees the liberal arts as a life-changing experience, observes Louis Markos, an English professor at Houston Baptist University who has recorded courses on C. S. Lewis and on literary criticism for the company. “They are hungry for this material.”

The company markets deftly to that hunger. The catalogs are learning opportunities in their own right, tantalizingly laying out the material that each course will cover, such as the contributions and foibles of the Renaissance popes. This peekaboo strategy presumes a burning desire for knowledge on the reader’s part. “Starting with the Renaissance, the culture of the West exploded,” begins the description of a Western civilization series. Then it irresistibly reels the reader in: “Over the next 600 years, rapid innovations in philosophy, technology, (more…)

Ten gorgeous televisions, all in a row. How many hi-def sets — TVs and monitors — do you have in your house right now? How long before you have this many — or more?

Steve Jobs announced his resignation today as CEO of Apple, Inc. From that one little tidbit of information, we can foresee a long, slow roll-out of “news” content.

Tonight and tomorrow we’ll see the newsy stuff — Jobs’ biography, his history with Apple, his successor, the product pipeline and the financial portents of the whole interconnected circus.

Tomorrow and later we’ll have reaction pieces, starting with phony tributes and leading to phony trashings.

The real ugliness will await the magazines — paper, video and virtual: Steve Jobs was a brutal boss. Steve Jobs was a techno-pirate. Steve Jobs was unfair to mediocrities!

Everything you read or hear about the man in the coming weeks will be defensibly true in some kind of you-could-look-it-up fashion. And every bit of it will mean nothing, the endless, senseless mastication of trivial details with not a shred of meaning to be found in the mash.

So let’s cut to the chase: Here is what actually matters about the working life of Steve Jobs:

With one incredible product after the next, with one brilliant strategic move after the next, with one astounding financial milestone after the next, the most wonderful thing Steve Jobs made in his working life was:

You.

Don’t believe me? Let’s (more…)

I love that phrase — “You’re not the boss of me!” — those words, that order, that emphasis. Children say it when they’re put upon, and I love it so much I write it into their mouths in fiction, too.

The sentence has that structure because the child has self-abstracted the genitive idea, the idea of “of-ness” — the relationship of dominance defined by every form of possession. “You’re not my boss!” is a learned shortening of the same idea, but “You’re not the boss of me!” is a completely self-abstracted, self-constructed sentence, which in turn expresses in the most succinct possible form a completely self-abstracted philosophy.

We spend a lot of time laughing at how silly children’s ideas are, but we never stop to marvel at everything they had to work out in order to have ideas of their own. To say that one simple sentence — “You’re not the boss of me!” — the child had to work out the idea of his own undeniable, inescapable ontological autonomy.

I could spend a month defending the idea of an “undeniable, inescapable ontological autonomy,” but I had to understand the raw essence of that idea as a four-year-old — and so did you!

We were (more…)

For real. Droolicious, palsyfying sex, the kind of deeply satisfying soul-enriching love-making you’ve always known was possible, but which you’ve always missed out on — usually by a couple-hundred-billion miles.

No details just yet — if you want to get to heaven, you’ve got to go through hell — but if you think you have something to gain by dismissing me, this is the countervailing argument:

If you attend to what I have to say, you will get better at everything you do — including making love.

Stay tuned. There is more to come, so to speak.

I write for my own ears. I’ve said that before, but it matters to me more than you can guess. I can defend that proposition from a lot of different directions, but the words themselves say what I most want said:

I put words together in ways that sound pleasing to my own mind’s ear.

I like to revisit things I have written, not alone because I like to hear how the words are holding up. I am accountable for my past self in every conceivable way, but I am accountable to myself, when I have written, in this way: I want to tell the truth beautifully.

The truth matters most, of course, but I understand far more than ever I have written down. When I am writing, I want to accompany my arguments with a music of the mind, one tone after the next, leading to a catharsis — art.

This is so funny to me — everything about my life is funny to me — but I want to talk about the hairiest, scariest, deepest philosophical issues, and I want to do it in such a way that the words never stop ringing in my ears.

Your ears, too? Good on ya. Your mind? (more…)