About Focusing on One’s Priorities

"Beware the barrenness of a busy life." Socrates

As a gift to myself this year, I've been doubling-down on my need to spent my waning hours my intentionally. Waning? I'm 68, so I've already lived most of my life. That said, I'm in good physical shape and I'm passionate about my work as a civil rights attorney (especially First Amendment). Every day I treasure opportunities to engage with friends and family, especially the love of my life, Beverly, who I met one year ago today. I am a serious musician and an exhibiting artist. I'm lucky in more ways than I can count.

But numbers don't lie. Last year I made an intrepid assumption that I'll live about 20 more years. Simple math reveals that this is only 240 more months. Last month went quickly. In fact, the better I am at living a mindful, principled and socially engaged life, the more quickly the months flash by. My endgame: If I'm really fortunate, I'll be able to look back at my 20 year Plan and consider that it was a life well-lived, which will make it much easier to deal with my inevitable decay and death. But how do I keep on track, giving my cravings to attend to more things than I can possibly absorb?

This year I committed to unsubscribing from emails lists that seemed like good ideas at the time. There are also many commercial emails that keep popping in, unsolicited. In the past few weeks, I have unsubscribed from about 200 email lists, which makes my inbox much more inviting. Now, most of my inbox consists of emails that I will either read or at least scan. This has also addressed my concern that I might overlook important emails because they are hidden among low (or no) priority emails. I recommend this to everyone. If an email list seems interesting, but not interesting enough to subscribe to, I follow the organization or person on X (Twitter), which circumvents my inbox.

I also decided to commit (for the umpteenth time) to do a better job of making and adhering to a daily to-do list that I create either that morning or the night before. I use a combination of paper and pen at my desk and the Reminders app on my iPhone. This simple tactic works extremely well.

I also make better use of my iPhone DND feature when trying to focus, sometimes for hours. This is heaven. How did we ever get to this point where so many people assume that you will immediately respond to texts and phone calls?

These three simple things have made a noticeable difference to help me spend quality time on the things that I have personally identified as my priorities. The alternative is the lose time chasing squirrels all day, which is admittedly sometimes valuable for generating unexpected but important insights, ideas and projects, but this daydreaming and brainstorming time needs to be consciously kept in check or else it destroys one's ability to deeply concentrate one's own priorities.

Today I received a mass emailing from Cal Newport announcing a new online course called Life of Focus. I won't be signing up, but I do appreciate his three goals for his course, which closely align with my own resolutions:

Month 1: Establishing deep work hours. You'll restructure your work life to feature less distraction and more depth.

Month 2: Conducting a digital declutter. You'll implement a digital declutter to help you break screen additions and cultivate a more deliberate relationship with the digital tools in your personal life.

Month 3: Taking on a deep project. In the final month, we’ll reinvest the time we’ve created at work and at home in a project that engages your mind and your soul in something meaningful.

v Along these same lines I recommend Newport's book: "Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World.

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Is Christmas About Jesus? Residential Christmas Light Displays Offer a Clue

To what extent is Christmas about Jesus? On evening of Dec 18, I conducted a survey of Christmas lights in south St. Louis. I walked through neighborhoods to photograph residential Christmas displays. I walked through several neighborhoods (in the vicinity Ted Drews, for those of you from St. Louis).

I photographed every front yard that had a person or a thing on the front yard, excluding houses that merely had Christmas lights without figures. I also excluded houses with only Christmas tree images and those displaying only angels. I wanted to know the percentage of homes that displayed Jesus or the Nativity Scene. If a house displayed Jesus plus other figures, I counted it as a house that displayed an image of Jesus. I'm fully aware that this was not a scientific survey. There are likely many religious people who choose (for many reasons) to refrain from displaying images of Jesus in their Christmas front yard displays.

Out of 164 Christmas displays I photographed, only 13 (8%) displays a representation of Jesus.

At the end of this article I’ve listed many of the other personalities and objects you’ll find on neighborhood lawns to celebrate Christmas. In addition to Santas and reindeer, these figures include Harry Potter, penguins, unicorns, pigs wearing sunglasses and the Grinch.

Why would I do this survey? I was not trying to point out America’s loss of religiosity. I’m an atheist. My position is to each to his or her own. Feel free to follow a religion or no religion as long as you celebrate the right of all other people to celebrate their own religion (or no religion).

My purpose was inspired by the following passage by Thomas Sowell, from Knowledge and Decisions (1980):

Perhaps the most important feature of the first half of Knowledge and Decisions is simply its analysis of decision-making processes and institutions in terms of the characteristics and consequences of those processes themselves—irrespective of their goals. As noted in Chapter 6, this approach rejects the common practice of “characterizing processes by their hoped-for results rather than their actual mechanics.” “Profit-making” businesses, “public interest” law firms, and “drug prevention” programs are just some of the many things commonly defined by their hoped-for results, rather than by the characteristics of die decision-making processes involved and the incentives created by those processes. So called “profit-making” businesses, for example, often fail to make a profit and most of them become extinct within a decade after being founded. In Knowledge and Decisions the owners of such businesses are defined not as profit makers but as residual claimants to the firm’s income—that is, to what is left over after employees, suppliers, and others have been paid. Put this way, it is dear from the outset that what is left over may be positive, negative, or zero. There is no more reason to expect "drug prevention” programs to prevent drug usage or “public interest” law firms to serve the public interest than to expect that most “profit-making” enterprises will in fact make profits. Whether any of these organizations do or do not live up to their expectations or claims is a question of empirical evidence. Pending the presentation of such evidence, such organizations can be analyzed in terms of what they actually do, not what they hope or claim to achieve.

Is Christmas about Jesus? Somewhat, but evidence abounds suggesting that Christmas is, mostly, for most Americans, about other things, including an orgy of consumerism. A Martian anthropologist who objectively studied Christmas behavior, including America’s choices in Christmas lights, would probably agree with me. Yes, Jesus is discussed in churches, but where are figurines of Jesus in grocery stores and hardware stores? Is Jesus discussed to any meaningful degree at family dinner tables? How often do people spontaneously discuss Jesus at cocktail parties?

Christmas, as a national institution, is mostly not about Jesus. It’s mostly about other things. It is my belief that it has become more and more about things since my childhood (I was born in the mid-1950s) and it has been a slow imperceptible drift. Jesus is the frog in the pot.

But the institution of Christmas is merely one example of many such drifting institutions. It appears to me that most American Institutions have been hollowed out over the years. They no longer do what they claim to do. Hence, the caveat offered by Thomas Sowell.

Wikipedia, which claims to offer a “neutral” point of view, is one of these hollowed-out institutions. And see here. 

Also note this about Wikipedia's annual budget:

Consider also the FDA, which is almost completely captured by pharmaceutical money. Consider the Department of “Defense,” which has waged numerous wars of discretion for decades, all of these wars supported by corporate media marching in lockstep.

And speaking of the corporate “news” media, it is clear that one can expect mostly to be misguided and propagandized by these institutions, not well-informed. Here are more than 300 examples of that.

Is a school functioning as a school?  You need to dig in deep to figure it out.  Don't just read the word school on the building and assume that children are being educated inside.

In conclusion, I refer back to the wise words of Thomas Sowell. Don’t ever assume that an institution actually does what it claims to do. I’m from Missouri, the “Show Me” state and I recommend that we all take on this attitude.

I decided to do my Christmas light survey because it was easy: people reveal in lights what is on their mind about the reason for the season. It’s much more difficult to tell what is really going on with most other institutions. Whenever institutions make claims that they are doing good things for society, demand that they open up and show you. Sunshine is the best disinfectant.

Merry Christmas to all, whatever that might mean to you!

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Basic Facts About USAID

Today I post this on FB, where am constantly smacked like a pinata by people who are completely ignorant about how U.S. foreign policy works.

If you are not following key people on Twitter, you are living in abject ignorance. You are missing real facts and real conversation. You are inviting corporate media to take over your brain so that you think and mouth corporate propaganda. You might hate what I've written above because you think of yourself as intelligent, but intelligence depends on being well informed by people who speak freely, without censorship. You are not getting that with corporate media. It's time to break out and learn important things that the giant U.S. propaganda machine is hiding from you. Case in point: USAID. You probably know nothing about USAID. You are probably completely ignorant about the damage we have done to dozens of other countries through USAID. We do this in the name of democracy, but that is complete bullshit. Mike Benz explains.

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RFK, Jr.: The Problem with Experts

RFK, Jr.:

Newsweek asked RFK Jr. "why he doesn't stop promoting conspiracy theories".

This was his reply:

"My father told me when I was a little boy that people in authority lie and the job in a democracy is to remain skeptical. I've been science-based since I was a kid. Show me the evidence and I'll believe you, but I'm not going to take the word of official narratives."

"The way you do research is not by asking authoritative figures what they think. Trusting experts is not a feature of science, and it's not a feature of democracy. It's a feature of religion and totalitarianism."

Compare with this passage from The Constitution of Knowledge by Jonathan Rauch (p.88):

I argue that liberal science’s distinctive qualities derive from two core rules, and that any public conversation which obeys those two rules will display the distinguishing characteristics of liberal science. The rules are

- The fallibilist rule: No one gets the final say. You may claim that a statement is established as knowledge only if it can be debunked, in principle, and only insofar as it withstands attempts to debunk it. That is, you are entitled to claim that a statement is objectively true only insofar as it is both checkable and has stood up to checking, and not otherwise. In practice, of course, determining whether a particular statement stands up to checking is sometimes hard, and we have to argue about it. But what counts is the way the rule directs us to behave: you must assume your own and everyone else’s fallibility and you must hunt for your own and others’ errors, even if you are confident you are right. Otherwise, you are not reality-based.

- The empirical rule: No one has personal authority. You may claim that a statement has been established as knowledge only insofar as the method used to check it gives the same result regardless of the identity of the checker, and regardless of the source of the statement. Whatever you do to check a proposition must be something that anyone can do, at least in principle, and get the same result. Also, no one proposing a hypothesis gets a free pass simply because of who she is or what group she belongs to. Who you are does not count; the rules apply to everybody and persons are interchangeable. If your method is valid only for you or your affinity group or people who believe as you do, then you are not reality-based...

Here is a problem, though, with the funnel metaphor. The boundaries of the reality-based community are fuzzy and frothy, not hard and distinct, and the same is true of knowledge itself. What has and The Constitution of Knowledge has not been validated? Who qualifies as an expert reviewer? Who is doing good science or journalism, who is doing bad science or journalism, and who is not doing science or journalism at all? Distinguishing science from pseudoscience and real news from fake news and knowledge from opinion will never be cut and dried. Among philosophers of science, a debate over what kind of thing is and is not science, the so-called demarcation problem, has been going on for a long time without resolution, which makes philosophers unhappy.

In fact, however, efforts to define who is or is not a scientist or what science does or does not do miss the point. The beauty of the reality-based community is that it can acquire all kinds of propositions and organize all sorts of arguments, and it can do all kinds of things to resolve those arguments, so long as its methods satisfy the fallibilist and empirical rules. In the real world, checking does not need to mean falsifying a factual statement in some precise, authoritative way. It means finding a replicable, impersonal way to persuade people with other viewpoints that a proposition is true or false. The reality-based community is thus not limited to handling factual disputes. It can work its will on any kind of proposition which its members and rules can figure out how to adjudicate, and it can drive many kinds of conversation toward consensus.

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Real Education

John Leake:

People who go to university and receive professional training generally obtain higher social status and incomes, and this fosters their belief that they are educated. This is especially true of medical doctors, who undergo far more training that almost every other professional.

However, it seems to me that a true education only begins when one graduates from college, and it never ends until one’s dying day. Common sense tends to decline with college education, but then returns as one continues on the path of experience and diligent learning.

People sometimes ask my why Drs. Peter McCullough and Paul Marik broke ranks with so many of their academic medical colleagues during the pandemic.

“Because they continued performing investigative scholarship while most of their colleagues sat on their hands and waited for guidance from Fauci’s NIAID,” I replied. In other words, most medical doctors in the United States acted more like clerics deferring to orthodoxy than true scholars.

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