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If everyone has just a little bit of courage, then no one has to be a hero.

—Sarah McBride (quoting her dad)

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I’m old enough to remember when Cadillacs were big cars. Heck I’m old enough to remember when this exact Cadillac was a big car. My uncle had one. It was huge.

But now, even Hondas are wider, taller and longer, and pickup trucks are so ludicrously big they make it look like a subcompact.

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Jaguar’s new brand image and use as Waymo vehicles is rapidly turning them into the logo-emblazoned Patagonia vest of vehicles.

Might still be top quality but I don’t want to be seen in one.

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There's a world beyond our borders

Paul Krugman is in Holland and has thoughts:

I’m still eager to get back to the United States. Indeed, traveling ends up reminding me how American I am, how much I love the good things about my country. But we could live better lives than we do, and it’s sad that we choose not to.

I'm reminded of Mark Twain's famouos observation:

Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one's lifetime.

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When we accept ourselves as a villain, and glorify brutality and inhumanity for some specific results, that mindset will undo us entirely.

At some point, the steady multiplication of cognitive dissonance inevitably turns that need to do bad things for a good cause into the insistence that doing bad things is a virtue in itself.

Whether the path leads to cleansing the population of immigrants, destroying institutions others have worked so hard to build, or simply “owning the libs,” the downward spiral into amorality from an accrual of mean-spiritedness follows the same basic pattern. Its self-justification builds upon itself until it becomes its own monster.

Because otherwise, without following that spiraling path, how does one justify the loss of shame, the loss of empathy, and the loss of empathy that has already occurred?

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Groundbreaking Mexican architect Felix Candela (who was also a very athletic man) used to say that thinking is some of the hardest work one can do. If it were easy, people wouldn’t try so hard to avoid it. Think of all the additional work people do to avoid simply stopping and figuring out a better way.

(Also. Race car drivers are athletes. It takes serious physical and mental conditioning. Sure, I may be jogging while they’re running a marathon, but jogging is also tiring.)

Whenever I take a long car ride I end up exhausted afterwards, and I’m always like “why am I so tired? I was just sitting around doing nothing all day.”

But the answer, it turns out, is I was doing something. Riding in a car jars your body in many directions and requires constant microadjustments of your muscles just to stay in place and hold your normal posture. Because you’re inside the car, inside the situation, it’s easy not to notice all the extra work you’re doing just to maintain the status quo.

There’s all sorts of type of work that we think of as “free” that require spending energy: concentrating, making decisions, managing anxiety, maintaining hypervigilance in an unfriendly environment, dealing with stereotype threat, processing a lot of sensory input, repairing skin cells damaged sun exposure, trying to stay warm in a cold room.

The next time you think you’re tired from “nothing”, consider instead that you’re probably in situation where you’re doing a lot of unnoticed extra work just to stay in place.

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Slow Down -- Respect Yourselves -- Protect Yourselves, Industrial Workers Of The World (I.W.W.), 1917.

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DEAD END

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Me & the missus

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That dude is creepy.

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FUDEZUKA Toshihisa（筆塚稔尚 Japanese, b.1957）

1. Shining Water 2  輝く水  2015  etching  21 × 15 cm  2. Rain Song 4  2015  etching 15.5 × 21.5 cm  3. Rain Song 3  2014  etching  25.5 × 39 cm   via