MEMBER MONDAY

One thinks of the story of a mother walking with her child. A stranger exclaims, “What a lovely girl!” The mother replies, “That’s nothing, you should see her picture!” Perhaps said child would become Elizabeth Holmes, the convicted CEO of Theranos for having defrauded investors to the tune of some seven hundred million dollars. That’s nothing. You should see her picture.

The irony presented in the recent quasi documentary “You Can See Everything” is that everything you can see seems little more than a curated invention. Judge for yourself whether or not her attempted rehabilitation in the movie is simply an attempt to further perpetuate a fraud.

What comes to mind is a book last read in that High School english class, The Picture Of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde’s novel about a portrait of the extraordinarily beautiful young and pure Dorian Gray who enters into a Faustian bargain wherein he would remain in such a youthful state while the portrait would age in his place…

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We might leave the eulogies for Pam Stewart elsewhere except to say we lost one kick-ass teutonic beauty with a zest for life, not so many years after we’d also lost her movie-star-handsome husband Bill. If any couple seemed destined for a hall pass to immortality it would have been Pam and Bill. Not so: memento mori.

The occasion provides the opportunity to remove a work of philosophy off the dusty shelves as we seek some real practical wisdom for the rest of us mere mortals. Lesson one is the subject of death.

Those of us who were with Pam in the days, the weeks, indeed the years, before her final curtain call knew how she would fight, fight against the dying of the light. Never mind that rage, rage were Dylan Thomas’ actual words in that refrain about (not) going gently into that good night. Pam was more of a fighter than a rager.

A few of us who had also been there with Bill in his final years couldn’t help but notice the preternatural equanimity with which he handled his ALS sentence. No medical industrial complex heroics for him. He’d lived life on his own terms and seemed at total peace with its trajectory.

Two lives, two deaths, that will help frame our discussion about our respective philosophical reckonings about life’s only certainty. We might view the session as our Member Monday final exam about learning how to die is really about learning how to live…

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There’s that old joke about a guy looking upward with outstretched arms bemoaning he’s never won the lottery, at which time a voice is heard coming down from the heavens, “You might start by buying a lottery ticket.”

We will embark on a discussion of the abstract forces of luck and chance, of contingency and probability, where each speculative path opens into a thousand new possibilities. Invisible, otherwise undetectable, luck can be known only by its works. The religious mind might call it Divine Providence while the agnostic would tend to chalk it up to the random meeting human biography, inclined to call it “dumb” or “blind.” Is there more?

Yes, there’s more. Luck can be made or at least seduced by, say, the gambler who can stay on intimate terms with luck while trying to tame and possess it. While chess is a perfect information game in that players know where all the pieces are at every point, poker is imperfect in that players don’t know all of their opponents’ cards. Life is more like poker in that regard…

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Compare the hardboiled, dogmatic, polarizing label sometimes applied to the self-identified sceptic of today – climate sceptic, vaccine sceptic, evolution sceptic, election sceptic – to the philosophical model created by Cicero some 2000 years ago.

Remove the toga, translate the latin, and we have a model of scepticism less pejorative than inspirational i.e. “The genuine sceptic is not the person who doubts everything, nor the person who demands proof before anything. It is the person who has learned to hold their best views with the right strength of grip: firmly enough to act on them, loosely enough to let go when the evidence turns.” Click: He Was probably Right.

That sounds like the provisional methodology of scientific inquiry in which hypotheses are iterated in response to new information or unexpected results. Now apply the same mindset to the political arena and doubt may be seen as less the enemy of conviction than a pause that prevents conviction from becoming a captive of rhetoric…

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A certain riddle about time and perception has stayed with me for some sixty years through a character named Dunbar in the satirical wartime novel Catch-22. Dunbar, you see, developed a strategy to “lengthen” his life by deliberately making time feel slow by cultivating boredom, “Dunbar loved shooting skeet because he hated every minute of it and the time passed so slowly.”

Fast forward to our focus article for another take on the elasticity of perceived time (click: Your Perception Of Time Is, Indeed, Warped) with the common lament about how the years just seem to just fly by faster and faster particularly as one ages. Let it first be said that the phenomenon has nothing to do with some kind of change in the brain’s internal clock. Also largely dismissed was the so-called time alive theory which states future time represents a smaller and smaller percentage of the increasing time that’s already passed.

No, as it turns out, how we gauge time in the present is totally distinct from how we see it in retrospect. That difference, as it turns out, arises from our capacity to anchor those then-present experiences into our memory. Aha, certain experiences, such as those that are novel and stimulating are readily anchored. The cited example is the way those absorbing real-life episodes of children give the brain more to chew on.

Contrast that with a more dulled, dampened state as we grow older where we become more immersed in patterns and routines, living more by rote. Take as an extreme example the claustrophobic monotony of the three years during the Covid lockdowns in which the weeks and months blended such that every day was “Blursday.” No wonder the anecdotes revealed Americans experiencing time disorientation…

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As you watch the short focus video The Spectacle | Vimeo | New Yorker | 20m perhaps reflect on Blaise Pascal’s sentiment that the sole cause of man’s unhappiness is that he does not know how to stay quietly in his room or, for that matter, in the Highland gardens. Breathe it in for five minutes, prepare to flinch about that point, and you might become misanthropic by minute eighteen hoping the figure perched on a rock with that look-ma pose will slip and fall into the crevice and thereby score one for nature.

So why do we travel? To penetrate mysteries? The earth does not withhold many secrets anymore. When does travel degenerate into snobbism, a stunt, even blasphemy? A tourist may be trapped by the narcissist fallacy of travel to imagine that one’s mere passing sets up a charmed understanding between traveler and native, or even a bare comprehension.

We sometimes sense that we have reached a moment when travel might no longer be necessary, with virtual tours offering stunning connections to the wider world, from dramatic landscapes, wildlife, and historic sites to views of museum contents that surpass those which can be detected in person. It may be just a matter of time before we’ll be able to virtually smell the cooking…

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People are people and empires are empires. One of the most rewarding of our past sessions was MM 12/4/17 The Fate Of Empires with its focus the extended essay covering the dynamics powering the rise and fall of ten representative empires – Assyria, Persia, Greece, Roman (pre- and post-Augustus), Arab, Mameluke (Egypt, Syria), Ottoman, Spain, Romanov Russia, and Britain – over the last four thousand years. Each was served up not so much for individual analysis but to highlight some of the common underlying dynamics.

The hope then was to apply those lessons to our own day and age. In particular, we wanted to better understand the insidious way that the wealth effect might have sapped certain virtues which were fundamental to their ongoing growth and stability. The takeaway was an appreciation for the way money can be both the builder and destroyer of human civilizations.

And so it is now with our upcoming focus article as we take on the History of Hard Money: The Denarius and the Fall of Rome. Spend just eight minutes reading the piece before you think we are somehow special and can blithely dismiss the lessons of history. Note certain profound parallels, some of which are as current as today’s WSJ. Rome was not the first or will it be the last empire to sow the seeds of economic decay through currency debasement.

The hard money backbone back then was the silver Denarius which maintained its purity for three hundred years as Rome remained committed to a stable monetary system until 64 AD. It was then the first round of Denarius debasement began with the reduction of that coin’s silver content, slowly at first and later accelerating over the course of twenty emperors until it was reduced to worthless pieces of a copper alloy with a thin layer of silver…

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A life trajectory may be the most profound and beautiful at the very edges. Member Kiley Hartigan knows all about this and has a story to share (Kiley’s Story).

Five years ago Kiley embraced an invitation from her mother, Christy, to co-create a family relationship coaching business called JourneyOn. Christy embodied every part of what they shared in each episode of their LifeProof relational podcasts. Christy died on June 23rd. She died just as she had lived, with a grace best described as victorious. May we honor and learn from a life so full that its very passing is transcendental.

We’d previously parsed the “fear of death” as a philosophical matter by distinguishing the fear of being dead from the fear of dying. The former was the subject of the philosophy of William Hazlitt and Epicurus who argued that the fear of some eternal non-existence was irrational given our non-existence before our birth posed no such existential angst. As to the fear of dying, the great philosopher Woody Allen famously quipped, “I’m not afraid of death; I just don’t want to be there when it happens.”..

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Trust me, how so? Trust me because, you see, a man’s word is his bond. Says who? Maybe it sounds sentimental but back in the Victorian Age trust and reputation were not peripheral virtues but were core to the business infrastructure. Now we have contracts.

Contracts for everything it seems. A rider in Van Halen’s roadie contract famously demanded backstage bowls of M&Ms with all the brown ones removed (in all fairness, it was meant to assure all the terms were actually read). More to the broader point, though, are commercial contracts such as this Fourth Amended and Restated Senior Secured Credit, Guaranty, Collateral, Intercreditor, Cash Management, and Hedging Agreement where one sentence can run for half a page, include eight defined terms, and end by referring you to an exhibit that refers you back to another section. People, you see, have ethics; corporations have contracts.

Our discussion goes well beyond contracts to the issue about the nature of trust in general. There are the so-called high-trust societies e.g. Scandinavian countries or, say, Japan, Switzerland, and New Zealand where trust and law are said to work together relatively well. Working well, that is, relative to what we find as we move down the social trust spectrum increasing the need for more time and energy to verify, insure, document, and litigate to protect yourself. Whether causation or correlation, the per capita number of lawyers in the United States dwarfs Japan by some 11-14 times…

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Member Monday endeavors to avoid the repeat of any session in the absence of something that makes it freshly relevant. The freshly relevant feature in this case is the extraordinary effort on the part of a Boulder citizen to thwart the proliferation of camera surveillance. Will Freeman, our lead participant, is a twenty-seven year old software engineer who, after discovering the silent rollout of Flock AI-driven ALPR (Automatic License Plate Reader) cameras, in Boulder and nationwide, created "DeFlock", a crowd-sourced mapping platform for locating these surveillance devices (click: YouTube).

Why one might care was the subject five years ago of a previous MM 8/23/21 Panopticon session in which the setup piece was what had been described as "a device of such monstrous efficiency that it left no room for humanity." The referenced "device" was an institutional building and system of control designed in the eighteenth century by the English philosopher and social theorist Jeremy Bentham. The so-called panopticon, from the Greek word for "all seeing," was devilishly simple.

A prison consisted of individual cells arranged along the circumference of a multistory rotunda, each cell facing inward. An inspection house sat in the middle. The efficiency allowed a single unseen guard in the inspection house to watch over hundreds of inmates. The power lay in the fact no prisoner was ever aware at any particular time whether the prisoner was being watched. This asymmetric viewing system served as the model for fifty-four prisons in Victorian Britain…

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Early memory, age four: on a driveway by a creek; facing little Ricky, just learning how to walk backwards; trusting me to say stop before reaching the bank, I say nothing as he tumbles backwards onto the creek bed. That such a memory punctured my so-called childhood amnesia made me wonder whether I had been destined to be some kind of psychopath.

Our discussion piece takes on the mystery of memory formation and dissipation, particularly in the early years (click: The Great Forgetting). Adults generally remember little or nothing from their first three or four years of life. Freud thought such memories were repressed but perhaps they were never formed. Research shows, however, that small children can form memories but they disappear within a couple of years. Why? Perhaps such memories are not formed systematically enough to co-exist with the influx of new information so they are swept away.

And so we learn about the interplay between the cerebral cortex, the seat of cognition, and the hippocampus that bundles multiple input from the senses into a single new memory which it links to similar previously-stored ones. The issue, then, seems to arise out of an incompletely-developed hippocampus…

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A broad decline in dating is being reported, especially among young adults in the U.S., with many dating only a few times or not at all in the past year. The pattern is said to be attributable to lower confidence, higher costs, and weaker social connection. Might there be something more?

Enter Rob Schuham’s MANSENSE, the title of a recently-published book, described as a modern field guide for men ready to bring depth, integrity, and presence back to dating. Among the testimonials is that of Anne V., Supermodel, Yogi, who gushes, “No gimmicks, no macho posturing – just real insights into how women think and what healthy connection actually looks like.” Spoiler alert: women are seeking the grounded man in a chaotic world (Chapter One heading, book available in club library).

So far, so good. Chivalry in the best sense of the word never goes out of style but changes with the times. The recurring themes applied here to the modern dating world: Clarity (knowing what you want and acting intentionally); Presence (showing up authentically rather than performatively); Emotional intelligence (understanding oneself and others); Grounded reflection (using self-awareness over impulse); Genuine connection (honest courtship over tactics). All certainly noble and necessary qualities, but are they sufficient?

Some say not. The ground has shifted when it comes to the mating dance. Maybe blame social media for a narrative that tilts the scale. Overt man-bashing, they say, has now refined itself into a certain atmospheric snideness that has settled down to a vague male aversion, as if masculinity itself were enveloped in a fine mist of shame. As such, per our focus piece No Wonder Men Are Dropping Out…

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Open my refrigerator door and you’ll find a container of loose batteries – lots of those AAs, some Cs and Ds, a smattering of AAAs and the little button ones for the remote – because everyone knows that their useful life is extended by cooler temperature. What, it’s not? So much for that childhood memory as it turns out the shelf life of alkaline batteries is not so affected. Another old wives’ tale debunked.

A small example, perhaps, but a good introduction to our focus piece which suggests the most dangerous thing in your head isn’t what you don’t know – it’s what you stopped questioning (click: The Knowledge You're Treating as Permanent That Has an Expiration Date). Wise words were these, It ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble. It's what you know for sure that just ain't so -- Mark Twain (maybe). Let’s start out with some “truths”:

The Chinese word for crisis is composed of the symbols for "danger" and "opportunity." False. The historical Buddha was fat. False. It is illegal to shout the word “fire” in a crowded theater. Misleading. The Great Pyramids of Egypt were constructed by slave labor. False. Listening to Mozart enhances intelligence. False. Sugar causes hyperactivity in children. False. The common cold is caused by cold. False. Isaac Newton was inspired to study gravity by an apple falling on his head. False/exaggerated. Marie Antoinette said "Let them eat cake." False. The United States Declaration of Independence was signed on July 4, 1776. Misleading. Albert Einstein failed grade school mathematics. False. Mussolini made the trains run on time. False/exaggerated. People use ten percent of their brain. False…

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Some might see Brigitte Mars, our session’s lead participant, as a vestige from a lost age, a world once defined by The Whole Earth Catalogue, communes, and In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida. But those who would dismiss her as some curio are making a big mistake. The wisdom she channels goes back well before the Sixties, before the French-Canadian folk remedies of her grandmother, to the ancients themselves. In short, Brigitte is a Boulder treasure when it comes to natural healthcare.

Natural healthcare embraces a whole life-enhancement spectrum for which Brigitte is nationally known with her fifty years as an herbalist and some twenty books on the subject, from natural healthcare to natural first aid. Our focus piece is a one-hour video (click: Healing Addiction Naturally) which was chosen to not only illustrate just one such application i.e. that of healing addiction naturally, but to showcase the immense respect she has for the power of plant medicine. (Our formal session will be followed by Brigitte’s guided walk-around through our garden highlighting some of the wonderful edible and medicinal plants right in our own backyard.)…

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Polls say it’s the most feared health concern for those over fifty. Dementia is the umbrella term for a syndrome that covers a number of distinct diseases. There’s no sugarcoating it.

Widow Susan Schneider Williams labeled one such disease as “the terrorist inside my husband’s brain” (focus article: The Terrorist In The Brain). The referenced husband was Robin Williams. The fact that the brain powering one of the greatest verbal high-wire acts could be hollowed out within a couple of years might tempt the mere mortal to become hypervigilant for early telltale signs like forgetting a name, a verbal gaffe, or mistaking your wife for a hat.

The above-identified Lewy body dementia is but the second most common neurodegenerative disease, representing somewhere between five and fifteen percent of cases, often mistaken for something else.

There’s then the most common Alzheimer’s disease that strikes later in life with its signature loss of short-term memory followed by frontotemporal dementia which attacks in middle age with one variant featuring primary progressive aphasia that dismantles language processing along with a behavioural variant that can radically affect personality, often in bizarre ways (still seeking cases in which a former naturally cantankerous subject suddenly exudes warmth)…

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I am a promiscuous tree hugger! 

Literally, I will wrap my arms around any type of tree in any type of forest.

My unusual love affair with forests and trees began during the lonely summers of my teenage years in the 1970’s.

Our family has a summer place on a 18th century abandoned farm that nestles up against Stokes State Forest in Sussex County New Jersey, and I would spend countless days and hours hiking and exploring in the woods.

Stokes State Forest is filled a wide array of different tree species including white and red oaks, pitch pine, bear oaks, black cherry, Eastern hemlocks, white pines, American beech, tulip poplars, shagbark hickory, and many other types of trees.

The forest showed me what it means to have nature hold you. Offering much-needed peace, to be sure. But beyond peace, a feeling of being sheltered – a sense that even when the world is dark, there are places you can go to feel some measure of belonging.

My passion also helped me academically, since for my freshman biology term paper, I scrapped book the leaves from different trees, outlined their genus, family, and origin and shared what the different trees meant to me personally…

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A simple Buddhist reflection goes something like “Today, my body is free from tooth pain, and I notice this gift with gratitude.” Gratitude indeed. One in five U.S. adults is affected by some sort of ongoing physical pain. Add to that the incidence of “psychical pain” and we have an estimated twelve million chronic sufferers out there. That doesn’t even include transitory pain incident to birth, end-of-life, and everything in between, including, yes, that toothache.

What does it all mean ? The armchair philosopher might hold that pain is the path to deep insight, strength, and clarity that emerges when we face suffering without avoiding it. Both ancient philosophy and modern psychology confirm that pain can be a powerful teacher – but only when we reflect on it rather than numb it. Uh huh. Tell that to the woman in labor eyeing the epidural drip.

Our focus piece The Darkness From The Darkness is a review of a book about physical pain that draws on a wealth of cultural references as well as different faith traditions with mentions of Heinrich Heine, Hannah Arendt, George Orwell, Franz Kafka, Kurt Cobain . . . .

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More philosophical wisdom has been rendered by the ten-year run of Calvin and Hobbes (1985-1995) than by a decade of MMs.

Each of the biggies – stoicism, free will, existentialism, paradox, materialistic hedonism, human ethics, our place in the universe – have all showed up among the frames featuring the musings of six-year-old Calvin (so-named after that 16th-century theologian) and his tiger Hobbes (so-named after that political philosopher – whether he is “real” or “imaginary” simply amounts to two versions of reality, like life itself).

For the many (of us), the strip has been the bridge between the imagination of childhood and whatever it is that comes thereafter. The cartoon genius of Bill Watterson is in his framing of 2000-year-old philosophical questions through that sense of wonder often lost with the hardening of the arteries. The heady questions become fresh and delicious once again…

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Few would deny Bob Dylan’s cultural influence and the way it has spanned music, literature, and politics. Out of the 1960s counterculture and beyond came that familiar refrain about “there’s something happening here but you don’t know what it is do you Mr. Jones?” What was happening there in that folk-rock era was the inability of even (maybe especially) the well-read man to comprehend the rapid changes about to engulf the, ahem, status quo. After some fifty years the culture remains seasick.

And, so, it might be useful for us to discuss the various influences that inspired that influencer Dylan himself as he expanded folk and pop lyrics by importing techniques from classic literature, modern poetry, and surrealism, making dense, allusive writing part of mainstream music as it seeped into culture itself. Well, as it turns out, we’re in luck in that it was flushed out somewhat ten years ago when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

The award itself is kind of beside the point. He seemed to view the award as a kind of intrusion, letting three weeks pass before even acknowledging the honor, thereby dissing the Royal Majesties, the King and Queen of Sweden as they awaited his answer. He eventually responded to their invitation to come to Stockholm to accept the coveted Prize, though he did by sending a proxy rather than in person. Classic Dylan, part of that persona featured in Bob Dylan's Superpower Is That He Doesn't Get Embarrassed.

But that’s all secondary to the main point that he finally did accept the prize (in absentia) and submitted that required essay about those literary inspirations, the focus of our discussion (click: Bob Dylan – Nobel Lecture - Essay)…

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“How can Phoenix have so many farms, golf courses and pools when they have no water?”

 A question I heard repeatedly from friends who visited me when I lived in Scottsdale from 1996 until 2025.

 Candidly, I thought the same thing, and I sought out the answer prior to embarking on buying land in the Sonoran Desert where rainfall is less than 7 inches annually.

 The answer was a marvel of 20th Century engineering, the Central Arizona Project (CAP), a 336-mile system of aqueducts, tunnels and pumping plants that divert water from the Colorado River was what allowed the metropolitan population of Phoenix to double from 1996 to 2025, growing from approximately 2.53 million residents to over 5.22 million residents.

 In the spring of 1997, I wanted to know how long this was sustainable and consulted an environmental expert from Arizona State University.  He explained that the Colorado River has been the foundation for growth of the modern American West, supplying water to homes, farms, industry, and our beloved golf courses.  He educated me on the 1922 Colorado River Compact that divided up the Colorado among seven basin states divided into the Upper and Lower Basins along with 30 Native American tribes and Mexico…

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