Coffee with John later today, but first I'll have to pick up the heart shaped macaroons at the Patisserie to go along with my card of hearts. The latter is an reproduction of the New Yorker magazine for Valentine's week in 1973 for 50 cents! It is my Valentine’s present to John and family. This year it some how seemed natural for me that they were my valentine this year.

Yesterday I still struggled to implement the handout files for the various audio presentations. This implementation requires changes to my standard design in ways I had not foreseen, hence the struggle.

I finished reading ‘Casual Vacancy’ by Rowling of Harry Potter fame. The author in her new book levels some serious criticism on everyday society in England, not do so explicitly, but through inferences on the part of the reader. It is a clever technique, but makes the book a challenge to finish, the more so if you are from that neighbourhood.

I am now into ‘In the Country of Men’, by Hisham Matar, which is a novel set in Kaddafi’s Libya; this, while I still have to finish King’s ‘The Inconvenient Indian’. The next book will be ‘Necropolis’, about Bombay’s opium trading days. I get these tittles from CBC’s Eleanor Wachtel’s book reviews on Sunday at 5pm and borrow the books from the library

I just want to record an interesting idea from this morning. It is this: 'Our ideals are simplifications of reality, which is too complex to deal with directly.'

Embroidering on this further I am able to explain why ideology always has a distortion in it, because each ideology does simplify. This gives it the motivating power from which to act. When things are simple enough, people feel ready to act, when things look too difficult people are discouraged. This is probably due to a sense of anticipated failure; training boosts self confidence.

"Our ideals are simplifications of reality, which is too complex to deal with directly."

When you have a complete theory of reality, it will probably be too complex to act from. In such a case nothing at all happens or a very rigid framework is put in place that suppresses decent from the reigning ideology. This way you get what I call ‘an energy of simplification’ available that allows people to proceed as long as they obey the rules.

As time goes on, the flaws and short comings of the simplified reality model - the ideology - will become evident. This is followed by a build up of resistance and eventually a change of ideology, complete with its new possibilities and shortcomings.

What goes around, comes around and as a leader you get in front of what comes around as soon as you have figured out where ‘the parade is going’, as former Alberta Premier Klein put it.
<8:13am~