BRILLIANCE

People use this word a lot, and I have heard it much recently. I don’t really know what it means. Anyone who is truly brilliant probably knows she isn’t brilliant as there is always someone smarter or more intelligent. It seems very relative to me. Plus, I’m not sure what it means or how it’s defined. Some have called me that, but I’m far from it. I’ve seen it, and I am not that. I think, to me (opinion), in it’s essence it’s creativity in its highest form. That is the synthesis, the highest level to achieve. So guys who might have a lot of information that they feed to an update list every week (sound familiar) does mean brilliance, it just means some knowledge recently acquired. If you go the MacArthur Foundation, they give out genius grants. They are not always on target, necessarily, but you’ll see some highly creative people doing some amazing things that really push the envelope of what we know, understand, and experience.

http://www.macfound.org/

Search for past winners

I was skimming a biography about Obama in which they biographer wrote about wonderful things and some of his cutthroat methods in politics. I was a bit intrigued, and I didn’t find it, but it’s definitely not anything like those strange e-mails trying to convince people he’s a radical Islamist who studied in the Wahabi strain or school of Islam because his mother’s second husband was a “fundamentalist.” It made me think of Mandela.

Some people asked what is some bad stuff about Mandela. Remember how I listed all of these artists, poets, leaders who pushed us and that I called them flawed with flawless messages? Well, Mandela is flawed, too, and he’d be the first to say it. But he’s never really criticized publicly. And someone was asking about his foibles, his bad points, his dark side. I know of a few things which aren’t really huge really. And I was going to write it really quickly. But then I thought, why does it matter? His work is his work. And his contributions are positive and have helped us. And I’m happy with that. And again, the criticisms are poor or weak (not too strong). Well, some might be upset that he lived with his current wife before they married, but I won’t say more past that one.