#LBJ Library

[deadpresidents]

"I'm sure that the Presidents who stand out in our history and in our memory are those who led the nation through times of great trial and challenge...Washington, Jackson, Lincoln, Wilson, Roosevelt, Truman. On the other hand, these very same Presidents would not be regarded now as great if their reactions and their responses had been weak, or if they had failed to achieve some of their major goals of if they had run away from the challenges...Greatness is an elusive thing and the judgment of history is sometimes different from that that is made when a President's in office or just after he leaves office. Wilson died a broken and disappointed man because he failed to win approval of the League [of Nations]. Yet history has judged that he was right in that fight and the willful men of the Senate who opposed him were wrong...There are a great many misconceptions about the Presidency...Some people think the President is a man who welcomes visitors to our country, who signs the laws that Congress sends him, who occasionally makes a speech about one of our problems, a kind of father or figurehead. Others see him as a manipulator or as an arm twister who is interested in power and how to use it. Others see him as a solitary figure surrounded by yes men, insulated from all [counselors], isolated from the real world. But very few people have any idea of the long and tedious and grinding work that goes into every Presidential day. I doubt that there was a single day of the Presidency, Sundays included, that I didn't give two or three hours to just solitary reading. There was hardly a night that I was President that I didn't read two or three hours. Even if it were a State Dinner or dancing...when I retired for the evening, I would have two hours of night reading ahead of me...No President in history has been able to do all the things that he or the people hoped he could accomplish at the time of election. But that doesn't mean that the job is impossible and that doesn't mean it's doomed. It's doable."

-- Former President Lyndon B. Johnson, on some of the unseen work of the Presidency.

Here's a great photograph taken by White House photographer Robert Knudson of some of LBJ's "night reading" homework, waiting for the President on his bed in the White House on October 12, 1966:

(I want to thank the incredible archivists at the @lbjlibrary and the National Archives ( @usnatarchives on Tumblr) -- especially, in this case, Chris of the Audiovisual Archives at the LBJ Library -- for tracking down a high-quality version of this specific photo for me. Without having any specifics on when or where the photo was taken, I reached out to the LBJ Library and vaguely described seeing this photo in the past and they quickly found a high-quality file that they sent me. The LBJ Library has done this numerous times for me over the years and I cannot express how grateful I always am for their help. The archivists at the National Archives and the NARA's Presidential Library system are incredible public servants and one of the very best examples of our federal government providing services to and for the American people.)

[daily-public-domain]

Day 350: "Jake Andrews gives a guinea pig a hug"

link

–This image is part of the public domain, meaning you can do anything you want with it! (you could even sell it as a shirt, poster or whatever, no need to credit it!)–

[sildarmillion-grounds]

Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum

Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library and Museum

LBJ Library: LBJ Presidential Library

Located in the LBJ School of Public Affairs Campus. Visited 27 August 2018.

More pictures from the LBJ School of Public Affairs Campus, including the LLILAS Benson Latin American Studies and Collections. Visited January 9 2020.

[carolynmappleton]

I recently came upon recordings of the 1972 Civil Rights Summit which included a good friend of mine, the late Dr. Melvin P. Sikes. The recordings are posted as a group on the YouTube channel of the LBJ Library. What a marvelous event!

Ten years later, I would go to work for Mel in the College of Education at UT while I was attending graduate school. We became fast friends. I helped Mel transition to Professor Emeritus. A link to a book he co-authored is below. It is an excellent discussion and recommended.

[lesbianjudasiscariot]

tysm to the lovely @stringcage for pointing out that jinx's shadow is vi! so i have two sorta theories on this that i wanna share ♡

vi is going to feel obligated to follow jinx in her path of destruction because she feels responsible for jinx and who she has become. the shadow representing how vi is not acting in her own interest rather following jinx

the shadow is to show how vi is now forever in jinx's past as jinx has gone so far and has turned full villain mode that vi no longer sees her as her sister powder and has accepted they are enemies

obviously which ever way it goes it will be way more nuanced but omg i have not stopped thinking about this 12 second clip and had to get my thoughts out there!!

[lonelykingofnowhere]

I come baring a bonus bundle of birds

( the artists behind the book I used as reference are Hilary Burn, Martin Elliot, Alan Harris, Peter Hayman, Stephen Message, Laurel Tucker and Dan Zetterström)

[mike-jacque-c-the-world]

04/09/24 - Austin, TX - THE JOHNSON TREATMENT - Meet Ralph, an old friend from my high school days. He’s from Phoenix and is visiting with us to see yesterday’s total solar eclipse and a little bit of Austin as well. Our first stop today is the LBJ Presidential Library. Lyndon Johnson liked to intimidate people, when cajoling them to agree to his point of view, by invading their personal space and pointing his finger at them: they called it ‘The Johnson Treatment’. Here, Ralph is showing you how it’s done.

[deadpresidents]

I've actually never seen this photo of LBJ!

The @richardnixonlibrary in Orange County is not just one of the best Presidential Libraries in the National Archives system (and has the unique feature of having Nixon's birthplace on site, just a few dozen feet from his gravesite), but they also have one of the best Tumblr sites for history content! You guys should follow them.

#OTD 1/22/1973 Former President Lyndon Baines Johnson died at the age of 64 following his third heart attack. In his statement on President Johnson’s death, President Nixon said, “No man had greater dreams for America than Lyndon Johnson. Even as we mourn his death, we are grateful for his life, which did so much to make those dreams into realities. And we know that as long as this Nation lives, so will his dreams and his accomplishments.” (Image: WHPO-1892-14A)

[1percentcharge]

sorry if this is an insane thing to send you but I thought your air horse one drawing would fit in perfectly in the scary lbj animatronic room at the lbj presidential library

i love that. everyone go tell your friends this is an unedited photo

[tupelomiss]

While at the LBJ library in Austin, Tx they had a Music through the decades display and it had our man Elvis Presley in it !!

@vintagepresley @precious-little-scoundrel

[deadpresidents]

"Before they left Poland, John [ and his wife, Elaine, Steinbeck] had written to Mrs. Kennedy to express their sorrow and sympathy [about JFK's assassination] and to the new President, Lyndon Johnson, their support. Shortly after they returned home, on December 17 [1963], they went to Washington for three days of debriefing by the State Department, and on the last evening of their stay they were invited to a private dinner at the White House. Elaine had known Lady Bird Johnson at the University of Texas, so there was already a connection between the two families, and this dinner, given so that John and Elaine could report to the President on their travels behind the Iron Curtain, would lay the foundation for what developed into a warm and relatively close friendship between the two couples.

Elaine recalls that at the end of the evening, as they were leaving, "John said, 'Lady Bird, we have been debriefed for three days, and nobody asked questions as good as yours.' It was true." The Steinbecks started to go back to their hotel, the Hay Adams across Lafayette Square, but after they said good-bye at the elevator, the Johnsons got on and rode down with them. John said, "You don't have to see us to the door," but the President just ushered them all out the front door, the one that is seldom used except for state occasions, and continued to guide them down the walk out to the gate.

As Secret Service men in overcoats began streaming out of doorways and running the way and that, Elaine said, "Please, Mr. President, you don't want to do this." "Don't worry," the President said, taking Elaine's hand. "No one expects to see us walking out this way, so they won't pay any attention." He continued to walk with them, around the square and to the front of the hotel. It was, of course, a very flattering and moving gesture. This would be the last tie the Steinbecks would stay in a hotel when visiting the Johnsons -- from then on, they stayed in the White House."

-- Jackson J. Benson, on the beginning of the close relationship between President Lyndon B. Johnson and legendary writer John Steinbeck and their families, in Benson's 1984 book, The True Adventures of John Steinbeck, Writer: A Biography (BOOK).

[mariacallous]

One phrase encapsulates the methodology of nonfiction master Robert Caro: Turn Every Page. The phrase is so associated with Caro that it’s the name of the recent documentary about him and of an exhibit of his archives at the New York Historical Society. To Caro it is imperative to put eyes on every line of every document relating to his subject, no matter how mind-numbing or inconvenient. He has learned that something that seems trivial can unlock a whole new understanding of an event, provide a path to an unknown source, or unravel a mystery of who was responsible for a crisis or an accomplishment. Over his career he has pored over literally millions of pages of documents: reports, transcripts, articles, legal briefs, letters (45 million in the LBJ Presidential Library alone!). Some seemed deadly dull, repetitive, or irrelevant. No matter—he’d plow through, paying full attention. Caro’s relentless page-turning has made his work iconic.

In the age of AI, however, there’s a new motto: There’s no need to turn pages at all! Not even the transcripts of your interviews. Oh, and you don’t have to pay attention at meetings, or even attend them. Nor do you need to read your mail or your colleagues’ memos. Just feed the raw material into a large language model and in an instant you’ll have a summary to scan. With OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Gemini, and Anthropic’s Claude as our wingmen, summary reading is what now qualifies as preparedness.

LLMs love to summarize, or at least that’s what their creators set them about doing. Google now “auto-summarizes” your documents so you can “quickly parse the information that matters and prioritize where to focus.” AI will even summarize unread conversations in Google Chat! With Microsoft Copilot, if you so much as hover your cursor over an Excel spreadsheet, PDF, Word doc, or PowerPoint presentation, you’ll get it boiled down. That’s right—even the condensed bullet points of a slide deck can be cut down to the … more essential stuff? Meta also now summarizes the comments on popular posts. Zoom summarizes meetings and churns out a cheat sheet in real time. Transcription services like Otter now put summaries front and center, and the transcription itself in another tab.

Why the orgy of summarizing? At a time when we’re only beginning to figure out how to get value from LLMs, summaries are one of the most straightforward and immediately useful features available. Of course, they can contain errors or miss important points. Noted. The more serious risk is that relying too much on summaries will make us dumber.

Summaries, after all, are sketchy maps and not the territory itself. I’m reminded of the Woody Allen joke where he zipped through War and Peace in 20 minutes and concluded, “It’s about Russia.” I’m not saying that AI summaries are that vague. In fact, the reason they’re dangerous is that they’re good enough. They allow you to fake it, to proceed with some understanding of the subject. Just not a deep one.

As an example, let’s take AI-generated summaries of voice recordings, like what Otter does. As a journalist, I know that you lose something when you don’t do your own transcriptions. It’s incredibly time-consuming. But in the process you really know what your subject is saying, and not saying. You almost always find something you missed. A very close reading of a transcript might allow you to recover some of that. Having everything summarized, though, tempts you to look at only the passages of immediate interest—at the expense of unearthing treasures buried in the text.

Successful leaders have known all along the danger of such shortcuts. That’s why Jeff Bezos, when he was CEO of Amazon, banned PowerPoint from his meetings. He famously demanded that his underlings produce a meticulous memo that came to be known as a “6-pager.” Writing the 6-pager forced managers to think hard about what they were proposing, with every word critical to executing, or dooming, their pitch. The first part of a Bezos meeting is conducted in silence as everyone turns all 6 pages of the document. No summarizing allowed!

To be fair, I can entertain a counterargument to my discomfort with summaries. With no effort whatsoever, an LLM does read every page. So if you want to go beyond the summary, and you give it the proper prompts, an LLM can quickly locate the most obscure facts. Maybe one day these models will be sufficiently skilled to actually identify and surface those gems, customized to what you’re looking for. If that happens, though, we’d be even more reliant on them, and our own abilities might atrophy.

Long-term, summary mania might lead to an erosion of writing itself. If you know that no one will be reading the actual text of your emails, your documents, or your reports, why bother to take the time to dig up details that make compelling reading, or craft the prose to show your wit? You may as well outsource your writing to AI, which doesn’t mind at all if you ask it to churn out 100-page reports. No one will complain, because they’ll be using their own AI to condense the report to a bunch of bullet points. If all that happens, the collective work product of a civilization will have the quality of a third-generation Xerox.

As for Robert Caro, he’s years past his deadline on the fifth volume of his epic LBJ saga. If LLMs had been around when he began telling the president’s story almost 50 years ago—and he had actually used them and not turned so many pages—the whole cycle probably would have been long completed. But not nearly as great.

[sildarmillion-grounds]

UT vs. Tulsa game at the Darrell K Royal–Texas Memorial Stadium. Hook 'Em Horns! 🤘🤘September 8, 2018.

Top 4 pictures are from the game. Rest are the view of campus from the stadium. Can see the LBJ Presidential Library, the Bass Concert Hall, and the UT Tower.

[djag2007]

Retro Stethoscope 🩺

Not to get political, but…

I was at the LBJ Presidential Library and they had a stethoscope on display to commemorate the signing of the Medicare and Medicaid Act of 1965. 🩺

[snapthistiger]

exercise 01092024

bike ride to the gym

3 x 10 lat pull

3 x 10 tricep press

3 x 5 dips

3 x 10 row

45 minute spin class

6 x 5 seated press

bike ride to my Mom's then the library and on home

the gym workers received Dove chocolates

my Mom was sleeping so i visited with the sitter. dropped off the LBJ and Lady Bird Johnson book for my Mom to start reading. tomorrow morning my Mom has her 1st appointment with the kidney doctor so i will be picking her up around 730a and taking her to see that doctor. Mom's general practitioner referred her due to slowly declining kidney function

bottom = books i was looking at in the biography section. she likes books about the 1960s and 1970s when she was in her 20s / 30s

super breezy and cool today / Peanut inside most of the day. she doesn't like the wind and not fond of cool weather either

started working on my 2023 taxes and estimating taxes for 2024. blech.

hope you have a peaceful afternoon and evening..

[187days]

Day Seventy-Eight

Happy new year!

My colleagues and I were back at school at 7AM sharp for PLC meetings. Dean 1 and The Principal both dropped in on mine at different times (because we're awesome). The Principal also caught me later to ask after two teachers who have had some rough stuff happen in their personal lives lately. Awkwardly, I had my hands full of packages because a supply delivery had come in during the break, but I set them down and had a quick, serious convo before getting on with my prep time.

I started a new unit in Global Studies on government and history. That got the ninth graders right back into school mode because the first day of a new unit is always old school in my classes. We went over the unit guide, the learning goals, when/how they'll be assessed, and so on. Then I taught the unit vocab as I always do: I wrote each definition on the board, they copied it down on paper. I also gave examples of how each term is used in discussing current events, and fielded a variety of questions. That meant we went on a few tangents (about trade, the Cold War, the UN, the war in Ukraine, and one particularly interesting one about why I didn't pause what I was doing to talk about the terrorist attack in New Orleans) but they were good tangents. That's what makes the class interesting.

In APGOV, we ate mini-cupcakes (because when the government almost shuts down, we almost eat cake) and discussed the budget deal that passed while we were on vacation. Then I read Heather cox Richardson's piece about President Carter, and- since we're closing out the unit on civil liberties and civil rights- played a video clip of President Carter discussing civil rights in 2014 at the LBJ Library. He focused a lot of his remarks on women's rights, which led to a good discussion in class afterwards.

And then it was time for track practice! The sprinters did some hallway sprints- varying distances, depending on their events- and some block work. The relay teams also did some baton passes (The Head Coach did, indeed, shake up the girls 4x200 team). And we had a visit from one of our former athletes, which was very cool.

All in all? A solid first day back.