Say you understand...............

Bruce Springsteen................................Nothing Man

On machines and men.................

"One machine can do the work of fifty ordinary men.  No machine can do the work of one extraordinary man."
-Elbert Hubbard

Yeow......................

On the great revolution....................

"The great revolution in the world today is not Communism.  That is a reactionary, historic force. The great revolution is the power of economic abundance.
     "For centuries the world has been struggling to divide up economic scarcity, and for the first time we have the tools of abundance with which to meet mankind's basic economic and material needs, and if we will use these tools intelligently, with a sense of social and moral responsibility, they will enable us to solve mankind's basic material needs, and then we can devote greater time and energy and effort to facilitating man's growth as a social and cultural and spiritual being, which is the real meaning of life on this earth."
-Walter P. Reuther (1907-1970)

Worth a visit..............

Make a stand...............

"Each part of life has its own pleasures.  Each has its own abundant harvest, to be garnered in season.  We may grow old in body, but we need never grow old in mind and spirit.  We must make a stand against old age.  We must atone for its faults by activity.  We must exercise the mind as we exercise the body, to keep it supple and buoyant.  Life may be short, but it is long enough to live honorably and well.  Old age is the consummation of life, rich in blessings."
-Cicero

Too late.......................

more good sense from gapingvoid here

Volume up.................................

The Rippingtons...................................Black Diamond

Heads up.......................

"Property, like liberty, thought immune under the Constitution from destruction, is not immune from regulation essential for the common good.  What the regulation shall be, every generation must work out for itself."
-Benjamin Cardozo

Oh, OK..........................

A fresh start..................

"You may have a fresh start any moment you choose, for this thing that we call 'failure' is not the falling down, but the staying down."
-Mary Pickford

So, who is this Damocles guy anyway?

The finest storyteller in the Intertunnel explains the lack of inflation - here.  Un-rose colored glasses excerpts here: 

"I did not earn money by fixing my own car, of course --just the opposite. The mechanic did not earn money. The people who rely on the mechanic to earn money will not earn money, and so forth. Ultimately, through a process which must be deduced, because it cannot be observed, this lack of commerce will ultimately filter its way through the entire economy to the point where someone will not buy what I make because I didn't hire the mechanic. It's the circle of life, except it's the circle of the death of commerce.


"I am barraged daily with references to Helicopter Ben running the Treasury printing presses day and night, and thereby causing inflation. It's an insane idea. When the velocity of money sniffs zero, there is no inflation. The Fed makes money and gives it to the government, who lends it to itself, and none of it ever makes it into the wild where a car mechanic and his downstream brethren might get ahold of it. For productive people in today's American economy, the money might as well not exist. The bill for it will exist plenty in the future, of course. But when the velocity of money is zero, the future must be entirely discounted. It's a meaningless concept, like watching an unplugged clock."


for the curious, the story of Damocles is here

Opening paragraphs...............

"That month of June swan into the Two Medicine country.  In my life until then I had never seen the sidehills come so green, the coulees stay so spongy with runoff.  A right amount of wet evidently could sweeten the universe.  Already m father on his first high patrols has encountered cow elk drifting up and across the Continental Divide to their calving grounds on the west side.  They, and the grass and the wild hay meadows and the benchland alfalfa, all were a good three weeks ahead of the season.  Which of course accounted for the fresh mood everywhere across the Two.  As is always said, spring rain in range country is as if halves of ten-dollar bills are being handed around, with the other halves promised at shipping time.  And so in the English Creek sheepmen, what few cowmen were left along Noon Creek and elsewhere, the out-east farmers, the storekeepers of Gros Ventre, our forest service people, in just everyone that start of June, hope was up and would stay strong as long as the grass did."
Ivan Doig, English Creek

Uh-oh.......................

"I place economy among the first and most important virtues, and public debt as the greatest of dangers to be feared.  To preserve our independence, we must not let our rulers load us with perpetual debt.  We must make our choice between economy and liberty, or profusion and servitude,  If we run into such debts, we must be taxed into our meat and drink, in our necessities and our comforts, in our labors and our amusements.  If we can prevent the Government from wasting the labors of the people, under the pretense of caring for them, they will be happy."
-Thomas Jeffferson

The central fallacy.........................

"To regard the making of money as more important than producing goods - that is the central fallacy on which government and finance agree."
-Henry Ford

A life that's full.....................

Tell the children.....................

"Death teaches us - if we want to hear - that the time is now.  The time is now to pick up a telephone and call the person that you love.  Death teaches us the joy of the moment.  It teaches us we don't have forever.  It teaches us that nothing is permanent.  It teaches us to let go, there's nothing you can hang on to.  And it tells us to give up expectations and let tomorrow tell its own story, because nobody knows if they'll get home tonight.  To me that's a tremendous challenge.  Death says 'live now.'  Let's tell the children that."
-Leo Buscaglia, Living, Loving & Learning

Worth-while...................

"Nobody ever asks me, 'Is this life you are living worth-while?'  That's a question that I ask myself, occasionally."

"Last summer a visitor....asked Ralph a purely hypothetical question, during one of those long rambling discussions that kindred souls get into:  'If you had a million dollars left to you to-morrow, what would be the first thing you'd do?'
     "Ralph thought for a long time, and I thought right along with him, wondering whether it would be an island in the South Seas - this was before Pearl Harbor - or a ranch in the Argentine.  Finally he said slowly, 'Well - that's a hard question to answer.   I can't make up my mind whether a bathroom or a  new roof for the woodshed comes first.'  He was serious, so we all laughed.......
     "I'd spend my million dollars on Forest Lodge, too, except for a fund I'd invest in letting the kids see the world.  I'd send them everywhere and let them taste everything, so that at last they'd come to know what we have here to value.  Discontent is only the fear of missing something.  Content is the knowledge that you aren't missing a thing worth-while."

-as excerpted from the final chapter to Louise Dickinson Rich's book,  We Took To The Woods

Hope......................

"The march of Providence is so slow and our desires so impatient;  the work of progress is so immense and our means of aiding it so feeble;  the life of humanity is so long, that of the individual is so brief, that we often only see the ebb of the advancing ways, and are thus discouraged.  It is history that teaches us to hope."
-Robert E. Lee

Innermost...................

"Most doctors recognize that medicine is just as much an art as it is a science and that the most important knowledge in medicine to be learned or taught is the way the human mind and body can summon innermost resources to meet extraordinary challenges."
-Norman Cousins, Anatomy of an Illness

Bow and accept..............

   

             Reluctance

Out through the fields and the woods

And over the walls I have wended;

I have climbed the hills of view

And looked at the world, and descended;

I have come by the highway home,

And lo, it is ended.

The leaves are all dead on the ground,

Save those that the oak is keeping

To ravel them one by one

And let them go scraping and creeping

Out over the crusted snow,

When others are sleeping.

And the dead leaves lie huddled and still,

No longer blown hither and thither;

The last lone aster is gone;

The flowers of the witch hazel wither;

The heart is still aching to seek,

But the feet question "Whither?"

Ah, when to the heart of man

Was it ever less than a treason

To go with the drift of things,

To yield with a grace to reason,

And bow and accept the end

Of a love or a season?

-Robert Frost

Lessons.................

"I am always ready to learn, although I do not always like being taught."
-Winston Churchill

An amazing lady. Thanks for everything............

Betts Layman       1924-2012