I promise to never do this again....................

Bee Gees.................................Night Fever

Jeff's feeling it...........................

Go read about a sweet and nostalgic look at the candy stores of our youth.  It resonates; although I would have swapped out the Fantastic Four for Sgt. Rock and Easy Company.

Awful way...............................

Sam Cooke...........................Another Saturday Night

Wary...............................

"Democracy has two excesses to be wary of:  the spirit of inequality, which leads to aristocracy, and the spirit of extreme equality, which leads it to despotism."
-De Montesquieu

Just another "ism"........................

"Cynicism such as one finds very frequently among the most highly educated young men and women of the West results from the combination of comfort and powerlessness."
-Bertrand Russell

cartoon via

Saturday morning with Sidney Harris.................

all cartoons via

The kids think this belongs by our new driveway....

courtesy of

Take wing........................

R.E.M.................................I'll Take The Rain

Never..................................

via

The Mighty E.............................

The ever-creative Eclecticity keeps cranking out the blog art.
To see most, probably not all, but most, of his blog headers
as art, click on the Eclecticity link under the "Labels" section.
Here are his entries from the past two months:

Hold on.......................

Them......................................Friday's Child

Ouch......................

Spengler frets about the recent lack of "inventiveness" in the good old U. S. of A.  Full essay is here.  Money quote is here:

"In short, the United States does not have a tech sector. It has mature consumer businesses operating under the technology label. They walk like mature consumer businesses, quack like mature consumer businesses, and fly like mature consumer businesses. They are run by patent lawyers rather than engineers."

Ornery.............................

Feels like an R.E.M. kind of day...............

R.E.M...................................Man On the Moon

File under the heading...................

.............of half the facts you know are wrong.  

Reason.com offers this essay pointing to Samuel Arbesman's,  new book The Half-Life of Facts: Why Everything We Know Has an Expiration Date. Arbesman suggests that all those precious facts we memorized in school may, in fact, not be facts.  I'm crushed.  Dinosaurs were not coldblooded?  Miss Bell misled me?  As much as that revelation hurt, the author then gets personal:

"The Web is great for finding an up-to-date list of the 10 biggest cities in the United States, but if the scientific literature is littered with wrong facts, then cyberspace is an enticing quagmire of falsehoods, propaganda, and just plain bunkum."

I do like this conclusion, however:

"There simply is no substitute for skepticism."

thanks craig

Experience has its virtues..................

..................and the Execupundit lays them out for us.  His list of 21 is here.  A wee sampling is here:

13.  A few of your facts aren't facts.
14.  Logic is a foreign tongue to many.
15.  One size doesn't fit all.

As good a reason as any...............

...........for open/free trade:

"When goods don't cross borders, armies will."
-Frederic Bastiat

More from Bastiat.............

French political economist Frederic Bastiat  1801-1850

"If the natural tendencies of mankind are so bad that it is not safe to permit people to be free, how is it that the tendencies of these organizers are always good? Do not the legislators and their appointed agents also belong to the human race? Or do they believe that they themselves are made of a finer clay than the rest of mankind?"

"When plunder becomes a way of life for a group of men in a society, over the course of time they create for themselves a legal system that authorizes it and a moral code that glorifies it."

"It is impossible to introduce into society a greater change and a greater evil than this: the conversion of the law into an instrument of plunder."

"The State is the great fiction through which everyone endeavours to live at the expense of everyone else."

"Competition is merely the absence of oppression"

"By virtue of exchange, one man's prosperity is beneficial to all others."

“Ah, you miserable creatures! You who think that you are so great! You who judge humanity to be so small! You who wish to reform everything! Why don't you reform yourselves? That task would be sufficient enough.” 

Life, liberty, and property do not exist because men have made laws. On the contrary, it was the fact that life, liberty, and property existed beforehand that caused men to make laws in the first place.” 

“The worst thing that can happen to a good cause is, not to be skillfully attacked, but to be ineptly defended.”

Heard................................

via

Milton Friedman schools Phil Donahue..........

...................................and makes it look easy.

No one to blame....................

Jim Croce.......................................Thursday

Tarnishing the halo....................

..............of St. Warren (Buffett that is).   Victor Davis Hanson includes Mr. Buffett in the pantheon of liberals who espouse a set of laws for the little people, then act in ways that directly contradict such espousal.  Full essay is here.  Buffett excerpt is here:

Multibillionaire Warren Buffett is a tireless advocate of hiking inheritance taxes on small businesses and farms. But he has pledged much of his wealth to the Gates Foundation, a ploy that will cost the federal Treasury billions of dollars in lost revenue. Meanwhile, if inheritance taxes go up, millions of terrified Americans will double up on their life-insurance policies — an industry central to the multibillion-dollar Buffett empire. It never seems to occur to the liberal-minded Buffett that there is something tawdry about advocating a policy that he not only seeks mostly to avoid, but will even profit from.

Good luck with that.........................

via

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

     The fateful shots fired at Lexington and Concord on the 19th of April, 1775, raised scores of Americans from obscurity and made their names household words throughout the colonies.  Such a man was Nathanael Greene, an anchorsmith by trade and son of a Rhode Island Quaker preacher.
-Theodore Thayer, Nathanael Greene:  Strategist of the American Revolution

Copy cats.......................

Rufus Thomas...........................Walking the Dog




Rolling Stones..............................Walking the Dog




Aerosmith................................Walking the Dog



Rufus Thomas wrote and sang Walking the Dog in 1963.  The Stones recorded it in 1964.  Aerosmith covered in in 1973.  Here is a live version of Rufus from 1965.

About that financial security thing................

............Penelope Trunk has been thinking and writing on it.  As is her fashion, she presents some out-of-the-box, yet common sensical, solutions.  Read them here.

I. Asimov...............

Isaac Asimov liked to write.   He penned over 450 books.  Once asked by Barbara Walters what he would do if the doctors told him he had six months to live, Asimov replied, "Type faster."

He begins Chapter 69 of his memoir this way:

One advantage of being prolific is that it reduces the importance of any one book.  By the time a particular book is published, the prolific writer hasn't much time to worry about how it will be received or how it will sell.  By then he has already sold several others and is working on still others and it is these that concern him.  This intensifies the peace and calm of his life.

You just never listen...................

My favorite thing about change............

It "frustrates policymakers and economic and social planners."  That alone makes all the collateral disruptions endurable, and even enjoyable.  

As usual, Walter Russell Mead is on the case.  This time he is opining on Chinese efforts to create thorium reactors and the unbelievable possibilities - if they work.

WRM concludes:

"Accelerating change is the only constant in our times. Change is inherently unpredictable, often radical, and usually disruptive. That frustrates policymakers and economic and social planners, but it is a reality that we ignore at our peril."

Interested readers can find the whole essay here.

Won't go away..................................

America...............................Wednesday Morning

Serious pool...............................

via

How's that Self-Esteem movement doing...........?

Althouse points to this article suggesting success requires a bit more than a "good self-esteem.  Damn, now she tells me.  A few excerpts here:

And while in the late 1980s, almost half of students said they studied for six or more hours a week, the figure was little over a third by 2009 - a fact that sits rather oddly, given there has been a rise in students' self-proclaimed drive to succeed during the same period.

"What's really become prevalent over the last two decades is the idea that being highly self-confident - loving yourself, believing in yourself - is the key to success.

"Now the interesting thing about that belief is it's widely held, it's very deeply held, and it's also untrue."

cartoon via

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

Among the countless paths and trails that crisscrossed pre-Columbian America there was a track called the Mingo Trail that wound through the woodlands of southern Ohio.  This area was then the home of the Wyandots.  One of their principal settlements lay some thirty miles south of modern-day Columbus, where the trail met a river the Indians called the Hockhocking; a ford or "ripple" there made for an easy crossing and spawned a village they called Cranetown.  Well into the eighteenth century the area remained isolated from the British colonies to the east; the momentous struggle that began at Lexington and Concord produced no reverberations along the Hockhocking.  Frontiersmen visiting Cranetown in the era of the American Revolution found a settlement with a hundred wigwams and perhaps five times that number of Wyandots.
-Lee Kennett, Sherman:  A Soldier's Life

On your mark..............get set.....................

via

There must be a lot of creativity around here.....

“Creativity is the residue of time wasted.”
- Albert Einstein

Steve Jobs vs. Sam Walton..................

Fortune Magazine has the story, interviewing the biographers of each.  It is a worthwhile reading of the differences and similarities of two men who wrought significant changes on the old U. S. of A.  Full article is here.  Excerpt is here:

Steve was focusing on an elite group of people who appreciated the art of his business talent. In so doing, he focused on the product, and he created a product that had margins that were as insanely great as the insanely great products. Sam was the exact opposite. He focused on being able to open a store in five days, and if the margins got above anything that was infinitesimal, he was angry. He was a businessman who had to keep margins down because he was all about volume. He wanted a clean store, but he wouldn't spend a penny on design. For years they did their own ads with clip-art books. Steve would design a new font to have an ad.

Because it's a school night, now go to bed......

via

Fun with music.....................

Live From Daryl's House.........I Can't Go For That
(with Booker T. et. al. sitting in)




Live From Daryl's House.........I Can't Go For That
(with Cee Lo Green standing in)

New day................................

The Rolling Stones..................................Ruby Tuesday

Linky goodness..........................

Vanderleun is worn out by compulsory compassion

Michael Wade points to six simple rituals to improve any day.

Ray's got some ties.

Walter Russell Mead bashes the Greens - again.

Penelope Trunk on figuring out who you are (with, or without, your own Wikipedia page)

Ryan Holiday suggests a reading list

Backfire.............................

Richard Epstein discusses the impact of the "law of unintended consequences" of governmental mandates and regulations within the health care world:

Apt............................

thanks

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

William Randolph Hearst did not speak often of his father.  He preferred to think of himself as sui generis and self-created, which in many ways he was.  Only in his late seventies, when he began writing a daily column in his newspapers, did he remind his readers - and himself - that he was the son of a pioneer.  In a column about the song "Oh Susannah," which he claimed his father had sung to him, Hearst recounted the hardships George Hearst had endured on his thousand-mile trek from Missouri to California in 1850.  There was pride in the telling and in the story.  His father had been one of the lucky ones, one of the stronger ones.  While others had "died from cholera or were drowned by the floods or were killed by the Indians or tarried by the wayside under crude crosses and little hasty heaps of stone," his father had stayed the course, braved "the difficulties and dangers" and "at length.....reached California in safety."
-David Nasaw, The Chief:  The Life of William Randolph Hearst

D is for Dance......................

Dance with fear.  Dance with done.  Dance with the resistance.  Dance with each other.  Dance with art.

-Seth Godin, V is for Vulnerable:  Life Outside the Comfort Zone,  illustrated by Hugh MacLeod

But, it "creates" jobs..............

What does the "Fiscal Cliff' have to do with the gentle corruption of crony capitalism?  Good question.  Read about it here.  Just another reason to ponder the wonderful world of a "no-deductions, no-credits, just pay x % of  your net income" tax system.

OK, now give me fifty more...............

thanks

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

thanks

Don't go away.....................

The Mamas & The Papas..................Monday Monday

It's called "winter".........................

via

Marvelously.............................

"We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled with books in many different languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn't know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being toward God. We see a universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws, but only dimly understand these laws. Our limited minds cannot grasp the mysterious force that moves the constellations.” 
-Albert Einstein

image via

Fifty years ago.......................

The Essex..........................Easier Said Than Done

Well, OK................................

thanks

Don't.....................................

via

However..................................

“A man said to the universe: 'Sir, I exist!' 
'However,' replied the universe. 
'The fact has not created in me
A sense of obligation.” 
-Stephen Crane

image via

Never satisfied...................

courtesy of

Like a Sunday morning..................

Commodores........................................Easy

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

One of those days:  late fall, bare black tree branches scratching at a churning gray sky, days cold, nights colder.  The harvest was very late - record late - and moving fast.  The soybean crop had been delayed because of a cold summer, and then in the middle of October, with half the crop in, rain began to fall, a couple of inches a week, and didn't quit for a month.  Now it was dry again, but a landslide of bad weather hovered over the western horizon, and the combines were working twenty hours a day, bringing in the last of the beans and corn.
-John Sandford, Bad Blood

Hmmm...................................

During a recent conversation, my daughter crowned an argument by reciting a popular saying.
"The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results." 
Clever kid.
"Perhaps," I replied. "But isn't it also insane to do the same thing over and over and expect the same results?"

So reports Tom Asacker, as he advises us to avoid the fossilization of our ideas and ways.  Full post is here.

Maybe the world can't be flat........................

................but how about the tax code?  The Coyote Blog takes a stab at it - here.  Excerpt here:

"I would be happy to make this revenue neutral (even if it required an individual income tax rate hike) and sell this to the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street alike as a plan to reduce waste, corporatism, and crony meddling."

Just as an observation - it would probably require a Constitutional amendment to get something like this enacted.  There is no way Congress would ever willingly sacrifice their main source of campaign funds:    special pleaders looking for special treatment under the tax code.  Just saying.

Works for me....................

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

thanks jonco

Repent.......................