How come you never play The Monkees........?

The Monkees..................................Last Train To Clarksville

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

Forty minutes out of London, passing through the rolling green fields and cherry orchards of Kent, the morning train of the South Eastern Railway attained its maximum speed of fifty-four miles an hour.  Riding the bright blue-painted engine, the driver in his red uniform could be seen standing upright in the open air, unshielded by any cab or windscreen, while at his feet the engineer crouched, shoveling coal into the glowing furnaces of the engine.  Behind the chugging engine and tender were three yellow first-class coaches, followed by seven green second-class coaches, and at the very end, a gray, windowless luggage van.
-Michael Crichton,  The Great Train Robbery:  A Novel (1975)

Crichton's tale is a fictionalized version of The Great Gold Robbery of 1855.  Wiki's accounting of the affair is here.

Cronies..........................

"Both big government and big business like to stack the deck in their favor.  And though they are sometimes adversaries, they are far too often allies.
     "Bureaucrats favor big business over the upstarts.  Large companies are more predictable - and easier to control.  So government tips the scales in their favor, instead of letting competition sort things out.  And big business is a willing accomplice - because regulation keeps the competition out.  Many times, large corporations don't oppose new regulations;  indeed, they help write them.  The point is, crony capitalism isn't a side effect - it's a direct result of big government."
-Paul Ryan, as excerpted from here

Out of bounds.....................................

     Trading labour for a degree sounds fair.  But the income elite players produce far exceeds the price of their scholarships - which colleges are free not to renew in case of injury or violations of the NCAA's stringent rules on gifts.  Many of the excess profits, or "rents", are captured by administrators.  In 39 of the 50 states, the highest paid public official is a college coach.
-as excerpted from this essay in The Economist

Probably true.......................................

via

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

The Beatles ...........  live at the Hollywood Bowl 8/23/64

Investing in cash................................

James Saft notices that Warren Buffett, in a contrarian sort of way, is hoarding cash.  Hmmm.  Wonder what that means.  Full post is here.  Fun excerpts here:

"The odd thing about the current market is how calm it is in the face of fairly unprecedented conditions."

"Cash is worth holding because it is dry powder which gives the owner options."

'Still, looking at the long-term returns on cash and concluding it is a tool to be shunned is a bit like saying a golfer ought not to have a back swing because only forward momentum drives the ball. Cash is the thing which puts you in a position to drive the ball, and gives your investment swing power. Its value lies not so much in itself but in the ease with which it can be turned into other things."

via

He says that like it is a bad thing.....................

CHENEY: Obama Would 'Rather Be On The Golf Course' Than The Situation Room

Full post, of which this is the headline, is here.

Perhaps either my history or my memory is wrong.  Wasn't Dick Cheney one of the main proponents for toppling Saddam Hussein?   Didn't he say our troops would be welcomed in Iraq as "liberators"?

[In response to "Do you think the American people are prepared for a long, costly, and bloody battle with significant American casualties?"] "Well, I don’t think it’s likely to unfold that way, Tim, because I really do believe that we will be greeted as liberators. I’ve talked with a lot of Iraqis in the last several months myself, had them to the White House....The read we get on the people of Iraq is there is no question but what they want to get rid of Saddam Hussein and they will welcome as liberators the United States when we come to do that."
-Meet The Press, March, 2003

There is no way of knowing what our world would look like today if the United States had not "Shocked and Awed" (a little hubris goes a long way) and then invaded Hussein's Iraq.  Reasonable people may disagree, but from here the Bush/Cheney decision to invade Iraq in 2003 looks like the worst foreign policy decision since The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in 1964 (Yes, worse than anything Jimmy Carter did, or did not do).

Might not our world today be a better place if Mr. Cheney had spent MUCH MORE time in 2000-2008 on the golf course and a LOT LESS time in the Situation Room?  Just asking.

While we are picking on Dick Cheney..........

............here are a few of his interesting quotes:

"Principle is OK up to a certain point, but principle doesn't do any good if you lose." (1975)

"Let us rid ourselves of the fiction that low oil prices are somehow good for the United States." (1986)

"And the question in my mind is how many additional American casualties is Saddam worth? And the answer is not very damned many. So I think we got it right, both when we decided to expel him from Kuwait, but also when the president made the decision that we'd achieved our objectives and we were not going to go get bogged down in the problems of trying to take over and govern Iraq.... Once we had rounded him up and gotten rid of his government, then the question is what do you put in its place? You know, you then have accepted the responsibility for governing Iraq." (1992)

"What we did in Iraq was exactly the right thing to do. If I had it to recommend all over again, I would recommend exactly the same course of action." (2004)

"Wolf, you can come up with all kinds of what-ifs; you've got to deal with the reality on the ground. The reality on the ground is, we've made major progress. We've still got a lot of work to do. There's a lot of provinces in Iraq that are relatively quiet. There's more and more authority transferred to the Iraqis all the time.... Bottom line is that we've had enormous successes and we will continue to have enormous successes." (2007)

Not so sure about this one...........................

Anvils seem pretty solid, steady, and stable; unaffected by all the drama going on around them.  I suspect that is why most anvils last a lot longer than most hammers.

A pretty good list............................

From Ray's Mom:

thanks Ray

How many....................................?

Peter, Paul and Mary.........................Blowing In The Wind

A point to remember........................

All real estate is local (as in location, location, location).

Exhibit A is here.

thanks craig

Mistakes were made.............................

"He is the fourth American president in succession to bomb Iraq."
-as excerpted from this The Economist Leaders essay

History...............................

David Merkel's always interesting Aleph Blog has a post up that starts this way:

“It ain’t what you don’t know that hurts you, it’s what you know that ain’t so.”
(attributed to Mark Twain, Will Rogers, Satchel Paige, Charles Farrar Browne, Josh Billings, and a number of others)

"A lot of what passes for investment knowledge is history-dependent, and may not serve us well in the future.  Further, a certain amount of it is misinterpreted, or, those writing about it, even really bright people, don’t understand the hidden assumptions that they are making."

Reading that caused me to want to dust off a few of my favorite quotes on "history":

“History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation.” 
-Julian Barnes

“History is the fiction we invent to persuade ourselves that events are knowable and that life has order and direction. That's why events are always reinterpreted when values change. We need new versions of history to allow for our current prejudices.” 
-Bill Watterson

"Nothing in history is inevitable."
-Paul Ryan

"That men do not learn very much from the lessons of history is the most important of all the lessons of history."
-Aldous Huxley

“There's an old saying about those who forget history. I don't remember it, but it's good.” 
-Stephen Colbert

When "positive thinking" doesn't help..........

Tiny Buddha has a suggestion:

Feel your feelings; just don’t attach meaning to them. 

Feelings are just like the weather; they can’t be controlled and they are always changing. I found that if I just let myself be in the sadness, it passed so much quicker.

Reminds me of a lesson learned in my 12-Step days:  We are not our feelings.  But, if we refuse to honor them by refusing to feel them, they will have their say.  They will absolutely mess with your head.

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

The Supremes...................................................Run Run Run

Maybe that's why we are friends....................

Guanciale posted this yesterday:

It reminded me of the time in third grade when I fell off the old metal "high slide" at the Merion Elementary School playground and landed head first on the asphalt.  Those old slides sure could get hot when the sun was shining.

But can they sell real estate........................?

The Mighty E. shares a video suggesting techo bots will be laying waste to all sorts of jobs....soon.

Sometimes the journey..............................

............is more important than the destination.  Like here.

Sublime..................................

Wes Montgomery....................................Round Midnight

Something's lost and something's gained.......

Judy Collins (and the Boston Pops)............Both Sides Now

Both sides now................................

418.  It is dangerous to make man see too clearly his equality with the brutes without showing him his greatness.  It is also dangerous to make him see his greatness too clearly, apart from his vileness.  It is still more dangerous to leave him in ignorance of both.  But it is very advantageous to show him both.  Man must not think that he is on a level either with the brutes or with the angels, nor must he be ignorant of both sides of his nature;  but he must know both.
-Blaise Pascal,   Pensees

thanks jessica

The Intertunnel is a fabulous place...............

This essay contains this line:  "The dispute recalls the comment of another Harvard professor, Henry Kissinger, that academic politics are so bitter because the stakes are so low."  It's a cute quote.  I have used it in conversations myself.  Reading it this time, however, the questions arose:  "Given the successful march of stultifying political correctness from academia to the mainstream, were the stakes really all that low?" and  "What would Kissinger think now?"  Not having the ability to ask him, the next best thing, The Oracle Google, was consulted.  Among other things this year-old post from the Quote Investigator was found.  It includes these fun quotes:

In 1765, Samuel Johnson wrote this

"It is not easy to discover from what cause the acrimony of a scholiast can naturally proceed. The subjects to be discussed by him are of very small importance; they involve neither property nor liberty; nor favour the interest of sect or party. The various readings of copies, and different interpretations of a passage, seem to be questions that might exercise the wit, without engaging the passions."

"But whether it be, that small things make mean men proud, and vanity catches small occasions; or that all contrariety of opinion, even in those that can defend it no longer, makes proud men angry; there is often found in commentaries a spontaneous strain of invective and contempt, more eager and venomous than is vented by the most furious controvertist in politicks against those whom he is hired to defame."

In 1970, Dwight Waldo wrote this:

We can no longer use our little joke that campus politics are so nasty because the stakes are so small. They are now so nasty because the stakes are so large.

For the record, Wikiquote seems to believe that the subject quote was "misattributed" to Kissinger.  This whole process of "discovery" took about two minutes.   Isn't the Intertunnel is a fabulous place?

Some interesting things Henry Kissinger said...

Henry Kissinger, as Secretary of State, was an important actor on the American political stage during the Nixon and Ford presidential administrations.  He practiced what was known as Realpolitik.  Pioneering detente with the USSR was perhaps his most noteworthy policy, although he also negotiated the end of our involvement in Vietnam and paved the way for Nixon's historic trip to China.  Here are some of his quotes:

The superpowers often behave like two heavily armed blind men feeling their way around a room, each believing himself in mortal peril from the other, whom he assumes to have perfect vision. Each side should know that frequently uncertainty, compromise, and incoherence are the essence of policymaking. Yet each tends to ascribe to the other a consistency, foresight, and coherence that its own experience belies. Of course, over time, even two armed blind men can do enormous damage to each other, not to speak of the room.

A country that demands moral perfection in its foreign policy will achieve neither perfection nor security.

Before the Freedom of Information Act, I used to say at meetings "The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer." … But since the Freedom of Information Act, I'm afraid to say things like that.

The absence of alternatives clears the mind marvelously.

We fought a military war; our opponents fought a political one. We sought physical attrition; our opponents aimed for our psychological exhaustion. In the process we lost sight of one of the cardinal maxims of guerrilla war: the guerrilla wins if he does not lose. The conventional army loses if it does not win. The North Vietnamese used their armed forces the way a bull-fighter uses his cape — to keep us lunging in areas of marginal political importance.

Nobody will ever win the battle of the sexes. There is too much fraternizing with the enemy.

Behind the slogans lay an intellectual vacuum.

Ninety percent of the politicians give the other ten percent a bad reputation.

There cannot be a crisis next week. My schedule is already full.

Difficulties with disruption..............

Successful companies succeed, in part, through close attention to their customers, delivering incremental (and sustaining) innovations they want.  Disruptive innovators leap ahead to produce what customers do not yet know they need. As Henry Ford observed, if he had consulted his customers they would have asked for a faster horse.
-John Kay, as excerpted from this essay

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

The Newbeats......................................Everything's Alright



Because sometimes you just need a B-side

Did you ever wonder about corn..................?

..................Sure seems like a lot of plant for a little output.  Why did God design an 8' tall stalk to support one ear?   Seems like a waste of energy.  Wouldn't 4' tall have been sufficient?  How come most stalks have one ear, but some stalks have two?  Just wondering.  Corn is pretty important in the Midwest.  Fortunately, the folks at Wikipedia have done some research.  You may read more than you really want to know about maize here.  A more specific, and shorter, answer to the question of "how many ears per stalk" may be found here.

From where I was standing, these healthy looking stalks seemed about 9' tall                          

The exception to this field's one-ear-per -stalk tendency

Your basic one ear per stalk plant

You can't win them all.........................

........and sometimes there is incredible value in falling short:




thanks

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

The Peacemaker Colt has now been in production, without change in design, for a century.  Buy one today and it would be indistinguishable from the one Wyatt Earp wore when he was the Marshal of Dodge City.  It is the oldest hand gun in the world, without question the most famous and, if efficiency in its designated task of maiming and killing be taken as criterion of its worth, then it is also probably the best hand gun ever made.  It is no light thing, it is true, to be wounded by some of the Peacemaker's more highly esteemed competitors, such as the Luger or Mauser:  but the high-velocity, narrow-calibre, steel-cased shell from either of those just goes straight through you, leaving a small neat hole in its wake and spending the bulk of its energy on the distant landscape whereas the large and unjacketed soft-nosed lead bullet from the Colt mushrooms on impact, tearing and smashing bone and muscle and tissue as it goes and expending all its energy on you.
-Alistair MacLean,  When Eight Bells Toll (1966)

More than you.........................

..........wanted to know about the Colt Peacemaker - here.

Live from Woodstock............................

Santana.......................................................Soul Sacrifice

Perspective.................................

The evolution of telephones.....................

Information on Chester A. Arthur (1829-1886), the 21st president of the United States is here.

One of the first portable phones

Back story on the brains behind Motorola's foray into cell phones is here.

A very brief pictorial on the evolution of telephones:

A few reasons why technological improvements were a good thing:

Early telephone lines

The switchboard

Seven............................................

..........................................................skills worth having.

Makes perfect sense to me....................

courtesy of

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

The Beatles................................................Ain't She Sweet

It used to be anyway................................

Freedom squandered...................................?

All scientific knowledge is uncertain.  This experience with doubt and uncertainty is important.  I believe that it is of very great value, and one that extends beyond the sciences.  I believe that to solve any problem that has never been solved before, you have to leave the door to the unknown ajar.  You have to permit the possibility that you do not have it exactly right.  Otherwise, if you have made up your mind already, you might not solve it.

This freedom to doubt is an important matter in the science, and, I believe, in other fields.  It was born of a struggle.  It was a struggle to be permitted to doubt, to be unsure.  And I do not want us to forget the importance of the struggle and, by default, to let the thing fall away.  I feel a responsibility as a scientist who knows the great value of a satisfactory philosophy of ignorance, and the progress made possible by such a philosophy, progress which is the fruit of freedom of thought.  I feel a responsibility to proclaim the value of this freedom and to teach that doubt is not to be feared, but that it is to be welcomed as the possibility of a new potential for human beings.  If you know you are not sure, you have a chance to improve the situation.  I want to demand this freedom for future generations.

-Richard P. Feynman, as excerpted from The Meaning Of It All:  Thoughts of a Citizen-Scientist

Like computer modeling..........................?

“Today’s scientists have substituted mathematics for experiments, and they wander off through equation after equation, and eventually build a structure which has no relation to reality. ” 
-Nikola Tesla

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

The warm monsoon blew gently from the east, wafting HMS Leopard into the bay of Pulo Batang.  She had spread all the sails she could, to reach anchorage before the tide should turn and to come in without discredit, but a pitiful show they made - patched, with discoloured heavy-weather canvas next to stuff so thin it scarcely checked the brilliant light - and her hull was worse.  A professional eye could make out that she had once been painted with the Nelson chequer, that she was a man-of-war, a fourth-rate built to carry fifty guns on two full decks; but to a landsman, in spite of her pennant and the dingy ensign at her mizen-peak, she looked like an unusually shabby merchant ship.  And although both watches were on deck, gazing earnestly at the shore, the extraordinarily bright-green shore, and breathing in the heady scent of the Spice Islands, the Leopard's crew were so sparse that the notion of her being a merchantman was confirmed:  furthermore, a casual glance showed no guns at all; while the ragged, shirt-sleeved figures on her quarterdeck could hardly be commissioned officers.
-Patrick O'Brian,  The Fortune of War

A pleasant mixing of facts and fiction.............

The Wikipedia page on the HMS Leopard

Pour a drink, put your feet up, relax..........

Stan Getz....................................................Autumn Leaves

From simpler times........................................

The Edsels........................................Rama Lama Ding Dong

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

The Tridels................................................Land of Love

Apparently I'm a business conservative.....

.............or, so says Pew Research after I took their Political Typology Quiz.  Labels really are not my thing.  Nor am I overly fond of either/or questions.  Life seems more nuanced (or gray, if you prefer) then their answers would suggest.  But, for now, file me with 10% of "the population."

thanks mark

A most important action..................

"Discipline yourself to count your blessings everyday."
-Wiley Johnson

Welcome to the asylum.......................

We are in the very best of hands:  Exhibit A here

Generally................................

"I think in general it's clear that most bad things come from misunderstanding, and communication is generally the way to resolve misunderstandings, and the Web's a form of communications, so it generally should be good."
-Tim Berners-Lee

Nevermind, I think I'll just take my car.....

courtesy of

Proof...............................................

The genius of the Beatles............................

The Beatles..................................Tomorrow Never Knows

(psychedelia alert)




22 things any business can learn from the Beatles - here

Toto, I don't think we're in Ohio anymore.....

My Sweetie and I had an away game this past weekend.  Went to a wedding at the Cheaha State Park, hard by the Talladega National Forest, Alabama, USA.  Let me tell you, that's a long, but pretty, drive. We had fun with family and learned that those Alabamans sure are nice folk.  Cheaha is the high point of Alabama.  These photos are from Bald Rock, the high point of the high point.

Believe...................................

"Somehow, I can't believe that there are any heights that can't be scaled by a man by a man who knows the secret of making dreams come true. The special secret it seems to me is summarized  in  four C's. 

They are Curiosity,Courage, Confidence and Constancy. And the greatest of all is Confidence. When you believe in a thing, believe in it all the way, implicitly and unquestionably."
-Walt Disney

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

The Four Seasons....................................Born to Wander

Meaning.....................................

First, there was the earth without anything alive on it.  For billions of years this ball was spinning with its sunsets and its waves and the sea and the noises, and there was no thing alive to appreciate it.  Can you conceive, can you appreciate of fit into your ideas what can be the meaning of a world without a living thing on it?  We are so used to looking at the world from the point of view of living things that we cannot understand what it means not to be alive, and yet most of the time the world had nothing alive on it.  And in most places in the universe today there probably is nothing alive.
-Richard P.  Feynman,  The Meaning Of It All:  Thoughts of a Citizen-Scientist

image via

Always wondered how to do this........................

.........................................................now I know.

Enemy.............................................

"If there is any consistent enemy of science, it is not religion, but irrationalism."
-Stephen Jay Gould

the above cartoon is a mystery to me, but it comes from here.  Maybe I should have used this cartoon instead:

You know we could....................................

Jefferson Starship...................................................Miracles

Source..............................................

Do not go about worshipping deities and
religious institutions as the
source of the subtle truth.
To do so is to place intermediaries
between yourself and the divine,
and to make of yourself a beggar who
looks outside for a treasure that is 
hidden inside his own breast.

If you want to worship the Tao, first
discover it in your own heart.
Then your worship will be meaningful.

-Hua Hu Ching:  The Unknown Teachings of Lao Tzu
Verse 17
Brian Browne Walker

A fortuitous concourse........................

"That the universe was formed by a fortuitous concourse of atoms, I will no more believe than that the accidental jumbling of the alphabet would fall into a most ingenious treatise of philosophy.” 
-Jonathan Swift

image via APOD

Yep. and it looks like she's hiding him..........

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

The Beach Boys...........................................Louie Louie

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

Verse.......................................

27  And he said, The things which are impossible with men are possible with God.
-Luke 18:27
The Holy Bible
King James Version

We noticed......................................

Hope he's not referring to blogging........

“There is nothing quite so useless, as doing with great efficiency, something that should not be done at all.”
-Peter Drucker

Not up to Her..........................

via