So glad....................................................

Spencer David Group..........................Gimme Some Lovin'



# 14 on this list

Great philosophers................................

François VI, Duc de La Rochefoucauld,  (1613-1680):

There’s a belief that philosophy, when properly done, should sound dense, forbidding, a little confusing, as if it might have been awkwardly translated from the German. But at the dawn of the modern age lived a French philosopher who trusted in a very different way of presenting his thoughts, a man who wrote a very slim book, barely 60 pages long, that can deservedly be counted as one of the true masterpieces of philosophy, a compendium of acerbic, melancholy observations about the human condition, each of them only a sentence or two long, that retains an exceptional number of timely, wise and oddly consoling lessons for our morally confused and distracted age.

Source of quote and back story on La Rochefoucauld is here.  Wiki here.

thanks

In truth................................

Il ne faut pas s'offenser que les autres nous cachent la vérité, puisque nous nous la cachons si souvent à nous-mêmes.
 (We should not be upset that others hide the truth from us, when we hide it so often from ourselves.)
-La Rochefoucauld

Delivering value..........................

................................The Execupundit Way:

A person once asked, "What do you do in those sessions?" My response was "We usually explore that which is hidden in plain sight." 

Finding that is much harder than many suspect. Solutions are often inches away, waiting to be seen by fresh eyes, but they like to hide.

Full story is here

A sad tale..........................................

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

Dave Berry............................Don't Give Me No Lip Child

A hope..................................

There are thousands of years in the past, and there is an unknown amount of time in the future.  There are all kinds of opportunities, and there are all kinds of dangers.  Man has been stopped  before by stopping his ideas.  Man has been jammed for long periods of time.  We will not tolerate this.  I hope for freedom for future generations - freedom to doubt, to develop, to continue the adventure of finding new ways of doing things, of solving problems.
-Richard Feynman,  The Meaning Of It All:  Thoughts of a Citizen-Scientist

Jamming..................................

     Why do we grapple with problems?  We are only in the beginning.  We have plenty of time to solve the problems.  The only way that we will make a mistake is that in the impetuous youth of humanity we will decide we know the answer.  This is it.  Not one else can think of anything else.  And we will jam.  We will confine man to the limited imagination of today's human beings.
-Richard P. Feynman,  The Meaning Of It All:  Thoughts of a Citizen-Scientist

On acting..............................................

"Stop philosophizing about what a good man is and be one."
-Marcus Aurelius

Gold.......................................................

"What is hateful to yourself, do not to your fellow man.  That is the whole of the Torah, and the remainder is but commentary.  Go and study it."
-Hillel the Elder

find the words.........................................

Grayson Hugh.....................................Blind To Reason




#10 on this list

Matters................................................

"The only thing that really matters in life is your relationships to other people."
-George Vaillant

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

You know, straight across the board, hardly anyone really knows what is Indian.  The word Indian in itself really doesn't mean anything.   That's how come nobody knows anything about Indians.  So I want to tell you how I grew up and who I am.  I've never read books.  I wasn't educated that way.  What I am saying here is based on my life.  That's what I am telling you.  I grew up with this Chanunpa, this "Sacred Pipe," and I have a spirit guide with me all the time.  He leads me in and out of all the difficulties, all the obstacles I have to go through.  The spirit always finds a pathway.  The Chanunpa (Sacred Pipe) finds a pathway.  It's like a deer trail.  If you find a deer trail and follow that trail, it's going to lead you to medicines and waterholes and a shelter.
-Wallace Black Elk, Black Elk:  The Sacred Ways of a Lakota

Cherish......................................

He who cherishes a beautiful vision, a lofty ideal in his heart, will one day realize it.  Columbus cherished a vision of another world, and he discovered it.  Copernicus fostered the vision of a multiplicity of worlds and a wider universe, and he revealed it.  Buddha beheld the vision of s spiritual world of stainless beauty and perfect peace, and he entered it.
     Cherish your visions;  cherish your ideals;  cherish the music that stirs in your heart, the beauty that forms in your mind, the loveliness that drapes your purest thoughts, for out of them will grow all delightful conditions, all heavenly environment;  of these, if you will but remain true to them, your world will at last be built.
-James Allen

Say it's not so..........................................

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

Mass hysteria:  The Beatles visit Cincinnati, Ohio.  The local Juvenile Court Judge believes that parents were "bugs" for allowing their little darlings to attend.  If only we had listened:

Fortunately..................................

Everything you always wanted to know....

.........(in 40 easy, and visual, steps) about the Roman Empire

A symphony................................

To live content with small means;  to seek elegance rather than luxury, and refinement rather than fashion;  to be worthy, not respectable, and wealthy, not rich;  to listen to stars and birds, babes and sages, with open heart; to study hard, to think quietly, act frankly, talk gently, await occasions, hurry never; in a word, to let the spiritual, unbidden and unconscious, grow up through the common - this is my symphony.
-William Henry Channing

Got a good reason.....................................

The Beatles.....................................................Day Tripper

Well, maybe not EVERYTHING.................

via Ka-Ching!

On time..............................................

                    He that can have Patience can
                             have what he will.

              If you have time, don't wait for Time.

                  Remember that Time is Money

             Let all your things have their places;
        Let each part of your business have its time

                             Lose no time; 
          be always employ'd in something useful; 
                cut off all unnecessary actions.

-Benjamin Franklin

Good question.....................................

"When you denounce people who are judgmental, aren't you being judgmental?"
-Michael Wade, as excerpted from his latest edition of Random Thoughts

Locks..............................................

via

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

The Beatles..............................................Thank You Girl

On spending................................

"It is how we spend ourselves - not our money - that makes us rich."
-Alexander Green

A good reason to get to work today.........

“Work spares us from three evils: boredom, vice, and need.”

-François-Marie Arouet, aka Voltaire

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

I was never good at solving mysteries.  I don't mean the kind cops solve or the ones you read about in novels or watch on television or on a movie screen.  I'm not talking about the mystery of Creation, either, or the unseen presences that reside perhaps just the other side of the physical world.  I'm talking about evil, without capitalization but evil all the same, the kind whose origins sociologists and psychiatrists have trouble explaining.
-James Lee Burke,  Light of the World:  A Dave Robicheaux Novel

The problem with predictions.......................

The iPod has been regarded by a lot of pundits as Apple getting lucky, a fluke, a one-shot.  When Apple entered the cutthroat cell phone market, it was predicted the iPhone would flop.  Microsoft's Steve Ballmer famously said it would never get any market share.  But the iPhone was a hit from the start, and Apple used its old playbook of rapidly adding features and models.
     Apple released the iPhone in mid-2007.  By the end of the year, 3.7 million iPhones had been sold.  By the first quarter of 2008, the sales volume of iPhones exceeded sales of Apple's entire Mac line.  And by the end of 2008, the company was selling three times as many iPhones as it was selling Macs.  Revenue and profits were through the roof.
-Leander Kahney,  Jony Ive:  The Genius Behind Apple's Greatest Products

Fourth Quarter 2013 cell phone operating system market share

Steve Ballmer video interview in which he expresses love for Microsoft's plan for succeeding in the world of cell phones:

And I wonder about his exception...............

“Every art and every inquiry, and similarly every action and pursuit, is thought to aim at some good; and for this reason the good has rightly been declared to be that at which all things aim,” begins the Nichomachean Ethics. But Aristotle’s assertion that all men seek the good (or at least the good as they see it) is wrong on the face of it.   Frequently men seek perversion, violence, and the destruction of themselves and all around them.  That is typical of civilizations that have reached their best-used-by-date, and at some point has been true of every civilization west of the Indus during the past 2,500 years with the exception of Israel.
-Spengler, as excerpted from this essay

The Rippingtons......................One Summer Night in Brazil

So hard to see....................................

The Beatles...................................................Come Together

It only seems like it..................................

via

Unfortunately....................................

“People think of education as something they can finish.” 
-Isaac Asimov

Happiness...............................

Happiness is a by-product.  It is achieved indirectly, by producing something beautiful or useful or by making someone else happy.  The search for happiness is one of the chief sources of unhappiness.
-Alexander Green

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

The Rivieras.............................................Let's Have A Party

Say what you will about our founding fathers, but please don't deny their insightfulness......

"It will be of little avail to the people that the laws are made by men of their own choice, if the laws be so voluminous that they cannot be read, or so incoherent that they cannot be understood;  if they be repealed or revised before they are promulged, or undergo such incessant changes that no man who knows what the law is today can guess what it will be to-morrow.  Law is defined to be a rule of action;  but how can that be a rule, which is little known and less fixed?" 
-James Madison, The Federalist No. 62 (writing as Publius, February 12, 1788)

thanks perry

Waiting.......................................

“Somewhere, something incredible is waiting to be known.” 
-Carl Sagan

photo via APOD

A secret for successful living......................?

"My advice to you is not to inquire why or whither, but just enjoy your ice cream while it's on your plate - that's my philosophy."
-Thornton Wilder,  The Skin Of Our Teeth

photo via

The kids will be just fine............................

courtesy of

Learn to fly...............................................

Kenny Rankin.......................................................Blackbird

illusive promise........................................

It seems difficult to imagine, but there was once a time when human beings did not feel the need to share their every waking moment with hundreds of millions, even billions, of complete and utter strangers.  If one went to a shopping mall to purchase an article of clothing, one did not post minute-by-minute details on a social networking site;  and if one made  fool of oneself at a party, one did not leave a photographic record of the sorry episode in a digital scrapbook that would survive all eternity.  But now, in the era of lost inhibition, its seemed no detail of life was too mundane or humiliating to share.  In the online age, it was more important to live out loud than to live with dignity.  Internet followers were more treasured than flesh-and-blood friends, for they held the illusive promise of celebrity, even immortality.  Were Descartes alive today, he might have written:  I tweet, therefore I am.
-Daniel Silva, as excerpted from The Heist

Just saying.............................................

via Ka-Ching!

If only we really knew.................................

One of life's little mysteries:
"You want to say, well, let's just keep doing what we're doing," Lindberg said. "But then you have to answer the question: what in the world are we doing?"
-as excerpted from this post on the falling (dramatically) rate of teen-age pregnancy

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Huxleyan................................

Spiritual devastation is more likely to come from an enemy with a smiling face than from one whose countenance exudes suspicion and hate.  In the Huxleyan prophecy, Big Brother does not watch us, by his choice.  We watch him, by ours.  There is no need for wardens or gates or Ministries of Truth.   When a population becomes distracted by trivia, when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public talk becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act, then a nation finds itself at risk.
-Neil Postman,  Amusing Ourselves to Death

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

Lyndon Baines Johnson argues for the Entitlement System

Self-imposed..............................

     Freedom, after all, is not the absence of responsibility.  It is the absence of restraints imposed by others.  To be truly free, however, we must generally impose severe restrictions on ourselves.  That often means delaying gratification ... or settling for less ... or simply doing without.
-Alexander Green, as excerpted from beyond Wealth:  The road map to a rich life

Revisionist History, the old-fashioned way....

Following Khrushchev's revelations of Stalin's less than saintly persona and procedures, the Soviet Union revised its official version of Communist Party history during the twentieth century.  I bought a copy of this new edition and immediately turned to the index to learn the latest word on Uncle Joe.  I found that he had suffered the worst of all fates:  he simply wasn't there.  And I thought to myself, Love him or hate him, but how in hell can you tell the story of twentieth-century Russia without him?  The keepers of official records had used the primary device of excommunicators, anathematizers, and ostracizers throughout history:  there is a fate far worse than death, or the rack, and its name is oblivion - not the acceptable fading of an honored life that passes from general memory as historical records degrade (for nearly all of us must endure this erasure), but the terror of unpersoning, of being present (either in life or immediate memory) but bypassed as though nonexistent.
-Stephen Jay Gould, as excerpted from his essay The Invisible Woman contained in Dinosaur In A Haystack:  Reflections on Natural History

Go Forth and Be Great........................

thanks doug

Don't want to stop now...............................

Etta James.......................I've Been Loving You Too Long

Trying to figure out what to do with Door #3......

More thoughts on the subject from the Heartland are here.

Positive.................................................

courtesy of

Keeping our eyes open.............................

My wish for you, Faithful Reader, is that you may happily take proper advantage of them.

Just for today.......................................

     Relationships are complicated because people are complicated.  We each have our own ideas, values, and hopes, and they can't always coincide with the desires of those we love.  Disagreements can be healthy and enlightening if we view them as a way to develop and deepen our relationships.  Kindness and respect for everyone concerned will go a long way towards making this possible.
     Today I will try to view every conflict as an opportunity to heal.  I will honor myself by responding with courtesy.   "The highest form of wisdom is kindness."
-Courage to Change

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

A little slice of Dick Clark's American Bandstand, featuring
Irma Thomas....................Anyone Who Knows What Love Is

Kids these days..................................

The Epicurean Dealmaker takes a look a the latest career trends:

I suppose it is a measure of our diminished times that Mr. Roose chooses to dub these careerist paragons of conventional wisdom “Renaissance Kids,” but I get that he needs to flatter his demographic that their uninspired and riskless choices denote some measure of intellectual breadth or reflected historical glamour. After all, he has trend pieces to write and books to sell. Personally, I cling to the outmoded notion that “renaissance man” (or woman) should mean something deeper than a Groton- and Harvard-educated 3.70 GPA history major/lacrosse player who read the Bhagavad Gita once in order to satisfy a distribution requirement. But I am stubborn that way.

Instead, I prefer to label these special snowflakes Trophy Kids, since their entire young lives have been spent in pursuit of trophies and awards of all kinds, scrapping and scrambling to get into the best schools and the best clubs and the best jobs from the moment their hypercompetitive parents decided they should.

Full entertaining post is here.

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

Ever since Jack Aubrey had been dismissed from the service, ever since his name, with its now meaningless seniority, had been struck off the list of post-captains, it had seemed to him that he was living in a radically different world; everything was perfectly familiar, from the smell of seawater and tarred rigging to the gently heave of the deck under his feet, but the essence was gone and he was a stranger.
-Patrick O'Brian,  The Letter of Marque

Why not try free enterprise..........................?

My favorite optimist makes that suggestion to all those statists out there.  The sure sign of a state directed economy is sluggishness.  The sure sign of free enterprise is................well, you know.  Two excerpts:

"Estonia has been the top performing of the former Soviet colonies because Mart Laar, the historian who became prime minister in 1992 at the age of 32, had read only one book on economics, Milton Friedman’s Free to Choose and was in his own words “so ignorant” that he thought flat taxes, privatisation and the abolition of tariffs and subsidies constituted normal policy in the West."

"As the economic historian Deirdre McCloskey argues in her forthcoming book Bourgeois Equality, the chief beneficiaries of free enterprise revolutions are the poor. As a result of what she calls “the great enrichment” since 1800, she says 'millions more have gas heating, cars, smallpox vaccinations, indoor plumbing, cheap travel, rights for women, lower child mortality, adequate nutrition, taller bodies, doubled life expectancy, schooling for their kids, newspapers, a vote, a shot at university and respect. Never had anything similar happened, not in the glory of Greece or the grandeur of Rome, not in ancient Egypt or medieval China.'"

Just because........................................

Led Zeppelin...............................Stairway to Heaven

How sweet the sound.............................

Judy Collins & The Boys' Choir of Harlem........Amazing Grace

Dance.............................

Many I loved as man and boy
Are gone beyond all that I know,
Fallen leaves under falling rain,
Except Christ raise them up again.
I know my blessings by their cost,
Thus is the pride of man made low.
To ease the sorrow of my thoughts,
Though I'm too weary now and slow,
I'd need to dance all night for joy.

-Wendell Berry,  Sabbaths II  2006

I've been known to sign this ditty in the shower...

Unimpressed..............................

This fawn, resting in our side yard this morning, allowed us to get within twenty yards.  If our old hound was five years younger, I'm guessing the outcome would have been different.

Beauty....................................

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

The Beatles........................................Matchbox/Slow Down

Powerful influence.............................

Perhaps.......................................

Hmmmm...................................

Crazy......................................

Ah, the "American system"...............

.....................................Is this a great country, or what?

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