... some kind of kindness............................

Stevie Ray Vaughn..................................................Crossfire

If you don't check in often........................

..........with David Kanigan's wondrous tumblr, well, you should.

Let's dance.........................................

“We should consider every day lost on which we have not danced at least once.” 
-Friedrich Nietzsche

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

Shirley Ellis..............................................The Name Game

The perfect tonic...................................

via

Who knew..........................................?

.................." if you want to learn, just keep asking questions."

Actually,  many a time an unasked question has died on my lips, and I've noticed that the unasked question never helps.  Here is a handy list of questions investment minded people often choose not to ask - often to their peril.  Ask the questions, people!

A Great Show.........................................!

Bob Seger and more than a few of his friends staged a love fest at the
Nationwide Arena last evening.  Aging like a fine wine.

On the road again..................................

Bob Seger....................................................Turn The Page

Stimulation...............................................

My Sweetie and I (it was her birthday too) ventured to the big city last evening to see Bob Seger.  The J. Geils Band showed up as well.  Our brains were well used.

The trick you said.......................................

Bob Seger............................................................Still The Same

The best laid plans.................................

The secrets that we shared......................

Bob Seger.....................................................Against The Wind

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

The Rolling Stones...........................................Satisfaction

What, me worry.......................................?

Faithful readers of this blog will remember that, from an economic point of view, the prospect of deflation is something I am way more concerned with  than the hint of inflation.  John Kay suggests that we not panic quite yet.  Full essay here.  A few wee excerpts here:

 "the consumer price index is a complex statistical construct not a physical fact."

"Raised body temperature might be a sign of fever or the result of a relaxing hot bath: it is wise to determine which it is before you start to worry, far less prescribe remedies."

The fire of her vision................................

J. Geils Band.......................................................Flame Thrower

Treasures.....................................

A bit of harmonica if you please.................

J. Geils Band...............................................Whammer Jammer

We're gonna have a good time..................

Paul McCartney (channeling his inner Beatle).............Birthday

That time of the year...................................

previous cartoons via

He's at it again.................................

Michael Wade returns with more random thoughts.

 "To gain a better sense of the present, get a dog."

End of an era.......................................

Andrew Sullivan announces the beginning of the end of his blogging career - here.  Excerpt here:

The second is that I am saturated in digital life and I want to return to the actual world again. I’m a human being before I am a writer; and a writer before I am a blogger, and although it’s been a joy and a privilege to have helped pioneer a genuinely new form of writing, I yearn for other, older forms. I want to read again, slowly, carefully. I want to absorb a difficult book and walk around in my own thoughts with it for a while. I want to have an idea and let it slowly take shape, rather than be instantly blogged. I want to write long essays that can answer more deeply and subtly the many questions that the Dish years have presented to me. I want to write a book.

One doesn't need to agree with Sullivan to like him.  I like him.  I like his restless intelligence, his willingness to reconsider, his forceful advocacy of issues dear to him, and his vision to take the next step.  Whenever he gets around to writing his book, I will buy it.

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

The Four Tops................................It's The Same Old Song

Fulfillment.......................................

Finding meaning and satisfaction at work.  The quest starts here.

"Not having a plan quickly puts us at the mercy of  those who do have one."

via

And a happy birthday to you too...........

Remember what..........................................?

via

Distant skies.............................................

Pousette-Dart Band..................................Woman of My Dreams

A Commodore........................................

............in the Armada of Intelligence offers some wise counsel.

“It's always tea-time” ..................................

If you ever question the wondrousness of us human types, consider for a moment Lewis Carroll.   The Strategic Learner did, and immediately recognized him as a leadership and personal development guru.  John E.'s post is here.   More fun stuff about Carroll here, here, and here.   A few favored quotes here:

“If everybody minded their own business, the world would go around a great deal faster than it does.” 

“The hurrier I go, the behinder I get.” 

“Imagination is the only weapon in the war against reality.” 

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

Sounds Orchestral....................Cast Your Fate To The Wind

Fun with the weather................................

Environmental determinism: a quick look at how climate changes have affected us humans throughout history.  Just two reminders:  at this blog we prefer warming to cooling; and, things just never stay the same.

thanks craig

I'm not an economist.............................

................but does this mean the jobs had been there for quite a while?   Local people who know these sorts of things have been saying, for at least the past two years, that one of the tough issues facing local employers has been finding new employees.   Now that long term extensions of unemployment insurance are off the table, people are seeking, and finding, jobs - jobs that had been available?  Who knew that such a thing would happen?   Not to be a nit-picker, but the authors say "1.8 million additional jobs were created in 2014 due to the benefit cut."   Would it not be more accurate to say that 1.8 million additional -and already available - jobs were filled in 2014 due to the benefit cut?  Just wondering.

Back when political correctness was........

.....................................humorous, and mostly harmless.

thanks bilbo

... the dice was loaded from the start...............

Mark Knopfler et. al......................................Romeo and Juliet

Torn...................................................

"If the world were merely seductive, that would be easy. If it were merely challenging, that would be no problem. But I arise in the morning torn between a desire to save the world and a desire to savor the world. This makes it hard to plan the day."
-Elwyn Brooks (E. B.) White

thanks Ben

E. B. White said some interesting things......

Necessity first mothered invention. Now invention has little ones of her own, and they look just like grandma. (1937)

We received a letter from the Writers' War Board the other day asking for a statement on "The Meaning of Democracy." It is presumably our duty to comply with such a request, and it is certainly our pleasure. Surely the Board knows what democracy is. It is the line that forms on the right. It is the don't in don't shove. It is the hole in the stuffed shirt through which the sawdust slowly trickles, the dent in the high hat. Democracy is the recurrent suspicion that more than half of the people are right more than half of the time. It is the feeling of privacy in the voting booths, the feeling of communion in the libraries, the feeling of vitality everywhere.  Democracy is the letter to the editor. Democracy is the score at the beginning of the ninth. It is an idea which hasn't been disproved yet, a song the words of which have not gone bad. It's the mustard on the hot dog and the cream in the rationed coffee. Democracy is a request from a War Board, in the middle of the morning in the middle of a war, wanting to know what democracy is. (1943)

I am a member of a party of one, and I live in an age of fear. Nothing lately has unsettled my party and raised my fears so much as your editorial, on Thanksgiving Day, suggesting that employees should be required to state their beliefs in order to hold their jobs. The idea is inconsistent with our constitutional theory and has been stubbornly opposed by watchful men since the early days of the Republic.  (1947)

The subtlest change in New York is something people don't speak much about but that is in everyone's mind. The city, for the first time in its long history, is destructible. A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate the millions. The intimation of mortality is part of New York now: in the sounds of jets overhead, in the black headlines of the latest edition.  All dwellers in cities must dwell with the stubborn fact of annihilation; in New York the fact is somewhat more concentrated because of the concentration of the city itself and because, of all targets, New York has a certain clear priority. In the mind of whatever perverted dreamer who might loose the lightning, New York must hold a steady, irresistible charm.   (1948)    Editor's Note:  Wow

We grow tyrannical fighting tyranny... The most alarming spectacle today is not the spectacle of the atomic bomb in an unfederated world, it is the spectacle of the Americans beginning to accept the device of loyalty oaths and witchhunts, beginning to call anybody they don't like a Communist. (1952)

Life's meaning has always eluded me and I guess it always will. But I love it just the same.  (1969)

More on White here and here.  More quotes here.

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

The Doctor knows..................................

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

The Rolling Stones.............................................The Last Time

Remember.............................................

via

An empty house...............................

      As for political systems, democracy is surely the healthiest for our time.  No one, except those who stand to gain when democratic values are ridiculed, would disagree with that.  But democracy is a little bit like an empty house.  You need to know what the people who live in the house are going to do with it.  Are they going to maintain the house properly, make it even more beautiful, or gradually let it collapse?
      What's neglected in the idea of human rights is the individual's responsibility to society.  The Dalai Lama often points out how particularly necessary universal responsibility is in our world, which has shrunk to the point that one can easily be on the other side of the world in a day.  It's obvious that unless a sense of responsibility develops in all individuals sharing this planet, it'll be very difficult to apply any democratic ideals.
-Matthieu Ricard, as excerpted from here

One of the many things I never knew.............

Some nations are born out of kinship, others out of conquest.  The nation of Belgium was born from a song.  In 1830, a few hundred spectators gathered in Brussels to take in what was by all accounts an unusually stirring performance of the French grand opera La Muette de Portici (The Mute Girl of Portici).  The opera's patriotic message - with its rousing song "Sacred Love of the Fatherland" ("Amour sacre de la patrie") - struck a chord with the French speakers in the crowd, who like many of their compatriots had long fled aggrieved under generations of Dutch rule.  The performance lit a fuse in the audience, igniting a nationalist fervor that swept thought Brussels as the attendees streamed out of the theater and into the streets, where thousands soon joined in a massive protest for independence.  The riots spread across the country, and within a year the fledgling nation of Belgium had declared independence from the Netherlands.
      As Europe's newest nation state, Belgium seemed imbued from the start with a spirit of forward-looking idealism.  After forming a national congress, the government invited a German prince named Leopold Georg Christian Friedrich to ascend the throne of its newly forged constitutional monarchy.  At first, the fledgling kingdom struggled to find its footing.  After severing ties with the Netherlands, Belgium lost access to the world markets commanded by the massive Dutch fleet.  As a result, the new regime faced considerable ill will from its powerful mercantile class.  By 1845, fully one-third of the population of Flanders was living off charity.  But the country had considerable assets at its disposal:  raw materials in the form of enormous coal and iron deposits in the south and east of the country, as well as a major port in Antwerp.  The country was ripe for the technological revolution that would soon transform it into the most industrialized nation on the continent.
-Alex Wright, as excerpted from Cataloging the World:  Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age

Wiki on the 1830 Belgium Revolution is here

Tough................................................

"When you are tough on yourself, life is going to be infinitely easier on you."
-Zig Ziglar

The Good, The Bad, The Ugly, and the beautiful...

Ennio Morricone.........................................The Ecstasy of Gold

Life its ownself...........................................

"Life is not a race - but indeed a journey. Be Honest. Work Hard. Be Choosy. Say 'thank you', and 'great job' to someone each day. Go to church, take time for prayer. The Lord giveth and the Lord taketh. Let your handshake mean more than pen and paper. Love your life and what you've been given, it is not accidental ~ search for your purpose and do it as best you can. Dreaming does matter. It allows you to become that which you inspire to be. Laugh often. Appreciate the little things in life and enjoy them. Some of the best things really are free. Do not worry, less wrinkles are more becoming. Forgive, it frees the soul. Take time for yourself ~ Plan for longevity. Recognize the special people you've been blessed to know. Live for today, enjoy the moment."
-Bonnie Mohr

What is it about books.......................?

      "He is a very old man with whom you can't talk about politics,"  wrote an unnamed Nazi apparatchik after an early meeting with Otlet on October 31, 1940.  "He has peculiar fantasies about world peace."
      World peace was a distant dream.  Europe was at war.  Four months earlier, shortly after conquering Belgium on his way to France, Hitler had authorized a cultural task force to fan out across the occupied countries.  Headed by his confidant Alfred Rosenberg - the recently appointed cultural czar and author of a great deal of seminal and toxic Nazi philosophy - the group operated under orders to seize any and all valuable books, works of art, or religious objects from museums, libraries, and universities, as well as from private Jewish and Masonic collections.  Drawing on this vast library of impounded books, Hitler hoped to build a new university worthy of the Third Reich, to be called the Hohe Schule.
      ... The commission would ultimately confiscate millions of volumes - including prized first editions, rare illuminated manuscripts, and countless other, more prosaic works on every topic imaginable - as well as paintings, religious objects, and innumerable other cultural artifacts.  For all their rapaciousness, however, Kruss and his staff proved quite discriminating in choosing what books to keep.  Most were destroyed or discarded.  At one point the German army paved the muddy streets of Ukraine with thousands of seized books to speed the passage of their military vehicles...

The Rosenberg Commission's campaign of literary plunder, appalling as it was, hardly marked the first time a conquering nation had instituted a program of violent cultural appropriation.  When Kin Ashurbanipal consolidated power over the Sumerian Empire in the seventh century BCE, he impounded every book in the kingdom to fill his royal library.  Four hundred years later, the Egyptian pharaoh Ptolemy I ordered his armed forces to search every incoming ship at the port of Alexandria and seize any books held onboard, thus populating the greatest library the world would know for another 2,000 years.
     At other times, nations have simply chosen to destroy the intellectual heritage of the people they conquered.  When Emperor Shi Huangdi consolidated power over the Chinese Empire in 213 BC, he commanded the destruction of every book in the kingdom to make way for a new library that better reflected his tastes.  And when the Spanish conquistadors arrived in the Aztec kingdom in the fifteenth century, they promptly burned nearly all of the Aztecs' glyph-laden deerskin books - including treatises on law, mathematics, and herbalism (this destruction likely came as no great surprise to the Aztecs, who themselves had destroyed all the books of a previous conquered regime just a century earlier).

-Alex Wright, as excerpted from Cataloging the World:  Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age

Consequences......................................

      There's no such thing as damnation in Buddhism.  Karmic retribution isn't a punishment, it's a natural consequence.  You're only reaping what you've sown.  If you throw a stone up in the air it's no good being astonished if it falls back down on your head.  It's a bit difference from the usual idea of sin - although I find very interesting Father Laurence Freedman's explanation:  "The Greek for sin means to miss the target.  Sin is what turns consciousness away from truth.  Being the consequence of illusion and selfishness, sin includes its own punishment.  God doesn't do the punishing.'
-Matthieu Ricard, as excerpted from here

An exaggeration perhaps.........................?

"I don't know where to turn next with my career.  Such is the problem that is ceaselessly buzzing in my ears.  Indecision is the worst of evils." 
-Paul Otlet

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

The Temptations...............................................Don't Look Back

Lest we forget.....................................

      Otlet not only invites study as an early avatar of the networked age.  His life and work also shed light on the deeper causes and conditions of the information age in which we now live.  While the proliferation of computers in recent years has certainly contributed to the much-chronicled problem of information overload, the first rumblings of our present-day data deluge really started during the second Industrial Revolution of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when the citizens of Europe and North America experienced a series of unprecedented technological transformations.  In the span of just a few decades, and enormous number of innovations were unleashed:  automobiles, airplanes, radio, telegraphs, typewriters, punch cards, microfilm, vaccines, and mechanical weapons.  Taken together, these rapid advances created a state of technological culture shock.  People and nations that had once lived in relative isolation quickly found themselves intertwined in a mesh of complex networks.  Telegraphs, telephones, railways, post offices, and expanding road systems allowed people, goods, and money to move across national borders more easily than ever before.  As a result, ideas started moving more freely as well, triggering an explosion of published information.  The resulting intellectual, commercial, and political entanglements gave rise to whole new industries, professions, and modes of thought, as well as to new opportunities for conflict - reaching the horrific crescendo of World War I.  This gave rise to a new "internationalist" consciousness that inspired some to imagine fundamentally new modes of living in a global, networked society.
-Alex Wright,  as excerpted from Cataloging the World:  Paul Otlet and the Birth of the Information Age

Freeing...................................

      Once we are committed to a spiritual path, it is essential to check that over the months and years we are actually freeing ourselves from hatred, grasping, pride, jealousy, and above all from the ego-centeredness and ignorance that cause them.  That is the only result that counts.
-Matthieu Ricard, as excerpted from here

Unless you hurry slowly..................................

more on "festina lente" can be found here.

Wondering if this is still true.....................

Pour ce qui est des connaissances non-écrites qui se trouvent dispersées parmi les hommes de différents professions, je suis persuadé qu’ils passent de beaucoup tant à l'égard de la multitude que de l'importance, tout ce qui se trouve marqué dans les livres, et que la meilleure partie de notre trésor n'est pas encore enregistrée.

• I am convinced that the unwritten knowledge scattered among men of different callings surpasses in quantity and in importance anything we find in books, and that the greater part of our wealth has yet to be recorded.

-Gottfried Wihlhem von Leibniz (1646-1716)

Finding something beautiful.......................

Music for listening to while staring at the fire in the fireplace while it is snowing outside on a chill winter's afternoon.........

Michael Hoppe/Tim Wheater...................Song Of The Hills

Itches that still ain't scratched......................

Travis Meadows..........................................Unfinished Business
(music starts about 2:15)




I got a list of things to do before I die
If I laid one on top of the other 
it'd stand about three feet high
The devil in the details
cross the T's and dot the i's
Sure made it easy 
putting off getting around to my
Unfinished business

Well I killed a lot of years 
by sweating over things that didn't last
I killed the better part of my youth 
by growing up way to fast
And I'm almost to the age 
where there is less future than there is past
My regrets are only half the size 
of the shadows that they cast
Oh my unfinished business

Got songs that I still ain't sung
Old fights that I still ain't won
Things I need to teach my son concerning wisdom
Itches that still ain't scratched
Doors and closets that still ain't latched
And fish I need to catch
Yeah I may be tired 
but I ain't leaving with
Unfinished business

I'm going to learn a few new chords 
on this beat-up old guitar
And I'm going to be strong enough
to not be ashamed of my old stars
And I'm going to run my engine hard 
despite all my missing parts.
Spend the last of my years
trying to finish what I start
Unfinished business

Got songs that I still ain't sung
Old fights that I still ain't won
Things I need to teach my son concerning wisdom
Itches that still ain't scratched
Doors and closets that still ain't latched
And fish I need to catch
Yeah I may be tired
but I ain't leaving with any
Unfinished business

I've got kisses that I still ain't kissed
"I love you"s that ain't left my lips
Dreams beyond my fingertips
But I'm reaching, 
hey I'm reaching
I may be tired but I ain't leaving with
Yeah I may be tired but I ain't leaving with
Unfinished 
business

I got a few more things I need to do.


Thanks David

This is what leadership sounds like...........

      Another lesson I think we may take, just throwing our minds back to our meeting here ten months ago and now, is that appearances are often very deceptive, and as Kipling well says, we must

                              ... meet with Triumph and Disaster
                              And treat those two impostors just the same.

      You cannot tell from appearances how things will go.  Sometimes imagination makes things out far worse than they are;  yet without imagination not much can be done.  Those people who are imaginative see many more dangers than perhaps exist, certainly more than will happen;  but then they must also pray to be given that extra courage to carry this far-reaching imagination.  But for everyone, surely, what we have gone through in this period  - I am addressing myself to the School - surely from this period of ten months this is the lesson:  never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never  - in nothing, great or small, large or petty - never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense.  Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy.  We stood all alone a year ago, and to many countries it seemed that our account was closed, we were finished.   All this tradition of ours, our songs, our School history, this part of the history of this country, were gone and finished and liquidated.
     Very different is the mood today.  Britain, other nations thought, had drawn a sponge across her slate.  But instead our country stood in the gap.  There was no flinching and no thought of giving in; and by what seemed almost a miracle to those outside these Islands, though we ourselves never doubted it, we now find ourselves in a position where I can say that we can be sure that we have only to persevere to conquer.

-Winston Churchill, as excerpted from his second speech as Prime Minister at his Alma Mater, the Harrow School,  October 29, 1941.   More on Winston here.

Though not always obvious.........................

                        "Patience is also a form of action."
                        -Rodin

An after and before twofer.........................................

Stevie Wonder........................................We Can Work It Out



Stevie Wonder......................................................Fingertips

Sort of like life its ownself..............................

"Golf is deceptively simple and endlessly complicated.  A child can play it well and a grown man can never master it.  Any single round is full of unexpected triumphs and perfect shots that end in disaster.  It is almost a science, yet it is a puzzle without an answer.  It is gratifying and tantalizing, precise and unpredictable;  it requires complete concentration and total relaxation.  It satisfies the soul and frustrates the intellect.  It is at the same time rewarding and maddening -- and it is without doubt the greatest game mankind has ever invented"
-Arnold Palmer

Sail.................................................

“Life is short, break the rules, forgive quickly, kiss slowly, love truly, laugh uncontrollably, and never regret anything that made you smile. Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn't do than by the ones you did. So throw off the bowlines. Sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”
-attributed to Mark Twain

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

The Beatles.........................................We Can Work It Out

On learning............................

"We've all heard that we have to learn from our mistakes, but I think it's more important to learn from successes.  If you learn only from your mistakes, you are inclined to learn only errors."
-Norman Vincent Peale

And the leading cause of death, of course,......

..............................................................................is birth.

More fun with "stylized facts" from Yoram Bauman, as the stand-up economists discourses on Hyper-inflation in Hell.

Wouldn't it be cool to be that kind of person...?

"I can feel the twinkle of his eye in his handshake."
-Helen Keller