A few of my favorite things................

...............................................if only we could.

...............................................Stress Reduction 201.

...............................................Forgotten Americans

...............................................Reaching for my dictionary

Our favorite Canadian.................

....................offers his take on the recent election.  A wee sample:

4. If you think Trump is bad, you should read some history. It wouldn’t take much. His views, in the main (as stated, not as falsely attributed), would have passed as middle-of-the-road liberal about one generation ago. On many of the issues, Trump is farther Left. By traditional standards for despots and demagogues, he strikes me as fey.

5. Which is why I despise him. I didn’t like liberal mediocrities then, and I don’t like them now.

6. On the specific question of his taste in fixtures and furnishings (including likely cabinet choices), we must be firm. On the basis of his Manhattan apartment alone, I’d be inclined to appoint a Special Prosecutor.

7. I will hope he is sufficiently Machiavellian to nominate Ted Cruz for the Scalia vacancy on the Supreme Court.

True, this................................

“If someone places a thorn in your way and you place another thorn in his way, there will be thorns everywhere.”

-Nizamuddin Auliya, 14th century Sufi from India

via

On alignments..........................

     Now we all had an alignment of self-interests.  We all had skin in the game.  No one succeeded unless we all succeeded.   The alignment of self-interests is that magic place where difficult projects, or in politics where initiatives or policies, suddenly take off.

-John Hickenlooper,  The Opposite of Woe:  My Life in Beer and Politics

Marvel..................................

15.  Great is this power of memory, exceedingly great, O my God -- a large and boundless inner hall! Who has plumbed the depths of it?  Yet it is a power of my mind, and it belongs to my nature. But I do not myself grasp all that I am. Thus the mind is far too narrow to contain itself. But where can that part of it be which it does not contain? Is it outside and not in itself? How can it be, then, that the mind cannot grasp itself? A great marvel rises in me; astonishment seizes me. Men go forth to marvel at the heights of mountains and the huge waves of the sea, the broad flow of the rivers, the vastness of the ocean, the orbits of the stars, and yet they neglect to marvel at themselves. 

-Saint Augustine,  as culled from Confessions,  Book X, Chapter VIII

fortune's fickle favours........................

     If men were able to exercise complete control over all their circumstances, or if continuous good fortune were always their lot, they would never be prey to superstition.  But since they are often reduced to such straits as to be without any resources, and their immoderate greed for fortune's fickle favours often make them the wretched victims of alternating hopes and fears, the result is that, for the most part, their credulity knows no bounds.  In critical times they are swayed this way or that by the slightest impulse, especially so when they are wavering between the emotions of hope and fear; yet at other times they are overconfident, boastful, and arrogant.

-Baruch Spinoza, from the preface to Theological-Political Treatise, Second Edition as translated by Samuel Shirley

A willful lack of understanding.......................

Liberals weren’t completely caught unawares. We recognized the rage—how could we not? We saw it in our social-media feeds all year. We read (and wrote) endless articles featuring reporters edging out to Red America, armed with a notebook and a pretense of empathy, to see what Trumpism was all about, why the fever seemed to be running so high among these people.


And what did that produce? The daily filling of a basket of deplorables. I sometimes refer to it as “point-and-laugh” liberalism. Our relentless mockery of Trump and his followers helped fuel the backlash and make it spread.
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And yes, the Democratic standard-bearer commented that “you could put half of Trump’s supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables.”


However correct that quote might have been, it contributed to this anger and stoked it.


-Both excerpts from this Dave Dayen essay.


Thanks Michael

These may be true...........................

But then the impossible happened. As Salena Zito had presciently written in The Atlantic: “The press takes him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally.”


“As flawed a candidate as Trump was, he had his finger on the pulse,” Kevin said. “The polls were off because nobody wanted to admit that they were going to vote for him. But it’s a populist revolt and a lot of people believed in Trump’s message: too much regulation, too much government. The whole thing is a bunch of guys getting rich on Capitol Hill and not paying attention to the people who elected them. They stay in Congress a couple years, then move on to K Street and call on the same people who replaced them.”


When Trump beat 16 seasoned pols in the Republican primary, Kevin wrote, that should have sent a clear message that the public was fed up with political insiders, including Hillary, who “has been in the public eye for 25 years,” with an image “cast in concrete.”


-all excerpted from this Maureen Dowd NYT essay

About the "elites"...................

The elites of the East and West coasts, betraying a dangerous arrogance, were dismissive and ignorant to the last of the heartland anger feeding Trump’s rise.


-Roger Cohen, from this NYT op-ed, which may now (or soon will be) be hidden behind the paywall.


Reading Cohen's essay I couldn't help but think, "he really should get out more.  There is a whole great country not located on the coasts.  He might try visiting sometime."

If you say so...................................

Here's hoping our hobgoblins are imaginary....

"The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary."


-H.L. Mencken

A worthy sentiment..............................

"I'm keeping my privacy about how I voted, so don't even ask. I wish the best for my fellow Americans and hope that whatever happens, you'll be able to handle it."


-Ann Althouse, as excerpted from here

Journeying.....................

"And the world cannot be discovered by a journey of miles,
no matter how long,
but only by a spiritual journey,
a journey of one inch,
very arduous and humbling and joyful,
by which we arrive at the ground at our feet,
and learn to be at home."

Wendell Berry : A Spiritual Journey


via

A time for judging.....................

"Judgement is given to men that they may use it."

-John Stuart Mill

Burke on liberty.....................

You hope, sir, that I think the French deserving of liberty. I certainly do. I certainly think that all men who desire it, deserve it. It is not the reward of our merit, or the acquisition of our industry. It is our inheritance. It is the birthright of our species. We cannot forfeit our right to it, but by what forfeits our title to the privileges of our kind. I mean the abuse, or oblivion, of our rational faculties, and a ferocious indocility which makes us prompt to wrong and violence, destroys our social nature, and transforms us into something little better than the description of wild beasts. To men so degraded, a state of strong constraint is a sort of necessary substitute for freedom; since, bad as it is, it may deliver them in some measure from the worst of all slavery—that is, the despotism of their own blind and brutal passions.

You have kindly said, that you began to love freedom from your intercourse with me. Permit me then to continue our conversation, and to tell you what the freedom is that I love, and that to which I think all men entitled. This is the more necessary, because, of all the loose terms in the world, liberty is the most indefinite. It is not solitary, unconnected, individual, selfish liberty, as if every man was to regulate the whole of his conduct by his own will. The liberty I mean is social freedom. It is that state of things in which liberty is secured by the equality of restraint. A constitution of things in which the liberty of no one man, and no body of men, and no number of men, can find means to trespass on the liberty of any person, or any description of persons, in the society. This kind of liberty is, indeed, but another name for justice; ascertained by wise laws, and secured by well-constructed institutions. I am sure that liberty, so incorporated, and in a manner identified with justice, must be infinitely dear to every one who is capable of conceiving what it is. But whenever a separation is made between liberty and justice, neither is, in my opinion, safe.

-Edmund Burke, as excerpted from this 1789 letter to Charles-Jean-François Depont 

Checking in with Aesop.............

     A carter was driving a wagon along a country lane, when the wheels sank deep into a rut.  The rustic driver, stupefied and aghast, stood looking at the wagon, and did nothing but utter loud cries to Hercules to come and help him.  Hercules, it is said, appeared and thus addressed him:  "Put your shoulders to the wheels, my man.  Goad on your bullocks, and never pray to me for help, until you have done your best to help yourself, or depend upon it you will henceforth pray in vain"

     Self-help is the best help

-Aesop's Fables,  Hercules and the Wagoner

Beware.......................

“Beware the man of a single book.” 

-Saint Thomas Aquinas

Privilege........................

 If  this book has a lesson, it is that we are awfully lucky to be here-and by "we" I mean every living thing. To attain any kind of life in this universe of ours appears to be quite an achievement. As humans we are doubly lucky, of course: We enjoy not only the privilege of existence but also the singular ability to appreciate it and even, in a multitude of ways, to make it better. It is a talent we have only barely begun to grasp.

-Bill Bryson,  *A Short History of Nearly Everything

enlargeable photo and explanation here

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

"The human brain is like any muscle in the body — it can get fatigued and can’t always operate at full speed. Willpower can be fleeting once decision fatigue sets in."

-Ben Carlson, as culled from here

(A refresher course on sleep may be found here.)

A suggestion that we get a grip...........

"We are in the midst of our tenth consecutive 'most important election in our lifetime!'  This nonsense is really starting to get old."

-As excerpted from this brief primer on the history of American electoral politics (and he left out the, arguably, most important election of all - 1800's Adams v Jefferson).

Some random signs.....................................

Fair and balanced..................

Aussies Clarke and Dawe take a look at our election:

Be careful what you wish for....................

"America is, and always has been, undecided about whether it will be the United States of Tom or the United States of Huck. The United States of Tom looks at misery and says: Hey, I didn't do it. It looks at inequity and says: All my life I busted my butt to get where I am, so don't come crying to me. Tom likes kings, codified nobility, unquestioned privilege. Huck likes people, fair play, spreading the truck around. Whereas Tom knows, Huck wonders. Whereas Huck hopes, Tom presumes. Whereas Huck cares, Tom denies. These two parts of the American Psyche have been at war since the beginning of the nation, and come to think of it, these two parts of the World Psyche have been at war since the beginning of the world, and the hope of the nation and of the world is to embrace the Huck part and send the Tom part back up the river, where it belongs."

-George Saunders

Don't know about you, but, the obvious over-simplification aside, it seems from here that we need both Tom and Huck.  Let the "war" continue.

Probably because it's an individual thing....

"The History of the World is not the theatre of happiness."

-Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel