Thirty-nine years ago...................

The year was 1980...................................................

Michael Stanley Band.............................I'll Never Need Anyone
                                                      More (Than I Need You Tonight)

Words matter.................................

..............................Use them kindly, because they really matter.

All your questions.............................

....................................................................answered here.

Orwell or Huxley...................

...........................It almost feels like a perfect storm of both.

via

The view.............................

.......................................from Planet Earth:

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

The Grass Roots.......................................I'd Wait A Million Years

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

Tommy James & The Shondells..................Sweet Cherry Wine

This is me................................

..............................................................waving the white flag of surrender.  Michael Stanley's Stagepass makes my all-time great list.  While Making Movies is not my favorite Dire Straits album (Brothers in Arms is), it is pretty darn good.  Ditto U2's Boy.  1980 will no longer be found in the "so-so music" file.  There may be two lessons here:  first, don't argue music with Kurt Harden unless you're prepared to lose; second, if do you want to argue with Kurt, make sure bourbon and cigars are at hand - it makes the losing easier.

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

The Temptations..........................Run Away Child, Running Wild

Betting on the rocks..........................

“Every deep thinker is more afraid of being understood than of being misunderstood.” 

“God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him. How shall we comfort ourselves, the murderers of all murderers? What was holiest and mightiest of all that the world has yet owned has bled to death under our knives: who will wipe this blood off us? What water is there for us to clean ourselves? What festivals of atonement, what sacred games shall we have to invent? Is not the greatness of this deed too great for us? Must we ourselves not become gods simply to appear worthy of it?”

“You have your way. I have my way. As for the right way, the correct way, and the only way, it does not exist.” 


-Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

cartoon via

Pretty much true of real estate too..............

     Probably the biggest reason it's so hard to outperform the market, other than the fact that competition has heated up so much over the past few decades, is because most portfolio managers either don't have the requisite patience to think and act for the long term or their investors don't (it's kind of a chicken or the egg problem).  Academic research and real world results of many of the great investors of all-time show that there are strategies that beat the market over longer time frames.  It just takes extreme patience and discipline, something not enough investors have.

-Ben Carlson, A Wealth of Common Sense:  Why Simplicity Trumps Complexity In Any Investment Plan

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

     For most human beings, what to do with our hands is an issue.  Until we need an opposable thumb to pick something up, our hands have the social utility of an inflamed appendix.  Once upon a time we busied them by smoking.  Bogart and Bacall taught us how to do this with style.  Now that that has been declared unhealthy and a universal stigma, we employ our idle fingers fondling our cell phones.

-Steve Martini, Blood Flag

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

Stevie Wonder........................Yester-Me, Yester-You, Yesterday

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

via

You only get one life...........................

..............................don't waste it comparing yourself to others:

There is one thing that you’re better at than other people: being you. This is the only game you can really win.

Althouse travels........................

............to a place where the times are "morally bewildering."

Is it okay to disagree with Kurt Harden?

....................In my wee corner of the blogosphere this might be considered risky, but I'm going out on the limb and say that 1980 was just a so-so year in the history of music.  Now 1969, that was something special!

Tony Isola..............................

.............................................................................convinces me.

Next time you hear a financial pundit predicting a market crash, depression, or impending armageddon because of some temporary event that’s commonplace in history, take a thoughtful pause.

There’s one constant in the prediction business – they’re almost always wrong.

Trust me, I’m an expert

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

Richie Havens...........................................Minstrel From Gault

There is a price.........................

To a distressed person who came to him for help the Master said, "Do you really want a cure?"

"If I did not, would I bother to come to you?"

"Oh yes.  Most people do."

"What for?"

"Not for a cure.  That's painful.  For relief."

To his disciples the Master said, "People who want a cure, provided they can have it without pain, are like those who favor progress, provided they can have it without change."

-Anthony de Mello,  One Minute Wisdom

A key step in the right direction............

     Charles Ellis once said, "Forecasting the future of any variable is difficult, forecasting the interacting futures of many changing variables is even more difficult, and estimating how other expert investors will interpret such complex changes is extraordinarily difficult."  It can make your head hurt just thinking about it, but its true.  No one is ever going to completely understand the exact forces that drive the markets for the simple fact that no one can predict the future.  A willingness to admit what it is that you don't know frees you up from the illusion of certainty in your predictive skills.

-Ben Carlson,  A Wealth of Common Sense

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

Richie Havens....................................It Could Be The First Day

On Crowds........................

....................................Josh Brown's post is here.  Quick take here:

Tenzing Norgay and Edmund Hillary conquered Mount Everest in 1953

"Being special requires taking a risk and doing something unproven – and difficult – before it becomes just another selfie opportunity for everyone else."

The line forms at the rear.  Mount Everest in 2019

Seems true............................

        via

Quite possibly..............................

.....................one day my claim to fame will be that, a long time ago, we were friends at Penn Valley Elementary School. 

The Wonder that is...........................

..........................................................................................Doug.

The great undiscovered ocean..................

The passage from Newton's pen that I like best is:  

          I do not know what I may appear to the world, but to
          myself I seem to have been only like a boy playing on
          the seashore and diverting myself in now and then
          finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary,
          while the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me.

To me, Newton's pebbles and shells are indeed smooth and pretty because they are so simple.  However, they did not seem simple before he recognized their nature.  Mankind shall find more pebbles and more beauty.
     The ocean of truth now offers a vista of a hundred billion suns clustered in the galaxy Galileo glimpsed with his telescope.  The universe contains billions of galaxies which, having started 15 billion years ago in a small space, now are moving apart at tremendous speeds.  Newton pointed out that the laws that apply to galaxies are the same as the laws that apply to atoms.  Regardless of how different galaxies, atoms and the application of laws may superficially appear, their common consistency is now clearly visible.
      But the simplicity in the structure and origin of the universe has not as yet been fully discovered, and therefore all people can repeat with Newton, the great ocean of truth is still undiscovered.

-Edward Teller,  The Pursuit of Simplicity

On the nature of us humans..................

"Human nature is stronger than any individual, than any institution or technological invention.  It ends up shaping what we create to reflect itself and its primitive roots.  It moves us around like pawns.  Ignore the laws at your peril."

-A cover blurb from Robert Greene's The Laws of Human Nature

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

      In September 2016, the influential blogger and commentator Andrew Sullivan wrote a 7,000-word essay for New York magazine  titled "I Used to Be a Human Being."  Its subtitle was alarming:  "An endless bombardment of news and gossip and images has rendered us manic information addicts.  It broke me.  It might break you, too."

-Cal Newport, from the introduction to Digital Minimalism:  Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World

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

Lee Marvin............................................................Wand'rin Star




At the movies.....................................................Paint Your Wagon