Good guys/Bad guys.........................

 ......Maybe two competing truths can be true at once. 

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

more fun here 

guerilla warfare............................?

 

Sounds of the Season............................

Mannheim Steamroller..............1984 Christmas Album

Strange and strong.......................

 Don't worry if you find you're interested in different things than other people. The stranger your tastes in interestingness, the better. Strange tastes are often strong ones, and a strong taste for work means you'll be productive. And you're more likely to find new things if you're looking where few have looked before.

-culled from this Paul Graham essay

I still say they are just guessing............

 Explanation: Massive stars in our Milky Way Galaxy live spectacular lives. Collapsing from vast cosmic clouds, their nuclear furnaces ignite and create heavy elements in their cores. After only a few million years for the most massive stars, the enriched material is blasted back into interstellar space where star formation can begin anew. The expanding debris cloud known as Cassiopeia A is an example of this final phase of the stellar life cycle. Light from the supernova explosion that created this remnant would have been first seen in planet Earth's sky about 350 years ago, although it took that light 11,000 years to reach us. This sharp NIRCam image from the James Webb Space Telescope shows the still hot filaments and knots in the supernova remnant. The whitish, smoke-like outer shell of the expanding blast wave is about 20 light-years across. Light echoes from the massive star's cataclysmic explosion are also identified in Webb's detailed image of supernova remnant Cassiopeia A.

-via the APOD site

together.........................

In the journey to the light,
the dark moments
should not threaten.
Belief
requires
that you hold steady.
Bend, if you will,
with the wind.
The tree is your teacher,
roots at once
more firm
from experience
in the soil
made fragile.

Your gentle dew will come
and a stirring
of power
to go on
towards the space
of sharing.

In the misery of the I,
in rage,
it is easy to cry out
against all others
but to weaken
is to die
in the misery of knowing
the journey abandoned
towards the sharing
of all human hope
and cries
is the loss
of all we know
of the divine
reclaimed
for our shared
humanity.
Hold firm.
Take care.
Come home
together.

-Michael D. Higgins,  Take Care

It's hard to get enough of........................

................................Charlie Munger. 

If you have to have enemies....................

 ..................................Doomers are my sworn enemies.

Sounds like.......................

 ................................heaven on earth:

Conversation with real people replaces an imaginary life on social media.

People care about what you have to say and are generally interested in hearing different viewpoints without considering you an enemy of the state. Rather than using the pretense of listening as an excuse for what they will opine about next, their questions are sincere and thoughtful.

As mantras go..................................

 ...............................................ouch.

A radical notion........................

.................................. face-to-face.

But tell us how you really feel................

 Perdition, thy name is entitlement. If I were forced to conjure up a single human characteristic lurking out there on the down low likely to be responsible for a societal implosion in the next few years, it just might be entitlement. The number of endlessly entitled and simultaneously clueless individuals out in the world is just stunning. I know that correlation is not causation, but, sweet Jesus Palomino, these two things sure do seem joined at the hip to me.

-Martin Hackworth, from here

It's an election year.....................

....................so all bets are off:

 The Federal Reserve declared victory today, projecting a soft landing as its base case in the years ahead, with more cuts in short-term rates, and with inflation gradually getting back to its 2.0% goal without a recession.  Unfortunately, we think the Fed is declaring mission accomplished too early.

Brian Wesbury, from here

divided...................

 Perhaps absolute power, of the kind it enjoyed after the Cold War, corrupted absolutely. Whatever the cause, the United States is now sharply, militantly divided over the question of whether it even wants to be a Western country. 

-Christopher Caldwell, as cut-and-pasted from here

Thinking about...........................

 .........................................."I thinks"

ability......................

 The deadliest flaw in human nature is the ability to hold an unshakable opinion based on inadequate evidence.

-anonymous/unknown, but found here

Showing up.......................

 .............................on Kurt's radar is an honor.

People just don't.........................

 ..................talk that way anymore:

Books are the best of things, well used; abused, among the worst. What is the right use? What is the one end, which all means go to effect? They are for nothing but to inspire. I had better never see a book, than to be warped by its attraction clean out of my own orbit, and made a satellite instead of a system. The one thing in the world, of value, is the active soul. This every man is entitled to; this every man contains within him, although, in almost all men, obstructed, and as yet unborn. The soul active sees absolute truth; and utters truth, or creates. In this action, it is genius; not the privilege of here and there a favorite, but the sound estate of every man. In its essence, it is progressive. The book, the college, the school of art, the institution of any kind, stop with some past utterance of genius. This is good, say they, - let us hold by this. They pin me down. They look backward and not forward. But genius looks forward: the eyes of man are set in his forehead, not in his hindhead: man hopes: genius creates.  Whatever talents may be, if the man create not, the pure efflux of the Deity is not his; - cinders and smoke there may be, but not yet flame. There are creative manners, there are creative actions, and creative words; manners, actions, words, that is, indicative of no custom or authority, but springing spontaneous from the mind's own sense of good and fair.

-Ralph Waldo Emerson, as excerpted from The American Scholar