Sit..........................................

"Sit close to someone with a big heart, sit in the shade of a tree with fresh leaves."

-Attributed to Rumi, by Brad Gooch in Rumi's Secret:  The Life of the Sufi Poet of Love

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

     The imposter borrowed the name of Neville Manchin, an actual professor of American literature at Portland State and soon-to-be doctoral student at Stanford.  In his letter, on perfectly forged college stationary, "Professor Manchin" claimed to be a budding scholar of F. Scott Fitzgerald and was keen to see the great writer's "manuscripts and papers" during a forthcoming trip to the East Coast.  The letter was addressed to Dr. Jeffrey Brown, Director of Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Firestone Library, Princeton University.  It arrived with a few others, was duly sorted and passed along, and eventually landed on the desk of Ed Folk, a career junior librarian whose task, among several other monotonous ones, was to verify the credentials of the person who wrote the letter.

-John Grisham,  Camino Island

He cracks me up....................

Amazon's offer to purchase Whole Foods has been in the news:

To hell with the consequence..........

Melissa Etheridge.......................................I Want To Come Over

My Sweetie and I......................

.....................just got home from seeing mega-talented and audience-connecting Melissa Etheridge perform at the wondrous Midland Theatre.  She featured a number of songs first produced by Stax Records, including one by William Bell.  Wasn't this one though:

William Bell..........................................I Forgot To Be You Lover

It is too depressing.......................

..............to contemplate, so I suggest you skip this Spengler post.

Roles..............................

     Feminist ideology has never dealt honestly with the role of the mother in human life.  Its portrayal of history as male oppression and female victimage is a gross distortion of the facts.  There was a rational division of labor from the hunter gatherer period that had its roots not in the male desire to subjugate and imprison but in the procreative burden which has fallen on women from nature.  It is woman who bears most of the responsibility in the process of procreation.  The male contribution to procreation is momentary, a mere pinprick, but the human female makes an enormous investment in the nine months of pregnancy, which could formerly not be forestalled or controlled as it is today.  Even now, pregnancy is a risky business that can result in the death of the mother.  Anything can go wrong and often does.  Before modern medicine, the mortality rate in childbirth was enormous.  In early history, women in advanced pregnancy or just after childbirth were extraordinarily vulnerable;  they could not fend for themselves and required the protection of men.  Feminist theory has been grotesquely unfair to men in refusing to acknowledge the enormous care that most men have provided to women and children.  The atrocious exceptions have been used by feminist theorists to blame all men, when over the whole of human history, men have given heroically of their energy and labor and indeed their lives to benefit and protect women and children.  Feminism has been very small-minded in the way it has treated male history.  Feminism cannot continue with this poisoned rhetoric - it is dangerous for young women to be indoctrinated to think in that negative way about men.

-Camille Paglia, as culled from here

Skin in the game..........................

Besides antifragility, another theme Nassim Taleb has been stressing of late is "skin in the game": the idea that people who face the consequences of their actions are more likely both to learn and to behave responsibly, than people who are shielded from such consequences.


Of course, Taleb is smart enough and educated enough to know that this is not an entirely new idea, and that he is expanding upon the intimations of earlier thinkers here. Even so, it was interesting to see Michael Oakeshott sound this motif so clearly in "Rational Conduct":

"And politics is a field of activity peculiarly subject to the lure of this 'rational' ideal. If you start by being merely 'intelligent' about a boiler or an electrical generator you are likely to be pulled up short by an explosion: but in politics all that happens is war and chaos, which you do not immediately connect with your error."


Gene Callahan, as excerpted from here

When you have more money...............

............than God, you can do this sort of thing.   Glad to see it happen.

Human nature............................

When you rule out the reality of human nature from the tool set, you’re left with solutions that are contrary to human nature.

-Zman

Well, this is fun.............................

.................................Any Major Dude With Half A Heart offers an eclectic mix of Beatles covers, mostly from Sgt Pepper's.  A sample, from 1968:

A sign of the times..................

      via

Consumer greed......................

.................................................Mark J. Perry wants to spoil the fun:

Here’s a dirty little secret about capitalism: consumers, not corporations, run the show.  If you find something about the marketplace objectionable, it would be more appropriate to blame those who actually call the shots: the ruthless, cutthroat, and disloyal American consumers.

Standing your ground......................

....................................................................for a really long time!

On the importance of.....................

....................."Devil's advocates".  Full post here.  Conclusion here:

It’s a scourge to be led by a great man, then, unless the great man is open-minded and big hearted enough to encourage others to take issue with his thinking. If not, the collective military mind closes. Doubt dissipates when it’s needed most—in the topsy-turvy realm of violent interaction among combatants determined to impose their will on one another. An institution unable or unwilling to entertain second thoughts about its assumptions or reasoning is an institution that has set itself up for failure. So it was for the Imperial Japanese Navy at the Battle of Midway. So it could be for today’s U.S. Navy, or any other institution.

Certitude is the bane of group decision-making. Physicist Richard Feynman beseeches researchers to “leave the door to the unknown ajar,” even when a scientific law appears settled. That’s doubly true for military and naval bureaucracies. After all, martial science is never settled. We should all be doubters—and seek out skeptics of Feynman’s ilk to poke holes in our schemes. Whether his input is right, wrong, or somewhere in between, the devil’s advocate invigorates strategic and operational discourses—subjecting proposals to penetrating scrutiny and bolstering the final product.

thanks craig

My advice...................................?

......................................................Get a lot while you are young.

       via

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

From the wide world of TV advertising........................McDonald's

Inflected......................................

     

     Too often we talk about our memories as if they were banks into which we deposit new information when it comes in, and from which we withdraw old information when we need it.  But that metaphor doesn't reflect the way our memories really work.  Our memories are always with us, shaping and being shaped by information flowing through our senses, in a continuous feedback loop.   Everything we see, hear, and smell is inflected by all the things we've seen, heard, and smelled in the past.

-Joshua Foer,  Moonwalking With Einstein:  The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

Warren Meyer...........................

..............the author of the read-worthy Coyote Blog is pondering an end to his blogging.   Here's hoping he continues.   An excerpt:

The world seems to be moving away from intellectualism.  I say this not because Trump voters were somehow rejecting intellectualism, but because intellectuals themselves seem to be rejecting it.  They act like children, they are turning universities into totalitarian monoculters, and they compete with each other to craft mindless 140-character "gotchas" on Twitter.  I challenge you to even find a forum today for intellectual exchange between people who disagree with one another.  In politics, Trump clearly rejects intellectualism but for whatever reasons, the Democratic opposition has as well.

Breed.......................

"Order imposed from without must always breed disorder."

-J. Krishnamurti

Unknown................................

It is not what we know that is important, it is what we do not know."

-attributed to Charles Kettering

image via
thanks Ray

This might have been more..................

..............interesting, and valuable, if the author had gone a bit more in depth and looked at what those "disproportionately burdened" by student debt majored in.  When it comes to earning power, not all degrees are made equal.

Might be boring to you big city types............

............but to us simple country folk, this is really good news.

"The Trump administration laid out its highly anticipated plan for overhauling bank rules" yesterday, and it is pretty good I guess? Here is the Treasury Department report, and just as a matter of form, it generally seems to have been written by professionals who are familiar with bank regulation, which I can't say I entirely saw coming. (It "was spearheaded by Craig Phillips, a former BlackRock Inc. executive who was major fundraiser for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.") 

As for content, there is a lot of it, and it is fairly miscellaneous, without too many unifying themes. One broad but boring theme seems to be that smallish banks -- below $10 or $50 billion in assets, depending on the provision -- should be exempted from Dodd-Frank stress tests and the Volcker Rule and other rules. I cannot get that excited about small-bank deregulation, but if you are a small bank this report will probably be pretty exciting for you.

-culled from this Matt Levine post

Optimists or Pessimists.......

...................Who is more insightful?   Marginal Revolution covers the story.  Don't have the answer here, but will stand by long-held Rule 27:  Always bet on the optimist.

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

...................................a Gerry Goffin/Carole King tune;

The Turtles..........................................................So Goes Love

On friendship.............................

“What sweetness is left in life, if you take away friendship? Robbing life of friendship is like robbing the world of the sun. A true friend is more to be esteemed than kinsfolk." 

-attributed to Cicero

courtesy of

Weil and Mann one more time.........

Paul Revere and The Raiders................................................Kicks

Political hospice..........................?

..............................Where would we be without the "experts"?

Being a “working class white voter” does not make us inferior or intellectually stunted so much that we need to be (re)educated in liberally biased schools of doublespeak and thoughtlessness. All we want to do is work a good job that does present a modest challenge, that does feel rewarding, keeps the lights on and our bellies full and after all of that, we just want to come home, drink some beers, pet the dog and enjoy the sunset in our small suburban slice of heaven. For us, that is what life is all about. We don’t care about revolutions, microaggressions, or how many physical and economic descriptors we can apply to a sub group of a sub group of a sub group. People like Gest and Capehart are more important to themselves, like Narcissus was to his reflection; eventually, they will drown in their obsession. And when they do, they’re still gonna be at the counter of a Mom and Pop shop asking some “white working class voter” with grease on his or her face “What’s wrong with my Prius?”

-as excerpted from here


via

This is just too fun to ignore...........

Booker T. & The M.G.s....................................Time Is Tight

One of those days..............

A second-hand people.................

     Man has always asked the question:  what is it all about?  Has life any meaning, at all?  He sees the enormous confusion of life, the brutalities, the revolts, the wars, the endless division of religion, ideology and nationality, and with a sense of deep abiding frustration he asks, what is one to do, what is this thing we call living, is there anything beyond it?
     And not finding this nameless thing of a thousand names which he has always sought, he has cultivated faith - faith in a saviour or an ideal - and faith invariably breeds violence. ...

    For centuries we have been spoon-fed by our teachers, by our authorities, by our books, by our saints.  We say, "Tell me all about it - what lies beyond the hills and the mountains and the earth?" and we are satisfied with their descriptions, which means we live on words and our life is shallow and empty.  We are a second-hand people.   We have lived on what we have been told,  either guided by our inclinations, our tendencies, or compelled to accept by circumstances and environment.  We are the result of all kinds of influence and there is nothing new in us, nothing that we have discovered for ourselves;  nothing original, pristine, clear.

-J. Krishnamurti,   Freedom from the Known

Seth peeks into the future...........

..............................................(talking technology not politics).

"Revolutions are impossible, until they're not, and then they seem totally normal."

-as extracted from here

Aspirationally....................

Memory...........................

     Buzan was eager to sell me on the idea that his own memory has been improving year after year, even as he ages.  "People assume that memory decline is a function of being human and therefore natural," he said.  "But that is a logical error, because normal is not necessarily natural.  The reason for the monitored decline in human memory performance is because we actually do anti-Olympic training.  What we do to the brain is the equivalent of sitting someone down to train for the Olympics and making sure he drinks ten cans of beer a day, smokes fifty cigarettes, drives to work, and maybe does some exercise once a month that's violent and damaging, and spends the rest of the time watching television.  And then we wonder why that person doesn't do well in the Olympics.  That's what we've been doing with memory."

-Joshua Foer,  Moonwalking With Einstein:  The Art and Science of Remembering Everything

Context, not content....................

     Detachment from positionalities - and especially the positionalities occasioned by labeling - leads to serenity, freedom, and security.  Greater serenity arises from relating to the context of life rather than to the content, which is primarily a game board of interacting egos.  This broader style of relating to life leads to greater compassion and emancipation from being at the effect of the world.

     Like any limiting ego position, it is not position itself that requires relinquishment, but the emotional payoff or energy that holding on to that position provides to the ego.

-David R. Hawkins

More Goffin and King....................

The Animals.............................................Don't Bring Me Down

Gone, but not forgotten...................

......................co-written by Gerry Goffin in 1983

Roberta Flack & Peabo Bryson........Tonight, I Celebrate My Love

On being anti-charlatan.................

“The reason that ‘guru’ is such a popular word is because ‘charlatan’ is so hard to spell.” 

-William Bernstein

Quote above opens this Ben Carlson post, wherein Ben politely asks "legendary investors" who have called six of the last zero market crashes to please stop doing that.

Accurate modeling is difficult...................

...............................as is long term investing.  Real estate anyone?

We're complicated..........................

“And what we students of history always learn is that the human being is a very complicated contraption and that they are not good or bad but are good and bad and the good comes out of the bad and the bad out of the good, and the devil take the hindmost.” 

-Robert Penn Warren

thanks David

Positive proof that I'm not the only one.....

.........................who believes "offbeat and quirky" is a good thing.

Marching orders.......................

Great moments in American history.......

* I got this figure of speech from Comey's testimony (which I discussed here). Comey claimed that he used an intermediary to leak his memo to the press because reporters were "camping at the end of [his] driveway," so for him to just hand them something "would be like feeding seagulls at the beach."

-via Althouse

Weil and Mann re-visited...................

Max Frost and  The Troopers.................Shape Of Things To Come

Uh-oh...................................

This trust in public institutions among Boomers is natural. Most of them grew up in a high trust culture. When they watched TV in the 50’s, the people making the shows were in love with America and promoted 1950’s values. Even into the 60’s, the mass media was supportive of America. When the culture began to collapse, the media seemed to be on the side of those good hearted Progressives trying to make things better for blacks, Jews, women and the disposed around the world. The media was all about good intentions.

Later generations came of age assuming that what was on television was a deliberate lie intended to have them buy stuff. Today’s youth have come of age in a time when the media is clearly the church choir for the managerial elite.

-excerpted from The Coming Boomercide

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

I was arrested at Eno's diner.  At twelve o'clock.  I was eating eggs and drinking coffee.  A late breakfast, not lunch.  I was wet and tired after a long walk in heavy rain.  All the way from the highway to the edge of town.

-Lee Child,  Killing Floor

Ed. Comment:  If you enjoy Child's Jack Reacher tales, this is the first one.  If you buy the paperback edition it may also contain a preface from Child about the why, how, and who of Jack Reacher.  You might also then share my utter disdain for whoever thought it was a good idea to cast Tom Cruise as the cinematic Reacher.

The Execupundit offers.......................

..................a great list of British films.  Might we add one?

1967 was a wondrous year............

The Human Beinz............................................................Noboby

Well, ok...............................

Recognizing the truth that all.................

........................................children are different, one should not overlook the impact of good parenting.

Beautiful........................

My Sweetie and I ventured to the amazing Ohio Theatre to see the show Beautiful:  The Carole King Musical.  If you are ever presented the opportunity, do go to this show.  It was fabulous.  Of course, some of us are children of the '60s, and Carole King contributed greatly to the soundtrack of our lives.   Somehow I made it this far in life without every owning Tapestry.  Our friends at Amazon are now busy correcting that.

Weil and Mann...........................

One of the story lines of  Beautiful:  The Carole King Musical was Goffin and King's friendship and rivalry with the song writing team of Cynthia Weil and Barry Mann.  The four of them are responsible for an amazing amount of the early 1960s music.  A twofer from Weil and Mann:

Gone, but not forgotten..................

Eva Cassidy....................................................... Over The Rainbow

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

The Doors..........................................................People Are Strange

Gone, but not forgotten................

Paul Desmond..................................................................Take Five

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

The Doors......................................................Love Me Two Times

Gone, but not forgotten...............

Peggy Lee...................................................................Fever

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

The Doors................................................................Strange Days

Gone, but not forgotten..................

Ella Fitzgerald.............................................................Summertime

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

The Kinks................................................................Two Sisters

Within..............................

All forms of loss are a confrontation to the ego, and its survival mechanisms.  All aspects of human life are transient, so to cling to any aspect eventually brings grief and loss.  Each incident, however, is an opportunity to search within for the source of life, which is ever present, unchanging, and not subject to loss or the ravages of time.

-David Hawkins

"I was keeping an eye on it"................

Source and back story here

Gone, but not forgotten.................

Johnny Winter.........................................Be Careful With A Fool

On dogmatism.......................

     Those who have a passion for quick returns and for an exact balance sheet of effort and reward may feel impatient of a study which cannot, in the present state of our knowledge, arrive at certainties, and which encourages what may be thought the time-wasting occupation of inconclusive meditation on insoluble problems.  To this view I cannot in any degree subscribe.  Some kind of philosophy is a necessity to all but the most thoughtless, and in the absence of knowledge it is almost sure to be  silly philosophy.  The result of this is that the human race becomes divided into rival groups of fanatics, each group firmly persuaded that is own brand of nonsense is sacred truth, while the other side's is damnable heresy.  Arians and Catholics, Crusaders and Moslems, Protestants and adherents of the Pope, Communists and Fascists, have filled large parts of the last 1,500 years with futile strife, when a little philosophy would have shown both sides in all these disputes that neither had any good reason to believe itself in the right.  Dogmatism is an enemy to peace, and an insuperable barrier to democracy.  In the present age, at least as much as in former times, it is the greatest of the mental obstacles to human happiness.

-Bertrand Russell, from his essay Philosophy For Laymen

Want a successful life?.................

...............The simplest, most effective plan would be to focus on each of these ideas - one new one per day for the next 1,111 days.  The three years will pass anyway, might as well put them to good use.

He does have a way with words............

"America, which is entertaining itself to inanition, has never experienced a scarcity of entertainment."

-George Will, as extracted from this WaPo column

My first reaction was it was a typo and he meant inattention, but this is George Will we are talking about.  His grasp of the language far and away exceeds mine.  Therefore, the Oracle Google was consulted:

Looks like his word usage is correct, again.

via Althouse

On emotional connection.......................or,

.........................................hoping computers stay unmotivated:

David Foster Wallace once said, "If you are immune to boredom, there is literally nothing you cannot accomplish."  In many ways, this is very true.  If you never get bored, you'd be a step closer to being a computer.  Computers do all kinds of boring things for us, and they do them quite well and very quickly.  Computers don't need game mechanics.  They don't get bored or unmotivated.  Yet we are designing offices as if we were machines - but we're not.  Jane McGonigal, a researcher and game designer, argues that by its very nature, efficiency entails removing game mechanics form the design of labor.  In other words, we're taking the fun out of it.
     Karl Marx was wrong about a lot of things in economics, but we're now realizing he was also right about some stuff.  When you remove people's emotional connection to their labor and treat them merely as machines that produce efforts, it's soul killing.

-Eric Barker,  Barking Up The Wrong Tree:  The Surprising Science Behind Why Everything You Know About Success Is (Mostly) Wrong

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

The Kinks........................................................Waterloo Sunset

That vision thing..............................

     As they began to plot in earnest for the general election, Hillary and her aides thought things were finally starting to go their way.  They believed Trump offered them the perfect foil against which to run a base-focused campaign with a dash of outreach to centrist Republicans fearful that he would be intemperate in an international crisis.  Trump was dividing the Republican establishment from its base in the primary, and the Clinton campaign saw an opportunity to take advantage of that rift.  If everything went right - and they thought there was a good chance of that happening - Hillary would be able to expand Democrats' dominance of the electoral map.  They couldn't or wouldn't see that Trump had spent the primaries courting voters in their backyard.

-Jonathan Allen & Amie Parnes,  Shattered:  Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign

My Sweetie and I..........................

....................ventured out to the wondrous Midland Theatre to experience the Marshall Tucker Band.  35 years ago Marshall Tucker approached #1 on my play list.  Only lead singer Doug Gray remains from the original version, but the new guys can play pretty well.  If you get the chance, go see them.

They opened with this beauty:

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

The Beach Boys............................................Let The Wind Blow

All one has to do is look around, and read.....

....a bit of history, to realize that the veneer of civilization is fairly thin.  Societal cohesion, once lost, is not an easy thing to peaceably re-create.  Martin Gurri offers an interesting essay on the subject, but leaves us all to draw our own conclusions and find our own solutions.   He begins this way:

Three years ago I remarked that the public was engaged in a messy divorce from the elites who run the great institutions of the industrial age.  That bit of scandal is by now notorious.  The elites, with more to lose, have come to regard the intrusive public as little better than a barbarian horde.  They know that a complex society can’t be managed without expertise, and long to return to a past in which the expert’s dictates went unquestioned.  Their watchword is “resistance,” but their dream is reaction.

The public, however, has so far proved irresistible, and the breach appears irreconcilable.  Established institutions, the political process, the economy, “the system,” all look to the public suspiciously like a lottery rigged in favor of the perpetual winners:  a class of insiders who manage to be both self-righteous and self-serving, arrogant and failed.  The terms of the divorce would send the lot of them packing.  This attitude is being called “populism” – a fraught word, rarely used by the populists themselves, connoting a politics of anger and negation played out on a minimalist ideological stage.  You can have populists of the right, like Donald Trump, or of the left, like Bernie Sanders.  What brings them together is a determination to do away with the present order of things, and an indifference to what comes after.

Gone, but not forgotten............

Roger Miller..........................................................King Of The Road

We will soon have a......................

...............35,000 square foot vacancy in a local shopping center.   Wonder if Amazon will bring a bookstore to Newark, Ohio?

via

Questions and answers............

....................................................with Deepak Chopra:

1.  How do you start your day?
I start my around 4:30, 5:00 in the morning. I meditate for two hour; it’s a practice of reflection and also of transcendence and experiencing the simplicity of awareness. Then I do 45 minutes to an hour of yoga either in a class or by myself depending on where I am. I then take a shower, get dressed and do a daily podcast on Facebook which is put on YouTube, answering people’s questions. Then I’m done. The rest of the day is whatever comes along, and I live it to the fullest with no resistance.

2. How do you end your day?
I end my evenings by going for a long walk, unless I’m at a social engagement. After the walk, I will reflect on the wonderful things that happened during the day and experience gratitude for them. I then close my eyes, observe my breathe and go to sleep -- 10:00 at the latest.

3. What’s a book that changed your mind?
A book by the Indian philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti called Freedom from the Known. I read it in medical school more than 45 years ago. It made me realize that every thought we have is the result of centuries of conditioning. We don’t have to own it, identify it or be victimized by it. We can observe it, let it go and live our lives totally free of resistance in every moment.

Thanks Andrew

QTIIPS...........................

Confused by the brouhaha over the Paris climate accord?   The Execupundit points to an essay by Keith Hennessey that might help explain a few things.   Essay here.  A few wee excerpts here:

"QTIIPS stands for Quantitatively Trivial Impact + Intense Political Symbolism."

"I therefore read the text of the agreement to see for myself. Doing so reinforced the view I developed when the agreement was concluded. Relative to the scope of the problem it is trying to solve, the Paris Agreement is quantitatively trivial. It is a set of weak process agreements, with many areas of ambiguous language and “flexibility” for countries to reinterpret their only loosely binding quantitative commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions many years from now.

The national leaders who supported Paris, including President Obama, had a political interest in overselling their policy accomplishment. Similarly, President Trump has a political interest in selling today’s move to his base as an enormous policy win, when to me it appears he is nullifying American participation in an agreement that on policy grounds was insignificant to begin with."

"QTIIPS issues are unfortunately great fits for our modern advocacy, political, and communications structures. Everyone can virtue signal to their heart’s content. No one has to read the text of the policy change, look at the numbers, or ask hard questions of a relevant policy expert. Political tribes can inhabit their comfort zones and preach to the converted while heaping scorn and derision on the other tribe. Passion abounds while everyone ignores the policy nerds saying “Um… I think the actual effect here is too small to matter.”"

Seems like this is happening a lot lately........

     
           via

Well, this explains a lot.........................

"There has been a fear, often unconscious, that clear thinking would lead to anarchy, and this fear has lead philosophers to hide in mists of fallacy and obscurity."

-Bertrand Russell, from his essay "Philosophy and Politics" as published in Unpopular Essays

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

The Beach Boys.........................................Here Comes The Night

Hope and Change...........................

Man is a restless animal, not content, like the boa constrictor to have a good meal once a month and sleep the rest of the time.  Man needs, for his happiness, not only the enjoyment of this and that, but hope and enterprise and change.

-Bertrand Russell, as excerpted from the essay Philosophy and Politics

Gone, but not forgotten.......................

Nina Simone.................................Don't Let Me Be Misunderstood

Still can't.........................

     On one of the flights, Hillary unburdened herself to Moore. "I don't understand what's happening with the country.  I can't get my arms around it,"  Hillary confided.  Moore just listened.  "How do I get answers to this?"  Hillary asked.
     It was a quandary that would plague her throughout the campaign.  After nearly a year on the campaign trail, and hundreds of stops at diners, coffee shops, and high school gymnasiums and just as many roundtables with young professionals and millworkers, Hillary still couldn't figure out why Americans were so angry or how she could bring the country together.

-Jonathan Allen & Amie Parnes,   Shattered:  Inside Hillary Clinton's Doomed Campaign

Wisdom........................

I have never placed the security of a job above the value of home.

-Toni Morrison, as she concludes this passage, as excerpted on David Kanigan's wondrous Thrive

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

"The dance continues, and here we are in it."

-Annie Mueller, with the rest of the story here

He either makes me laugh.....................

..........................or, he makes me think.   Makes him read-worthy.

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

The Beach Boys.......................................I Was Made To Love Her

Gone, but not forgotten..............

Stevie Ray Vaughan....................................................Pride and Joy

Spengler looks behind the headlines.....

.........................and references a classic 1946 Disney movie:

The German chancellor in effect threatens to throw President Trump into the proverbial briar patch, giving him what he wants while appearing to denounce him (see the Disney version here).

-full post here

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

The Beach Boys.................................................Aren't You Glad

From your keyboard to God's ears....

..........................................................this can't happen soon enough:

Millennials will be huge for housing demand in the coming years. The area we live in is being flooded by couples with younger kids who are moving out of cities and into the suburbs. There will always be a huge demand for big city living but young people, like everyone who came before them, eventually get older. And when you get older and have kids it’s not quite as easy to make things work living in a city. Buying a house won’t be the right decision for everyone but the flood of new homebuyers from the millennial cohort in the coming years could be enormous.

-Ben Carlson, taken from this post

The State of The Union..................

.........................................Politics in America, circa 2017.

Well on my way............................

“Eventually, all that one has learnt will have to be forgotten.”

-Ramana Maharshi

the One.................................

“Those who believe that the world of being is governed by luck or chance and that it depends upon material causes are far removed from the divine and from the notion of the One.”

-Plotinus,   The Enneads

All things..................................

“God does not lead all His servants by one road, nor in one way, nor at one time; for God is in all things;  and that man is not serving God aright, who can only serve Him in his own self-chosen way.” 

-Johannes Tauler

art via

And that is hard enough....................

“Don’t try to understand!  It’s enough if you do not misunderstand.” 

-Nisargadatta Maharaj

Gone, but not forgotten.......................

B. B. King......................................................Sweet Little Angel

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

On top of everything, the cancer ward was Number 13.  Pavel Nikolayevich Rusanov had never been and could never be a superstitious person, but his heart sank when they wrote "Wing 13" on his admission card.  They should have had the ingenuity to assign number 13 to some kind of prosthetic or intestinal department.

-Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Cancer Ward

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

The Beach Boys........................................................Wild Honey

Just because you are paranoid...............

............................doesn't mean they are not out to get you:

Winston Churchill should have never been prime minister of Great Britain.  He wasn't someone who "did everything right," and it was shocking that he was elected.  His contemporaries knew he was brilliant - but he was also a paranoid loose cannon who was impossible to deal with.
     Initially rising up through the ranks of British politics at a steady clip (he was elected to Parliament at age twenty-six),  Churchill was eventually found lacking and deemed unsuitable for the highest offices.  By the 1930s his career was effectively over.  In many ways he was a perfect foil for Neville Chamberlain, a leader who had done everything right and was the prototypical British prime minister. ...
      Churchill was a maverick.  He did not merely love his country;  he displayed a clear paranoia toward any possible threat to the empire.  He saw even Gandhi as a danger and was quite outspoken in his opposition to what was a pacifist rebellion in India.   He was the Chicken Little of Great Britain, passionately railing against all opposition to his country, great, small - or imagined.  But this "bad" quality is the key to why he is one of the most revered leaders in world history. ...
     When it mattered most, Churchill's paranoia was prescient.  He didn't believe the schoolyard bully would leave them alone if they gave him their lunch money.  He knew they needed to sock him in the nose.
      Churchill's zealotry - the thing that had nearly ruined his career early on - was exactly what Britain needed heading into World War II.  And thankfully the British people realized this before it was too late.

-Eric Barker,  Barking Up The Wrong Tree:  The Surprising Science Behind Why Everything You Know About Success Is (Mostly) Wrong