On guarantees............................

"Only one thing is ever guaranteed, that is that you will definitely not achieve the goal if you don’t take the shot."
-Wayne Gretzky

He was, I think, the first Canadian forward to play a true team game", said hockey writer and former NHL goalie Ken Dryden. The focus of the game prior to Gretzky's arrival, he said, especially among the Canadian teams, was on the player with the puck—in getting the puck to a star player who would make the big play. "Gretzky reversed that. He knew he wasn't big enough, strong enough, or even fast enough to do what he wanted to do if others focused on him. Like a magician, he had to direct attention elsewhere, to his four teammates on the ice with him, to create the momentary distraction in order to move unnoticed into the open ice where size and strength didn't matter. . . . Gretzky made his opponents compete with five players, not one, and he made his teammates full partners to the game. He made them skate to his level and pass and finish up to his level or they would be embarrassed."

The Code............................

“Parents today might be surprised to discover what kids can do if they are left to their own devices. We certainly learned to figure things out for ourselves. We had to take the initiative, because the odds were that no parent would be available to shovel off the bay or the rink or a stretch of road. If we wanted to play, we had to do the work to make it happen. We also learned how to give as well as take, because we were all in it together, and it was important to interact with everybody in the group even if they weren’t your closest friends. If there is no one there to tell you to play nice, you figure out pretty quickly that there really is a code, and kids naturally respect it.”  


-Bobby Orr

Bobby Orr at his first training camp 1966.   I must be getting old.

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

Donovan.............................................................Hurdy Gurdy Man

 

Birthday present from my daughter.......

When tithing is a bargain..............

     From as early as 1913, AT&T has been battling the U. S. government over its monopoly control of the nation's phone service.  That it was, in fact, a monopoly was undeniable.  If you were making a phone call in the United States at any point between 1930 and 1984, you were almost without exception using AT&T's network.  That monopoly power made the company immensely profitable, since it faced no significant competition.  But for seventy years, AT&T managed to keep the regulators at by by convincing them that the phone network was a "natural monopoly" and a necessary one.  Analog phone circuits were simply too complicated to be run by a hodgepodge of competing firms; if Americans wanted to have a reliable phone network, it needed to be run by a single company.  Eventually, the antitrust lawyers in the Justice Department worked out an intriguing compromise, settled officially in 1956.  AT&T would be allowed to maintain its monopoly over phone service, but any patented invention that had originated in Bell Labs would have to be freely licensed to any American company that found it useful, and all new patents would have to be licensed for a modest fee.  Effectively, the government said to AT&T that it could keep its profits, but it would have to give away its ideas in return.
     It was a unique arrangement, one we are not likely to see again.  The monopoly power gave the company a trust fund for research that was practically infinite, but every interesting idea that came out of that research could be immediately adopted by other firms.  So much of the American success in postwar electronics - from transistors to computers to cell phones - ultimately dates back to that 1956 agreement.  Thanks to the antitrust resolution, Bell Labs became one of the strangest hybrid in the history of capitalism:  a vast profit machine generating new ideas that were, for all practical purposes, socialized.  Americans had to pay a tithe to AT&T for their phone service, but the new innovations AT&T generated belonged to everyone.

-Steven Johnson,  How We Got to Now:  Six Innovations That Made the Modern World

Please...........................

Hey Sweetie.................................

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

The Foundations.............................Baby Now That I've Found You

 

Released in 1967, but still all over the 1968 charts

On the virtue of really listening...........

" ...  because it's so hard to learn when I'm sure that I already know the answers."

-Chip Gaines

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

Cream...................................................................White Room

Yep..............................

"... there's something really beautiful about work that feels like play."

-Chip Gaines

Unearth it......................................

"Fear dressed up as wisdom provides poor counsel.  It lures you into thinking that if you will just trust it, it will afford you some level of control.
     But guess what?  You're not in control.  So I'm calling bull on that illusion.  It's time for a wake-up call.  Maybe a little cold water in the face wouldn't hurt.
     Life isn't safe, remember.
     But life can be wonderful if you choose adventure rather than fear.
     I get where these fearful tendencies are coming from, I really do.  Humanity has, by and large, come to the conclusion that the world is getting worse and worse every day and that people are ultimately bad.  No wonder everyone's scared to death.
     Life feels altogether different when your perception shifts, though.  It's amazing how gorgeous the landscape of life looks when we choose to believe that all people have good in them and every situation has potential for a positive outcome.  It may be buried or dormant, but I truly believe it's there - most likely waiting for someone to look for it, to help unearth it, to expect it, maybe even to demand it."

-Chip Gaines,  Capital Gaines:  Smart Things I Learned Doing Stupid Stuff

Four Rules for Work and Financial Life...

1. 1.  Don’t confuse your workplace with your family.
2. 2.  When you have little left to learn on your job, it is time to move on.
3. 3.  Take risks with high plausible upside. Avoid risks with high plausible downside.
4. 4.  Save and invest to get rich slowly.

-Arnold Kling.  Details may be found here

May I offer an "Amen".................?

"Ten minutes without sound advice can be jarringly expensive."

-Michael Wade

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

All of you, when young, will make your own history: you will struggle, you will betray some and others will betray you. You will love and lose love. You will feel profound joy and deep sorrow and during all of this you will grow as an individual. That’s why it is your duty when you get old to tell the young about your odyssey across the vast ocean of your life. It is why when death does come for me – even if it mauls me with decrepitude before it takes me – I will not lament either my old age or my faded youth. They were just different times of the day when I stood in the sun and felt the warmth of life.

-Harry Leslie Smith, a borrowed from this love letter

Thanks Ben

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

Gladys Knight & The Pips.....................The End Of Our Road

 

Recommended............................

Speculation, like most human characteristics, appears to be a mixed bag.  It has its positive benefits and it has its dark side.  Any economic system that involves freedom will experience speculation.  There is no use rooting for government to control it, as the evidence is ample that by the time speculation turns to a manic bubble, legislators and regulators are fully engaged in helping the bubble grow.
       If the world of finance and investing interests you, Chancellor's well-written book is a must read.  Only two regrets about the book.  The first is that he wrote it in 1998.   I would have loved to read his take on the great mortgage bubble years of 2004-2007.  The second is highlighted by this page 271 excerpt:



          At some point principled laissez-faire gives way to a
         widespread acceptance of short-cuts in the pursuit of
         self-interest, and from there it is but a short step to
         outright dishonesty.



It is pretty clear from his research and writing that when speculation turns to mania, fraud and other criminal behaviors have taken over the bubble.  It is no longer "speculation."

Devil take the hindmost......................

Highlights............................

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

Frank Sinatra.............................................Gentle On My Mind

 

I'm not very fond of it myself............

"I despise scientism, warmly — the pretence of science, dressed in high-priestly labcoat robes, in pursuit of an essentially theocratic power; or, “settled science,” as its adepts call it."

-David Warren, as lifted from here

Persuasion reading list..................

..........Persuasion guru Scott Adams updates his recommendations.

Never in a million years............

.....................would I have predicted what is shown on this chart.  I can, however, testify to its painful truth.  We still have a number of fabulous, wooded, reasonably price, residential building lots available.   Come on people, let's get building!

When it comes to government policy...........

..................................................................it pays to remember:

"The most important truth about policy is that there is no Truth."

-Arnold Kling, as culled from here

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

Aretha Franklin..................................................Chain Of Fools

A two-fer from Milton Friedman............

“A major source of objection to a free economy is precisely that it does this task so well.   It gives people what they want, instead of what a particular group thinks they ought to want. Underlying most arguments against the free market is a lack of belief in freedom itself.” 

“I do not believe that the solution to our problem is simply to elect the right people. The important thing is to establish a political climate of opinion which will make it politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing. Unless it is politically profitable for the wrong people to do the right thing, the right people will not do the right thing either, or it they try, they will shortly be out of office.” 

-Milton Friedman

Remember, capitalism is a terrible system.......

.........and its only redeeming value is that it has proven to be more effective at providing a decent life for more people than all the other systems combined.

"Friedman boldly asserted that all societies were structured on greed:  'The problem of social organization,' he claimed, 'is how to set up an arrangement under which greed will do the least harm;  capitalism is that kind of system.'"

-Edward Chancellor,  Devil Take The Hindmost:  A History Of Financial Speculation

Ed. Note:  If the lust for power is considered one facet of "greed," surely you will agree that Friedman is correct about societies.

Today.................................

“Forget mistakes. Forget failure. Forget everything except what you're going to do now and do it. Today is your lucky day” 

-from the eminently quotable Will Durant

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

The Impressions..................................................We're A Winner

 

Enjoy.......................................

It is ridiculous, if not blasphemous, to believe that God wills us to despise the natural world he created, with its unspeakable beauty, which is available to even the most destitute for the mere price of noticing it.

-The Monks of New Skete,  In the Spirit of Happiness

Unexpected..................................

“Pleasure is very seldom found where it is sought.  Our brightest blazes of gladness are commonly kindled by unexpected sparks.” 

-Samuel Johnson,  The Idler

image via

The Gratitude Project...............

.......................................... "Its goal is to promote and acknowledge kindness and courtesy in our world."   Sign up here!

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

In the news.......1/23/68 The USS Pueblo captured by North Korea

Divergences........................

The great problem of man, how to live in conscious harmony with himself, with his neighbor, and with the whole to which he belongs, admits of as many solutions as there are provinces in our Father's kingdom; and it is in this, and not in the material sphere, that individuals and nations display their divergences of character. 

-Christian Matthias Theodor Mommsen

Pretty sure this is true.................

“If the mind were simple enough for us to understand, we would be too simple to understand it.” 


-Ray Kurzweil

At least not yet............................

“People who look for easy money invariably pay for the privilege of proving conclusively that it cannot be found on this earth.”

-attributed to Jesse Livermore

Interesting reading...........................

    
       The crookedness of Wall Street is in my opinion an overrated phenomenon.  The hearts of Wall Street men are not more or less black than the hearts of the men in the sausage-cover game.  There is probably the same percentage of malpractice, but the Wall Street depredations are more spectacular.  The involve vastly greater sums, and they make more interesting reading.  Best of all, they suggest to the public an excuse for the public's own folly.
      The indignation school of writers never tires of pointing out the millions that are stolen in the Street. But while the millions are being stolen, the billions are being lost. Nothing crooked—just bad luck and bad brains met together in an effort to do something that couldn’t be done in the first place.

-Fred Schwed, Jr.,  Where Are the Customer's Yachts? or A Good Hard Look at Wall Street

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

On the TV....................................Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In

Infected...................................

     Periods of speculation had always fostered dishonesty, but in the nineteenth-century American stock market this tendency was even more pronounced.  The corruption of speculation was not limited to company promoters and stock operators; it infected the entire political class of the 1860s.

............................................

     Having burnt their fingers at direct speculation, the New York legislators reverted to the more certain profits of bribery. ... Gould subsequently travelled to Albany with half a million dollars in cash - needless to say, the money technically belonged to Erie shareholders - in order to bribe the legislators to validate retrospectively the new issue of shares.   Vanderbilt played the same game but was defeated by Gould at (what Adams called) the "legislative broker's board, where votes are daily counted."  The total expenditure on bribes in Albany during the summer of 1868 was estimated to exceed a million dollars.

-Edward Chancellor,   Devil Take The Hindmost:  A History Of Financial Speculation

Stunning.....................

via and copyright

Predictions are hard..................

............................................................especially about the future:

"Stock prices have reached what looks like a permanently high plateau," declared the eminent Yale economist Irving Fisher in the autumn of 1929.  A few weeks after this oracular pronouncement, the Dow Jones Industrial Average had declined by more than a third.  The worst was still to come.  On 8 July 1932, the Dow Jones closed at 41.88, a drop on nearly 90 percent from its 1929 peak.

Edward Chancellor,  Devil Take The Hindmost:  A History Of Financial Speculation

And "science" hasn't yet recovered............

The commercialization of molecular biology is the most stunning ethical event in history of science, and it happened with astonishing speed.  For four hundred years since Galileo, science has always proceeded as a free and open inquiry into the workings of nature.  Scientists have always ignored national boundaries, holding themselves above the transitory concerns of politics and even wars.  Scientists have always rebelled against secrecy in research, and have even frowned on the idea of patenting their discoveries, seeing themselves as working to the benefit of all mankind.  And for many generations, the discoveries of scientists did indeed have a peculiarly selfless quality.
     When, in 1953, two young researchers in England, James Watson and Francis Crick, deciphered the structure of DNA, their work was hailed as a triumph of the human spirit, of the centuries-old quest to understand the universe in a scientific way.  It was confidently expected that their discovery would be selflessly extended to the greater benefit of mankind.
     Yet that did not happen.   Thirty years later, nearly all of Watson and Crick's scientific colleagues were engaged in another sort of enterprise entirely.  Research in molecular genetics had become a vast, multibillion-dollar commercial undertaking, and its origins can be traced not to 1953 but to April 1976.
     That was the date of a now famous meeting, in which Robert Swanson, a venture capitalist, approached Herbert Boyer, a biochemist at the University of California.  The two men agreed to found a commercial company to exploit Boyer's gene-splicing techniques.  Their new company, Genentech, quickly became one of the largest and most successful of the genetic engineering start-ups.
      Suddenly it seemed as if everyone wanted to become rich.  New companies were announced almost weekly, and scientists flocked to exploit genetic research.  By 1986, at least 362 scientists, including 64 in the National Academy, sat on advisory boards of biotech firms.  The number of those who held equity positions or consultancies was several times greater.
      It is necessary to emphasize how significant this shift in attitude actually was.  In the past, pure scientists took a snobbish view of business.  They saw the pursuit of money as intellectually uninteresting, suited only to shopkeepers.   And to do research for industry, even at the prestigious Bell or IBM labs, was only for those who couldn't get a university appointment.   Thus the attitude of pure science was fundamentally critical toward the work of applied scientists, and to industry in general.  Their long-standing antagonism kept university scientists free of contaminating industry ties, and wherever debate arose about technological matters, disinterested scientists were available to discuss the issues at the highest levels.
      But that is no longer true.   There are very few molecular biologists and very few research institutions without commercial affiliations.  The old days are gone.  Genetic research continues, at a more furious pace than ever.  But it is done in secret, and in haste, and for profit.

-Michael Crichton, from the Introduction to his 1990 book, Jurassic Park

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

At the movies........................................Steve McQueen in Bullitt

the same pity........................

I'm really convinced that our descendants a century or two from now will look back at us with the same pity that we have toward the people in the field of science two centuries ago.

-John Templeton

Saw this quote while looking for something else, but thought, "Ah, an excuse to re-play (again) one of my favorite cartoons":

Two out of three ain't bad...............

a guiding principle....................?

In a democratic society, such as the United States, where wealth is the ultimate determinant of status, there lingers a constant fear of being left behind materially.  We may say that the guiding principle of American society is not to grow richer in absolute terms, but to avoid becoming poorer in relative terms.  And nothing makes a man feel poorer than being a passive bystander during a bull market.   Therefore, the fiercest struggle for the preservation and restitution of economic equality in the United States takes place in the stock market, where everyone is seeking to discover what others are doing and anticipate what they intend to do.  As Keynes observed with all the cultural disdain of the Old World for the New:  "Even outside the field of finance, Americans are apt to be unduly interested in discovering what average opinion believes average opinion to be;  and this national weakness finds its nemesis in the stock market."

-Edward Chancellor,  Devil Take The Hindmost:  A History Of Financial Speculation

Wants...........................

     Although the desire of acquiring the good things of this world is the prevailing passion of the American people, certain momentary outbreaks occur when their souls seem suddenly to burst the bonds of matter by which they are restrained and to soar impetuously towards heaven. ... 
     Here and there in the midst of American society you meet with men full of a fanatical and almost wild spiritualism which hardly exists in Europe.  From time to time strange sects arise which endeavor to strike out extraordinary paths to eternal happiness.  Religious insanity is very common in the United States. ...
     The soul has wants which must be satisfied; and whatever pains are taken to divert it from itself, it soon grows weary, restless, and disquieted amid the enjoyments of sense.

-Alexis de Tocqueville,  Democracy In America,  Volume II, Chapter XII, 1840

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

Marvin Gaye...............................I Heard It Through The Grapevine

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

Mary Hopkins................................................Those Were The Days

 

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

The Human Beinz...................................................Nobody But Me

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

Lemon Pipers.....................................................Green Tambourine

 

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

Johnny Rivers..........................................................Summer Rain

 

King.......................................

      You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws. This is certainly a legitimate concern. Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court's decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools, it is rather strange and paradoxical to find us consciously breaking laws. One may well ask, "How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?" The answer is found in the fact that there are two types of laws: there are just laws, and there are unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that "An unjust law is no law at all."   

     Now, what is the difference between the two? How does one determine when a law is just or unjust? A just law is a man-made code that squares with the moral law, or the law of God. An unjust law is a code that is out of harmony with the moral law. To put it in the terms of St. Thomas Aquinas, an unjust law is a human law that is not rooted in eternal and natural law. Any law that uplifts human personality is just. Any law that degrades human personality is unjust. All segregation statutes are unjust because segregation distorts the soul and damages the personality. It gives the segregator a false sense of superiority and the segregated a false sense of inferiority. To use the words of Martin Buber, the great Jewish philosopher, segregation substitutes an "I - it" relationship for the "I - thou" relationship and ends up relegating persons to the status of things. So segregation is not only politically, economically, and sociologically unsound, but it is morally wrong and sinful. Paul Tillich has said that sin is separation. Isn't segregation an existential expression of man's tragic separation, an expression of his awful estrangement, his terrible sinfulness? So I can urge men to obey the 1954 decision of the Supreme Court because it is morally right, and I can urge them to disobey segregation ordinances because they are morally wrong.

-Martin Luther King, Jr., as excerpted from his timeless Letter From Birmingham Jail

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

Sam and Dave............................................................I Thank You

 

Important questions..........

reference point is here

A gift....................................

...............................................................................to humanity.

Just the basics.......................

a vast Fund.................................

There must certainly be a vast Fund of Stupidity in Human Nature, else Men would not be caught as they are, a thousand times over, by the same Snare;  and while they yet remember their past Misfortune, go on to court and encourage the Causes to which they were owing, and which will again produce them.

-Cato's Letters,  January 1721

My preference..........................

To know what you prefer, instead of humbly saying Amen to what the world tells you you ought to prefer, is to have kept your soul alive.

-Robert Louis Stevenson

via

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

Steppenwolf....................................................Magic Carpet Ride

Why and what...........................?

     Many people at the time of the September crisis thought they were only giving away the interests of Czechoslovakia, but with every month that passes you will see that they were also giving away the interests of Britain, and the interests of peace and justice.  Now I have defended this speech which has been attacked, and I say never did I make a truer statement to Parliament.  Practically everything that I said has already been proved true.  And who are these people who go about saying that even if it were true, why state the facts?  I reply, why mislead the nation?  What is the use of Parliament if it is not the place where true statements can be brought before the people?  What is the use of sending Members to the House of Commons who say just the popular things of the moment, and merely endeavor to give satisfaction to Government Whips by cheering loudly every Ministerial platitude, and by walking through the Lobbies oblivious of the criticisms they hear?  People talk about our Parliamentary institutions and Parliamentary democracy; but if these are to survive it will not be because the Constituencies return tame, docile, subservient Members, and try to stamp out every form of independent judgment.

-Winston Churchill, from a March, 1939 speech

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

..................................Keith Jackson, one of the great voices of college football, has passed.

 

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

Dionne Warwick..........................................Valley Of The Dolls

We are having some weather tonight.....

"Beware the man who takes the weather personally."

-Ol' Remus

It's a comforting thought, actually........

via

I can't be the only one...............

......................that misses all the goings-on at Sippican Cottage.  Please come back.  A healthy Intertunnel needs you.

All other things being equal...................

....................I'm 97% sure that I prefer global warming to global cooling.   My favorite optimist has the story.  A few cherry-picked quotes:

" If we aspire to keep the show on the road for another 10,000 years, we will have to understand ice ages."

“winter storms are a manifestation of winter, not climate change”.

"All of human civilisation happened in an interglacial period, with a relatively stable climate, plentiful rainfall and high enough levels of carbon dioxide to allow the vigorous growth of plants. Agriculture was probably impossible before then, and without its hugely expanded energy supply, none of the subsequent flowering of human culture would have happened.

"That interglacial will end."

About value................................

The contemporary land-bank projectors, who wanted to replace a gold-backed currency with one supported by the value of land, even realised that the notion of "intrinsic value" was an oxymoron, since "intrinsic" suggested an inward quality, while "value" was always external.  For instance, Nicholas Barbon argued that "things have no Value in themselves, it is opinion and fashion which brings them into use and gives them a value."

-Edward Chancellor,  Devil Take The Hindmost:  A History of Financial Speculation

Ed. Note:  Spell check keeps telling me "realised" is incorrect.  Perhaps not.

Wants vs. Needs...................

"It is not Necessity that causeth the Consumption, Nature may be Satisfied with little; but it is the wants of the Mind, Fashion, and desire of Novelties, and Things scarce, that causeth Trade. A Person may have English-Lace, Gloves, or Silk, as much as he wants, and will Buy no more such; and yet, lay out his Mony on a Point of Venice, Jessimine-Gloves, or French-Silks; he may desire to Eat Westphalia-Bacon, when he will not English; so that, the Prohibition of Forreign Wares, does not necessarily cause a greater Consumption of the like sort of English. Besides, There is the same wants of the Mind in Foreigners, as in the English; they desire Novelties; they Value English-Cloth, Hats, and Gloves, and Foreign Goods, more than their Native make."

-Nicholas Barbon  (Only follow the link if you want to be truly amazed by a middle name.  There is no accounting for parents.)  Barbon's quote above was found here.

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

On the TV............................................................The Mod Squad

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

When the first man woke up that morning, he wasn't thinking about killing anyone.  He woke up with a head full of blues, a brain that was too big for his skull, and a bladder about to burst.  He lay with his eyes closed, breathing across a tongue that tasted like burnt chicken feathers.  The blues rolled in through the bedroom door.
     Coming down hard.

-John Sandford,  Easy Prey

Was this really published in..................

.............................................................the Washington Post?

"... — always wrong but nonetheless repeated so often as to take on the appearance of truth — ..."

"Despite the media circus surrounding the salacious but questionable allegations in Wolff’s book, most Trump supporters don’t care. Nor do they care much about the very public row between the president and Bannon. They care about what the president and his administration can do for them. They support Trump because he articulated and, increasingly, is enacting an agenda they believe will improve their lives and secure the future peace and prosperity of the country. It’s that simple."

It could be that.........................

............I'm just a poor line-switcher, but I too find this rings true:

via

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

At the movies....................................................2001: A Space Odyssey 

I wonder if Scott Adams agrees........

"Words which are on proper occasions the most powerful engines lose their weight and power and values when they are not backed by fact or winged by truth, when they are obviously the expression of a strong feeling, and are not related in any way to the actual facts of the situation."

-Winston Churchill, from a 1926 speech in the House of Commons

David Warren asks..................

Is it alright to express outrage against excessive displays of outrage?

Feel free to read his whole post, but I suspect his answer is:

 Anger may serve to inspire us to action, but makes a poor formulator of tactics. 

Have you hugged a fracker lately...........?

via

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

In the news...................January 10, 1968 Surveyor 7 "soft lands" on the moon.   The seventh and final Surveyor mission, setting the stage for Neil Armstrong's first step onto the moon.

Surveyor 7 model

"Tycho" crater, the target for Surveyor 7 (landed just north)

zen parenting............................

"The first time I fell in love" recalled the Seeker, "my dad's reaction was an amused 'Fine, now go mow the lawn,'"..

-The Monks of New Skete,  In The Spirit of Happiness

Am I the only one ...................

.......................who thinks that most of the the problems we create in trying to solve problems we've created - or otherwise encounter - are caused by our confusion over "time frames"?

"People will be right for the wrong reasons and wrong for the right reasons but markets don’t care about these things over shorter time frames. Over any given year a great process can produce subpar results while a terrible (or no) process can produce phenomenal results. Bad decisions get rewarded all the time but luck doesn’t last forever in the markets. Eventually a good decision-making process will win out but over a one-year time frame anything can happen."

-Ben Carlson, as culled from this smart list of ten things investors can expect in 2018.

On civility and open-mindedness......

Tim Harford offers a check-list for the art of disagreement:

1.   Take five minutes before responding. Walk around the block.
2.   Don’t argue to win, argue to learn.
3.   Avoid people who fan flames.
4.   Don’t feel you have to weigh in on every topic.
5.   If your peers demand you weigh in, ponder your choice of peers.
6.   Seek out thoughtful people who disagree with you. Listen.
7.   Examine your own emotional responses.
8.   Summarise your opponents’ arguments fairly and thoughtfully.

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

Ray Thomas............................................................For My Lady

So much for my history degree..............

The one wholly true thought one can hold about the past is that it is not here.  To think about it at all is therefore to think about illusions.

-The Course In Miracles,  Workbook: Lesson 8

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

Vanilla Fudge...................................You Keep Me Hangin' On

 

a Utopian yearning............

     The spirit of speculation is anarchic, irreverent, and antihierarchic.  It loves freedom, detests cant, and abhors restrictions.  From the tulip Colleges of the seventeenth century to the Internet investment clubs of the late twentieth century, speculation has established itself as the most demotic of economic activities.  Although profoundly secular, speculation is not simply about greed.  The essence of speculation remains a Utopian yearning for freedom and equality which counterbalances the drab rationalistic materialism of the modern economic system with its inevitable inequalities of wealth.  Throughout its many manifestations, the speculative mania has always been, and remains to this day, the Carnival of Capitalism, a "Feast of Fools."

-Edward Chancellor, Devil Take The Hindmost:  A History Of Financial Speculation

Learned a new word today..............

Tulip mania.........................

Sounds like fun..............................

     No actual delivery of tulips took place during the height of the boom in late 1636 and early 1637 as the bulbs remained snug in the ground.  A market in tulip futures appeared, known as the windhandel (the wind trade):  sellers promised to deliver a bulb of a certain type and weight the following spring, buyers took the right to delivery - in the meantime, cash settlement could be made for any difference in market price.  Most transactions were expedited with personal credit notes which also fell due in the spring when the bulbs would be dug up and delivered.  Gaergoedt boasts of having made 60,000 guilders from his tulip speculations but admits that he has only received "other people's writing."  By the later stages of the mania the fusion of the windhandel with paper credit created a perfect symmetry of insubstantiality:  most transactions were for tulip bulbs that could never be delivered because they didn't exist and were paid for with credit notes that could never be honoured because the  money wasn't there.

Edward Chancellor,  Devil Take The Hindmost:  A History Of Financial Speculation

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

     The propensity to barter and exchange is an innate human characteristic.  An inclination to divine the future is another deeply ingrained trait.   Together they comprise the act of financial speculation.   "All life is speculation," declared the celebrated nineteenth-century American trader James R. Keene, "the spirit of speculation is born with men."  For the earliest known historical cases of speculation we must turn to ancient Rome during the Republic of the second century B.C.  By this date, the Roman financial system had developed many of the characteristics of modern capitalism:  markets flourished because Roman law allowed the free transfer of property, money was lent out at interest, money changers dealt in foreign currencies, and payments across the Roman territories could be made by bankers' draft.  Capital concentrated in Rome, as it later did in Amsterdam, London, and New York.  The idea of credit had also developed, along with a primitive form of insurance for ships and other forms of property.  The people of Rome exhibited a passion for the accumulation of wealth, matched by an extravagance in its display and consumption.  Gaming was common.

-Edward Chancellor,  Devil Take The Hindmost:  A History Of Financial Speculation

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

The Turtles.......................................................................Elenore

Recommended..................

     "Keep in mind that my main point of this book is that humans do not see reality as it exists.  We didn't evolve to have that capability.  What we do have is the ability to rationalize our observations and wrap them into little movies about reality that we create in our minds."

-Scott Adams,  Win Bigly:   Persuasion In A World Where Facts Don't Matter

If only they had known............

From the day that Trump announced his candidacy, his biggest persuasion challenge was that people literally couldn't imagine him as president. We can easily imagine boring old senators and governors sitting in the Oval Office. But it was tough to imagine this orange ball of provocation sitting in the Oval Office. And so I watched in awe as Trump methodically fixed his biggest problem by helping us imagine his presidency until we we could do it on our own. His best persuasion move on this front involved his appearance on the late-night television program Saturday Night Live. 
        I have enough experience appearing on TV and radio - having done it several hundred times - that I know some things that the general public wouldn't necessarily know. One thing I know is that a guest as important as a presidential candidate gets a hard veto over any skit they are in. And that means Trump approved the SNL skit that imagined him as president and working in the Oval Office. I have a distinct memory of Trump in the Oval Office on SNL, but I can't remember a single joke from the skit. Visual memory overwhelms any other kind of memory, and vision is the most persuasive of your senses.
       I assume the jokes on SNL that night were at Trump's expense. I assume the humor was edgy but not so bad that Trump would veto any of it. SNL allowed Trump to show his sense of humor, which is one of his strengths. But more important, it created a future "visual memory" of Trump in the Oval Office. If you saw that episode live, or on social media later, you suddenly had an easy way to imagine Trump as president. SNL did that for him. 

 -Scott Adams, Win Bigly: Persuasion In A World Where Facts Don't Matter

For your viewing pleasure:

 

And Scott continues.............................

       Compare Trump's skit with Hillary Clinton's appearance on Saturday Night Live. She approved a skit in which she played a bartender named Val who was serving a drunken Hillary Clinton who was played by one of the SNL cast. The visual we got from that was that Clinton loved alcohol - maybe too much. That is just about the worse image you could present for a presidential candidate. And it is doubly bad because of the power of contrast. Trump was a rare nondrinking candidate for president. He was competing for a job that required sobriety at all hours of the day. And thanks to SNL, he was competing against the image of a drunk. 
       After seeing how both candidates handled their SNL choices, my opinion of Trump's chances was set in concrete. Barring any surprises (and there were plenty to come), this was not going to be a fair fight. To me it looked like a massacre in the making. 
       In political terms, and looking back at the SNL skit, if you are helping people think of you as president of the United States while your competitor is self-branding as a barfly, you are right where you want to be. 

 -Scott Adams, Win Bigly: Persuasion In A World Where Facts Don't Matter


 

a belief........................

"There are many definitions of populism. I think American populism is a belief that the citizenry should be empowered, not the government."

-Lawrence Kudlow, as extracted from here

Strength..............................

"After Abba John the Dwarf had prayed to the Lord and the Lord had taken away all his passions, he went to one of the experienced old men and said, 'You see before you a man who is completely at rest and has no more temptations.'  The elder replied, 'Go and pray to the Lord to stir up your passions once again, for the soul is made strong only in battle.  And when this happens, do not pray that the struggle be taken away from you, but only say, 'Lord, give me strength to get through the fight.'"

-As extracted from The Monks Of New Skete's In the Spirit of Happiness

Interesting times.................

"Many of the qualities that make Trump seemingly unfit for the presidency in fact increase his attractiveness as a weapon in the hands of a mutinous public:  his utter lack of experience, for example, his disdain for history and tradition, even his vulgarity.  The people who voted for Trump expect him to humble the elites and break a lot of institutional crockery in the process.  They demand different."

-Martin Gurri, as culled from here

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

The Troggs............................................Love Is All Around

 

 Released in the fall of 1967, this song first charted in February of 1968.