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

Joe Tex..................................................................That's The Way

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

The Zombies........................................................Imagine the Swan

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

Tony Joe White....................................I Thought I Knew You Well

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

Neil Young with Crazy Horse....Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere

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

Neil Young with Crazy Horse...……………….Cinnamon Girl

I don't claim expertise..................

..............but it amazes me that people don't give changes in that fiery ball in the sky more credit for our climate,  92.96 million miles away or not:

image via

Fun with the language...............

............................................................with Rick & Morty:



thanks Connor

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

Neil Young with Crazy Horse...……….Down By The River

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

Neil Young...………………………..……..Cowgirl In The Sand

Control................................

While you don't control external events, you retain the ability to decide how you respond to those events.  You control what every external event means to you personally.
     This means the difficulty in front of you right now.  You'll find, if you approach it right, that this trump card is plenty.

-Ryan Holiday, from today's entry in The Daily Stoic

An environmental catastrophe....

....................is likely in our future.  As a betting man, I would wager a large sum that it won't be man-made:

     In about 2200 B.C., a major volcanic eruption somewhere far to the north spewed enormous quantities of fine ash into the atmosphere.  If historic eruptions are any yardstick, the debris veiled the sun for months on end, bringing unseasonal cold.  Unfortunately for Ur's lords, the eruption coincided with the beginning of a 278-year drought cycle that affected huge areas of the eastern Mediterranean world and is clearly visible in ice cores from the Greenland ice sheet and the high Andes.  With catastrophic abruptness, the moist Mediterranean westerlies faltered.  Winter rainfall plummeted.  The Euphrates and Tigris floods, starved of rain and snowfall in the distant Anatolian highlands, failed as well.
     The drought turned the once-fertile northern Habur plains by the Euphrates into a near desert.

-Brian Fagan,  The Long Summer:  How Climate Changed Civilization

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

Frankie Laine......................................You Gave Me A Mountain

Don't ask..............................

Afterthoughts................................

A priority................................

About climate change....................

If you are worried about rising sea levels, don’t be. The smartest and richest people in the world are still buying property on the beach. They don’t see the problem. And if sea levels do rise, it will happen slowly enough for people to adjust.

-Scott Adams, from this love letter

thanks Chris

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

Glen Campbell......................Where's The Playground Susie

The complexity of sociality..................

Many people think about conversation and connection as two different strategies for accomplishing the same goal of maintaining their social life.  This mind-set believes that there are many different ways to tend important relationships in your life, and in our current modern moment, you should use all tools available—spanning from old-fashioned face-to-face talking, to tapping the heart icon on a friend's Instagram post.
     The philosophy of conversation-centric communication takes a harder stance.  It argues that conversation is the only form of interaction that in some sense counts toward maintaining a relationship.  This conversation can take the form of a face-to-face meeting, or it can be a video chat or a phone call—so long as it matches Sherry Turkle's criteria of involving nuanced analog cues, such as the tone of your voice or facial expressions.  Anything textual or non-interactive—basically all social media, email, text, and instant messaging—doesn't count as conversation and should be categorized as mere connection. . . .The socializing that counts is real conversation, and text is no longer a sufficient alternative. . . .
     To be clear, conversation-centric communication requires sacrifices.  If you adopt this philosophy, you'll almost certainly reduce the number of people with whom you have an active relationship.  Real conversation takes time, and the total number of people for which you can uphold this standard will be significantly less than the total number of people you can follow, retweet, "like," and occasionally leave a comment for on social media, or ping with the occasional text.  Once you no longer count the latter activities as meaningful interaction, your social circle will seem at first to contract.
     This sense of contraction, however, is illusory. . . .

Our sociality is simply too complex to be outsourced to a social network or reduced to instant messages and emojis.

-Cal Newport,  Digital Minimalism:  Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World

Micro blogging.............................

................................Sensory Dispensary has changed venues.   Catch up with Scott here.

A simple, one-page return, flat tax anyone?....

Mankiw attempts to inform our politicians that writing tax law is difficult, it also tends to unleash the The Law of Unintended Consequences.