Wait . . . . . .what?..............

 

Fall back........................

 

via 

Sixty years ago.....................

 

On the TV...............Adam West debuts as Batman

Halloween.......................

 

.............as celebrated in Downtown Newark this evening:

Amusement..................

 

There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge.

-Bertrand Russell

Ah, human nature..............

 

It is doubtful if the oppressed ever fight for freedom. They fight for pride and power—power to oppress others. The oppressed want above all to imitate their oppressors; they want to retaliate.

-attributed to Eric Hoffer

The beat of a different drummer........

 

Age may have one side, but assuredly Youth has the other. There is nothing more certain than that both are right, except perhaps that both are wrong. Let them agree to differ; for who knows but what agreeing to differ may not be a form of agreement rather than a form of difference?

-Robert Louis Stevenson, Crabbed Age and Youth

On ignorance and wisdom.............

 

For it was my master who taught me not only how very little I knew but also that any wisdom to which I might ever aspire could consist only in realizing more fully the infinity of my ignorance.

-attributed to Karl Popper

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

 

Tom Petty and The Heartbreakers debut album

Some people are up on their Sun Tzu.........

 

Cause division among them.
-Master Sun

Send interlopers to create rifts among them
-Cao Cao

Seduce them with the prospect of gain, send interlopers in among them, have rhetoricians use fast talk to ingratiate themselves with their leaders and followers, and divide up their organization and power.
-Du You

You may cause rifts between the leadership and their followers, or between them and their allies—cause division, and then take aim at them.
-Zhang Yu

-Sun Tzu, The Art of War, translated by Thomas Cleary

Eric Barker suggests....................

 

..............................we pay attention to some of Napoleon's strategic wisdom.

Incredibly, it took him just nineteen years to go from junior artillery officer to Emperor. (Meanwhile, it takes me two years to cancel a subscription.)

Martin Gurri asks a great question.............

 

How could the principle of equality be squared with a hierarchy of expertise?

Gurri is always a fascinating read, and this Substack is no exception.  A wee excerpt here:

In the conflict between equality and elitism, those who already wielded power had the advantage—they could redefine equality down until the concept was virtually drained of meaning. The industrial age, which looked on society as a factory floor to be organized on the precepts of “scientific management,” worshiped at the altar of hierarchy. Mass production, mass consumption, mass media, and mass movements in politics allowed the elites to herd the newly educated, newly affluent millions into fenced enclosures where they could cause no trouble. Progressive government built an immense bureaucracy of regulators and overseers. The deplorables were rendered inaudible. The last century was a golden age of social control.

Fast-forward to the chaos of the present moment. The digital tsunami has obliterated those tidy industrial-age arrangements. The public has gained a voice like thunder—it drowns out the edicts of presidents and the precious phrases of the intellectuals. The deplorables run rampant around the globe, intent, somewhat paradoxically, on electing “authoritarian personalities” to positions of authority. The top-down system has bled out its legitimacy and is now flatlining. The elites and their supporters are gripped by panic and despair, with good reason. The constant lamentations about the end of democracy translate into the existential dread of a class that knows it has lost control.

I would have flipped the board after night 2.....

 

.......Thinking about Monopoly and "behavioral finance"

All but the Walkman here..................

 

via

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

At the cinema..........................................Rocky

Probably just a coincidence..................

 

Of course, much opposition to mass immigration possesses ugly nativist elements. But it’s also clear that recent waves of migration have done little to spark economic growth. Is it a coincidence that some of the countries with the highest per capita rates of immigration in recent years – including the UK, Canada, Germany, and France – have also been suffering from stagnant economies? 

-Joel Kotkin, from this substack

Not sure there are other good options............

 

It takes great courage to see the world in all its tainted glory, and still to love it.

-Oscar Wilde

Connection....................

 

Human connection is one of the most pressing problems in our world.  In the U.S., loneliness has been rising steadily since the late 1970s.

We are lonely because we're missing connection.  We're missing connection because we're struggling with its foundation: interaction.

Social skills are like muscles: without regular training, they atrophy.

-Adam Grant, from the prologue to Vibe: The Secrets of Strong Connections in a Lonely World

If only someone would open a Piano Bar to help with interactions.

War.........................

 

     He later was struck forcefully by "how rapidly the mind adjusts itself" to new circumstances, how contingent even the most fundamental truths seem to be.  "I thought for awhile that I was dying, and it seemed the most natural thing in the world—The moment the hope of life returned it seemed as abhorrent to nature as ever that I should die."  More matter-of-factly he recalled that "one of the thoughts that made it seem particularly hard to die was the recollection of several fair damsels whom I wasn't quite ready to leave."

-Stephen Budiansky,  Oliver Wendell Holmes: A Life in War, Law, and Ideas

The above being after Holmes was wounded at the Battle of Ball's Bluff.   Holmes was also wounded at the Battle of Antietam.  Budiansky enlightens us:

      The Battle of Antietam remains the bloodiest single day in the history of the United States Army, its casualties on that hot September day in the Maryland countryside twice those it would experience even in the D-Day landings against Nazi-occupied France.  The morning of September 17, 1862, found Holmes's regiment encamped on the east side of the Antietam Creek a few miles outside the town of Sharpsburg, Maryland.  By seven thirty they were on the move . . .

The horrific casualties suffered by attacking forces throughout the Civil War was largely a result of the collision of traditional tactics with the vastly increased firepower of newer weapons; rifled muskets that could be accurately aimed to five hundred yards and lethal to a thousand yards, and cannon that could sweep the field with curtains of cannister shot.

Sixty years ago...................

 

The Byrds lip-syncing Turn! Turn! Turn! on the Ed Sullivan Show