Wednesday, November 11, 2026

Interesting for certain...................




 

stingy....................

 

People are frugal in guarding their personal property; but a soon as it comes to squandering time they are most wasteful of the one thing in which it is right to be stingy.

-Seneca


yearning...................

 

Our consciousness yearns for transcendence, to feel we are a part of something greater than our individual selves.

-Robert Greene, The Law of The Sublime


coherent and livable..................


Holmes said he thought railing against the universe was like damning the weather or firing a gun at the sky; the only change it produced on the relation between man and the cosmos was the kick of the gun on the man who fired it.  "It seems to me that the only promising activity is make my universe coherent and livable, not to babble about the universe," he wrote (William) James in 1907.

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


Friday, October 30, 2026

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


Thursday, October 29, 2026

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



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.)