The ordinary....................

“The great lesson is that the sacred is in the ordinary, that it is to be found in one's daily life, in one's neighbors, friends, and family, in one's backyard.”

-Abraham Maslow

It just might...........................

“If stupidity got us in this mess, how come it can't get us out?”

-Will Rogers

Organic and messy..................

Relationships bring us everything from joy to sadness to angst - sometimes the same relationship on the same day can bring all those!  Give your relationships attention and they will be the better for it:  more joy, less haste;  more up times, fewer difficult times.  As organic, messy human beings we cannot predict the consistency of our relationships, nor should we try and control them.  We should simple do our best to care for them.

-Nicholas Bate,  as excerpted from here

Don't try this at home..................

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

The Rolling Stones................................................Jig-Saw Puzzle

 

Filling a vacuum.......................

       The most bizarre part of the whole story is that having done what we intended to do in our narrow, purist teenage brains at the time, which was to turn people on to the blues, what actually happened was we turned American people back on to their own music.   And that's probably our greatest contribution to music.  We turned white America's brain and ears around.  And I wouldn't say we were the only ones - without the Beatles probably nobody would have broken the door down.  And they certainly weren't bluesmen.
      American black music was going along like an express train.  But white cats, after Buddy Holly died and Eddie Cochran died, and Elvis was in the army gone wonky, white American music when I arrived was the Beach Boys and Bobby Vee.  They were still stuck in the past.  The past was six months ago;  it wasn't a long time.  But shit changed.  The Beatles were the milestone.  And then they got stuck inside their own cage.  "The Fab Four."  Hence, eventually, you got the Monkees, all this ersatz shit.  But I think there was  a vacuum somewhere in white American music at the time.

-Keith Richards,  Life

Simple, but not easy.................

 Start with a small circle of competence, things you can understand. [Look for] things that are selling for less than they’re worth. Forget about things you can’t understand. You need to understand accounting, which has enormous limitations. [You need to] understand when a competitive advantage is durable or fleeting. Learn that the market is there to serve you, not instruct you. In the investing business, if you have an IQ of 150, sell 30 points to someone else. You do not need to be a genius. You need to have emotional stability, inner peace and be able to think for yourself, [since] you’re subjected to all sorts of stimuli. It’s not a complicated game; you don’t need to understand math. It’s simple, but not easy.

-Warren Buffett, from here

This is almost a given..........

The "We must DO something!" people are, as usual, making things worse.

-as lifted from here

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

The Magic Lanterns...............................................Shame, Shame

 

Unfortunately.....................

"Don’t people learn?   What we learn from history is that people don’t learn from history."

-Warren Buffett

It doesn't hurt to remember............

..................................that the veneer of civilization is mighty thin.

"Hammurabi and the American Founding Fathers alike imagined a reality governed by universal and immutable principles of justice, such as equality or hierarchy.  Yet the only place where such universal principles exist is in the fertile imagination of Sapiens, and in the myths they invent and tell one another.  These principles have no objective reality."

-Yuval Noah Harari,  Sapiens:  A Brief History of Humankind

On the wise use of power................

"No person has the power to have everything they want, but it is in their power not to want what they don't have, and to cheerfully put to good use what they do have."

-Seneca, Moral Letters, 123.4, as quoted here

About diversification........................

“Students learn corporate finance at business schools. They are taught that the whole secret is diversification. But the exact rule is the opposite. The ‘know-nothing’ investor should practice diversification, but it is crazy if you are an expert. The goal of investment is to find situations where it is safe not to diversify. If you only put 20% into the opportunity of a life-time, you are not being rational. Very seldom do we get to buy as much of any good idea as we would like to.”

-Charlie Munger, as quoted here

Bridgewater's...........................

..............................................self-reinforcing evolutionary spiral:

1.   We went from on independent thinker who wanted to achieve audacious goals to a group of independent thinkers who wanted to achieve audacious goals.

2.   To enable these independent thinkers to have effective collective decision making, we created an idea meritocracy based on principles that ensured we would be radically honest and transparent with each other, have thoughtful disagreements, and have idea-meritocratic ways of getting past our disagreements to make decisions.

3.   We recorded these decision-making principles on paper and later encoded them into computers and made our decisions based on them.

4.   This produced our successes and failures, which produced more learnings, which were written into more principles that were systemized and acted upon.

5.   This process resulted in excellent work and excellent relationships that led us to having well-rewarded and happy employees and clients.

6.   That led us to be able to bring n more audacious independent thinkers with more audacious goals to strengthen this self-reinforcing upward spiral.

     We did that over and over again, which produced the evolutionary looping behind Bridgewater's forty-plus years of success.

-Ray Dalio, Principles:  Life and Work

Data over dogma................

"The best investment advice often comes from books that have little to do with money."

-Tony Isola, as culled from here

The magic ring of myth...................

     Throughout the inhabited world, in all times and under every circumstance, myths of man have flourished;  and they have been the living inspiration of whatever else may have appeared out of the activities of the human body and  mind.   It would not be too much to say that myth is the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into the human cultural manifestation.  Religions, philosophies, arts, the social forms of primitive and historic man, prime discoveries in science and technology, the very dreams that blister sleep, boil up from the basic, magic ring of myth.

-Joseph Campbell,  The Hero With A Thousand Faces

The whole world is watching........

Chicago Transit Authority...............................Prologue/Someday

Trifecta........................

Go here for further instructions.

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

From Chicago.............................The 1968 Democratic Convention

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

Two men passed under the wooden arch that led into Campo Santo Stefano, their bodies harlequined by the coloured Christmas lights suspended above them.  Brighter light splashed from the stalls of the Christmas market, where vendors and producers from different regions of Italy tempted shoppers with their local specialities:   dark-skinned cheeses and packages of paper-thin bread from Sardina, olives in varying shape and colour from the entire length of the peninsula;  oil and cheese from Tuscany; salami of all lengths, compositions, and diameters from Reggio Emilia.  Occasionally one of the men behind the counters shouted out a brief hymn to the quality of his wares:  'Signori, taste this cheese and taste heaven';  'It's late and I want to go to dinner:  only nine Euros a kilo until they're gone';  Taste this pecorino, signori, best in the world.'

-Donna Leone,  Blood From A Stone

Maybe the answer................

.....................is that people don't believe what they say anymore?

Paging John E. Smith................

"However, for the first time in my working life, I am tasked with literally making my living through using whatever enterprising skills I have to create relationships.  No paycheck occurs, unless I sell, first myself, then a “deal” to others."

Hoping you're having massive success!   Please check in.

Merged.........................

"An individual human existence should be like a river - small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past boulders and over waterfalls.  Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being."

-Bertrand Russell, from his essay How To Grow Old from here

Alter.................................

     A man only begins to be a man when he ceases to whine and revile, and commences to search for the hidden justice which regulates his life.   And as he adapts his mind to that regulating factor, he ceases to accuse others as the cause of his conditions, and builds himself up in strong and noble thoughts;  ceases to kick against circumstances, but begins to use them as aids to his more rapid progress, and as a means of discovering the hidden powers and possibilities within himself.
       Law, not confusion, is the dominating principle in the universe;  justice, not injustice, is the soul and substance of life;  and righteousness, not corruption, is the molding and moving force in the spiritual government of the world.   This being so, man has but to right himself to find that the universe is right, he will find that as he alters his thoughts towards things and other people, things and other people will alter towards  him.

-James Allen,  As A Man Thinketh

Romantic consumerism..................

      Even what people take to be their most personal desires are usually programmed by the imagined order.  Let's consider, for example, the popular desire to take a holiday abroad.  There is nothing natural or obvious about this.  A chimpanzee alpha male would never think of using his power in order to go on holiday into the territory of a neighboring chimpanzee band.  The elite of ancient Egypt spent their fortunes building pyramids and having their corpses mummified, but none of them thought of going shopping in Babylon or taking a skiing holiday in Phoenicia.  People today spend a great deal of money on holidays abroad because they are true believers in the myths of romantic consumerism.
       Romanticism tells us that in order to make the most of our human potential we must have as many different experience as we can.  We must open ourselves to a wide spectrum of emotions;  we must sample various kinds of relationships;  we must try different cuisines;   we must learn to appreciate different styles of music.   One of the best ways to do all that is to break free from our daily routines, leave behind the familiar setting, and go travelling in distant lands, where we can 'experience' the culture, the smells, the tastes and the norms of other people.  We hear again and again the romantic myths about 'how a new experience opened my eyes and changed my life'.
     Consumerism tells us that in order to be happy we must consume as many products and services as possible.  If we feel that something is missing or not quite right, then we probably need to buy a product (a car, new clothes, organic food) or a service (housekeeping, relationship therapy, yoga classes).  Every television commercial is another little legend about how consuming some product or service will make life better.
      Romanticism, which encouraged variety, meshes perfectly with consumerism.  Their marriage has given birth to the infinite 'market of experiences', on which the modern tourism industry is founded.  The tourism industry does not sell flight tickets and hotel bedrooms.  It sells experiences.

-Yuval Noah Harari,  Sapiens:  A Brief History of Humankind

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

Frankie Valli & The Four Seasons...Will You Love Me Tomorrow

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

The New Colony Six.................I Will Always Think About You

 

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

      via

Dig...................................

School is one thing. Education is another. The two don’t always overlap. Whether you’re in school or not, it’s always your job to get yourself an education.

You have to be curious about the world in which you live. Look things up. Chase down every reference. Go deeper than anybody else – that’s how you’ll get ahead.

-Austin Kleon, from here

Focus..............................

"Whatsoever he had to do at all, he put his whole mind into it and held it there until that was done.  That makes men great almost anywhere."

-Russell Conwell, discussing Abe Lincoln in his Acres of Diamonds lecture

The generous long game..............

"If you show up and show up and show up, and care enough to learn to connect, you will have a skill for life."

-Seth Godin, as culled from here

Subsidiarity..............................

"People should learn to deal with a world, which since the Fall of Man has been demonstrably imperfect.  They should  'cultivate their gardens.'"

-David Warren, as extracted from this Too Big to Succeed essay

subsidiarity defined here 

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

Paul Revere and The Raiders..................................Too Much Talk

Learned something new today.......

Twist ties have meaning.  Who knew?   Back story here

via

For the most part, yes..................

via

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

Paul Revere and The Raiders.....................................Happening '68

 

Recipe............................

After the age of eighty she found she had some difficulty in getting to sleep, so she habitually spent the hours from midnight to 3:00 A.M. in reading popular science.  I do not believe that she ever had time to notice that she was growing old.  This, I think, is the proper recipe for remaining young.  If you have wide and keen interests and activities in which you can still be effective, you will have not reason to think about the merely statistical fact of the number of years you have already lived, still less of the possible brevity of your future.

Bertrand Russell, discussing his maternal grandmother in his essay, How To Grow Old.  Published here

Seeds...............................

     All the eventful year of 1793, which witnessed the execution of Louis XVI and the outbreak of the war between France and England, the decline of Danton and the rise of Robespierre, was passed quietly by Talleyrand in London.  It was probably during this year that he wrote the treatise on the Duke of Orleans which forms part of his published memoirs.  He offers no defence for, and indeed strongly condemns, the character and conduct of Philippe Egalite, but acquits him of any responsibility for the outbreak or the course of the Revolution.  "If historians strive to attribute the blame of having caused, or directed, or modified the French Revolution, they will be wasting their time.  It had no authors, nor leaders, nor guides.  The seed was sown by writers who, in a bold and enlightened age, wishing to attack prejudice, overthrew the principles of religion and of social life, and by incompetent Ministers, who increased the embarrassment of the treasury and the discontent of the people."  Whether Talleyrand wrote these words in 1793 or at a later date they can be taken as giving his considered opinion, the soundness of which few historians will be inclined to dispute.

-Duff Copper, Talleyrand

Bring forth.............................

     A man's mind may be likened to a garden, which may be intelligently cultivated or allowed to run wild:  but whether cultivated or neglected, it must, and will, bring forth.  If no useful seeds are put into it, then an abundance of useless weed-seeds will fall therein, and will continue to produce their kind.

-James Allen,  As A Man Thinketh

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

The Beach Boys............................................................Darlin'

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

The Marvelettes............................My Baby Must Be A Magician

 

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

Canned Heat................................................On The Road Again

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

Leapy Lee..................................................................Little Arrows

 

Brushing up on my.........................

..............................................................................................Yiddish

A readiness..........................

     A readiness to adapt oneself to the facts of the real world is often praised as a virtue, and in part it is.  It is a bad thing to close one's eyes to facts or fail to admit them because they are not welcome.  But it is also a bad thing to assume that whatever is in the ascendant must be right, that regard for fact demands subservience to evil.  Even worse than conscious subservience to evil is the self-deception which denies that it is evil.  When I find individual liberty being everywhere lessened by regimentation, I will not on that account pretend that regimentation is a good thing.  It may be necessary for a time, but one should not on that account acquiesce in it as part of any society that one can admire.

-Bertrand Russell, from his essay "Hopes: Realized and Disappointed", as contained in this fine little tome.

Points of view...........................

        If you're like most people, you have no clue how other people see things and aren't good at seeking to understand what they are thinking, because you're too preoccupied with telling them what you yourself think is correct.   In other words, you are close-minded;  you presume too much. This closed-mindedness is terribly costly;  it causes you to miss out on all sorts of wonderful possibilities and dangerous threats that other people might be showing you - and it blocks criticism that could be constructive and even lifesaving. 

-Ray Dalio,  Principles

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

Booker T & The M.G.'s..........................................Soul-Limbo

Doesn't always seem that way.......

Endless house cleaning..............

via

Connections.........................

“No matter what you look at, if you look at it closely enough, you are involved in the entire universe.” 

-Michael Faraday

image via APOD

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

"Yet Trump’s apparent success, flawed as it is, offers one more illustration of how the corruption of ruling U.S. elites created a vacuum that opened the door to Trumpism."

-as cut and pasted from here

Grace under pressure....................

    via

Good question.....................

Interesting sentences.............

     Lele smiled his crooked smile, one side of his mouth turning down, the other up, a smile Brunetti had always thought best expressed the Italian character, never quite sure of gloom or glee and always ready to switch from one to the other.

-Donna Leon,   Acqua Alta

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

Joe Tex.....................................................Skinny Legs and All

Developing.......................

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

      American food is in crisis, and rarely has more disruption loomed before us.
      People are rebelling against the current food-production methods involving long-distance shipping, fertilizers, and genetically modified organisms.  Many people have returned to eating locally grown food from small farms, and there is a fear that our agricultural practices lead to mass-produced food products that are bad for our health and worsen climate change.  But is this fear well founded?  Is local food a good thing?
      On the other side of the ledger, we are spending more and more on fancy restaurants.  At a time when many economic sectors are struggling, the choices for fine meals are expanding in most American cities.  But are we spending our money in the best way possible, or are we overlooking cheaper and possibly superior alternatives?
     In a world with some pretty big problems, is it even appropriate to think of food in aesthetic terms as much as we do?   The backlash drove a recently published article in the Atlantic Monthly to suggest that foodies are evil for aestheticizing the experience of eating.  But what could be morally wrong with eating good, even beautiful food?

-Tyler Cowen,  An Economist Gets Lunch:  New Rules For Everyday Foodies

Talleyrand..................................

      The contents of this document are of profound interest to the student of Talleyrand's foreign policy, and provide an invaluable testimony to the perspicacity of his vision and the consistency of his views.  The new France that has been created by the Revolution must, he maintains, adopt a new policy which will be in accordance with the philosophy of her Constitution.   The basis of this policy mus be the abandonment of the old ambition to be the greatest Power in Europe and of the old endeavour to acquire aggrandisement of territory.  "We have learnt, a little late no doubt, that for States as for individuals real wealth consists not in acquiring or invading the domains of others, but in developing one's own.  We have learnt that all extensions of territory, all usurpations, by force or by fraud, which have long been connected by prejudice with the idea of 'rank,' of 'hegemony.' of 'political stability,' of 'superiority,' in the order of  the Powers, are only the cruel jests of political lunacy, false estimates of power, and that their real effect is to increase the difficulty of administration and to diminish the happiness and security of the governed for the passing interest or for the vanity of those who govern. ... France ought, therefore, to remain within her own boundaries, she owes it to her glory, to her sense of justice and of reason, to her own interest and to that of the other nations who will become free."

-Duff Cooper, Talleyrand.   The document in question was written by Talleyrand in November of 1792.

There is a lot of this going on.............

 "Consider, for example, the middle-aged men, their stomachs well-stocked against starvation, ..."

-as culled from this essay, which concludes:

"What also strikes me is that the capacity to choose to do things for their own sakes defines a free people. Alexis de Tocqueville long ago praised Americans’ associations, which he considered a schoolroom of liberty and initiative. Perhaps our capacity to do useful things well and with grace comes from the joy we take in the intelligent pursuit of our pleasures—the reason that Josef Pieper called leisure “the basis of culture.” The highest arts of the mind, most freely pursued, as our whole tradition has recognized until lately, are paradoxically the most useful of all."

I thought this was the purpose of blogging....

"Being alone and connecting inwardly is a skill nobody ever teaches us. That’s ironic because it’s more important than most of the ones they do."

-as culled from here, with an assist from here

It does get complicated............................

.................................................or, be careful what you wish for:

In all of these cases, we may be giving up control in order to have convenience. The cumulative effect may be to give away our independence.

-from here, but check this one too

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

Aretha Franklin......................................................Ain't No Way

Perspectives matter..........................

The Agricultural Revolution certainly enlarged the sum total of food at the disposal of humankind, but the extra food did not translate into a better diet or more leisure.  Rather, it translated into population explosions and pampered elites.  The average farmer worked harder than the average forager, and got a worse diet in return.  The Agricultural Revolution was history's biggest fraud.
     Who was responsible?  Neither kings, nor priests, nor merchants.  The culprits were a handful of plant species, including wheat, rice, and potatoes.  These plants domesticated Homo sapiens, rather than vice versa.
     Think for a moment about the Agricultural Revolution from the viewpoint of wheat.  Ten thousand years ago wheat was just a wild grass, one of many, confined to a small range in the Middle East.  Suddenly, within just a few short millennia, it was growing all over the world.  According to the basic evolutionary criteria of survival and reproduction, wheat has become one of the most successful plants in the history of the earth.  In areas such as the Great Plains of North America, where not a single wheat stalk grew 10,000 years ago, you can today walk for hundreds upon hundreds of miles without encountering any other plant.   Worldwide, wheat covers about 870,000 square miles of the globe's surface, almost ten times the size of Britain.  How did this grass turn from insignificant to ubiquitous?
     Wheat did it by manipulating Homo sapiens to its advantage.

-Yuval Noah Harari,  Sapiens:  A Brief History of Humankind

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

Jose Feliciano............................................................Light My Fire

The year was 1792.....................

     The situation in which Talleyrand now found himself was even more difficult than that in which he had been placed at the beginning of the year.  Pitt was as anxious to avoid war as he had ever been; Talleyrand was as sincere in his repudiation of all forms of propaganda and in his assurances as to the pacific intentions of the French Government.  But already the 'war on kings' had been declared in the Assembly;  already the missionary spirit was abroad in the streets of Paris and finding noisy utterance in the press; already the first soldiers of the revolutionary crusade had crossed the border into the Low Countries; and already the English people were irritated, indignant, and alarmed.  Wise and moderate individuals were still struggling for peace, but ignorant and passionate mobs were sweeping all obstacles before them as they surged irresistibly forward to their own destruction in war.

-Duff Cooper,  Talleyrand

A definition of..................................

....................................................................................Success.

via

On self-sabotage........................

“We tend to see the troublemaker as something outside ourselves. If we reflect deeply, however, we discover that the real troublemaker is within us: our true enemies are our own destructive tendencies.” 

-The Dalai Lama, as quoted here

All of which reminds me of this classic post from Michael Wade:

Nine traits................................

..............................................found in self-actualizing people.

Maslow was pretty smart, studying well-adjusted and mentally healthy people.   To give you a taste, here are three of the nine traits:

1.   Self actualizing people know how to enjoy the journey, not just the destination. They are flexible, they can change; they adapt. Self actualizing people embrace uncertainty and ambiguity. They do not cling to the familiar.

3.   While inherently unconventional, self actualizing people do not seek to shock or disturb. They are neither conformers nor rebels. They resist enculturation. They are free thinkers, able to think outside the box, self-starters. They take responsibility for their own destinies.

7.   Self actualizing people are full of gratitude, full of wonder. They are at once realists and optimists.

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

Hugh Montenegro...............The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

On bringing order..................

With pen and paper, you have a chance to bring order to that development, that creativity, that intelligence that comes with a human being. To neglect that ordering process is to give reign to worry, anxiety, stress; each and every one an electrical impulse which is out of control. For goodness sake, write. Or risk simply Mondays as a human doing.

-Nicholas Bate, as copied from here

Sounds about right...................

“Democracy is finding proximate solutions to insoluble problems.” 


-Reinhold Niebuhr

The angels cry..............................

..............................................the chain of consequences.

Better................................

"I have something that I call my Golden Rule. It goes something like this:  'Do unto others twenty-five percent better than you expect them to do unto you.' … The twenty-five percent is for error."

-Linus Pauling

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

At the book store..........................Eldridge Cleaver's Soul on Ice

"And why does it make you sad to see how everything hangs by such thin and whimsical threads? Because you're a dreamer, an incredible dreamer, with a tiny spark hidden somewhere inside you which cannot die, which even you cannot kill or quench and which tortures you horribly because all the odds are against its continual burning. In the midst of the foulest decay and putrid savagery, this spark speaks to you of beauty, of human warmth and kindness, of goodness, of greatness, of heroism, of martyrdom, and it speaks to you of love."

Damn..............................

"I am not a product of my circumstances.  I am a product of my decisions."

-Stephen R. Covey

2.300 years later.....................

...................................................foundations still matter:

ὥσπερ γὰρ οἰκίας, οἶμαι, καὶ πλοίου καὶ τῶν ἄλλων τῶν τοιούτων τὰ κάτωθεν ἰσχυρότατ᾽ εἶναι δεῖ, οὕτω καὶ τῶν πράξεων τὰς ἀρχὰς καὶ τὰς ὑποθέσεις ἀληθεῖς καὶ δικαίας εἶναι προσήκει

"For a house, I take it, or a ship or anything of that sort must have its chief strength in its substructure; and so too in affairs of state the principles and the foundations must be truth and justice."

-Demosthenes

One word...............

“One word
Frees us of all the weight and pain of life:
That word is love.” 

-Sophocles

Chronicles of Defunction............

Alas, they had the Big Idea. Too, they were exemplars of temperance — workaholic instead, and probably incorruptible, in that sterile, short-sleeve, Puritan way. This is of the essence of liberalism and progress. It is a matter of stolid conviction, in opposition to all human experience. Everything is done consciously, nothing by instinct. Statistics are gratuitously gathered, and constantly reviewed. Everything must be managed, to the end of eliminating anything that smacks of a living tradition, spontaneity, or morale.

The (ancient) Greeks, who knew a thing or two about tyranny, felt that no decision should be made until it had become unavoidable, by when it would have been discussed, in a leisurely and therefore thorough way, sometimes drunk and sometimes sober. If the same conclusion is reached by both methods — by the coffee method and by the whisky method, as it were — then, and only then, should we dare proceed.

- David Warren, as culled from this post

dearer....................................

"In the modern world, if communities are unhappy, it is because the choose to be so.  Or, to speak more precisely, because they have ignorances, habits, beliefs, and passions, which are dearer to them than happiness or even life.  I find many men in our dangerous age who seem to be in love with misery and death, and who grow angry when hopes are suggested to them.  They think that hope is irrational and that, in sitting down to lazy despair, they are merely facing facts.  I cannot agree with these men.  To preserve hope in our world makes calls upon our intelligence and our energy.  In those who despair it is very frequently, the energy that is lacking."

-Bertrand Russell, excerpted from his essay Reflections on My Eightieth Birthday

This is sooooo true...........................

"In many cases, saving a little money on taxes will bring people much more joy than earning a lot of money on their investments."

This is even more true:

 "I’m a huge proponent of deferring or avoiding taxes whenever possible but you never want to make an investment decision based purely on the tax benefits."

-both quotes from here

Interesting excerpts found while...............

.........................wandering through the Intertunnel thicket:

Legislation often backfires because the majority of congressmen are lawyers who try to fix most things through imposing procedures and regulations rather than altering incentives. These lawyer-legislators prefer to force the sinner to repent rather than making virtue more attractive. Perhaps they ignore incentives, since in their careers, they have experienced only two: bill more hours and get reelected.

The SEC believes that “sunlight is the best disinfectant”–disclosure is the cure for everything from insider trading to cancer. Had they hired a few gardeners to complement their staff of brilliant lawyers, they might have learned that sunshine also makes weeds grow. As the SEC required more disclosure about CEO pay, pay increased relentlessly because more disclosure made it easier for everyone to know what everyone else was making–and to leapfrog to the next higher level.

source is here

Maybe not the literal translation.............

   via

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

At the movies.....Barbra Streisand and Omar Sharif in Funny Girl

 

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

Country Joe and The Fish.................................An Untitled Protest

 

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

     None of it would have come to pass - not the desperate quest for the traitor, not the strained alliances nor the needless deaths - were it not for poor Heathcliff.  He was their tragic figure, their broken promise.  In the end, he would prove to be yet another feather in Gabriel's cap.  That said, Gabriel would have preferred that Heathcliff were still on his side of the ledger.  Assets like Heathcliff do not come along every day, sometimes only once in a career, rarely twice.  Such was the nature of espionage, Gabriel would lament.  Such was life itself.

-Daniel Silva,  the Other Woman

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

The Byrds....................................................Wasn't Born To Follow

 

Out-of-step, culturally..................

Here is a list of the 100 Best TV Episodes  since the year 2000.   Reasonable people can can disagree about many things, especially lists.   Out of the 100 TV shows listed, I have only watched four.  Of those four, I did happen to see these two "best episodes."  Maybe I should watch more TV.   Likely not.





via

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

Jefferson Airplane..............................................................Lather

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

via

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

Pink Floyd...............................................Let There Be More Light

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

Strawberry Alarm Clock...............................Shallow Impressions

 

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

Them.......................................................She Put A Hex On You

 

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

The Lemon Pipers.................................I Was Not Born To Follow

 

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

At the movies...Robert Mitchum & Dean Martin in Five Card Stud

 

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

Grass Roots.......................................Who Will You Be Tomorrow

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

It's A Beautiful Day........................................................White Bird

 

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

Quicksilver Messenger Service.................................Pride of Man

 

Don't await......................

We want things to go perfectly, so we tell ourselves that we'll get started once the conditions are right, or once we have our bearings.  When really, it'd be better to focus on making do with how things actually are.

-Ryan Holiday, as culled from today's entry