a parallel narrative.....................

      Lost in the American mythology of the Mayflower is a central question:  How did a group of disenfranchised religious separatists finance a large ship, pay an experienced crew, and provision for a year's worth of supplies on the way to the New World?  Even for sovereign authorities of the early seventeenth century, outfitting a trans-Atlantic voyage was no small financial undertaking.  Certainly, impoverished political refugees of today, when crossing oceans, do not do so in chartered transportation or arrive with any capacity for financial sustenance.  The financial story behind this journey points to a parallel narrative, one in which the exalted sentiments of religious liberty found themselves subordinated to economic considerations and motivations.

-Bhu Srinivasan, Americana: A 400-Year History of American Capitalism

This is sort of interesting...................

 

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In praise of..........................

...............................................................................sandstorms?

What was previously thought to be dangerous and destructive turns out to have been clarifying and constructive. The desert needs the sandstorm to stay vibrant and vital. The overturning of the status quo is chaotic and dark, but what is revealed is bright and beautiful. For the desert to bloom, it needs to be cleansed from time to time; sandstorms make space for new growth.

Hmmm...........................

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Hmmmm.........................

"Cynicism masquerades as wisdom, but is the farthest thing from it."

-Stephen Colbert, as culled from this commencement address

Hmmmm....................................

"The Web is an unhealthy place for someone hungry for attention."

-Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Hmmm.....................................

All definitions of words, like everything else, are relative.  Definition is to a major degree dependent upon your partisan position.  Your leader is always flexible, he has pride in the dignity of his cause, he is unflinching, sincere, an ingenious tactician fighting the good fight.  To the opposition he is unprincipled and will go whichever way the wind blows, his arrogance is masked by a fake humility, he is dogmatically stubborn, a hypocrite, unscrupulous and unethical, and he will do anything to win; he is leading the forces of evil.  To one side he is a demigod, to the other a demagogue.

-Saul Alinsky,  Rules For Radicals:  A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals

Hmmm....................................

It is fashionable for the left to say we need big government to deal with big business. The opposite is true. Only big business can survive big government.
-Carly Fiorina

I believe I know what this means..................

"Risk is the price that you never believed you would have to pay."
-Alex Pollock

Speechless..............................

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I can never remember..............................

.............is it the weather or the climate that necessitates this?

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Quite a lot of bother......................

Clarke & Dawe take another look at Iraq and war........

Might be true, but I'd be the last to know......

One of these actually saved my life one night...

Phantom cell phone vibrations: an attempt at an explanation here.

While driving home late one night (sober, mind you), I came to a stop after getting off the expressway ramp.  Just as I was starting to pull into the intersection, my cell phone vibrated in my pocket.  I braked to pull the phone out of my pocket just in time to watch another car come speeding through the intersection.  If I had not braked, I would have been t-boned on the driver's side for sure.  I never saw him coming.  Of course, the  phone registered no call, no message, no e-mail, no text, no nothing; just a phantom vibration.  It is a mysterious universe we inhabit, thank God.

thanks glenn

Hmmm...................................................

Solace.....................................

"But no public man in these islands ever believes that the Bible means what it says: he is always convinced that it says what he means ..."
-George Bernard Shaw

Hmmmm.................................

"The guiding motto in the life of every natural philosopher should be:  Seek simplicity and distrust it."
-Alfred North Whitehead

Suppose.................................

"The universe is not only queerer that we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose."
-J. B. S. Haldane

And just in case you think you understand the universe, check out the latest word on "black holes" from Stephen Hawking.  Feel free to explain.

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Speculation..............................

In case we ever needed reminding about how much we don't know, here comes the Phaistos Disc. Discovered in 1908 by an Italian archaeologist digging in a Minoan palace in Crete, the fired-clay disc is stamped with glyphs on both sides.  Based on the location of the discovery, it was estimated that the Phaistos Disc dates to 1700 BC.  What does it mean?  This is where the fun begins:  "Most experts believe the symbols have some sort of hidden meaning, theorizing that its message may have been a geometric theorem, a board game, a prayer, or a mythological story.  Some experts speculate that the pictograms may have been use phonetically, in a manner similar to Egyptian hieroglyphics.  However, no other samples of the script have been found and efforts to decipher the text have proved unsuccessful.....Some experts contend that the employment of reusable characters to make an reproduce a body of text means that the Phaistos Disc represents the earliest known example of ancient movable type printing."   Adding to the fun, at least one expert believes the Phaistos Disc is a hoax.

The quotation used above was taken from Scott Christianson's 100 Diagrams That Changed The World