One upside...............................

 

.....................................of young children:

One of the best parts about having young children is so much of your time is devoted to their activities that you don’t have a lot of time to pay attention to the outside world. Some parents complain about being busy all the time but I find it to be a welcomed break from paying attention to all of the craziness this world has to offer.

This should make some interesting reading...

 

King-Slutzky, whose thesis is on “theories of the imagination and poetry as interpreted through a Marxian lens” and the “fantasies of limitless energy in the transatlantic Romantic imagination from 1760–1860,” and whose fantasies are indeed limitless, goes on . . .

-as cut-and-pasted from here

Hate it.............................

 ..................................when that happens.

Happy.........................

 

To the child of my child: I may not be around when you read this but I want you to know that this morning I walked on a path and I could see the full moon above the pine trees. It was very bright and round and full and it made me very happy to see it. Someday you will be watching that same moon. I hope it makes you happy too.

-Leonard Cohen

via

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

 Mark Twain said kids provide the most interesting information, “for they tell all they know and then they stop.” Adults tend to lose this skill. 

-Morgan Housel, from this post

Hey, it could happen...................

 

Toughen up................................

 Humans are not built for a life of ease. This is a forgotten wisdom, one revered by the ancient Stoics and once fundamental to philosophical thought. Within the writings of Seneca and Epictetus lies the maxim that it is not our hardship that harms us, but how we relate to it. In choosing to learn and grow from affliction, we fortify our mind. As Seneca wrote, “Difficulties strengthen the mind, as labor does the body.” . . .

“Humans don’t mind hardship,” Junger remarks, “in fact they thrive on it. What they mind is not feeling necessary. Modern society has perfected the art of making people not feel necessary.”

-Freya India, from this post on Generation Z and suffering

Be very careful what you wish for......

     Lest there be any misunderstanding:  It is capitalism that opened the gates to the Land of Plenty, but capitalism alone cannot sustain it.  Progress has become synonymous with economic prosperity, but the twenty-first century will challenge us to find other ways of boosting out quality of life.

. . .  conflicting utopias are the lifeblood of democracy, after all.

     True progress begins with something no knowledge economy can produce:  wisdom about what it means to live well.

If anything, kids today are struggling under the burden of too much pampering.

-Rutger Bregman, being a few excerpts from his Utopia For Realists:  How We Can Build The Ideal World

Be VERY careful what you wish for.....

To modern millennials, however, fear of socialism seems as ancient as a rotary phone.  Story here.

via

The kids................................

............................................................will be just fine.

Say it ain't so..........................

................................the end of toys?  Or just the end of toy stores?

This week, Toys ‘R’ Us Inc. finally died. ...

Seeking a cause for its demise, Toys ‘R’ Us has cast the blame upon its competitors -- particularly Amazon.com Inc. and Walmart -- which is a little like saying I’d have won the golf tournament if not for all those guys with the lower scores. ...

But the chain’s biggest foe was neither nimbler retailers nor that heavy debt load. It was the undermining of the very concept of the toy. For most of recorded history, toys have been physical things with which children play and create, telling themselves stories about the world and their place in it. ...

Well, toys that talk and blink a chain could still stock, albeit at a fearsome discount to compete with online retailers. But when a toy as a tangible thing to be manipulated yielded to a toy as a digital presence with which a child interacted via a multipurpose device, the idea of a toy store was in its death throes. As we learned from the demise of video and record chains, that which is downloadable needs no physical presence to be sold. And nowadays even very young children prefer the touchable screen to the touchable toy. Apart from a niche here and there, toy stores no longer serve any discernible function.

photo via

And I don't think he is talking about bourbon....

"If you go to college today, you had best take on the hard stuff or nobody cares."

-The News Junkie, as culled from here

From your keyboard to God's ears....

..........................................................this can't happen soon enough:

Millennials will be huge for housing demand in the coming years. The area we live in is being flooded by couples with younger kids who are moving out of cities and into the suburbs. There will always be a huge demand for big city living but young people, like everyone who came before them, eventually get older. And when you get older and have kids it’s not quite as easy to make things work living in a city. Buying a house won’t be the right decision for everyone but the flood of new homebuyers from the millennial cohort in the coming years could be enormous.

-Ben Carlson, taken from this post

Sensing this is true....................

"Someone who has spent his life as a heterosexual white male will never be able to understand how an incorrectly-made sandwich could trigger a trauma."

-Philipp Oehmke. as extracted from his essay Has Political Correctness Gone off the Rails in America?

Parenting 101:

......................I'll have to ask my kids how well we did:

I don't believe in playing down to children, either in life or in motion pictures. I didn't treat my own youngsters like fragile flowers, and I think no parent should.  Children are people, and they should have to reach to learn about things, to understand things, just as adults have to reach if they want to grow in mental stature. Life is composed of lights and shadows, and we would be untruthful, insincere, and saccharine if we tried to pretend there were no shadows. Most things are good, and they are the strongest things; but there are evil things too, and you are not doing a child a favor by trying to shield him from reality. The important thing is to teach a child that good can always triumph over evil, and that is what our pictures attempt to do.

-Walt Disney, as excerpted from here

On learning........................

     "After years of working with students at both ends of the achievement spectrum, I now have a distinctly different view of school reform.  The problem, I think, is not only the schools but also the students themselves.  Here's why:  learning is hard.  True, learning is fun, exhilarating, and gratifying - but it is also often daunting, exhausting, and sometimes discouraging.  By and large, students who no longer want to learn, who don't think they can learn, and who don't see any point in learning simply won't - no matter how wonderful the school or teacher...
     To help chronically low-performing but intelligent students, educators and parents must first recognize that character is at least as important as intellect."

     "Underachievement among American youth is often blamed on inadequate teachers, boring textbooks, and large class sizes.  We suggest other reasons for students falling short of their intellectual potential:  their failure to exercise self-discipline...We believe that many of America's children have trouble making choices that require them to sacrifice short-term pleasure for long-term gain, and that programs that build self-discipline may be the royal road to building academic achievement."

-Angela Lee Duckworth, as excerpted from Martin E. P. Seligman's Flourish:  A Visionary New Understanding of Happiness and Well-being

What does one do..........................

.....................................with a startled masked procyonid?

In case you ever needed proof................

.........that the kids are going to be just fine, allow me to offer Exhibit A:

              Unorganized Hancock's original song:  Go, Go, Go

As my favorite optimist might say, "The boys are evolving quite nicely."

It was a long time ago.................

..............................but I don't remember junior high school as being anything like a "cozy emotional embryo."

"Are today’s students, then, brave reformers or fragile hothouse campus plants? Do they want to wade into freewheeling debate and battle all ideological comers, or do they insist on being protected by surrogate faculty parents, who must provide them the same cozy emotional embryos that they enjoyed in junior high school?"

A quote from Victor Davis Hanson does some research on a new breed:  the cry-bully.  Read about it here.

The next fifty years will be very interesting........