No-noes.........................................

Wealth without work
Pleasure without conscience
Science without humanity
Knowledge without character
Politics without principle
Commerce without morality
Worship without sacrifice.” 
-Mohandas K. Gandhi

Scout detail.................................

The moments of happiness we enjoy take us by surprise. It is not that we seize them, but that they seize us.
-Ashley Montagu 

via

Zest..................................

True happiness comes from the joy of deeds well done, the zest of creating things new.
-Antoine de Saint-Exupery 

via

Swing me....................................

Ritchie Valens..............................Come on, Let's Go

Twainisms.......................................

Here of late, a number of Mark Twain witticisms have crossed my path.  The man was a virtual quote machine. The problem with posting one or two or twelve is...how do you choose?  Then the thought arose...bet you could make a blog just out of Twain's sayings.  Turns out you can.  Like here and here and probably seventeen other places.  Anyway, enjoy a few Twain quotes:

"If you don't read the newspaper you are uninformed, if you do read the newspaper you are misinformed."

"The easy confidence with which I know another man's religion is folly teaches me to suspect that my own is also."

“Clothes make the man. Naked people have little or no influence on society”

"Loyalty to petrified opinions never yet broke a chain or freed a human soul in this world — and never will."

"It takes a thousand men to invent a telegraph, or a steam engine, or a phonograph, or a photograph, or a telephone or any other important thing—and the last man gets the credit and we forget the others. He added his little mite — that is all he did. These object lessons should teach us that ninety-nine parts of all things that proceed from the intellect are plagiarisms, pure and simple; and the lesson ought to make us modest.  But nothing can do that."

“Education: that which reveals to the wise, and conceals from the stupid, the vast limits of their knowledge.”

"The only reason why God created man is because he was disappointed with the monkey."

Social injustice............................

...........Or "feel good"  is not the same as "doing good."  As always, the Law of Unintended Consequences bats last:



thank maggie's

About markets...................................

Stuart Schneiderman analyses a (gated Wall Street Journal) Paul Rubin essay on markets.  It is worthy of your reading and you may even learn a new word.   Blog post is here.  Brief excerpts here:

How can we explain this emporiophobia—a fear of markets—given the overwhelming evidence that such institutions provide the greatest wealth, health and happiness for humankind?

Why does the free market have such a bad reputation? Rubin suggests that the discourse about markets has distorted the truth. We have all been told that people compete in markets; we have not been told that people cooperate in them.

He wants to rethink the notion of  the free market to emphasize cooperation and to de-emphasize competition. After all, market transactions are negotiated compromises in which both parties feel like they have gained. A market in which some gain at the expense of others cannot long function.

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

LBJ declares "War on Poverty" in his State of The Union address

Thrall....................................

"The greatest slave is not he who is ruled by a despot, great though that evil be, be he who is in thrall of his own moral ignorance, selfishness, and vice."
-Samuel Smiles

cartoon via

Extrapolation........................

"Astronomers have worked out that there are 70 thousand million million million - or seven followed by 22 zeros - stars visible from the Earth through telescopes."

Full (dated) story here.  Notice the words "stars visible."   Of course they're not even hazarding a guess at how many planets are hanging around all those stars.  Seven followed by 22 zeros is a pretty big number, and yet, we still act as though our little world is the most important thing going.  Wonder why that is?

Thanks Gerard

Fearing fear...................................

Understanding youngsters.........................

Buddy Holly & the Crickets......................Peggy Sue

'Tis the season..............................

 

           Good-By And Keep Cold

This saying good-bye on the edge of the dark

And cold to an orchard so young in the bark

Reminds me of all that can happen to harm

An orchard away at the end of the farm

All winter, cut off by a hill from the house.

I don't want it girdled by rabbit and mouse,

I don't want it dreamily nibbled for browse

By deer, and I don't want it budded by grouse.

(If certain it wouldn't be idle to call

I'd summon grouse, rabbit, and deer to the wall

And warn them away with a stick for a gun.)

I don't want it stirred by the heat of the sun.

(We made it secure against being, I hope,

By setting it out on a northerly slope.)

No orchard's the worse for the wintriest storm;

But one thing about it, it mustn't get warm.

"How often already you've had to be told,

Keep cold, young orchard. Good-bye and keep cold.

Dread fifty above more than fifty below."

I have to be gone for a season or so.

My business awhile is with different trees,

Less carefully nourished, less fruitful than these,

And such as is done to their wood with an axe—

Maples and birches and tamaracks.

I wish I could promise to lie in the night

And think of an orchard's arboreal plight

When slowly (and nobody comes with a light)

Its heart sinks lower under the sod.

But something has to be left to God.

-Robert Frost

photo via

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

Terry Stafford........................................Suspicion

On channeling selfishness......................

"Capitalism is rotten at every level, yet it adds up to something extraordinarily useful for society over time.  The paradox of capitalism is that adding a bunch of bad-sounding ideas together creates something incredible that is far more good than bad.  Capitalism inspires people to work hard, take reasonable risks, and to create value for customers.  On the whole, capitalism channels selfishness in a direction that benefits civilization, not counting a few fat cats who have figured out how to game the system."
-Scott Adams, as excerpted from How To Fail At Almost Everything And Still Win Big:  Kind of the Story of My Life

Since we've been talking about listening.........................

and since we've been quoting Scott Adams, and since Dennis brought it up, here is Dilbert on the topic of listening:

The race is on...............................

"So let’s get started. Obamacare can’t be fixed by its namesake. It’s up to us to make it happen."
-Michael Moore, as excerpted from here
thanks mungo

Put salt on her tail.....................

Jeff continues to amaze with his knowledge of old science fiction movies:

Okay - I may have done a mashup of The Three Stooges in Orbit, Three Stooges in Have Rocket Will Travel, and Abbott & Costello Go to Mars. But that last one most likely not. All I remember was a square headed martian at which point I grabbed my stomach and told by budz I wasn't feellng well. Heck - I was only eight years old! 

And let's no forget The Incredible Shrinking Man and it's gender alter ego, Attack of the 50 Foot Woman. That one really got the hormones going...heh...

- J.

Feel free to watch this clip (or others available at YouTube Central), but friend to friend, don't invest a lot of time in it.

Round two..............................

Bruce Cockburn..................Lovers In A Dangerous Time



A day of so ago we featured the Bare Naked Ladies version of this song.  A commenter suggested that Cockburn, who wrote the song, did it better.  Hey, we report, you decide.  For those who REALLY like this one, go here for a Cockburn/Steven Page duet.

Winners and losers........................

No, we're not talking Clemson and Ohio State here.  Faithful readers will understand that I am a fan of Walter Russell Mead and his American Interest blog.  Mead looks back at 2013 and sees winners and losers, setting the parameters thusly: "AI didn’t make moral judgments. This is a realist calculation, looking at who gained power during the year and who lost."

Ten Biggest Winners

Ten Biggest Losers

As always, Mead is thoughtful and interesting.  In case you're wondering where the good old U.S. of A. lands on scorecard, consider this quote:  "Whatever their politics, Americans should join in hoping for a better 2014."

So............................

..............how are your plans for 2014 working out?

\
"No plan of battle ever survives contact with the enemy."
-Helmuth von Moltke, the elder

image via

Opening the back door........................

Greg Mankiw offers a different look at the push to raise the minimum wage in this NYT-published essay.   The Cliff Note version of his column might be "beware the law of unintended consequences.  A wee excerpt:

Because “tax” is a dirty word in Washington, politicians generally prefer regulations like the minimum wage to accomplish their goals. But many regulations work like hidden taxes. Sometimes, in the process of hiding taxes, lawmakers opt for more damaging alternatives.

Well, it worked for 210 years......................

"The nice men in periwigs who came up with the Fourth Amendment were recklessly naive to imagine that branches of a government, each of whose power is enhanced when the power of the other branches grows, would serve to check one another. The idea of a judiciary that would police the executive as an arm of a self-correcting tripartite government was worse than naive."
-Ilana Mercer

via

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

The Kinks (and more)................................You Really Got Me

Shedding...........................

To travel lightly through life, one must first decide not to carry unnecessary baggage.   Here is a handy guide on five things not to be toting around.

image via
thanks todd

On sci-fi movies......................

A few days ago, your friendly neighborhood blogger linked to a list of the top-ten scientist ranked science fiction/fantasy movies.  Friend Jeff, who has probably forgotten more about sci-fi movies than I ever knew, sent the following comment to that post:

The problem with lists is that they're always incomplete. How Forbidden Planet was left out I don't know. And if you're going to include Jurassic Park, then what about King Kong, Mighty Joe Young, Rodan, Mothra, and Beast from 20,000 Fathoms? Then there's The Fly (original version with Vincent Price) and The Thing (original version with Marshal Dillon as the monster), Attack of the Crab Monsters, and I just might even add The Three Stooges Go To Mars. Okay - that last one might not make the top ten but it scared me out of the theatre... :) 

A cursory review of YouTube Central did not turn up a clip of the The Three Stooges Go To Mars.  It did, however, turn up this:

It is kind of dark out...................

I'd respect those pushers of AGW (Anthropogenic Global Warming) more is they were a little less certain, a little less in love with computer modeling, and had a little bit more humility.  There is an awful lot we just don't know:

As a political joke, the idea of global warming scientists out to prove the shrinking Antarctic ice sheet becoming trapped is mildly amusing. But as a matter of science, looking at an infinitesimally small part of the ice sheet and basing any conclusions on how thick the ice is at that small section at a given point during a given time of the year is silly. The Antarctic ice sheet covers 4.5 million square miles and the local concentration of ice that covers a few dozen or even hundreds of miles is certainly not indicative of whether the entire ice sheet is growing, shrinking, or remaining constant.

That said, there doesn’t seem to be a good explanation for why part of the Antarctic ice sheet is shrinking and other parts are growing. The explanation for both cannot be global warming so there is obviously some dynamic about ice masses at work of which we are still in dark.
-As excerpted from this blog post

An update on the situation from The Telegraph

Are we talking to ourselves............?

Beach Boys/Kathy Troccoli.........................I Can Hear Music

Returning to the theme of listening.........

more Potato Head cartoons via Bilbo here

Since we're really not listening.................

does it really matter........................?

The conclusion she’s arrived at while researching her new book is not, technically, that we’re not talking to each other. We’re talking all the time, in person as well as in texts, in e-mails, over the phone, on Facebook and Twitter. The world is more talkative now, in many ways, than it’s ever been. The problem, Turkle argues, is that all of this talk can come at the expense of conversation. We’re talking at each other rather than with each other.

As Andrew Sullivan quotes Megan Garber in this blog post.

Of course it matters...............................

The importance, and messiness, of real communication...............

Conversations, as they tend to play out in person, are messy—full of pauses and interruptions and topic changes and assorted awkwardness. But the messiness is what allows for true exchange. It gives participants the time—and, just as important, the permission—to think and react and glean insights. “You can’t always tell, in a conversation, when the interesting bit is going to come,” Turkle says. “It’s like dancing: slow, slow, quick-quick, slow. You know? It seems boring, but all of a sudden there’s something, and whoa.”

As excerpted from this essay by Megan Garber about Sherry Turkle (and her work) in The Atlantic.

Verse..................................

13  He that answereth a matter before he heareth it, it is folly and shame unto him.
-Proverbs 18:13
The Holy Bible
King James Version

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

Simon and Garfunkel.......................The Sound of Silence



Purists interested in more information about this tune can go here.

Keep going.......................................

“This is the problem with dealing with someone who is actually a good listener. They don’t jump in on your sentences, saving you from actually finishing them, or talk over you, allowing what you do manage to get out to be lost or altered in transit. Instead, they wait, so you have to keep going.” 
-Sarah Dessen

cartoon via

Focus now............................

“You can't fake listening. It shows.” 
-Raquel Welch

cartoon via

Underestimate.............................

“Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have the potential to turn a life around.” 
-Leo Buscaglia

image via

Don't assume....................................

“Don't assume, because you are intelligent, able, and well-motivated, that you are open to communication, that you know how to listen.” 
-Robert K. Greenleaf

cartoon via

.........bleeds daylight..................

Bare Naked Ladies....................Lovers In A Dangerous Time

Serving...................................

     The age of the "go-getter has passed.  He has been supplanted by the "go-giver."
-Napoleon Hill, as excerpted from Think and Grow Rich

Landshark..................................

via

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

Dr. Strangelove at the movies:  "ruling out human meddling"

Maybe, but at this age just hearing is presenting its own challenges.....

via

.............close to mine.............

American Flyer.......................................Back in '57

Counter-intuitiveness on display.............

If the same-old same-old is not your thing,  consider spending some time with Dan Pink's Flip Manifesto.  A wee sample:

Steve Swasey, Netflix's vice-president for corporate communication, says:  "Rules and policies and regulations and stipulations are innovation killers.  People do their best work when they're unencumbered.  If you're spending a lot of time accounting for the time you're spending, that's time you're not innovating."

The same goes for expenses.  Employees typically don't need to get approval to spend money on entertainment, travel, or gifts.  Instead, the guidance is simpler:  act in Netflix's best interest.  It sounds delightfully adult.  And it is - in every regard.  People who don't produce are shown the door.  "Adequate performance," the company says. "gets a generous severance package."

The idea is that freedom and responsibility, long considered fundamentally incompatible, actually go together quite well.

On genies and bottles.......................

Technology has delivered to us many fabulous gifts.  The fruits of technology have spurred dramatic increases in the healthiness of our species.  Magic algorithms located somewhere within the Intertunnel have made an incalculable amount of information (both true and false) available to the everyman.  The toys and tools of this age have gone way beyond time saving and labor saving and way finding.  So where does it all lead?   Us history majors are much better at looking at the past than figuring out the future.  For that we turn to Mashable and its recent post 7 Huge Tech Trends To Expect in 2014.  My favorite is Drone Wars.  Enjoy.

Bring back the draft...............?

If you were to say to yourself, "I only have time to read one essay about the state of our republic today, so I'm going to make it a good one," then I would say to you, "read Andrew J. Bacevich's essay, One Percent Republic."    Excerpt here:

"... in formulating basic military policy and in deciding when and how to employ force, the state no longer requires the consent, direct participation, or ongoing support of citizens. As an immediate consequence, Washington’s penchant for war has appreciably increased, without, however, any corresponding improvement in the ability of political and military leaders to conclude its wars promptly or successfully. A further result, less appreciated but with even larger implications, has been to accelerate the erosion of the traditional concept of democratic citizenship."

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

The Beatles.................................A Hard Day's Night

Sentient money....................

Asked recently if money today is smarter, Greg Vilkin, managing principal and president of MarcFarlane Partners, said that, "Money today is more nervous than it has ever been."
-as excerpted from here

Unfathomed...............................

"Didst thou ever descry a glorious eternity in a winged moment of time?  Didst thou ever see a bright infinite in the narrow point of an object?  Then thou knowest what spirit means -- the spire-top, whither all things ascend harmoniously, where they meet and sit contented in an unfathomed Depth of Life."
-Peter Sterry

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

Mitch Rapp stared at his reflection in the dusty, cracked mirror and questioned his sanity.  There was no shaking, or sweaty palms.  He wasn't nervous.  It was just a cold, calculated assessment of his abilities and his odds for success.  He went over the plan once more from start to finish, and again concluded it was likely that he would be severely beaten, tortured, and possible killed, but even in the face of such prospects, he couldn't bring himself to walk away, which brought him right smack dab back to that part about his mental health.  What kind of man willingly chose to do such a thing?  Rapp thought about it for a long moment and then decided someone else would have to answer that question.
-Vince Flynn,  American Assassin

In the good old US of A.......................

cartoons via

Need some work...............................

Bruce Hornsby.....................................The Changes

One of my new favorite blogs.................

is Joe Hanson's It's Okay To Be Smart.  If you haven't visited, try it out.  You gotta love somebody who loves Feynman.

The Whole Universe in a Glass of Wine

“A poet once said, 'The whole universe is in a glass of wine.' We will probably never know in what sense he meant it, for poets do not write to be understood. But it is true that if we look at a glass of wine closely enough we see the entire universe. There are the things of physics: the twisting liquid which evaporates depending on the wind and weather, the reflection in the glass; and our imagination adds atoms. The glass is a distillation of the earth's rocks, and in its composition we see the secrets of the universe's age, and the evolution of stars. What strange array of chemicals are in the wine? How did they come to be? There are the ferments, the enzymes, the substrates, and the products. There in wine is found the great generalization; all life is fermentation. Nobody can discover the chemistry of wine without discovering, as did Louis Pasteur, the cause of much disease. How vivid is the claret, pressing its existence into the consciousness that watches it! If our small minds, for some convenience, divide this glass of wine, this universe, into parts -- physics, biology, geology, astronomy, psychology, and so on -- remember that nature does not know it! So let us put it all back together, not forgetting ultimately what it is for. Let it give us one more final pleasure; drink it and forget it all!”

-Richard P. Feynman

About those resolutions..................

via Ka-Ching!

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

Beach Boys...................................................I Get Around

The ten best science fiction movies....................

..........as chosen by scientists. I've seen, and liked, most of them.  Without trying to be picky, my list would probably include The Day The Earth Stood Still with Michael Rennie, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and Woody Allen's Sleeper.   Full scientist-picked list is here.  Sample here

No. 5 Fantastic Voyage (1966)

A miniature spacecraft and crew are injected into a comatose scientist to remove a life-threatening blood clot, so that he can survive to share vital secrets. The movie's lavishly depicted workings of the human body garnered two Academy Awards and three additional nominations—and got James Giordano thinking about medicine at the tiniest scale. Now a professor of neuroscience at Georgetown University, Giordano examines the mechanics of the brain's response to pain. "The film has been a lifelong inspiration for me to work on developing neurotechnology," he says. David Carroll, director of the Center for Nanotechnology and Molecular Materials at Wake Forest University, says that the movie's minuscule technology, although physically impossible, is echoed in his current work. "It's exactly what we are working on: Injecting nanobots that find a cancerous tumor, tell us when they have found it, and destroy it," he says. Now that's fantastic.

The criminalizing of daily life....................

40,000 new laws this year?  Can that possibly be right?   It was drummed into me as a youngster that "ignorance of the law is no excuse."  That seems like a long time ago.

On laughing at yourself more...........

The Strategic Learner makes some promises for the New Year, including to laugh more.  To help with that process, he posted a hour+ clip of George Carlin highlights.  As a time saving public service, here a a seven minute excerpt from that performance.  Enjoy, but remember - it is Carlin.

George Carlin doing what George Carlin did best

Purposeful.........................

thanks e-man

It's a tradition.......................

U2........................................................New Year's Day




here is last years version

Tackling the Trinity.........................

Walter Russell Mead sets out to explain the "Father, Son, and Holy Spirit."

"...and many people who think they are extremely well educated don’t know much about these ideas and many schools don’t teach them as part of a general cultural curriculum; unfortunately this means that young people will have to pick up their knowledge of core religious ideas from disreputable bloggers like yours truly."

It is an essay well worth reading.

Recycling for the New Year................

Remorseless............................

"Life is a checkerboard, and the player opposite you is time.  If you hesitate before moving, or neglect to move promptly, your men will be wiped off the board by time.  You are playing against a partner who will not tolerate indecision."
-Elbert Hubbard

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

Marvin Gaye...................................You're A Wonderful One

About those resolutions....................

"The first and best victory is to conquer self.  To be conquered by self is, of all things, the most shameful and vile."

-Plato

Bootstrapping.........................

Debt is serfdom, capital in all its forms is freedom.

So says this guest post at the Zero Hedge blog.  The title to the essay is The Only Leverage We Have is Extreme Frugality.  Based on his example, the writer should add to his leverage list the following:  worthy goals, determination, focus, discipline, and hard work.

thanks maggie's