Thursday, July 6, 2017
It's a process...............................
Traffic...................................................John Barleycorn Must Die
There were three men came out of the west, their fortunes for to try
And these three men made a solemn vow
John Barleycorn must die
They've plowed, they've sown, they've harrowed him in
Threw clods upon his head
And these three men made a solemn vow
John Barleycorn was dead
They've let him lie for a very long time, 'til the rains from heaven did fall
And little Sir John sprung up his head and so amazed them all
They've let him stand 'til Midsummer's Day 'til he looked both pale and wan
And little Sir John's grown a long long beard and so become a man
They've hired men with their scythes so sharp to cut him off at the knee
They've rolled him and tied him by the way, serving him most barbarously
They've hired men with their sharp pitchforks who've pricked him to the heart
And the loader he has served him worse than that
For he's bound him to the cart
They've wheeled him around and around a field 'til they came onto a pond
And there they made a solemn oath on poor John Barleycorn
They've hired men with their crabtree sticks to cut him skin from bone
And the miller he has served him worse than that
For he's ground him between two stones
And little Sir John and the nut brown bowl and his brandy in the glass
And little Sir John and the nut brown bowl proved the strongest man at last
The huntsman he can't hunt the fox nor so loudly to blow his horn
And the tinker he can't mend kettle or pots without a little barleycorn
THE YEAR WAS 2081......................
.......................................and everybody was finally equal.
Re-reading Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.'s short story, Harrison Bergeron, is an annual event around these parts. Try it out.
Others feel the same
Wise selfishness............................
"So as you rightly mentioned, a self-centered attitude is the source of the problem. We have to take care of ourselves without selfishly taking care of ourselves. If we don't take care of ourselves, we cannot survive. We need to do that. We should have wise selfishness rather than foolish selfishness. Foolish selfishness means you just think only of yourself, don't care about others, bully others, exploit others. In fact, taking care of others, helping others, ultimately is the way to discover your own joy and to have a happy life. So that is what I call wise selfishness."
-The Dalai Lama
receiving and retrieving.................
Spirit ........................................................................Nature's Way
It's nature's way of telling you something's wrong
It's nature's way of telling you in a song
It's nature's way of receiving you
It's nature's way of retrieving you
It's nature's way of telling you
Something's wrong
It's nature's way of telling you, summer breeze
It's nature's way of telling you, dying trees
It's nature's way of receiving you
It's nature's way of retrieving you
It's nature's way of telling you
Something's wrong
It's nature's way, it's nature's way
It's nature's way, it's nature's way
It's nature's way of telling you
It's nature's way of telling you
Something's wrong
It's nature's way of telling you
It's nature's way of telling you
In a song, oh-h
It's nature's way of receiving you
It's nature's way
It's nature's way of retrieving you
It's nature's way
It's nature's way of telling you
Something's wrong, something's wrong, something's wrong
-Randy California
It's nature's way of telling you something's wrong
It's nature's way of telling you in a song
It's nature's way of receiving you
It's nature's way of retrieving you
It's nature's way of telling you
Something's wrong
It's nature's way of telling you, summer breeze
It's nature's way of telling you, dying trees
It's nature's way of receiving you
It's nature's way of retrieving you
It's nature's way of telling you
Something's wrong
It's nature's way, it's nature's way
It's nature's way, it's nature's way
It's nature's way of telling you
It's nature's way of telling you
Something's wrong
It's nature's way of telling you
It's nature's way of telling you
In a song, oh-h
It's nature's way of receiving you
It's nature's way
It's nature's way of retrieving you
It's nature's way
It's nature's way of telling you
Something's wrong, something's wrong, something's wrong
-Randy California
It's Entertainment.....................
The world is actually entertainment. Like amusement, it is meant to be worn lightly. Heaven is within and is revealed by awareness. The world is merely an appearance. Its melodrama is an artifice of the distorted sense of perception. It leads one to think that the world is large, powerful, and permanent and that the Self is small, weak, and transitory; exactly the opposite is true.
-David R. Hawkins
Wednesday, July 5, 2017
Soothing every raging wave that comes.......
Sugarloaf..........................................................Green Eyed Lady
Transition from misery to hope................
In other words, when we economic historians lecture to undergraduates we emphasize an anti-Malthusian message of hope - that average human welfare has shot up startlingly since 1980. A graph of average income over time resembles an ice hockey stick, with tens of thousands of years spent tracing the long, horizontal handle. Then finally, after 1800, history reached the business end of the hockey stick and shot up the blade. A video by Rosling, "200 Countries, 200 Years, 4 Minutes," makes the optimistic point, illustrating the transition from misery to hope.
-Deirdre Nansen McCloskey, Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital Or Institutions, Enriched The World
the strange idea.........................
The bourgeois, voluntary, egalitarian, bettering ideology writ across a society is recent, and therefore cannot be put down to ancient risings of empires and strugglings of classes, or to biological evolution on a scale of centuries. We did not become rich at the time of the rise of trade, which is paleolithically ancient, or upon the establishment of towns and the agricultural state and the legal protection of real property, which are less ancient but nonetheless many millennia old, or in long times of peace, which has characterized life in economically stagnant places as much as in Europe 1815-1914. An ideological change did it, and recently. In northwestern Europe the strange idea grew up that aristocracy (the rule of the best by descent) and theocracy (the rule of priests) and even plutocracy (the rule of the present rich) were all nasty. What replaced them in people's ideology, slowly, was the rule of the better technique, allowing free entry to compete with the monopolies that the aristocrats or the plutocrats had arranged under the aegis of a captured government. The new ideology in places like Britain and Belgium around 1800 favored a "betterocracy," or, if you want the pure Greek, a "kaluterocracy."
-Deirdre Nansen McCloskey, Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital Of Institutions, Enriched The World
The Great Enrichment..................
Then after 1798 - as economic historians have discovered over the past few decades - life in quite a few places got better. Slowly, and then quickly, and by now with unstoppable, ramifying, worldwide force, it got much better. Material life got better not merely for Europeans or imperial powers or Mr. Moneybags, but for ordinary people from Brooklyn to Beijing.
The betterment stands out in human history as the Great Enrichment, the most important secular event since we first domesticated squash and chickens and wheat and horses. The Enrichment has been and will continue to be more important historically that the rise and fall of empires or the class struggle in all hitherto existing societies. Such perennial fascinations of historians, entranced by the realpolitik that accompanies empires rising and classes struggling, had little to do with our enrichment. Empire did not enrich Britain. America's success did not depend on slavery. Power did not lead to plenty, and exploitation was not plenty's engine.
The real engine was the expanding ideology of liberty and dignity that inspired the proliferating schemes of betterment by and for the common people.
-Diedre Nansen McCloskey, Bourgeois Equality: How Ideas, Not Capital Or Institutions, Enriched The World
Because the learning never stops...........
Not remembering my Zeno's Paradoxes, the Oracle Google was consulted. Now I remember, but I still don't understand. Read it yourself.
"To fully solve any of the paradoxes, however, one needs to show what is wrong with the argument, not just the conclusions."
Really? I think Diogenes the Cynic had the correct answer.
Forty years ago......................
Santana...................................................................She's Not There
Tuesday, July 4, 2017
Learning something new (again)............
.....................................................................The Ship of Theseus
A visit to this post at Maggie's Farm will provide the readable context, as well as a cool link. Keep learning.
Ouch.........................
Finally, no one has calibrated quite the nation’s deep antipathy toward the coastal media-university-political-cultural nexus, most specifically its utter hypocrisy. Half the country sees not so much Democrats or progressives, but rather a bankrupt class whose venom for others is used to excuse their own exemptions from the ramifications of their own ideology.
People are tired of the social justice warrior Obama frolicking in Tahiti, the feminist Hillary Clinton excusing four decades of the sexual predations of her husband upon the weak, the supposedly in the know campus bullies picking on the vulnerable while shelling out a quarter-million dollars for a mediocre education; the progressive media decrying inequality and fairness amid face-surgeries, hair plugs, nannies, and prep schools; the Silicon Valley masters of the universe sermonizing on the evils of walls, inequality, and social justice from their gated hideaways, servants, and schemes to monopolize, offshore, outsource, and avoid taxes.
There is a limit to Trump’s crude personal tweets, but apparently no observer has yet calibrated where it is—given the country’s disdain for the media, the progressive hypocritical agenda, and the scatological and obscene rhetoric of Trump’s opposition.
-Victor Davis Hanson, as extracted from this essay on the president's communication style
Next thing you know....................
...................................they will be telling us that quarter-pounders with cheese, with a side of fries and a coke, are bad for you. I wish these people would just stop.
via
School is never out....................
...........................................................with Professor Althouse:
....................................................fun with the language
....................................................on "doctoring" videos
Responsibility.........................
..........................is the price one pays for independence. Seth Godin has some thoughts, and some more thoughts, on the subject.
A few more thoughts on liberty and responsibility
There are two primary choices in life: to accept conditions as they exist, or accept the responsibility for changing them.
-Denis Waitley
Most people do not really want freedom, because freedom involves responsibility, and most people are frightened of responsibility.
-Sigmund Freud
Liberty means responsibility. That is why most men dread it.
-George Bernard Shaw
The greatest day in your life and mine is when we take total responsibility for our attitudes. That's the day we truly grow up.
-John C. Maxwell
You must take personal responsibility. You cannot change the circumstances, the seasons, or the wind, but you can change yourself. That is something you have charge of.
-Jim Rohn
Freedom and responsibility aren't interconnected things. They are the same thing.
The aim of art, the aim of a life can only be to increase the sum of freedom and responsibility to be found in every man and in the world. It cannot, under any circumstances, be to reduce or suppress that freedom, even temporarily. No great work has ever been based on hatred and contempt. On the contrary, there is not a single true work of art that has not in the end added to the inner freedom of each person who has known and loved it.
Freedom is never more than one generation away from extinction.
-Ronald Reagan
Sunday, July 2, 2017
Well, it would explain a lot...................
If power were a prescription drug, it would come with a long list of known side effects. It can intoxicate. It can corrupt. It can even make Henry Kissinger believe that he’s sexually magnetic. But can it cause brain damage?
-Jerry Useem, as he opens this essay in The Atlantic
Read the whole thing. Amazingly, the essay never mentions our current president.
via
One reason us History majors..............
.........................appreciate the Oracle Google, is that it helps us understand correct grammar. Reading the essay featured in the above post, your faithful blogger was puzzled. Shouldn't "If power were a prescription drug..." be "If power was a prescription drug..."? The Oracle Google seems to say that the wordsmiths at The Atlantic are correct:
Learned something new today.
Saturday, July 1, 2017
Got to get The Dog one of those vests.....
"I have confirmed that 30% of the public can’t identify a joke without the help of a service animal."
-Scott Adams, taken out of context here
The Dog:
It is a Rippington kind of afternoon...........
The Rippingtons..........................................Led Here By An Eagle
Thursday, June 29, 2017
The Law of Unintended Consequences......
.......................................never rests (although one wonders from time to time if the consequences were truly unintended):
The true beneficiaries of Silicon Valley’s new minimum wage laws are going to be found in the corporate offices of the tech giants who create robots and the venture capitalists who invest in them rather than among the growing number of Californians trapped in the low-paid labor market.
-Walter Russell Mead, as lifted from here
A sign for our times..................
-taken from this Tony Isola post connecting the world of investing with Emerson's essay, "Compensation."
On the investigation of pleasure............
Pleasure is the structure of society. From childhood until death we are secretly, cunningly or obviously pursuing pleasure. So whatever form our pleasure is, I think we should be very clear about it because it is going to guide and shape our lives. It is therefore important for each one of us to investigate closely, hesitantly and delicately this question of pleasure, for to find pleasure, and then nourish and sustain it, is a basic demand of life and without it existence becomes dull, stupid, lonely, and meaningless.
-Jiddu Krishnamurti, as excerpted from Freedom from the Known
The importance of the process........
"Intelligent investors understand that a good process has very little to do with short-run outcomes but quality decisions give you a high probability of success over the long-run."
-Ben Carlson, concluding this post
On duty...................................
Some philosophers - not necessarily the ablest - are impressive through their quality of intellectual honesty. Of these a very good example was Henry Sidgwick, who was my teacher in ethics. In his youth fellowships at Cambridge were only open to those who would sign the Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England. Years after he had signed them, he developed doubts, and, though not expected to affirm that his beliefs remained unchanged, decided that it was his duty to resign. This action hastened the change in the law which put an end to the old theological restrictions. As a teacher, he showed the same honesty, and considered objections by pupils as courteously and carefully as if they had been made by colleagues. This made his teaching more fruitful than that of many abler men.
-Bertrand Russell, from his essay, Eminent Men I Have Know, as found here
On mis-estimation.....................
"Society is like a schoolmaster who estimates boys according to their conformity to a standard that is easiest for running a school."
Life its ownself..........................
"As a human being, one has been endowed with just enough intelligence to be able to see clearly how utterly inadequate that intelligence is when confronted with what exists."
-Albert Einstein
Wednesday, June 28, 2017
Gone, but not forgotten.....................
Burl Ives...................................................Ghost Riders In The Sky
#18 on this list
McArdle looks at......................
....................................................Seattle's minimum wage increases, and the studies that have followed:
"That’s the danger of striking out for uncharted territory; sometimes, you end up where there be dragons."
-full post here
Fifty years ago.......................
The Rolling Stones.....................................................Complicated
Tuesday, June 27, 2017
You'd think they were capitalists or something....
"Google has come up with many innovative products and services that have made a difference to our lives. That's a good thing. But Google's strategy for its comparison shopping service wasn't just about attracting customers by making its product better than those of its rivals. Instead, Google abused its market dominance as a search engine by promoting its own comparison shopping service in its search results, and demoting those of competitors."
-borrowed from this Coyote Blog post about the EU fining Google more euros than I could count.
A few quotes.....................
“Don’t go around saying the world owes you a living. The world owes you nothing. It was here first.”
-Mark Twain
"I fell in love, not with anything or anybody in particular but with everything.”
-George Harrison
“Up to a point a person’s life is shaped by environment, heredity, and changes in the world about them. Then there comes a time when it lies within their grasp to shape the clay of their life into the sort of thing they wish it to be. Only the weak blame parents, their race, their times, lack of good fortune or the quirks of fate. Everyone has the power to say, "This I am today. That I shall be tomorrow.”
-Louis L'Amour
“A person who is nice to you, but rude to the waiter, is not a nice person.”
-Dave Barry
“Before you criticize a man, walk a mile in his shoes. That way, when you do criticize him, you'll be a mile away and have his shoes.”
-Steve Martin
“Where love rules, there is no will to power, and where power predominates, love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.”
-C.G. Jung
“Do not wait for the last judgment. It comes every day.”
-Albert Camus
Fifty years ago..........................
Otis Redding...............................................................Satisfaction
Monday, June 26, 2017
Reach out.....................................
Sam & Dave.........................................Hold On, I'm Coming
Self-knowledge............................
“Self-control is the chief element in self-respect, and self-respect is the chief element in courage.”
-Thucydides
Not your typical...............................
.............................................................graduation advice:
Don’t pretend you know what you’re doing. No one will believe it. Instead show humility and ask for lots of help. Because every recent grad looks fresh and full of potential and people will want to help you because you remind them of them, when they were young and fresh and full of potential. If you act like you know what you’re doing, they can’t offer help.
-From this Penelope Trunk post
Sunday, June 25, 2017
Others.............................
For that which you receive from others is a testimony to their virtue, but all that you do for others is the sign and clear indication of your own virtue.
-Giordano Bruno
Thinking Jeboy might like this..............
Ryan Tennis........................................Till The Ghost Is Gone
Complexity.........................
................for the sake of complexity doesn't seem very productive:
"In London I am often asked to give talks about developments in the finance sector to a general audience. One question which routinely comes up is “what do people who work in the finance sector, in those large office blocks and in the City of London and Canary Wharf, actually do?” And the answer I give is that, to an extent that almost defies belief, what they do is trade with each other."
"When I was a schoolboy in Scotland in the 1960s, joining the Bank of Scotland or the Royal Bank of Scotland was a career for the boys in my class who were not going to get good enough grades to go to leading universities. Even when a few years later I began my teaching career at Oxford, careers in the City of London were mostly for undergraduates who were not academically distinguished but nevertheless socially polished and well-connected. All that has changed, and not altogether for the better, as was evident when the Bank of Scotland and the Royal Bank of Scotland failed in 2008, after three centuries of prudent success, under the stewardship of able individuals with good degrees from the finest universities and business schools.
"Larry Summers, former president of Harvard and US Treasury Secretary, once observed that finance had once been the preserve of people whose primary skills were those of good companions at the 19th hole of the golf course, but had become the province of people with the sophisticated mathematical skills required to price complex derivatives.[10] Summers, with skills better adapted to solving differential equations than conviviality at the 19th hole, noted this shift with evident approval. I am not so sure."
-Quotes retrieved from this John Kay essay
On the collapse of transaction costs....
..............................and the coming "sharing economy":
Fifty years from now, people will look back on the turn of the century and wonder about us. They will wonder why we were so wasteful, so selfish. Why we had closets, garages, and rental storage units, all under lock and key so we could keep other people from using the stuff that we weren’t using, either.
-Mike Munger, as he opens this essay
Fifty years ago....................
Four Tops.................................Standing In The Shadow Of Love
I know a lot of people who will consider....
.............................................................this silly, but I don't:
"The wise know that the intellect can take one only so far, and beyond that, faith and belief must substitute for knowledge."
-David R. Hawkins
Saturday, June 24, 2017
Purpose..........................
“This is the true joy in life, being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one, being a force of nature instead of a feverish selfish clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy.”
-George Bernard Shaw, as quoted here
Quiz time..............................
Years back, Marilyn vos Savant had a quiz column in which a question was: “Two bugs in a jar reproduce, doubling their number every minute. The jar is full in an hour. How long does it take to half fill the jar?”
-extracted from here
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
17 Ideas..............................
.............for the modern world, from Seth Godin. Idea #1:
You are more powerful than you think.
Welcome to the age of leverage. A moment in time when each of us has more tools, more reach and more impact than a head of state did a hundred years ago.
Each of us has the skills and insight and power to see what’s happening around us, to create new ideas, and most of all, to change the way others respond and act.
Jagged indeed........................
"Comfort and stability is not always the best goal. With comfort it can be hard to change. Without change it can be hard to maintain future stability. And comfort."
-Nicholas Bate, as lifted from here
While technology may create the need........
...........................for immediacy, we actually live in a "not-yet" world. Jeff Gill offers some thoughts:
"The world around us may expect speed, but we look for truth, a concept that can be blessedly slow."
Friday, June 23, 2017
Thursday, June 22, 2017
Wednesday, June 21, 2017
Arrant..................................
"There is no nonsense so arrant that it cannot be made the creed of the vast majority by adequate governmental action."
-Bertrand Russell, from his essay, An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish
Coming home..............................
Allman Brothers...............................................Into The Mystic
We were born before the wind
Also younger than the sun
Ere the bonnie boat was won as we sailed into the mystic
Hark, now hear the sailors cry
Smell the sea and feel the sky
Let your soul and spirit fly into the mystic
And when that fog horn blows I will be coming home
And when the fog horn blows I want to hear it
I don't have to fear it
And I want to rock your gypsy soul
Just like way back in the days of old
And magnificently we will flow into the mystic
When that fog horn blows you know I will be coming home
And when that fog horn whistle blows I got to hear it
I don't have to fear it
And I want to rock your gypsy soul
Just like way back in the days of old
And together we will flow into the mystic
Come on girl...
Too late to stop now...
-Van Morrison, c. 1970
Gotta love the '60s..................
The Byrds.............................................I'll Feel A Whole Lot Better
Tuesday, June 20, 2017
When you've lost David Brooks...........
I was the op-ed editor at The Wall Street Journal at the peak of the Whitewater scandal. We ran a series of investigative pieces “raising serious questions” (as we say in the scandal business) about the nefarious things the Clintons were thought to have done back in Arkansas.
Now I confess I couldn’t follow all the actual allegations made in those essays. They were six jungles deep in the weeds. But I do remember the intense atmosphere that the scandal created. A series of bombshell revelations came out in the media, which seemed monumental at the time. A special prosecutor was appointed and indictments were expected. Speculation became the national sport.
In retrospect Whitewater seems overblown. And yet it has to be confessed that, at least so far, the Whitewater scandal was far more substantive than the Russia-collusion scandal now gripping Washington.
-via
Ah, the memories. It's almost like we should read history books to keep up with current matters.
Now I confess I couldn’t follow all the actual allegations made in those essays. They were six jungles deep in the weeds. But I do remember the intense atmosphere that the scandal created. A series of bombshell revelations came out in the media, which seemed monumental at the time. A special prosecutor was appointed and indictments were expected. Speculation became the national sport.
In retrospect Whitewater seems overblown. And yet it has to be confessed that, at least so far, the Whitewater scandal was far more substantive than the Russia-collusion scandal now gripping Washington.
-via
Ah, the memories. It's almost like we should read history books to keep up with current matters.
Monday, June 19, 2017
Fifty years ago......................
Tim Buckley...............................No Man Can Find The War
Trump.............................
Can we "all agree on is that he is America’s first modern asymmetric warrior president"? It would be nice if we could agree on at least one thing.
-idea further fleshed out here
via
Counter-intuitive..............................
.................................but human nature is a fairly mysterious thing:
"As the level of information and access to knowledge continues to improve it’s only making it harder for most people to make better decisions."
-Ben Carlson, as he concludes this post about the Dorito Effect
Sunday, June 18, 2017
Optimism versus pessimism.....................
...................An interesting post from Morgan Housel here. An extracted quote that I enjoyed here:
Optimists are often ridiculed as being oblivious to how risky the world is. I’ve found this to be a bad reading. They’re often quite aware of risks, but equally aware of risks being the soil optimism eventually grows out of.
As said here before, while pessimism many sell more newspapers and books, always bet on the optimists.
via
A few thoughts..........................
.........................................on Jeff Bezos's philanthropic impulses:
Because he is presumably uniquely good a creating businesses, probably the best way for him to maximize the use of his money and time in improving the lives of a maximum number of people is to go start another business. Certainly Amazon has created value for the rest of us that dwarfs the amount he has earned from it. Taken another way, via Amazon he has hugely improved the lives of many, many people and in turn taken just a small commission for himself on this value created. He has lowered prices for us, he has saved us time, he has brought us many more choices. He has created a platform for small businesses to sell their product that they could never duplicate themselves. He has nearly single-handedly created the self-publishing business and provided an outlet for a ton of new authors (myself included). He helps keep Apple and Google honest (and vice versa) from his competition with them.
-Warren Meyer, as culled from here
as all right-thinking people are aware......
“When Benjamin Franklin invented the lightning-rod, the clergy, both in England and America, with the enthusiastic support of George III, condemned it as an impious attempt to defeat the will of God. For, as all right-thinking people were aware, lightning is sent by God to punish impiety or some other grave sin—the virtuous are never struck by lightning. Therefore if God wants to strike any one, Benjamin Franklin [and his lightning-rod] ought not to defeat His design; indeed, to do so is helping criminals to escape. But God was equal to the occasion, if we are to believe the eminent Dr. Price, one of the leading divines of Boston. Lightning having been rendered ineffectual by the 'iron points invented by the sagacious Dr. Franklin,' Massachusetts was shaken by earthquakes, which Dr. Price perceived to be due to God's wrath at the 'iron points.' In a sermon on the subject he said, 'In Boston are more erected than elsewhere in New England, and Boston seems to be more dreadfully shaken. Oh! there is no getting out of the mighty hand of God.' Apparently, however, Providence gave up all hope of curing Boston of its wickedness, for, though lightning-rods became more and more common, earthquakes in Massachusetts have remained rare. Nevertheless, Dr. Price's point of view, or something very like it, was still held by one of the most influential period of recent times. When, at one time, there were several bad earthquakes in India, Mahatma Gandhi solemnly warned his compatriots that these disasters had been sent as a punishment for their sins."
-Bertrand Russell, from his essay An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish found in his book, Unpopular Essays
Fifty years ago..............................
Tim Buckley..........................................................Once I Was
Seems about right.....................
"A problem with using the mind to discover the truth is that it often cannot tell the forest from the trees and instead focuses on problematic irrelevancies and extraneous diversions..."
-David R. Hawkins
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