I suspend judgment........................

      Like the others, Skepticism amounted to a form of therapy.  This, at least, was true of Pyrrhonian Skepticism, the type originated by the Greek philosopher Pyrrho, who died about 275 BC, and later developed more rigorously by Sextus Empiricus in the second century AD. ("Dogmatic" or "Academic" Skepticism, the other kind, was less far-reaching.)   Some idea of the bizarre effect Pyrrhonism had on people is apparent from the story of how Henri Estienne, Montaigne's near-contemporary and first French translator of Sextus Empiricus, reacted to his encounter with  Sextus's Hypotyposes.  Working in his library one day, but feeling too ill and tired to do his usual work, he found a copy while browsing through an old box of manuscripts.  As soon as he started reading, he found himself laughing so heartily that his weariness left him and his intellectual energy returned.  Another scholar of the period, Gentian Hervet, had a similar experience.  He too came across Sextus by chance in his employer's library, and felt that a world of lightness and pleasure had opened up before him.  The work did not so much instruct or convince its readers as give them the giggles.
     A modern reader perusing the Hypotyposes might wonder what was so funny.  It does contain some sprightly examples, as philosophy books often do, but it does not seem wildly comic.  It is not obvious why it cured both Estienne and Hervet of their ennui—or why it had such an impact on Montaigne, who would find it the perfect antidote to Raymond Sebond and his solemn, inflated ideas of human importance.
     The key to the trick is the revelation that nothing in life need be taken seriously.  Pyrrhonism does not even take itself seriously.  Ordinary dogmatic Skepticism asserts the impossibility of knowledge;  it is summed up in Socrates's remark:  "All I know is that I know nothing."  Pyrrhonian Skepticism starts from this point, but then adds, in effect, "and I'm not even sure about that."  Having stated its one philosophical principle, it turns in a circle and gobbles itself up, leaving only a puff of absurdity.
      Pyrrhonians accordingly deal with all the problems life can throw at them by means of a single word which acts as a shorthand for this maneuver:  in Greek, epekho.  It means "I suspend judgment."  Or, in a different rendition given in French by Montaigne himself, je souliens:  "I hold back."  This phrase conquers all enemies;  it undoes them, so that they disintegrate into atoms before your eyes.

-Sarah Bakewell,  How To Live - 0r - A Life of Montaigne:  In One Questions And Twenty Attempts At An Answer

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

We all make mistakes, but starting the Third World War would have been a rather large one.  To this day, I still maintain it was not entirely my fault.  But I'm getting ahead of myself.

-Frederick Forsyth,  The Outsider:  My Life in Intrigue

Fifty years ago..................at Woodstock

Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young..............................Wooden Ships

Meddling...............................

     President Kennedy, during his first months in office, spent long hours on the exotic disturbances in Laos—primarily because just before his inauguration, Eisenhower had told him that Laos was the key to all Southeast Asia.  Once they had taken Laos, the Communists, he said, could bring "unbelievable pressure" on Thailand, Cambodia, and South Vietnam.  If the situation reached the point where other countries could not be persuaded to act with us, we should be willing "as a last desperate hope, to intervene unilaterally."  Kennedy's interest in Laos was no doubt further stimulated by the natural desire of all new Presidents to show their skill at statecraft.  Laos was at the time the only game in town—the only genuine shooting war, even though little actual shooting was ever heard.
      To me, Laos and Vietnam were all part of the Southeast Asia drama that had begun long before.  Refusing to sign the 1954 settlements that made possible the French withdrawal, Secretary John Foster Dulles had the preempted the French role.  With his addiction for formalistic paper solutions, he had devised the South East Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO)—a so-called mutual security arrangement the included the United States, Great Britain, France, Australia, and New Zealand as well as three Asian states:  Thailand, Pakistan, and the Philippines.  By a supplementary protocol, the signatory states of SEATO pledged themselves to protect three nonsignatory nations:  South Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos.   Through Dulles's astigmatic vision, Laos loomed large as a "bulwark against Communism" and a "bastion of freedom," and by the end of 1960, we had provided the Laotian government with nearly $300 million, of which 85% was to help build an army.
     Not much of an army was ever built, however, for the Laotian generals and civilian bureaucrats concentrated on stealing the new wealth.  That left a Viet Minh-directed group, the Pathet Lao, to establish a firm hold on the villages and countryside.  Old friendships and family played a role;  the leader of the Pathet Lao, Prince Souphanouvong, was closely tied to Ho Chi Ming, while the regular government of Laos in Vientiane was headed by his half-brother Souvanna Phouma.  In October 1957, the two half-brothers negotiated the so-called Vientiane Agreements, which provided a neutralized Laos under a coalition government—with the Pathet Lao represented in both the army and cabinet.
      That infuriated Dulles, who thought coalitions with Communists a halfway house to perdition, so he made use of his own family ties by persuading his brother, CIA Chief, Allen W. Dulles, to force out Prince Souphanouvong and replace him with a politician bearing the even more unlikely name of Phoui Sananikone.  Then the CIA conjured up from France a Laotian military officer named General Phoumi Nosavan; sixteen months later, Phoumi overthrew Phoui (which could have been either a significant event or a typographical error).  Five months after that, Souphanouvong escaped from jail to the North, and the Pathet Lao resumed the civil war.
     Phoumi in turn was displaced by a young paratroop captain, Kong Le, who seized power and asked Prince Souvanna to form a new government that, as before, would be neutralist.  Meanwhile, the Defense Department continued to whoop it up for Phoumi, who, with American encouragement, took the Royal Laotian Army to Savannakhet in September 1960, where he proclaimed a new government and denounced Souvanna.  Washington promptly responded by sending him American military aid, though continuing to give economic assistance to the Souvanna government in Vientiane.   Then, in December, shortly after the American elections, Phoumi marched on Vientaine.  Souvanna fled to Cambodia, where he made a deal with Souphanouvong.  Kong Le, prudently taking along a huge store of American supplies, joined the Pathet Lao.  That ended the first act of a preposterous long-running serial that, more than anything else, resembled a Kung Fu movie.

-George W. Ball,  The Past Has Another Pattern:  Memoirs

We should know our history.................

     Ten years after the United States had withdrawn its last man, ignominiously, from Saigon, the journalist Joseph Lelyveld observed acutely, "When we talk about Vietnam, we are seldom talking bout the country of that name or the situation of the people who live there.  Usually we are talking about ourselves.  Probably we always were, which is one conspicuous reason our leaders found it so hard to shape a strategy that fit us and our chosen terrain."  There are many ways of explaining why the United States came to grief so spectacularly in Vietnam.  But the plain fact of it will always be astounding.   The United States was not only five times more populous than Vietnam, its economy was seventy-six times larger.  In 1964 there were only around ten countries in the world, aside from sub-Saharan Africa, that were poorer than Vietnam in terms of per capita gross domestic product, at a time when the United States cam in second only to Switzerland.  Technologically the gap between the two countries—not least in the realm of armaments—was so large as to be nigh immeasurable.  Yet America lost.  Small wonder the Vietnam War became a trauma not just for those men who served in it but for all Americans of that generation.
     Robert McNamara, who was secretary of defense throughout the period of military escalation, looked back in shame on at least six different failures for which he took at least some measure of responsibility.  There was the failure to consult allies, despite the existence of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) since 1954;  the failure to appreciate how a people in arms could withstand and overcome the most sophisticated weaponry;  the failure to see the limits of economic and military aid in the process of state building;  the failure to uphold democratic principles in the governance of South Vietnam;  the failure to understand the complex relationship between the application of military force and the achievement of political objectives;  and above all, the failure of the American decision-making process itself.  To explain this, McNamara blamed lack of time, lack of institutional memory within the government, and "the incremental nature of decision making about intervention in Vietnam [which] never allowed policy makers an opportunity to step back."
      Another member of the flagellant order of the former Kennedy-Johnson officials was McGeorge Bundy.  In a memorandum written as late as May 1967—a year after he had left the administration to run the Ford Foundation—Bundy could still assure the president, "The fact that South Vietnam has not been lost and is not going to be lost is a fact of truly massive importance in the history of Asia, the Pacific and the U. S."  Nearly thirty years later Bundy added a simple marginal note; "McGB all wrong."  His explanation for the American failure was a basic underestimation of  "the endurance of the enemy."

-Niall Ferguson,  Kissinger:  1923-1968:  The Idealist

View from my desk..............

Fifty years ago................at Woodstock

Crosby, Stills & Nash....................................Suite: Judy Blue Eyes

Fifty years ago......................at Woodstock

Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young.......................Long Time Gone



It's been a long time comin'
It's goin' to be a long time gone

And it appears to be a long
Appears to be a long
Appears to be a long time
Yes, a long, long, long, long time before the dawn

Turn, turn any corner
Hear, you must hear what the people say
You know there's something that's goin' on around here
That surely, surely, surely won't stand the light of day, no

And it appears to be a long (yes it does)
Appears to be a long (mm)
Appears to be a long time
Such a long, long time before the dawn

Speak out, you got to speak out against the madness
You got to speak your mind, if you dare
But don't—no, don't no—try to get yourself elected
If you do you had better cut your hair, mm

And it appears to be a long (yes it does)
Appears to be a long (mm)
Appears to be a long time
Such a long, long, long, long time before the dawn

Secret...................................

"The secret to creativity is knowing how to hide your sources."

-attributed to Albert Einstein

Building blocks..........................

     It's a thrilling story of invention:  the young wizard of Menlo Park has a flash of inspiration, and within a few years his idea is lighting up the world.  The problem with this story is that people had been inventing incandescent light for eighty years before Edison turned his mind to it.  The lightbulb involves three fundamental elements:  some kind of filament hat glows when an electrical current runs through it, some mechanism to keep the filament from burning out to quickly, and a means of supplying electric power to start the reaction in the first place.  In 1802, the British chemist Humphry Davy had attached a platinum filament to an early electric battery, causing it to burn brightly for a few minutes.  By the 1840's dozens of separate inventors were working on variations of the lightbulb.  The first patent was issued in 1841 to an Englishman named Frederick de Moleyns.  The historian Arthur A. Bright compiled a list of lightbulb's partial inventors, leading up to Edison's ultimate triumph in the late 1870s. [one version of that list may be found on page 38 of this pdf.]

-Steven Johnson, How We Got to Now:  Six Innovations That Made the Modern World

image via

Historically misunderstood..............

     By any measure, Edison was a true genius, a towering figure in nineteenth-century innovation.  But as the story of the lightbulb makes clear, we have historically misunderstood that genius.  His greatest achievement may have been the way he figured out how to make teams creative:  assembling diverse skills in a work environment that valued experimentation and accepted failure, incentivizing the group with financial rewards that were aligned with the overall success of the organization, and building on ideas that originated elsewhere.  "I am not overly impressed by the great names and reputations of those who might be trying to beat me to an invention. . . . It's their 'ideas' that appeal to me,"  Edison famously said.  "I am quite correctly described as "more of a sponge than an inventor."

-Steven Johnson,  How We Got to Now:  Six Innovations That Made the Modern World

Fifty years ago.....................at Woodstock

Blood, Sweat & Tears.....................................their 22 minute set

Guilty, Your Honor.................................

         via

The glory of repetition.................................

I was once asked, at a journalism conference, how I defined my job. I said: My job is to write the exact same thing between 50 and 100 times a year in such a way that neither my editors nor my readers will ever think I am repeating myself.

That’s because good advice rarely changes, while markets change constantly. The temptation to pander is almost irresistible. And while people need good advice, what they want is advice that sounds good.

-Jason Zweig, as cut-and-pasted from here

Fifty years ago.................At Woodstock

Richie Havens...........................................................Freedom

Soul force.............................

We must forever conduct our struggle on the high plane of dignity and discipline. We must not allow our creative protest to degenerate into physical violence. Again and again we must rise to the majestic heights of meeting physical force with soul force.

-Martin Luther King, Jr., as excerpted from here

On the importance of................

.................................................................Jessica Hagy:

This is likely not a compliment.......

"His upper lip is Nixonizing."

-as extracted from the end of the fifth paragraph of this post

Stand thou forth.........................

I am not a day of season,
For thou mayst see a sunshine and a hail
In me at once.  But to the brightest beams
Distracted clouds give way, so stand thou forth,
The time is fair again.

-The King, as channeled by Wm. Shakespeare in Act Five Scene Three of All's Well That Ends Well

Still haven't come across where..............

.......................................................Shakespeare wrote this:

Sean Carpenter........................

……..wants to know how you're going to finish out 2019:

Take a deep breath, grab a sip of water, and remind yourself that the actions you take over the next 30 days will have a huge effect on how the year will end.

Make sure part of your plan includes building relationships, solving problems and having fun. After that, the rest of the actions you take should be pretty easy to figure out.

On the importance of alibis....................

……………………………...Unfortunately, I don't have one.

Truth is elusive, although alcohol helps..........

The basic question that a lot of us have is why capitalism is such a boo-word among young people and why socialism is such a yeah-word. Young people sympathetic to socialism seem determined to believe that when they observe things they don’t like, capitalism is at fault; when they observe things that they do like, socialism deserves the credit. Yet the book drives home the point that the truth is the opposite.

-Arnold S. Kling, as he reviews this just-now-available book

All I want for Christmas...............

.........is to spend a day or three checking out his library, or his.

Fifty years ago.................At Woodstock

Country Joe...........................I-feel-like-I'm-fixing- to-die-rag

Not the version you hear on the radio....

Joni Mitchell....................................................Woodstock

I came upon a child of God
He was walking along the road
And I asked him where are you going
And this he told me

I'm going on down to Yasgur's farm 
I'm going to join in a rock 'n' roll band
I'm going to camp out on the land
I'm going to try an' get my soul free 

We are stardust
We are golden
And we've got to get ourselves
Back to the garden

Then can I walk beside you
I have come here to lose the smog
And I feel to be a cog in something turning

Well maybe it is just the time of year
Or maybe it's the time of man
I don't know who I am
But you know life is for learning

We are stardust
We are golden
And we've got to get ourselves
Back to the garden

By the time we got to Woodstock
We were half a million strong
And everywhere there was song and celebration

And I dreamed I saw the bombers
Riding shotgun in the sky
And they were turning into butterflies
Above our nation

We are stardust
       Billion year old carbon
We are golden
       Caught in the devil's bargain
And we've got to get ourselves
back to the garden

Culture, as mirrored in advertising..........

     English has evolved over the past century because of mass media and advertising, but the shadowy literary establishment in the United States, in and outside academe, has failed to adjust.  From the start, like Andy Warhol (another product of an immigrant family in an isolated Northeastern industrial town), I recognized commercial popular culture as the authentic native voice of America.  Burned into my memory, for example, is a late-1950s TV commercial for M & M's chocolate candies.  A sultry cartoon peanut, sunbathing on a chaise lounge, said in a twanging Southern drawl:  "I'm an M & M peanut/Toasted to to a golden brown/Dipped in creamy milk chocolate/And covered in a thin candy shell!"  Illustrating each line, she prettily dove into a swimming pool of melted chocolate and popped out on the other side to strike a pose and be instantly toweled in her monogrammed candy wrap.  I felt then, and still do, the the M & M peanut's jingle was a vivacious poem and that the creative team who produced that ad were folk artists, anonymous as the artisans of medieval cathedrals.

-Camille Paglia,  Break Blow Burn:  Camille Paglia Reads Forty-Three Of The World's Best Poems

Couldn't find the exact advertisement she was talking about on YouTube.  This compilation might serve notice though that the M & M creative team are indeed folk artists.  Enjoy:

Hope you have a Road Runner kind of day.....

Never heard this one before..............

Consider what life would have been like for a farmer in New England in 1700.  In the winter months the sun goes down at five, followed by fifteen hours of darkness before it gets light again.  And when that sun goes down, it's pitch black:  there are no streetlights, flashlights, light bulbs, fluorescents—even kerosene lamps haven't been invented yet.  There's just a flickering glow of a fireplace, and the smoky burn of the tallow candle.
     Those nights were so oppressive that scientists now believe our sleep patterns were radically different in the ages before ubiquitous night lighting.  In 2001, the historian Roger Ekirch published a remarkable study that drew upon hundreds of diaries and instructional manuals to convincingly argue that humans had historically divided their long nights into two distinct sleep periods.  When darkness fell, they would drift into "first sleep," waking after four hours to snack, relieve themselves, have sex, or chat by the fire, before heading back for another four hours of "second sleep."  The lighting of the nineteenth century disrupted this ancient rhythm, by opening up a whole array of modern activities that could be performed after sunset:  everything from theaters and restaurants to factory labor.  Ekrich documented the way the ideal of a single, eight-hour block of sleep was constructed by nineteenth century customs, an adaptation to a dramatic change int he lighting environment of human settlements.  Like all adaptations, its benefits carried inevitable costs: the middle-of-the-night insomnia that plagues millions of people around the world is not, technically speaking, a disorder, but rather the body's natural sleep rhythms asserting themselves over prescriptions of nineteenth century convention.  Those waking moments at three a. m. are a kind of jet lag caused by artificial light instead of air travel.

-Steven Johnson,  How We Got to Now:  Six Innovations That Made the Modern World

Sunrise.............................

     I had always loved sunrise:  was always renewed in spirit.  For all my life I'd felt cheated if I'd ever slept through dawn.  The primeval winter solstice on bitter Salisbury Plan had raised my childhood's goose pimples long before I understood why, and it had long seemed to me that dawn-worship was the most logical of primitive beliefs.

-Dick Francis, as excerpted from Wild Horses

photo via

Fifty years ago.............at Woodstock

Mountain.........................................................Blood Of The Sun

Checking in with Thurber..............

“All human beings should try to learn before they die what they are running from, and to, and why.” 


-James Thurber

Puzzles.................................

          via

Purging..........................

The search for happiness is not about looking at life through rose-colored glasses or blinding oneself to the pain and imperfections of the world. Nor is happiness a state of exultation to be perpetuated at all costs; it is the purging of mental toxins, such as hatred and obsession, that literally poison the mind. It is also about learning how to put things in perspective and reduce the gap between appearances and reality. To that end, we must acquire a better knowledge of how the mind works and a more accurate insight into the nature of things, for, in its deepest sense, suffering is intimately linked to a misapprehension of the nature of reality.

-Matthieu Ricard

David Kanigan......................

...........................................don't start your day without him.

Achievable goals...........................

Gratitude.............................

........................................................and the "grand old journey."

There's a time or three...............

..................................when this would have made life easier.

via

Fifty years ago............at Woodstock

Mountain...........................................................Southbound Train

Rarest............................

They say miracles are past, and we have our philosophical persons, to make modern and familiar, things supernatural and causeless.  Hence it is, that we make trifles out of terrors, ensconcing ourselves into seeming knowledge, when we should submit ourselves to an unknown fear.  Why, 'tis the rarest argument of wonder that hath shot out in our latter times.

-Lafeu, as channeled by Wm. Shakespeare in Act Two Scene Three of All's Well That Ends Well

The rugged individual....................

“We are all alone, born alone, die alone, and—in spite of True Romance magazines—we shall all someday look back on our lives and see that, in spite of our company, we were alone the whole way. I do not say lonely—at least, not all the time—but essentially, and finally, alone. This is what makes your self-respect so important, and I don't see how you can respect yourself if you must look in the hearts and minds of others for your happiness.”

-Hunter S. Thompson

photo via

So call me Steve..................

Public Service Announcement.......................

Fifty years ago..................at Woodstock

Mountain...............,,,,,,,,......Theme From An Imaginary Western

Yea, but this sounds really hard.........

The way to rob the narrative managers of their ability to manipulate our sense of normalcy is to create an image of a sane and healthy world for ourselves to hold onto at all times, and to make that image into our own personal sense of what normal is. By having a vivid picture of what a sane and healthy world would look like in your mind, the false normal that the propagandists are trying to sell you will have no purchase.

-as culled from here

And don't forget, as we've said here many times before, normalcy is merely the psychosis of the majority.

Who am I...............................

I am your constant companion. I am your greatest helper or your heaviest burden. I will push you onward or drag you down to failure. I am completely at your command. Half the things you do, you might just as well turn over to me, and I will be able to do them quickly and correctly.  I am easily managed; you must merely be firm with me.  Show me exactly how you want something done, and after a few lessons I will do it automatically.

I am the servant of all great men.  And, alas, of all failures as well.  Those who are great, I have made great.  Those who are failures, I have made failures.  I am not a machine, though I work with all the precision of a machine.  Plus, the intelligence of a man. You may run me for profit, or run me for ruin; it makes no difference to me. Take me, train me, be firm with me and I will put the world at your feet.  Be easy with me, and I will destroy you.
Who am I?  I am a habit!

-The intertunnel is conflicted on who said this.  I found it here.

Remedies................................

Our remedies oft in ourselves do lie,
Which we ascribe to heaven.  The fated sky
Gives us free scope;  only doth backward pull
Our slow designs when we ourselves are dull.

-Helena, as channeled by Wm. Shakespeare in Act One Scene One of All's Well That Ends Well

Interwoven.............................

“The misconception which has haunted philosophic literature throughout the centuries is the notion of 'independent existence.' There is no such mode of existence; every entity is to be understood in terms of the way it is interwoven with the rest of the universe.” 


-Alfred North Whitehead

thanks David

Fifty years ago.....................at Woodstock

Paul Butterfield Blues Band....................................Drifting Blues

More fun............................

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

On worry..................

Most of us are consumed by worry. It may be acute anxiety because of an immediate crisis, or it may be caused by chronic anxiety due to a lingering worry that rears its head only occasionally. Either way, worry too easily consumes us. We take vacations to try to get away from it all, but find ourselves needing a vacation from our vacation. We tell ourselves if we had enough money all our worries would disappear. Watch the news just one evening and you’ll find that being rich and famous aren’t solutions to worry.

-culled from this A Potter's View post

Thanks Ray

Off track..............................

“The problem with long-term investing is the short term. Nothing destroys a good long-term plan like extreme short-term volatility. That throws people off track, and they often do things that are emotional rather than rational.” 

-Richard Ferri

Philosophy acts as the glue.............

It's not always easy to define yourself as an investor.  There are so many labels out there that it can be hard to keep up—value investor, short-term trader, index investor, active investor, diversified asset allocator, buy, hold, and rebalance, trend follower, tactical, quantitative/systematic, technical analysis, risk parity, and the list could go on.   There's no right or wrong answer for every single individual.  What matters is what works for you.
     There's never going to be a one-size-fits-all investment philosophy for every person.  We all have different strengths and weaknesses.  You have to find a belief system that fits your own personality.  You can't force a square peg through a round hole just because you want to make something work for you.  This will only compound your issues. . . .
     Regardless of the strategy you implement, the true test of your beliefs will always come at those times when it's not working.  These are the times when you investment philosophy should help.
     Inventor and author Rick Ferri summed this up nicely when he said, "Philosophy is universal; strategy is personal; and discipline is required.  Philosophy acts as the glue that holds everything together.  Philosophy first, strategy second and discipline third.  These are the key to successful  investing."

-Ben Carlson, as extracted from A Wealth of Common Sense

I went out too far.........................

     One came, finally, against the head itself and he knew that it was over.  He swung the tiller across the shark's head where the jaws were caught in the heaviness of the fish's head which would not tear.  He swung it once and twice and again.  He heard the tiller break and he lunged at the shark with the splintered butt.  He felt it go in and knowing it was sharp he drove it in again.  The shark let go and rolled away.  That was the last shark of the pack that came.  There was nothing more for them to eat.
     The old man could hardly breathe now and he felt a strange taste in his mouth.  It was coppery and sweet and he was afraid of it for a moment.  But there was not much of it.
     He spat into the ocean and said, "Eat that, galanos.  And make a dream you've killed a man."
     He knew he was beaten now finally and without remedy and he went back to the stern and found the jagged end of the tiller would fit in the slot of the rudder well enough for him to steer.  He settled the sack around his shoulders and put the skiff on her course.   He sailed lightly now and he had no thoughts nor any feelings of any kind.  He was past everything now and he sailed the skiff to make his home port as well and as intelligently as he could.  In the night the sharks hit the carcass as someone might pick up crumbs from the table.  The old man paid no attention to them and did not pay any attention to anything except steering.  He only noticed how lightly and how well the skiff sailed now there was no great weight beside her.
      She's good, he thought.  She is sound and not harmed in any way except for the tiller.  That is easily replaced.
      He could feel he was inside the current now and he could see the lights of the beach colonies along the shore.  He knew where he was now and it was nothing to get home.
      The wind is our friend, anyway, he thought.  Then he added, sometimes.  And the great sea with our friends and enemies.  And bed, he thought.  Bed is my friend.  Just bed, he thought.  Bed will be a great thing.  It is easy to know when you are beaten, he thought.  I never knew how easy it was.  And what beat you, he thought.
     "Nothing," he said aloud.  "I went out too far."

-Ernest Hemingway,  The Old Man and the Sea

photo via

Respect thyself.......................

     "Always do the affairs of man change and improve because keen-minded men seek greater skill that they may better serve those upon whose patronage they depend.  Therefore, I urge all men to be in the front rank of progress and not to stand still, lest they be left behind. . . .
     "Thus the seventh and last remedy for a lean purse is to cultivate thy own powers, to study and become wiser, to become more skillful, to so act as to respect thyself to achieve thy carefully considered desires."

-Arkad, as channeled by George S. Clason in The Richest Man In Babylon

Fifty years ago..................At Woodstock

Ten Years After................................................I'm Going Home

Fifty years ago.......................At Woodstock

Sha-Na-Na....................................................The Duke of Earl

(audience facial expressions are priceless)

Jamie Varon says....................

courtesy of Swiss Miss

A deficit most serious.....................

Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan fact tank that conducts public opinion polls and social science research and informs the public about issues, attitudes, and trends shaping the world. The organization recently published a new report called Trust and Distrust in America, which reveals that Americans think declining trust in the government and in each other is making it harder to solve important problems.

-culled from this Zero Hedge post

Shards.............................

The decisive endeavor of our moment – far surmounting, I believe, any specific policy call – is the re-establishment of trust in the institutions of representative democracy.  Only after the system has been reformed and the public has been reconciled to it can we again talk about truth as a self-evident proposition.  Until then, all we will have is perspectives – fragments of truth circling, randomly, the gravitational power of some opinion.  Appealing to tribal identity only compounds the fragmentation.  Fighting imaginary fascists and Nazis can be no more rewarding than hugging an imaginary friend.  What we need is a rhetoric aimed at the whole and persuasive to the whole – and for that to be possible, the public must be heard, and its perspectives, in their multiple and contradictory reality, must be taken seriously.

-Martin Gurri keeps banging his drum

Fifty years ago.............At Woodstock

Paul Butterfield Blues Band...Everything Gonna Be Alright

Unexpectedly..............................

"The problem for me was not ignorance; it was pre-conceived ideas."

-Hans Rosling, from this TED talk

Checking in with Eric Arthur Blair.............

"Perhaps a man really dies when his brain stops, when he loses the power to take in a new idea."

"It is not possible for any thinking person to live in such a society as our own without wanting to change it."

"So much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot."

"Either we all live in a decent world, or nobody does."

". . . there is the fact that the intellectuals are more totalitarian in outlook than the common people."

"The relative freedom which we enjoy depends of public opinion. The law is no protection. Governments make laws, but whether they are carried out, and how the police behave, depends on the general temper in the country. If large numbers of people are interested in freedom of speech, there will be freedom of speech, even if the law forbids it; if public opinion is sluggish, inconvenient minorities will be persecuted, even if laws exist to protect them."

-all quotes lifted from here

About failure.......................

Failure hurts so much that we, as a society, have tried to minimize its impact.  Kids are told that it's okay to fail.  We read how great men and women failed time and again.  We're told that failure is a part of life and it's nothing to get upset about.  At the same time, we're told to learn from our mistakes.  How can we learn from our failures and mistakes if we're told that they're no big deal?
     You can't really have it both ways.  It is the pain that makes failure a step toward success.  By trying to hide your failure or minimize it, what you're really doing is protecting your own ego at the expense of improvement.  We don't get stronger by giving our muscles a little bit of a workout—nothing too painful, nice and steady.  We get stronger when we literally shred our muscle fibers, so that when they grow back, they grow back larger.  It's the trauma, the pain, that builds our bodies.  It's no different when we're going after our dreams.  Experiencing the pain of failure helps us grow.

-Akbar Gbajabiamila, Everyone Can Be A Ninja:  Find Your Inner Warrior And Achieve Your Dreams

Fifty years ago.................At Woodstock

Sly & The Family Stone........................Dance To The Music

Time is of the essence.................

17.  Live not as though there were a thousand years ahead of you.  Fate is at your elbow;  make yourself good while life and power are still yours.

-Marcus Aurelius,  Meditations, Book Four

Unchanged..............................

      Every form of government tends to perish by excess of its basic principle.  Aristocracy ruins itself by limiting too narrowly the circle within which power is confined;  oligarchy ruins itself by the incautious scramble for immediate wealth.  In either case the end is revolution. . . .
     But even democracy ruins itself by excess—of democracy.  Its basic principle is the equal right of all to hold office and determine public policy.  This is at first glance a delightful arrangement; it becomes disastrous because the people are not properly equipped by education to select the best rulers and wisest courses. . . . Mob-rule is a rough sea for the ship of state to ride;  every wind of oratory stirs up the waters and deflects the course.  The upshot of such a democracy is tyranny or autocracy;  the crowd so loves flattery, it is so "hungry for honey," that at last the wiliest and most unscrupulous flatterer, calling himself the "protector of the people" rises to supreme power. . . .
     . . ."Like man, like state"; "governments vary as the characters of men vary; . . . states are made out of the human natures which are in them", the state is what it is because its citizens are what they are.  Therefore we need not expect to have better states until we have better men; till then all changes will leave every essential thing unchanged.

-Will Durant, once again quoting Plato in The Story of Philosophy

An indictment......................

. . .why is it that these Utopias never arrive upon the map?
     He answers, because of greed and luxury.  Men are not content with a simple life:  they are acquisitive, ambitious, competitive, and jealous;  they soon tire of what they have, and pine for what they have not; and they seldom desire anything unless it belongs to others.  The result is the encroachment of one group upon the territory of another . . .

-Will Durant,  The Story of Philosophy:  The Lives and Opinions of the Greater Philosophers, from his chapter on Plato

Fifty years ago.......................At Woodstock

Sly & The Family Stone...........,.......................Everyday People