Us self-employed types.................................

………………...have only passing familiarity with this concept of "paid time off."  I think the last paycheck I received, that wasn't signed by me, was in February of 1977.  Still, reading Althouse is such a delight:

Not one word about the environment in that article. Why not celebrate the status quo? If we were traveling, WaPo should shame us for the impact on climate change, so why is the failure to travel treated like a problem? Maybe people like their day-to-day life — working, living at home, near friends and family, doing what is familiar. Isn't that what most people have done throughout human history and prehistory? 

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

Sammy Davis Jr..................................................I've Gotta Be Me

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

Tony Joe White................................................Polk Salad Annie

The private world.................

Our work for peace must begin within the private world of each one of us. To build for man a world without fear, we must be without fear. To build a world of justice, we must be just. And how can we fight for liberty if we are not free in our own minds? How can we ask others to sacrifice if we are not ready to do so?

-Dag Hammarskjold

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

...............................................Johann Wolfgang von Goethe:

Things which matter most must never be at the mercy of things which matter least.

The human race is a monotonous affair. Most people spend the greatest part of their time working in order to live, and what little freedom remains so fills them with fear that they seek out any and every means to be rid of it.

If you treat an individual as he is, he will remain how he is. But if you treat him as if he were what he ought to be and could be, he will become what he ought to be and could be.

Know thyself? If I knew myself, I'd run away.

A man sees in the world what he carries in his heart.

We do not have to visit a madhouse to find disordered minds; our planet is the mental institution of the universe.

Daring ideas are like chessmen moved forward. They may be beaten, but they may start a winning game.

A man should hear a little music, read a little poetry, and see a fine picture every day of his life, in order that worldly cares may not obliterate the sense of the beautiful which God has implanted in the human soul.

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

The Lettermen..........................................................Hurt So Bad

By blogging........................................?

Concerning magnification.................

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

On the TV................................Dick Clark's American Bandstand

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

Marvin Gaye.......................Too Busy Thinking 'Bout My Baby

Time: the great leveler.....................

I met a traveller from an antique land

Who said:  Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal, these words appear:

'My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;

Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!'

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

-Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ozymandias

Better than not doing any at all...........

             via

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

Gestures are all that I have;  sometimes they must be grand in nature.  And while  I occasionally step over the line and into the world of melodramatic, it is what I must do in order to communicate clearly and effectively.  In order to make my point understood without question.  I have no words I can rely on because, much to my dismay, my tongue was designed long and flat and loose, and therefore, is a horribly ineffective tool for pushing food around in my mouth while chewing, and an even less effective tool for making clever and complicated polysyllabic sounds that can be linked together to form sentences.  And that's why I'm here now waiting for Denny to come home—her should be here soon—lying on the cool tiles of the kitchen floor in a puddle of my own urine.
      I'm old.  And while I'm very capable of getting older, that's not the way I want to go out.  Shot full of pain medication and steroids to reduce the swelling of my joints.  Vision fogged with cataracts.  Puffy, plasticky packages of Doggy Depends stocked in the pantry.  I'm sure Denny would get me one of those little wagons I've seen on the streets, the ones that cradle the hindquarters so a dog can drag his as behind him when things start to fail.  That's humiliating and degrading.  I'm not sure if it's worse than dressing up a dog for Halloween, but it's close.  He would do it out of love, of course.  I'm sure he would keep me alive as longs as he possible could, my body deteriorating, disintegrating around me, dissolving until there's nothing left but my brain floating in a glass jar filled with clear liquid, my eyeballs drifting at the surface and all sorts of cable and tubes feeding what remains.  But I don't want to be kept alive.  Because I know what's next.  I've seen it on TV.  A documentary I saw about Mongolia, of all places.  It was the best thing I've ever seen on television, other than the 1993 Grand Prix of Europe, of course, the greatest automobile race of all time in which Ayrton Senna proved himself to be a genius in the rain.  After the 1993 Grand Prix, the best thing I've ever seen on TV is a documentary that explained everything to me, made it all clear, told the whole truth:  when a good is finished living his lifetimes as a dog, his next incarnation will be as a man.

-Garth Stein,  The Art Of Racing In The Rain

Recommended..................

At the cinema....................................The Art of Racing in the Rain

Rx: Banjo music..............................

Add caption

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

The 1910 Fruitgum Company..............................Indian Giver

Scott Blitstein,....................

..............................................our friend from Sensory Dispensary, has a new outlet.   Check it out.

Reasons why I like living in Newark and Licking County.......

Reason #73.............................................The Newark Skate Park

Thanks to collaboration between two local philanthropic foundations and the City of Newark, we are blessed by the $2,000,000 re-imagining and rejuvenation of Everett Park.  Today was the ribbon cutting ceremony for the cornerstone of this project - the Newark Skate Park,  The skate park is clearly a world-class facility.   Free for kids of all ages.  Amazing:

Ground Rules.........................

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

Smith.....................................................I Don't Believe (I Believe)

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

The Zombies........................................................Friends of Mine

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

Janis Joplin...........................................................Summertime

Corrective...........................

“Laughter is the corrective force which prevents us from becoming cranks.” 


-Henri Bergson

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

..............................................................................Ziggy:

Pretty good advice..........................

“My advice, as in everything, is to read widely and think for yourself.  We need more dissent and less dogma.” 

-Camille Paglia

Why on earth not.....................?

“I don't know why we are here, but I'm pretty sure that it is not in order to enjoy ourselves.” 


-Ludwig Wittgenstein

Pretending.....................................?

“Our great democracies still tend to think that a stupid man is more likely to be honest than a clever man, and our politicians take advantage of this prejudice by pretending to be even more stupid than nature made them.” 

-Bertrand Russell

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

Jefferson Airplane.................Somebody To Love & White Rabbit

Yep.........................

Eleven Universal Laws of the World.........

………………………..can be found here.  Ignore them at your own risk.  Here are two, just to whet the appetite:

1. Littlewood’s law: We can expect “miracles” to happen regularly, because in a world with 7 billion people the odds of a one-in-a-billion event are pretty good.

7. Wiio’s laws: “Communication usually fails, except by accident.”

via

Value...............................

The value people place on free things is zero, though they may riot if the giveaways stop. When they must actually pay, or make other sacrifices, they value what they have obtained. This is human nature. It does not change when technology changes; it cannot ever be suppressed for long. But it can be corrupted.

-David Warren, from this disquisition

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

Creedence Clearwater Revival.....................................Proud Mary

Wow, here's a great idea................

I think conservative intellectuals should not try to build an ideological scaffolding around the Trump presidency. Just focus on trying to bring rigor back into academia.

-Arnold Kling

Ravikant..................

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

Creedence Clearwater Revival.......................Born On The Bayou

Well, fifty years ago anyway...................

“Sixty years ago I knew everything; now I know nothing; education is a progressive discovery of our own ignorance.”

-Will Durant

Eternally............................

Everything goes, everything comes back; eternally rolls the wheel of being. Everything dies, everything blossoms again; eternally runs the year of being. Everything breaks, everything is joined anew; eternally the same House of Being is built. Everything parts, everything greets every other thing again; eternally the ring of being remains faithful to itself. In every Now, being begins; round every Here rolls the sphere There. The center is everywhere. Bent is the path of eternity.

-Friedrich Nietzsche,  Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Nice..........................

“Think like a man of action, act like a man of thought.” 

-Henri Bergson

Paying attention.......................

     . . .in Egyptian monasticism, enormous stress is laid on the virtue of humility.  As Evagrius says, 'asceticism with humility is valuable, but asceticism without humility is extremely dangerous'.  And another Father said, 'It is better to fail with humility that to succeed with pride.'
     Above all else the Egyptian monks emphasised  self-knowledge.  The one practice which they harp on over and over again is 'paying attention to yourself', and going with this, they highlight the virtue of 'discernment', but which they mean an ability to diagnose exactly what is going on at any given moment.
     This explains why sometimes the Desert Fathers seem to be rather casual about morality.  Their concern is not that people should behave correctly according to the rules, but rather that people should be able to see their situation clearly for what it is. and so become free of the distorting perspective which underlies all our sins.
     Thus we hear of a fornicating monk, who kept a woman in his cell so indiscreetly that word got around about it.  The neighboring monks resolved to drive the monk away, and abba Ammonas, who happened to be visiting there was asked to go with them.  The offending monk heard them coming and hid his woman in a large jar.  Ammonas saw her at once, but 'hid the affair for the sake of God'.  He sat down on the jar, and then told the other monks to search the cell.  They, of course, found nothing and went away again abashed and apologetic.  Ammonas then took the culprit's hand and simply said to him, 'Brother, pay attention to yourself,' and went out.

-Simon Tugwell, Ways of Imperfection:  An Exploration of Christian Spirituality

Ryan Holiday on....................

........................................................................doing your job:

"Everything we do matters — whether it’s making smoothies to save up money or studying for the bar — even after we’ve already achieved the success we sought. Everything is a chance to do and be our best. Only self-absorbed assholes think they are too good for whatever their current station requires."

--------------------------------------------------------------

"The great psychologist Viktor Frankl, survivor of three concentration camps, found presumptuousness in the age-old question: “What is the meaning of life?” As though it is someone else’s responsibility to tell us. Instead, he said, the world is asking you that question. And it’s our job to answer with our actions.

"In every situation, life is asking us a question, and our actions are the answer. Our job is simply to answer well."

Entrench.........................

     via

Today...........................

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

Creedence Clearwater Revival.....................I Put A Spell On You

Getting a head start on 2020.......

...............I started thumbing through the newest Almanac (for farmers & city folk).  Among the tidbits of interesting things, this was found:

     Lemmings are not suicidal!  Filmmakers in Disney's 1958 nature film, "White Wilderness" pushed dozens of lemmings off a cliff while cameras rolled, for dramatic effect—thereby staging a lemming death plunge.  This deliberate fraud started the myth.

Finding it difficult to fathom that Disney would ever release a film that wasn't the gospel truth, the Oracle Google was consulted.  Google clearly backs up the Farmer's Almanac on outing this fraudulent film.  Amazing.  How come I never knew this?

Making a case for.................

...........................................paying down the mortgage.   While it is an interesting discussion, our tendency has always been to invest in more real estate and take out another mortgage.  Different strokes.........

Beyond Meat........................

......................Color me doubtful, but this is still pretty interesting.

Rx: A wee bit of healthy self-doubt.....

Why do we demonize those with whom we disagree? The basic reason is that it helps to protect us from having to question or doubt our own beliefs. 

-Arnold S. Kling, as taken from this "How We Polarize Ourselves" essay

Cartoon Saturday.........................

.....................................at Bilbo's aims at guns.  A single sample:

That one reminded me of this one:

Virtually impossible.................

Myles Udland put it perfectly when he said, “The more accurate formulation of ‘No one knows anything’ is ‘Everyone knows everything.'”Everybody knows everything is the new nobody knows nothing.

In ten minutes you can learn most of what took a lifetime for Darwin to discover. You have to be careful trying to infer something from everything, because in today’s world, it is virtually impossible to separate the signal from the noise.

-as lifted from here

Bring back the Wooly Mammoth!.........

..................................................................No, seriously.

I wonder if young Wooly Mammoths............

...............................................believed in the Tooth Fairy?

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

Janis Joplin............................................................Ball & Chain

The view from my desk...........................

Ah, science..............................

     via

In case you were not aware.............

The very long U.S. election season is here.  What to keep on mind? Two things strike me as fundamental.

1. Knowledge is complex and dispersed. This means that innovation (and progress) depend on trial-and-error innovation in a competitive environment – one not encumbered by the heavy hand of you-know-who. This is especially important in a season when the candidates have policies, plans and programs for everything.

2. In fact, there will always be a political class (includes their many private sector cronies) working hard on cronyist plans and policies.

Millions of voters have sat through some version of an economic principles class. How many of them have encountered these two fundamental principles? Too few, I worry.

These two fundamental observations are facts of life and in conflict. That’s what makes it interesting. The economist Peter Boettke has elaborated and even imagined a derby involving “Three S’s”.  Smithian gains from trade, Schumpeterian competition, and, third S for stupid.

All three are always in play. And it’s election season.

-Peter Gordon, as cut-and-pasted from his blog

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

Joe Cocker...........................................Something's Coming On

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

.........................Woodstock:  Three Days of Peace & Music.

Aging like a fine wine..................

He's still pretty young, but still...............

Garbage time....................

Jerry Seinfeld on Father's Day and parenting:

I don’t need any special days. I mean they’re all special. We spend a lot of time together and I enjoy every second of it. Again, I’m a believer in the ordinary and the mundane. These guys that talk about “quality time” – I always find that a little sad when they say, “We have quality time.” I don’t want quality time. I want the garbage time. That’s what I like. You just see them in their room reading a comic book and you get to kind of watch that for a minute, or [having] a bowl of Cheerios at 11 o’clock at night when they’re not even supposed to be up. The garbage, that’s what I love.

The bigger picture....................

"It is a mistake to think that the past is dead. Nothing that has ever happened is quite without influence at this moment. The present is merely the past rolled up and concentrated in this second of time. You, too, are your past; often your face is your autobiography; you are what you are because of what you have been; because of your heredity stretching back into forgotten generations; because of every element of environment that has affected you, every man or woman that has met you, every book that you have read, every experience that you have had; all these are accumulated in your memory, your body, your character, your soul. So with a city, a country, and a race; it is its past, and cannot be understood without it. 

"Perhaps the cause of our contemporary pessimism is our tendency to view history as a turbulent stream of conflicts — between individuals in economic life, between groups in politics, between creeds in religion, between states in war. This is the more dramatic side of history; it captures the eye of the historian and the interest of the reader. But if we turn from that Mississippi of strife, hot with hate and dark with blood, to look upon the banks of the stream, we find quieter but more inspiring scenes: women rearing children, men building homes, peasants drawing food from the soil, artisans making the conveniences of life, statesmen sometimes organizing peace instead of war, teachers forming savages into citizens, musicians taming our hearts with harmony and rhythm, scientists patiently accumulating knowledge, philosophers groping for truth, saints suggesting the wisdom of love.  History has been too often a picture of the bloody stream. The history of civilization is a record of what happened on the banks."

-Will Durant

On self-fulfilling prophesies........

         via

Expectations...............

“There is nothing in nature that blooms all year long, so don’t expect yourself to do so either.” 

-Unknown, from this of five things to stop doing

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

Joe Cocker.................................................Let's Go Get Stoned

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

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

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

This is asking a lot...............

These articles about the election must be cranked out, and I'm only blogging this one because it is so absurd. Kamala Harris was "briefly sent... into the stratosphere"?! She briefly polled in the teens, and then slipped back into the single digits. Instead of an article asking why she's not more popular, ask yourselves how you ever got caught up into assuming that she was supposed to be so popular. You assume something should be true, then you proceed to inquire why it isn't. How about speaking honestly about your own assumption?

-from this Althouse post