Within.............................................

12.  Work yourself hard, but not as if you were being made a victim, and not with any desire for sympathy or admiration.  Desire one thing alone:  that your actions or inactions alike should be worthy of a reasoning citizen.


13.  Today I have got myself out of all my perplexities;  or rather, I have got the perplexities out of myself - for they were not without, but within;  they lay in my own outlook.


-Marcus Aurelius,  Meditations,  Book IX

Aging gracefully...............................................?

Of course, Hillary will turn 69 in October.   As a 64-year-old, I don't mind at all having these two candidates push back on the definition of "old".


thanks Ann

Unsettled science...............................

Present reality is that science is on the verge of a nervous breakdown.
-as excerpted from this Samizdata post


It would be wrong to suspect that Science on the Verge is the work of right-wing activists, climate skeptics and hide-bound traditionalists.  It is the work, rather, of scientists with a range of ideological views despairing over what appears to be a fundamental breakdown as science has become more and more enmeshed in the business of providing evidence for policy-making.
-Terence Corcoran, as excerpted from here

Something usually does......................

"We do not know what the future will bring, except that it will be quite different from anything we could predict.  I have said in another context that it is a disadvantage of 'the long run' that in the long run we are all dead.  But I could have said equally well that it is a great advantage of 'the short run' that in the short run we are all alive.  Life and history are made up of short runs.  If we are at peace in the short run that is something.  The best we can do is put off disaster, if only in the hope, which is not necessarily a remote one, that something will turn up."

-John Maynard Keynes,  July 1937

Brexit.......................................?

This blog has no official position (although there is an unofficial position, which you are likely to guess correctly about) on Britain's referendum on the European Union, but it is interesting, and a bit of relief, to watch other countries struggle over tough choices.

I choose not to believe it is a curse to live in interesting times.  Study up and enjoy the ride.  Here are two thoughtful people, not directly affected by the vote, thinking thoughtfully about the subject: 

11.  So I would vote Remain, but with some feelings of despair, because what I’d be voting to remain with is a system that desperately needs reform but shows little sign of reforming.
-Paul Krugman

"Actually, Obama likes the European Union’s approximation of American progressives’ aspirations. These include unaccountable administrators issuing diktats, and what one E.U. critic calls “trickle-down postmodernism” — the erasure of national traditions and other impediments to “harmonizing” homogenized nations for the convenience of administrators."
-George Will

The historian in me....................

...............................................believes this to be a mighty truth:

"The treaty seems to mean whatever the politicians in the big countries want it to mean."

-Mervyn King

Reexamine...........................

Paradigms power perception and perceptions power emotions.  Most emotions are responses to perception - what you think is true about a given situation.  If your perception is false, then your emotional response to it will be false too.  So check your perceptions, and beyond that check the truthfulness of your paradigms - what you believe.   Just because you believe something firmly doesn't make it true.  Be willing to reexamine what you believe.

-William Paul Young

A mask chosen by you.........

David Gilmour.................................................Faces Of Stone

Do something special today......................

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

At the movies............................The Russians Are Coming etc.

Mastery........................................

4.  The sinner sins against himself;  the wrongdoer wrongs himself, becoming worse by his own action.


5.  A man does not sin by commission only, but often by omission.


6.  Enough if your present opinion is grounded in conviction, your present action grounded in unselfishness, and your present disposition contented with whatever befalls you from without.


7.  Erase fancy; curb impulse; quench desire; let sovereign reason have the mastery,


-Marcus Aurelius,  Meditations,  Book IX

A decent question............................

“How could our society have regressed to the point where a bridge that could be built in less than a year one century ago takes five times as long to repair today?”
-attributed to Larry Summers from this post titled, "Larry Summer sits in traffic, has an epiphany on regulation


A hint to the author's idea of a simplistic answer to the decent question might be found here:
"The Federal Register, the daily log of federal agency regulations, proposed rules, public notices and executive orders, clocked in at 80,035 pages in 2015, among the highest on record. The rule book was 2,620 pages in 1936, the first year it was published."


thanks craig

The science of persuasion.....................

"Truth is useless for persuasion whenever emotions are involved."
-Scott Adams, as excerpted from this post about the awesomeness of "science"

I ain't lying........................

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

Life its ownself.........................

.................................Good thing the year's not over yet.

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

Cliff Bennett & The Rebel Rousers.....Gotta Get You Into My Life

Growth.............................

"Faith does not grow in the house of certainty."
-William Paul Young

Evil...............................

"Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from a religious conviction."
-Blaise Pascal

Let's do Darwin proud then.................

..............................................................and stay very, very adaptable.

When silicon chips came along, few foresaw personal computers; when the internet arrived, few predicted the central role of search engines or one-click shopping; when mobile phones took us by surprise, few imagined texts, let alone social media, sat-nav, phone cameras or the sharing economy. The one thing that the history of technology shows above all else is our complete inability to see what comes next.

-As excerpted from this Matt Ridley post on Europe's blindness

The always exceptional.............................

................................Cultural Offering is in especially fine form today.