A view of life and commercial real estate from Newark and Licking County, Ohio
Conflict is the essential core of a free and open society. If one were to project the democratic way of life in the form of a musical score, its major theme would be the harmony of dissonance.
-Saul D. Alinsky, a lifted from Rules For Radicals: A Pragmatic Primer for Realistic Radicals
The story seems too good to be true—but people who should know swear that it is true. The first time that Huey P. Long campaigned in rural, Latin, Catholic south Louisiana, the local boss who had him in charge said at the beginning of the tour: "Huey, you ought to remember one thing in your speeches today. You're from north Louisiana, but now you're in south Louisiana. And we got a lot of Catholic voters down here." "I know," Huey answered. And throughout the day in every small town Long would begin by saying: "When I was a boy, I would get up at six o'clock in the morning on Sunday, and I would hitch our old horse up to the buggy and I would take my Catholic grandparents to mass. I would bring them home, and at ten o'clock I would hitch the old horse up again, and I would take my Baptist grandparents to church." The effect of the anecdote on the audiences was obvious, and on the way back to Baton Rouge that night the local leader said admiringly: "Why, Huey, you've been holding out on us. I didn't know you had any Catholic grandparents." "Don't be a damn fool," replied Huey. "We didn't even have a horse."
-T. Harry Williams, Huey Long
There is no such thing as perfection, only the relentless, thirsty matching of an organism to its environment. That is the engine that drives evolution.
-Siddhartha Mukherjee, The Gene: An Intimate History
Willpower, it turns out, is more like a reservoir than a river. If we deploy willpower in one decision, we have less self-control available for our next decision. Many of our worst dietary choices, for example, are made in periods of low self-control—at the end of a long day when a big glass of cabernet or a pint of Ben and Jerry's calls out our name.
-Donald Sull and Kathleen M. Eisenhardt, Simple Rules: How To Thrive In A Complex World
On September 14, 1814, Francis Scott Key pens what became the National Anthem of the USA. Story here.
.................but the smart bet is on the optimists:
As long as more people try to get better than screw up, the long-term odds are in an economy’s favor. And that’s virtually always the case because the screw-ups – the declines, the recessions, and panics, the wars – fuel the problem-solving.
-As extracted from this Morgan Housel post
Littlewood's law states that a person can expect to experience events with odds of one in a million (defined by the law as a "miracle") at the rate of about one per month.
Littlewood defines a miracle as an exceptional event of special significance occurring at a frequency of one in a million. He assumes that during the hours in which a human is awake and alert, a human will see or hear one "event" per second, which may be either exceptional or unexceptional. Additionally, Littlewood supposes that a human is alert for about eight hours per day.
As a result, a human will in 35 days have experienced under these suppositions about one million events. Accepting this definition of a miracle, one can expect to observe one miraculous event for every 35 days' time, on average – and therefore, according to this reasoning, seemingly miraculous events are actually commonplace.
-as cut-and-pasted from our friends at Wikipedia
Knowing when enough is enough. A nice post about brothers Dick and Mac McDonald.
............................. H. L. Mencken's 140th birthday.
11. The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
.............................to check in periodically with Martin Gurri:
The repudiation of everything in a free, reasonably prosperous democratic society echoes the web’s rhetoric of the rant but probably springs from deeper sources. Lacking community and religion, a significant percentage of the public has looked for personal meaning in utopian political aspirations that invariably collide with reality. The pose of universal grievance may well be based in a politics of cultural despair.
-as culled from this essay which concludes like this:
The demonstrable failure of our political elites during this episode can be added to the long roster of disasters they have mismanaged. Those in charge continue to bleed out authority, and the democratic institutions they represent have begun to totter. Since we, the voters, elevated them to office, the supreme lesson of this troubled moment should probably be how to replace them with competent grown-ups. But that is another story.
The great soul is always in search of ways and means for adding to the welfare of others. But no way is better, greater or more far reaching than this — just be glad.
Life becomes worth the living only when the living of life makes living more worthwhile for an ever increasing number. It is only the joys we share that give happiness; it is only the thoughts we express that enrich our minds; it is only the strength we use in actual helpfulness that makes our souls strong. Therefore, to add to the pleasures of others, is to add to our own pleasure; to add to the wealth and comfort of others is to add in like manner to our own. This the great soul knows; and every soul is great that has learned to be glad regardless of what may come of go in the world.
To be glad at all times is to be of greater service to mankind than any other thing that we can do.
-Christian D. Larson, Just Be Glad: Insights For Your Spiritual Journey
It started in the galley of my wobbly old house during a lightning storm that fried a nearby transformer. A sizzling boom rattled the windows. Combusted ozone drifted bayward and sweetened the air while rain hammered the tin roof.
The lights went out.
"Perfect," my boat bum pal, Tomlinson, said. "Natural disaster is humanity's last hope. The internet has butt-ravaged us all and looted our privacy. I say bring on the pale rider. Might as well have another beer, huh?"
-Randy Wayne White, Salt River: A Doc Ford Novel
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