Expanding vocabularies..............

This new word for the day comes not from Mr. Webster's New World College Dictionary, but from the American Digest:

On losing a wheel...........

     "I know a wheel is starting to fall off when the meal I'm preparing becomes more important that the people I'm preparing it for.  When work becomes more important than the family I'm working for.  When a point I'm making becomes more important than the person I'm making it to.  That's how I can tell I've lost the still axis.  When I lose sight of what's more important.  When I lose a sense of the sacredness of another human being, especially the human beings closest to me, the ones in my family."
-Ken Gire, Windows of the Soul

A question about birds

I am going to sit on a rock near some water
or on a slope of grass
under a high ceiling of white clouds,

and I am going to stop talking
so I can wander around in that spot
the way John James Audubon might have wandered

through a forest of speckled sunlight,
stopping now and then to lean
against an elm, mop his brow,

and listen to the songs of birds.
Did he wonder, as I often do,
how they regard the songs of other species?

Would it be like listening to the Chinese
merchants at an outdoor market?
Or do all birds perfectly understand one another?

Or is that nervous chittering
I often hear from the upper branches
the sound of some tireless little translator?

-Billy Collins

Context matters..............

Hanging with the optimists........

Brian Wesbury says "The Pouting Pundits of Pessimism are hyperventilating....", but they, and their data, are not to be trusted.  His full post, which includes four steps to turn the economy around big time, is here.  Excerpt here:


"We call it a Plow Horse Economy…it ain’t gonna win the Belmont, but it ain’t gonna keel over and die, either. And there is nothing in the latest data or market action that changes our mind; the economy is not in recession and we highly doubt it will fall into one anytime soon."


thanks Kurt

Amendments...........

                                    Amendment XVI
     The Congress shall have the power to lay and collect taxes on income, from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration.

The Sixteenth Amendment was ratified on February 3, 1913

The classic's classic........

Booker T. & the MG's.........................Green Onions

Tax fairness....................

Mark Perry offers this graph and this analysis (with comments):

Looks like we need more, not fewer, really rich people.

Stillness.................

"The problem is not entirely in finding the room of one's own, the time alone, difficult and necessary as that is.  The problem is more how to still the soul in the midst of its activities."
-Anne Morrow Lindbergh

Is this really true?

From Spengler:


      "State and local property tax collections  have risen by 10%, from $400 billion to $440 billion, since 2008, even though the price of homes in most American markets (red line)  has fallen by 30% since 2008. Your house is worth less and your property taxes have gone up. Most of the $440 billion in property taxes is paid by homeowners. That compares with the $380 billion a year or so that homeowners pay on the $10 trillion in outstanding home mortgage debt. Homeowners now pay roughly as much in property taxes as in mortgages interest. It used to be a quarter to a third as much. No wonder home prices remain depressed."


Never really gave the issue much thought, but that statement in bold caused me to get out the calculator.  Not sure that I am typical, but, in 2012, I'm on pace to pay $4,200 in mortgage interest.  According to my Tax Duplicate from the County Treasurer, the property taxes on my house will be $2,213.18 this year.  Whew!

Amendments................

                                       Amendment XV
      Section 1.  The right of citizens of the United States to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the United States of by any State on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude.
      Section 2.  The Congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation.

The Fifteenth Amendment was ratified on February 2, 1870

Can't. Take it. Any. More......

David Kanigan posts about the downside of e-mail.  Here is my contribution to the conversation.

image courtesy of gapingvoid.com

The layman's tool kit............

thanks Todd

heart leaps..........

My heart leaps up when I behold          A rainbow in the sky;So it was when my life began;So it is now I am a man;So be it when I shall grow old,          Or let me die!The Child is the father of the ManAnd I could wish my days to beBound each to each by natural piety.

-William Wordsmith

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

It was a quiet morning, the town covered over with darkness and at ease in bed.  Summer gathered in the weather, the wind had the proper touch, the breathing of the world was long and warm and slow.  You had only to rise, lean from your window, and know that this indeed was the first real time of freedom and living, this was the first morning of summer.
-Ray Bradbury, Dandelion Wine

Ellington and Burke on adversity..............

"A problem is a chance for you to do your best."
-Duke Ellington


"He that struggles with us strengthens our nerves, and sharpens our skill.  Our antagonist is our helper.:
-Edmund Burke

Seneca and Hazlitt on adversity......

"Prosperity is a great teacher; adversity is a greater."
-William Hazlitt

Pasternak on adversity.............

"I don't like people who have never fallen or stumbled.  Their virtue is lifeless and it isn't of much value.  Life hasn't revealed its beauty to them."
-Boris Pasternak

Thoreau and Byron on adversity.......

"If we will be quiet and ready enough, we shall find 
compensation in every disappointment."
-Henry David Thoreau

Hayes on adversity...........

"There's nothing that cleanses your soul like getting the hell kicked out of you."
-Woody Hayes