Not a bad idea at any time.............

"Perhaps whenever survival is at stake, we need to unite as human beings rather than quarreling genders."

-Camille Paglia

On why the study of history is important.....

Man is a rational animal - so at least I have been told.  Throughout a long life, I have looked diligently for evidence in favor of this statement, but so far I have not had the good fortune to come across it, though I searched in many countries spread over three continents.  On the contrary, I have seen the world plunging continually further into madness.  I have seen great nations, formerly leaders of civilization, led astray by preachers of bombastic nonsense.  I have seen cruelty, persecution, and superstition increasing by leaps and bounds, until we have almost reached the point where praise of rationality is held to mark a man as an old fogey regrettably surviving from a bygone era.  All this is depressing, but gloom is a useless emotion.  In order to escape from it, I have been driven to study the past with more attention than I had formerly given to it, and have found, as Erasmus found, that folly is perennial and yet the human race has survived.  The follies of our own times are easier to bear when they are seen against the background of past follies.

-Bertrand Russell, from the essay An Outline of Intellectual Rubbish, as published in Unpopular Essays

Okay by me.......................

-Shel Silverstein,   Where The Sidewalk Ends

Simplicity..............................

     When we condemn or justify we cannot see clearly, nor can we when our minds are endlessly chattering;  then we do not observe what is;  we only look at the projections we have made of ourselves.  Each of us has an image of what we think we are or what we should be, and that image, that picture, entirely prevents us from seeing ourselves as we actually are.
     It is one of the most difficult things in the world to look at anything simply.  Because our minds are very complex we have lost the quality of simplicity.  I don't mean simplicity in clothes or food, wearing only a loin cloth or breaking a record fasting or any of that immature nonsense the saints cultivate, but the simplicity that can look directly at things without fear - that can look at ourselves as we actually are without any distortion - to say we lie when we lie, not cover it up or run away from it.

-J. Krishnamurti,  Freedom from the Known

Singular..................................

      How did he live such a life, so hectic with public concerns, while preoccupying himself so fully with individual human beings:  whose torments, never mind their singularity, he adopted as his own, with the passion that some give only to the universal?  Eleanor Roosevelt, James Burnham once mused, looked on all the world as her personal slum project.  Although he was at home with collectivist formulations, one had the impression of Allard Lowenstein that he might be late in aborting a Third World War - because of his absorption with the problems of one sophomore.  Oh, they followed him everywhere;  because we experienced in him the essence of an entirely personal dedication.  Of all the partisans I have known, from the furthest steppes of the spectrum, his was the most undistracted concern, not for humanity - thought he was conversant with big-think idiom - but with human beings.

-William F. Buckley, Jr., A Torch Kept Lit:  Great Lives of the Twentieth Century;  Allard Lowenstein, RIP

Seismographs....................

Congressmen are not evil people, they're mostly sort of seismographs with antennae; they're waiting - they're more worried about losing their jobs than Assistant Deans of Men in the Ivy League.

-attributed to Allard  K. Lowenstein

Sit..........................................

"Sit close to someone with a big heart, sit in the shade of a tree with fresh leaves."

-Attributed to Rumi, by Brad Gooch in Rumi's Secret:  The Life of the Sufi Poet of Love

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

     The imposter borrowed the name of Neville Manchin, an actual professor of American literature at Portland State and soon-to-be doctoral student at Stanford.  In his letter, on perfectly forged college stationary, "Professor Manchin" claimed to be a budding scholar of F. Scott Fitzgerald and was keen to see the great writer's "manuscripts and papers" during a forthcoming trip to the East Coast.  The letter was addressed to Dr. Jeffrey Brown, Director of Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Firestone Library, Princeton University.  It arrived with a few others, was duly sorted and passed along, and eventually landed on the desk of Ed Folk, a career junior librarian whose task, among several other monotonous ones, was to verify the credentials of the person who wrote the letter.

-John Grisham,  Camino Island

He cracks me up....................

Amazon's offer to purchase Whole Foods has been in the news:

To hell with the consequence..........

Melissa Etheridge.......................................I Want To Come Over

My Sweetie and I......................

.....................just got home from seeing mega-talented and audience-connecting Melissa Etheridge perform at the wondrous Midland Theatre.  She featured a number of songs first produced by Stax Records, including one by William Bell.  Wasn't this one though:

William Bell..........................................I Forgot To Be You Lover

It is too depressing.......................

..............to contemplate, so I suggest you skip this Spengler post.

Roles..............................

     Feminist ideology has never dealt honestly with the role of the mother in human life.  Its portrayal of history as male oppression and female victimage is a gross distortion of the facts.  There was a rational division of labor from the hunter gatherer period that had its roots not in the male desire to subjugate and imprison but in the procreative burden which has fallen on women from nature.  It is woman who bears most of the responsibility in the process of procreation.  The male contribution to procreation is momentary, a mere pinprick, but the human female makes an enormous investment in the nine months of pregnancy, which could formerly not be forestalled or controlled as it is today.  Even now, pregnancy is a risky business that can result in the death of the mother.  Anything can go wrong and often does.  Before modern medicine, the mortality rate in childbirth was enormous.  In early history, women in advanced pregnancy or just after childbirth were extraordinarily vulnerable;  they could not fend for themselves and required the protection of men.  Feminist theory has been grotesquely unfair to men in refusing to acknowledge the enormous care that most men have provided to women and children.  The atrocious exceptions have been used by feminist theorists to blame all men, when over the whole of human history, men have given heroically of their energy and labor and indeed their lives to benefit and protect women and children.  Feminism has been very small-minded in the way it has treated male history.  Feminism cannot continue with this poisoned rhetoric - it is dangerous for young women to be indoctrinated to think in that negative way about men.

-Camille Paglia, as culled from here

Skin in the game..........................

Besides antifragility, another theme Nassim Taleb has been stressing of late is "skin in the game": the idea that people who face the consequences of their actions are more likely both to learn and to behave responsibly, than people who are shielded from such consequences.


Of course, Taleb is smart enough and educated enough to know that this is not an entirely new idea, and that he is expanding upon the intimations of earlier thinkers here. Even so, it was interesting to see Michael Oakeshott sound this motif so clearly in "Rational Conduct":

"And politics is a field of activity peculiarly subject to the lure of this 'rational' ideal. If you start by being merely 'intelligent' about a boiler or an electrical generator you are likely to be pulled up short by an explosion: but in politics all that happens is war and chaos, which you do not immediately connect with your error."


Gene Callahan, as excerpted from here

When you have more money...............

............than God, you can do this sort of thing.   Glad to see it happen.

Human nature............................

When you rule out the reality of human nature from the tool set, you’re left with solutions that are contrary to human nature.

-Zman

Well, this is fun.............................

.................................Any Major Dude With Half A Heart offers an eclectic mix of Beatles covers, mostly from Sgt Pepper's.  A sample, from 1968:

A sign of the times..................

      via

Consumer greed......................

.................................................Mark J. Perry wants to spoil the fun:

Here’s a dirty little secret about capitalism: consumers, not corporations, run the show.  If you find something about the marketplace objectionable, it would be more appropriate to blame those who actually call the shots: the ruthless, cutthroat, and disloyal American consumers.

Standing your ground......................

....................................................................for a really long time!