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.