Granville Turkey Trot.....................

 

My Sweetie has been co-chair of the Granville Turkey Trot for a while now.  The 5k run/trot/walk/waddle event, held Thanksgiving mornings, draws a good crowd.  Despite temperatures hovering around freezing, over 2,000 friendly folk participated this morning.  This is the twentieth year for the event; it has become a family tradition.  The Granville Turkey Trot is also a fund-raiser.  All of the money goes to the Food Pantry Network of Licking County.  Last year the committee wrote them a check for around $130,000.  My Sweetie is hoping they top that this year.

Happy Thanksgiving................

 

A little bit of psychedelia never hurts..............

The Human Beinz............................Nobody But Me

 

In the background....................

Sven Zetterberg....................Let's Straighten It Out

 

All that is needed.....................

 

     If the nation is generous, governments take it upon themselves to cure all the ills of humanity.  They will revive commerce, they say; they will bring prosperity to agriculture, develop factories, encourage arts and letters, abolish poverty, etc., etc.  All that is needed is to create some new government functions and pay for some new functionaries.

-Frédéric Bastiat, from his Economic Sophisms, Second Series (1848)

no replays.......................

 

It is often said that history provides us with no action replays.  It is not given to controlled experiments.  We only learn what can go wrong after it has already done so, and by then it is too late to put it right.  In fact, the history of freedom in the modern world can be seen as a testing ground for different conceptions of politics.

-Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning

a bad habit...........................

 

 A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason.

-Thomas Paine, as culled from his pamphlet, Common Sense

the thin fabric...............

 

He had made a hobby of studying the American Civil War and he had always been disturbed by the passions which it had unleashed in the country, the tensions and angers just below the surface, the thin fabric of the society which held it all together, so easy to rend.

-David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest

choices................

 

Human cooperation under the system of the social division of labor is possible only in the market economy.  Socialism is not a realizable system of society's economic organization because it lacks any method of economic calculation. . . .

Socialism cannot be realized because it is beyond human power to establish it as a social system.  The choice is between capitalism and chaos.  A man who chooses between drinking a glass of milk and a glass of a solution of potassium cyanide does not choose between two beverages; he chooses between life and death.  A society that chooses between capitalism and socialism does not choose between two social systems; it chooses between social cooperation and the disintegration of society.  Socialism is not an alternative to capitalism; it is an alternative to any system under which men can live as human beings.

-Ludwig Von Mises, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics

In the background.........................

D Man.................................Ain't Enough Whiskey

 

I know for certain..................

 

......................................that this is true.

life itsownself.................

 

"The end of being is to know; and if you say the end of knowledge is action—why yes, but the end of that action again, is knowledge."  Self-knowledge and self-cultivation he now sees not as a means to something but as the ends and goals of life itself.

-Robert D Richardson, Jr., Emerson: The Mind on Fire

the health of the soul.................

 

Let no one be slow to seek wisdom when they are young nor weary in the search when they have grown old.  For no age is too early or too late for the health of the soul.  And to say that the season for studying philosophy has not yet come, or that it is past and gone, is like saying that the season for happiness is not yet or that it is now no more.

-Epicurus, as cut-and-pasted from this letter

Thankful for the Rules...................

 

...........................................especially #10.

Against utopianism............

Utopianism always begins as an awakening. It ends, if it is allowed to run through its phases, as a tyranny of the pure. There is a slower path. It lacks ecstasy and salvation. It is not rough or revolutionary. It can feel like a letdown, particularly to the young and the impatient. It accepts imperfection as the price of freedom. It chooses a decent polity over a redeemed one. History suggests this is the wiser bet. Its lesson is unromantic and, for that reason, trustworthy: whenever we try to storm heaven, we tend to wake up in a very familiar place, counting the costs and wondering how the rope we thought we could use to pull ourselves up became a noose.

Dustin Sharp, as he concludes this essay

abuse......................

 

     History has shown that we shouldn't rely on governments to protect us financially.  On the contrary, we should expect most governments to abuse their privileged positions as the creators and users of money and credit for the same reasons that you might commit those abuses if you were in their shoes.

-Ray Dalio, Principles for Dealing with The Changing World Order

A worthy goal................

 

     My only financial goal is to go to bed every night with a sense of calm, knowing my family is OK and that I can spend the next day doing what I want, when I want, with whom I want, for as long as I want.

-Morgan Housel, The Art of Spending Money:  Simple Choices for a Richer Life

Never the how, always the why................

 

Spader channeling Reddington......One more time

 

consumable otherness...................

     Chesterton knew that progressivism and capitalism were bedfellows that would produce unnatural offspring.  He was also conscious that the politicization of sex would lead to confusion instead of fulfilling the desire for equality or the happiness of both sexes.  Sexlessness, the refusal to acknowledge the God-ordained design of sexual difference, would be the result of the battle of the sexes.  Once cut off from its spiritual roots, equality would lead not to fairness but to a culture of lies and the popularizing of consumable otherness.  Chesterton was sure that, in the name of equality, standards would be attacked and what Pope Benedict XVI would later name a "dictatorship of relativism" would become the norm. 

-Duncan Reyburn, The Roots of the World: The Remarkable Prescience of G. K. Chesterton

Sixty years ago.............................

Del Shannon....Keep Searchin' (We'll Follow the Sun)