Arthur Miller on Mark Twain & America

"I wonder whether in him is some kind of symbolization of the American character.

There is so much boasting going on; that always goes on. Great country for self advertising - we are god's country, we're a big success.

And he had that about him. He was not hiding his light under a bushel. At the same time, underneath there, you smelled suffering.

And of course that's the American dilemma - we are all great successes, and if you push a little bit, you can reach the anguish that's underneath it all."

--- Ken Burns' Mark Twain

Graduation advice by Mary Schmich

"Wear sunscreen.

If I could offer you only one tip for the future, sunscreen
would be it. The long-term benefits of sunscreen have been proved
by scientists, whereas the rest of my advice has no basis more
reliable than my own meandering experience. I will dispense this
advice now.

Enjoy the power and beauty of your youth. Oh, never mind. You
will not understand the power and beauty of your youth until
they've faded. But trust me, in 20 years, you'll look back at
photos of yourself and recall in a way you can't grasp now how much
possibility lay before you and how fabulous you really looked. You
are not as fat as you imagine.

Don't worry about the future. Or worry, but know that worrying
is as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing
bubble gum. The real troubles in your life are apt to be things
that never crossed your worried mind, the kind that blindside you
at 4pm on some idle Tuesday.

Do one thing every day that scares you.

Sing.

Don't be reckless with other people's hearts. Don't put up with
people who are reckless with yours.

Floss.

Don't waste your time on jealousy. Sometimes you're ahead,
sometimes you're behind. The race is long and, in the end, it's
only with yourself.

Remember compliments you receive. Forget the insults. If you
succeed in doing this, tell me how.

Keep your old love letters. Throw away your old bank
statements.

Stretch.

Don't feel guilty if you don't know what you want to do with
your life. The most interesting people I know didn't know at 22
what they wanted to do with their lives. Some of the most
interesting 40-year-olds I know still don't.

Get plenty of calcium. Be kind to your knees. You'll miss them
when they're gone.

Maybe you'll marry, maybe you won't. Maybe you'll have children,
maybe you won't. Maybe you'll divorce at 40, maybe you'll dance the
funky chicken on your 75th wedding anniversary. Whatever you do,
don't congratulate yourself too much, or berate yourself either.
Your choices are half chance. So are everybody else's.

Enjoy your body. Use it every way you can. Don't be afraid of it
or of what other people think of it. It's the greatest instrument
you'll ever own.

Dance, even if you have nowhere to do it but your living
room.

Read the directions, even if you don't follow them.

Do not read beauty magazines. They will only make you feel
ugly.

Get to know your parents. You never know when they'll be gone
for good. Be nice to your siblings. They're your best link to your
past and the people most likely to stick with you in the
future.

Understand that friends come and go, but with a precious few you
should hold on. Work hard to bridge the gaps in geography and
lifestyle, because the older you get, the more you need the people
who knew you when you were young.

Live in New York City once, but leave before it makes you hard.
Live in Northern California once, but leave before it makes you
soft. Travel.

Accept certain inalienable truths: Prices will rise. Politicians
will philander. You, too, will get old. And when you do, you'll
fantasize that when you were young, prices were reasonable,
politicians were noble and children respected their elders.

Respect your elders.

Don't expect anyone else to support you. Maybe you have a trust
fund. Maybe you'll have a wealthy spouse. But you never know when
either one might run out.

Don't mess too much with your hair or by the time you're 40 it
will look 85.

Be careful whose advice you buy, but be patient with those who
supply it. Advice is a form of nostalgia. Dispensing it is a way of
fishing the past from the disposal, wiping it off, painting over
the ugly parts and recycling it for more than it's worth.

But trust me on the sunscreen."

The Groupings of Life

From the book 'Your Inner Fish: A Journey into the 3.5 Billion-Year History of the Human Body' P. 7 - 9.

"That a column of rocks has a progression of fossil species probably comes as no surprise. Less obvious is that we can make detailed predictions about what the species in each layer might actually look like by comparing them with species of animals that are alive today; this information helps us to predict the kinds of fossils we find in ancient rock layers. In fact, the fossil sequences in the world's rocks can be predicted by comparing ourselves with the animals at our local zoo or aquarium.

How can a walk through the zoo help us predict where we should look in the rocks to find fossils? A zoo offers a great variety of creatures that are all distinct in many ways. But let's not focus on what makes them distinct; to pull off our prediction, we need to focus on what different creatures share. We can then use the features common to all species to identify groups of creatures with similar traits. All the living things can be organized and arranged like a set of Russian nesting dolls, with smaller groups of animals comprised in bigger groups of animals. When we do this, we discover something very fundamental about nature.

Every species in the zoo and aquarium has a head and two eyes. Call these species 'Everythings.' A subset of the creatures with a head and two eyes has limbs. Call the limbed species 'Everythings with limbs.' A subset of these headed and limbed creatures has a huge brain, walks on two feet, and speaks. That subset is us, humans. We could, of course, use this way of categorizing things to make many more subsets, but even this threefold division has predictive power.

The fossils inside the rocks of the world generally follow this order, and we can put it to use in designing new expeditions. To use the example above, the first member of the group 'Everythings,' a creature with a head and two eyes, is found in the fossil record well before the first 'Everythings with limbs.' More precisely, the first fish (a card-carrying member of the 'Everythings') appears before the first amphibian(an 'Everything with limbs"). Obviously, we refine this by looking at more kinds of animals and many more characteristics that groups of them share, as well as by assessing the actual age of rocks themselves.

...

The order of fossils in the world's rocks is powerful evidence of our connections to the rest of life. If, digging in 600-million-year-old rocks, we found the earliest jellyfish lying next to the skeleton of a woodchuck, then we would have to rewrite our texts. That woodchuck would have appeared earlier in the fossil record than the first mammal, reptile, or even fish--before even the first worm. Moreover, our ancient woodchuck would tell us that much of what we think we know about the history of the earth and life on it is wrong. Despite more than 150 years of people looking for fossils--on every continent of earth and in virtually every rock layer that is accessible--this observation has never been made."

Does Certainty exist?

"I am certain there is too much certainty in the world." -- Michael Crichton

"The most educated person in the world has to admit he or she knows less and less ... but knows less and less about more and more." God is Not Great- how religion poisons everything P. 9

"The more I know, the less I understand
And all the things I thought I figured out, I have to learn again" - Don Henley

"… the world is funnier than you think. And the more you think about it, the funnier it gets. Close inspection reveals the ironies, contradictions, and confusions that make life interesting, but also frustrating.
...
The more man thinks, the slower he moves. Thought uncovers the limitations of his plans. Exploring the possibilities, he sees yet more potential outcomes, a greater number of problems … and he increasingly recognizes how little he actually knows.
" - Financial Reckoning Day P. 2

“You don’t know what tomorrow will bring. Every day you research and strategize about your next move. Just when you think you have a handle on things, something turns your plans upside-down. When that happens you realize you know nothing.” Oil on the Brain P. 137

Do Deficits Matter?

"I read a report by David Walker, the former Comptroller of the United States, where he was explaining the depth of the fiscal budget alone. He estimated that balancing the Federal Budget by 2040 would require actions as large as: 1. Cutting Total Federal Spending by 60%, or 2. Raising taxes to 2X today's level.

He also states, "Closing the current long-term fiscal gap based on reasonable assumptions would require real average annual economic growth in the double digit range every year for the next 75 years.

Keep in mind that: During the 1990's, the economy grew at an average 3.2% per year. So… "As a result, we cannot simply grow our way out of this problem."

Well… Now that's something to help wake you up, eh? But deficits don't matter; so don't worry about what the former Comptroller of the U.S. says… HA! You won't catch me taking that bait! David Walker is a very smart man, and has been the Lone Ranger in the Government when it comes to pointing out the problems with these deficits."

Chuck Butler in The Daily Pfennig of April 16, 2008

Proof that Women are more Responsible

"Sperms and eggs contribute equal numbers of genes, but eggs contribute far more in the way of food reserves: indeed, sperms make no contribution at all and are simply concerned with transporting their genes as fast as possible to an egg. At the moment of conception, therefore, the father has invested less than his fair share (i.e. 50 per cent) of resources in the offspring. Since each sperm is so tiny, a male can afford to make millions of them everyday. This means he is potentially able to beget a very large number of children in a very short period of time, using different females. This is only because each new embryo is endowed with adequate food by the mother in each case. This therefore places a limit on the number of children a female can have, but the number of children a male can have is virtually unlimited. Female exploitation begins here." The Selfish Gene P. 142

On Taxes

"People who complain about taxes can be divided into two classes: men and women." - unknown

How do we KNOW the things we believe?

“Each of us has life view. For most of us, our view results more from where we were born, who our parents were, and what schools we attended than a careful examination of issues. Yet our life view influences every thought we have, every word we speak, and every action we take.” - The Man in the Mirror P. 38

"That illustrates what the psychoanalysts so much emphasize -- the immensely stronger hold upon us that our very early associations have than those of later times." - Bertrand Russell

"Systematic thinking is apparently a comparatively late development in human experience; it has not played any great part in human life until within the last 3,000 years. And even today those who really control and order their thoughts are but a small minority of mankind. Most of the world still lives by imagination and passion." A Short History of the World, H.G. Wells P. 37

"We want to stand upon our own feet and look fair and square at the world -- its good facts, its bad facts, its beauties, and its ugliness; see the world as it is and be not afraid of it. Conquer the world by intelligence and not merely by being slavishly subdued by the terror that comes from it. ... We ought to stand up and look the world frankly in the face. We ought to make the best we can of the world, and if it is not so good as we wish, after all it will still be better than what these others have made of it in all these ages. A good world needs knowledge, kindliness, and courage; it does not need a regretful hankering after the past or a fettering of the free intelligence by the words uttered long ago by ignorant men. It needs a fearless outlook and a free intelligence. It needs hope for the future, not looking back all the time toward a past that is dead, which we trust will be far surpassed by the future that our intelligence can create." - Bertrand Russell

Depressing? Maybe! Maybe Not!

"... if you accept the ordinary laws of science, you have to suppose that human life and life in general on this planet will die out in due course: it is a stage in the decay of the solar system; at a certain stage of decay you get the sort of conditions of temperature and so forth which are suitable to protoplasm, and there is life for a short time in the life of the whole solar system. You see in the moon the sort of thing to which the earth is tending -- something dead, cold, and lifeless.

I am told that that sort of view is depressing, and people will sometimes tell you that if they believed that, they would not be able to go on living. Do not believe it; it is all nonsense. Nobody really worries about much about what is going to happen millions of years hence. Even if they think they are worrying much about that, they are really deceiving themselves. They are worried about something much more mundane, or it may merely be a bad digestion; but nobody is really seriously rendered unhappy by the thought of something that is going to happen to this world millions and millions of years hence. Therefore, although it is of course a gloomy view to suppose that life will die out -- at least I suppose we may say so, although sometimes when I contemplate the things that people do with their lives I think it is almost a consolation -- it is not such as to render life miserable. It merely makes you turn your attention to other things. " - Bertrand Russell

Things that make you go hmmm...

"It is now widely accepted that the Universe we inhabit emerged from a hot, dense fireball called the Big Bang. In the 1920s and 1930s, astronomers first discovered that our Galaxy was simply one island of stars scattered among many similar galaxies and then that groups of these galaxies were moving apart from one another as the space between them stretched. This idea of an expanding universe had actually been predicted by Einstein's general theory of relativity, completed in 1916, but it had not been taken seriously until the observers made their discoveries. When it was taken seriously, mathematicians discovered that the equations exactly describe the kind of expansion we observe, with the implication that if galaxies are getting farther apart as time passes then they must have been closer together in the past; and long ago all the matter in the Universe must have been piled up in a dense fireball.

It is the combination of theory and observation that makes the idea of the Big Bang so compelling; clinching evidence in support of the idea came in the 1960s with the discovery of a weak hiss of radio noise, the cosmic background radiation, that comes from all direction in space and is interpreted as the leftover radiation from the Big Bang itself. Like the expansion of the Universe, the existence of this background radiation was predicted by theory before it was observed experimentally. By the end of the twentieth century, the combination of theory and observations had established that the time that has elapsed since the Big Bang is about 14 billion years, and that there are hundreds of millions of galaxies like our own scattered across the expanding Universe. The question cosmologists are now confronting is how the Big Bang itself occurred -- or, if you like, how did the Universe begin?"

-- The Origins of the future: ten questions for the next 10 years P. 51-52

On Human behavior ...

“[Humans] are perfectly capable of holding rational ideas and arguing, rationally, any point that suits them. One day, their reason leads them to positions that seem irrefutable; the next, the opposite opinion may seem just as irresistible, or even more so.

What is more remarkable is that they can hold an idea, and even cherish it, while doing something that is completely at odds with it.”

– Financial Reckoning Day P. 159

“People do not always act as they ‘should.’ Other people seem ‘irrational’ to us – especially those with whom we disagree. Nor do we always follow a logical and reasonable course of action. Instead, we are all swayed by tides of emotion … and occasionally swamped by them.”

- Financial Reckoning Day P. 1

“The world never works the way people think it does. That is not to say every idea about how the world works is wrong, but that often particular ideas about how it works will prove to be wrong if they are held in common. For only simple ideas can be held by large groups of people. Commonly held ideas are almost always dumbed down until they are practically lies …and often dangerous ones.”

- Financial Reckoning Day P. 3

“Public knowledge has its own peculiar character, for it must be dumbed down to a level that can be absorber by a mob.

A learned and thoughtful man may speak before a crowd and get no positive reaction whatsoever. A real demagogue, on the other hand, will distill his thoughts into a few simple-minded expressions and soon have enough admirers to run for public office. Readers who have wondered why it is that politicians all seem to be such simpletons now have their answer: It is a requirement for the job. For, en masse, mankind can neither understand complex or ambiguous thoughts nor remember them.”

- Financial Reckoning Day P. 168

“Democracy has a lie at its very core --- that you can cheat, murder, and steal as long as you get 51 percent of registered voters to go along with you. People are perfectly happy to vote their way into other people’s bank accounts --- and feel morally superior doing so. For they always do so in the name of some high-minded chutzpah, whether it is concern for the environment or the poor --- or making the world free!”

- Financial Reckoning Day P. 175

Lest I forget I'm an Immigrant

"The violent upheavals of the twentieth century have made millions of people homeless in one traumatic uprooting after another. Exile, is of course, not simply a change of address. It is also spiritual dislocation. Anthropologists and psychologists tell us that displaced people feel lost in a universe that has suddenly become alien. Once the fixed point of home is gone, there is fundamental lack of orientation that makes everything seem relative and aimless. Cut off from the roots of their culture and identity, migrants and refugees can feel that they are somehow withering away and becoming insubstantial. Their world – inextricably linked with their unique place in the cosmos – has literally come to an end.” - The Spiral Staircase, P.23-24.

Why I'm glad I'm not a Mantise

"... More well known is the macabre cannibalism of female praying mantises. Mantises are large carnivorous insects. They normally eat smaller insects such as flies, but they will attack almost anything that moves. When they mate, the male cautiously creeps up on the female, mounts her, and copulates. If the female gets the chance, she will eat him, beginning by biting his head off, either as the male is approaching, or immediately after he mounts, or after they separate. It might seem most sensible for her to wait until copulation is over before she starts to eat him. But the loss of the head does not seem to throw the rest of the male's body off its sexual stride. Indeed, since the insect head is the seat of some inhibitory nerve centers, it is possible that the female improves the male's sexual performance by eating his head. If so, this is an added benefit. The primary one is that she obtained a good meal." The Selfish Gene, P. 5

The Question

To Caucus or Not to Caucus,
That is the Question!

I think I shall, with the following in mind:

"'The voters decide on their own misgovernment' is the accepted formula. Majority rule is the essential math. There is some truth to it. But there is a bigger measure of falsehood. No president in modern times ever got a majority of Americans to come out and vote for him, and the president in office, as of this writing, didn't even get a majority of the votes cast. And even if the system of defining a majority were legitimate, there is still the question -- so what? Whether they vote on it or not, by the time three wolves and one sheep sit down to decide what to have for dinner, the menu has already been drawn up." Mobs, Messiahs and Markets, P. 193

“Public knowledge has its own peculiar character, for it must be dumbed down to a level that can be absorbed by a mob. A learned and thoughtful man may speak before a crowd and get no positive reaction whatsoever. A real demagogue, on the other hand, will distill his thoughts into a few simple-minded expressions and soon have enough admirers to run for public office. Readers who have wondered why it is that politicians all seem to be such simpletons now have their answer: It is a requirement for the job. For, en masse, mankind can neither understand complex or ambiguous thoughts nor remember them.” Financial Reckoning Day P. 168