Noteworthy

On How To Live

2009-08-20T22:51:00.000-07:00

"Walk tall, kick ass, love music, and never forget you come from a long line of truth seekers, lovers, and warriors."

- Hunter S. Thompson

Living

2009-07-30T23:51:00.000-07:00

Al-anon tells me to live One Day at a Time. This is that day.

- Anonymous

What's Old Is New Again

2009-07-26T22:53:00.000-07:00

Ronald McDonald is the new Joe Camel.

- Adam Wygle

Jerry Yang (July 2008)

2009-06-27T14:22:00.000-07:00

“I’ll admit that I haven’t been following this particular story that closely. Since getting laid off from AOL, my interest in this genre of news only stretches as far as what new horror has befallen my former employer. But I do read through the tales of the Yahoo debacle, and it struck me this morning that Jerry Yang is kind of like the Amy Winehouse of the corporate world. Entertaining for a while, but now just a bit… sad.”

- unknown

How we DON"T get there.

2009-05-31T09:53:00.000-07:00

There are few political positions that can be reached only by argument and empirical evidence.

- Michael White

On Shiny Things

2009-05-30T16:42:00.000-07:00

A favorite pastime of us phone nerds is to gather around a phone in a box ... and take it out.

- Phil Nickinson

On Surviving After the Apocalypse

2009-05-24T12:27:00.000-07:00

The only advise that they will need is ‘Zombies can only be killed by destroying the brain stem. A gun shot wound to the head or decapitation will suffice.’

- "ilandrah"

Investment Advice

2009-05-12T23:51:00.000-07:00

What the world really needs is a product that will prevent people from using their own dumbass ideas to invest.

- Scott Adams

On the Religion of Atheism

2009-05-09T12:14:00.000-07:00

I’m not going to loop myself in with atheists, because they seem so militant. It’s like, even though they don’t believe in God, they have to be so ridiculously enthusiastic about it that it’s practically a religion to them.

- Brad from Staires

Main St or Wall St?

2009-05-09T11:21:00.000-07:00

We may have wasted valuable time trying to save Wall Street at the cost of Main Street. …Has the time come to shift the policy focus away from the things that we love, namely big zombie banks, to tackle those things that are truly hurting us?

- Christopher Whalen

Football as Preparation for Polititcs

2009-05-02T21:16:00.000-07:00

"Pro football gave me a good perspective. When I entered the political arena, I had already been booed, cheered, cut, sold, traded, and hung in effigy."

- Jack Kemp (R.I.P.)

Protection

2009-04-22T13:25:00.001-07:00

“The rain forests certainly deserve our protection, but man as creature indeed deserves no less.”

--Pope Benedict XVI

But now I get it!

2009-04-18T01:26:00.000-07:00

"We're all wearing the blue dress now."

--Plaztiq

Me either...

2009-04-17T12:13:00.000-07:00

"I think BK is the only viable solution to any of these zombie companies. However, what I find ironic and highly problematic, is that a company like GM, which actually MANUFACTURES something, is left to go the BK route, while all the zombie banks, which just push around paper and don't actually produce anything except shit sandwiches and profits for their executives, are kept alive at any cost. I just don't get it."

--"Mondocondo"

Well, that's a pleasant thought

2009-04-14T14:39:00.000-07:00

"Economic volatility, plus ethnic disintegration, plus an empire in decline: That combination is about the most lethal in geopolitics. We now have all three. The age of upheaval starts now."

--Niall Ferguson

Analysts

2009-04-09T20:04:00.000-07:00

"...they can tell the Reuters poll of ten analysts to pack sand in their left ear and walk lopsided..."

- Doug Smith

Let's cut to the chase

2009-04-07T23:35:00.000-07:00

"I'm taking this class where they're trying to help us figure out how to determine what's right from wrong. But the kids at my school all know right from wrong. That's not the problem. The problem is that some kids just don't give a shit."

--Annonymous, 16 years old

Curiousity and the sense of a fuller truth.

2009-04-06T12:48:00.000-07:00

"Religion partakes of elements of both art and science. It could not have begun without our uniquely human understanding of false belief, which develops in individuals during their fourth year—our awareness that another person can have a different understanding of a situation from what we know to be the case, and our concomitant awareness that in other circumstances we may not have all we need to understand this or that situation. Our capacity to understand false belief has amplified our curiosity and spurred us to the quest for the deeper knowledge that has led to both religion and science."

--Brian Boyd

Do we REALLY need to study this so closely?

2009-04-06T04:29:00.000-07:00

Simply analyzing the tactical engagements that occurred over the 34 days of direct contact between Israel and Hezbollah doesn't serve either side of the COIN/Conventional debate well. Israel's long term policies and actions built Hezbollah. The particular situation within Lebanon created the conditions under which an organization like Hezbollah could grow and thrive. If the U.S. thinks it makes sense to invade another country without our own security being gravely at risk, then we haven't learned our own set of lessons from Iraq.

Let's figure that one out before we spend too much time picking apart 34 days of fighting between two entities that have been battling each other for years.

Why science works and consensus is a loss, not a gain.

2009-03-30T11:19:00.000-07:00

"Dyson may be an Obama-loving, Bush-loathing liberal who has spent his life opposing American wars and fighting for the protection of natural resources, but he brooks no ideology and has a withering aversion to scientific consensus.... Dyson has said he believes that the truths of science are so profoundly concealed that the only thing we can really be sure of is that much of what we expect to happen won’t come to pass. In “Infinite in All Directions,” he writes that nature’s laws “make the universe as interesting as possible.”

--Nicholas Dawidoff

Human ingenuity.

2009-03-23T17:32:00.000-07:00

The blogger from Rands in Repose gives us some insight into building the Brooklyn Bridge:

"With the caisson on the riverbed, it’s time to push it another 45 feet into the riverbed in search of bedrock. Workers did this through the continued application of stone to the top while workers in the caisson dug out the riverbed with shovels, buckets, and, when necessary, dynamite. There was nothing resembling an electrical grid, so there was nothing resembling modern lighting in this watertight pine-tarred box, which was slowly descending through the floor of the East River. There were no jack hammers, so when they hit rock, they used small amounts of dynamite to crack these rocks. In a pine-tarred box, at the bottom of a river, mostly in a very wet dark.

And when the caisson finally hit bedrock 45 underground, they had to do it all over again for the New York tower. 30 feet deeper."

Friedman on the political crisis accompanying the financial crisis

2009-03-22T17:09:00.000-07:00

"Right now we have an absence of inspirational leadership. From business we hear about institutions too big to fail — no matter how reckless. From bankers we hear about contracts too sacred to break — no matter how inappropriate. And from our immature elected officials we hear about how it was all 'the other guy’s fault.'"

The Orator stumbles

2009-03-21T10:47:00.000-07:00

"The story of the day often catches the president flat-footed or on the defensive — and regularly undercut by fellow Democrats. To Obama’s dismay, he is learning that successful presidential communications is only in part — often a fairly small part — about personal eloquence."

Yep.

2009-03-17T16:23:00.001-07:00

At a time when the world seems
to be spinning hopelessly out of control,
There's deceivers and believers and old in-betweeners,
That seem to have no place to go.

--Willie Nelson

Why they lost connection to life as the rest of us live it?

2009-03-17T11:35:00.000-07:00

"Perhaps the most important difference is that, not so long ago, the overwhelming majority of the elites in each generation were drawn from the children of farmers, shopkeepers, and factory workers—and could still remember those worlds after they left them. Over the last half century, it can be demonstrated empirically that the new generation of elites have increasingly spent their entire lives in the upper-middle-class bubble, never even having seen a factory floor, let alone worked on one, never having gone to a grocery store and bought the cheap ketchup instead of the expensive ketchup to meet a budget, never having had a boring job where their feet hurt at the end of the day, and never having had a close friend who hadn’t gotten at least 600 on her SAT verbal. There’s nobody to blame for any of this. These are the natural consequences of successful people looking for pleasant places to live and trying to do the best thing for their children."

--Charles Murray