Imagine a fairy tale where I offer you a choice between two jobs. You can have a tax free job or a job with a 90% tax on its income. You might jump at the tax free job, but a smart person would ask what are the salaries of the…
I hope Bernie Sanders gets the Democratic nomination, but if he does not I will be voting for the Green Party (likely Jill Stein). The reason I will not vote for a mainstream candidate arises, ironically, from Bill Clinton’s first term. Unfortunately I was a naïve party line voter at…
You’d never guess that a Donald Trump vs. Bernie Sanders match up would be good for the country if you listen to the media. The media elites for each side say their respective candidates would be unelectable. The Republican leaning press claims Trump is too racist, xenophobic, and just plain…
Or as Anthelme Brillat-Savarin wrote, in Physiologie du Gout, ou Meditations de Gastronomie Transcendante, 1826: Dis-moi ce que tu manges, je te dirai ce que tu es Food is quite possibly the first area where practicality began to develop into philosophy. As we got past the most basic, I must…
Oscar Wilde in The Critic as Artist said, “man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth.” With all due respect to Oscar Wilde it should have been “give him anonymity, and he will tell you the…
As most people know Antonin Scalia passed away this weekend. Say what you will, I agreed with some of his positions on the 4th amendment, not much else. Mark Twain could have been talking about Justice Scalia when he said in, A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court: You see,…
It wasn’t Ted Cruz who said, “Who needs Manhattan when we can get the electoral votes of eleven Southern states?”; Kevin Phillips a Richard Nixon’s campaign strategist said it. Ted Cruz is just the latest politician to complain about New York values not being his. They are right, New York…
“How many yachts can you water-ski behind? How much is enough, huh?” Bud Fox (Charlie Sheen), Wall Street (1987) The Powerball lottery prize is up over $1,400,000,000 this week. If you win and take the lump sum, which in my opinion you should, you would have about $651 million left…
Winter snow falls, or not Days grow short; cold wind blusters New Year renews life
The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. Attributed to Edmund Burke, (by Charles Aked 1920) Trump scares me. As his campaign that I thought of as a joke (just like all the late night hosts from Colbert to Wilmore), goes on gaining…
A complete poem is one where an emotion finds the thought and the thought finds the words. -Robert Frost, Letter to Louis Untermeyer (1 January 1916). It’s been a rough month; kids coming home for holidays, kids leaving for good, getting ready to move to New York, and getting the…
Basic human problems can have no final solutions. Eric Hoffer, The Temper of Our Time (1967) I love problems. Give me a disaster in my house I can sit down and solve that. Calling the right people, or getting the materials to fix it, fixing it or helping other fix…
If you don’t know where you’re going, you might not get there. Yogi Berra – When You Come to a Fork in the Road, Take It!: Inspiration and Wisdom from One of Baseball’s Greatest Heroes So far on this blog I have only written about politics and spirituality. Now is…
[I]n this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes. Benjamin Franklin Letter to Jean-Baptiste Leroy (13 November 1789); reported in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919) Yesterday when I wrote about income inequality it may have seemed like I implied the solution to the problem…
The life of money-making is one undertaken under compulsion, and wealth is evidently not the good we are seeking; for it is merely useful and for the sake of something else. Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, Book I, 1096.a5 As election day approaches it’s been easy to see some of the ugly…
Poor is the man who can boast of nothing more that gold. -William Scott Downey, Proverbs Ch 1, #11 (1858) In the article, The Shared Delusion of Money, I discussed some of the delusions surrounding the “value” of money. The other day I overheard someone talking about how they wanted…
Dreams are often most profound when they seem the most crazy. -Sigmund Freud, The Complete Works Change is in the air, and not just because it’s autumn. Governments and cultures all over the world are being called upon to change. This desire for change is occurring because social structures are…
I’m urging everyone to go to the Electronic Frontier Foundation and use their form to comment to the FCC on net neutrality. The open comment period as been extended once again until Sept. 15th. The Internet is one of the greatest tools for freedom, and like other such tools (printing…
Do you remember when you were nine or ten? School’s out and it’s a lazy hazy summer day. Sitting under a tree, nothing to do, looking up at the deep blue blue sky. A cool breeze blowing the puffy white clouds across the sky as you gaze at that huge,…
Klaatu barada nikto -The Day the Earth Stood Still, Dir. Robert Wise (1951) Science fiction is rife with stories of robots threatening humanity such as: Terminator, The Matrix, Robocop, etc. In fact as we see drones striking America’s enemies across the world, the DARPA robotics challenge, and Google purchasing a…