Another from MR

From Marginal Revolution comes this adage

It is through exchange that difference becomes a blessing, not a curse.

Words of wisdom from surprising sources

From Understanding Wood Finishing comes this little nugget of wisdom:

The real reason for secrecy is the necessity of concealing the fact that there is nothing to conceal.

I wonder if historians will look back onto our age and note that the war on terror was won, as much as it could be won by mid 2002 and we just kept on going. That would explain the decision to go into Iraq, that is to say the short term problem was solved for a while, so why not work on the long term problem?

Update - I mis-phrased this. It should read more like "we solved the problem, and then tried working on the condition with no avail."

More Hoffer

I figure I'll make up for my light blogging by posting some of my favorite Hoffer quotes, still the most insightful thinker of the 20th century, along with Mencken. I was trying to remember the first quote below (from his classic, The True Believer) when I was thinking about the current immigration kerfluffle, I figured I would repost them all for posterity.

It is easier to hate an enemy with much good in him than one who is all bad. We cannot hate those we despise. The Japanese had an advantage over us in that they admired us more than we admired them. They could hate us more fervently than we could hate them. The Americans are poor haters in international affairs because of their innate feeling of superiority over all foreigners. An American's hatred for a fellow American (for Hoover or Roosevelt) is far more virulent than any antipathy he can work up against foreigners. It is of interest that the backward South shows more xenophobia than the rest of the country. Should Americans begin to hate foreigners wholeheartedly, it will be an indication that they have lost confidence in their own way of life.

The remarkable thing is that we really love our neighbor as ourselves: we do unto others as we do unto ourselves. We hate others when we hate ourselves. We are tolerant toward others when we tolerate ourselves. We forgive others when we forgive ourselves. We are prone to sacrifice others when we are ready to sacrifice ourselves.
It is not love of self but hatred of self which is at the root of the troubles that afflict our world.

The history of this country was made largely by people who wanted to be left alone. Those who could not thrive when left to themselves never felt at ease in America.

We are ready to die for an opinion but not for a fact: indeed, it is by our readiness to die that we try to prove the factualness of our opinion.

It was the craving to be a one and only people which impelled the ancient Hebrews to invent a one and only God whose one and only people they were to be.

When hopes and dreams are loose in the streets, it is well for the timid to lock doors, shutter windows and lie low until the wrath has passed. For there is often a monstrous incongruity between the hopes, however noble and tender, and the action which follows them. It is as if ivied maidens and garlanded youths were to herald the four horsemen of the apocalypse.

Faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute for the lost faith in ourselves.

When our individual interests and prospects do not seem worth living for, we are in desperate need for something apart from us to live for. All forms of dedication, devotion, loyalty and self-surrender are in essence a desperate clinging to something which might give worth and meaning to our futile, spoiled lives.

Unless a man has talents to make something of himself, freedom is an irksome burden. Of what avail is freedom to choose if the self be ineffectual? We join a mass movement to escape individual responsibility, or, in the words of the ardent young Nazi, "to be free from freedom." It was not sheer hypocrisy when the rank-and-file Nazis declared themselves not guilty of all the enormities they had committed. They considered themselves cheated and maligned when made to shoulder responsibility for obeying orders. Had they not joined the Nazi movement in order to be free from responsibility?

We can be absolutely certain only about things we do not understand. A doctrine that is understood is shorn of its strength.

Self-righteousness is a loud din raised to drown the voice of guilt within us.

When people are free to do as we please, they usually imitate each other.

Whenever we proclaim the uniqueness of a religion, a truth, a leader, a nation, a race, a part or a holy cause, we are also proclaiming our own uniqueness.

The sick in soul insist that it is humanity that is sick, and they are the surgeons to operate on it. They want to turn the world into a sickroom. And once they get humanity strapped to the operating table, they operate on it with an ax.

Our credulity is greatest concerning the things we know least about. And since we know least about ourselves, we are ready to believe all that is said about us. Hence the mysterious power of both flattery and calumny.... It is thus with most of us: we are what other people say we are. We know ourselves chiefly by hearsay.

The ratio between supervisory and producing personnel is always highest where the intellectuals are in power. In a Communist country it takes half the population to supervise the other half.

Free men are aware of the imperfection inherent in human affairs, and they are willing to fight and die for that which is not perfect. They know that basic human problems can have no final solutions, that our freedom, justice, equality, etc. are far from absolute, and that the good life is compounded of half measures, compromises, lesser evils, and gropings toward the perfect. The rejection of approximations and the insistence on absolutes are the manifestation of a nihilism that loathes freedom, tolerance, and equity.

The Savior who wants to turn men into angels is as much a hater of human nature as the totalitarian despot who wants to turn them into puppets.

Commitment becomes hysterical when those who have nothing to give advocate generosity, and those who have nothing to give up preach renunciation.

I hang onto my prejudices, they are the testicles of my mind.


The chief difference between me and others is that I have plenty of time — not only because I am without a multitude of responsibilities and without daily tasks, which demand attention: But also because I am basically without ambition. Neither the present nor the future has claims on me.

How terribly hard and almost impossible it is to tell the truth. More than anything else, the artist in us prevents us from telling aught as it really happened. We deal with the truth as the cook deals with meat and vegetables.

Religion and nationalism, as well as any custom and any belief however absurd and degrading, if it only connects the individual with others, are refuges from what man most dreads: isolation.

Take man's most fantastic invention — God. Man invents God in the image of his longings, in the image of what he wants to be, then proceeds to imitate that image, vie with it, and strive to overcome it.

The ability to get along without an exceptional leader is the mark of social vigor.

Quote of the afternoon

"Faith in a holy cause is to a considerable extent a substitute for the lost faith in ourselves."

Eric Hoffer

Quote of the moment

"Values aren't taught, they're caused."

Rick Arndt

Quote of the morning

Via Megan

At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide. ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald,

Quote of the morning

Via Megan

At eighteen our convictions are hills from which we look; at forty-five they are caves in which we hide. ~ F. Scott Fitzgerald,

Quotes of the evening

From Napoleon

In war, moral is to the physical as three is to one.

And this old chestnut from the Duke of Wellington

For a great nation there are no small wars.

Quotes of the morning

I don't remember where I got these...

"Aesthetic standards are ultimately the only standards that exist in engineering."

and

"A committee is a cul-de-sac down which ideas are lured and then quietly strangled."

Random thought

The more advanced the combatants in a war, the less likely it is they'll be fighting the same war.

Quote of the morning

From David Frum on BloggingHeads.tv

First God blesses you with luck, then he curses you by letting you think you're smart

A short adage

Julian Sanchez comes up with a new term, the Outsight, defined as the opposite of insight, further defined as an

elementary point that everyone else had taken for granted as a premise of the conversation, and indeed, one too obvious to be worth stating.

The quotable Dwight Eisenhower

While perusing WikiQuote while waiting for some files to upload I came across these nuggets of wisdom

if a political party does not have its foundation in the determination to advance a cause that is right and that is moral, then it is not a political party; it is merely a conspiracy to seize power.

An intellectual is a man who takes more words than necessary to tell more than he knows.

If you want total security, go to prison. There you're fed, clothed, given medical care and so on. The only thing lacking... is freedom.

In his case, there seems to be no final answer to the question, "How stupid can you get?"

The runner up

The United States never lost a soldier or a foot of ground in my administration. We kept the peace. People asked how it happened — by God, it didn’t just happen, I’ll tell you that.

Any my favorite

Oh, goddammit, we forgot the silent prayer.

A wonderful adage

Via PurpleSlog comes "until robots get better" which is a fine life motto. Much more appropriate these days than Woodie Guthrie's "Until we outnumber 'em"

I coin a new phrase

I hereby dub Climate Change Activists "The coalition of the chilling".

And here's an article on public attitudes on Climate Change

The Ipsos Mori poll of 2,032 adults - interviewed between 14 and 20 June - found 56% believed scientists were still questioning climate change.

There was a feeling the problem was exaggerated to make money, it found.

Quote of the moment

From this BloggingHeads episode:

The world is a tragedy to those who feel and a comedy to those who think.

Random Thursday links

• How to fix the Microsoft Home Page
• Robert Conquest's 3 Laws of Politics

  1. Everyone is conservative about what he knows best.
  2. Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.
  3. The simplest way to explain the behavior of any bureaucratic organization is to assume that it is controlled by a cabal of its enemies.

• More Stirling Engines how to guides - this one looks a bit better than the last one I posted. Here is another one.
• The top 100 web apps for freelancers - mine is not on it, yet.
  

Wars in the Middle East are officially a vested interest

I read this article on CNN.com

White House taps general for 'war czar' post
President Bush has chosen Lt. Gen. Douglas Lute, the Pentagon's director of operations, to oversee the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan as a "war czar" after a long search for new leadership, administration officials said Tuesday.

In the newly created position, Lute would serve as an assistant to the president and deputy national security adviser, and would also maintain his military status and rank as a three-star general, according to a Pentagon official.

and was reminded of this Albert Jay Nock quote:

Experience has made it clear beyond doubt or peradventure that prohibition in the United States is not a moral issue; it is not essentially, even, a political issue; it is a vested interest.

and this H.L. Mencken quote:

The New Deal began, like the Salvation Army, by promising to save humanity. It ended, again like the Salvation Army, by running flop-houses and disturbing the peace.

We have this horrible tendency in our culture to see the means (a big new bureaucracy) as an end in itself, nay, an achievement. What endeavor has failed because there are too few managers? The right managers, sure, lots of failures due to a lack of them. But too few?

Plus an additional bureaucracy just creates it's own principal-agent and knowledge problems.

Functionally Lute will probably serve as a dedicated adviser, but why the title Czar? All of the Russian Czars were an odd combination of stagnant, incompetent and murderous. Why is that some role model.

Sigh.

More wisdom from my old econ professors

The same professor mentioned in the previous post said that it is the natural order of things for

"Those who study the very big see the study of the very small as true, but not relevant. Those who study the very small see the study of the very big as relevant, but not true".

Infuriating comments

From this CNN.com article

Democratic Sen. Barbara Boxer of California, for example, is a sponsor of a bill that would call for troops to come home in 180 days and allow for a minimum number of forces to be left behind to hunt down terrorists and train Iraqi security forces.

"Read the Constitution," Boxer told her colleagues last week. "The Congress has the power to declare war. And on multiple occasions, we used our power to end conflicts."

This idea is coming to her now? It's nauseating how we elect these people. There are countless acts of courage and kindness that happen when the cameras aren't running, but as soon as they start everyone puts their head down and genuflects to the conventional wisdom. Congress gives war making authority to the president, who of course was only enforcing UN resolutions. All to avoid criticism or losing a job, which very few of them need.

That's an odd thing about American; risk taking is private. That's good I suppose.

A useful axiom

In my first advanced macroeconomics class my professor defined truth as "The consensus of informed opinion". I remembered that for some reason today.

Quotes of the moment

Marine Corps Gun Rules

• Anything worth shooting is worth shooting twice. Ammo is cheap. Life is expensive.
• Someday someone may kill you with your own gun, but they should have to beat you to death with it because it is empty.
• Be polite. Be professional. But, have a plan to kill everyone you meet.

From the quiet insightful Green Lantern theory comments

"Conan, what is best in life?"

"To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentation of the women!"

Quote of the moment

From the comments of this post at Coming Anarchy

"generalizations are a willful display of ignorance"

Funny notions

Funny convergences: I came across this

Blair's Law - the ongoing process by which the world's multiple idiocies are becoming one giant, useless force.

which was part of post that included Ku Klux Klan wins approval to protest Iraq war seemingly, though not explicitly, arguing that the war is bad for white people.

Quotes of the moment

Samuel Goldwyn

"You've got to take the bitter with the sour."

37 Signals

The secret to building half a product instead of a half-ass
product is saying no.

Each time you say yes to a feature, you’re adopting a child. You
have to take your baby through a whole chain of events (e.g.
design, implementation, testing, etc.). And once that feature’s
out there, you’re stuck with it.

Quote of the moment

This actually dovetails nicely with Bevelry's adage "Look as busy as possible" theory of retail. From the 37 signals book "Getting Real"

If you want something done, ask the busiest person you know

Quotes of the moment

From the comments of a vitriolic post about an Israeli flag being waved at some soccer game

This is why the entire Arab world can barely make a good washing machine and we send people into space for fun.

And via Jane Galt (original post about second languages)

I'm a poor programmer whose solution to execution failures is type louder and more slowly.

Friday round up

• Batwings! No, really, those look very cool.
• The physics and biology of Superman's possible reproduction
• Possible cheap hyrodgen to fuel cars.
• Why women have fat thighs.
• Amazing RC Plane Demo
• Get rid of the Thumbs.db file that Windows creates in every folder.
• Julian Sanchez and the conflicts that a pro-drug legalization citizen (like myself) faces when called for Jury Duty. I had a similar internal conversation with myself last year when I was called.
  

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Quotes That Caught My Eye
Eric Hoffer

• The poor on the borderline of starvation live purposeful lives. To be engaged in a desperate struggle for food and shelter is to be wholly free from a sense of futility.
• We lie the loudest when we lie to ourselves.
• It is thus with most of us; we are what other people say we are. We know ourselves chiefly by hearsay.
  

Ambrose Bierce

• Acquaintance, n.: A person whom we know well enough to borrow from, but not well enough to lend to.
• There is nothing new under the sun but there are lots of old things we don't know.
• To be positive: To be mistaken at the top of one's voice.
  

H.L. Mencken

• An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup.
• Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard.
• Faith may be defined briefly as an illogical belief in the occurrence of the improbable.
• Every decent man is ashamed of the government he lives under.
• I believe that all government is evil, and that trying to improve it is largely a waste of time.
• It is even harder for the average ape to believe that he has descended from man.
• Say what you will about the Ten Commandments, you must always come back to the pleasant fact that there are only ten of them.
• The capacity of human beings to bore one another seems to be vastly greater than that of any other animal.

Quotes of the moment

The Duke of Wellington

For a great power there are no small wars

Orson Welles

In Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed - they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo Da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love and five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock.

On England between the wars

The fault was not decadence but the desire for holiness, the belief in sacrifice, and a willingness to serve as the butchered victim acceptable to God.

From the guide to Christianity for the secular

Christians are not easy to understand. To begin with, there are roughly 2,000 years of history to grasp, and certainly more denominations and subdivisions than that to take on board. For people who were raised secular, I imagine it's like trying to understand an opera after coming in halfway before the end: the stage is crowded with people, two of them seem to be dead, a woman is wearing a hat with horns, and everyone is making a terrible racket.

An odd quote

G.K. Chesterton:

There is more true simplicity in the man who eats caviar on impulse than in the man who eats grape nuts on principle

Line of the moment

From Thomas Sowell

"Intellectuals' ability to think of people in the abstract is a dangerous talent in a world where people differ in all the ways that make them people."

Quote of the moment

"There is nothing worse than a sharp image of a fuzzy concept." - Ansel Adams

Quote of the Moment

Whiskey and Beer are a man's worst enemies... but the man that runs away from his enemies is a coward!" --Zeca Pagodinho

Quote of the moment

From Inside the Net podcast - "A business plan will emerge."

Joke of the moment

From a Reason article on the future of Russia.

Answering a question about the future of democracy in Russia, Shevtsova said: “To add some optimism to my conclusions, I’ve got my favorite joke that, it seems to me, reflects the ambiguity of our democratic movement.

A sick man is picked up by an ambulance. He asks the doctor, ‘Doctor, where are you taking me?’ The doctor replies, ‘To the morgue.’ The man says, ‘But I’m not dead yet!’ The doctor says, ‘But we’re not there yet.’”

If this is Russian-style optimism, I’d hate to see what the pessimism looks like.

2 things that annoy me

1. When pundits, wags, and periodically me use the term "unintended consequences" as a rhetorical trump card. It's a well established concept by now, and it is usually used to refer to a foreseen, but unpleasant risk, not anything unexpected.
2. When people say "It's more complicated than that" when they really mean that the set of options or outcomes is different than what the original speaker thinks. The situation is not necessarily more complicated, and it could even be simpler than originally thought, just different.
   

Thought of the moment

Problems are avoided, not solved.

Today's clear concise phrase

Today's line comes from Jim Wooten of the AJC.

"The fleas come with the dog". Stated in reference to federally funded universities banning military recruiters.

A thought

Whilst contemplating my working night (after a working day) I think of the adage that "Hard work never killed anybody". Then I think, yes, it has. Millions in fact.

Observation

I think the worst part of being homeless would be not being able to enjoy camping.

Lines of the moment

Once the game is over, the King and the pawn go back in the same box.
- Italian Proverb

I'm not saying I beat the devil but I drank his beer for nothing
-Johnny Cash

Qutoe of the moment

Originality is the fine art of remembering what you hear but forgetting where you heard it.
- Laurence J. Peter

Well put

From Reason's interview with NYT columnist John Tierney

I find it ironic that after half a century of the golden age of urban planning, people all want to live in neighborhoods that were built before then—that the planners are now trying to recreate. They were built by private developers and private streetcar companies, and the market guided it. I've heard it argued that urban planning is one area where the market really doesn't work that well, that you find in great cities that there was a lot of central planning of the street grids. I'd like to know more. You obviously need someone to set some rules, but I still tend to think that the really successful cities and neighborhoods are the ones where there's a lot of trial and error, people trying things on their own.

Which brings to mind the programming definition of creationism

The (false) belief that large, innovative software designs can be completely specified in advance and then painlessly magicked out of the void by the normal efforts of a team of normally talented programmers. In fact, experience has shown repeatedly that good designs arise only from evolutionary, exploratory interaction between one (or at most a small handful of) exceptionally able designer(s) and an active user population -- and that the first try at a big new idea is always wrong.

It's annoying that the current design v evolution debate consists of spastic posturing, it's really an interesting topic.

Quotes of the moment

"Credit you give yourself is not worth having"
Irving Thalberg

"We don't' want our slickness and professionalism to overwhelm you."
Norman Blake.