Butt ugly

A bad apology is like a fat person: it drags behind it a fat "but" that gets in the way.

The devil's toolkit, tool number 1

If you want to hide the feelings you are not proud of from others , first hide them from yourself.

[It doesn't work but since nothing much does, at least its nice to feel like your being a mensch.]

Connecting Seurat's dots

I was watching people, always an instructive activity. It was a hot, humid afternoon in Manhattan with an on-again-off-again threat of showers. Around Union Square, nothing more reached the ground than an few light sprinkles. It was sensible for people to carry an umbrella and more than a few did. After a sprinkle, you could still see one or two people walking about under their umbrellas, even in a crowd of people going about bare headed. The sprinkles having come and gone rather gradually, these few never notice it had ceased to rain and went about with one hand tied up protecting them from rain that was not there. If "parasol" was even a word in the working vocabularies of these people, I would be a bit surprised. There wasn't much sun anyway. If you let the scene go out of focus, it would remind you of Seurat's "Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte" but if you look closely you might see instead a form of neurosis.

From the personal to the national, if your protective measures make you unaware of your actual state of threat, you are, at the very best, wasting your resources.

differentiating

A liberal overestimates how much others care. A conservative underestimates how much others do.

Consider, as an example, the smelly place Mr. Marr has stuck his head in his first paragraph here.

history lessons pt 2

A progressive moves forward because he or she is a person who has studied history with a sufficiently open mind to dread going back.
A conservative is a person who imagines a past worth repeating and will only study as much as suits that purpose.

History lessons

History forgotten is history foretold.
No blindness darker than knowing what you want to behold,
Nor deafness quieter than news you wanted to be told.

buy the numbers

This being a blog that fancies it is arguing, if tersely, for values [which when you think it through properly, IMHO, comes out to "liberal values"], discussion of media, academic political science and the sociology of electoral politics are a bit Off Topic. So click through to Mean Stream Media and help me answer a few questions about numerical values.

Honesty is also the most practical policy

To be known to have made a mistake is better, in the long or short term, than to be suspected of acting with malice.

The environment is four dimensional

You live in the three dimensions of space, where water and air and land fill up the space and bear a few things for you to live on....for a while. Do not forget this environment also has the dimension of time, past and future.

If the only way you care to meet your needs is to steal from the future, you should do without or think up a better solution.

If doing without means you will parish, so what? You had no future anyway. ( Or do you believe that you were meant to be of the last generations of men?)

Theories of social relativity

If you have no doubts about the rectitude of your ways and your understandings and are at all public with this certainty, then there will be others that have equally little doubt you are a fool and possibly a danger to others.

Thats one reason religion and politics mix with such rancorous consequences.

Hedonism

The odd thing about a hedonist is how little he heeds.

Delectation or distraction , a shoping cart's a two part animal of which he is the ass.