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.