“Luxury has never appealed to me. I like simple things ― books, being alone, or with somebody who understands.”
― Daphne du Maurier
All of the things little boys think are cool they still think are cool when they're adults -- sports cars, motorcycles, bulldozers, ships, airplanes, spaceships, wolves, dinosaurs. All the things little girls think are cool they still think are cool when they are adults -- dolls, babies, pretty dresses, putting on make-up, cute clothes, dancing, horses. But society tells them they should not, that the boys should like putting on pretty dresses and the girls should like dinosaurs.
I can't say I like dinosaurs, but I've always found them interesting. I like Jack Horner's books about them. Discovering what the world was like, life was like, 100 million years ago is endlessly fascinating and gives one perspective on the here and now, which will, in the blink of the planet's eye, be buried under a mile of rock.
I still like putting on pretty dresses, though.
“The only palliative is to keep the clean sea breeze of the centuries blowing through our minds, and this can be done only by reading old books.”
— C.S. Lewis
My friend Jim, the ag pilot told me about a time he almost bought the farm:
"But this is how pilots get tangled up in wires. See, while cross-country power lines are fairly thick and visible, they have a smaller but deadly ground wire above them. This wire is not “'hot,' but it’s often the one that gets us because we’re trying to clear the larger and more visible hot wires and don't see it. In fact, I suspect that many pilots don't even know the ground wire is there ― until it kills them.
"This type of accident can happen when you focus on terrain beyond the wires as you try to fly a straight spray swath over the forest. This is especially dangerous when there is forest behind the wires instead of their being silhouetted against the sky.
"Then, as in my case, a pilot might be distracted by other things going on around him. Too often you simply fly into the wires without warning."
“If you happen to read fairy tales, you will observe that one idea runs from one end of them to the other ― the idea that peace and happiness can only exist on some condition. This idea, which is the core of ethics, is the core of the nursery-tales.”
― G.K. Chesterton
When I read "The Bell Curve" about a decade after it was published, a key insight I took away from it was not the race stuff, which was only one chapter (the 48-page Chapter 13, "Ethnic Differences in Cognitive Ability," part of Part III, "The National Context" which totals 120 pages out of 833), but the observation that in the modern world IQ had become monetized. In the past, IQ was just one aspect of an individual's personality, and throughout the land there was a mix of the dumb, the average and the bright. The blacksmith, not the mayor or preacher, might be the brightest man in the village and be sought out for advice and counsel.
But once IQ became monetized, business, industry and academia swept through the country scooping up all the brights leaving the small towns and cities, ranches and farms bereft of their smartest and left to stagnate. Murray wrote that it was like taking the yeast out of the bread recipe and worried what it was doing to the country.
This struck me as a very astute observation. But since then something has happened that Murray didn't anticipate -- that now bright whites are shunned. Business, industry and academia do not want them, most especially those from "flyover country." There is lots and lots of overt evidence of this.
So men like Jay Forrester, Mancur Olson, William Allen White and my grandfather's friend since they met in the Navy during World War II, Alvin Kernan, now have no chance of developing their mental gifts and contributing to the larger society.
But maybe this will work out for the best. The yeast is remaining in the bread recipe. So "when the cities lie at the monster’s feet there are left the mountains," in Robinson Jeffers' words, the mountains will have the brights they need to restart civilization.
I hope.
I fly because it releases my mind from the tyranny of petty things.
―Antoine de St.-Exupery
"But we had a pilot in our squadron with eyesight like mine at 20/10 but she could get 'tallies' like nobody's business, like seeing F-16s head-on at 6-7 miles, near impossible. And it wouldn't take her long to see them either. Then she would spend the next few seconds trying to talk our eyes onto them. I'd usually see them well before the merge but not at ridiculous ranges like that.
"There was something else, something in addition to 20/10 that gave her the ability to sense objects against backgrounds, to sense the tiniest sliver of relative motion, to notice and pick out airplanes when nobody else could. At the doc's office, our eyes were equal, but in the real world, I knew they weren't.
"Oh, and she was a great stick too."
― Tom Bush
(Women are able to pick out very subtle color differences so, in this case, the aviatrix could see the color difference between the on-coming airplane and the sky.)
“We write to taste life twice,
in the moment and in retrospect.”
― Anaïs Nin
Grasslands themselves are unstable: a little more rain and they become forests; a little less rain and they become deserts. Species dependent on them perish when conditions favorable to them change.
Human beings are evolved from African grassland apes, the African grasslands being created when the Isthmus of Panama formed, changing rainfall patterns in Africa, resulting in the decline of forests and forcing forest apes to adapt to the new climate regime.
The late atmospheric scientist James Lovelock estimated that CO₂ would eventually decline to such an extent that all life on the planet would become extinct and the Earth would be as lifeless as Mars. He estimated this would happen in about 100 million years.
Of course, that was based on no sudden increase in volcanic activity, something like the Deccan Traps or the Yellowstone Caldera being triggered into erupting by a large asteroid striking the earth.
But since a Seyfert Galaxy could explode at any time, sending a massive gamma ray burst at the Earth, such as is postulated to have caused the Late Ordovician mass extinction, why should we worry?
“There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke ― though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns ― and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own.” ―Herman Melville
I've noticed that a big class difference is that among the upper classes there is less of what you could call social-sexual dimorphism. By that I mean that both the man and woman in the upper-class world will likely be equally highly skilled, highly trained, highly educated and both work or have worked at some variety of highly skilled job ― lawyer, business exec, military officer, scientist, doctor, airline pilot, university professor, engineer...that sort of thing. That's especially true for women. No one is upset by a lady judge or robotics engineer. Conversely, if the wife chooses to be a stay-at-home mom during her children's early years, no opprobrium is attached to her choice because her peers know she is highly educated, has a skilled profession, but chooses to carry out a different role at this time in her life because her husband or her family in general is well enough off that she can do so.
But social-sexual dimorphism seems to intensify the lower down the social ladder you go, so there are jobs that if a woman does them, she is met with male resentment and hostility, sometimes intense hostility which often expresses itself as sexual harassment, including rape. I'm not sure why this is so, and it isn't income related as some so-called lower class occupations pay very well these days. It's the social environment that is the cause. And when I say "lower class," I don't mean the bottom of the barrel, but on up some indefinite ways, but definitely fading out as you go up.
In any case, hostility to a woman's profession is a clear marker of a lower class individual from a lower class background. This can clearly be seen in military records of sexual harassment: most of it occurs in E-3 and below, declining steadily as rank increases, drops off radically from enlisted to officer, where it becomes almost non-existent. In one unit I was assigned to there was not even one report of sexual harassment or any other kind of harassment among the officers, male and female while I was there. They respected each other as professionals and worked together to accomplish the mission. But there were the usual cases of female enlisted having their lives made miserable by their male co-members, and not just because of sexual harassment but by the males just being, well, dicks.
"I was going to buy a copy of The Power of Positive Thinking, but then I thought what good would that do?"
― Ronni Shanks
The first kingdom was quite rich, and sent an army of 25 knights, each with three squires. The night before the battle, the knights jousted and cavorted as their squires polished armor, cooked food, and sharpened weapons.
The second kingdom was not so wealthy, and sent only 10 knights, each with two squires. The night before the battle, the knights cavorted and sharpened their weapons as the squires polished armor and prepared dinner.
The third kingdom was very poor, and only sent one elderly knight with his sole squire. The night before the battle, the knight sharpened his weapon while the squire, using a noosed rope, slung a pot of gruel high over the fire to cook while he prepared the knight’s armor.
The next day the battle began. All the knights of the first two kingdoms had cavorted a bit too much (one should never cavort while sharpening weapons and jousting) and could not fight. The squire of the third kingdom could not rouse the elderly knight in time for combat. So, in the absence of the knights, the squires fought.
The battle raged well into the late hours but when the dust finally settled, a solitary figure limped from the carnage. The lone squire from the third kingdom dragged himself away, beaten, bloodied, but victorious. And that just goes to prove that the squire of the high pot and noose is equal to the sum of the squires of the other two sides
“There is no comparison between that which is lost by not succeeding and that which is lost by not trying.”
― Francis Bacon
"Why break rules that no one follows anyway? Why disrupt a system that is disrupting itself into oblivion?
"Maybe it's just that western civilization is 'drawing dead' to use a poker term, or in 'garbage time' to use a sports term. Maybe the best thing to do in these times is avoid the mindless thrashing of the dying monster and live. Just live."
― Some guy
