We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
Handling money is almost, or more, complicated than handling love and sex. People want both so much that it often scrambles their brains and incites irrational or self-destructive behavior (see our morning links today).
Money is difficult to obtain, all too easy to get rid of. Romance and sex are easy to obtain, difficult to get rid of. Having some money put aside means security and power over a crazy world, and love and sex mean, well, whatever they mean to you.
I once lived beyond my means, and made all sorts of rationalizations for it (eg turning wants into needs, like shoes, luxurious impulses, and "therapeutic shopping"). I learned from that, and some discipline from a financial spouse helped. I was smart about love, but dumb about money even though, before I married, I worked for every penny.
Some might term this simple guide cynical. Others might not. For the guys' use, there is a crazy/hot matrix, for the gals' use a cute/money matrix. Simplified indeed, but a good starting point anyway.
Yes, it's a comedy sketch, but young males need to know that women are always seeking guys, and young women need to know that guys are always seeking gals. Human nature. There is no need for anyone to be shy or non-judgemental.
Evil exists because human beings exist. No other living thing, and no inanimate object, is capable of being, thinking, feeling evil or of committing evil acts. Only us.
"The world" is not a wicked place. And Humanity is not a wicked thing. Evil is just one of many capabilities we possess. We have to recognize it and (if we're sane) choose not to indulge in it. That's not easy. Most of all, we shouldn't deny evil or act all surprised when it turns up. Like it or not, it's business as usual for us humans.
Fortunately, it's not the WHOLE business. We can do better...
If you have some savings (which most responsible people sacrifice comforts and luxuries to have), what do you do with it? Investing how? Or not investing?
- Short-term savings (might possibly need within a year or three)
- Long-term (might need someday, or might wish to leave to kids if you croak soon enough)
Inquiring people want to know what you do with your money. If I get some comments, I'll show you mine.
I've been a Roger Angell reader for most of my life. Whether interested in baseball or not, I recommend his prose to you. He just turned 93, has retired to Maine, is planning a second marriage, and is being honored in Cooperstown for his contributions to baseball.
Check me out. The top two knuckles of my left hand look as if I’d been worked over by the K.G.B. No, it’s more as if I’d been a catcher for the Hall of Fame pitcher Candy Cummings, the inventor of the curveball, who retired from the game in 1877. To put this another way, if I pointed that hand at you like a pistol and fired at your nose, the bullet would nail you in the left knee. Arthritis.
Also,
Recent and not so recent surveys (including the six-decades-long Grant Study of the lives of some nineteen-forties Harvard graduates) confirm that a majority of us people over seventy-five keep surprising ourselves with happiness. Put me on that list. Our children are adults now and mostly gone off, and let’s hope full of their own lives. We’ve outgrown our ambitions. If our wives or husbands are still with us, we sense a trickle of contentment flowing from the reliable springs of routine, affection in long silences, calm within the light boredom of well-worn friends, retold stories, and mossy opinions. Also the distant whoosh of a surfaced porpoise outside our night windows.
We elders—what kind of a handle is this, anyway, halfway between a tree and an eel?—we elders have learned a thing or two...
If you want to reinvent the wheel and design a whole new way to live an adult life, go bananas. Nobody gives a shit. If, however, you don’t have a smarter plan, here’s what’s been working for many generations...
The American founders knew that government needed a short leash. So much for that plan.
This essay by Williamson is almost too good to post on a summer Friday afternoon: Property and Peace - The irreplaceable basis for a prosperous and decent society is property. One quote:
The founding ideal of this republic is that we are the who and government is the whom, a necessary evil that is to some degree necessarily evil. On the right scale and in its proper place, that necessary evil is bearable. But when it oversteps, we are under no obligation to bear it — in fact, we are morally obliged by our particular American patrimony to resist. That is why the usual progressive taunt, “If you don’t like it, why don’t you move to Somalia?” is foolish and shallow: The American government exists at our sufferance — we do not exist at its sufferance. George W. Bush was mocked for talking about an “ownership society,” but if you want peace, that’s precisely what you should be trying to build. The alternative is to have 50 percent + 1 arbitrating the uncomfortable question of who in effect owns whom.
You want a less polarized politics? Consider that the God of the Old Testament asked only for 10 percent, and had Ten Commandments, not ten thousand.
What’s driving the libertarian convergence of our two parties, as described by Edsall and Wehner? In a nutshell, the morality of capitalism has won. All of American life is being transformed by the imperatives of the 21st century global marketplace. The Koch brothers, we read, are “moderating” the Republican party by purging it of its concern with social issues, which are really just reactionary prejudices. Silicon Valley is “moderating” the progressivism of the Democratic party, purging it of policies that stifle growth and innovation by stripping members of the meritocracy of their honestly earned property and money. Impediments to globalization have fallen away, and the results are astonishing. More people than ever have access to the world past and present through what they can call up on their various screens, the average lifespan continues to get longer, and the realm of personal freedom or autonomy, as our Supreme Court explains, continues to grow. More than ever, America is defined by a meritocracy based on productivity. Race, class, gender, sexual orientation, even the imperatives of biology (such as birth and death), and so forth mean less than ever in constraining the opportunities for free and industrious individuals.
This libertarian convergence of opinion is clear in both parties...
The best book sale in New England begins this Friday in Southport, CT. It's good fun, and I have stumbled on some random life-enhancing goodies there.
See ya there. I'll be the goofy jerk with the Cape Cod t-shirt and the 16-gauge baseball cap, and I'll be carryin', of course, so don't try to take my precious book.
Everybody judges you by what you read: read Maggie's Farm.
Surely some of our readers went to the 1964 World's Fair (Peace through understanding, and It's a small world after all). NYC is an endless wonder, adventure, and delight to me as a country boy.
Took a trip to Queens on Friday evening to see some theatrical performances celebrating the 50th anniversary of the most recent NY World's Fair. The site is now Flushing Meadows Corona Park. A bit bedraggled but very pleasant large park filled with Queens people, mostly with kids. We spoke with a proud resident of Queens who had attended both the 1939 and the 1964 world's fairs sited there. At the edge of the park, the Mets' new CitiField, and the National Tennis Center.
A cool place. The futuristic remnants of 1964 are strange, rusting, and apocalyptic in a way. None of the fountains work. The Space Center is all gone now.
The Unisphere fountains are now a place for kids to practice bike-riding and roller-blading. The lights and structures behind the treeline are the US (Billy Jean King) Tennis Center:
... intellectuals are a paradoxical product of the market economy, because “unlike any other type of society, capitalism inevitably and by virtue of the very logic of its civilization creates, educates and subsidizes a vested interest in social unrest.” Like Hayek, Schumpeter described intellectuals broadly as “people who wield the power of the spoken and the written word.” More narrowly, “one of the touches that distinguish them from other people who do the same is the absence of direct responsibility for practical affairs.” That is, intellectuals do not participate in the market (at least not in the areas they write about), and do not generally rely on satisfying consumers to earn a living. Add to this their naturally critical attitude—which Schumpeter argues is the product of the essential rationality of the market economy—and it is easy to see why intellectuals would be hostile to the market.
... most adolescents do not develop anxiety disorders, but acquire the skill to modulate their fear as their prefrontal cortex matures in young adulthood, at around age 25. But up to 20 percent of adolescents in the United States experience a diagnosable anxiety disorder, like generalized anxiety or panic attacks, probably resulting from a mix of genetic factors and environmental influences. The prevalence of anxiety disorders and risky behavior (both of which reflect this developmental disjunction in the brain) have been relatively steady, which suggests to me that the biological contribution is very significant.
"It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776, that we have had new thoughts and new experiences which have given us a great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning cannot be applied to this great charter. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction can not lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers."
It's bogus to compare nations, really. It's apples and oranges. In America, K-12 has tons of immigrants who are not yet acculturated and do not have excellent English. And when it comes to college, America aspires to send everybody there, not just the scholarly. Why? Don't ask me. A credential I guess. Thus it makes no sense to compare with places like Finland or Singapore, or places like the UK with high bars for university entry and without mass-market schools.
Handling money is almost, or more, complicated than handling love and sex. People want both so much that it often scrambles their brains and incites irrational or self-destructive behavior (see our morning links today).
If you have some savings (which most responsible people sacrifice comforts and luxuries to have), what do you do with it? Investing how? Or not investing?
Pic on loan from the NYT article - 
10 Great Things About the Burqa,
Thomas is what's happening today! 
"It is often asserted that the world has made a great deal of progress since 1776, that we have had new thoughts and new experiences which have given us a great advance over the people of that day, and that we may therefore very well discard their conclusions for something more modern. But that reasoning cannot be applied to this great charter. If all men are created equal, that is final. If they are endowed with inalienable rights, that is final. If governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed, that is final. No advance, no progress can be made beyond these propositions. If anyone wishes to deny their truth or their soundness, the only direction in which he can proceed historically is not forward, but backward toward the time when there was no equality, no rights of the individual, no rule of the people. Those who wish to proceed in that direction can not lay claim to progress. They are reactionary. Their ideas are not more modern, but more ancient, than those of the Revolutionary fathers."