You are the co-star of The LeftyBosco Picture Show. In a variety of styles and subjects, from playful to poignant, Keith DuQuette, aka LeftyBosco, presents a drawing a day. Daily drawings by Keith DuQuette engage, inspire and challenge you to add your witty and wise comments. Play along with LeftyBosco and his friends – or have fun watching from the sidelines. The punch line starts here.
Trying to keep up with a busy real job schedule and my desire to get Exotic Contraband ready for the first book to be published on Smashwords so blogging has not been prolific, will at least be home this week, hope to get a few meaty posts done.
Used to be that Sunday was the day before Monday and I dreaded school…until I got over that and actually started to like it. Then it was the day before Monday and I had to face the fact that I was just a cog in the gears of my job. Then I was a manager and I would have to face the folks who worked for me and keep up expectations. Next I was working for myself and Monday meant having to figure out how I was going to keep it up after the near term mana gave out. Then I was working for a small company and it meant another week of 12 to 14 hour days, and commutes that really sucked, though I enjoyed what I was doing. Still the case but now its the realization that I didn’t get to most of the things I’d intended to do over the weekend and the week is going to be clogged…
But then isn’t that the human condition, never really satisfied, isn’t that what keeps us moving forward?
Sorry edited, used the quick blog button and it made the central paragraph a differen color and unreadable on my blog….had to get into the HTML, I find that WP is a way to learn some HTML…again.
Before I had chance in another war, the desire to kill people to whom I had not been introduced had passed away.
– Autobiography of Mark TwainChange is the handmaiden Nature requires to do her miracles with.
– Roughing It
Strangely enough I have only read a little of Mark Twain’s work, I like reading about him and I like his humor and his philosophy but his classic novels don’t interest me. Not sure if it was Junior High, High School readings that did it to me or if I’m just not up for the experience.
I find the times in which he lived fascinating, in some ways we should be ashamed of ourselves for complaining about the rate of change today. The rate of change during the Victorian era, or the Twain era (which overlap a great deal,) was simply incredible. The biggest difference is that the impact was probably less personal than the changes today, but they were more physical. The Transition from horse carriage and canal to train, the telegraph, the steam ship, the spread of parliamentary gov’t and limited monarchy, the explosion of broadsheet papers and journalism, the beginnings of scientific medicine etc.
By the time Twain died the world he had been born into would be almost unrecognizable. The world you and I were born into are recognizably precursors to our life today. However the differences in mental attitude and knowledge etc, are many orders of magnitudes greater than the same types of changes that happened across Twain’s life.
The intellectual changes that lead to the Victorian/Twain era explosion, happened in the decades and years leading up to the years of greatest change. Is that what we are seeing now, the build up of an underpinning that will enable quantum leaps in the physical characteristics of our lives like those that occurred from ~1840-1900?
Just a thought …
“Anyone who trades liberty for security deserves neither liberty nor security”
But in his world it was almost impossible for a single person to be responsible for killing millions. Does world we live in today require some trade of liberty for security? If so where do you stop and how do you stop?
A rarity in the comics, 9 Chickweed Lane spotlights music and dance with superb artistry that complements Brooke McEldowney’s strong-minded characters. A popular comic strip about three generations of family, 9 Chickweed Lane features strong characters, flights of fancy and an intuitive grasp of all kinds of relationships. The strip was recognized in 2006 for its brilliant artistry and intellectual humor when it was named Best Newspaper Comic Strip by the National Cartoonists Society. The strip appears in 60 newspapers worldwide, including the Los Angeles Times, Houston Chronicle, Calgary Sun and Columbus Dispatch. Central character Edda Burber is dancing to the beat of a different drummer these days as McEldowney focuses 9 Chickweed Lane more on the story of a young woman who moves away from home to perform with a prestigious metropolitan ballet company in New York City. Although it may seem like a completely new strip, 9 Chickweed Lane is peopled with very familiar friends, like furry feline Solange, and Edda’s childhood friend and recent love interest, Amos.
I have browsed far into the archives, I adore this comic strip!
A Hubble picture I think its looking into the hot hydrogen spectrum
Just some writing therapy other than Elgin, struggling a bit with Elgin in New York. I think having that deadline in front of me was effective even after I’d gotten over the base line. But that’s the way it is.
Spent too much time today reading articles and blogs on the current state of the world. Things are starting to look up in the US and yet most of the pundits are saying it’s going to be a flash in the pan, especially if the Euro resumes its crash into the toilet. And Oh, even if the Europeans pull it out, the Chinese are probably going to implode. And if the Chinese don’t implode then we need start worrying about their hegemonic intentions in the far east.
And then you have the Arab spring, all of which are now turning out to be pro Islamists of one stripe or another….well duh! Of course they are, the secular piece of the population almost has to be small be definition and they were rebelling against various levels of despotism that was supported at least partly by secular and pro-Israel US/Europe. The reaction is going to blow back. One just has to hope that the more liberal (reasonable set of rights and open economy) arms of the Islamists remain in control because the majority realize that the hardliner conservatives will keep them in at least a deep a hole as they have been for the last fifty years.
As to space and entropy…
Review of a book by Lynn Stout, Cultivating Conscience: How Good Laws Make Good People. The review provides a synopsis of Dr. Stout’s thesis, she has tied together the results of modern research from a broad range of relevant science threads to present strong argument against the punitive and overly complex laws and rules that are the norm today.
She argues that the populist lowest common denominator laws with their no tolerance, zero sum, economic animal analysis of the human mind, far from making us safer and more law-abiding are deeply damaging to the social fabric we all depend on. She points out the mechanisms that lie behind some of the strikingly good results of modern urban policing and that these same mechanisms can be expanded more broadly. This probably explains why experiments with shaming young drug offenders seems to have better results than time in jail.
Lynn Stout is the Paul Hastings Professor of Corporate and Securities Law at the UCLA School of Law. She is the coauthor of several books and a frequent commentator for NPR, PBS, and the “Wall Street Journal”.
(This is a bit of an update with the book link…and bio from B&N book page)
Cheers
So i finally found the party that I can support! The GTP Green-Tea-Party, Kermit the frog is their spokesperson and their motto is, “it’s not easy being green.” This sounds like a joke, may be in some minds but the ‘party platform’ and tenets are seriously focused and not just on traditional green issues. At least I don’t see it as ecology + fuzzy/finned friends, this is seriously about a better world through the stimulation of innovative, low impact, sustainable, low bureaucrat, and economically sound/practical policies….this is a political philosophy that could->should rival the now utterly depleted/tired/corrupted progressive>liberal<>mercantilist <onservative spectrum we seem damned to suffer with today. Read the article, it’s concise and rational, go GTP->Kermy!!!
Photo: InsEyedOut, via flicker, Defining Ideas..
How did we get here? Why is this happening now?
The Here and Now is a phonograph needle tracking the wobbles in the groove that all our yesterdays laid down.
Is there a way out?
There is only foreward there is no going back.
Not sure I agree at an individual level all the time, but on the aggregate in the immediate time frame I would. Perhaps its like this: Science tells me that most of my actions are planned a significant fraction of a second ahead of my consciousness recognizing what is going on. It is impossible to change what you do not know is coming but if you plan ahead you can control what happens at a future point in time and space.
And what we do individually and locally does matter nationally and globally, at least a little and if not now then sometime in the future.
Does that mean I demand “Word Gov’t Now!” how stupid do you think I am?
We need more self-control, personal control, local control and less regional control, national control and global control. We do need norms and some way of enforcing them for such things as : life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and such easily debased things as contract enforcement, property rights, ecological cost accounting, financial cost accounting…a few others…maybe
But….the old bureaucratic model, relying on a plethora of relatively well paid trustworthy functionaries to enforce norms is becoming unaffordable.
Laissez-Faire – let it be – management doesn’t work, it doesn’t work in regulation either.
Why has the US Constitution remained important for more than 200 years? Because its simple, basic, lays out fundamentals and leaves the rest for interpretation but by being fairly simple, constrained and pragmatic it is actually possible to interpret it to cover very large sets of cases.
We have to get over the belief that you can make life perfect if you can just tune your laws/regulations/rules just right and get the humans out-of-the-way. We used to know better, I think that most scholars know better. But somehow many folks have come to believe that if not all, then the one specific law they care about can be perfected, and since they care about it passionately they push it forward, usually through a system that has no time to really understand the consequences of this law when combined with that law and this social reality, etc. And with each law becoming more complex because of fiddling to tune it to perfection, the way they interact becomes utterly unknowable. And the law becomes harder to obey and easier for smart lawyers to subvert.
So….
So where do we go from here?
Start to build down the complexity we have built up at every level, what about:
You can think of more, I know you can!
Cheers
I have a new hero! I love this line, maybe it was just a matter of right words at the right time on the right topic but it is perfect. Bob Krum was discussing the euro debt crisis among other things (like stupid questions on ‘presidential debates’) in Stop Waiting for Superman.
There are no grownups; there are just folks (blokes in Brit speak) like us, imperfect humans who are lucky to make a right decision (on issues more complex than whether to turn into the path of that oncoming Mack truck or not) much more than 50% of the time (and we don’t always make the right one regarding the Mack truck.)
What does that mean? Many things but one of them is that overly complex political, financial, social, technical…etc constructs are asking for problems. Stable systems are ones that are essentially self organizing, a pile of sand will settle into the same conical shape every time because its stable in its environment. Small c capitalist, old meaning liberal economies, are self organizing and stable. The euro zone is a complex web of overly constrained systems that like some cartoon Rube Goldberg steam plant is constantly threatening to blow a gasket and it requires a genius just to know where to apply the next tourniquet.
In the last few decades we have made vast strides in understanding ourselves and our world (in a thousand different dimensions.) Then we have often reacted to this increased understanding by thinking we can control more things and implementing more and more rules. The effects of those rules are often individually complex and unintended but the interactions between them is (IMHO) utterly outside of our ability to cope with. Among other things I rather suspect that every one of us (barring a newborn baby maybe) is technically a criminal, having violated at one time or another various laws, rules or regulations most of which we had no idea existed or had no way to follow.
Somehow we have become inured to the regulated world, see it as natural, but it’s probably reached its practical limits and is now in the process of imploding. We have the tools to creat a more self organized – de-bureaucratized world but have not yet quite figured out what it really looks like and how to transition from where we are to where we need to be.
Maybe that’s just wishful thinking….fueld by a frustration at the idiocy that seems to have become institutionalized in so many places. But change ‘is in the air,’ though it may still be some years away. I just hope that the transition can be made relatively peacefully, there are far too many people on this orbiting rock (7Billion!?) for a major disruption to be anything other than catastrophic for far too many.
There is no utopia waiting over the brow of the next hill, and there was never a golden age that we have somehow lost (one man’s golden age was someone elses hell.) We can’t go back to a past that never existed, and refusing to live and work today because the day after tomorrow will be better is foolish and self-destructive. Tomorrow never gets here, let alone the day after, and your vision of the world will never occupy a future today unless you work for it in the today you find yourself in. Live in the now with a vision of where you want to end up.
This World and Others 