“There is no cure for birth and death, save to enjoy the interval.”
Santayana, quoted by Jon Winokur, ed. Zen to Go
On June 16 I was on Global News Radio 640 with Alex Pierson and John Mraz to discuss various current public affairs follies.
“I didn’t know of anybody in my entire platoon that wanted to kill, who ever killed before.”
Robert Santos in Al Santoli, ed., Everything We Had: An Oral History of the Vietnam War by 33 American Soldiers Who Fought It
In my latest National Post column I mock the notion of a geopolitical lightweight like our Prime Minister putting himself forward as an elder statesman.
On Tuesday I joined Alex Pierson to discuss the ugly mix of ideological and partisan dysfunction behind MP Jenica Atwin’s decision to leave the Green Party for the welcoming Liberals over extreme anti-Israel views she then suddenly claimed she’d never held.
“Strong reciprocators are not altruists.... They’re rejecting lowball offers because the offers violate their individual sense of what a just exchange would be. But the effect is the same as if they loved humanity… Individually irrational acts, in other words, can produce a collectively rational outcome.”
James Surowiecki The Wisdom of Crowds [regarding experiments involving the “ultimatum game”]
“When Benjamin Franklin was seven years old... he fell in love with a whistle. He was so excited about it that he went into the toy shop, piled all his coppers on the counter, and demanded the whistle without even asking its price. ‘I then came home,’ he wrote to a friend 70 years later, ‘and went whistling all over the house, much pleased with my whistle.’ When his older brothers and sisters found out that he had paid far more for his whistle than he should have paid, they gave him the horse laugh; and, as he said: ‘I cried with vexation.’... But the lesson taught Franklin was cheap in the end. ‘As I grew up,’ he said, ‘and came into the world and observed the actions of men, I thought I met with many, very many, who gave too much for the whistle.’”
Dale Carnegie How to Stop Worrying and Start Living
“The early bird may get the worm, but the second mouse gets the cheese.”
Willie Nelson, quoted as “Thought du jour” in “Social Studies” in Globe & Mail February 4, 2008