John Lennon on aging

Count your age by friends, not years.  Count your life by smiles, not tears.

~ John Lennon

Eleanor Roosevelt on aging

Beautiful young people are accidents of nature, but beautiful old people are works of art.

~ Eleanor Roosevelt

Charlie Munger on how investing isn't like physics

I think [Warren and I] have had some effect [on investing and thinking], but they’re still teaching the Efficient Market Theory at business schools.  The old ideas die hard. And by the way, it’s roughly right.  It’s just the very hard form, which everybody believed.  They believed it was impossible, they didn’t think it was rare.  They thought efficiency was absolutely inevitable, like physics.  I call it physics envy.  That’s what they had in the finance field, they wanted to make their subject like physics.  Now, what kind of a nut would want to make stock markets like physics?  It ain’t like physics.  It’s more like a mob at a football game.

~ Charlie Munger

January 1, 1924 - November 28, 2023

Sean Corrigan on liars

All the best liars - from Satan down to his earthly legate, Tony Blair - are convincing because they first lie most successfully to themselves and thus affect an almost impenetrable air of sincerity when they spread their falsehoods.

~ Sean Corrigan

Ludwig von Mises on protectionism

The philosophy of protectionism is a philosophy of war.  The wars of our age are not at variance with popular economic doctrines; they are, on the contrary, the inescapable result of consistent application of these doctrines.

~ Ludwig von Mises, Human Action, p. 683

1949

David D'Amato on the war on terror and growth of the surveillance state

In the United States, particularly in the hysterical environment of the post-9/11 War on Terror, terrorism has been the convenient, go-to pretext for violating the civil and human rights of political dissidents and activists.  In the years following 9/11, the national security state carefully cultivated an environment of fear and paranoia, a social atmosphere in which Americans would be billing to abandon high-minded ideals of civil liberties and due process in favor of safety.  If we were to be safe, those suspected of terrorism couldn’t have rights, not the same rights anyway.  A new, exceptional kind of war required new, exceptional powers—and, besides, those pesky constitutional safeguards were for real Americans, not suspected terrorists.  It is at this juncture that the racial and religious dimensions of terrorism as a concept played their critical role, buttressed by “a pervasive media and political discourse that insisted the disciplinary techniques available to the state were insufficient for dealing with the threat that terrorism posed.”  The terrorist or suspected terrorist becomes an “exceptional figure,” dehumanized and subject to different rules, to “excess levels of state power” and disciplinary actions that would not be permissible absent this context of race.  The War on Terror became the primary means through which an imperial ruling class could consolidate its real and psychological power by punishing the other.  Policing at home could become ever more militarized and oppressive, surveillance more pervasive—justified by an omnipresent threat that has already infiltrated the homeland.

~ David S. D'Amato, "Power and Punishment in the Construct of Terrorism," CounterPunch, November 24, 2023

Kevin Duffy on the cold war with China

The collapse of the Soviet Union thirty years ago ushered in a very unusual, unipolar world in which the US dominated geopolitically.  That world is over.  From 2020 to 2025 the increase in interest on the public debt alone will exceed the entire U.S. military budget.  So being at war with Russia, China and Islam at the same time – 44% of the world’s population – isn’t sustainable.  The U.S. is going to have to start getting along with people, which I believe means that chilled relations with China will thaw over time.

~ Kevin Duffy, "The Stock Market is Quite Complacent," The Market, December 1, 2023