I Can Feel Him in the Morning

Take me down to the water, let me feel it run over me.
Let me feel the pain and the coldness, the loneliness that there must be.
Can’t you see their dreams as they go drifting by?
Can’t you see their faces and their tear-soaked eyes?

I can feel Him in the morning; I can feel Him in the evening too.
I can hear Him in the morning telling me what I got to do.
Got to make a new world; ought to make the old one right.
I can see Him in the morning; I can see Him in the stars at night.

Take me out to the battlefield; let me hear the shells flying by.
Let me hear the sound of the cannons; let me hear them scream and cry.
Can’t you hear their dreams as they tumble to the blood-soaked ground?
Hear them scream for shelter from the world they never found.

-- Brewer / Farner (Grand Funk Railroad) 1971

I Bet You

ice cubes on a red-hot stove will melt.
a drowning man's very first word is help.
if you bet on a horse and the horse don't win, you lose.
if you try to sit on air, you're gonna fall.

take a car without fuel, it ain't gonna move.
a carpenter can't build his house without his tools.
if your shoes are too small, they hurt your feet.
you can't know what's going on if you sleep.

-- Barnes / Clinton / Lindsey (Funkadelic) 1970

risk and fragility

The more you try to de-risk a system, the more accident-prone it becomes, and the more damaging the accidents are....   By using interest rates and monetary policy to try to prevent recessions, central bankers are making the world less safe and more likely to have a horrible accident. They are making the financial system more fragile....

You might not believe that the world becomes more dangerous precisely because you're trying to make it safer. But studies show that after the introduction of seat belts, the number of car accidents went up. Why? Well, people must have felt that because the belts made them safer, and made accidents more survivable, it was OK to take more risks, drive faster and otherwise abdicate responsibility for their own actions....

[I]t's a psychological phenomenon we're talking about. If people are led to believe they are safer, they will quite naturally be less vigilant about risk. [A] sense of risk is a highly useful advantage in evolutionary terms. Risk tells you when something big is at stake and the quality of your actions and decisions matter. If you try to systematically eliminate risk from society -- even if it's out of good intentions -- you aren't helping people at all. You're robbing them of a basic instinct that promotes their ability to look after themselves....

--Dan Denning, The Daily Reckoning (May 8, 2013)

free markets adapt

Markets that are “allowed” to crash, sometimes violently, are usually quick to adapt and evolve, something akin to Schumpeter’s “creative destruction.” They are dynamic, responsive, adaptive. In sharp contrast, markets that receive government / taxpayer-sponsored bailouts are “fragilized”-- rendered deaf to the market’s timely lessons and mute in response to the new demands and expectations of market participants.
-- Joel Bowman, The Daily Reckoning (April 14, 2013)

daydreaming

Think of a place I would go.
To where the sycamore grow.
I’m daydreaming
And oh, if you knew what it meant to me
To be where the air was so clear.
Oh, if you knew what it meant to me.
Anywhere but here.
-- Nona Marie Invie / Marshall LaCount (Dark Dark Dark) 2010

american face dust

Change is the thing; that is what we do.
Change is the change that's changing you.

The day that you melt will shine; we'll have a good time.
-- The Seven Fields of Aphelion / Tobacco (Black Moth Super Rainbow) 2009

contact

Une météorite m'a transpercé le cœur
Vous, sur la terre, vous avez des docteurs

Il me faut une transfusion de mercure
J'en ai tant perdu par cette blessure

Ôtez-moi ma combinaison spatiale
Retirez-moi cette poussière sidérale

Comprenez-moi il me faut à tout prix
Rejoindre mon amour dans la galaxie

-- Serge Gainsbourg (1967)

Circles

from Essays: First Series
Nature centres into balls,
And her proud ephemerals,
Fast to surface and outside,
Scan the profile of the sphere;
Knew they what that signified,
A new genesis were here.

ESSAY X _Circles
The eye is the first circle; the horizon which it forms is the second; and throughout nature this primary figure is repeated without end. It is the highest emblem in the cipher of the world....
Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth, that around every circle another can be drawn; that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning; that there is always another dawn risen on mid-noon, and under every deep a lower deep opens....
There are no fixtures in nature. The universe is fluid and volatile. Permanence is but a word of degrees....

-- Ralph Waldo Emerson (1841)

why planning fails

Why do these plans fail? The simple answer is because that’s not the way the world works.  Life on Earth is not so rational that it lends itself to simpleminded, heavy-handed intervention of the naïve social engineer. Bridges are designed. So are houses. And particle accelerators. Economies are not. Neither are real languages. Customs. Markets. Love. Marriages. Children. Or any of the other really important things in life.

-- Bill Bonner, The Daily Reckoning (March 6, 2013)

central planning fails

Aristotelian logic came to dominate Western thought after the Renaissance. It was essentially a forerunner of positivism — which is supposedly based on objective conditions and scientific reasoning. “Give me the facts,” says the positivist, confidently. “Let me apply my rational brain to them. I will come up with a solution!”  This is fine, if you are building the Eiffel Tower or organizing the next church supper. But positivism falls apart when it is applied to schemes that go beyond the reach of the “herald’s cry.”  That’s what Aristotle said. He thought only a small community could work at all. Because only in a small community would all the people share more or less the same information and interests.

In a large community, you can’t know things in the same direct, personal way. So it’s hard for people to work together in the same way.  In a large community, you have no idea who made your sausage or what they put in it. You have to rely on “facts” that are no longer verifiable by direct observation or personal acquaintance.  Instead, the central planners’ facts usually are nothing more than statistical mush, wishful thinking or theoretical claptrap — like Weapons of Mass Destruction, the unemployment rate and the Übermensch.  Large-scale planning fails because the facts upon which it is built are unreliable, frequently completely bogus.  And it fails because people don’t really want it.

-- Bill Bonner, The Daily Reckoning (March 6, 2013)

For the Love of Ivy

Gonna buy me a graveyard of my own
Kill everyone who ever done me wrong
Gonna buy me a gun just as long as my arm
Kill everyone who ever done me harm
-- Jeffrey Lee Pierce / Kid Congo Powers (The Gun Club) 1981

subhuman

So ladies, fish and gentlemen,
Here's my angled dream.
See me in the blue sky bag,
And meet me by the sea.
-- Eric Bloom / Sandy Pearlman (BÖC) 1974

girl on a motorbike

Too many folk in the middle lane don't want to swerve against the rails.
Apathy balanced with disdain;  dogs chasing their own tails.
-- Adam Franklin (Swervedriver) 1993

missing person

Home to sweet home, it just occurred to me
To be on my own in search of bitter treats.
I get so removed, but you never notice it
Step in my shoes; you'll see that I don't fit.

I walk home the wrong way
Hoping I'll go astray.
I'd like to be a missing person.

-- Neil Finn (Split Enz) 1980