Well-Meaning but Without Understanding

 
Justice Louis Brandeis

Experience should teach us to be most on our guard to protect liberty when the government’s purposes are beneficial. Men born to freedom are naturally alert to repel invasion of their liberty by evil-minded rulers. The greater dangers to liberty lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.

— Justice Louis Brandeis, Olmstead v. United States, 277 U.S. 479 (1928)

Burn it Down

 
Chris Matthews David Shankbone 2010 NYC

Chris Matthews:

I have waited all my adult life for an election in which voters have the fire to reach up and burn those who have been running the show for decades. But I didn’t know it would come from the right and center.

If the plan of those in power is to raise a ton of cash and run nasty TV ads saying you can’t vote for this new person, that he or she is flawed — I expect the voter will say, “Are you telling me I have no choice but to vote for you? Are you saying that I, this little voter out there, dare not take a chance on someone who has not yet let me down as you have? If that is what you’re telling me, that I have no choice, well, Mr. Big Stuff, you just have to wait — stay up late election night and see what I have done.”

What You Might Be

 
Joseph Campbell

You must have a room, or a certain hour or so a day, where you don’t know what was in the newspaper that morning, you don’t know who your friends are, you don’t know what you owe anybody, you don’t know what anybody owes you.

This is a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be.

Woody Allen

 
Woody Allen

Q. How do you feel about the aging process?

A. Well, I’m against it. [laughs] I think it has nothing to recommend it. You don’t gain any wisdom as the years go by. You fall apart, is what happens. People try and put a nice varnish on it, and say, well, you mellow. You come to understand life and accept things. But you’d trade all of that for being 35 again. I’ve experienced that thing where you wake up in the middle of the night and you start to think about your own mortality and envision it, and it gives you a little shiver. That’s what happens to Anthony Hopkins at the beginning of the movie, and from then on in, he did not want to hear from his more realistic wife, “Oh, you can’t keep doing that — you’re not young anymore.” Yes, she’s right, but nobody wants to hear that.

Other Than That . . .

 

The social fabric is fraying. Human capital is being squandered. Society is segmenting. The labor markets are ill. Wages are lagging. Inequality is increasing. The nation is overconsuming and underinnovating. China and India are surging.

David Brooks, New York Times

Point taken. But other than that, things are going okay, right?

Kevin McCarthy, 1914-2010

 
Kevin McCarthy and Dana Wynter in

Kevin McCarthy, the suave, square-jawed actor who earned accolades in stage and screen productions of “Death of a Salesman” but will always be best known as the star of the 1956 science fiction movie “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” died Saturday at Cape Cod Hospital in Hyannis, Mass. He was 96 and lived in Sherman Oaks Calif.

Shocking news — not that he died, but that he was still alive at the age of 96.