JustThinking.us

This story has been flying around all day.

I've read three different versions of it.

As you might well expect the best, which is to say clearest and easiest to understand comes from NASA.

As always click the drawing to read the entire piece.

Be smarter than your friends.

NASA Announces Results of Epic Space-Time Experiment

If you read newspapers, you've probably been reading Ashleigh Brilliant for most of your life.

His "Pot Shots" cartoons have been appearing in newspapers seemingly forever.

If you don't read newspapers, you've seen him on mugs, tshirts, caps, you name it.

He claims to have published over 10,000 epigrams, all with the exception of 42 using 17 words or less.

41 at 18, 1 at 19.

Many of which, in my opinion have been brilliant.

I like to go hang out at his site every once in a while when I go dull.

Click either gear to link up with his fine site.

Recommended.

“Please don't ask me what the score is, I'm not even sure what the game is.”

“Our meetings are held to discuss many problems which would never arise if we held fewer meetings.”

“It's human to make mistakes and some of us are more human than others.”

“I'm not yet desperate enough to do anything about the conditions that are making me desperate.”

“My biggest problem is what to do about all the things I can't do anything about.”

“Strange as it may seem, my life is based on a true story.”

“If you don't do it, you'll never know what would have happened if you had done it”

“By accepting you as you are, I do not necessarily abandon all hope of your improving”

“Take Courage!  Whatever you decide to do, it will probably be the wrong thing.”

“It's hard to face tomorrow, but it's easier than facing no tomorrow.”

“The trouble is that sex is a force of nature, and reason is not.”

“How can I be sure I've succeeded, if I can't remember what I was trying to do”

“It's good to know that if I behave strangely enough, society will take full responsibility for me.”

“If you can't go around it, over it, or through it, you had better negotiate with it.”

“Sometimes I need what only you can provide -- your absence.”

“To be sure of hitting the target, shoot first, and call whatever you hit the target.”

“I don't have any solution, but I certainly admire the problem.”

“All I want is a little more than I'll ever get.”

“If only our great thinkers could learn to talk, and our great talkers could learn to think.”

“I may not be totally perfect, but parts of me are excellent.”  (The little wiffer had this one on a tee shirt, it was indisputeable)

“Strangely enough, this is the past that somebody in the future is longing to go back to.”

“We've been through so much together, and most of it was your fault.”

“Sometimes the best way to be useful is to get out of somebody's way.”

“The really great people are the ones who know how to make the little people feel great.”

Feeling overwhelmed?

It gets to the best of us.

As always, Stratfor Global Intelligence blows the doors off of all competition in the News and/or Analysis business.

The first chart will link you up to the full analysis, they do have some free stuff which I mooched for years, you may have to register or fool around some to get this story.

The second chart will link you to a much larger version of the chart that you can actually read.

 The distinction between Core, Franchise and Grassroots attacks is interesting to me.

Basically core is al Qaeda itself, Franchise groups are those that have some loose affiliation and/or allegiance to al Qaeda, and Grassroots are individual people who have been inspired by al Qaeda and have taken matters into their own hands.

Nobody can be exactly like me. Even I have trouble doing it.

I read Shakespeare and the Bible, and I can shoot dice. That's what I call a liberal education.

Let's not quibble! I'm the foe of moderation, the champion of excess. If I may lift a line from a die-hard whose identity is lost in the shuffle, "I'd rather be strongly wrong than weakly right."

There is less in this than meets the eye.

I'm not at my best when I start to moralize or philosophize. Logic is elusive, especially to one who so rarely uses it.

I've been called many things, but never an intellectual.

I'm as pure as the driven slush.

The only thing I regret about my past is the length of it.  If I had to live my life again, I'd make the same mistakes, only sooner.

I have three phobias which, could I mute them, would make my life as slick as a sonnet, but as dull as ditch water: I hate to go to bed, I hate to get up, and I hate to be alone.

I have been absolutely hag-ridden with ambition. If I could wish to have anything in the world it would be to be free of ambition.

I did what I could to inflate the rumor I was on my way to stardom. What I was on my way to, by any mathematical standards known to man, was oblivion, by way of obscurity.

It's one of the tragic ironies of the theatre that only one man in it can count on steady work -- the night watchman.

If you really want to help the American theater, don't be an actress, dahling. Be an audience.

Don't be taken in by the guff that critics are killing the theater. Commonly they sin on the side of enthusiasm. Too often they give their blessing to trash.

Television could perform a great service in mass education, but there's no indication its sponsors have anything like this on their minds.

Here's a rule I recommend: Never practice two vices at once.

I'll come and make love to you at five o'clock. If I'm late start without me.

The less I behave like Whistler's mother the night before, the more I look like her the morning after.

My father warned me about men and booze, but he never mentioned a word about women and cocaine.

Katie K. has cache.

Katie K. (not her real initial) has been with us from the very beginning.

Katie was Terry D's first secretary and as such typed (I've always suspected wrote, which he vehemently denies while she stays mum which only hardens my opinion) Terry D's letters when we were nothing but a newly minted group of young grownups firing letters around to each other in an effort to figure out just what the hell was going on.

Anyway, Katie followed the conversation on facebook which resulted from the quotes on astrology you'll find three or five posts below, liked one of the comments and asked if I would give it a post of it's own.

Around here, whatever Katie wants, Katie gets.

A Christian's Defense of Astrology

If you are a Christian and have read the Bible, you have to acknowledge that it was a “Star” placed in the heavens that caused the Magi to mount up in search of “The King of the Jews”.

Genesis 1:14.

If you are a Christian and have read the Bible, you have to acknowledge that it was God himself who said, “Let there be lights in the firmament of the heavens to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs and seasons, and for days and years;

Matthew 2:1-2.

It wasn’t Pete Seeger who came up with the idea, it was Solomon in Ecclesiastes Chapter 3 who says, “To everything there is a season, A time for every purpose under heaven: 2 A time to be born, And a time to die; A time to plant, And a time to pluck what is planted; 3 A time to kill, And a time to heal; A time to break down, And a time to build up; 4 A time to weep, And a time to laugh; A time to mourn, And a time to dance; 5 A time to cast away stones, And a time to gather stones; A time to embrace, And a time to refrain from embracing; 6 A time to gain, And a time to lose; A time to keep, And a time to throw away; 7 A time to tear, And a time to sew; A time to keep silence, And a time to speak; 8 A time to love, And a time to hate; A time of war, And a time of peace.”

Ecclesiastes 3:1-8.

The fact that men aren’t very good at understanding the times and cycles of our lives and world beyond the very simple patterns of the tides and the seasons and worse still at predicting them, is neither here nor there.

There are now thousands of years of man’s recorded history available for us to study.

And there are millions of years of astronomical history available for us to study.

Seems quite the waste not to spend a little time comparing the two.

We're cleaning house around here.

Here's a chart we saved from The Big Picture in 2010, and never finished a post for.

The information is a little dated as it ends at Q3 2009.

A chart current to today would look even worse.

Total US debt to GDP from 1870 to 2009.