I saw this quote by Pharrell Williams  in Readers Digest July 2014 issue and was impressed:

“There is no breathing human being on this planet [who] did not benefit by a woman saying yes twice: yes to make you and yes to have you.”

A friend recently pointed out to me that we have about 100-120 years of weather history data and earth has been here for about 4,000 – 300,000,000,000 years, so we simply don’t have enough data to say which way it’s headed.  I know we can all agree that climate it’s a changing, for sure.   For example, just yesterday it was 83 here and today only getting up to 71.

http://www.latimes.com/science/la-sci-pacific-warming-20140923-story.html

Excerpt

Naturally occurring changes in winds, not human-caused climate change, are responsible for most of the warming on land and in the sea along the West Coast of North America over the last century, a study has found.

The analysis challenges assumptions that the buildup of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere has been a significant driver of the increase in temperatures observed over many decades in the ocean and along the coastline from Alaska to California.

Interesting survey, I got 8 of 10

http://www.cnn.com/2013/12/10/world/gapminder-us-ignorance-survey

 

Recently finished reading the book “Eleni” and “A Place for Us” by Nicholas Gage.  Both are exceptional books.

I took note of page 445 from “Eleni”.  Nicholas Gage referred to the change in behavior and philosophy of Greeks who moved to America: “The Greeks seemed to absorb the Calvinist work ethic with their first step on American soil.  They abandoned afternoon siestas and long, lazy hours in the coffee shops to work fourteen-hour days – husbands, wives and children, side by side.  They paid for their homes and automobiles in cash. Many of the Mourgana Greeks in Worcester, including all four of my brothers-in-law, saved enough eventually to open pizza parlors throughout New England.”

It struck me that a core truth we know is that something worked hard for and earned is so much more valuable, rewarding and incentivizing than to receive a hand-out.  To directly realize the benefits of one’s own labors is intrinsically rewarding.

A clear example is the difference of Hurricane Katrina flooding in New Orleans and the flooding of the northern Mississippi a couple years later.  In one situation you had a populace reliant on government assistance which bred a dependency and seeming helplessness to fix one’s situation in New Orleans versus the self-reliance, help each other other out, rebuild without sitting back and asking “where’s my government?”.