Nassim Nicholas Taleb has a nice article at the NewStatesman.

Debt implies a strong statement about the future, and a high degree of reliance on forecasts. … debt is dangerous if you are overconfident about the future and are Black Swan-blind – which we all tend to be.

Read it here.

Camille Paglia takes a shot at explaining the female sexual apathy for which drug makers seek to provide a “female Viagra”. She makes a few good observations, including:

In the discreet white-collar realm, men and women are interchangeable, doing the same, mind-based work. Physicality is suppressed; voices are lowered and gestures curtailed in sanitized office space. Men must neuter themselves, while ambitious women postpone procreation. Androgyny is bewitching in art, but in real life it can lead to stagnation and boredom, which no pill can cure.

Let that sink in for a minute and then see what you think of this:

The sexes, which used to occupy intriguingly separate worlds, are suffering from over-familiarity, a curse of the mundane. There’s no mystery left.

Mystery… It almost seems like a nasty word in this day and age. Like mystery is a shameful failure instead of the main fixture of our human condition. Read more: Op-Ed Contributor – No Sex Please, We’re Middle Class – NYTimes.com.

A Cree Indian prophecy, remembered by a man thinking about the effects of the BP oil spill:

Only after the last tree has been cut down… Only after the last river has been poisoned… Only after the last fish has been caught, only then will you find that money cannot be eaten.

@CNN iReport Blog

Jessica Bennett lists 10 facts (although I have a hard time regarding figures from an AskMen.com poll as facts) that should cause a person to think twice about marriage. A commenter responds:

Youth is a time of selfishness and immaturity, when the world revolves around you, and you think that’s the way it should be. But as you grow older, you realize that there is more to life than an endless party, more to life than even living for fun—that happiness too vigorously pursued doesn’t lead to happiness at all.

@Marriage Facts and Trivia: Men, Women and Surveys – Newsweek

If you happen to have a few hours to burn, The Case Against Credentialism from The Atlantic tracks the fascinating development of credentialism:

Three changes, which took place in the past hundred years, produced the system that is now producing M.B.A.s. They were the conversion of jobs into “professions,” the scientific measurement of intelligence, and the use of government power to “channel” people toward certain occupations.

The 20th century was a century of the redistribution of wealth; the 21st century will probably be a century of the redistribution of work. @Futurity.org – Will 90 be the new 40?

How we view the Depression today has much to do with how leaders chose to portray their actions then. Whether we realize it or not, we are still reacting to those portrayals more than we are to the actions themselves. What really changed was the way the world’s elite thought of themselves and their institutions. Above all, what happened in the early 1930s was a loss of trust in authority—a loss of faith that the institutions that ordered society could be counted on to provide stability and prosperity for those willing to work for it. Suffering the most damage was the great, but still relatively new and fragile Western idea that anonymous and uncoordinated exchanges among millions of strangers could be trusted to lead to good outcomes without supervision or filtering. @The Real New Deal – John V. C. Nye – The American Interest Magazine

Mutuality rather than independence is the chief characteristic of human life, whatever wed like to believe. @The School of Life : On Mutuality

City-states organize by tinkering; nation-states produce bureaucracies, empty suits, Bernankes, deficits, and the toobigtofail. Too obvious. @nntaleb

You get the politicians you deserve.  Arguing over “cutting spending” polarizes Americans because that soundbite is contentless, but elicits a strong emotional response not to a plan but about an imagined recipient (welfare abusers, etc.)  This kind of a debate is an addictive drug. @The Last Psychiatrist: Wrong About Obama II

A lifetime consuming does not prepare you well for a good old age. If we reorganised society from the perspective of making the end of life better, what would we focus on? @The School of Life : Charles Leadbeater on Perspective

As with any other species, human populations are shaped by the usual forces of natural selection, like famine, disease or climate. A new force is now coming into focus. It is one with a surprising implication — that for the last 20,000 years or so, people have inadvertently been shaping their own evolution. Although it does shield people from other forces, culture itself seems to be a powerful force of natural selection. @Human Culture Plays a Role in Natural Selection – NYTimes.com

The Western World has quietly become a civilization that undervalues men and overvalues women, where the state forcibly transfers resources from men to women creating various perverse incentives for otherwise good women to conduct great evil against men and children, and where male nature is vilified but female nature is celebrated.  This is unfair to both genders, and is a recipe for a rapid civilizational decline and displacement, the costs of which will ultimately be borne by a subsequent generation of innocent women, rather than men, as soon as 2020.  @The Futurist: The Misandry Bubble

Dr. Helen writes:

Goodreau has it all wrong. It is not that men are “man-children.” They are just grown-up enough to know that a controlling woman like Goodreau does not a good wife make.

@Marriage, The Last Frontier – Forbes.com

If you treat people right, you can only hope that they treat you right. It’s as simple as it gets in this complicated world. @A Victim Treats His Mugger Right : NPR