Happy New Year

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Originally published in 2012, I repeat it here.

This blogger hopes for increasing prosperity for all in the new year just begun.  Following are some additional thoughts, from those better than me.

Dinner was made for eating, not for talking.
–William Makepeace Thackeray

New Year’s Resolution: to tolerate fools more gladly, provided this does not encourage them to take up more of my time.
–James Agate

Those who gave thee a body, furnished it with weakness; but He who gave thee Soul, armed thee with resolution.  Employ it, and thou art wise; be wise, and thou art happy.
–Akhenaton

Character is the ability to carry out a good resolution long after the excitement of the moment has passed.
–Cavett Robert

And ye, who have met with Adversity’s blast,
And been bow’d to the earth by its fury;
To whom the Twelve Months, that have recently pass’d
Were as harsh as a prejudiced jury –
Still, fill to the Future! and join in our chime,
The regrets of remembrance to cozen,
And having obtained a New Trial of Time,
Shout in hopes of a kindlier dozen.
–Thomas Hood

We spend January 1 walking through our lives, room by room, drawing up a list of work to be done, cracks to be patched.  Maybe this year, to balance the list, we ought to walk through the rooms of our lives…not looking for flaws, but for potential.
–Ellen Goodman

New Year’s Day: now is the accepted time to make your regular annual good resolutions.  Next week you can begin paving hell with them as usual.
–Mark Twain

Youth is when you’re allowed to stay up late on New Year’s Eve.  Middle age is when you’re forced to.
–Bill Vaughn

This bit of ’70s-style wisdom:

A year from now, you’re gonna weigh more or less than what you do right now.
–Phil McGraw

And finally,

Let our New Year’s resolution be this: we will be there for one another as fellow members of humanity, in the finest sense of the word.
–Goran Persson

It’s the End of the Year

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And it’s time for some humor.

Youth is when you’re allowed to stay up for New Year’s. Middle age is when you’re forced to.

A woman took an afternoon nap on New Year’s Eve. When she woke up, she told her husband, “I just dreamed that you gave me a diamond ring for a New Year’s present. What do you think it all means?” He replied, “Aha, you’ll know tonight!” At midnight, her husband handed her a small gift-wrapped present. Excited, she opened it quickly, but was even more surprised: In it was a book titled The Meaning of Dreams.

A man who had too much to drink decides to walk home on New Year’s Eve. A policeman stopped the man and asked where he was going. “I’m on my way to a lecture,” the man replied. The cop scoffed, “Who gives lectures on New Year’s Eve?” The man answered: “My wife.”

I was going to quit all my bad habits for the New Year, but then I remembered that nobody likes a quitter.

My resolution was to read more, so I put the subtitles on on my TV.

How you elect to spend New Year’s Eve will depend on your:
1. age
2. remaining levels of optimism
3. threshold of pain
– Joseph Connolly

An optimist stays up until midnight to see the new year in. A pessimist stays up to make sure the old year leaves.
– Bill Vaughan

Wait a second, there’s ANOTHER year? I have to do it all over again???
– Jake Vig ‏@Jake_Vig

Finally, some few readers might wonder why I don’t do a retrospective of the year just concluding. Why I don’t are illustrated as follows:

That great American philosopher, Satchel Paige:

Don’t look back. Something might be gaining on you.

And this, from Italian racing (or so I’ve heard), but that has wide applicability:

What’s behind me is not important.

Finally, finally, this bit, counter-tenor, from Michael Jordan:

I’ve missed more than 9000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. 26 times, I’ve been trusted to take the game winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.

A Poll

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And a cynically timed one, at that. FiveThirtyEight ran a poll against the backdrop of a potential Supreme Court ruling regarding abortion, asking for abortion stories from women who’d had them.

And they ran that poll on Christmas Day, a day when hundreds of millions of Americans, and billions of Christians globally, celebrate the birth—not the abortion—of a child.

Aside from that tone-deaf, if not cynical, timing, the crowd also didn’t get the answers for which it was looking, even though it equally cynically distorted the subject altogether.

[FiveThirtyEight] states…”And now it seems likely that the Supreme Court will limit the right to abortion even further. As we document the impact of these shifts, we want to include the voices of people who have had abortions in the U.S.”

That’s the cynical mischaracterization of a potential (it’s far from a done deal) Supreme Court outcome.

What the Supreme Court might do is acknowledge the right of babies to their life by limiting access to medical procedures for killing those babies before they’re born.

The voices of those who choose a baby’s life answered the poll far more so than those who favor a mother’s “right” to kill her baby, so long as it’s not yet born. It’ll be interesting to see whether FiveThirtyEight‘s managers publish their poll’s outcome, and if they do, how they characterize it.

What She Said

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Cynthia Millen, the erstwhile USA Swimming official who resigned over the NCAA’s and UPenn’s decision to let transgender swimmer Lia Thomas compete in women’s swimming meets, had some further thoughts on the larger matter.

The fact is that swimming is a sport in which bodies compete against bodies. Identities do not compete against identities[.]

And

The statement for women then is you do not matter, what you do is not important, and little girls are going to be thrown under the bus by all of this[.]

And

…boys will always have larger lung capacity, larger hearts, greater circulation, a bigger skeleton, and less fat.

And

While Lia Thomas is a child of God, he is a biological male who is competing against women. And no matter how much testosterone suppression drugs he takes, he will always be a biological male and have the advantage.

And

All these women who worked so hard before Title IX when they didn’t have the opportunities that men had. It would be such a shame, such a travesty to throw it away now. This is what will happen.

Indeed, where is Title IX? Transgender athletes should have their own, equally funded and equally supported, athletic programs.

Just a Thought

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California is running a very large budget surplus—$31 billion worth—and the men and women of that State’s government really and truly don’t know what to do with it. Especially since the voter-approved Gann Limit doesn’t let the government run that big a surplus.

Here’s a thought.

Maybe pay a tax refund to the citizens of California, and sock the rest of the surplus away in a State rainy-day fund.

Nah. Waste of money. Those citizens would only waste it on their own needs and wants, rather than spending it properly. And who needs a rainy-day fund? California has droughts.