This is not to suggest that using art to make a socio-political point is necessarily bad, only when those points become detrimental to art itself. When the driving impulse is, “Use the story to serve these agendas,” when politics dictates how our stories are told and eclipses universal truths about the human experience — the deeper things that actually touch us — the result is an artistically diminished product.
— Read on fee.org/articles/the-last-jedi-and-the-politicization-of-storytelling/

Amen to this

Although the potential range of emotional experience is essentially the same in all human beings, each culture exhibits its own patterns, inculcating certain feelings while discouraging others, promoting either expression or restraint, and defining variously the place of the emotions in everyday life… (essay by George Stanciu)
— Read on www.theimaginativeconservative.org/2018/02/emotions-primer-george-stanciu.html

When it comes to aging and emotions, there are two common but equally inaccurate myths. On the one hand is the view that aging brings with it a second ch…
— Read on www.huffingtonpost.com/susan-krauss-whitbourne/more-complex-as-you-get-older_b_8741338.html

Why Buffett Pulled Back: Companies Overvalued after “Purchasing Frenzy” Fueled by “Cheap Debt” | Wolf Street
— Read on wolfstreet.com/2018/02/25/why-buffett-pulled-back-companies-overvalued-after-purchasing-frenzy-fueled-by-cheap-debt/

“Nobody knows anything…. Not one person in the entire motion picture field knows for a certainty what’s going to work. Every time out it’s…
— Read on www.mauldineconomics.com/frontlinethoughts/state-of-inflationary-confusion

Since we’ve now been living with the global warming story for 30 years, it might seem hard to believe that science could now come up with anything that would enable us to see that story in a wholly new light. But that is what I am suggesting in a new paper, thanks to a book called Groupthink, written more than 40 years ago by a professor of psychology at Yale, Irving Janis.
What Janis did was to define scientifically just how what he called groupthink operates, according to three basic rules. And what my paper tries to show is the astonishing degree to which they explain so much that many have long found puzzling about the global warming story.
— Read on fee.org/articles/groupthink-on-climate-change-ignores-inconvenient-facts/

Critical thinking skills are needed

Georgie Porgie, Pudding and Lies – Taki’s Magazine
— Read on takimag.com/article/georgie_porgie_pudding_and_lies_taki

Good read

Canada Taxes & Dependents | Armstrong Economics
— Read on www.armstrongeconomics.com/world-news/taxes/canada-taxes-dependents/

Sad but true

If a reform produces unintended consequences of a troubling sort, succeeding generations of reformers will make use of those consequences not to undo the original reform, but rather to call for new action that requires an ever-larger federal government… (essay by Chuck Chalberg)
— Read on www.theimaginativeconservative.org/2018/02/how-reform-laws-backfire-chuck-chalberg.html

The reformers have their own agendas

If the recent uptick marks the typical mid-to late-cycle inflection up in inflation, how long after did the next recession typically occur? On average 3 years, which would put it in late 2020…
— Read on www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-02-24/how-long-rising-inflation-leads-recession-deutsche-answers

Just a matter of time