I read “About WIST” because I was curious. It’s a neat idea, and I have in the past wondered why I don’t make such a collection myself. But I know now that I have a safer way to store such gems. Safer because language itself is susceptible to propaganda, tyranny, and simple coercion. For example, consider that the leaders of the USA mostly believe that the Patriot Act is aptly named, on one hand, and Constitutional on the other. So I record the ideas rather than the words. But there’s only one recording device suited to that, and it is my mind. Now if I can only remember all those clever things I’d read…

Huxley’s essay has advanced my personal love of the maxim that the school of hard knocks is the best school. Indeed, one could be better prepared to learn in that school if one had the liberal education – the artificial education, as he calls it – that he describes. So I suppose there is a school better than the school of hard knocks, and it is the school in which the teacher knows that the school of hard knocks is the most important one, and prepares a student to learn in its classrooms.

Bucky invited me here, and for that, I thank him.