These are some year end thoughts submitted by consummate entrepreneur, doctor, inventor and the  Grand Poobah, Dr. Doug Ott.  Though not his creation they are collections from others he has accumulated over his years of reading.

Looking is not the same as seeing.

Experience does not guarantee expertise.

Confidence is not competence.

Intellectual laziness cannot be made up by brute force

Ideas are cheap and plentiful;  it is execution that matters

Most people just don’t want something bad enough

It is your responsibility to make your dreams come true

Have a point of view, believe in something, know what you are willing to fight for, draw a line in the sand

When you don’t know what you believe everything becomes an argument

Constraints are advantages in disguise.

Be a visionary, not a reactionary.

Pare down to the essence but don’t remove the poetry

We like to believe we are rational creatures, but we are more driven by emotion. Even in intellectual affairs we tend to make up our minds first by emotion, and only then rationalize our decisions intellectually.  I call this emotional rationalism. Advertisers have known this since Moses sold the Hebrews on the idea of circumcision.

In the face of irrefutable evidence it is still quite possible to reach the wrong conclusion. See ‘emotional rationalism.’

Living without a goal opens up avenues of discovery and opportunity often missed by those with their nose to the grindstone.  All who wander are not lost.

Efficiency is a form of leverage. Many companies stripped down to their bare essentials to maximize their profit found themselves fragile and vulnerable in the face of the unexpected. (Tips to Nassim Taleb)

When unlimited information is available to everyone, then no one is responsible for knowing anything.

If there is one thing we learn from history it is that too often we do not learn from history.

In politics, as in medicine, one should revisit the diagnosis before doubling down on the treatment.

The pursuit of clarity may be noble and it may be productive, but don’t expect it to win you many friends.

Forget fairness; it is a mirage.  Seek justice, but know that occasionally you will have to settle for revenge.

I had about two dozen postings in American Thinker this past year.  A few for those who may have missed them:

The New Aristocracy

Why Elitists Fail

Finding John Galt

The Price of Equality

The Immorality of Class Warfare

Many of the readers’ comments are well worth the time.

Walter Williams writes in Townhall.com,  Free or Fair? In order to expose the fallacies of the debate between free trade and fair trade he poses the question of how we would view our basic constitutional rights if they were written to provide ‘fairness’ instead of freedom.

Excerpt:

How supportive would you be to a person who argued that he was for free religion but fair religion, or he was for free speech but fair speech? Would you be supportive of government efforts to limit unfair religion and unfair speech? How might life look under a regime of fairness of religion, speech and the press?

Suppose a newspaper published a statement like “President Obama might easily end his term alongside Jimmy Carter as one of America’s worse presidents.” Some people might consider that fair speech while other people denounce it as unfair speech. What to do? A tribunal would have to be formed to decide on the fairness or unfairness of the statement. It goes without saying that the political makeup of the tribunal would be a matter of controversy. Once such a tribunal was set up, how much generalized agreement would there be on what it decreed? And, if deemed unfair speech, what should the penalties be?

Williams continues to explore the distinction in the issue of trade:

The bottom line is that what’s fair or unfair is an elusive concept and the same applies to trade. Last summer, I purchased a 2010 LS 460 Lexus, through a U.S. intermediary, from a Japanese producer for $70,000. Here’s my question to you: Was that a fair or unfair trade? I was free to keep my $70,000 or purchase the car. The Japanese producer was free to keep his Lexus or sell me the car.

Mercantilists have absolutely no argument when we recognize that trade is mostly between individuals. Mercantilists pretend that trade occurs between nations such as U.S. trading with England or Japan to appeal to our jingoism.

Global warming- I mean ‘climate change’- mongers are unfazed by record cold temperatures. They are astute at explaining how record cold temperatures do in fact prove man made global warming and carbon dioxide emissions actually support their warming hypothesis, but only after the fact.   True understanding is of value in the power to predict.

In the American Thinker Howard Richman and Raymond Richman examine who really did understand the climate issues in The Winner of This Year’s ‘Best Climate Predictor’ Award (Clue It Wasn’t Al Gore!). The press seems to give the most coverage to those who understand the issue the least.  The worst predictor, Al Gore himself, received a Noble Prize for the subject he clearly understands very poorly.

Excerpts:

Gore’s prediction is clearly the worst of these three, yet he was awarded a million-dollar Nobel Peace Prize for bringing this issue to the attention of the world.  Schwarzenegger’s prediction comes in second-worst, yet he is angling for a global warming spokesman job in the Obama administration.  The IPCC’s prediction is third-worst, yet it just won a huge expansion of the U.N. bureaucracy at the Cancun Climate Conference.

Corbyn, like many other astrophysicists, has figured out that climate change is mainly due to extraterrestrial forces, including solar activity and cosmic rays, not carbon dioxide.  If you still believe in the theory that carbon dioxide causes climate change, click here to watch an excellent lecture by Jasper Kirkby at the Cern, one of Europe’s most highly respected centers for scientific research.  Astrophysicists have discovered that changes in the rate of cosmic ray inflow cause climate change and that solar activity shields the earth from cosmic rays.

I do not pretend to know enough about the science of climatology to know which side of this debate  is correct, but it is reckless and foolish to pretend that the debate does not exist.  Predictions of catastrophe from a population bomb (Thomas Malthus), massive toxin exposure (Silent Spring), running out of oil (Club of Rome), or now a disastrous outcome of man induced climate change have not ended as predicted even from noted scientists of their day.  How can we be certain that global warming does in fact exist, that it is necessarily a bad thing if it does (more people die from excessive cold that excessive heat and warming could lengthen growing seasons and increase food production), that it is man made and finally, that any of the policies promising to correct it would be effective.

It is hard to imagine any field of science with more known and unknown variables than global climate prediction. When the tone of the language resembles religious fanaticism rather than an objective reality I can not help but remain skeptical whether scenarios of disaster serve the desires of political power rather than constructive scientific inquiry.