In Personality Plus, Florence Littauer argues that there are four basic temperaments:

1. Popular Sanguine
2. Perfect Melancholy
3. Powerful Choleric
4. Peaceful Pragmatic

She also argues that knowing your temperament and those of others you interact with enables you to live a fuller, freer, richer life.

I don’t like these sorts of ideas, but I tested myself and found that my strongest tendency is as a Powerful Choleric with secondary Popular Sanguine aspects. It turns out to be scarily true.

5 Easy Theses is the promising title of a serious book by a man (James M. Stone) who has academic, government, and business credentials. But it was too dense and difficult to read. I gave up after the first thesis and skimmed the rest.

Stone’s idea for the book, though, is good: sensible ways to solve five big problems – the budget deficit (and federal debt), inequality, education, health care, and financial sector reform.

His solution for the budget deficit (the one I read) is to somehow force Congress not to enact projects or programs they can’t fund, to cease unnecessary tax deductions for big businesses (the gas industry, the farming industry, etc.), to get the Social Security Administration to stop expanding its coverage as the average mortality increases, and to repeal all corporate and personal deductions for taxes on debt.

What I’m Reading: Bill Bonner on “Do We Have a ‘Liberal Bias’?”
It’s true. We are a country sharply divided… on many issues, but none more starkly than Donald Trump.

Satori in Paris by Jack Kerouac is a short, semi-autographical novella about a trip the author took to Paris and Brittany to look into his family’s genealogy. Full, chock full, of interesting (though sometimes irrelevant) facts that display Kerouac’s fluency in French and knowledge of history, language, art, Buddhism, and literature. It is saved from pretention by the loose and easy writing style. Although written after he returned to Florida (didn’t know that he lived in Florida), it reads as if it was written as notes while he was traveling. Maybe most of it was.

The style is effective. And it seems like it could be emulated. I am inspired to try to write like him, just as Hemingway’s sparse but poetic style makes me want to imitate him.