You can’t be a successful investor if you look at the world with ironic detachment. If you are a naysayer. Or a cynic. Skeptical, yes, of course. But fundamentally you have to believe that individuals with tremendous willpower can do things. Great, shocking, inconceivable things.
-Bari Weiss, as extracted from here
.............with Michel de Montaigne:
The most certain sign of wisdom is cheerfulness.
We should tend our freedom wisely.
To distract myself from tiresome thoughts, I have only to resort to books; they easily draw my mind to themselves and away from other things.
We can be knowledgeable with another man's knowledge, but we can't be wise with another man's wisdom.
He who establishes his argument by noise and command, shows that his reason is weak.
Let us give Nature a chance; she knows her business better than we do.
Nothing is so firmly believed as that which we least know.
Ease crushes us.
A man with nothing to lend should refrain from borrowing.
There is no conversation more boring than the one where everybody agrees.
I quote others only in order the better to express myself
................................is common sense showing up in the unlikeliest of places?
The construction business is trying its hardest to catch up to the demand for housing. In our market, anyway, most of the existing available building lots are either under contract or have recently sold. Faithful readers may remember we had a whole passel of wondrous, wooded building lots available - seemed like for years. Thankfully, over the past twelve months, almost all of them have sold.
..............................."self-expansion."
But how does this increase love? It’s due to the criminally underrated concept of emotional contagion. When we feel excited, we associate it with what’s around us, even if that thing is not directly responsible. When we feel partner = fun, we enjoy their presence more. And that lets us be somewhat lazy by letting environments do the work for us. Go to a concert. Get on a roller coaster. You want a fairy tale? Great. Go fight a dragon together.
...........38 million light years distant. The mind reels.
photo copyright: Mark Hanson and Mike Selby. Enlargeable photo and explanation of Messier 96 may be found here.
..........Any Major Dude With Half A Heart offers up his "Not Feeling Guilty Mix, Volume 12."
..................may be found here.
No real secrets. As the Egyptians knew more than 4,000 years ago, if you want something to last, start with a strong foundation.
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| Shooting the Rapids Watercolor on paper. 1902 |
The Sun will not rise or set without my notice and thanks.
For in every adult there lurks a child - an eternal child, something that is always becoming, is never completed, and calls for unceasing care, attention, and education. That is the part of the human personality which wants to develop and become whole. But the man of today is far indeed from this wholeness. . . .
If there is anything that we wish to change in our children, we should first examine it and see whether it is not something that could better be changed in ourselves. Take our enthusiasm for pedagogics. It may be the boot is on the other leg. It may be that we misplace the pedagogical need because it would be an uncomfortable reminder that we ourselves are still children in many respects and still need a vast amount of education.
-C. G. Jung, from his essay, The Development of Personality found here.
Harlequin with Glass 1905
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| Portrait of Madame Canals 1905 |
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| The Accordionist 1911 |
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| Nude in a Black Chair 1932 |
When we think of Picasso we imagine Cubist tours de force like Guernica and Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, where horses have their heads turned around backward and young women pose with two eyes on one side of their faces. But the young Pablo used to plant himself in the Louvre before pure representational masterpieces by Rembrandt and Leonardo and copy them stroke for stroke.
-Steven Pressfield, from here
I looked at my friend and saw a man who had robbed me. Deeply disturbing. The ultimate in rejection.
-Dick Francis, High Stakes
A modest understanding of the dynamics of climactic change in past societies could well prove useful in the event that climates continue to fluctuate. If you know that a drop of one degree Centigrade on average reduces the growing season by three to four weeks and shaves five hundred feet off of the maximum elevation that crops can be grown, then you know something about the boundary conditions that will confine people's actions in the future. You can use this knowledge to forecast changes in everything from grain prices to land values. You may even be able to draw informed conclusions about the likely impact of falling temperatures on real income and political stability. In the past, governments have been overthrown when crop failures over several years raised food prices and shrank disposable incomes.
For example, it is no coincidence that the seventeenth century, the coldest in the modern period, was also a period of revolution worldwide. A hidden megapolitical cause of this unhappiness was sharply colder weather. It was so cold, in fact, that wine froze on the "Sun King's" table at Versailles. Shortened growing season produced crop failures and undermined real income. Because of the colder weather, prosperity began to wind down into a long global depression that began around 1620. It proved drastically destabilizing. The economic crisis of the seventeenth century led to the world being overwhelmed by rebellions, many clustering in 1648, exactly two hundred years before another and more famous cycle of rebellions. Between 1640 and 1650, there were rebellions in Ireland, Scotland, England, Portugal, Catalonia, France, Moscow, Naples, Sicily, Brazil, Bohemia, Ukraine, Austria, Poland, Sweden, the Netherlands, and Turkey. Even China and Japan were swept by unrest.
-James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg, The Sovereign Individual: Mastering the Transition to the Information Age
Stonehenge Watercolor 1835
The mysterious monument of Stonehenge, standing remote on a bare and boundless heath, as much unconnected with the events of past ages as it is with the uses of the present, carries you back beyond all historical records into the obscurity of a totally unknown period.
The future is disorder. A door like this has cracked open five or six times since we got up on our hind legs. It is the best possible time to be alive, when almost everything you thought you knew is wrong.
-Tom Stoppard, Arcadia
Politicians are like bad horsemen who are so preoccupied with staying in the saddle that they can’t bother about where they’re going.
Corporeal life is indeed difficult. To identify with the sheer physicality of one's flesh may well seem lunatic. The body is an imperfect and breakable entity vulnerable to a thousand and one insults—to scars and the scorn of others, to disease, decay, and death. And the material world that our body inhabits is hardly a gentle place. The shuddering beauty of this biosphere is bristling with thorns: generosity and abundance often seem scant ingredients compared with prevalence of predation, sudden pain, and racking loss. Carnally embedded in the depths of this cacophonous profusion of forms, we commonly can't even predict just what's lurking behind the near boulder, let alone get enough distance to fathom and figure out all the workings of this world. We simply can't get it under our control. . . .Only by welcoming uncertainty from the get-go can we acclimate ourselves to the shattering wonder that enfolds us. This animal body, for all its susceptibility and vertigo, remains the primary instrument of all our knowing, as the capricious earth remains our primary cosmos.
-David Abram, Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology
Globalization is starting to take shape around the globe in a whole new form. Reshoring of manufacturing was beginning before COVID but was accelerated by it. According to the capital managers at BlackRock, the last 30 years of globalization are being proven a mistake. Fears of overseas turmoil creating domestic economic turmoil makes U.S. production reshoring a national imperative. More and more this mantra will be true: If you want to sell in the U.S., you must make it in the U.S.
CHANGES IN THE TECHNIQUE OF WAR HAVE HAD more influence upon the course of history than is supposed by those whose attention is mainly centred upon economic causation. There has been, since the beginning of organized fighting, an oscillation between superiority of the defensive and superiority of the offensive. Broadly speaking, when the defensive is strong civilization makes progress, and when the offensive is strong men revert towards barbarism. Another oscillation has been between the importance of mere numbers and the importance of skill and elaborate equipment. In the Middle Ages, the knight in armour was an expensive unit, and the world was aristocratic; gunpowder abolished chivalry, and led by slow stages to citizen armies and democracy.
-Bertrand Russell, as extracted from this 1936 essay
............................with Cardinal Richelieu on the goings-on in the Ukraine:
You solicited my advice, Spengler, because you cannot bear the self-satisfied moralizing of the well-meaning people who set this tragedy into motion, and you are appalled by men of action who clean up the mess left by practitioners of the politics of virtue. Get a stronger stomach if you want to see under the surface of history – including the history that is unfolding before your squeamish eyes.
Why have our recent presidents insisted on being “transformative”? Nowhere do I find that Americans crave radical cosmetic surgery every four years—we just expect our leaders to take out the garbage. Yet between election and inauguration, the candidate who appeared to be a humble fellow-citizen on the campaign trail assumes the trappings of a divine emperor, expecting, with the wave of a mighty hand, to transform the world.
-Martin Gurri, as culled from here
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| A Storm (Shipwreck) Watercolor on paper 1823 |
It is only when we are no longer fearful that we begin to create.
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