Saturday, July 16, 2022
According to......................
...........the blogspot counting thing, the 20,000-post threshold has been crossed. My apologies for all the litter on the Intertunnel floor. Hopefully some value has been extracted.
The Peshtigo Principle...................
When you think you’ve got all the facts, look a little more.
When you think you’ve got a good solution to a problem, push on to see if there’s a better one.
When you think you’ve done your due diligence, take a deep breath and make one more call.
The important fact you need could be out there, just out of sight.
In the background...............................
Checking in...........................
...........................with Bertrand Russell:
He could not, in any case, have succeeded in politics, because of his very exceptional intellectual integrity; he was always willing to admit the weak points on his own side and the strong points on that of his opponents. (Russell talking about his father)
She had that indifference to money which is only possible to those who have always had enough of it. (Russell talking about his grandmother)
My grandfather’s library, which became my schoolroom, stimulated me in a different way. There were books of history, some of them very old; I remember in particular a sixteenth-century Guicciardini. There were three huge folio volumes called L’Art de vérifier les dates. They were too heavy for me to move, and I speculated as to their contents; I imagined something like the tables for finding Easter in the Prayer Book. At last I became old enough to lift one of the volumes out of the shelf, and I found, to my disgust, that the only ‘art’ involved was that of looking up the date in the book. Then there were The Annals of Ireland by the Four Masters, in which I read about the men who went to Ireland before the Flood and were drowned in it; I wondered how the Four Masters knew about them, and read no further. There were also more ordinary books, such as Machiavelli and Gibbon and Swift, and a book in four my mental development 11 volumes that I never opened: The Works of Andrew Marvell Esq. M.P. It was not till I grew up that I discovered Marvell was a poet rather than a politician. I was not supposed to read any of these books; otherwise I should probably not have read any of them.
William Lord Russell, who was executed under Charles II, was held up for special admiration, and the inference was encouraged that rebellion is often praiseworthy.
In 1895, when in Berlin, I made a study of German Social Democracy, which I liked as being opposed to the Kaiser, and disliked as (at that time) embodying Marxist orthodoxy. For a time, under the influence of Sidney Webb, I became an imperialist, and even supported the Boer War. This point of view, however, I abandoned completely in 1901; from that time onwards, I felt an intense dislike of the use of force in human relations, though I always admitted that it is sometimes necessary.
But China did one thing for me that the East is apt to do for Europeans who study it with sensitive sympathy: it taught me to think in long stretches of time, and not to be reduced to despair by the badness of the present.
The question of discipline in childhood, like all other practical questions, is one of degree.
History has always interested me more than anything else except philosophy and mathematics. I have never been able to accept any general schema of historical development, such as that of Hegel or that of Marx. Nevertheless, general trends can be studied, and the study is profitable in relation to the present.
The relation of philosophy to social conditions has usually been ignored by professional philosophers. Marxists are interested in philosophy as an effect, but do not recognize it as a cause. Yet plainly every important philosophy is both.
. I have always ardently desired to find some justification for the emotions inspired by certain things that seemed to stand outside human life and to deserve feelings of awe. I am thinking in part of very obvious things, such as the starry heavens and a stormy sea on a rocky coast; in part of the vastness of the scientific universe, both in space and time, as compared to the life of mankind; in part of the edifice of impersonal truth, especially truth which, like that of mathematics, does not merely describe the world that happens to exist.
-All excerpts from his essay, "My Mental Development"
Way out........................
Of all 36 ways to get out of trouble, the best way is — leave.
-maybe a Chinese proverb
central problem......................
Protection of life and property is indeed a crucial need that has bedeviled every society that has ever existed. How to fend off violent aggression is history's central problem. It cannot easily be solved . . .
-James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg, The Sovereign Individual: Mastering The Transition To The Information Age
Seat belts fastened.................................
Today most people believe that cultures are more matters of taste than sources of guidance for behavior that can mislead as well as inform. We are all too keen to believe that all cultures are created equal, too slow to recognize the drawbacks of counterproductive cultures. This is especially true of the hybrid cultures that have begun to emerge in the hothouse of subsidy and intervention in many parts of the world in this century. Like the criminal subculture of America's inner cities, they retain incoherent bits of pieces of cultures appropriate to earlier stages of economic development and combine them with values for informing behavior in the Information Age.
The Information Revolution, therefore, will not merely release the spirit of genius, it will also unleash the spirit of nemesis. Both will contest as never before in the millennium to come.
The shift from an Industrial to an Information Society is bound to be breathtaking. The transition from one stage of economic life to another has always involved a revolution. We think that the Information Revolution is likely to be the most far-reaching of all. It will reorganize life more thoroughly than either the Agricultural Revolution or the Industrial Revolution. And its impact will be felt in a fraction of the time. Fasten your seat belts.
-James Dale Davidson and Lord William Rees-Mogg, The Sovereign Individual: Mastering The Transition To The Information Age
Wednesday, July 13, 2022
The hopeful birth..........................
.........................of a sub-division:
Episode 25: Phase Two water line installation.
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| The blue pipe is the water main. All that pipe will be in the ground today, we hope. |
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| One pipe at a time |
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| Making a solid, leak-proof connection between pipes |
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| Beginning the tap for the service lateral |
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| Unrolling the 3/4" copper water service line |
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| setting the shut-off valve |
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| One water lateral installed. Next...... |
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| Phase One from a distance. Houses sprouting everywhere |
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| All this since February |
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| Your basic new house. Awaiting the drywallers |
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| "Sold". My favorite sign |
Sunday, July 10, 2022
demand...........................
War has long been a rite of passage, with new generations feeling a need to prove their courage and earn the right to supplant their elders. Clay's generation grew up on the hero tales of the American Revolution—the stories of boldness in the political arena and valor on the battlefield. Often implicit in the stories, as in the stories of every generation of elders, was skepticism that the younger generation had what it took to match the elders' feats. Where was the George Washington of the younger set, the general who could smite the British as Washington had done at Yorktown? Where were the Patrick Henry and Thomas Jefferson, whose words inspired a nation and brought down an empire? Where were the James Madison and Alexander Hamilton, the framers of a new government for a new nation?
Henry Clay had heard the stories and felt the skepticism. He was burdened with no conspicuous personal sense of inferiority, but he reckoned that an ambitious young politician could do worse than demand that the country complete the work commenced by the generation of the founders.
-H. W. Brands, Heirs of the Founders: The Epic Rivalry of Henry Clay, John Calhoun and Daniel Webster
concentrated, coherent, and connected.....
It is almost a physical law: What is bloated beyond its proportions inevitably collapses. The mind must not wander from goal to goal, or be distracted by success from its sense of purpose and proportion. What is concentrated, coherent, and connected to its past has power. What is dissipated, divided, and distended rots and falls to the ground. The bigger it bloats, the harder it falls.
-Robert Greene, 48 Laws of Power
Mania..............................
All the major troubles we have had in the last half century have been caused by people who have let politics become a mania.
-Robert Conquest, The Dragons of Expectation: Reality and Delusion in the Course of History
Parenting advice........................
...............................from Louis L'Amour:
From earliest childhood she had been taught to accept responsibility, and to make her own decisions and abide by them. "Every youngster wants to be grown-up," her father had said, "but the difference between a child and an adult is not years, but rather it's a willingness to accept responsibility, to be responsible for one's own actions.
-as culled from his book, Flint
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