Saturday, July 29, 2023
Dipping into Chris Lynch's..................
..................................latest post on Substack:
If the Democrats would say, "We'll have Joe Biden resign because of signs of dementia and age but only if you do the same for Mitch McConnell" - I be 100% fine with that trade... Sam Bankman-Fried of FTX has had all campaign charges against him dropped. Here's a list of the politicians SBF or FTX donated money to. Curious to see if any return his stolen money. And people wonder why there's a perception about unequal justice in the US... Albert Einstein once said, "The value of a college education is not the learning of many facts but the training of the mind to think." Modern education seems to consist in mainly getting the student not to think for themselves but to obey. Gigantic difference which will cause great harm.
wisdom..........................
. . . getting another opinion seldom is a lengthy process and not getting extra insight may wind up gobbling massive amounts of time.
-Michael Wade, from herewaiting....................
I have used up more than
20,000 days waiting to see
what the next would bring.
-Ted Kooser and Jim Harrison, Braided Creek: A Conversation in Poetry
Opening paragraphs.....................
For years I've had a recurring dream in which I am caught in a futile struggle to get somewhere. Sometimes I'm running up a hill; sometimes I am climbing over boulders or swimming against a current. Often a loved one is in trouble or something bad is about to happen. My mind is speeding frantically, but my body feels heavy and exhausted; I move as if through molasses. I know I should be able to handle the problem, but no matter how hard I try, I can't get to where I need to go. Completely alone and shadowed by the fear of failure, I am trapped in my dilemma. Nothing else in the world exists but that.
-Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life With the Heart of a Buddha
Love...............................
Love has bridged the high rises of despair we were about to fall between. Love has been a penlight in the blackest, bleakest nights. Love has been a wild animal, a poultice, a dinghy, a coat. Love is why we have hope.
-Anne Lamott, Almost Everything: Notes on Hope
kindred spirits.................................
On the surface, the two men were quite different. Churchill was more robust in every way; born twenty-eight years before Orwell, he outlived him by fifteen years. But in crucial respects they were kindred spirits. In their key overlapping years in the middle of the century, the two men grapples with the same great questions—Hitler and fascism, Stalin and communism, America and its preemption of Britain. They responded with the same qualities and tools—their intellects, their confidence in their own judgments even when those judgments were rebuked by most of their contemporaries, and their extraordinary skill with words. And both steered by the core principles of liberal democracy: freedom of thought, speech, and association.
-Thomas E. Ricks, Churchill & Orwell: The Fight for Freedom
What if?..............................
Yes, we need to make a living. But how do we make a life? It might not be simply about the money. When the world is in turmoil, when our health is at risk and the future seems murky, perhaps paychecks and productivity simply aren't enough. Perhaps we can't manage our way into the future. What if we created the best job someone ever had? What if we built an organization people would genuinely miss if it were gone? How much better would our work be if we could simply talk about the work without hesitation? What if the work we did made things better?
-Seth Godin, as extracted from The Song of Significance
Friday, July 28, 2023
cyclicality.....................................
Everything is cyclical, and the thing that’s easy miss about cyclicality is that it doesn’t require any outside force to push it in the other direction. The act of getting big is enough to make you smaller without being pushed by anyone or anything.
A lot of mistakes in life come when you think risk is something caused by external forces, when in fact the weight of your own success is enough to pull you down without any outside help.
-Morgan Housel, from here
Thursday, July 27, 2023
Fifty years ago..........................
Deliberately.......................
His footsteps were a rhythm, a cadence that connected him to the world around him. As he strolled through the quiet streets, he noticed the subtle changes that only the early morning bestowed upon the world – the dew-kissed grass, the soft whispers of the wind, and the occasional song of a waking bird.
Checking in......................
...........................with Aldous Huxley:
After silence that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music.
The propagandist's purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.
Man is impelled to invent theories to account for what happens in the world. Unfortunately, he is not quite intelligent enough, in most cases, to find correct explanations.
Too much consistency is as bad for the mind as it is for the body. Consistency is contrary to nature, contrary to life. The only completely consistent people are the dead.
Anarchism seems to me more likely to lead to desirable social change than highly centralized, dictatorial Communism.
Happiness is not achieved by the conscious pursuit of happiness; it is generally the by-product of other activities.
At least two thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice, and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity, idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political idols.
That all men are equal is a proposition which at ordinary times no sane individual has ever given his assent.
Habit converts luxurious enjoyments into dull and daily necessities.
Most human beings have an almost infinite capacity for taking things for granted.
Thanks Rob
Likely true............................
In the Midwest if someone says, "I'll let you know" - that means they're not coming.
Wednesday, July 26, 2023
tree of wealth...................
Wealth, like a tree, grows from a tiny seed. The first copper you save is the seed from which your tree of wealth shall grow. The sooner you plant that seed the sooner shall the tree grow. And the more faithfully you nourish and water that tree with consistent savings, the sooner you may bask in contentment beneath its shade.
-George Clason, The Richest Man in Babylon
Years......................
All those years
I had in my pocket.
I spent them
nickel-and-dime.
-Ted Kooser and Jim Harrison, Braided Creek: A Conversation in Poetry
Easy does it...............................
In summary, he told me, you want to exert effort in meditation practice but not more than necessary: “A bird flaps its wings and then soars on momentum, and doesn’t flap again until it needs to.”
If you spend time in Buddhist meditation settings you’ll hear variants of this advice frequently offered to “achiever” personalities who mistakenly think the more fierce their effort, the more plentiful their likely results. “Don’t try so hard to make something happen” “Soften your gaze” “Ease up” All different ways of getting at the simple but hard-to-follow guidance: Just relax.
Relaxation, as Tim Gallwey says, happens only when allowed, not as a result of “trying” or “making.”
“The art of relaxed concentration unlocks a secret to winning: not trying too hard”
-as taken from this Ben Casnocha post
The Happiness Advantage...............
You can increase your success rates for the rest of your life and your happiness levels will flatline, but if you raise your level of happiness and deepen optimism it turns out every single one of your success rates rises dramatically compared to what it would have been at negative, neutral, or stressed.
-Shawn Achor, as culled from here
Martin Gurri.........................
..............................on the New Censorship:
A remarkable transvaluation has occurred since that idealistic time. In essence, the postmodern establishment Left has reversed the terms of the Jeffersonian ideal. The threat to democracy is now society—a realm of injustice and oppression, in which human wolves perpetually devour the weak. Trump and Musk stand as archetypes of the predator. They represent the authoritarian impulse, and they can manipulate the dull-minded masses, even unto insurgency, by spreading falsehoods and fake news. The pandemic showed them willing to kill with their lies, to undermine the authority of science.
Only a powerful, watchful government, in the hands of the Party of Truth, can impose democracy on a troubled society by controlling the words said, as well as the means of communication that convey them, to the public. A wise guardian class, advised by specialists, must be mobilized to assume control of politics and culture. In this framework, opposition can never be legitimate—it belongs to the Party of Lies. Those who follow Savio’s exhortation and throw themselves on the gears of the great institutions will be ground to pulp—for their own good.
free speech......................
There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part. You can't even passively take part! And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop! And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it — that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all!
-Mario Savio, from a 1964 speech at UC-Berkeley
Ohio is voting on......................
............a proposed amendment to our State's constitution. The question being asked in this special election (it is the only issue on the ballot) is should we make it more difficult to amend the constitution. The amendment would raise the threshold for passage of a constitutional amendment from 50.01% to 60%. Reasonable people might conclude that it should be difficult to amend a constitution. Reasonable people might also conclude that the Ohio legislature has a history of embarrassing itself, and we the people deserve the right to pull on their chain from time to time. My recommendation would be, if you are eligible, vote. The process, at least in Licking County, is painless and easy. Vote.
Tuesday, July 25, 2023
Seven questions to ask yourself....................
..............................when you don't know what you want.
When it comes to eating .............
............................or just living the healthy life, do not ignore this advice.
Maradona and the 'Hand of God' ..........
More broadly, there is in this culture a humiliation, an abjectness, in always playing by the rules.
-Martin Amis, from his essay, In Search of Dieguito Maradona
projections................
In order to observe the movement of your own mind and heart, of your whole being, you must have a free mind, not a mind that agrees and disagrees, taking sides in an argument, disputing over mere words, but rather following with an intention to understand—a very difficult thing to do because most of us don't know how to look at, or listen to, our own being any more than we know how to look at the beauty of a river or listen to the breeze among the trees.
When we condemn or justify we cannot see clearly, nor can we when our minds are endlessly chattering; then we do not observe what is; we look only at the projections of what we think we are or what we should be, and that image, that picture, entirely prevents us from seeing ourselves as we actually are.
-J. Krishnamurti, Freedom from the Known
indelibly engraved.....................
In 1750, Mayhew, fresh from receiving his Scottish divinity degree, preached a sermon in Boston celebrating, somewhat shockingly, the hundredth anniversary of the execution of King Charles I. One of the lessons, the radical young man noted, was that "no civil rules are to be obeyed when they enjoin things that are inconsistent with the commands of God." Indeed, such resistance to authority was "a duty, not a crime."
Adams was paying attention to such thinking. He would later note that this was the sermon that made Mayhew's reputation. He studied it repeatedly before he went off to college. "I read it, till the Substance of it was incorporated into my Nature and indelibly engraved on my Memory," he told Thomas Jefferson decades later. "It was read by every Body, celebrated by Friends, and abused by Enemies."
-Thomas E. Ricks, First Principles
Recommended*...............................
I'm anxious that you should be a good scholar, but I'm more anxious that you should be a good clean man. And if you graduate with a sound conscience, I shan't care so much if there are a few holes in your Latin. There are two parts to a college education—the part that you get in the schoolroom from the professors, and the part that you get outsideof it from the boys. That's the really important part. For the first can only make you a scholar, while the second can only make you a man.
*Ed. Note: This book contains letters supposedly written in the 1890s. As such some readers may find the attitudes and mores of that time different and difficult.
Fifty years ago.................................
On the economics...................
...................of running for President. Don Surber has one perspective:
Now look at them Bozos, that’s the way you do it. You dump on Trump on C-Span TV. That ain’t working, that’s the way you do it. Money from donors and your trips for free.
Ah yes, a little Dire Straits for a nation in dire straits.
YIMBYism versus NIMBYism.........................
.....................................interesting stuff. Always good to remember to be careful around the "isms".
Three ideas...................................
........................from James Clear:
Most of the time you don't need more information, you need more courage.
Avoiding mistakes is an underrated way to improve. It's easier to fend off a bad day than achieve a perfect day. Rather than do your best, avoid your worst.
Being good at what you do is partially about competence, but not exclusively. Two other things that matter: Reliability. You do what you say you're going to do—on time and as expected. Enthusiasm. You're excited to be here and eager to work on this problem. Skills matter, but in many cases it's your reliability or attitude that separates you from the pack.
Investing in farmland..................
................For the patient person, investing in farmland can be a really good thing. One caveat: don't do it with borrowed money. From personal experience, that takes a lot of the fun out of it. Back story is here.
reveries..................
Jozef Israels Oil on Canvass circa 1870s
There are certain half-dreaming moods of mind in which we naturally steal away from noise and glare, and seek some quiet haunt where we may indulge our reveries and build our air castles undisturbed.
Monday, July 24, 2023
well served........................
Postmodern times are well served by premodern thinkers, especially when it comes to caring about cosmos and psyche.
-Matthew Fox, Meister Eckhart: A Mystic Warrior for Our Times
watering the arid wastelands..........
The task of the modern educator is not to cut down jungles but to irrigate deserts. The right defence against false sentiments is to inculcate just sentiments.
-C. S. Lewis, from The Abolition of Man
perfectly imperfect.....................
America is great because the people who came before us and built this country were imperfect. And they knew it. Their obvious imperfections gave them humility. That is why they envisioned a country where no single imperfect person—or small group of imperfect people—would have all the power. Instead, all of us—imperfect as we are—would come together and work on problems together and figure things out together. While each and every one of us is imperfect, the final result of that democratic, constitutional process would achieve the most perfect solutions possible.
-Kristi Noem, Not My First Rodeo: Lessons from the Heartland
perception...................
Many things seem to us greater in imagination than in reality.
-Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Works, Book Two, Chapter 6
John Adams................
The dominant political narrative of colonial American elites was the story of how the Roman orator Cicero put down the Catiline conspiracy to take over Rome. John Adams aspired to be the Cicero of his time—that is, the key political figure in late eighteenth-century America.
He would come very close to achieving that vaulting ambition, which is surprising, because he was in many ways the odd man out among the first four presidents. He was the only one who spent time as a schoolteacher, working for wages. The other three were emotionally reserved, while he wore his feelings on his sleeve and tended to wallow in them all his life. They were Virginians, while he was a son of Massachusetts, a colony founded by Puritans in 1628. He was also the only one of the four never to own an enslaved human being.
Most significant of all, Adams also was the first of the four men to move towards revolt. He was entertaining radical notions while still an adolescent—and while George Washington was striving to achieve rank and standing in the structure of the British empire. Indeed, long before the adolescent Adams crossed the Charles River to Harvard, he was full of thoughts about how to better resist British authority. It helped that he was both bright and naturally irascible. He had been questioning authority for years. More than most men, he was born to do so.
-Thomas E. Ricks, First Principles: What America's Founders Learned from the Greeks and Romans and How That Shaped Our Country
Much has changed...........................
In America the aristocratic element has always been feeble from its birth; and if at the present day it is not actually destroyed, it is at any rate so completely disabled that we can scarcely assign to it any degree of influence on the course of affairs.
The democratic principle, on the contrary, has gained so much strength by time, by events, and by legislation, as to have become not only predominant, but all-powerful. No family or corporate authority can be perceived; very often one cannot even discover in it any very lasting individual influence.
-Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Book 1, Chapter III, published in 1835
"Change".......................
People who talk incessantly about "change" are often dogmatically set in their ways. They want to change other people.
Change....................
To be in process of change is not an evil, any more than to be the product of change is a good.
-Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, 4:42
Change.......................
Incredible change happens in your life when you decide to take control of what you do have power over instead of craving control over what you don't.
withness.................................
There is no reason why social dancing of the kind I have been praising should not return. Indeed, the craze for Salsa suggests that it might. And there is no reason to think that young people will not find some other way of rediscovering the withness that they will not find by clubbing. Maybe the rise of sport as a social arena is to be explained, at least in part, by this hunger for an elegant display of the human body. And maybe, when young people search, as they must, for a paradigm of withness, they will find it on the football field, or learn it from watching what goes on there. All is not lost, if that is so. But it is worth drawing one last lesson from this thought. Social dancing of the kind I have praised did not merely exercise the virtues of freedom and order. It obeyed the precept of equality. Anybody could learn the steps, and everybody could join in, regardless of how agile, young, or attractive they were. The new replacement activities arise to a considerable extent from the official culture of equality and political correctness, with its fear of elegance and distinction. They are nevertheless massively discriminatory. The cult of sport, good though it is for our sense of withness, requires us to turn the spotlight on young, athletic, and attractive people, and to rub into the remainder the humiliating awareness that they are not part of the game. In losing the love of dancing, therefore, we have lost a major source of our love for ourselves.
-Roger Scruton, Confessions of a Heretic
Sunday, July 23, 2023
risk.............................
The greatest successes are explained by the establishment of clever arrangements for the reduction of risks rather than by excessive risk taking.
-as culled from here
surly populists...........................
Today, industrial policy’s political purpose is to defuse angry populism that is blamed on “deindustrialization” displacing workers. But declines in the portions of labor forces devoted to manufacturing are normal as nations become richer, regardless of wide variations in nations’ economic policies. And the U.S. government’s would-be industrializers should hope that surly populists, who are eager to cause society’s upper crust to crumble, do not notice how industrial policy makes eager bedfellows of government bureaucrats and corporate elites — for their mutual benefit.
-Don Boudreaux, channeling George Will
"apocalypse was in the air"..........
As traditional faiths are waning, environmentalism is coming to resemble a faith for the new age. Christianity offered guidance for how one should live and conduct one's personal affairs in a manner pleasing to God, but the green movement seeks to steer people to a life in better harmony with nature. Environmentalism, said Joel Garreau, has become "the religion of choice for urban atheists."
Like medieval Catholicism, the green faith foresees impending doom caused by human activity. To people in the Middle Ages, wrote Barbara Tuchman, "apocalypse was in the air." The Final Judgement, brought on by human sin, was not only real but imminent. St. Norbert in the twelfth century predicted the event would come within the lifetime of his contemporaries. Similarly, the environmental movement—whether religious, scientific, or leftist—routinely traces a direct line from human materialism to looming catastrophe.
Recommended................................
Always be quick to give credit, and to take blame.
To manage yourself use your head, to manage others use your heart.
Don't let your inbox become your to-do list run by others.
Don't ever work for someone you don't want to become.
Experiences are fun, and having influence is rewarding, but only mattering makes us happy. Do stuff that matters.
Greatness is incompatible with optimizing in the short term.
The greatest teacher is called "doing."
About freedom.......................
. . . Freedom includes an act of choice, but its root is in the realization that the self is no sovereign, in the discontent with the tyranny of the ego. Freedom comes about in the moment of transcending the self, . . .
-as cut-and-pasted from this post
Ouch.......................
The problem that’s been threatening Western democracies for years, and which is captured in books like Martin Gurri’s The Revolt of the Public, is the widespread loss of faith in institutional authority. At first this was a technical problem, caused by a monstrous new surfeit of information on the Internet, allowing the public for the first time to see warts that were always there. What’s happening now is different. Even those of us who never trusted leaders before at least trusted such people to act in their self-interest. We thought that in emergencies, even the worst officials would suspend their stealing and conniving long enough to do the bare minimum.
As these documents show, however, we can’t even have that expectation.
-Matt Taibbi, from here
Checking in with.............................
................................Thomas Sowell:
Ideas, as the raw material from which knowledge is produced, exist in superabundance, but that makes the production of knowledge more difficult rather than easier.
Facts do not "speak for themselves." They speak for or against competing theories. Facts divorced from theory or visions are mere isolated curiosities.
Competition does a much more effective job than government at protecting consumers.
Understanding the limitations of human beings is the beginning of wisdom.
Much of the social history of the Western world over the past three decades has involved replacing what worked with what sounded good. In area after area - crime, education, housing, race relations - the situation has gotten worse after the bright new theories were put into operation. The amazing thing is that this history of failure and disaster has neither discouraged the social engineers nor discredited them.
Envy plus rhetoric equals 'social justice'.
When you want to help people, you tell them the truth. When you want to help yourself, you tell them what they want to hear.
People who pride themselves on their "complexity" and deride others for being "simplistic" should realize that the truth is often not very complicated. What gets complex is evading the truth.
Maturity is not a matter of age. You have matured when you are no longer concerned with showing how clever you are, and give your full attention to getting the job done right. Many never reach that stage, no matter how old they get.
Some of the biggest cases of mistaken identity are among intellectuals who have trouble remembering that they are not God.
Racism has never done this country any good, and it needs to be fought against, not put under new management for different groups.
Since this is an era when many people are concerned about 'fairness' and 'social justice,' what is your 'fair share' of what someone else has worked for?
Although I am ready to defend what I have said, many people expect me to defend what others have attributed to me.
thanks Chris
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