A view of life and commercial real estate from Newark and Licking County, Ohio
. . . if we trace these through the foregoing essay on driving, I think we arrive at a better understanding of the central issue of politics: sovereignty.
To see a problem that needs fixing often stems from a failure to see that a solution has already been achieved—through the skill and intelligence of ordinary people.
To drive is to exercise one's skill at being free, and one can't help but feel this when one gets behind the wheel. It seems a skill worth preserving.
...........................................from the Babylon Bee.
Ed Note: I especially liked #6 and #7
.................men and women from Matthew Crawford:
The most impressive and successful women, like their male counterparts, seem not to feel burdened with responsibility to advance the arc of History; they just do what they do, and find their satisfaction in meeting the demands of their craft.
But we have wandered off the topic of what makes men strong (answer: women who demand strength).
As Rousseau said, if you want to men to be virtuous, teach women what virtue is. . . . Men will make themselves into whatever women prefer.
. . . working-class women prefer their men to be manly, and in that respect may be said to accept male norms as valid, even crucial. The standard feminist response is to say that in doing so, they suffer a false consciousness that guarantees their subordination. But that is hard to square with what one sees. In fact, working class "patriarchy" can look an awful lot like matriarchy.
The very qualities that are called "toxic" in a man often seem to count as "empowerment" in a woman.
Administrative mandates and therapeutic regimens multiply—speech and behavior are ever more closely monitored—to protect the delicate sensibilities of our empowered young women.
Anything that lets us see a clear connection between effort and consequences—and that helps us feel in control of a challenging situation—is a kind of mental vitamin that helps build resilience and provides a buffer against depression. . . . Flourishing—that of rats and humans alike—seems to require an environment with "open problem spaces" that elicit the kinds of bodily and mental engagement bequeathed us by evolution and cultural development.
-Matthew Crawford, Why We Drive: On Freedom, Risk and Taking Back Control
Throughout the past, as successive stages of social evolution unfolded, man's awareness followed rather than preceded the event. Because change was slow, he could adapt unconsciously, "organically." Today, unconscious adaptation is no longer adequate. Faced with the power to alter the gene, to create new species, to populate the planets or depopulate the earth, man must now assume conscious control of evolution itself. Avoiding future shock as he rides the waves of change, he must master evolution, shaping tomorrow to human need. Instead of rising in revolt against it, he must, from this historic moment on, anticipate and design the future.
-Alvin Toffler, from his 1970 classic, Future Shock
The most selfish thing in the world you can do is be generous. Your generosity will return you ten fold.
To you is granted the power of degrading yourself into the lower forms of life, the beasts, and to you is granted the power, contained in your intellect and judgment, to be reborn into the higher forms, the divine.
-Rabbi Jonathan Sacks: The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning
Ed. Note: Methinks if he had added "heart" to "intellect and judgment", he would have been on to something.
...........he has a pretty good sense of the real estate market:
We won’t be in this situation forever because something unexpected always happens eventually, but for now, we’re in a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t housing market.
If anyone tells you low interest rates help buyers, ignore them. Low interest rates help sellers - because low rates enable a buyer to pay a higher price while maintaining a lower monthly payment. Much of the "affordability" crisis in housing has been brought on by over a decade of ridiculously low interest rates. In real estate, low interest rates are inflationary.
You didn't ask, but I'll tell you anyway: any interest rates for borrowers that do not allow financial institutions to pay an interest rate to savers that exceeds the rate of inflation is too low.
I want to sit here longer, to move unhurried, to glide, to breathe, to be ordered but not scheduled, to release into reverie, to let my mind wander, my shoulders loosen, my being melt and flow with curiosity, delight, warmth, ease.
-Annie Mueller, from here
“Welcome. You’re one of us now. The Wi-Fi password is getoffmylawn.”
-Eric Barker shares the secret to aging gracefully
That’s because they understand what the work involves, and they don’t confuse effort with results.
-Seth Godin, from here
When liberal policies were simply abstract inanity, average Americans could roll their eyes, hold their tongues, and let their lives go on. But the radical Left made the abstract concrete for average Americans. For their part, average Americans have found the radical Left’s policies as unavoidable as they are unendurable.
-J. T. Young, as culled from here
With frustration and some regret, she studied murder. It lay in the quiet room on a sofa the color of good merlot, with heart blood staining a pale gray shirt beneath the silver bolt of a scalpel. Her eyes, flat and grim, tracked the body, the room, the tray of artfully arranged fruit and cheese on the low table.
-J. D. Robb, Celebrity in Death
When a situation looks grim, but also you're not sure exactly how things stand, you form theories that are attractive not because they are the most plausible, but because they give you something to do, and doing something is the only way not to be crushed by miasmic uncertainty and despair. Fetching water had given me a purpose. As so often happens for mortals like us, it turned out to be pointless purpose. But string enough of these together and you've got yourself a life, of sorts. We are playthings of the gods, and to provide amusement is not nothing.
-Matthew Crawford, Why We Drive: On Freedom, Risk and Taking Back Control
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