The Licking County Courthouse is all dressed up for the holiday.
Many
situations in life are similar to going on a hike: the view changes once you
start walking.
You don't
need all the answers right now. New paths will reveal themselves if you have
the courage to get started.
-James Clear, from this edition
Intuition appears to be something that, while inevitably fallible, is often more reliable, much quicker, and capable of taking into account many more factors, than explicit reasoning, including factors of which we may not even be consciously aware. It also underlies motor, cognitive and social skills, and is the ground of the excellence of the expert. The attempt to replace it with rules and procedures is a typical left hemisphere response to something it does not understand – a response that is, alas, powerfully destructive. We inhabit a world in which reason is needed more than ever before, yet in which reason is so narrowly conceived that it drives out true understanding. For that we would have had to learn respect for the power of intuition, not as opposed to reason, but as both grounding it, and the means for it to fulfill its potential in making judgments in life.
Aristotle described virtue as a kind of craft, something to pursue just as one pursues the mastery of any profession or skill. "We become builders by building and we become harpists by playing the harp," he writes. "Similarly, then, we become just by doing just actions, temperate by doing temperate actions, brave by doing brave actions."
Virtue is something we do.
It's something we choose.
Not once, for Hercules's crossroads was not a singular event. It's a daily challenge, one we face not once but constantly, repeatedly. Will we be selfish or selfless? Brave or afraid? Strong or weak? Wise or stupid? Will we cultivate a good habit or a bad one? Courage or cowardice? The bliss of ignorance or the challenge of a new idea?
Stay the same . . . or grow?
The easy way or the right way?
-Ryan Holiday, Wisdom Takes Work
A free political order is possible only when the fundamental political act is a mutual promise between governor and governed. But no human being can be trusted to keep his or her word when he or she has access to power—a power not available to opponents. Sooner or later, if not in the lifetime of the ruler, then in that of his or her descendants, there is an inescapable risk of tyranny. Freedom can only be guaranteed in a political system where the constitution sovereign is God himself, where he has sought and obtained the free consent of the governed, and where he has bound himself to respect human freedom.
-Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning
So whether you're in retail, finance, real estate, education, health care, computer services, transportation, or communications, you have an incredible opportunity to be just as intentional and creative—as unreasonable—about pursuing hospitality as you are about every other aspect of your business. Because whether a company has made the choice to put their team and their customers at the center of every decision will be what separates the great ones from the pack.
Unfortunately, these skills have never been less valued than they are in our current hyperrational, hyperefficient work culture. We are in the middle of a digital transformation. That transformation has enhanced many aspects of our live, but too many companies have left the human behind. They've been so focused on products, they've forgotten about people. And while it may be impossible to quantify in financial terms the impact of making someone feel good, don't think for a second that it doesn't matter. In fact, it matters more.
The answer is simple, if not easy: create a culture of hospitality. Which means addressing questions I've spent my career asking: How do you make the people who work for you and the people you serve feel seen and valued? How do you give them a sense of belonging? How do you make them feel part of something bigger than themselves? How do you make them feel welcome?
-Will Guidara, Unreasonable Hospitality: The Remarkable Power of Giving People More Than They Expect
To devise a method of barring incompetence and knavery from public office, and of selecting and preparing the best to rule for the common good—that is the problem of political philosophy.
-Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy
Perhaps the largest barrier to housing availability and affordability in places like California are permitting rules, land use restrictions, and construction codes that make it absurdly expensive, or even outright impossible, to construct new single or multi-family housing. Part of this is a conspiracy of current homeowners to protect and increase the value of their property -- after all, new home construction inevitably reduces their property value (or future escalation) by adding competing inventory and/or by creating congestion and loss of property-value-enhancing open space. Another part of this is "everything bagel liberalism" where every program has to achieve every Leftish goal -- eg we want new housing but it has to have solar and appliances with a minimum SEER and use recycled materials and have a certain number of units set aside for protected groups and create a conservation easement on part of the land, etc etc -- until even units that can get permitted are too expensive for all but the very wealthy.
-Warren Meyer, from this post
It doesn’t matter if you are trying to pick a new skill, or get fit. Discipline is the secret sauce. Do it long enough and it becomes a part of who you are. Then rewards compound. Every seed of talent, when watered with consistent input grows to bear multiple fruits.
-Tanmay Vora, from here
We live in a world of unintended consequences.
-Michael Wade, as he posts on technology and AI
P. S. Check his recommended reading list at the end
...........takes a look at the housing affordability crisis:
It won’t make you feel any better as a young person in the U.S. to know that it’s even harder for people to afford homes in other countries around the globe.
But these numbers help put things into perspective that things can always get worse.
If the government doesn’t make this a priority the housing affordability crisis likely will get worse in the coming years.
Editor's Note: The only thing the government can do to relieve the housing affordability crisis is to remove many of the regulatory barriers to new development. At the end of the day, supply versus demand still rules. If it were easier to build new housing, more housing would be built. Once supply exceeds demand, or even matches it, prices will moderate. Any attempt to subsidize home buyers or tenants, will only cause prices to keep increasing. Trust me on this.
My Sweetie has been co-chair of the Granville Turkey Trot for a while now. The 5k run/trot/walk/waddle event, held Thanksgiving mornings, draws a good crowd. Despite temperatures hovering around freezing, over 2,000 friendly folk participated this morning. This is the twentieth year for the event; it has become a family tradition. The Granville Turkey Trot is also a fund-raiser. All of the money goes to the Food Pantry Network of Licking County. Last year the committee wrote them a check for around $130,000. My Sweetie is hoping they top that this year.
If the nation is generous, governments take it upon themselves to cure all the ills of humanity. They will revive commerce, they say; they will bring prosperity to agriculture, develop factories, encourage arts and letters, abolish poverty, etc., etc. All that is needed is to create some new government functions and pay for some new functionaries.
-Frédéric Bastiat, from his Economic Sophisms, Second Series (1848)
It is often said that history provides us with no action replays. It is not given to controlled experiments. We only learn what can go wrong after it has already done so, and by then it is too late to put it right. In fact, the history of freedom in the modern world can be seen as a testing ground for different conceptions of politics.
-Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning
A long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason.
-Thomas Paine, as culled from his pamphlet, Common Sense
He had made a hobby of studying the American Civil War and he had always been disturbed by the passions which it had unleashed in the country, the tensions and angers just below the surface, the thin fabric of the society which held it all together, so easy to rend.
-David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest
Human cooperation under the system of the social division of labor is possible only in the market economy. Socialism is not a realizable system of society's economic organization because it lacks any method of economic calculation. . . .
Socialism cannot be realized because it is beyond human power to establish it as a social system. The choice is between capitalism and chaos. A man who chooses between drinking a glass of milk and a glass of a solution of potassium cyanide does not choose between two beverages; he chooses between life and death. A society that chooses between capitalism and socialism does not choose between two social systems; it chooses between social cooperation and the disintegration of society. Socialism is not an alternative to capitalism; it is an alternative to any system under which men can live as human beings.
-Ludwig Von Mises, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics
"The end of being is to know; and if you say the end of knowledge is action—why yes, but the end of that action again, is knowledge." Self-knowledge and self-cultivation he now sees not as a means to something but as the ends and goals of life itself.
-Robert D Richardson, Jr., Emerson: The Mind on Fire
Let no one be slow to seek wisdom when they are young nor weary in the search when they have grown old. For no age is too early or too late for the health of the soul. And to say that the season for studying philosophy has not yet come, or that it is past and gone, is like saying that the season for happiness is not yet or that it is now no more.
-Epicurus, as cut-and-pasted from this letter
Utopianism always begins as an awakening. It ends, if it is allowed to run through its phases, as a tyranny of the pure. There is a slower path. It lacks ecstasy and salvation. It is not rough or revolutionary. It can feel like a letdown, particularly to the young and the impatient. It accepts imperfection as the price of freedom. It chooses a decent polity over a redeemed one. History suggests this is the wiser bet. Its lesson is unromantic and, for that reason, trustworthy: whenever we try to storm heaven, we tend to wake up in a very familiar place, counting the costs and wondering how the rope we thought we could use to pull ourselves up became a noose.
Dustin Sharp, as he concludes this essay
History has shown that we shouldn't rely on governments to protect us financially. On the contrary, we should expect most governments to abuse their privileged positions as the creators and users of money and credit for the same reasons that you might commit those abuses if you were in their shoes.
-Ray Dalio, Principles for Dealing with The Changing World Order
My only financial goal is to go to bed every night with a sense of calm, knowing my family is OK and that I can spend the next day doing what I want, when I want, with whom I want, for as long as I want.
-Morgan Housel, The Art of Spending Money: Simple Choices for a Richer Life
Chesterton knew that progressivism and capitalism were bedfellows that would produce unnatural offspring. He was also conscious that the politicization of sex would lead to confusion instead of fulfilling the desire for equality or the happiness of both sexes. Sexlessness, the refusal to acknowledge the God-ordained design of sexual difference, would be the result of the battle of the sexes. Once cut off from its spiritual roots, equality would lead not to fairness but to a culture of lies and the popularizing of consumable otherness. Chesterton was sure that, in the name of equality, standards would be attacked and what Pope Benedict XVI would later name a "dictatorship of relativism" would become the norm.
-Duncan Reyburn, The Roots of the World: The Remarkable Prescience of G. K. Chesterton
Roughly 66% of US households own real estate, and for the typical American homeowner, that property makes up roughly half of their household’s net worth. . . .
The US housing market alone was worth a hefty sum of $55T as of September 2025. For context, the entire US stock market is worth roughly $62.2T.
The best are always learning.
Read like crazy.
Think alone.
Keep a journal.
Write stuff down the moment you see it.
Review regularly.
Memorize the big ideas to fluency.
Attack your best ideas.
And never get high on your own supply.
You don't have to be gifted. You do have to be deliberate.
-Shane Parrish, from this edition
We want to know that the little things are little, and the big things are big, before it is too late; we want to see things now as they will seem forever—"in the light of eternity." We want to learn to laugh in the face of the inevitable, to smile even at the looming of death. We want to be whole, to coordinate our energies by criticizing and harmonizing our desires; for coordinated energy is the last word in ethics and politics, and perhaps in logic and metaphysics too. "To be a philosopher," said Thoreau, "is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live, according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust." We may be sure the if we can but find wisdom, all things else will be added unto us. "Seek ye first the good things of the mind," Bacon admonishes us, "and the rest will either be supplied or its loss will not be felt." Truth will not make us rich, but it will make us free.
-Will Durant, The Story of Philosophy
. . . that action is the answer. Thinking about your problems will never solve them. Waiting around to feel like doing something means you'll never do it. It taught me that no one is coming to save you. You must save yourself from yourself. You have to force yourself to move make little moves forward, all day, every day, especially when you don't feel like it. . . .
Waiting for the right time. Waiting to feel ready or a little less afraid. Waiting for someone to come along and tell you that today is the day to start. The problem with waiting is no one is coming. The only permission you need is your own.
-Mel Robbins, The Let Them Theory
I've always relied on logic to make sense of myself and the world.
A prescriptionist at heart, I've always looked to reason to find the rhyme, the practical to get to the mystical, the choreography to find the dance, the proof to get to the truth, and reality to get to the dream. I've always believed that art emulates life, not the other way around.
I've been finding that tougher to do lately.
-Matthew McConaughey, Poems & Prayers
When I get honest, I admit I am a bundle of paradoxes. I believe and I doubt. I hope and get discouraged. I love and I hate. I feel bad about feeling good. I feel guilty about not feeling guilty. I am trusting and suspicious. I am honest and I still play games. Aristotle said I am a rational animal; I say I am an angel with an incredible capacity for beer.
To live by grace means to acknowledge my whole life story, the light side and the dark. In admitting my shadow side, I learn who I am and what God's grace means. As Thomas Merton put it, "A saint is not someone who is good but who experiences the goodness of God."
The gospel of grace nullifies our adulation of televangelists, charismatic superstars, and local church heroes. It obliterates the two-class citizenship theory operative in many American churches. For grace proclaims the awesome truth that all is a gift. All that is good is ours, not by right, but by the sheer bounty of a gracious God.
-Brennan Manning, The Ragamuffin Gospel
It is a glorious destiny to be a member of the human race, though it is a race dedicated to many absurdities and one which makes many terrible mistakes: yet, with all that, God Himself gloried in becoming a member of the human race. A member of the human race! To think that such a commonplace realization should suddenly seem like news that one holds the winning ticket in a cosmic sweepstake.
-Thomas Merton, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander
...................embraces Albert Camus.
Camus defines “The Absurd” as the tension between the human desire for meaning and the universe’s refusal to provide any. Meaning is not waiting for you like an unclaimed bag at a sad regional airport. It’s not included in your welcome kit at birth. The universe just shrugs and says, “lol, no.”
The evil that is in the world always comes of ignorance, and good intentions may do as much harm as malevolence, if they lack understanding. On the whole men are more good than bad; that, however, isn't the real point. But they are more or less ignorant, and it is this that we call vice or virtue; the most incorrigible vice being that of an ignorance which fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill. There can be no true goodness, nor true love, without the utmost clear-sightedness.
. . . those societies that draw on the widest range of people and give them responsibilities based on their merits rather than privileges are the most sustainably successful because 1) they find the best talent to do their jobs well, 2) they have diversity of perspectives, and 3) they are perceived as the fairest, which fosters social stability.
-Ray Dalio, Principles for Dealing with The Changing World Order: Why Nations Succeed and Fail
He advocated no sure cure for all the sorrows of the world, and doubted that such a panacea existed.
1. Complexity kills more companies than competition.
2. Long-term greedy, not short-term stupid.
3. Commitment owns you. You don’t own it.
4. The best seek out the details.
5. Failing fast works in software, not restaurants.
6. There is no balance. You make choices.
7. Obsession isn’t a problem. It’s an advantage.
8. People want to feel special in a world where they don’t.
9. The greatest risk is underinvesting in what works.
10. Build something worthy of those who believed in you.
.............that God loves us and wants us to be happy.
Enjoy your NFL Sunday. Mother nature has cooperated and the leaves are all to wet to rake! Hooray!
So much of what people call "conviction" is actually a willful disregard for facts that might change their minds. It's dangerous because conviction feels like a good attribute, while its opposite—being wishy-washy—makes you feel and sound like you don't know what's going on.
The strategy of having strong beliefs, weakly held, is often helpful.
When I was young, my dad gave me a paperweight that read, "What would you attempt to do if you knew you could not fail?" That's what I was thinking about when Daniel and I wrote, "We will be Number One in the world," on a cocktail napkin. . . .
Most of the chefs on the 50 Best list had made their impact by focusing on innovation, on what needed to change. But as I thought about the impact I wanted to make, I focused on the one thing that wouldn't. Fads fade and cycle, but the human desire to be taken care of never goes away.
Daniel's food was extraordinary; he was undeniably one of the best chefs in the world. So if we could become a restaurant focused passionately, intentionally, wholeheartedly, on connection and graciousness—on giving both the people on our team and the people we served a sense of belonging—then we'd have a real shot at greatness.
-Will Guidara, Unreasonable Hospitality: The Remarkable Power of Giving People More Than They Expect
The concept of obligations takes precedence over that of rights, which are subordinate and relative to it. A right is not effective on its own, but solely in relation to the obligation to which it corresponds. The successful fulfilment of a right comes not from the person who possesses it, but from others who recognize that they have an obligation towards that person. The obligation takes effect once it is recognized. If an obligation is not recognized by anyone, it loses nothing of the plentitude of its being. But a right that is not recognized by anyone amounts to very little.
-Simone Weil, The Need for Roots
This should be interesting.
Been reading that the idea of a 50-year mortgage is being bandied about. Lots of commentary about why this is a horrible idea. The amount of extra interest the home buyer would pay—if they kept the mortgage for all fifty years—over a more traditional loan is staggering. But, while it is not for everyone, it could have its uses. It is essentially an interest-only loan. If your intent is to only live in a place for a few years, and you believe housing prices will still be inflating, then it could be a very viable option. Just be careful to avoid any pre-payment penalties. It is certainly not a panacea for the affordability problems we are currently facing.
Remember Alfred Nobel, later of Nobel Prize fame, who – reportedly – read his own obituary that was mistakenly printed when his brother died and a newspaper got mixed up. He was horrified at what he read and realized he should change his behavior.
Don’t count on a newsroom mix-up: Decide what you would like your obituary to say and live the life to deserve it.
Greatness does not come about through accumulating great amounts of money, great amounts of publicity or great power in government. When you help someone in any of thousands of ways, you help the world. Kindness is costless but also priceless. Whether you are religious or not, it’s hard to beat The Golden Rule as a guide to behavior.
I write this as one who has been thoughtless countless times and made many mistakes but also became very lucky in learning from some wonderful friends how to behave better (still a long way from perfect, however). Keep in mind that the cleaning lady is as much a human being as the Chairman.
I wish all who read this a very happy Thanksgiving. Yes, even the jerks; it’s never too late to change. Remember to thank America for maximizing your opportunities. But it is – inevitably – capricious and sometimes venal in distributing its rewards.
Choose your heroes very carefully and then emulate them. You will never be perfect, but you can always be better.
Warren Buffett, from his last annual letter
They cannot see that growth for the sake of growth is a cancerous madness, that Phoenix and Albuquerque will not be better cities to live in when their populations are doubled again and again. They would never understand that an economic system which can only expand or expire must be false to all that is human.
-Edward Abbey, Desert Solitaire: A Season in the Wilderness
Nature is our home, and in nature we are at home.
This strange, multicolored, and astonishing world that we explore—where space is granular, time does not exist, and things are nowhere—is not something that estranges us from our true selves, for this is only what our natural curiosity reveals to us about the place of our dwelling. About the stuff of which we ourselves are made. We are made of the same stardust of which all things are made, and when we are immersed in suffering or when we are experiencing intense joy, we are being nothing other than what we can't help but be: a part of our world.
Carlo Rovelli, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics
Humanity's capacity to invent solutions to its problems and to identify how to make things better has proven to be far more powerful than all of its problems combined.
-Ray Dalio, Principles for Dealing with The Changing World Order
Dear Kit,
I was so pleased to get your letter of November 12th a few minutes ago. As you can see from the length of time it took to get across that our mail has been almost nil for the past month or so. Right now the APO is specializing in clearing our Christmas boxes, so the letter mail is more or less overlooked. This sort of puts us between the dive and the deep - for we want our boxes and yet honestly think the letters ease the loneliness and homesickness that is so deep in our hearts. . . .
When Terry told me about the new baby I was happy as anything for both of you. And I can easily understand you joy and eagerness for the little boy or girl to round out your lovely trio.
I certainly can understand the worries of people about what kind of world the baby will be brought into. The life you and Terry and I and everyone else are living just now is certainly a miserable one and far from pleasant. Yet this much I know, the people of all countries will see to it that when this hell on earth is finished we will see a life and live a life that will be worthy of human beings and Christians. I know that even on my lowest and bluest days I have put into combat during the past two years never have I doubted that once the war was over we could manage to pull the strings of our lives together and forget all we have had to put up with. No one can ever realize just how precious and pleasant and hopeful life can be until it is almost snatched away. I have had one or two close calls that left me so scared I didn't realize how lucky I was. Then I knew so deep within my heart that it almost hurt that even in the midst of the most terrible war man has known just to live and be with people is worth all the hurts and agony man inflicts on man.
No Kit, a little child brought into the world at such a time as this is probably more fortunate than ever.
I seldom thought about this before I went into combat, but one begins to get a far different slant on all that life means. If you could see what these fellows go through for each other, how much each one depends on his buddy simply for his life, then you could know and appreciate all this talk of mine. Very few GIs are sentimental enough to talk about things like this and yet the American boy overseas is the most sentimental guy in the world.
Somehow out of all this madness and blindness the people of the world will find the true way of life as Christ taught so long ago. No matter how it may seem to us at the moment, there are the ever encircling arms of God to lead us through the blindness into the light. Something I saw before I went into the service comes back to me now—it runs on this order:
Kit, this must sound very jumbled and rather incoherent but I have been grasping for words as I write. How I wish I might be sitting with you and Terry. I know so well that it would be far easier to talk to you about this and then I could get across what is really in my heart and mind.
There is so much to live for and so many pleasant things to do for and with close friends, that it honestly hurts to be here.
But then two years of combat makes a man sentimental even though there is seemingly nothing but cynicism and bitterness in his heart. . . .
With my best wishes and love to each of you for a Merry Christmas!
Affectionately,
Dan
This is part of a letter my Dad wrote to a dear friend. Despite the heading, he was probably in Belgium, not Germany. The Battle of the Bulge started three days after he wrote this letter, and he participated in said battle. He enlisted, at age 29, shortly after Pearl Harbor. He was part of the Ninth Infantry that chased Rommel across Africa, fought in Sicily, then landed in Cherbourg on D-Day +3. He entered Germany and then was sent back home in early March of 1945, just before the crossing of the Remagen Bridge. As I grew up, Dad would NEVER talk about the war. It was only after returning from the fiftieth anniversary of D-Day at Normandy that he said he had a collection of old letters and offered me the chance to read them. Quite the gift from a father to a son. He died of congestive heart failure at age 84. I miss him still.
A salute to the veterans.
A mark of wisdom isn’t choosing quality over quantity or vice versa. It’s recognising that coffee and political philosophy require excellence, while daily steps and moments of stillness require accumulation.
Master this distinction and build a life that’s well-crafted and abundant; quality where it counts, quantity where it compounds. Sometimes less is more. Sometimes more is more.
Know the difference. Go be human.
The dominant modern belief is that the soundest foundation of peace would be universal prosperity. One may look in vain for historical evidence that the rich have regularly been more peaceful than the poor . . .
-E. F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered
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