While certainly not an early...................

 

.............adapter to Chat GPT, I have been entertaining myself with it lately.  The assignment given was: "Write a 1000 word essay, in the style of William F. Buckley, Jr., about Donald Trump and Tariffs." 

     Much fun resulted.  Here are a few paragraphs:

 I am, as the reader may know, no neophyte in the realm of economic dialectics. I have, with considerable constancy, allied myself with the venerable edifice of classical liberal economics—an edifice first sketched by Smith and polished by the manicured hands of Hayek and Friedman. It is from the lofty watchtower of this ideological architecture that I peer, somewhat dyspeptically, at the resurgent specter of protectionism, not as it was once preached by wool-coated McKinleyites or argued by ink-smudged populists, but as it is now theatrically brandished by one Donald J. Trump.

God, I miss Buckley's use of the language.  Nobody talks like this anymore.

Mr. Trump, whom one cannot ignore however strenuously one might try, has made a veritable catechism of tariffs. With the fervor of a man who has discovered a new form of ancient fire, he has resuscitated the dusty implements of economic nationalism and presented them to the American polity with all the solemnity of a patriarch offering stone tablets. One would think he had conjured the tariff ex nihilo, so untroubled is he by precedent or nuance.

Not an expert on the subject myself, but I think Chat GPT misses the extent that Trump uses the threat of tariffs as a cudgel to bring the "art of the deal" into play.

Here we arrive at the crux of the matter, and I must tread delicately, lest I be accused of ivory tower disdain. It is true that many Americans have been ill-served by the globalization of the last three decades. Factories have closed, communities have suffered, and a certain elite consensus has too often ignored the cultural and economic dislocation wrought by untrammeled free trade. But the solution to this malaise is not to embrace the economic equivalent of bloodletting. . . .

Let us, therefore, speak with clarity: trade, like liberty, is messy. It does not guarantee equal outcomes, nor does it always flatter our national pride. But it is, on the whole, a generator of wealth, innovation, and peace. To embrace it is not to surrender sovereignty but to recognize that prosperity is not a zero-sum game.

adept...........................

The human mind is incredibly adept at rationalizing pleasurable but unhelpful behavior.

Self-restraint is also, on present evidence, not universally distributed.

-Clay Shirky, from this essay on the impact of AI on education

via

the notion of originality..............

 

. . . in the quest for ideas, the entrepreneur should not overly obsess with the new.  That we tend to venerate the original without always penetrating the notion of originality.  Sometimes, if not frequently, the best idea is a refinement of something that already exists or a recombination of parts that no one else has thought to assemble.  And success comes so often in the remorseless perfection of execution.

-Albert Read, The Imagination Muscle

possible..........................

 

     Sony had the benefit of cheaper wages in Japan, but its business model was ultimately about innovation, product design, and marketing.  Morita's "license it" strategy couldn't have been more different form the "copy it" tactics of Soviet Minister Shokin.  Many Japanese companies had reputations for ruthless manufacturing efficiency.  Sony excelled by identifying new markets and targeting them with impressive products using Silicon Valley's newest circuitry technology.  "Our plan is to lead the public with new products rather than ask them what kind of products they want," Morita declared.  "The public does not know what is possible, but we do."

-Chris Miller, Chip War

In the background..................

Jimmy Buffett Changes in Latitudes, Changes in Attitudes

 

Opening paragraphs.............

 

     A cold day in December.  Long afterward, after the assassination and all the pain, the older man would remember with great clarity the young man's grace, his good manners, his capacity to put a visitor at ease.  He was concerned about the weather, that the old man not be exposed to the cold or to the probing questions of the freezing newspapermen, that he not have to wait for a cab.  Instead he had guided his guest to his own car and driver.  The older man would remember the young man's good manners almost as clearly as the substance of their talk, though it was an important meeting.

-David Halberstam, The Best and the Brightest

the trail.................

 

The thing to remember when traveling is that the trail is the thing, not the end of the trail.  Travel too fast and you miss all you are traveling for.

-Louis L'Amour, Ride the Dark Trail

Memorial Day........................................

 

human dignity.........................

 

It's like the greatest painting in the modern world, which is Rembrandt's The Return of the Prodigal Son.  The story's in place.  All the conflict and tension are there, but the narrative was in place.  Rembrandt can take that for granted.  Mennonites, Jews, and others there in the Netherlands all connect to this particular way of understanding human dignity at its deepest level.  You go beyond Christianity, beyond Judaism, just human and raw, and le lays it out right before he dies, lays it down.  Now jump to our period where, existentially, we got so much conformity, complacency, and cowardliness being rewarded that courage, they squeeze out.  Now courage is the enabling virtue of all other virtues—all of them.  So, even we Christians, okay, we got faith, we got hope, and the greatest of these, love.  But where's courage?

None of them work without courage.  You can't love without courage.  God can't use cowards.  You can't sustain your faith without courage.

-Cornel West, as excerpted from Truth Matters: A Dialogue on Fruitful Disagreement in an Age of Division by Robert P. George and Cornel West

 

The Return of the Prodigal Son     1669 by Rembrandt

    painting details may be found here

Fifty years ago......................

At the movies: Charles Bronson in Breakheart Pass

 

from first page to last...........

 

His life shows, the Yale scholar A. Whitney Griswold has noted, "what Puritan habits detached from Puritan beliefs were capable of achieving."

     He was also far less inward looking than Cotton Mather or other Puritans.  Indeed, he poked fun at professions of faith that served little worldly purpose.  As A. Owen Aldridge writes, "The Puritans were known for their constant introspection, fretting about sins, real or imaginary, and agonizing about uncertainty of their salvation.  Absolutely none of this soul-searching appears in Franklin.  One can scrutinize his work from first page to last without finding a single note of spiritual anxiety."

-Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

Sixty years ago...............................

On the TV: The Avengers hire Diana Rigg

   

in trust.................

 

. . . we who pass do not own this land, we but use it, we hold it briefly in trust for those yet to come.  We must not reap with seeding, we must not take for the earth without replacing.

-Louis L'Amour, The Lonesome Gods

everything........................

 

Everything is a test.  Because how you do anything is an indication of how you do everything.

-Paul Rabil

Creed.....................

 

     This plan for pursuing virtue, combined with the religious outlook that he had simultaneously been formulating, laid the foundation for a lifelong creed.  It was based on pragmatic humanism and a belief in a benevolent but distant deity who was best served by being benevolent to others.  Franklin's ideas never ripened into a profound moral or religious philosophy.  He focused on understanding virtue rather than God's grace, and he based his creed on rational utility rather than religious faith.

-Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

freedom.........................

Instant gratification will kill your dreams.   You have to sacrifice short-term freedom in order to earn long-term freedom.

-Sahil Bloom

start noticing.......................

 

Problems scream for attention while successes only whisper. We're wired to chase whatever's loudest.

Your biggest opportunity isn't hiding in what's broken; it's hiding in what's working that you've stopped noticing.

-Farnum Street

Checking in...................................

.......................................with Scott Adams:

Nothing defines humans better than their willingness to do irrational things in the pursuit of phenomenally unlikely payoffs. This is the principle behind lotteries, dating, and religion.

The office is designed for "work," not productivity. Work can be defined as "anything you'd rather not be doing." Productivity is a different matter. Telecommuting substitutes two hours of productivity for ten hours of work.

I have a saying: "Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep."

Of all the things that influence elections, it appears that information is the least significant. Elections are won by the candidate whose staff members are the most skilled at manipulating the voters. That's not necessarily a bad thing, because you have to be quite smart to figure out the best way to manipulate millions of individuals into marching in the same direction.

I predict that news outlets will try to compensate for the loss of relevant news by focusing on stories that are more shocking and depressing than ever. At least that way they'll get your attention and sell advertising even if the stories aren't "news" in the traditional sense.

Unless you work alone, one of the biggest assaults on your happiness is something called a meeting. A meeting is essentially a group of people staring at visual aids until the electrochemical activity in their brains ceases, at which point decisions are made.

People think they follow advice but they don't. Humans are only capable of receiving information. They create their own advice. If you seek to influence someone, don't waste time giving advice. You can change only what people know, not what they do.

Express gratitude. Give more than is expected. Speak optimistically. Touch people. Remember names. Don't confuse flexibility with weakness. Don't judge people by their mistakes; rather, judge them by how they respond to their mistakes. Remember that your physical appearance is for the benefit of others. Attend to your own basic needs first; otherwise you will not be useful to anyone else.

Remember there’s no such thing as a small act of kindness. Every act creates a ripple with no logical end.

A bit over-optimistic..................

 

It is, I think, as I survey the picture from every angle, a simple fact that the chief hindrance to progress comes from three elements which, thank God, grow less in importance with the growth of a clearer understanding of our purposes on the part of the overwhelming majority. These groups are those who seek to stir up political animosity or to build political advantage by the distortion of facts; those who, by declining to follow the rules of the game, seek to gain an unfair advantage over those who are willing to live up to the rules of the game; and those few who, because they have never been willing to take an interest in their fellow Americans, dwell inside of their own narrow spheres and still represent the selfishness of sectionalism which has no place in our national life.

-President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s Memorial Day Address at Gettysburg, 1934, as culled from here