Saturday, August 23, 2025
on retentiveness...................
Progress, far from consisting in change, depends on retentiveness. When change is absolute there remains no being to improve and no direction is set for possible improvement: and when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
I didn't much like college philosophy either.....
Santayana took to teaching as a swan to ping-pong. He disliked the idea of being thought "essentially" a professor. As for teaching philosophy, he found the enterprise quite hopeless: "I can't take the teaching of philosophy seriously in itself, either as a means of being a philosopher or of teaching the young anything solid." As a teacher, his interest, he tells us in his autobiography, "was never in facts or erudition, but always in persons and ideas." He seems never to have viewed teaching philosophy mare than a "decent means of livelihood," to which he was never fully committed. Not difficult to sympathize. College philosophy is dry bones; it teaches that this is nominalism, that materialism, the other naturalism; that Plato thought this, that Aristotle thought that, and that Descartes came along and thought very differently. Not much to do with genuine thinking here.
-Joseph Epstein, from his essay on George Santayana in Essays in Biography
Playing well with others...........
Psychologists, philosophers, and religions all agree on one thing. Helping others is a better path to happiness than helping only yourself. Giving makes you happier than receiving. People with strong social ties live longer, healthier, happier lives. The most miserable people are self-absorbed. So aim to be the opposite. Living for others is how to live.
-Derek Sivers, How To Live: 27 conflicting answers and one weird conclusion
Good question....................
..............since the majority seems neither happy nor financially independent.
Why should we pay so much attention to what the majority thinks?
a voice inside................
A library is a good place to soften solitude; a place where you feel part of a conversation that has gone on for hundreds and hundreds of years even when you're all alone. The library is a whispering post. You don't need to take a book off a shelf to know there is a voice inside that is waiting to speak to you, and behind that was someone who truly believed that if he or she spoke, someone would listen.
-Susan Orlean, The Library Book
Friday, August 22, 2025
Pretty sure the answer is yes.....
But that means that every night then, before you go to bed, you’re stuffing your head with one poem, one short story, one essay—at the end of a thousand nights, Jesus God, you’ll be full of stuff, won’t you?
Thursday, August 21, 2025
Hard to argue with this one.................
One
conclusion she draws that most of us likely can agree with is that we now live
in a world in which “politics and science corrupt each other.”
Ah, the Constitution........................
In no part of the constitution is more wisdom to be found than in the clause which confides the question of war or peace to the legislature, and not to the executive department. Beside the objection to such a mixture of heterogeneous powers: the trust and the temptation would be too great for any one man: not such as nature may offer as the prodigy of many centuries, but such as may be expected in the ordinary successions of magistracy. War is in fact the true nurse of executive aggrandizement. In war a physical force is to be created, and it is the executive will which is to direct it. In war the public treasures are to be unlocked, and it is the executive hand which is to dispense them. In war the honors and emoluments of office are to be multiplied; and it is the executive patronage under which they are to be enjoyed. It is in war, finally, that laurels are to be gathered, and it is the executive brow they are to encircle. The strongest passions, and most dangerous weaknesses of the human breast; ambition, avarice, vanity, the honorable or venial love of fame, are all in conspiracy against the desire and duty of peace.
Wednesday, August 20, 2025
interesting.........................
Men sometimes submit to shame, to tyranny, to conquest, but they never long suffer anarchy. There is no people so barbarous that they escape this general law of humanity.
-Alexis-Charles-Henri Clérel de Tocqueville
the ocean of the unknown.........
There are frontiers where we are learning, and our desire for knowledge burns. They are in the most minute reaches of the fabric of space, at the origins of the cosmos, in the nature of time, in the phenomenon of black holes, and in the workings of our own thought processes. Here, on the edge of what we know, in contact with the ocean of the unknown, shines the mystery and beauty of the world, and its breathtaking.
-Carlo Rovelli, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics
regulatory arbitrage.....................
It is a curious fact that the earliest known set of laws, Hammurabi's Code, which dates back to around 1750 BC, is largely concerned with the regulation of interest. The Babylonian king codified existing credit practices with the customary interest rates set in stone—quite literally, since the Code survives for posterity engraved in cuneiform script on a basalt stele. . . .
Drawing up financial regulations is one thing but getting people to follow the spirit of the law is another matter. What we call 'regulatory arbitrage'—namely, the attempt by financial practitioners to evade regulation—turns out to be as old as the law itself.
-Edward Chancellor, The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest
Hard to argue with this..............
In the big picture of contemporary science, there are many things that we do not understand, and one of the things that we understand least about is ourselves.
-Carlo Rovelli, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics
Tuesday, August 19, 2025
A big if............................
If Virtue & Knowledge are diffus'd among the People, they will never be enslav'd. This will be their great Security.
On exercise...........................
The absolute best exercises are the ones you will do every day, no misses, no excuses. Just saying.
start......................
The real
question is not "What is my current position?" but rather, "What
is my current trajectory?" Doing nothing builds nothing. Put yourself on
the path to something better. Start small, but make sure you start."
interesting theory....................
"the decline of the heavy manufacturing industry in the American “Rust Belt” is often thought to have begun in the late 1970s, when the United States suffered a significant recession. But theory suggests, and data support, that the Rust Belt’s decline started in the 1950s when the region’s dominant industries faced virtually no product or labor competition and therefore had little incentive to innovate or become more productive."
The rust-belt’s problems were caused not by its industries' and workers' confrontation with economic competition but, instead, from their insulation from competition— . . .
-Don Boudreaux, from this post
counsel.............................
who benefits....................?
As Bastiat understood, a very low rate of interest may benefit the rich, who have access to credit, more than the poor.
-Edward Chancellor, The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest
Good questions.......................
If the natural tendencies of mankind are so bad that it is not safe to permit people to be free, how is it that the tendencies of these organizers are always good? Do not the legislators and their appointed agents also belong to the human race? Or do they believe that they themselves are made of a finer clay than the rest of mankind?
Franklin at age 62.............................
The year is 1768..............
Above all, as he admitted in some letters, his views were in flux and he was still trying to make up his mind. . . .
That was the crux of Franklin's dilemma. He had rendered himself suspect, he noted in a letter to a friend, "in England of being too much of an American, and in America of being too much of an Englishman." With his dreams for a harmonious and growing British Empire, he still hoped he could be both. "Being born and bred in one of the countries and having lived long and made many agreeable connections in the other, I wish all prosperity to both," he proclaimed. Thus, he was intrigued, even hopeful, about securing a government job in which he could try to hold the two parts of the empire together.
-Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life,
Monday, August 18, 2025
seeking to re-humanize...............
And purging style. If
communications were a form of fashion, text messages would be Mao suits:
sparse, functional, and devoid of charm. Although understandable when pressed
for time, they are now used even when time is abundant. . . .
If we don’t carefully explore and initiate ways to connect with one another, ways that go beyond electronic grunts, then we risk discovering that the scariest robots in the workplace are ourselves.
-Michael Wade, two excerpts from here
a vague nobleness.................
A foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds, adored by little statesmen and philosophers and divines. With consistency a great soul has nothing to do. He may as well concern himself with his shadow on the wall. Speak what you think now in hard words, and to-morrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said to-day.—'Ah, so you shall be sure to be misunderstood.'—Is it so bad, then, to be misunderstood? Pythagoras was misunderstood, and Socrates, and Jesus, and Luther, and Copernicus, and Galileo, and Newton, and every pure and wise spirit that ever took flesh. It is great to be misunderstood.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, from his essay, Self-Reliance
"He is a man so sui generis, that I do not wonder at his not being apprehended till he is seen. His influence is of a curious sort. There is a vague nobleness and thorough sweetness about him, which move people to their very depths, without their being able to explain why. The logicians have an incessant triumph over him, but their triumph is of no avail. He conquers minds, as well as hearts, wherever he goes; and without convincing anybody's reason of any one thing, exalts their reason, and makes their mind worth more than they ever were before."
-Harriet Martineau, as quoted in Mary Oliver's Upstream essay on Emerson
on acquiring knowledge............
If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.
-Haruki Murakami, as borrowed from herea "system of response".............
I rarely worry about taking care of myself in most situations. This confidence is because I have a "system of response' to address external factors that my instructors have drilled so deeply into my muscle memory I don't have to think about what I'd do in a fight, as my body knows how to respond automatically. That's the beauty of having a reliable system—it gets the indecisive, overthinking, pausing brain out of the way and lets the body's natural but practiced response mechanism react without the conscious mind slowing things down.
-Kevin Ervin Kelley, Irreplaceable
responded......................
Remember the bad times as well as the good. Life is hard and always has been. You are what you are today not just because of the music you blasted or the traditions you followed but because of how you responded to the bad times.
-Jay Heinrichs, Aristotle's Guide to Self-Persuasion
nowise...........................
44. Make the best of today. Those who aim instead at tomorrow's plaudits fail to remember that future generations will be nowise different from the contemporaries who so try their patience now, and nowise less mortal. In any case, can it matter to you how the tongues of posterity may wag, or what views of yourself it may entertain?
-Marcus Aurelius, Meditations, Book Eight
imagination....................
10 The name of the Lord is a strong tower;
The Rightous runs into it and is safe.
11 A rich man's wealth is his strong city,
And like a high wall in his own imagination.
12 Before destruction the heart of man is haughty
But humility goes before honor
-The Holy Bible, The Open Bible, Proverbs 18: 10-12
1
essence........................
Perhaps, simply feeling grateful and living with a prayerful attitude are the essence of the entire spiritual journey.
Bastiat.........................
L'État c'est la grande fiction à travers laquelle tout le monde s'efforce de vivre aux dépens de tout le monde.
The State is the great fiction through which everyone endeavours to live at the expense of everyone else.
About interest..................
"The emergency of interest to incentivize lending is the most significant of all innovations in the history of finance," writes the financial historian William Goetzmann. This point is well made. Finance allows people to transact across time. The farmer borrows barley to sow his fields but must wait until harvest before repaying the debt. Industrial processes—even the light crafts-based industries of the Ancie4nt Near East—require time in production from raw materials to the sale of finished goods. A text from third-millennium Mesopotamia shows that the preparation of cloth took over a year. Foreign trade consumes a lot of time. When capital is tied up in industry or trade, the interest charge bears some connection to the time used in production.
In any society with private property, whether in Mesopotamia or later civilizations, the payment of interest is required to induce people to lend their resources.
-Edward Chancellor, The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest
on being careful what you wish for..............
. . . no trap is so deadly as the one you set for yourself, and suddenly the men who had humbled a king and boldly waged ideological war against the monarchs of Europe were reduced to frightened little pawns. Running for their lives, some managed to escape, with the faint hope of inciting civil war in the provinces, while others were placed under house arrest.
-Jay Winik, The Great Upheaval: America and the Birth of the Modern World: 1788-1800
After the fall of the French monarchy in January of 1793, the triumphant Girondins were soon trumped by the Jacobins, who didn't survive too long either.
The more things change...............
As he prepared to leave for England in November 1764. Franklin wrote a letter to his daughter. It included paternal exhortations to be "dutiful and tender towards your good mama" and typical Franklin advice, such as "to acquire those useful accomplishments arithmetic and bookkeeping." But it also contained a more serious note. "I have many enemies," he said. "Your slightest indiscretions will be magnified into crimes, in order the more sensibly to wound and afflict me. It is therefore the more necessary for you to be extremely circumspect in all your behavior that not advantage may be given to their malevolence."
-Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life
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