Ouch.......................

 Capitalism seems to have moved into an actively misanthropic stage. Corporations don’t just hate their workers. They hate their customers.

-Matt Feeney

Ouch....................

 

Ladies and gentlemen of the class of 2005 at Emory, real life is not college; real life is not high school. Here is a secret that no one has told you: Real life is junior high. The world that you’re about to enter is filled with junior high adolescent pettiness, pubescent rivalries, the insecurities of 13-year-olds, and the false bravado of 14-year-olds.

-Tom Brokaw, Emory University Commencement Address (2005) 

as found in this week's edition of Tim Ferriss's Five-Bullet Friday

splintered.................

 

     The modern experiment has been the act of dethroning both literal human sovereignty and the representatives of the sacred order, and replacing them with purely human, and purely abstract, notions—'the people' or 'liberty' or 'democracy' or 'progress'.  I'm all for liberty, and it would be nice to give democracy a try one day too, but the dethroning of the sovereign—Christ—who sat at the heart of the Western sacred order has not led to universal equality and justice.  It has led, via a bloody shortcut through Robespierre, Stalin and Hitler, to the complete triumph of the power of money, which has splintered our culture and our souls into a million angry shards.

-Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity

Misusing the language...............

 

     But did he see himself as ruthless?  Or as a ghoulish fiend?  This is unlikely.  For one thing, the Terror was an old Roman idea: If a roman legion did not do its duty, then indiscriminate punishment would be meted out.  For another, Robespierre preferred to preach virtue as Rousseau, his model, had done.  Virtue, of course, mandated dedication to family, to work, to civic zeal and the dreams of the revolution.  But it also meant getting rid of the enemies of virtue, whoever they were, wherever they were.  From as early as 1789, he trafficked in a world of conspiracy theories, warning about newly minted "patriots," old traitors and hypocrites ("who flatter you today to betray you tomorrow"), and the need for constant purges.  As the revolution wore on, as the gore deepened, as the daily tumbrels bore victims to the guillotine, Robespierre prophesied that for those who refused to adopt virtue, "the Razor of the republic" awaited.  The Terror, he also declared famously, is nothing, nothing "save justice, prompt, severe, inflexible.  It is an emanation of Virtue." . . .

. . . And even as head of the Twelve, he shrank from blood.  It has been duly noted that the only execution he ever attended was his own.

-Jay Winik, The Great Upheaval: America and the Birth of the Modern World: 1788-1800

This is so wrong..............................

 

..................More than thirty days before Halloween and Macy's is offering Christmas decorations.  Stop it:

On human nature and history..........

 

     We cannot prevent insatiable desires from springing up in the heart of man.

     We cannot arrange things so that no work is required for these desires to be satisfied.

     We cannot avoid the fact that man's reluctance to work is as strong as his desire to have his needs satisfied.

     We cannot prevent the fact that, as a result of this state of affairs, there is a constant effort by men to increase their share of enjoyment while each of them tries by force or by fraud to throw the burden of labor onto the shoulders of his fellows.

     It is not up to us to wipe out universal history, to stifle the voice of the past that attests that things have been like this from the outset.  We cannot deny that war, slavery, serfdom, theocracy, abuse by government, privileges, frauds of all kinds, and monopolies have been the incontrovertible and terrible manifestations of these two sentiments that ar4e intertwined in the hearts of men:  attraction to pleasure, avoidance of pain.

     "By the sweat of thy brow shalt thou eat bread."  But everyone wants as much bread and as little sweat as possible.  This is the conclusion of history.

-Frédéric Bastiat, Economic Sophisms, Second Series, 1847ish

Unfortunately................

 

One of the great lessons of the past decade is that when you read a variation of “experts say” in a headline, you ought to think twice and for yourself.

-from this episode of The Free Press

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.

-Alexander Hamilton

bad business.........................

 

Bad ideas refuse to die, misinformation is everywhere, and a very profitable industrial complex has arisen to spread outrageous, inflammatory ideas — their business model IS clickbait. The mainstream media may be problematic, but social media is oh so much worse.

-Barry Ritholtz, from here

rooting against the status quo..........

 

But roughly every 120 years, global leadership shifts hands.

Why? Because success breeds complacency. Great societies, like great countries and companies, eventually get comfortable. They ride on the coattails of their success. They offshore everything to developing countries because they have the luxury of prioritizing returns and efficiency over resilience. It’s easy to chase lower costs abroad when the threats seem far away. But when it matters most, these societies find they’ve lost the capacity to build anything that counts.

-Chris Power, as culled from here

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

1970..............................

       Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young................Ohio

 

forecasts........................

 

I come not to praise forecasters, but to bury them. . . .

    There is a forecasting-industrial complex, and it is a blight on all that is good and true.  The symbiotic relationship between the media and Wall Street drives a relentless parade of money-losing tomfoolery: Television and radio have 24 hours a day they must fill, and they do so mostly with empty nonsense.  Print has column inches to put out.  Online media may be the worst of all, with an infinite maw that needs to be consistently filled with new and often meaningless content.

     Just because the beast must be fed, does not mean you must be dragon fodder.

-Barry Ritholtz, How Not to Invest

Abundance liberalism, or, learning how to build...

 

But what frustrates me most is that by insisting on degrowth over abundance, progressives are hurting themselves much more than they’re hurting any billionaires, oligarchs, or conservatives.

-Noah Smith, from this blog post

Instant gratification takes too long............

 

............................looking for a course correction.

Umm.................no

 

Often, I’m waiting for the biggest Jackpot of all: the spontaneous remission of all my problems without any required effort. Someone suggests a way out of my predicament and I go, “Hmm, I dunno, do you have any solutions that involve me doing everything 100% exactly like I’m doing it right now, and getting better outcomes?”

-Adam Mastroianni, as quoted here

still.............................

 

     This idea was at the core of Van Buren's worldview.  It would never change.  Collusion between government and private interests, he believed, would always enrich the few at the expense of the many.

-James M. Bradley, Martin Van Buren: America's First Politician

When elites aren't........................

 There’s a radical dissatisfaction with the social and political status quo across the democratic world. The people in charge are distrusted and despised by the public: They are thought to be in business for themselves and indifferent to the concerns of ordinary people. From government agencies to the scientific establishment, the institutions that buttress modern society have been tainted by the corruption and poor performance of the ruling elites. The public has come to view these institutions as cash cows for the haves—and an oppressive machinery for bleeding the have-nots.

-Martin Gurri, from here

Ouch..........................

 

If anything, the Democrats synchronized swimming of the past month could only occur in a party largely uniform in its core constituencies and essential beliefs. They shift positions and allegiances through technology and media control, using influencers to hide troublesome past positions with a dexterity that a Communist vozdh like Joseph Stalin would have appreciated.

-Joel Kotkin, from "What Happened to My Party?"

And somewhere C. S. Lewis smiles.........

 

We have the greatest country on earth, the greatest constitution, the greatest economy, the greatest everything, and we’ve ended up fostering a political culture so generally nauseating that even Screwtape must be feeling a little sorry for us.

-John Podhoretz