a prey.........................

 Human infirmity in moderating and checking the emotions I name bondage: for, when a man is a prey to his emotions, he is not his own master, but lies at the mercy of fortune: so much so, that he is often compelled, while seeing that which is better for him, to follow that which is worse.

-Baruch de Spinoza

telling ourselves stories...............

      We are territorial creatures, just like chimpanzees, wolves, and tigers.  We claim our territory and fight for it, and our genes, which require just such an exclusive claim over habitat if their replication is to be guaranteed, depend on our success.  Yet when we fight it is, as a rule, in the name of some high ideal: justice, liberation, national sovereignty, even God Himself.  Once again, it seems that we are in the habit of telling ourselves stories that make no reference to the biological realities in which they are rooted.

-Roger Scruton, On Human Nature

Calming down about GPT-4................

 . . . that one of the deadly sins was how we humans mistake performance for competence.

-Rodney Brooks, from this article

Field trip..........................

 My Sweetie and I visited the world-class Dawes Arboretum in suburban Newark this afternoon.  A good time was had:

No sads here...........................

 As I reflected on this subtle change, it occurred to me that after suffering a loss so enormous, and surviving it, Charlie decided he could get through anything. Brought face to face with the limits of his ability, of anyone’s ability, to master fate or turn back time, Charlie began reaching for the things he could control — his own actions, his own emotions, his outlook, his grit. As he put it: “We didn’t have time to be sad.”

     Charlie was not a student of philosophy. Yet in those words, I recognized the essence of a credo that has served human beings for centuries: Stoicism, one of the most durable and useful schools of thought ever devised. It has spoken to paupers and presidents, to emperors and the enslaved. It’s the philosophy of freedom and self-determination, one that seeks to erase envy, resentment, neediness and anxiety. Its pillars are wisdom, courage, temperance and justice. It is a philosophy of radical equality and mutual respect.

-As redirected by this David Kanigan post.  Book now residing in my B & N shopping cart.

Highly recommended...................

 

      To go from strength to strength requires learning a new set of life skills.  We need to adopt a new formula, which I have laid out in detail in this book, chapter by chapter.  But of course you are unlikely to memorize the last sixty thousand words.  So let me summarize the whole book in seven—a formula that encapsulates all the lessons I have learned and now strive to live:  Use things.  Love people.  Worship the divine.

my research librarian..................

      Another skill is the recall of names and facts.  By the time you are fifty, your brain is as crowded with information as the New York Public Library.  Meanwhile, your personal research librarian is creaky, slow, and easily distracted.  When you send him to get some information you need—say, someone's name—he takes a minute to stand up, stops for coffee, talks to an old friend in the periodicals, and then forgets where he was going in the first place.  Meanwhile, you are kicking yourself for forgetting something you have known for years.  When the librarian finally shows back up and says, "That guy's name is Mike," Mike is long gone and you are doing something else.

-Arthur C. Brooks,  From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life

About your prefrontal cortex...........

 For most people, decline is just not an unwelcome surprise, it is also a huge mystery.  We learn early on that practice makes perfect; there is plenty of research telling us that mastery comes from ten thousand hours of work, or some really high number like that.  In other words, life has a formula: the more you do something, the better at it you become.

     But then you don't.  Progress isn't a straight line upward, . . . So what explains the downward portion? . . . 

     A better explanation involved structural changes in the brain—specifically, the changing performance of the prefrontal cortex (the part of the brain behind your forehead).  This is the last part of the brain to develop in childhood and the first to exhibit decline in adulthood.  It is primarily responsible for working memory, executive function, and inhibitory mechanisms—that is, the ability to block out information extraneous to the task at hand, so we can focus and imp[orve our core skill.  A big, strong prefrontal cortex makes it possible for you to get better and better at your specialty, whether it is making a legal case, doing surgery, or driving a bus.

      In middle age, the prefrontal cortex degrades in effectiveness . . .

-Arthur C. Brooks, From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life

On striverly instincts......................

 In my field of economics, we have something called "Stein's Law," named after the famous economist Herbert Stein from the 1970s: "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop."  Obvious, right?  Well, when it comes to their own lives, people ignore it all the time.  But you ignore this about your professional success at your peril.  It will leave you falling further and further behind, shaking your fist at the heavens.

     There is another path, though, instead of denying change in your abilities, you can make the change itself a source of strength.  Instead of trying to avoid decline, you can transcend it by finding a new kind of success, better than what the world promises and not a source of neurosis and addiction: a deeper form of happiness than what you had before; and in the process, true meaning in life—maybe for the first time. . . .

     A word of caution, though: This path means going against many of your striverly instincts.  I'm going to ask you not to deny your weaknesses but rather to embrace them defenselessly.  To let go of some things in your life that you worked hard for—but that are now holding you back.  To adopt parts of life that will make you happy, even if they don't make you special.  To face decline—and even death—with courage and confidence.  To rebuild relationships you neglected on the long road to worldly success.  And to dive into the uncertainty of a transition you have worked so hard to evade.

-Arthur C. Brooks, From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness, and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life

the "striver's curse".............

      What I found was a hidden source of anguish that wasn't just widespread but nearly universal among people who have done well in their careers.  I came to call this the "striver's curse": people who strive to be excellent at what they do often wind up finding their inevitable decline terrifying, their successes increasingly unsatisfying, and their relationships lacking.

-Arthur C. Brooks, From Strength to Strength: Finding Success, Happiness and Deep Purpose in the Second Half of Life

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

Billy Joel.........................the Piano Man album

 

Parenting.............................

 

Credit.....................

 Credit—the disposition of one man to trust another—is singularly varying.

-Walter Bagehot, Lombard Street: A Description of the Money Market

believe......................

     "You don't believe in reason," Sharpe let the conversation veer away from the painful subject of the Count of Mouromorto's loyalty.

     "Reason is the mathematics of thinking, nothing more.  You don't live by such dry disciplines.  Mathematics cannot explain God, no more can reason, and I believe in God! Without Him we are no more than corruption.  But I forget. You are not a believer."

Bernard Cornwell, Sharpe's Rifles

embrace..................

 Ask anyone you admire: Their lucky breaks happened on a detour from their main goal.  So embrace detours.  Life is not a straight line for anyone.

-Kevin Kelly

replace.........................

 Life gets better as you replace transactions with relationships.

-Kevin Kelly

Much has changed.....................

 ....................since he wrote these words:

     The culture of repudiation is sometimes referred to (usually dismissively) as 'political correctness'—the assumption being that university gurus are involved in a kind of brain-washing exercise, to ensure that no political view will be transmitted or accepted on campus save those of a liberal-egalitarian kind.  But, interesting though this assumption is, I doubt that it has any real bearing on the cultural phenomenon.  The feminists, gay activists, new historicists, crypto-Marxists, Foucauldians and deconstructionists who thrive in humanities departments do not, as a rule, have much interest in the political view of their students.

-Roger Scruton, An Intelligent Person's Guide to Modern Culture (1998)

On expectations...............

 

In truth, unrealistic expectations tarnish our appreciation of life and weigh down the buoyancy of the present moment.

-Lama Surya Das

as much as...........................

 You'll find that education's about the only thing lying around loose in this world, and that it's about the only thing a fellow can have as much as he's willing to haul away.  Everything else is screwed down tight and the screw-driver lost.

-George H. Lorimer, Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son

an ardent conformist................

     Light comes from the East.  The Chinese sage Confucius, who lived five centuries before Christ, left no writings of his own, and is known to us, as Christ is, from the words and deeds recorded by his apostles.  Unlike Christ, however, Confucius was not a religious reformer, but an ardent conformist in all matters both temporal and spiritual, and his counsels and maxims, recorded in the Analects, are concerned with the orderly conduct of life in this world, rather than the hopes and fears for the next.  Confucius lived through the collapse of feudal civilization in ancient China, and wandered the land in search of a prince who would listen to his counsels.  He loved life, was fond of horses and hunting, and was both a practical and a respectable man, distinguished from his contemporaries largely by his propensity both to utter uncomfortable truths, and to live by them. 

-Roger Scruton, An Intelligent Person's Guide to Modern Culture

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

The Marshall Tucker Band...The Marshall Tucker Band

 

once celebrated..........................

      The pioneers of the modern tech industry were once celebrated as exemplars of capitalist competition, illustrating what Joseph Schumpeter called the "creative destruction" that breaks up monopolies and allows others to rise from below.  But today's tech leaders increasingly resemble an exclusive ruling class, controlling a few exceptionally powerful companies, and like aristocracies everywhere they are often resistant to any dispersion of their power.  As the conquer ever more of the precious digital real estate, they are building a more stratified economic and social order, with widening class divisions, not only in the United States, but around the world.

-Joel Kotkin, The Coming of NEO Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class

small and serendipitous thrills.............

      Satisfaction comes not from chasing bigger and bigger things, but paying attention to smaller and smaller things. . . .

       Once, my wife and I were at the home of close friends, eating and drinking out in their garden.  It was dusk, and they asked us to gather around a plant with small, closed flowers.  "Watch a flower," one of them instructed.  We did so, for about ten minutes, in complete silence.  All at once, the flowers popped open, which we learned that they did every evening.  We gasped in amazement and joy.  It was a moment of intense satisfaction.

     But here's the interesting thing: Unlike most of the junk on my old bucket list, that satisfaction endured.  That memory still brings me joy—more so than many of my life's earthly "accomplishments"—not because it was the culmination of a large goal, but because it was a small and serendipitous thrill.  It was a tiny miracle that felt like a free gift, freely given.

-Arthur C. Brooks, From Strength to Strength

Aging like a fine wine...............

 Age will only be respected if it fights for itself, maintains its own rights, avoids dependence, and asserts control over its own sphere as long as life lasts.  For just as I like a young man to have something old about him, so I approve of an old man who has a touch of youth.  If that is his aim, whatever the age of the body, in spirit he will never be old.

-Cicero, from his 44 B.C. essay, Cato the Elder On Old Age

your thing........................

 Making art is not selfish: it's for the rest of us.  If you don't do your thing, you are cheating us.

-Kevin Kelly

Taking a walk around the yard..........

early bloomers

We love our peonies

A few alliums

Rhododendrens     My favorite plant

These azaleas have been around for a while

My Sweetie has the touch

Next week this will be magnificent

some begonias just hanging around

 

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

Joe Walsh.....The Smoker You Drink, The Player You Get

 

Highly recommended....................

 

     Billions of data points are available at any given moment and we collect only a small number.  With this glimpse through a keyhole, we assemble an interpretation and add another story to our collection.

     With each story we tell ourselves, we negate possibility.  Reality is diminished.  Rooms of the self are walled off.  Truth collapses to fit a fictional organizing principle we've adopted.

     As artists, we're called to let go of these stories, again and again, and blindly put our faith in the curious energy drawing us down the path.

     The artwork is the point where all the elements come together—the universe, the prism of self, the magic and discipline of transmuting idea to flesh.  And if these lead you into contradiction—into territories that seem unbridgeable or unknowable—that doesn't mean they aren't harmonious.

     Even in perceived chaos, there is order and pattern.  A cosmic undercurrent running through all things, which no story is immense enough to contain.

Be careful what you wish for............

 The corruption inherent in absolute power derives from the fact that such power is never free from the tendency to turn man into a thing, and press him back into the matrix of nature from which he has risen. For the impulse of power is to turn every variable into a constant, and give to commands the inexorableness and relentlessness of laws of nature. Hence absolute power corrupts even when exercised for humane purposes. The benevolent despot who sees himself as a shepherd of the people still demands from others the submissiveness of sheep. The taint inherent in absolute power is not its inhumanity but its anti-humanity.

-Rob Firchau channeling Eric Hoffer

the end of the "in the background" posts?.....

      In middle age, the prefrontal cortex degrades in effectiveness, and this has several implications.  The first is that rapid analysis and creative innovation will suffer—just what we would expect when looking at the evidence on decline.  The second is that some specific, once-easy skills become devilishly hard, like multi-tasking.  Older people are much more easily distracted than younger people.  If you have—or had—teenage kids, you might have found yourself telling them they can't study effectively while listening to music and texting their friends.  Actually, it is you who can't do that.  If fact, older adults can enhance their cognitive effectiveness precisely by taking their own advice: turn off the phone and music and go someplace completely quiet to think and work.

-Arthur C. Brooks, From Strength to Strength

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

The Grass Roots.....................................Greatest Hits

 

On privilege........................

 Moreover, in politics as well as in philosophy and in religion the intellect of democratic nations is particularly open to simple and general notions.  Complicated systems are repugnant to it, and its favorite conception is that of a great nation composed of citizens all formed upon one pattern and all governed by a single power.

     The very next notion to that of a single and central power which presents itself to the minds of men in the ages of equality is the notion of uniformity of legislation.  As every man sees that he differs but little from those around him, he cannot understand why a rule that is applicable to one man should not be equally applicable to all others.  Hence the slightest privileges are repugnant to his reason; the faintest dissimilarities in the political institutions of the same people offend him, and uniformity of legislation appears to him to be the first condition of good government.

     I find, on the contrary, that this notion of a uniform rule equally binding on all members of the community was almost unknown to the human mind in aristocratic ages; either it was never broached, or it was rejected.

-Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, Volume II,  Fourth Book, Chapter II

   

It's a pretty short list....................

 .............................................rules for life:

Mission creep..............................

 

more fun here

useful, provided you did not notice them....

The concept of the intellectual (though not the word) is new to the English language.  In the past we were in the habit of distinguishing the educated from the uneducated person.  And during the nineteenth century there were many educated people among our leaders—for example Disraeli and Gladstone, who between them did much to create the new style of politics, in which parties bargain for votes by promising goods that do not belong to them.  But the concept of the intellectual—as a creature whose social role is shaped by his critical posture outside society—was foreign to English life.  Coleridge had marked out an important role for the 'clerisy'; but he saw this class as a conservative force, maintained by church, university, and the professions.  The Romantic poet, the 'man of feeling', and the hermit had all be extolled and ridiculed, with Jane Austen and Thomas Love Peacock effectively putting a lid on their pretensions.  Thereafter, thinking and feeling re-assumed their old functions in social life: they were useful, provided you did not notice them.  The very idea that someone should draw attention to his intellect and emotions, and regard them as a qualification for overthrowing the established civil order, was anathema to the ordinary English person.

-Roger Scruton, An Intelligent Person's Guide to Modern Culture

Gone, but not forgotten.....................

 .................................Jim Brown:

a rule..................................

 Your Ma did the cooking and I hustled for things to cook, though I would take a shy at it myself once in a while and get up my muscle tossing flapjacks.  It was pretty rough sailing, you bet, but one way and another we managed to get a good deal of satisfaction out of it, because we had made up our minds to take our fun as we went along.  With most people happiness is something that is always just a day off.  But I have made it a rule never to put off being happy till tomorrow.  Don't accept notes for happiness, because you'll find that when they're due they're never paid, but just renewed for another thirty days.

-George H. Lorimer, Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son

rites of passage.................

      The youth culture prides itself on its inclusiveness.  That is to say, it removes all barriers to membership—all obstacles in the form of learning, expertise, allusion, doctrine, or moral discipline. For these would be rites of passage, constituting a tacit admission that to be young is not enough, that the world expects something, and that there is a higher stage of existence to which we all must eventually proceed.  This very inclusiveness, however, deprives the youth culture of human purpose.  It remains locked in the present tense, looking for good causes, spiritual icons, ways of representing itself as legitimate, but without crossing the fatal barrier into responsible adulthood.

-Roger Scruton, An Intelligent Person's Guide to Modern Culture (1998)

This chart measures.................

 .........the growth of interest payments on the U. S. debt.  Hang on.  It will be an interesting ride.

Turn off and tune out.................

 Our brains haven’t evolved to handle the deluge of bad news we now receive on a regular basis. Before 24/7 news, social media and alerts on our smartphones, most people simply weren’t aware of all the bad stuff occurring in the world.

-Ben Carlson

On "relative wealth"...............

 If our system is so unfair and “exploitative,” then why are tens of thousands of people every year willing to risk their health, even their lives, to try to get here? It’s because even poor people are rich, by comparative standards. The US is a marvel, but our friends on the left have to deny that, because admitting it would mean that their imaginary utopias are not actually better than the system we already have.

-Michael Munger, from this post

via

lists.......................

What gets you up in the morning?  What keeps you up at night?  If you're not working on these two lists, you're wasting your precious time.

-Alan M. Webber 

a picture...................

 A man who does not have a picture of the whole in his head cannot possibly arrange the pieces.

-Michel de Montaigne

worth....................

 Even when I was young, I just decided I was worth a lot more than the market thought I was worth, and I started treating myself that way.

-Naval Ravikant

vibration........................

     This is the essence of great art.  We make it for no other purpose than creating our version of the beautiful, bringing all of ourself to every project, whatever its parameters and constraints.  Consider it an offering, a devotional act.  We do best, as we see the best—with our own taste.  No one else's. . . .

      With the objective of simply doing great work, a ripple effect occurs.  A bar is set for everything you do, which may not only life your work to new heights, but raise the vibration of your entire life.  It may even inspire others to do their best work.  Greatness begets greatness. It's infectious. 

-Rick Rubin, The Creative Act: A Way of Being

Lightly........................

 Touch everything lightly, enjoy it while it is within your reach, and no not regret it when it is gone, since that is the nature of things.

-Massimo Pigliucci

A little bit of wisdom............

 What you do on your bad days matters more than what you do on your good days.

-Kevin Kelly

judged.........................

 Although I am always minded to say good of what is good, and inclined to interpret favorably anything that can be so interpreted, still it is true that the strangeness of our condition makes it happen that we are often driven to good by vice itself—were it not that doing good is judged by intention alone.

-Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Works, Book 2, Chapter 1

complexity.....................

 True wisdom requires discarding the intention heuristic. It requires accepting that the world is complex and that each individual is complex.

-Arnold S. Kling, from here

the line separating..................

 It was granted me to carry away from my prison years on my bent back, which nearly broke beneath its load, this essential experience: how a human being becomes evil and how good. In the intoxication of youthful successes I had felt myself to be infallible, and I was therefore cruel. In the surfeit of power I was a murderer, and an oppressor. In my most evil moments I was convinced that I was doing good, and I was well supplied with systematic arguments. And it was only when I lay there on rotting prison straw that I sensed within myself the first stirrings of good. Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains … an unuprooted small corner of evil.

-Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Gulag Archipelago.

sale pending.......................

 The commercialisation of modern life has been the subject of lamentation ever since it was first remarked upon, and ambitious theories—commodity fetishism, conspicuous consumption, the affluent society, and countless lesser attempts—have arisen from the natural revulsion that intellectuals feel towards the "getting and spending" of others.  But something new seems to be at work in the contemporary world—a process that is eating away the very heart of social life, not merely by putting salesmanship in place of moral virtue, but by putting everything—virtue included—on sale.  The cynic, said Oscar Wilde, is the one who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.  And in a letter to Lord Alfred Douglas he described sentimentality as "the bank holiday of cynicism". Wilde's quips tend to be more exciting that truthful.  These, however, are exact.  Cynicism and sentimentality are two ways in which things of value are demoted to things with a price.

-Roger Scruton, An Intelligent Person's Guide to Modern Culture

Our very own.....................

 ..................................next gen Real Intelligence unit, aka Dakota, explains the meaning of life its ownself to his grandparents..

God save..........................

 ...........................the King.

perspective...................

 Upon every culture there is an internal and external perspective—the perspective of the tribesman and that of the anthropologist.  Homer's Odyssey enables us to share the internal perspective on an enchanted world.  Thanks to such artists as Pope, Goethe, and Mozart, we can acquire the same internal perspective of the sober world of the Enlightenment.  They show us what it was like, to live through the loss of old authority, and to see the vision unfold of man in his freedom, with his dignity not yet degraded, and his religion not yet crumbled to dust. In art, literature, and music, the Enlightenment gave content to its universalism, with stories, epics and operas that might be set in any place of time, each devoted to the human substance beneath the local colour.  Its criticisms of old authority were accompanied by a fervent and pious attempt to retain the ethical view of man. . . . The Enlightenment, we discover, is part of us.  It belongs to the archaeology, rather than the pre-history, of modern consciousness, 

-Roger Scruton, An Intelligent Person's Guide to Modern Culture

feel.........................

 We cannot prove by theoretical reasoning that there is a God; nor can we grasp the idea of God, except by a via negativa that forbids us to apply it.  Nevertheless, we have intimations of the transcendental.  In the sentiment of beauty we feel the purposiveness and intelligibility of everything that surrounds us, while in the sentiment of the sublime we seem to see beyond the world, to something overwhelming and inexpressible in which it is somehow grounded.  Neither sentiment can be translated into a reasoned argument—for such an argument would be natural theology, and natural theology is a thing of the past, believable only in an age of unquestioning faith.  All we know is that we can know nothing of the transcendental.  But that is not what we feel—and it is in our feeling for beauty that the content, and even the truth, of religious doctrine is strangely and untranslatably intimated to us.

-Roger Scruton, An Intelligent Person's Guide to Modern Culture

Claude Monet     1896-97     Early Morning on the Seine 
oil on canvas

wisdom...................

 Perhaps the most counterintuitive truth of the universe is that the more you give to others, the more you'll get.  Understanding this is the beginning of wisdom.

-Kevin Kelly, Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I'd Known Earlier

believe.....................

 Those people who believe that money cannot buy happiness have not given enough away.

-Jon Hanson

Highly recommended......................

 

our new norm...........................

 When the Cold War ended, the Americans had the opportunity to do nearly anything.  Instead, on both the Left and the Right, we started a lazy descent into narcissistic populism.  The presidential election record that brought us Clinton and W Bush and Obama and Trump and Biden isn't an aberration, but instead a pattern of active disinterest in the wider world.  It is our new norm.

     Nor is there leadership beyond America.  There is no new hegemon-in-waiting, nor countries that will rise to support a common vision.  There is no savior waiting in the wings.  Instead, the world's secondary powers have already fallen back into their old habits of mutual antagonism. . . .

    China and Russia have already fallen back on instinct, heedless of the lessons of their own long sagas.  In the post-Cold War era, the pair benefited the most by far from American engagement, as the Order prevented the powers that had impoverished, shattered, and conquered them through the centuries from fully exerting themselves, while simultaneously creating the circumstances for the greatest economic stability they have ever known.  Instead of seeking rapprochement with the Americans to preserve their magical moment, they instead worked diligently—almost pathologically—to disrupt what remained of global structure.  Future history will be as merciless to them as their dark and dangerous pasts.

-Peter Zeihan, The End of the World Is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization

the odd out-of-season avocado........

      The same network of sacrosanct interconnections that has brought us everything from quick mortgages to smartphones to on-demand electricity has not only filled 8 billion bellies, it has done so with the odd out-of-season avocado.  That's now largely behind us. The web is failing.  Just past the horizon looms a world of lower and less reliable agricultural yields, marred by less variety.  A world with less energy or fewer manufactured goods is the difference between wealth and security or poverty and conflict.  But a world with fewer foodstuffs is one with fewer people.

     More than war, more than disease, famine is the ultimate country killer.  And it is not something the human condition can adjust to quickly or easily.

-Peter Zeihan, The End of the World Is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization

Community.................

 Communities depend upon the force which Burke called prejudice; they are essentially local, bound to a place, a history, a language and a common culture.  The Enlightened individualist, by forgoing such things, lives increasingly as a stranger among strangers, consumed by a helpless longing for an attachment which his own cold thinking has destroyed.

     These conflicts within Enlightenment culture are part of its legacy to us.  We too are individualists, believers in the sovereign right of human freedom, living as strangers in a society of strangers.  And we too are beset by those ancient and ineradicable yearnings for something else—for a homecoming to our true community.

-Roger Scruton, An Intelligent Person's Guide to Modern Culture

Head's up Kurt................

      My world cannot function without coffee (7th by value) and I am . . . concerned.  Coffee is a lot like cocaine . . . in terms of where it can be grown.  It demands a very specific mix of elevations, temperature, and moisture conditions.  Too dry and the crop shrivels.  Too wet and it rots. Too hot and it is bitter.  Too cold and it won't flower.  Roughly 7,500 feet is the ideal elevation, putting it well above most lines of human habitation and making servicing and transport tricky.  Mass coffee culture is only possible in a globalized system in which the inputs can access such often-near-inaccessible areas.  The Arabica coffee you get at everything from McDonald's to your favorite espresso bar faces the greatest challenges, while the robusta coffee that goes into instant is far more heat and drought tolerant.  The combination of deglobalization and climate change suggests that most of the world is about to get a coffee downgrade.

-Peter Zeihan, The End of the World Is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization

Oil...................

 Modern energy in general and oil in specific is what separates our contemporary world from the preindustrial.  It separates what we define as "civilization" from what came before. . . .

     Without oil, the American-led global Order would have never had a chance.  Nor would have passenger cars. Or global food distribution.  Or global manufacturing. Or modern health care.  Or the shoes most of us are wearing.  Oil's power is such that in many ways, it has almost enabled us to ignore nothing less than geography itself. . . .

     Oil is different.  Because oil is central to everything from the shingles on your roof to the phone in your hand to the spatula in your kitchen to the pipes and hoses in your plumbing to the diapers on your kid to the paint on your walls to your daily commute to how products cross the ocean, a slight increase in demand for oil or a slight decrease in supply for oil results in wild price swings that are most assuredly not proportional. . . .

     The specifics will be as wild and unpredictable as the rest of the post-Order chaos, but a good starting point is to assume that 40 percent of global supplies fall into the Kashagan-style bucket:  too-dangerous export routes to survive globalization's end, too-expensive projects to maintain without outside financing, too difficult technically to operate without an army of out-of-region workers.  Such projects will go away and not come back for decades.  If ever.  And oil's absence for a few weeks, never mind a few decades, would be more than enough to crash modern civilization as we know it.

-Peter Zeihan, The End of the World Is Just the Beginning:  Mapping the Collapse of Globalization

Coal..................

      Greentech in its current form simply isn't mature enough or cheap enough to move the needle for most people in most locations.  It is largely limited to developed countries with rich capital supplies who just coincidentally happen to have large population centers fairly close to sunny or windy locations.  The southwest quarter of the United States looks great, as do the American Great Plains, Australia, and the coasts of the North Sea

     Nearly all other locations will remain dependent upon more traditional fuels for the vast majority of their energy needs.  This is far worse than it sounds from the point of view of greenhouse gas emissions because the vast majority of these locations will not be able to retain access to internationally traded oil and gas, either.  If they cannot source oil or natural gas and their geographies do not enable sufficient use of sun and wind, they will have a simple decision to make.  Option A is to do without the products that have enabled humanity to advance for the past two centuries, to suffer catastrophic reductions in product access and food productions, triggering massive downward revisions in standards of living and population. To go without electricity. To deindustrialize. To decivilize. 

     Or—Option B—to use one fuel source that nearly all countries have locally: coal.  Many particularly unlucky people will be stuck with something called lignite, a barely-qualifies-as-coal fuel that is typically one-fifth water by weight and is by far the least efficient and dirtiest fuel in use today.  Germany already today uses lignite as its primary power input fuel because Greentech is so woefully unapplicable to the German geography, and yet the Germans—for environmental reasons—have shut down most of their other power-generation options.

     As a planet, we are perfectly capable of suffering broad-scale economic collapse and vastly increasing our carbon emissions at the same time.

-Peter Zeihan, The End of the World Is Just the Beginning: Mapping the Collapse of Globalization.

annoying.....................

 An annoying malady, to think yourself so wise that you persuade yourself that no one can believe the contrary!

-Michel de Montaigne, The Complete Works, Book One, Chapter 56

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

      Feudalism is making a comeback, long after it was believed to have been deposited in the historical dustbin.  Of course it will look different this time around: we won't see Knights in shining armor, or vassals doing homage to their lords, or a powerful Catholic Church enforcing the reigning orthodoxy.  What we are seeing is a new form of aristocracy developing in the United States and beyond, as wealth in our postindustrial economy tends to be ever more concentrated in fewer hands.  Societies are becoming more stratified, with decreasing chances of upward mobility for most of the population.  A class of thought leaders and opinion makers, which I call the "clerisy" provide intellectual support for the emerging hierarchy.  As avenues for upward mobility are diminishing, the model of liberal capitalism is losing appeal around the globe, and new doctrines are arising in its place, including ones that lend support to a kind of neo-feudalism.

-Joel Kotkin, The Coming of Neo Feudalism: A Warning to the Global Middle Class

harmony here and discord there.....

 

There's always a lesson to be learned

whether in a hotel bar

or over tea in a teahouse,

no matter which way it goes, 

for you or against,

what you want to hear or what you don't.

Seeing Roland Kirk, for example,

with two then three saxophones

in his mouth at once

and a kazoo, no less,

hanging from his neck at the ready.

Even in my youth I saw this

not as a lesson in keeping busy

with one thing or another,

but as a joyous impossible lesson

in how to do it all at once,

pleasing and displeasing yourself

with harmony here and discord there.

But what else did I know

as the waitress lit a candle

on my round table in the dark?

What did I know about anything?

-Billy Collins, The Five Spot, 1964

On temper................

 Remember that when you're in the right you can afford to keep your temper, and that when you're in the wrong you can't afford to lose it.

-George Lorimer, Letters From A Self-Made Merchant To His Son

rooted..................

 The Enlightenment began with the rise of modern science, culminated in the French Revolution and then dwindled in wave after wave of yearning, hope and doubt.  It was characterized by a scepticism towards authority, a respect for reason, and an advocacy of individual freedom rather than divine command as the basis of moral and political order.  The Enlightenment expressed itself in many ways, according to national character and local conditions; but it owes its most celebrated definition to Kant who, in 1784, described it as 'the liberation of man from his self-imposed minority', adding that this minority lies 'not in lack of understanding, but in lack of determination and courage to use it without the assistance of another'.  By the time of Kant's words the Enlightenment was at its crisis.  Herder's advocacy of 'culture' against 'civilization' was in part a reaction to Kant's view of human nature, as formed from a single pattern and fulfilled in a single way—through reason, freedom and law. The 'universalism' advocated by Kant seemed to Herder to threaten all that is most precious in the human soul—namely, the local, the loyal and the rooted.

-Roger Scruton, An Intelligent Person's Guide to Modern Culture

If we are talking about..............

..................the best TV show theme songs, it would be 

difficult to ignore:  

    M.A.S.H 

    Hawaii 5-0 

    Mission Impossible 

    The Monkees 

 

a conscious effort.................

 Make a conscious effort this month…and every month after this one, to choose your attitude and focus on what you need to do each day. Then do just a little bit more.  Believe. Smile. Laugh. Engage. Commit. Show resilience. . . . I’ll be focused on building relationships, solving problems, and having fun.  What about you?

-Sean Carpenter, as culled from here