I know what you're going to ask me," Spike said. "And the answer is yes."
-Alison Gaylin, Robert B. Parker's Booked: A Sunny Randall Novel
Sunday, August 16, 2026
decency....................
Faith is a pre-condition of all systematic knowing, all purposive doing and all decent living. Societies are held together, not primarily by the fear of the many for the coercive power of the few, but by a widespread faith in the other fellow's decency.
Aldous Huxley, The Perennial Philosophy
surviving and even thriving..........
It's true that we can never be in total control of our fate. Just because we're having some good luck doesn't mean we earned it, and just because we're having some bad luck doesn't mean we deserve it. We can't outrun the chaos of life. But the more we nurture positive relationships, the better our chances of surviving and even thriving on this bumpy ride.
-Waldinger and Schulz, The Good Life: Lessons from the World's Longest Scientific Study of Happiness
The new predators.................
The mental shortcuts we use daily are what academics politely call "cognitive biases." They exist because your ancestors who made fast decisions survived, and those who paused for careful deliberation were eaten.
Those shortcuts saved your species, but they will be the death of your autonomy.
In the world your brain was built for, these rapid-fire judgments worked beautifully. You no longer live in that world. The new predators are a new class I call Malware Engineers. They are the marketers, political strategists, user-experience designers, and the social engineers who study the schematics of your mind with obsessive focus.
To defend yourself, and to become a conscious operator of these shortcuts, you must first learn the schematics of your own vulnerabilities.
Saturday, August 15, 2026
whispery......................
This is a story walking us in several directions. Whoever said time was a straight line? We now find ourself right back at the beginning, in the very woods the terrible deal was struck. A message is caught and manipulated between king and queen, warrior and mother. Fake news flying around the psyche. When we are out of touch with truth, we can stew on such wretched and fictitious messages. Often in a fairy tale when a witch or sorcerer wants to infect you, they get you alone and start whispering such distortions in your ear, delighted to paralyze your immediate relationships. The mythologist Marie-Louise von Franz called this 'cold evil' as opposed to 'hot evil'. Hot evil is all giants and swinging clubs, heads on spikes, villages massacred, very visible. Cold evil is something else again. Very interior, very subtle, very whispery, very hidden. This is a good example. It has a hallucinatory, paranoid essence. Gossipy.
-Martin Shaw, Smoke Hole: Looking to the Wild in the Time of the Spyglass
choices......................
Persistent emotional turmoil can undermine our peace of mind, and it might be caused by an ongoing spiral that’s fueled by the short-term choices we make. Cultural and economic pressure can make those choices feel non-optional, but if we can protect ourselves early, we may be able to create enough value for others that our hygienic choices easily pay for themselves.
There are countless opportunities to thrive. But we might have to make hard choices to find them.
-Seth Godin, from this post
The more things change..................
There is a tendency, as strong now as at any former time, to suppose that an oligarchy is admirable if it consists of 'good' men. The government of the Roman Empire was 'bad' until Constantine, and then it became 'good'. In the Book of Kings, there were those who did right in the sight of the Lord, and those who did evil. In English history as taught to children, there are 'good' kings and 'bad' kings. An oligarchy of Jews is 'bad', but one of Nazis is 'good'. The oligarchy of Tsarist aristocrats was 'bad', but that of the Communist Party is 'good'.
This attitude is unworthy of grown-up people. A child is 'good' when it obeys orders, and 'naughty' when it does not. When it grows up and becomes a political leader, it retains the ideas of the nursery, and defines the 'good' as those who obey its orders and the 'bad' as those who defy it. Consequently our own political party consists of 'good' men, and the opposite party consists of 'bad' men. 'Good' government is government by our group, 'bad' government that by the other group. The Montagues are 'good', the Capulets 'bad', or vice versa.
Such a point of view, if taken seriously, makes social life impossible.
-Bertrand Russell, The Taming of Power, circa 1938, from The Basic Writings of Bertrand Russell
shelter.......................
I had grown up in a world which, according to Bishop Ussher's reckonings, the one true God had made in 4004 B.C. It was a great drama, that world. A drama in five acts, the acts being Creation, Fall, Revelation, Redemption and Last Things. Having become incarnate in it, the God who created our world had left sacraments and commandments in it. By receiving the graces made available to us in these sacraments and by keeping these commandments, we could in the end win through to a life of glory. Alternatively, by rejecting the sacraments and breaking the commandments, we could be running the risk of damnation. It was in other words a drama that had for issue one or the other of two stupendous possibilities, eternal bliss in heaven or eternal perdition in hell.
That was the story I lived in. That was the story that sheltered me. And now I knew that it isn't only houses that shelter us. A great story can shelter us.
It was my calamity that I had fallen out of my story. I had fallen out of a world into a universe that seemed infinitely indifferent, even hostile to my purposes and yearnings.
And the killingly lonely thing was, I didn't know of anyone else to whom this had happened. As far as I could see, it was an utterly unique calamity. It only deepened my isolation whenever I attempted to talk to someone about it.
I felt like Job.
-John Moriarty, nostos: an autobiography
meaning......................
In some way, suffering ceases to be suffering at the moment it finds meaning, such as the meaning of a sacrifice.
-Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning
about that understanding...............
We did not live upon the same earth that they did and we flatter ourselves when we think we understand them.
A declarative force........
She was not beautiful according to the standards of the magazines and moving pictures of the time, and she knew it. But by any standard she was a desirable woman, and she also knew that. She knew it from what she had seen in the eyes of certain men, to which from time to time she had felt something like an echo in herself.
That she was desirable was acceptable to her as a part of the liveliness and also the goodness of the world. It was a gift. But that she was desirable and knew it and accepted it unfitted her somewhat for her role as a minister's wife. It was not expected. She had not expected it herself until her own wits told her it was so. Part of her desirability was her look of knowing more that she was saying, and being amused by the difference. That, and the utter frankness of her presence. There was in her, even in old age, a declarative force of being that was unhesitating and without disguise.
-Wendell Berry, from his story, A Desirable Woman (1938-1941)
Friday, August 14, 2026
when investing....................
. . . lean more heavily on emotional intelligence rather than IQ. Temperament is more important than brainpower in the markets.
Although, understanding the past would be a good place to start.......................
It is no longer sufficient for Johnny to understand the past. It is not even enough for him to understand the present, for the here-and-now environment will soon vanish. Johnny must learn to anticipate the directions and rate of change. He must, to put it technically, learn to make repeated, probabilistic, increasing long-range assumptions about the future. And so must Johnny's teachers.
-Alvin Toffler, Future Shock (1976)
cherry picking......................
When any statistic can be recruited to support your preferred theory, you are suffering from confirmation bias. Scientists like to boast that they strive to prove themselves wrong, that following the philosopher Karl Popper they know falsification is the essence of science. Nonsense. Like prosecutors determined to find a suspect guilty, they usually seek out evidence that bolsters, rather than challenges, their pet ideas. In this they are only human.
As the philosopher Francis Bacon noted in 1620: “And such is the way of all superstition, whether in astrology, dreams, omens, divine judgments, or the like; wherein men, having a delight in such vanities, mark the events where they are fulfilled, but where they fail, though this happen much oftener, neglect and pass them by."
-Matt Ridley, from this substack
A dream.................
I think Christianity has often forgotten that it is a dream, to its own peril. When threaded to political power it often engenders the will rather than the wonder, the law almost entirely over the spirit. Christianity is a dream in which the very best of us is encouraged to emerge. A dream that challenges and inspires us. A dream in which God speaks directly to us.
-Martin Shaw, Liturgies of the Wild
Opening paragraphs..................
Skye and Henry stood on a corner of Union Square on a fading San Francisco afternoon in early June, the occasional odor of popcorn swirling through, trying to busk up a few dollars. Skye saw the devil go by in his black '85 T-top, crooked smile, ponytail, twisty little braids in his beard. His skinny blond girlfriend sat beside him, tats running across her bare shoulders like grapevines, front teeth filed to tiny sharp points. Skye turned away, a chill running down her back.
-John Sanford, Gathering Prey
Sunday, August 9, 2026
Wait, what.............................?
No item sold on Amazon has the ability to perform a life transplant.
Fifty years ago........................
Any Major Dude With Half a Heart offers his 20 major albums from 1976.
It would overstate things to say that 1976 was a great year for music, the release of a few absolute classics notwithstanding, but it was a satisfying year.
working with..................
The basic ground of compassionate action is the importance of working with rather than struggling against, and what I mean by that is working with your own unwanted, unacceptable stuff, so that when the unacceptable and unwanted appears out there, you relate to it based on having working with loving-kindness on yourself.
have the genius..............
We should all engage in capitalism in this country. In the United States, we believe capital belongs in the hands of the people. Communism teaches that capital belongs in the hands of the state. This is a great difference in ideology. Communism seems to be based on the idea that humans are too stupid to know what to do with capital, so it should all be given to the state to manage.
In our country, we believe the knowledge of what to do with capital resides in the populace. The people have the genius to come up with ideas for goods and services for the marketplace. This philosophy has built a dynamic enterprise known as capitalism and has created an abundance of opportunities.
-Jim Rohn, Leading an Inspired Life
Saturday, August 8, 2026
access......................
What you need is access to the ways in which people explain themselves to themselves.
All outcomes.....................
But just know that economic outcomes do not play out in a vacuum. There are trade-offs to consider.
-Ben Carlson, from here
most profound mysteries...........
But for all the impressive scholarship that has been marshaled in an effort to determine the Sistine Ceiling's elusive meanings and to unmask its secret author, the evidence strongly suggests that Michelangelo himself was almost entirely responsible for what we see, and that he developed the elaborate program organically in response to the demands—technical, conceptual, and esthetic—that confronted him when he discarded the pope's simplistic plan and opted for a more elaborate scheme. What we see is the product of Michelangelo's genius, not merely the skills of a consummate craftsman illustrating a theological text, but a passionate, unconventional vision of an artist who thought deeply about the miracle of Creation and developed his own unique language to confront life's most profound mysteries.
-Miles J. Unger, Michelangelo: A Life in Six Masterpieces
Thursday, August 6, 2026
expertism..................
The problem with experts, put succinctly, is that experts are humans who are susceptible to all the human foibles. That ranges from being clueless about their own deficiencies to being downright evil.
Assuming anything benevolent about them, simply because they’re experts, is the surest way to make everything worse.
Should we listen to them? To a point. We need to consider what they have to say, but we also need to hear what the other experts have to say. We need to learn as much as we can before we do anything simply because an expert said it was a good thing.
-Tom Knighton, from this substack
clarity....................
Clarity isn't about knowing what you want to do with your life, it's about knowing what you want to do this week. You don't need to have it all figured out. You just need to know your next step.
-James Clear, from this edition
prepare for the unpredictable.................
One can only prepare for the unpredictable by trying to keep an open and unprejudiced mind — a feat which is extremely difficult to achieve, even with the best will in the world. Indeed, a completely open mind would be an empty one, and freedom from all prejudices and preconceptions is an unattainable ideal. Yet there is one form of mental exercise that can provide good basic training for would-be prophets: Anyone who wishes to cope with the future should travel back in imagination a single life-time — say to 1900 — and ask himself just how much of today’s technology would be, not merely incredible, but incomprehensible to the keenest scientific brains of that time.
1900 is a good round date to choose because it was just about then that all hell started to break loose in science.
-Arthur C. Clarke, from his 1962 essay, Hazards of Prophecy: The Failure of Imagination
If I could remember who set me off on the chase to find this essay, I would thank them
all kinds of scuffs................
The God I follow has things to say about envy, and self-serving motivations. He offers a road that doesn't indulge peering at our neighbours' fields and fuming with our supposed lack. For you and I trying to get home, to become real human beings, to gather our thrown-away stories, this is a radical step in the right direction. You can be a pious monk in fifth-century Egypt or a burlesque dancer in modern New York, but we all turn green sometimes. Someone is our Akanida, someone evokes our smaller nature. There be monsters. Pat the gargoyle on the shoulder and tell it a story, I promise it will help. There are all sorts of accumulated hurt in us, all kinds of scuffs. A story helps settle the interior-den and brings these turbulent and evasive forces to the table. In my decades as a story-teller I have become much more honest. Stories are the most delightful vehicles for the brightening of consciousness. True, archaic technology.
-Martin Shaw, Liturgies of the Wild
listen.......................
It is better for the intellectual not to talk all the time. To begin with, it would exhaust him, and, above all, it would keep him from thinking.
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