...................Viewed purely through the lens of probability, many of humanity’s greatest achievements look irrational.
Sunday, June 14, 2026
memories.....................
The truth is that memory and forgetting are forever entwined. . . .
Neurobiologists learn a great deal about memory by studying forgetting. To forget something means we had to have known it at some point, and that's different than never having known it in the first place. And even when we think we know something, memory is fallible in two different ways. First, we can lose things in our memory banks, sometimes temporarily, sometimes for a lifetime. Second, when we do locate and retrieve a memory, it can be fantastically distorted without our realizing it.
The truth is we have false memories every day, lots of them. We just don't know it because we're not often challenged.
-Daniel J. Levitin, I Heard There Was a Secret Chord: Music as Medicine
ought to be adjusted.................
Throughout, however, Burke demonstrates his ability to combine specific details with Olympian generalization. Thus a discussion of imports from Jamica and the malign effects of the Stamp Act yields the timeless Burkean insight that 'politics ought to be adjusted, not to human reasonings, but to human nature; of which the reason is but a part, and by no means the greatest part.'
-Jesse Norman, Edmund Burke: The First Conservative
how long is an era...................?
An Oriental wise man always used to ask the divinity in his prayers to be so kind as to spare him from living in an interesting era. As we are not wise, the divinity has not spared us and we are living in an interesting era. In any case, our era forces us to take an interest in it. The writers of today know this. If they speak up, they are criticized and attacked. If they become modest and keep silent, they are vociferously blamed for their silence.
-Albert Camus, from his 1957 lecture at the University of Uppsala
Tuesday, June 9, 2026
thoroughly.................
This is the true joy in life, the being used for a purpose recognized by yourself as a mighty one; the being thoroughly worn out before you are thrown on the scrap heap; the being a force of Nature instead of a feverish selfish little clod of ailments and grievances complaining that the world will not devote itself to making you happy. And also the only real tragedy in life is the being used by personally minded men for purposes which you recognize to be base. All the rest is at worst mere misfortune or mortality: this alone is misery, slavery, hell on earth; and the revolt against it is the only force that offers a man's work to the poor artist, whom our personally minded rich people would so willingly employ as pandar, buffoon, beauty monger, sentimentalizer and the like.
-George Bernard Shaw, from here
Monday, June 8, 2026
self-hazards.......................
Investing is hard. You're forced to deal with the constant uncertainty, volatility, fear, greed, and an endless stream of noise. Your worst enemy in the markets is not the person on the other side of the trade—it's you.
Doing more, trying harder, making more trades and paying more attention to your portfolio can be hazardous to your wealth. The most important work you can do as an investor is proper preparation. And when it is time to act, it will because your plan tells you to, not because of some scary headlines or talking head on financial television forcing your hand.
-Ben Carlson, Risk & Reward
the temperament.....................
Investing is not a game where the guy with the 160 IQ beats the guy with the 130 IQ. Once you have ordinary intelligence, what you need is the temperament to control the urges that get other people into trouble in investing.
unraveling.................
Our unraveling continues, even accelerates. Political institutions and geopolitical norms are fracturing. Far-right and nationalist movements are ascendant. Democracies around the world look vulnerable; the sturdy-seeming institutional bulwarks that loomed solemnly around them now sag under pressure like rotten wood. There is no more staggering an indicator of the profound misoperation of American society that its decision in 2024 to return Donald Trump to the office of the presidency. It is madness to have put him there, and is our madness that keeps us from perceiving—collectively—the absurdity and destructiveness of our choice. But the world as a whole is sheathed in confusion. In all likelihood, the postwar era of liberal hegemony is ending, and it is honestly difficult to say why. In America and around the world, we look at each other bewildered, unable to comprehend the reality that others perceive or to fathom their motivations.
-Ryan Avent, In Good Faith: How the Nature of Belief Shapes the Fate of Societies
Somewhere on my journeys through the Intertunnel I found a recommendation for this book, so I bought it. Enjoyed the first three pages, then came to the above paragraph. All I can say is that Avent needs to get out more. A few stray thoughts: first, one of the problems with our elections is that the choice is binary. Donald Trump or Kamala Harris was our choice in 2024. Reasonable people may disagree, but it was certainly not madness, or far-right, to prefer Trump over Harris. A majority of the country made that choice. Second, Avent finds it difficult to understand why the "postwar era of liberal hegemony is ending". Maybe, in good faith, he should take a closer look at the quality and character of those people passing as "elites" in government, media, and in our world-at-large these days. Open your eyes, Ryan. Anyway, if the quality of thinking does not improve, I will not be finishing this book.
Religious freedom, or not...............
............More stuff I never learned as a history major:
In 1768, with dissenting religion continuing to grow, the Anglican establishment—both a political and religious entity—resorted to arrests. Baptists faced the brunt of arrests. By the time of the American Revolution, more than half the Baptist ministers in Virginia had been jailed for preaching without a license or disturbing the peace. (Some ministers responded that they had a license from "King Jesus" and recognized no other authority over their calling.) . . .
Facing the most formidable military of the eighteenth century, and with dissenters accounting for 20 to 33 percent or more of Virginia's white population, patriot leaders realized quickly that they needed dissenters' support in the war effort. (Government documents noted, for example, the need for support from those marksmen in the heavily Presbyterian Shenandoah Valley with the extraordinarily accurate long rifles who eventually mad up the core of Daniel Morgan's riflemen at the Battle of Saratoga.) This recognition led to a remarkable negotiation—support for the war effort being offered by dissenters in return for religious freedom.
Dissenters' earlier pleas for some limited relief were replaced by demands for equal treatment: an end to the church tax; an end to Anglican control of marriage, orphans, and poor relief; exemption from military service for dissenting ministers. Religious freedom was tied to the sought-after support for the war.
-John A. Ragosta, from his essay, What Does the American Revolution Mean to Me? in The American Revolution at 250: Twenty-Four Historians Reflect on the Founding
Sunday, June 7, 2026
Good luck with that.................
If Mamdani wants his affordability agenda to be more than a redistribution of this shrinking pie, he will need to recharge the private-sector engines of upward mobility. He can do that by confronting the occupational licensing and business regulations, land-use restrictions, and cost drivers that have made middle-class life in New York so hard to sustain.
-Michael Dresdale, from this essay
however....................
However beautiful the strategy, you should occasionally look at the results.
On handling..........................
............................................conflict.
Well, today we’re gonna get some help from what may seem like an unlikely source: Carl von Clausewitz.
Yeah, the dead war guy. The 19th-century Prussian strategist who spent his time thinking about armies and violence, which sounds like it has nothing to do with you, a person whose most frequent combat scenarios involve passive-aggressive emails.
About denying danger..................
Given our ability to deny dangers - to stare at a lion and declare "That is not a lion" - the only moment when many matters are crystal clear are when they are being analyzed from inside of the lion's stomach.
Letters...................
From my infancy I was taught to love humanity and liberty. Enquiry and experience have since confirmed my reverence for the lessons then given me, by convincing me more fully of their truth and excellence. Benevolence toward mankind excites wishes for their welfare, and such wishes endear the means of fulfilling them. These can be found in liberty only, and therefore her sacred cause ought to be espoused by every man, on every occasion, to the utmost of his power. As a charitable but poor person does not withhold his mite because he cannot relieve all the distresses of the miserable, so should not any honest man suppress his sentiments concerning freedom, however small their influence is likely to be. Perhaps he “may touch some wheel” that will have an effect greater than he could reasonably expect.
-John Dickinson, from his first Letters from a Farmer in Pennsylvania
Been reading The American Revolution at 250: Twenty-Four Historians Reflect on the Founding. More than a few historians are troubled by the contradiction between the sentiments of liberty inherent in the Founding and the reality of enslavement. 250 years and a bloody civil war later, we are still dealing with the echoes of that contradiction. Reading Dickinson's first letter, the question arose, "was Dickinson a slave owner?" Google says yes. Dickenson College puts it this way: "The founders of Dickinson College believed in the principles of the enlightenment and yet still found ways to rationalize ownership of other human beings."
Saturday, June 6, 2026
bureaucracy...........................
I have always had, no matter the regime (I make no exceptions), a repugnance for bureaucracy. . . . I noticed that, to get ahead, one needed to be pliable and obsequious to those who gave you orders, and duplicitous or violent towards those who take orders from you. In France, the administrative state does not conduct itself with the general welfare in mind, but only in the interests of those who govern. And no one can hope to rise in the ranks without subordinating his interests to those of others. . . . And though many things I encountered in my judicial career displeased me, I embraced what seemed to me the only career in civil service that gave me any independence from the transient groups that cycle through power in our country, the only one where one can both be civil servant and oneself.
-Alexis de Tocqueville, from a letter to his nephew Hubert, 1854
Some things never change............
Guizot would become both a major historian and formidable statesman; he was also, like Royer-Collard, a significant presence in the young Tocqueville's life. One of his first initiatives as Secrétaire général was to order what we would nowadays call a public opinion survey, pioneering a new role for local administrators. The Bourbons had been in exile, and thus out of power, for so many years that they had to rediscover France. In September 1814, Guizot instructed all prefects to inquire about the "hearts and minds of the masses, their general opinions, and general mentality and assumptions of each profession and each rank, and how they shaped public affairs in the département, especially regarding those opinions that are resistant to the authorities." Guizot would eventually think of "governance of the public mind" as "the great challenge of modern society.
-Olivier Zunz, The Man Who Understood Democracy: The Life of Alexis De Tocqueville
worthwhile...............
A person was like a city. You couldn't let a few less desirable parts put you off the whole. There may be bits you don't like, a few dodgy side streets and suburbs, but the good stuff makes it worthwhile.
-Matt Haig, The Midnight Library
Harrison...........................
The danger of civilization, of course, is that you will piss away your life on nonsense. The discounted sociologist Jared Schmitz, who was packed off from Harvard to a minor religious college in Missouri before earning tenure when a portion of his doctoral dissertation was proven fraudulent, stated that in a culture in the seventh stage of rabid consumerism the peripheral always subsumes the core, and the core disappears to the point that very few of the citizens can recall its precise nature. Schmitz had stupidly confided to his lover, a graduate student, that he had in fact invented certain French and German data, and when he abandoned her for a Boston toe dancer this graduate student ratted on him, This is neither specifically here nor there to our story other than to present an amusing anecdote on the true nature of academic life. Also, of course, the poignant message of a culture spending its time as it spends its money; springing well beyond the elements of food, clothes, and shelter into the suffocating welter of the unnecessary that has become necessary.
-Jim Harrison, The Beast God Forgot to Invent
a faint flutter................
Great ideas, it has been said, come into the world as gently as doves. Perhaps then, if we listen attentively, we shall hear, amid the uproar of empires and nations, a faint flutter of wings, the gentle stirring of life and hope. Some will say that this hope lies in a nation; others, in a man. I believe rather that it is awakened, revived, nourished by millions of solitary individuals whose deeds and works every day negate frontiers and the crudest implications of history. As a result, there shines forth fleetingly the ever threatened truth that each and every man, on the foundation of his own sufferings and joy, builds for all.
-Albert Camus, from this collection of essays
Thursday, June 4, 2026
an increased valuing...............
People who depend too much upon the past have become almost useless in many professions. We need a new kind of human being who can divorce himself from his past, who feels strong and courageous and trusting enough to trust himself in the present situation, to handle the problem well in an improvising way, without previous preparation, if need be.
All of this adds up to an increased emphasis on psychological health and strength. It means an increased valuing of the ability to pay fullest attention to the here-now situation, to be able to listen well, to be able to see well in the concrete, immediate moment before us. It means that we need people who are different from the average kind of person who confronts the present as if it were a repetition of the past, and who uses the present simply as a period in which he prepares for future threats and dangers, which he doesn't trust himself enough to meet unprepared when the time comes.
-Abraham Maslow, The Farther Reaches of Human Nature
rooted.................
We shall find, after earnest observation and reflection, that all, except those who have entered into the way of wisdom, believe that happiness is only to be obtained by the gratification of desire. It is this belief, rooted in the soil of ignorance and continually watered by selfish cravings, that is the cause of all the misery in the world.
benefits...................
One last point about laughter. As I described it laughter seems to have a beneficial effect on human communities: those who laugh together also grow together and win through their laughter a mutual tolerance of their all-too-human failings. But not everything that confers a benefit has a function. Entirely redundant behavior—jumping for joy, listening to music, bird-watching, prayer—may yet confer enormous benefits. By calling it redundant I mean that those benefits are the effect of the behavior, not its cause.
-Roger Scruton, On Human Nature
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