Freedom is not empowerment. Empowerment is what the Serbs have in Bosnia. Anybody can grab a gun and be empowered. It’s not entitlement. An entitlement is what people on welfare get, and how free are they? It’s not an endlessly expanding list of rights – the “right” to education, the “right” to food and housing. That’s not freedom, that’s dependency. Those aren’t rights, those are the rations of slavery – hay and a barn for human cattle. There is only one basic human right, the right to do as you damn well please. And with it comes the only basic human duty, the duty to take the consequences.

-P. J. O'Rourke, as copied from here

Great moments...........................

 

.............................................in lip-syncing.

Sixty years ago........................

 

The Outsiders........................Time Won't Let Me

Not sure whether to laugh or cry.......

 

In the meantime, Warsh, as official chairman, could try to speed Powell’s departure by making his life at the Fed uncomfortable: maybe take away his parking space and staff plus put his office in the basement.  But the decision to leave would still be Powell’s until January 2028.   

Based on Powell’s statements about trying to protect Fed “independence” from politics, preventing Trump from getting a board majority may be an ulterior motive for Powell to stay, which means the policy shifts supported by Warsh could be on the back burner for some time to come.

-Brian Wesbury, from here

 

Being busy is not being able to add anything else to your calendar.  Being fulfilled is not wanting to add anything else to your calendar.  Don’t confuse one for the other.

-Mark Manson, from here

Learned something new today............

 

Uruguay had been established with the help of Britain as a buffer state between Argentina and Brazil and formally declared independence in 1830.  The remainder of the nineteenth century was bloody as those of European descent first massacred the Indigenous peoples and then fell to a series of civil wars between the Blancos, the conservative champions of the rights of landowners, and the Colorados, the liberals based largely in Montevideo.  Although the Colorados won every election held between 1865 and 1958, it took a long time for that to equate to stability.  By 1900, Uruguay had suffered around fifty coups and uprisings.

-Jonathan Wilson, The Power and The Glory:  The History of the World Cup

soccer does matter.............

 

Successes allow leaders to strut and pontificate, to make grand speeches about the symbolic ramifications of victory.  Soccer has, at least if claims made in the moment of glory are to be believed, put Uruguay on the map, reintegrated postwar West Germany into the global community, and ended racism in France.  That's almost entirely nonsense, of course, but it doesn't mean that the assertions are not revealing.  And soccer does matter, does offer insights, often unconscious, into the desires and doubts of a culture, never more so than in the quadrennial snapshot offered by the World Cup.

-Jonathan Wilson, The Power and The Glory:  The History of the World Cup

Slopulism....................

 

In general, this tax idea fits into the increasing trend toward “slopulism” in Democratic policymaking — the idea that a modern government can be funded solely on the backs of the super-rich, while the merely-rich get big tax cuts.

-Noah Smith, as he looks at California's "one time" billionaire tax

Feels like he's nagging....................

 

People underestimate themselves and overestimate how long things take.

You can do far more than you think, far better, and far faster.

-Shane Parrish, from here

For kids of all ages................

The most damaging idea in modern parenting might be the phrase “screen time” itself.

Treating “screen time” as one thing is like treating “food time” as one thing. A grilled salmon and a Pop-Tart are both “food.” A kid using an adaptive math app for 20 minutes and a kid mainlining TikTok for 20 minutes are both on “screens.” In both cases, lumping them together makes it impossible to think clearly about what’s actually happening to your kid’s brain.

-From this episode of the Austin Scholar substack

Predictions are hard................

 

This data is fairly well known. The problem, though, is that trading activity generates revenue for the brokerage industry, so it has an interest in keeping investors engaged with the market. That’s why brokerage analysts are on TV every day, offering their forecasts for individual stocks, for the overall market and for the broader economy. To be sure, this makes for interesting television. The problem, though, is that it’s been shown to carry almost no value. According to research by Joachim Klement, the accuracy of Wall Street prognosticators is approximately zero.

-Adam Grossman, from here

Any Major Dude With Half A Heart.............

......................................offers us a Good Morning.

Getting a taste............................

 

.................................of Edward Hopper.

Great art is the outward expression of an inner life in the artist, and this inner life will result in his personal vision of the world. No amount of skillful invention can replace the essential element of imagination. One of the weaknesses of much abstract painting is the attempt to substitute the inventions of the intellect for a pristine imaginative conception. The inner life of a human being is a vast and varied realm and does not concern itself alone with stimulating arrangements of color, form, and design. The term "life" as used in art is something not to be held in contempt, for it implies all of existence, and the province of art is to react to it and not to shun it. Painting will have to deal more fully and less obliquely with life and nature's phenomena before it can again become great.

-Edward Hopper, from here (page 8)

The audacity of art..................

 

He’s one of those people who needed to sail over the horizon, to see what’s out there. The danger, of course, is that no matter how far you go, the horizon remains the horizon. Whatever.

-from this Sippican Cottage (an artist himself) post

Viewed from the proper timeline...........

 

.....................................our planet is not only alive but it is doing what it has always done.

   via

The writers at the Babylon Bee..............

 

.....need to get out of their bubble every once in a while.

An interesting question................

 

more fun can be found here

Not sure.........................

 

..........................he is correct about all this.

Nobody ever got to the end of their to-do list and thought: “Good, I'm done now.”

On political violence................

This is America right now, where nothing seems real and where your sympathies are open to constant manipulation. When I was a girl, the priest always asked for prayers for the United States, which seemed silly to me, like asking for prayers for the moon or gravity. For the first time in my life, I’ve been doing what those priests instructed.

-Caitlin Flanagan, from here

the narcissism of minor differences...........

 

For toleration to be sustained, principled arguments are necessary too. . . . And when Protestantism fragmented into sects, the sects regarded one another with the bitter antipathy that Freud calls the "narcissism of minor differences".

-Ritchie Robertson, The Enlightenment:  The Pursuit of Happiness 1680-1790

He seems a bit testy....................

 

............about how things are going in California:

As the descent accelerates, the promises of more free shit accelerate. Eventually we’ll all be living in a muddy hole in the ground, and the political debates for state office will be about eating daily free lobster and filet mignon from the government. “Buddy, I’ll fill that muddy hole in the ground where you live with the biggest free diamonds you’re ever seen.” They’re out of money, they’re out of sanity, they’re out of logic, and they’re out of honesty. Why, boys, out in Californee, they go lakes full of hot stew, and the rivers flow with the finest whiskey.

The combination of getting less and being promised more seems to be inevitable, making politics an exercise in filling psychological holes. You’ll go to bed hungry, but debates will be a buffet. Hobos dream big.

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

 

Bob Seger & The Silver Bullet Band....Night Moves

A dozen life lessons.............

 

.........................inspired by Ruth Alder Schnee:

6. Pay attention and seek beauty. As Adler Schnee reminds us, “We all make our own environment in which we are comfortable, and beauty is a great part of it.” She also emphasized that finding beauty is much easier than many of us have been led to believe. “You just have to look at things. Everything is designed. My biggest criticism of American education is the schools don’t teach children to look and to see things, because design is all around us. You just have to go outside and look.” 

getting comfortable............................

 

...........................................with chaos.

The birth of anything—stars and galaxies as well as people and animals—takes place amid disorder, confusion, and chaos.

-Steven Pressfield

internal......................

 

Improvement is being better than your past self.  It doesn't have to be more complicated than that. Do not compare against others, compare against your past self.  Keep the focus internal.

-James Clear, from this edition

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

 

R.E.M..........................................Document

fun with the language..............

 

Somehow the word
allow is in the word
swallow and in swallow
two wholly different meanings:
one to take in through
the mouth and another
what we call the common
winged gnat hunter who
is, in all probability,
somewhere near us now.
Once, I thought
if I knew all the words
I would say the right thing
in the right way,
instead language became
more brutish: blink twice
for the bird, blink once
for tender annihilation. Who
knows what we are doing as
we go about our days lazily
choosing our languages. Some
days my life is held together
by definitions, some days
I read the word swallow
and all my feathers show.

-Ada Limon, the poem "Literary Theory" from Startlement: New and Selected Poems

a prisoner of words..............

 

Subject to these reservations, we must hope for a common rallying.  But first our Leftist intellectuals, who have swallowed so many insults and may well have to begin doing so again, would have to undertake a critique of the reasonings and ideologies to which they have hitherto subscribed, which have wreaked the havoc they have seen in our most recent history.  That will be the hardest thing.  We must admit that today conformity is on the Left.  To be sure, the Right is not brilliant.  But the Left is in complete decadence, a prisoner of words, caught in its own vocabulary, capable merely of stereotyped replies, constantly at a loss when faced with the truth, from which it nevertheless claimed to derive its laws.  The Left is schizophrenic and needs doctoring through pitiless self-criticism, exercise of the heart, close reasoning, and a little modesty.  Until such an effort at re-examination is well underway, any rallying will be useless and even harmful.

-Albert Camus, from his 1957 essay, "Socialism of the Gallows", found in Resistance, Rebellion, and Death

Wondering about Francis Bacon...........

 

The contention that knowledge is power, as advanced by Bacon, secularized the previously occult dictum to great effect. Disinterested curiosity was not Bacon’s only goal; he also envisioned the command of nature, its subjugation and bondage, in the advancement of human comfort, wealth, control, and power. And his vision would shape the dominant ideology of the next half-millennium. “Human knowledge and human power meet in one,” claimed Bacon in Novum Organum, charting the passage of that supposedly unsinkable ship of civilization toward the brighter and more prosperous future that enlightened men had long dreamed of. All that was required was a ritual sacrifice of the mystery that had suffused the world in the millennia the scientific revolution. 

-as culled from this Hedgehog Review essay

Eric Barker.........................

 

...................thinks about Arthur Schopenhauer:

“You’re comparing Taylor Swift to a 19th century German philosopher who thought life was an unquenchable spiral of desire?”

Yes. And you can’t stop me, but more importantly, you can’t tell me why I’m wrong, which is the part that should bother you.

The problem is never just the problem..........

.......It's the response to it that defines your team.

from this Tanmay Vora post