Life its ownself............................

 

...........................grandparenting is pretty great.

dread........................

 

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

Congratulations...........................

 

...................................are in order.

The art.....................................

 

.............................................of teaching.

Starting to think that.......................

 

................Bari Weiss is a national treasure:

What's become clear is the crisis of trust is more accurately a crisis of trustworthiness.

In other words, it's not that Americans have randomly stopped trusting the experts while softening toward the conspiracy theorists.  It's that so many experts have been exposed as partisan and unreliable and stopped deserving our trust.

-as culled from here

Ah, the 21st century....................

 But even as we consume more than ever before, big business faces a crisis of legitimacy. The pharmaceutical industry creates life-saving vaccines but has lost the trust of the public. The widening pay gap between executives and employees is destabilising our societies. Facebook and Google have more customers than any companies in history but are widely reviled.

-Sir John Kay suggests we read his newest book

The good life..........................

 

........................................well lived.

astray....................

 

. . . a man unaware of his ignorance will be led astray by his knowledge.

-Rob Firchau

Ah, democracy...................

 

A “democracy” where unelected bureaucrats have effective veto power is not a real democracy. 

-as cut-and-pasted from here

Ed. Note:  The history major in me bristles when I hear people talking about the U.S. as a democracy.  I suspect the Founding Fathers would share my bristles.  They created, and we should still be considered, a constitutional republic, which is a very different animal from a democracy.  Having said that, if you substitute "constitutional republic" for "democracy" in the above quote, the quote is still true.

Ah, history.........................

 

Everything feels unprecedented when you haven’t engaged with history. 

-Kelly Hayes, as culled from Morgan Housel's recent quote collection.

Ed. Note:  Been reading Walter Stahr's biography Salmon P. Chase: Lincoln's Vital Rival and I can tell you for certain that politics in 1840 were just as messy as they are today.  I suspect by the time the author gets around to the late 1850s we will find the politics might have gotten even messier.

Carpe diem...................................

 

all you could possibly want to know is here

And doing a mighty fine job of it..........

 

Only six people in the Galaxy knew that the job of the Galactic President was not to wield power but to attract attention away from it.

- Douglas Adams, via Chris Lynch

avoidance......................

 

It can be difficult to appreciate how much avoiding the standard ways of failing dramatically increases the odds of success.

-from the good folk at Farnam Street

Post-truth....................

 

Truth isn’t the sum of many facts: It works the other way around. We erect frameworks of understanding which the facts must fit into or modify. A healthy society will debate the relationship between a given fact and its role in our understanding of the world. The catastrophic failure of the mediators means that we now debate the frameworks and their meanings among ourselves. In this rolling chaos, interpretations have turned tendentious and partial. Reality has splintered into a million pieces. That’s the post-truth condition. . . .

The 20th century’s illusion of narrative integrity is gone forever. We now stumble along in the dark, plagued by uncertainty—an accurate description, I note, of the human condition.

-Martin Gurri, from this essay

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

 

. . . if we trace these through the foregoing essay on driving, I think we arrive at a better understanding of the central issue of politics: sovereignty.

     To see a problem that needs fixing often stems from a failure to see that a solution has already been achieved—through the skill and intelligence of ordinary people.

     To drive is to exercise one's skill at being free, and one can't help but feel this when one gets behind the wheel.  It seems a skill worth preserving.