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

About the housing affordability problem.......

 

............................there are two main culprits.   The first is the huge swath of the local building companies that could not survive the Great Recession.  Since we decided several decades ago that every high school graduate needed to go to college, there was no back filling in the building trades.  No local builders building equals a shortage of supply.   The second is the following chart.  Don't let anyone tell you differently, very low interest rates are inflationary for the single-family housing markets.  Since buyers tend to pay based on their monthly payment, low interest rates enable buyers to borrow more, thus pay more, which is a great boon to sellers.   Very low interest rates combined with limited supply quickly allowed the sharp increase in home values.  Voila—an affordability "crisis".

chart courtesy of this post

Some old cartoons........................

 

........................................you might enjoy.

A pretty fair speech..................

 

"For nearly two centuries before the revolution, this land was settled and forged by men and women who bore in their souls the blood and noble spirit of the British. Here on a wild and untamed continent, they set loose the ancient English love of liberty and Great Britain’s distinctive sense of glory, destiny, and pride. And that’s what it is: glory, destiny, and pride. The American patriots who pledged their lives to independence in 1776 were the heirs to this majestic inheritance. Their veins ran with Anglo-Saxon courage. Their hearts beat with an English faith in standing firm for what is right, good, and true. In recent years, we’ve often heard it said that America is merely an idea. But the cause of freedom did not simply appear as an intellectual invention of 1776. The American founding was the culmination of hundreds of years of thought, struggle, sweat, blood, and sacrifice on both sides of the Atlantic."

-as cut-and-pasted from here

On compasses......................

 

But humans are not machines, and work is not life. Your Personal Compass ensures you’re moving in the right direction across the areas that matter to you, bearing in mind that those areas will undoubtedly shift during your life.

-Nicholas Bate

A few more years of this.........................

 

.................and the supply/demand scales will level out.  Then, and only then, can we talk seriously about solving the affordability problem.   Historically, one million housing starts per year is the magic number. 

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

 

R.E.M...................Automatic For The People

Willingness..................

 

So it's not about whether we feel depressed or happy; rather, it's about our willingness and ability to participate fully in any and all of our feelings.  The experience of freedom arises not from acquiring our preferred lifestyle and our preferred state of mind but from a willingness to stay with ourselves—to be completely committed to experiencing our lives—regardless of circumstance.

-Bruce Tift, Already Free: Buddhism Meets Psychotherapy on the Path of Liberation

Consulting with Dostoyevsky..............

 

Over the course of his work, he concluded that most of what we truly care about in life is somewhere outside the scientific map and rational calculation, but that much of our misery comes from looking for it inside that map—the palace of crystal—"all ready-made and worked out with mathematical exactitude."

-Arthur C. Brooks, The Meaning of Your Life: Finding Purpose in an Age of Emptiness

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

 

Let me begin my story with a few words about my family.  They were all plan Missouri farmers, proud, honest, hardworking and poor.  Desperately poor.

     According to family legend, my Bradley ancestors immigrated from the British Isles sometime in the mid-1700s to Madison County, Kentucky.  In the early 1800s they migrated west to what would become the State of Missouri.  They settled on small, hard farm parcels in Randolph County in the central part of the state near Clark, a farm village, and Higbee a coal-mining town.

     My grandfather, Thomas Minter Bradley, still in his teens, served as a private in the Confederate Army during the Civil War.  When he came home, he married Sarah Elizabeth Lewis, the daughter of a poor Clark farmer.  They had nine children.  My father, John Smith Bradley, born February 17,1867, was the oldest.

     Like all the Missouri Bradley's, my father began life as a sodbuster.  But he became the first Bradley to break out of the mold.  At age nineteen, and until then largely self-educated, he entered one of the rural schools near Clark.  He was a quick study.  Two years later he had advanced far enough to qualify as a teacher in the rural school system and about 1888 he launched his life's work.

     My father was a curious blend of frontiersman, sportsman, farmer, and intellectual.  Powerfully built and fearless, he was a superb hunter and shot—indisputably the best in Randolph County.  A pioneer in baseball, he carved his own bats, taught himself to pitch curve balls and organized and starred on local teams.  In the months when school was not in session, he usually hired out to farmers or sharecropped to earn enough money to survive.  At the same time, he was an omnivorous reader and lover of books.  Everywhere he taught, he encouraged his students to read and created small libraries for them.

-Omar N. Bradley (with Clay Blair), A General's Life:  An Autobiography by General of The Army Omar N. Bradley

Choices...................

 

We have men of science, too few men of God. We have grasped the mystery of the atom and rejected the Sermon on the Mount. Man is stumbling blindly through a spiritual darkness while toying with the precarious secrets of life and death. The world has achieved brilliance without wisdom, power without conscience. Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing than we know about living.

-Omar N. Bradley, one of only a handful of 5-Star Generals in U. S. history, from a 1948 speech

Those were the days my friend............

 

The year was 1966:

Francis Sinatra...............Strangers In The Night

The Beach Boys.............Good Vibrations

The Young Rascals.........Good Lovin'

Noah...........................

 

...........couldn't we just say stealing is bad karma wrong?

Staying awake at night..........................

 

............................with Jared Dillion:

There is a chart that gets passed around from time to time which is a chart of the S&P 500 going up annotated with all the reasons why it might go down over the last 40 years or whatever, the most recent example being the Iran War. The price of oil goes up 50%? Fuck you, stocks are going up anyway. That has been our experience, pretty much, for most of the last 20 years. Every worry, every pullback has been a buying opportunity.

Now, it doesn’t take a galaxy brain to figure out that this dynamic might not continue indefinitely. 

-------------------------

We just elected large-C Communist mayors in Seattle and New York. The Democrats are moving to the far left faster than you can say Hegelian dialectic. It seems as though the stakes are higher for each successive election, and it says something when Gavin Newsom is probably your most centrist candidate. Newsom would have been far to the left of Carter in the 1970s. But here we are, and the polarization is a freight train coming through your living room. 

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

 

Dave Mason....................Look At You Look At Me

On Generative AI.................

 

Most people don’t care that GPT 5.5, released late last week, underperformed Opus 4.7 on SWE-Bench Pro. They want the AI companies to let them know when they have a product that will actually and notably improve their lives, and until then, they want these companies to leave them alone and try their best not to ​crash the economy​.

As Lopatto concludes: “At some point, our Silicon Valley overlords forgot that in order for their vision of the future to be adopted, people had to want it.” They still have a lot of work to do.

Cal Newport, from this essay

Ah, recessions......................

 

Goodspeed has little patience with the moralising that claims recessions are a nation’s just deserts for periods of greed and moral decrepitude. He disapprovingly cites Alan Greenspan’s description of periods of “irrational exuberance” for which Greenspan suggested that downturns and recessions were just punishments. Goodspeed compares much of this sort of discussion to “the parables of Jesus or Aesop’s fables”: fine for moral instruction, but not really the prime causes of economic downturns.

-Joel Kotkin, from this substack post

filtering....................

 

     Reality is what is happening right now.  It is the objective circumstance that is occurring without any meaning or judgment attached to it.  And so what we experience is not reality itself but our perception of reality.  Any meaning or thinking we give something is self-created and our choice. . . . the meaning we give something is the filter through which we see life.

-Joseph Nguyen, Don't Believe Everything You Think:  Why Your Thinking Is the Beginning & End of Suffering

Uh-oh..................

 

 I do not bring into this assemblage politics, certainly not partisan politics; but it is a fair subject for our deliberation to consider what may be necessary to secure the prize for which they battled. In a republic like ours, where the citizen is the sovereign, and the official the servant, where no power is exercised except by the will of the people, it is important that the sovereign—the people—should possess intelligence. 

-U. S. Grant, as lifted from here

nests...................

 

     Towards the end of his life, riven with chemotherapy, John threw fistfuls of his hair out his window, hoping they would commingle with the sheep wool floating about his neighbour Tim Conner's field.  A few months later that hair was the lining of a chaffinch's nest where she laid her egg and reared her young.

Let us all have a nest with a lock or two of John's hair in it.  God knows what could grow from it.

-Martin Shaw's introduction to John Moriarty's, A Hut at the Edge of the Village

I regarded it as a fraud..................

 

My problem was that for my first ten years in school, I was at the back of the class.  In the end, I came to see myself as my teachers saw me and as everyone in my class saw me.  Without knowing it I made a compact with being last.  And when, eventually, my exam results showed that I was first, I regarded it as a fraud.  Nothing so trivial as a fact could give the lie to an old sense of self.

-John Moriarty, A Hut at the Edge of the Village

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

 

     I'm walking on Revere Beach outside of Boston where the low tide has pushed the ocean far away from the shore, and the wet sand is squishing between my toes.  I came here for no particular reason—just to clear my head after two frantic weeks in the city surrounded by noise, construction, and crowds.  A briny, sweet smell hangs over everything in the thick humidity of September.  Warm air and wafts of cool breeze intermingle—it is T-shirt and jacket weather both at the same time.

-Daniel J. Levitin, I Heard There Was A Secret Chord:  Music as Medicine

bridging.....................

 

We may think of science and art as standing in opposition to one another, but they are bound by a common objective.  Science seeks to find truth in the natural world; art seeks to find truth in the emotional world.  Medicine fits somewhere in between, bridging science, art, and the emotions that move us toward the will to survive, to heal, to take our medicine, to exercise, and to put in motion all those things that keep us healthy.

-Daniel J. Levitin, I Heard There Was A Secret Chord:  Music as Medicine

The Great Blurring...............

 

We all have a desire for transcendence. We want to reach higher and outward beyond our limitations so we can grow and do great things. That yearning is part of who we are; it’s behind the greatest art and music and scientific achievements. But transcendence that ignores the human condition isn’t enlightenment. It’s chaos. As we seek to transcend the limitations of the natural world, we should respect the boundaries that make us human.

-via the Rogue Highway substack

thanks

compounding...............

 

Good and evil both increase at compound interest. That is why the little decisions you and I make every day are of such infinite importance. The smallest good act today is the capture of a strategic point from which, a few months later, you may be able to go on to victories you never dreamed of.

-C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

via

responsibility...........

 

We are responsible for our own ignorance or, with time and open hearted enlightenment, our own wisdom.

-Isabel Wilkerson

via

Captivated...................

 

We live in an era that often feels defined by great despair. War rages, lawlessness spreads, politicians betray their values, and it can seem, at times, that we are simply drowning in the uncertainty of it all.

And then something breaks through. For the first time in more than 50 years, we sent human beings to the moon and back. For 10 days, we watched as they beat a new path for exploration beyond anything we have ever known.

We watched them record detailed scientific observations of the lunar surface. We pored over their remarkable images of the far side of the moon. We saw them collect biological samples, test radiation-monitoring equipment, and conduct bone marrow experiments, all while traveling more than 24,000 miles per hour through the solar system.

For 10 days, we were captivated by achievements most of us could never imagine. And yet, the most compelling part of it all was not how foreign it felt, but how familiar.

-from The Free Press

Seatbelts..........................?

 

.....................we don't need no stinkin' seatbelts.

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

 

Frank Sinatra..........Songs for Swingin' Lovers!

The great enrichment....................

 

 ....................................emigrated from Glascow?

via

at the edge..............

 

When culture is in woeful crisis, the insights rarely come from parliament, senate, or committee, they tend to come from a hut at the edge of the village. Let’s go there. There is tremendous, unexpected hope waiting.

-John Moriarty, A Hut at the Edge of the Village

via

to minister.....................

 

Happiness lies not in the mere possession of money; it lies in the joy of achievement, in the thrill of creative effort. The joy, the moral stimulation of work no longer must be forgotten in the mad chase of evanescent profits. These dark days, my friends, will be worth all they cost us if they teach us that our true destiny is not to be ministered unto but to minister to ourselves—to our fellow men.

-Franklin Roosevelt, from his first Inaugural Address, March 4, 1933

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

 

.................................sharp teeth and all.