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

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