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

 

Lou Christie....................................Lightnin' Strikes

Leadership 101.......................

 

Leadership is not a job title: it’s a state of being.

Silly season is in full swing.............

 

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

 

Al Stewart..........................Year of the Cat (album)

unappeasable...........................

 
Anger at humans, my own kind—
I remember how it carried me,
joyous in self's self-exaltation,
through a narrow opening as at birth
into the great hollow of the dark itself
where the unappeasable, in unending
revenge for revenge, tread each
alone the circle of no known
beginning or end.  And that is Hell.

-Wendell Berry, Sabbaths 2010 X

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

 

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

 

Young Rascals.....................................Good Lovin

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

 

My name is David Burkett.  I'm actually the fourth in a line of David Burketts beginning in the 1860s when my great-grandfather emigrated from Cornwall, England, to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan which forms the southern border of Lake Superior, that vast inland sea of fresh water.  This naming process is of no particular interest except to illustrate how fathers wish to further dominate the lives of their sons from the elemental beginnings.  I have done everything possible to renounce my father but then within the chaos of the events of my life it is impossible to understand the story without telling it.

-Jim Harrison, True North

something worthy of notice..........

  

     Burley Coulter himself was one of the best perquisites of my office.  Burley was nineteen years older than I was, old enough to have been my father, and in fact he was the same age as my father would have been if he had lived.  He was the most interesting man I ever knew.  He was in his way an adventurer.  And something worthy of notice was always going on in his head.  I found him to be a surprising man, unpredictable, and at the same time always true to himself and recognizable in what he did.  I had lived in Port William several years before I realized that Burley was proud of me for being a reader of books; he was not himself a devoted reader, but he thought it was excellent that I should be.  It must have been 1940 or 1941 when he first came all the way into my upstairs room and saw my books in my little bookcase,

"Do you read in them?"

"Yes," I said.

He gave the shelves a long study, not reading the titles, apparently just assaying in his mind the number and weight of the books, their varying sizes and colors, the printing on their spines.  And then he nodded his approval and said, "Well, that's all right."

-Wendell Berry, Jayber Crow

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

 

Frank Sinatra..............................Strangers In The Night

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

 

With chatbots, the negative impact is immediate. The high generated by side-stepping mental effort using LLMs is so compelling that, with only a short exposure, hard thinking quickly becomes intolerable.

-Cal Newport, from his post The Good Thing About Hard Things

the slightest idea................

Ledger of the head’s transactions, 
log of the body’s voyage,
it rides all day in a raincoat pocket, 
ready to admit any droplet of thought,
nut of a maxim, 

narrowest squint of an observation.

It goes with me 

to a gallery where I open it to record 

a note on red and the birthplace of Corot,
into the tube of an airplane 

so I can take down the high dictation of clouds,
or on a hike in the woods where a young hawk 

might suddenly fly between its covers.

And when my heart is beating 

too rapidly in the dark,
I will go downstairs in a robe, 

open it up to a blank page
and try to settle on the blue lines 

whatever it is that seems to be the matter.

Net I tow beneath the waves of the day, 

giant ball of string or foil,
it holds whatever I uncap my pen to save:
a snippet of Catullus, 

a passage from Camus,
a tiny eulogy for the evening anodyne of gin,
a note on what the kingfisher looks like when he swims.

And there is room in the margins 

for the pencil to go lazy and daydream 

in circles and figure eights, 

or produce some illustrations,
like Leonardo in his famous codex —
room for a flying machine, 

the action of a funnel, 

a nest of pulleys,
and a device that is turned by water,

room for me to draw 

a few of my own contraptions,
inventions so original and visionary
that not even I — genius of the new age —
have the slightest idea what they are for.

-Billy Collins, Journal

Now tell us how you really feel...........

 

........................about the digital world:

The business logic of these platforms, the relationship they forge with their users (who are not customers, in the traditional sense), is essentially extractive, parasitic, vampiric. As a form of entrepreneurship, it more closely resembles… manufacturing highly addictive Tianeptine (“Gas Station Heroin”) for general sale, than it does the selling of cars or refrigerators.

-from Matthew B. Crawford's substack as he looks at the simultaneous rise of “surveillance capitalism” and of attention engineering. 

When governing (effectively)................

 

Focusing on basics, and on developing a sense of community, is far more effective than emphasizing partisan politics.

-Joel Kotkin, from this substack effort

willingness.................

 

     What's important to recognize is that risk and reward are attached at the hip.  If you cannot deal with uncertainty and volatility, you should expect to earn lower returns.  If you desire higher returns, you need to become comfortable with drawdowns and unexpected events vaporizing a piece of your portfolio on occasion.

     If there's one lesson this book hopes to leave you with, it's that risk cannot be avoided—it's something you have to manage, understand, and ultimately respect. . . .

    The real secret to investing, as it turns out, is no secret at all.  It's the willingness to accept that pain and progress are two sides of the same coin.  It's having the courage to hold when others sell, the humility to admit what you don't control and focus on what you do.

     You don't need to outsmart the market.  You just need to outlast it.

-Ben Carlson,  Risk & Reward

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

The Four Tops......Loving You Is Sweeter Than Ever
 

noticing..................

 

Have you ever noticed when you're driving that anyone who's driving slower than you is an idiot and anyone driving faster than you is a maniac?

-George Carlin

a new momentum......................

 

The first real grip I ever got on things
Was when I learned the art of pedalling
(By hand) a bike turned upside down, and drove
Its back wheel preternaturally fast.
I loved the disappearance of the spokes,
The way the space between the hub and rim
Hummed with transparency.  If you threw
A potato into it, the hooped air
Spun mush and drizzle back into your face;
If you touched it with a straw, the straw frittered.
Something about the way those pedal treads
Worked very palpably at first against you
And then began to sweep your hand ahead
Into a new momentum—that all entered me
Like an access of free power, as if belief'
Caught up and spun the objects of belief
In an orbit coterminous with longing.

-Seamus Heaney, Wheels within Wheels

On irrational knowledge...........

 

Leo Tolstoy's struggle with life's meaning seemed quite bleak.  He had searched far and wide, through his own work and that of hte greatest scientists of his day, and come up empty.  Fearing that life might, in fact, be meaningless, he was poised to kill himself.  He didn't, however, because he hadn't given up searching.

     He tried one last strategy.  Not finding life's meaning among the greatest and most sophisticated people and ideas, he ran away to a small Russian village filled with uneducated, simple farmers.  They were not scientists and scholars but ordinary working people who didn't know he was a famous author and couldn't even read his books. They didn't know that the weird guy who had moved into their town was the world-renowned Leo Tolstoy.  Day after day, he got to know them. He watched them work, talk to one another, and pray.  Here's what he noticed:  They had no crisis of meaning in their lives at all.  The lived at peace with the universe in the simplicity of their love for God and each other.  They seemed untroubled by the existential crisis that tormented him.

     Perhaps, he thought, that was the secret to living well: to embrace the irrationality of life itself, without asking questions.  Ignorance is bliss, as they say.  But on reflection, he found this perception was incorrect.  The peace of the faithful unschooled, he learned, was not that they didn't wonder about the meaning of life.  They wondered plenty.  It was that they did not insist on finding neat answers someplace.  Through the way they lived, they sought instead an understanding of life beyond what any intellect could articulate, and this understanding brought peace.  He called this "irrational knowledge."  As he concluded, "Rational knowledge, presented by the learning and wise, denies the meaning of life, but the enormous masses of men, the whole of mankind, receive that meaning in irrational knowledge.  Irrational knowledge is faith . . . It is God."

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

an ongoing responsibility.....................

 

     Yet populist manners are all for show, are they not?  The pretense grows thinner as the state thickens.  If the call to "drain the swamp" does more than repopulate it with creatures amenable to the party in power, it will be a miracle.  Government grows because the people ask more of it, and officeholders once in power seek to increase their powers and tenure and multiply their colleagues.  Lafayette's friend James Madison thought that each of the many parts of government under the Constitution—legislature, executive, judiciary, federal, state—would keep jealous watch on all the others.  Sometimes.  At other times they unite to maintain themselves over against their constituents.  The only remedy is vigilance, inspired when it is not disgraced by spasms of resentment.

     Lafayette was a friend of liberty in America and in the world.  He believed America shared his sentiments—more than it did. . . .

     So it goes with popular institutions founded on the plain rights of man.  Heroes cannot defend them for long, or alone.  The people have to take care of their institutions and their rights.   That is our ongoing responsibility.

-Richard Brookhiser:  The Hero Returns: Lafayette and the Legacy of Revolution

Voted last week.....................

 

..........now please stop sending me robo-political texts.

Voting early is one of my favorite things to do.  Many people were in line with me, and many more were in the line as I was leaving, but the process only took about ten minutes.  The Licking County Board of Elections has their act together.  It is smooth, easy, and quick.  Do go vote.

On the importance........................

 

................of reading serious fiction:

As people skills decline in the workplace, they’ll have to be acquired elsewhere. Novels and plays can make a difference because their authors know well how subtle intangibles can reveal characters and signal rough or smooth patches. They know how to convey suspense, affection, fear, joy, and doubt. Their skills, in time, can become yours.

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

There is a wide range of fiction that can acquaint the people-phobic young, the ones who text-message instead of calling so they avoid the risk of having to speak with a person, with the complexity of brilliant and flawed people.

-Michael Wade, from this episode

and reality always intrudes.................

 

Planners, architects of city design, and those they have led along with them in their beliefs are not consciously disdainful of the importance of knowing how things work.  On the contrary, they have gone to great pains to learn what the saints and sages of modern orthodox planning have said about how cities ought to work and what ought to be good for people and businesses in them.  They take this with such devotion that when contradictory reality intrudes, they must shrug reality aside.

-Jane Jacobs, The Death and Life Of Great American Cities

Checking in..........................

............................with Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr:

Most people are willing to take the Sermon on the Mount as a flag to sail under, but few will use it as a rudder by which to steer.

Greatness is not in where we stand but in what direction we are moving. We must sail sometimes with the wind and sometimes against it—but sail we must and not drift, nor lie at anchor.

We should be eternally vigilant against attempts to check the expression of opinions that we loathe.

If I had a formula for bypassing trouble, I wouldn't pass it around. Wouldn't be doing anybody a favor. Trouble creates a capacity to handle it. I don't say embrace trouble. That's as bad as treating it as an enemy. But I do say, meet it as a friend, for you'll see a lot of it and had better be on speaking terms with it.

A word is not a crystal, transparent and unchanged; it is the skin of a living thought and may vary greatly in colour and content according to the circumstances and time in which it is used.

I have no respect for the passion of equality, which seems to me merely idealizing envy.

The man of action has the present, but the thinker controls the future.

Young man, the secret of my success is that at an early age I discovered that I was not God.

A man who called everyone a damn fool is like a man who damns the weather. He only shows that he is not adapted to his environment, not that the environment is wrong.

about that certainty................

 

     A trouble with a system of religious and moral teaching based on challenging the very idea of doctrine and authority was that it sowed the seeds of its own destruction.  It was a losing proposition to tell a bright nineteen-year-old that he must cultivated his own sense of reason and conscience, then punish him for "indecorum" and "disrespectfulness" when he did so.  Holmes's skepticism about human certainty would be powerfully reinforced in the cataclysmic events that were about to close in on him and his fellow members of the Class of 1861.

-Stephen Budiansky, Oliver Wendell Holmes: A Life in War, Law, and Ideas

Yes, but..................to data centers

 

Movements are afoot to stop the spread of data centers.  We hesitate to give advice, but there are certainly better alternatives to the “just say no” approach.

First of all, can we all agree that unless your intent is to roll back the internetization of things, data centers are somewhat of a necessity.  Reasonable people might agree that it is bizarre that household appliances are now designed to be connected to the internet, but unless we are willing to forsake our smart phones and the convenience of on-line shopping, we need data centers.

While “data center” may sound vaguely mysterious, they are really nothing by large warehouses filled with electronic equipment, i.e. computer servers.   It is helpful to remember that when we talk about stuff being in “the cloud” all we are talking about is your information being stored on other people’s servers – located in data centers.   The more that we rely on (or become addicted to) our smart phones and computers, the greater the necessity for the infrastructure to handle that usage – I. e. data centers.   The advent and growing sophistication and usage of AI has led to the explosive growth of that infrastructure.

Is that really such a bad thing?  The major objections to data centers seem to be their enormous demand on the electrical grids and municipal water supplies, and thus causing rates for us normal folk to spike.  Let us remember that our world evolves, and the data center industry is evolving rapidly.  Already they have figured out how to recycle the water they use, dramatically reducing their impact on municipal systems.  A whole new industry is developing to convert natural gas to electricity on a local level.  One thing Ohio has a lot of is excess natural gas.  Smart people have figured out the conversion of this excess gas into electric power on a site specific basis.  In other words, it is now possible for data centers to satisfy their power requirements without impacting the overall electrical grid.

Another significant objection to data centers could be best described as “opportunity costs”.    Data centers take up a lot of land generally zoned for industrial uses.  Industrial uses are important to communities because of the jobs they create, and the payroll taxes those jobs generate support municipalities.  While data centers create significant construction jobs, once up and running they are notorious for having very few employees.   This is a problem.  The City of Pataskala recently said no to a data center.   While we did not attend the public hearings, it is likely that this “opportunity cost” loss weighed heavily on Council’s decision.

The final negative to data centers seems to be that they are not always the best neighbors.

There are some benefits to the community from having a data center.  The biggest one being property taxes.  Here locally Microsoft has started construction of two data centers, both being located within the Lakewood School District.   Strategically trying to build local goodwill, Microsoft has declined the available property tax abatement.  That decision means that Lakewood Local School District will collect an estimated three million dollars per year in property taxes once the construction is completed.   That is a nice benefit.   We should also remember that Microsoft has pledged over thirty million dollars (combined) to Heath and Hebron for municipal infrastructure  improvements.  Another nice benefit.

So, back to the alternatives to “just say no”.   Why wouldn’t a municipality amend their zoning ordinance to make data centers permitted as “Conditional Uses”.   Let’s imagine some of those conditions:

1.      Set a maximum amount of kilowatts the facility could draw from the power grid on any given day.  Force the data center developer to create the required electricity without impacting the grid.

2.     Set a maximum amount of water the facility could draw from the public water system on any given day.  Force the data center developer to create a sophisticated recycling system for coolants.

3.     Disallow the facility from receiving any property tax abatements or other governmental incentives.  Force the data center owner to pay appropriate market rate property taxes.

4.     Most municipalities already have “impact fees” established for development.  Specify that new data centers shall pay significant “impact fees” to enhance local infrastructure.

5.     Establishment of significant separation distance from residentially zoned land along with mandated buffering from same.

6.     Establish an “average payroll tax per acre” that the municipality might expect from an industrial user.  Make approval of the data center subject to the data center operator committing to annual payments to the municipality that would mirror the anticipated payroll tax generated by the “average payroll tax per acre” metric.

 

It is clear, based on the way, way, way above market price data centers are willing to pay for land, that the data center business is very profitable.   Good for them.   Rather than “just say no,” wouldn’t it be a better decision to say “yes, but….”, and figure out ways in which the municipality, and its citizens, could share in the financial bounty?

One thing we should remember:   in their beginning, cell towers were unpopular with many people who had to look at them.  As cellular phones became ubiquitous, cell towers became so important that the government decreed that cell towers were like public utility lines and denied local zoning codes the ability to regulate them out of existence.   Like cell towers, data centers are taking on national importance.   If local governments get too heavy handed in saying “no” to data centers, it should not surprise us to see the federal government classify them similarly to cell towers, and deny local government the ability to say no.  Before we get that far, how about we ponder the possibilities of “ Yes, but…”.

this was first published in the September 2026 Shai-Hess Report

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

 

Dolly Parton (with Paul and Ringo).................Let It Be

Mini-sabbatical over...................?

 

After 15 years and more than 24,000 posts, a brief vacation from blogging was in order.  Needed a break and took one.  Guess we will see what happens next.

What we did on vacation: Part 1...........

 

Flew to Calgary from Columbus, Ohio (note to future self:  avoid O'Hare if at all possible), got on a coach and drove to Banff.  From Banff we went to Lake Louise.  At Lake Louise we boarded the Rocky Mountaineer and rode the rails to Kamloops and then on to Vancouver.   Other that a handful of people who shared our coach wearing buttons that said "I didn't vote for him" and two signs in Calgary, politics never intruded on our travels.  Blessed relief.   In case you were wondering, the Canadian Rockies and British Columbia are among the most beautiful places on earth.  A few snapshots:

Iconic Banff view

Not a shabby place to stay

Bow River Falls in Banff

Lake Louise

More Lake Louise

Even more Lake Louise

The right traveling partner is important

The Rocky Mountaineer arrives

Vacation, Part 2.........................

 

Spent the first week of October in Lake Keowee, South Carolina with twelve friends of fifty+ years. An amazing blessing.  Our fraternity pledge class in 1970 was 31-strong.   We had a more than a few leave us before graduation and at least four have died post-graduation.  We (averaging 12 attendees) have been gathering in the fall annually for the last 15 years.  My Sweetie, bless her soul, will not let me miss it.  As we age, hanging out with old friends has to be one of the most important, and joy-inspiring, parts of life.