This world is full of conflicts and full of things that cannot be reconciled. But there are moments when we can … reconcile and embrace the whole mess, and that’s what I mean by ‘Hallelujah.'
-Leonard Cohen, as channeled by Tim Ferriss
Saturday, February 7, 2026
straying....................
The two ideas of human freedom and economic freedom working together came to their greatest fruition in the United States. Those ideas are still very much with us. We are all of us imbued with them. They are part of the very fabric of our being. But we have been straying from them. We have been forgetting the basic truth that the greatest threat to human freedom is the concentration of power, whether in the hands of government or anyone else. We have persuaded ourselves that it is safe to grant power, provided it is for good purposes.
Fortunately, we are waking up. We are again recognizing the dangers of an overgoverned society, coming to understand that good objectives can be perverted by bad means, that reliance on the freedom of people to control their own lives in accordance with their own values is the surest way to achieve the full potential of a great society.
-Milton & Rose Friedman, as they conclude their 1979 book, Free to Choose: A Personal Statement
Insuperable limits.............
If man is not to do more harm than good in his efforts to improve the social order, he will have to learn that in this, as in all other fields where essential complexity of an organized kind prevails, he cannot acquire the full knowledge which would make mastery of the events possible. He will therefore have to use what knowledge he can achieve, not to shape the results as the craftsman shapes his handiwork, but rather to cultivate a growth by providing the appropriate environment, in the manner in which the gardener does this for his plants. There is danger in the exuberant feeling of ever growing power which the advance of the physical sciences has engendered and which tempts man to try, “dizzy with success”, to use a characteristic phrase of early communism, to subject not only our natural but also our human environment to the control of a human will. The recognition of the insuperable limits to his knowledge ought indeed to teach the student of society a lesson of humility which should guard him against becoming an accomplice in men’s fatal striving to control society – a striving which makes him not only a tyrant over his fellows, but which may well make him the destroyer of a civilization which no brain has designed but which has grown from the free efforts of millions of individuals.
-Friedrich August von Hayek, from his 1974 Nobel Prize lecture
Supernova Remnant Cassiopeia A............
Enlargeable photo and description may be found here. I love the confidence they project in describing what we are looking at.
Color me skeptical too...............
The hot new theory online is that reading is kaput, and therefore civilization is too. The rise of hyper-addictive digital technologies has shattered our attention spans and extinguished our taste for text. Books are disappearing from our culture, and so are our capacities for complex and rational thought. We are careening toward a post-literate society, where myth, intuition, and emotion replace logic, evidence, and science. Nobody needs to bomb us back to the Stone Age; we have decided to walk there ourselves.
I am skeptical of this thesis.
-more on the subject from Adam Mastroianni here
Friday, February 6, 2026
A playful mind is inquisitive..........
Selling out is usually more a matter of buying in. Sell out, and you're really buying into someone else's system of values, rules, and rewards.
-Bill Watterson, from his 1990 Commencement address at his alma mater, Kenyon College
A few more snippets:
A playful mind is inquisitive, and learning is fun. If you indulge your natural curiosity and retain a sense of fun in new experience, I think you’ll find it functions as a sort of shock absorber for the bumpy road ahead. . . .
We’re not really taught how to recreate constructively. We need to do more than find diversions; we need to restore and expand ourselves. Our idea of relaxing is all too often to plop down in front of the television set and let its pandering idiocy liquefy our brains. Shutting off the thought process is not rejuvenating; the mind is like a car battery — it recharges by running.
Let it go...................
There is too much tendency to look inward at one's own moods, and to try to evaluate them. To stand on the outside and try to look inside is futile; whatever was there will go away. This also applies to a nebulous thing described as "Happiness." To try to identify it is like turning on a light to look at the darkness. Analyze it, and it is gone.
-Striking Thoughts: Bruce Lee's Wisdom for Daily Living
Scaling.......................
Kroc sees the genius behind the Speedee Service System. The genius isn't only in its ability do deliver a perfect burger within seconds. The true genius is that it can be replicated nearly anywhere on planet Earth. And that, as we know, is exactly what Ray Kroc did. He took the Speedee Service System and went big time, bugger than even the brothers had anticipated. He applied their methodology to thousands of McDonald's restaurants across the globe. The brothers started with one store in 1937. By 2020, there were almost forty thousand across the globe. . . .
Unlimited predictability is more valuable than intermittent quality.
-Dan Martell, Buy Back Your Time: Get Unstuck, Reclaim Your Freedom, and Build Your Empire
I don't know...........................
Whatever success I've had has been more due to my knowing how to deal with what I don't know than anything I know. Betting on the future is betting on probabilities and nothing is certain, not even the probabilities. That's just the way it is. While what I've given you up until this point is what I believe I know about the future based on my reasoning about the past, what I want to pass along that is probably more important is how I make decisions in life and in the markets based on what I don't know. In a nutshell, here's what I try to do:
* Know all the possibilities, think about the worst-case scenarios and then find ways to eliminate the intolerable ones.
* Diversify.
* Put deferred gratification ahead of immediate gratification so you will be better off in the future.
* Triangulate among the smartest people possible.
Ray Dalio, Principles for Dealing with The Changing World Order: Why Nations Succeed and Fail
precision and accuracy.............
Precision requires producing the same results each time. Repeatable, measurable, dependable.
Accuracy means hitting the target. . . .
The world we live in is recent, and was created by a revolution in precision. We’re still working on accuracy.
-Seth Godin, from here (adding yet another book to the shopping cart)
Thursday, February 5, 2026
The world has always been uncertain......
.............................................but:
Control what you can. Read widely the best literature for wisdom and comfort. Listen to the best music for mood management. Shop locally, enjoy cooking and eat well. Spend time with those who listen, support and create.
And walk daily, the greatest distance you can.
power..............
There is such power when a leader can admit to their mistakes and apologize for them. The idea that you're not going to make any errors is criminally stupid—as is the idea that if you don't own up to an error, nobody will notice you've made one.
-Will Guidara, Unreasonable Hospitality: The Remarkable Power of Giving People More Than They Expect
On expectations............
The first rule of a happy life is low expectations for things outside your control and high expectations for things within it. If you have high expectations for the world and no expectations for yourself, you’re going to be miserable your whole life.
On maintenance.........................
Maintenance is what keeps everything going. It’s what keeps life going. Yet it’s also easy to shirk or defer—until the thing breaks, the system falters, and everything stops. The apparent paradox is profound: Maintenance is absolutely necessary and maintenance is optional.
-from the Amazon review of this book, which has been ordered
The Intertunnel contains amazing things...........
The Torment of Saint Anthony is the earliest surviving work attributed to Michelangelo, painted by him in 1487 or 1488 when he was 12 or 13 years old. This is an intense painting, the kind of thing that would have resulted in Michelangelo’s parents visiting the principal’s office had the young man painted this in a contemporary 7th grade art class.
On manual art...................
He made his living at first by teaching children in Van den Ende's school, and then by polishing lenses, as if he had an inclination for dealing with refractory material. He had learned the optical trade while living in the Jewish community; in accord with the Hebrew canon that every student should acquire some manual art; not only because study and honest teaching can seldom make a livelihood, but as Gamaliel had said, work keeps one virtuous, whereas "every learned man who fails to acquire a trade will at last turn out a rogue."
-Will Durant, from the chapter on Spinoza in The Story of Philosophy
Wednesday, February 4, 2026
Eric Barker tackles.................
.............................persuasion:
If humans were rational, persuasion would be easy. You’d just present your argument like a neat little tray of facts, and they would accept it. But persuasion isn’t all about logic and evidence. It’s about emotion, identity, mood, status, pride, resentment, what they ate for lunch, and whether they’ve decided you remind them of someone who was mean to them in eighth grade. You can be completely correct and still get treated like you’ve just announced you enjoy kicking puppies.
embrace.......................
Rather than immersing ourselves in a mass movement in which adrenaline and anger energize, we can embrace the harder but far more rewarding work of slowly but surely becoming ourselves.
-Ari Weinzweig, from his 2/4/26 edition of Ari's Top Five
Having been in a ................
............. "fee for services" business for 9/10 of my professional life, this is a wonderful post.
In other words, a reasonable fee is poetry and prose, logic and magic. You can get too logical. Put down that calculator and consider feelings and status.
Life is complicated.....................
In a world without truth, the future belongs to the most entertaining liars.
-Scott Pinsker, from this post on the wide, wide world of Bill Gates
Uh-oh...................
All of the good forms of government are good only if the rulers are virtuous.
-Leighton and Lopez, Madmen, Intellectuals, and Academic Scribblers: The Economic Engine of Political Change
Vital needs......................
Freedom is a vital food for the human soul. In the concrete sense of the word, freedom means the possibility of choice. . . . Those who lack good will or remain infantile are never free in any state of society.
---------------
Initiative and responsibility, the feeling of being useful and even indispensable, are vital needs of the human soul.
-----------------
Equality is a vital need of the human soul. It consists of public, general, and effective recognition, concretely expressed through institutions and practices, that every human being is owed the same amount of respect and consideration because respect is due to every human being as such and has no degrees.
...................
Hierarchy is a vital need of the human soul. It comprises a certain veneration, a certain devotion, to superiors considered not in their person or for the powers they exercise, but as symbols.
-------------
Honour is a vital need of the human soul.
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Punishment is a vital need of the human soul. There are two kinds, disciplinary and penal.
.................
Security is an essential need of the soul. Security means that the soul is not hampered by fear or terror, except as a result of a combination of accidental circumstances and for rare and short periods.
-------------
Risk is an essential need of the soul. The absence of risk creates a kind of boredom that numbs in a different way from fear, but almost as much.
---------------
Private property is a vital need of the soul. The soul is isolated, lost, when not surrounded by objects that feel like an extension of the body's limbs.
----------------
Participation in collective goods does not consist of material enjoyment but in a sense of ownership, is just as important a need. It is a state of mind rather than a legal provision.
-----------------
-Simone Weil, excerpted from The Need for Roots
Tuesday, February 3, 2026
21............................
.....................................tiny lessons:
7. What you refuse to do matters more than what you do.
8. The best ideas don’t come from headquarters. They come from people close to the problem.
9. Leverage comes from being willing to walk away.
Cal Newport............
............on the disingenuousness of "vibe reporting":
The goal of this type of article is to create a pre-ordained vibe, not to get to the bottom of what’s really happening.
My parents.....................
.......................and Rob's parents could have been neighbors. The one big thing missing from his list is the command, "Go play outside."
Cultural Offering.................
..............introduces us to John Dabell and his 200 reasons:
121. I’m not here to rush healing, I’m here to honour it.
122. I’m not here to be untouched, I’m here to be unbroken.
123. I’m not here to wait for hope, I’m here to practice it daily.
Think I have mastered #37
Monday, February 2, 2026
inclind...........................
Love to faults is always blind
Always is to joy inclind
Lawless wingd & unconfind
And breaks all chains from every mind
Always is to joy inclind
Lawless wingd & unconfind
And breaks all chains from every mind
Deceit to secresy confind
Lawful cautious & refind
To every thing but interest blind
And forges fetters for the mind
Lawful cautious & refind
To every thing but interest blind
And forges fetters for the mind
Teachers.....................
Everyone loves to teach, but rarely do any of us take unsought advice well, and even more rarely are we truly teachable. Being teachable means being open to learn. In order to learn, one must listen, and we learn to listen only if we know the most important thing—that we do not know everything, that we do not have "all the answers." . . .
In the long history of spirituality, those recognized as somehow spiritually "great" have consistently been called "Teacher"—they help others to learn, to become teachable. Spiritual teachers (who are never "experts") do three things: First and foremost, they listen. Second, they ask questions. Third, they tell stories. Each practice reflects the acceptance of not having all the answers, and each teaches the essential truth of spirituality's open-endedness.
-Kurtz and Ketcham, The Spirituality of Imperfection: Storytelling and the Search for Meaning
Nostalgia.....................
You wouldn’t have seen social engineering in the Roadrunner and Coyote cartoons, but you would have been far better entertained.
The Master said...............
To a disciple who was forever complaining about others the Master said, "If it is peace you want, seek to change yourself, not other people. It is easier to protect your feet with slippers than to carpet the whole of the earth."
-Anthony de Mello, One Minute Wisdom
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