Only......................

 

Transporting..................

Billie Holiday...........................I´ll Be Seeing You

 

Recorded music is a miracle. Not sort of like a miracle, but an actual miracle. Transporting human voices across time and space. Bringing people long gone back into the room. Giving us a chance to hear music that we’d never experience otherwise.

-Seth Godin, from here

can't help but be....................

 

Nature is our home, and in nature we are at home.

     This strange, multicolored, and astonishing world that we explore—where space is granular, time does not exist, and things are nowhere—is not something that estranges us from our true selves, for this is only what our natural curiosity reveals to us about the place of our dwelling.  About the stuff of which we ourselves are made.  We are made of the same stardust of which all things are made, and when we are immersed in suffering or when we are experiencing intense joy, we are being nothing other than what we can't help but be: a part of our world.

Carlo Rovelli, Seven Brief Lessons on Physics

Let's not stop now...............

 

Humanity's capacity to invent solutions to its problems and to identify how to make things better has proven to be far more powerful than all of its problems combined.

-Ray Dalio, Principles for Dealing with The Changing World Order

Dad........................

 

Germany
13 December 1944

Dear Kit,

I was so pleased to get your letter of November 12th a few minutes ago.  As you can see from the length of time it took to get across that our mail has been almost nil for the past month or so.  Right now the APO is specializing in clearing our Christmas boxes, so the letter mail is more or less overlooked.  This sort of puts us between the dive and the deep - for we want our boxes and yet honestly think the letters ease the loneliness and homesickness that is so deep in our hearts. . . .

When Terry told me about the new baby I was happy as anything for both of you.  And I can easily understand you joy and eagerness for the little boy or girl to round out your lovely trio.

I certainly can understand the worries of people about what kind of world the baby will be brought into.  The life you and Terry and I and everyone else are living just now is certainly a miserable one and far from pleasant.  Yet this much I know, the people of all countries will see to it that when this hell on earth is finished we will see a life and live a life that will be worthy of human beings and Christians.  I know that even on my lowest and bluest days I have put into combat during the past two years never have I doubted that once the war was over we could manage to pull the strings of our lives together and forget all we have had to put up with.  No one can ever realize just how precious and pleasant and hopeful life can be until it is almost snatched away.  I have had one or two close calls that left me so scared I didn't realize how lucky I was.  Then I knew so deep within my heart that it almost hurt that even in the midst of the most terrible war man has known just to live and be with people is worth all the hurts and agony man inflicts on man.

No Kit, a little child brought into the world at such a time as this is probably more fortunate than ever.

I seldom thought about this before I went into combat, but one begins to get a far different slant on all that life means.  If you could see what these fellows go through for each other, how much each one depends on his buddy simply for his life, then you could know and appreciate all this talk of mine.  Very few GIs are sentimental enough to talk about things like this and yet the American boy overseas is the most sentimental guy in the world.

Somehow out of all this madness and blindness the people of the world will find the true way of life as Christ taught so long ago.  No matter how it may seem to us at the moment, there are the ever encircling arms of God to lead us through the blindness into the light.  Something I saw before I went into the service comes back to me now—it runs on this order:

    And I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year:
    Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown!
    And he replied: Go out into the darkness and put thine
    Hand into the Hand of God.  That shall be to thee
    Better than light and safer than a known way.

Kit, this must sound very jumbled and rather incoherent but I have been grasping for words as I write.  How I wish I might be sitting with you and Terry.  I know so well that it would be far easier to talk to you about this and then I could get across what is really in my heart and mind.

There is so much to live for and so many pleasant things to do for and with close friends, that it honestly hurts to be here.

But then two years of combat makes a man sentimental even though there is seemingly nothing but cynicism and bitterness in his heart. . . .

With my best wishes and love to each of you for a Merry Christmas!

Affectionately,

Dan

This is part of a letter my Dad wrote to a dear friend.  Despite the heading, he was probably in Belgium, not Germany.  The Battle of the Bulge started three days after he wrote this letter, and he participated in said battle.  He enlisted, at age 29, shortly after Pearl Harbor.  He was part of the Ninth Infantry that chased Rommel across Africa, fought in Sicily, then landed in Cherbourg on D-Day +3.  He entered Germany and then was sent back home in early March of 1945, just before the crossing of the Remagen Bridge.  As I grew up, Dad would NEVER talk about the war.  It was only after returning from the fiftieth anniversary of D-Day at Normandy that he said he had a collection of old letters and offered me the chance to read them.  Quite the gift from a father to a son.  He died of congestive heart failure at age 84.  I miss him still.

A salute to the veterans.

distinctions matter..................

 

A mark of wisdom isn’t choosing quality over quantity or vice versa. It’s recognising that coffee and political philosophy require excellence, while daily steps and moments of stillness require accumulation.

Master this distinction and build a life that’s well-crafted and abundant; quality where it counts, quantity where it compounds. Sometimes less is more. Sometimes more is more.

Know the difference. Go be human.

-Nicholas Bate

prep work............................

 

look in vain.....................

 

The dominant modern belief is that the soundest foundation of peace would be universal prosperity.  One may look in vain for historical evidence that the rich have regularly been more peaceful than the poor . . .

-E. F. Schumacher, Small Is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered

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

The Temptations...........................My Girl

 

got that right.......................

 

     The war against terrorism is not, strictly speaking, a war against nations, even though it has already involved international war in Afghanistan and presidential threats against other nations.  This is a war against "the embittered few"—"thousands of trained terrorists"—who are "at large" among many thousands, and even millions of others who are, in the language of this document, "innocents," and thus deserving of our protection.

     Hunting these terrorists down will be like combing lice out of a head of hair.  Unless we are willing to kill innocents in order to kill the guilty—unless we are willing to blow our neighbor's head off, or blow our own head off, to get rid of the lice—the need to be lethal will be impeded constantly by the need to be careful.  Because of the inherent difficulties and because we must suppose a new supply of villains to be always in the making, we can expect the war on terrorism to be more or less endless, endlessly costly and endlessly supportive of a thriving bureaucracy.

-Wendell Berry, Citizenship Papers, 2003, containing the essay, A Citizen's Response

caught in honey....................

We seem to be like flies caught in honey.  Because life is sweet we do not want to give it up, and yet the more we become involved in it, the more we are trapped, limited, and frustrated.  We love it and hate it at the same time.  We fall in love with people and possessions only to be tortured by anxiety for them.  The conflict is not only between ourselves and the surrounding universe; it is between ourselves and ourselves.  For intractable nature is both around and within us.  The exasperating "life" which is at once loveable and perishable, pleasant and painful, a blessing and a curse, is also the life or our own bodies.

-Alan Watts, The Wisdom of Insecurity: A Message for an Age of Anxiety

 

With many thanks..................

 

............honored to be in such company.

confounded.............................

 

The constituent parts of the state are obliged to hold their public faith with each other, and with all those who derive any serious interest under their engagements, as much as the whole state is bound to keep its faith with separate communities.  Otherwise competence and power would soon be confounded, and no law be left but the will of a prevailing power.

-Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, 1790

sniffing glue.....................

Lloyd Bridges from the classic 1980 movie, Airplane!

 

meme via

a universal sympathy..............

 

Years ago, living as I then was in Connemara, I moved house.  It was all of five or six weeks later that I had reason to open a cupboard in the kitchen.  On a shelf of it were some potatoes that the previous occupant had left behind.  Drawing only upon their own energies, these tubers had sprouted so naturally and so self-sacrificially as it were that now they were withered and shriveled, and cut off as they were from soil and sun, the sprouts were long and ghostly, almost transparent.

     Desperately, they needed inhumation.

     Desperately also, does modern humanity need to find ways, ritual ways, of living and expressing its affinity with nature.  With Stoics, I believe that there is a sumpatheia ton hollon, a universal sympathy, that runs through all things, that connects all things to all things, and it would I believe be good for all things, including ourselves, if we lived from that sympathy.

      In this we might need a little of what Karl Marx was pleased to call the idiocy of rural life.

-John Moriarty, Dreamtime

an oppositional stance...................

 

Here then is a Peripatetic who is standing his ground, a man on a walkabout without real wanderlust, a man who is, in the Borgesian formula, the perfect reader - that is to say, someone who has re-read the same passage endlessly, someone who is prepared to privilege a quorum of old religious scrolls over the lazy, aphasic multitude of brisk paperback bulletins in our three-second timespan culture . . . There is something magnificent about his single-minded oppositional stance in our deconsecrated world; and to watch him perform his rain-dance on the astroturf is to witness an ecumenical invocation of all human spiritual authority.

-Aidan Carl Mathews, from his review of Moriarty's Dreamtime

Ella Baker..............................

 .................. a new sculpture, of Ella Baker, is up at the OSU-N campus:

I use the term radical in its original meaning–getting down to and understanding the root cause.

-Ella Baker

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

The Rolling Stones.................Satisfaction live

 

fences....................

 

President Trump argues that Senate Majority Leader John Thune should use the “nuclear option” to end the filibuster and get the government open again. I’d argue that you should be careful what you ask for and maybe Trump should acquaint himself with the Chesterton’s Fence theory.

-Chris Lynch

In the matter of reforming things, as distinct from deforming them, there is one plain and simple principle; a principle which will probably be called a paradox. There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, "I don't see the use of this; let us clear it away." To which the more intelligent type of reformer will do well to answer: "If you don't see the use of it, I certainly won't let you clear it away. Go away and think. Then, when you can come back and tell me that you do see the use of it, I may allow you to destroy it."
This paradox rests on the most elementary common sense. The gate or fence did not grow there. It was not set up by somnambulists who built it in their sleep. It is highly improbable that it was put there by escaped lunatics who were for some reason loose in the street. Some person had some reason for thinking it would be a good thing for somebody. And until we know what the reason was, we really cannot judge whether the reason was reasonable. It is extremely probable that we have overlooked some whole aspect of the question, if something set up by human beings like ourselves seems to be entirely meaningless and mysterious. There are reformers who get over this difficulty by assuming that all their fathers were fools; but if that be so, we can only say that folly appears to be a hereditary disease. But the truth is that nobody has any business to destroy a social institution until he has really seen it as an historical institution. If he knows how it arose, and what purposes it was supposed to serve, he may really be able to say that they were bad purposes, or that they have since become bad purposes, or that they are purposes which are no longer served. But if he simply stares at the thing as a senseless monstrosity that has somehow sprung up in his path, it is he and not the traditionalist who is suffering from an illusion.

-Gilbert Keith Chesterton, The Thing, Chapter 4

He will not go behind his father’s saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, “Good fences make good neighbors.”

-Robert Frost, Mending Wall

lost a focus........................

 

More than an ideological shift, it’s important to have a candidate who taps into public disdain for politics-as-usual. Even if they can project a more moderate image, this is the ingredient that continues to elude the current crop of Democrats.

It’s not just that Democrats have gotten too liberal. It’s that by opposing Trump on all fronts, they’ve been tricked into adopting a posture of defending the elite norms and institutions Trump attacks. And they’ve lost a focus on regular people in the process.

-Patrick Ruffini, from this edition

Philosophy...................

 

Is that the point of philosophy? To read interesting stories and lessons to feel smarter? To impress friends? No.

The point of philosophy is to make you a better person. To make your life better. And through that, to lift up the lives of the people around you.

But here’s the catch: to do that, you need to put into practice what you read. 

-Ryan Holiday, via the Daily Stoic

reliability.............................

Reliability is magnetic because humans are hardwired to avoid risk, so once you prove yourself trustworthy and reliable, you become the default choice for opportunities without ever asking for them.

-Shane Parrish, from here

A stealth cause.....................

 

.......................................of half of our housing affordability issues too:

When shop classes were tossed, so too went a number of practical skills related to organizing, measuring, and safety; skills that many of us still use when making minor home repairs.

The omission of such classes is especially irritating as many of the students who went on to college would have been wealthier and happier had they instead gone to trade schools.

-Michael Wade, from this episode

On earning and spending...................

 

Earning more money increases freedom.

Spending less than you earn reduces stress.

-James Clear, from this edition

A few more snippets from................

 

....................................Against the Machine:

     Reactionary radicalism, then as now, is a defense of that moral economy—a system build around community bonds, local economics and human-scale systems—in the face of colonisation by the Machine.  That colonisation may come via gunboats or trade agreements, redcoats or giant superstores, enclosure acts or digital currencies, but it will always suck wealth out of place-based communities and funnel it to distant stockholders, just as it sucks the power away from local people and funnels it to national or international bodies whose interests align with those of the Machine.  It will always replace people with technology, and it will always make consumers of us all.

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

Ideology is the enemy of particularity, which is why every modern revolution has ended up turning on its own people.

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

Real culture—human-scale culture—is messy.  It cannot be labeled.  The moral economy rarely makes rational sense.  But it makes human sense, which is what matters.

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

A reactionary radicalism could be usefully defined as an active attempt at creating, defending or restoring a moral economy built around the four Ps. (people, place, prayer, the past)

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

     This, then, is my idea of an anti-Machine politics.  A reactionary radicalism, its face set against Progress Theology, which aims to defend or build a moral economy at the human scale, which rejects the atomized individualism of the liberal era and understands that materialism as a worldview has failed us.  A politics which embraces family and home and place, loving the particular without excluding the outsider, and which looks on all great agglomerations of power with suspicion.  The rejection of abstract ideologies in favour of real-world responses, and an understanding that material progress always comes with a hidden price tag.  A politics which aims to limit rather than multiply our needs, which strategically opposes any technology which threatens the moral economy and which, finally, seeks a moral order to society which is based on love of neighbor rather than competition with everyone.

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

 

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

The Kinks.................Tired of Waiting For You

 

Rooted............

 

The questions all humans will eventually ask—Who am I?  Where do I come from?—are at least partially answered by the country they find themselves part of.  Our national community gives us roots; to quote Simone Weil again, 'to be rooted is perhaps the most important and least recognized need of the human soul'.

-Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine

On the importance of literature........

 

And literature conveys irrefutable condensed experience in yet another invaluable direction; namely, from generation to generation. Thus it becomes the living memory of the nation. Thus it preserves and kindles within itself the flame of her spent history, in a form which is safe from deformation and slander. In this way literature, together with language, protects the soul of the nation. . . . 

But woe to that nation whose literature is disturbed by the intervention of power. Because that is not just a violation against “freedom of print”, it is the closing down of the heart of the nation, a slashing to pieces of its memory. The nation ceases to be mindful of itself, it is deprived of its spiritual unity, and despite a supposedly common language, compatriots suddenly cease to understand one another. Silent generations grow old and die without ever having talked about themselves, either to each other or to their descendants. When writers such as Achmatova and Zamjatin – interred alive throughout their lives – are condemned to create in silence until they die, never hearing the echo of their written words, then that is not only their personal tragedy, but a sorrow to the whole nation, a danger to the whole nation.

-Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, from this 1970 speech

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

The Byrds.................Mr. Tambourine Man

 

the empty city.....................

 

As you came with me in silence
to the pump in the long grass

I heard much that you could not hear:
the bite of the spade that sank it,

the slithering and grumble
as the mason mixed his mortar,

and women coming with white buckets
like flashes on their ruffled wings.

The cast-iron rims of the lid
clinked as I uncovered it,

something stirred in its mouth.
I had a bird’s eye view of a bird,

finch-green, speckly white,
nesting on dry leaves, flattened, still,

suffering the light.
So I roofed the citadel

as gently as I could, and told you
and you gently unroofed it

but where was the bird now?
There was the single egg, pebbly white,

and from the rusted bend of the snout
tail-feathers splayed and sat tight.

So tender, I said, 'Remember this.
It will be good for you to retrace this path

when you have grown away and stand at last
at the very center of the empty city.'

-Seamus Heaney, Changes